The Two-Line Pass

It’s tough being an NHL player, we all know that.

The business is cutthroat, and where one day you can be the toast of the town, the next day you can be out on your ass in a matter of half an ineffective season.

Georges Laraque found that out the hard way today, as the Canadiens, clearly tired of his being of Haitian descent and not the fact that he’s a tough guy that doesn’t fight or hit anyone any more, sent him home for the remainder of the season with an eye toward being bought out once the Habs are able to do so.

Wait.. what? That Haitian thing seems out of place. Well, I mean, not if you’re Laraque. The money quote (emphasis obviously mine):

“Classless,” Laraque said angrily. “To do this in the midst of all I’m dealing with in Haiti, the timing is awful. I’m not going to sugar coat anything.”

Yes, all he’s dealing with.

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Well another Festivus is upon us and since I can’t write a post about a metal pole or a meatloaf dinner (although…), I figure I’ll do what just about every other blog on the planet must be doing today and write a post about the stupidest things that happened in hockey this year, and then call it The Airing of Grievances in a hat tip to both Seinfeld and Glen Rock, New Jersey’s greatest export, scumbag rockers Titus Andronicus, who have an album by the same name that you should definitely buy and are incredible.

In poking around this stupid site just now in preparation for writing this malarkey, I also noticed that I did the exact same thing on this date last year, but due to my being a moron, failed to connect the dots and actually make it more Festivian, which I think is a word I invented just now but oh well.

Anyhow, here is a list of the hockey-related things by which I felt particularly aggrieved this year.

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Konnichiwa again.

Partly because I have recently taken a shine to Japanese poetry and theatre (what?), and partly because it will be much, much easier and quicker this way, I have decided to preview the season for each conference in the ancient art of haiku. All teams will be covered in the order in which I believe they’ll finish. Yes, these are meant to take some thought.

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Konnichiwa.

Partly because I have recently taken a shine to Japanese poetry and theatre (what?), and partly because it will be much, much easier and quicker this way, I have decided to preview the season for each conference in the ancient art of haiku. All teams will be covered in the order in which I believe they’ll finish. Yes, these are meant to take some thought.

Read the rest of this entry »

“It was a really tough decision for me to make. When I compared the two teams, I felt like I would have a little better of a chance to win the Cup in Detroit.” - Marian Hossa, July 2, 2008.

Regardless of whether or not the Red Wings beat the Penguins later tonight, Hossa was pretty much wrong. If Detroit pulls out the victory on its home ice, Hossa will happily lift the Cup, but that won’t have made him any more correct that Detroit gave him “a little better of a chance.”

Hossa, though you might not know it from his play in this series (0-3-3, plus-1) or indeed the whole playoffs (6-9-15, plus-6 in 22 games), is a game-changing player. That he took the smaller paycheck to have a better shot at the Cup might seem like some sort of magnanimous “I’m not in it for the money” type gesture, and certainly I don’t begrudge him that. It’s just kind of a dick move.

But that’s old news, obviously. So here we are more than 11 months later, and it all comes down to one game between the one he chose and the one he snubbed to see which team wins the Cup. All things considered, it’s more or less a 50-50 chance that everything works out in what he’d consider to be his favor.

But what this point ignores is that the Red Wings now have just as good of a shot of winning the grandest prize in all athletic competition as do the Penguins, and that’s with the whole “We have Marian Hossa on our team” affect. WITH Hossa, the Red Wings were more or less a dominant force, even when saddled with some of the worst goaltending in the NHL for the entirety of the regular season. WITH Hossa, the Red Wings rolled through Columbus in four games, struggled to down Anaheim in seven, dispatched Chicago in five and now stand on the brink against Pittsburgh.

Meanwhile, WITHOUT Hossa, the Penguins struggled mightily before they dumped Michel Therrien. And without Hossa, they became inarguably the best team in the NHL under Dan Bylsma (I mean, they’ve lost 10 games in regulation since Bylsma took over on Feb. 16). And without Hossa, they snuck by Philadelphia in six games, struggled to down Washington in seven, dispatched Carolina in four and now stand on the brink against Detroit.

Clearly, Pittsburgh and Detroit are two very even teams, but imagine where the former would be if it were plus-Hossa and where the latter would be if it were minus-Hossa. Pretty easy to imagine that Pittsburgh would have been a better team if Hossa, who scored 40 goals this year, was the one getting one-timer feeds from Crosby or Malkin instead of, say, Petr Sykora (25), Ruslan Fedotenko (16) or Miroslav Satan (17).

Obviously there are some mitigating factors here: Might the Pens have fired Therrien had their record been slightly better? Might they have had the cap room to trade for Chris Kunitz and Bill Guerin? Might they never have discovered the power of a barbecue pork burrito? Tough to say, obviously. But Marian Hossa makes Pittsburgh, like any other team he happens to be on, better, and conversely a Hossaless Detroit worse.

A better Penguins team would have beaten a worse Detroit and Hossa would have already lifted the Cup by now. Just sayin’.

For the next two months, you won’t want to talk to anyone — coworkers, friends, and family can all take a hike. You won’t want to do anything — things like going to work, running errands, making waste in the toilet seems like a terrible misappropration of valuable time. You won’t want to pay attention to personal hygiene — shaving, changing or washing your clothes are all out of the question.

And that’s because it is, at long last, playoff time.

The wheat has been separated from 14 teams worth of useless chaff with poor goaltending and now we settle things like gentlemen.

This being my first NHL playoffs as a blog writer, I will break things down for you thusly:

1. Why the team will win a Stanley Cup.
2. Why you’re an idiot for believing in the team in which you’ve invested so much time and love.
3. What my prediction is, for better or worse (and likely the latter).

Here goes:

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Well apparently, three-ish days after the fact, “Bubba” over at Canes Country is getting after me for my criticism of Eric Staal over at Puck Daddy.

The crux of my argument was this: If I were a ‘Canes fan, I would be incredibly frustrated by the inconsistent play of Eric Staal. This was somehow massively offensive and tipped off a 700-or-so-word rant about what a clown I was (well, they kind of lumped me in with Mr. L. Gregory Wyshynski as though we were the same person. We are not).

So here is my retort, because, as the person that e-mailed me this told me, I need to “Smarten up,” which is something moms say.

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Well golly every year, every single prognosticator prognosticates upon who was, in fact, the big, big winners and the terrible, awful losers at the trade deadline.

As we all know, I am one of the most brilliant hockey minds around (I consider myself third only to Nick Kypreos and Dwayne Klessel), so I will tell you, all the stupid hockey fans that don’t know offsides from the offensive zone, who won and lost on this deadline day.

Now, when you tell your friends what I think about today’s transactions and pass it off as your own opinion, you will look like a freakin’ GENIUS.

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With the year finally winding down, we can now look back on the prior 350-something days and start to put together some conclusive feelings about them. It seems, to me at least, that this has been literally the stupidest calendar year of hockey in maybe a decade.

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Because the entire world can’t stop talking about Sean Avery’s “sloppy seconds” comment (I have friends who haven’t seen a hockey game in their lives texting me about it), the story goes on and on and on. But at least one guy in the hockey world is sick of it.

Darryl Sutter was asked about it at a press conference and provided the most pointed criticism of anyone. Except Sutter directed it at the media.

“You know what? Put it to bed. You guys cover hockey. It’s supposed to be the sports page. If you guys want to cover that stuff, go ahead. It’s been pretty disgusting for three days, actually. The Dallas Stars come to town . . . two of the best spokesmen in the league, other than a couple of our guys, are Mike Modano and Marty Turco, and I didn’t see their picture or hear a story about them.

“So you guys aren’t really covering hockey.”

Attaboy, Darryl. The whole thing is, and has been, silly from the get-go, and while Avery clearly planned this whole thing, the media certainly did its part to drum up interest ahead of the Dallas/Calgary game two nights ago. While it’s impossible to say if Avery would have made the comment had the media not been working so hard to talk to him about the “Jarome Iginla is boring” thing (and I’d say he probably would’ve because, hey, he’s Sean Avery), it certainly can’t have helped him to avoid the desire to turn the game into another sideshow act.

Andre Roy, who called Avery a “dum-dum,” also had a suggestion for how the media should deal with Avery in the future:

“But maybe you can stop talking (to Avery), even if he gets a hat trick. Just leave him in the corner and don’t even mention him. That would be the right thing to do with this guy because he definitely needs attention. That’s what he’s looking for.’”

But then Scott Cruickshank, who’s usually a pretty damn good writer, went waaaaaaaaaaay off the reservation.

Is his conduct as bad as drilling someone head-first into the boards? …Or is it worse?

Actual question being posed: Is calling someone a name “as bad as” or “worse” than potentially putting someone’s life in jeopardy? Hmmm that IS a noodle-scratcher. I mean, on the one hand words HURT! On the other hand, so does a crushed vertebrae. Unfortunately, science has yet to quantify which injury is more severe and damaging in the long-term.

Think of it this way. Todd Bertuzzi almost crippled someone for life and might end up serving fewer games than Sean Avery, who said a mean thing about an ex-girlfriend.

Yeah, that makes tons of sense.