The Two-Line Pass

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.

A lot is being made of tonight’s Dallas/Calgary game because it will be the first time the two teams face eachother since Sean Avery called Jarome Iginla boring.

TSN, obviously, has been banging the drum on this for a few days now. What everyone, from Flames fans to the mainstream hockey media, has done is take Sean Avery’s quote out of context to make it seem as though Iginla was somehow boring.

Our commissioner hasn’t realized that he needs to probably do a better job of marketing the game and certainly some of the players in it.  Nobody cares about Jarome Iginla and guys like that. They’re just not exciting enough. They don’t bring enough to the game.

Obviously, out of context, that doesn’t look so good. “Nobody cares about Jarome Iginla!?” cries the media. “BUT HE SCORED 50 GOALS TWICE!!!” And that’s certainly true. But of course, the video of the interview is “no longer available,” so proper context is difficult to ascertain. However, I’m one of those Flames fans that’s always eager to play the insult card (a “no one hits my brother but me” type of thing), and in watching the clip originally, I just didn’t see the big deal. My feeling was that he was saying that Iginla deserved to be marketed better and that everyone AT THE NHL thought Iginla was boring.

And really, that depends on how you define “not exciting.” Does Iginla score flashy, highlight-reel goals every night like Ovechkin or Toews? No. Does he go through four guys and make a perfect pass to a waiting teammate for a tap-in goal like Crosby or Kane? No. Does he even demolish people like Phaneuf? Not really. What Iginla does is simple: quietly go about being excellent. As a Flames fan, Iginla could murder a child right in front of me and I’d just go, “Oh, you!” He’s a great leader, great player and a great guy. Classiest guy in the league, by all accounts. Google it. But is he really THAT exciting? Quick, name five exciting things Jarome Iginla has done this year. Apart from being awesome at hockey, I’m coming up with nothin’. As far as I’m concerned, he’s diplomatic to a fault.

“He can say whatever he wants,” Iginla said. “I think the NHL has done a better job, especially since the lockout, with the players - of getting the players out there.

That, of course, isn’t especially true. Still, everyone on the planet would take boring ol’ Jarome Iginla on their team any day of the week because of his skill and that attitude.

That being said, Avery didn’t mean it like that. Not that we’d know. In all the fervent quote-gathering TSN has done for this story, no one bothered to give Avery a jingle and say, “You really mean that?” Of course not. He’s the guy that dated actresses and interned at Vogue. What a dick! If TSN was going to bother to dredge up out-of-context quotes from two months ago for this game and get everyone to comment on them again, the fact that Avery’s take all this time later isn’t being discussed seems awful dubious.

Instead, TSN just wants to take a dump on Avery, which is what this is really about. To wit, Iginla said, “We haven’t even talked about it for weeks,” which shows that it’s a non-issue. TSN did helpfully add these facts:

Iginla is enjoying another typically excellent season, leading the Flames in goals, assists and points while his team continues to battle the surprising Vancouver Canucks and Minnesota Wild for the Northwest Division lead.

Meanwhile Avery leads the NHL in penalty minutes …  In addition Avery was called out by teammate Mike Modano for his selfish play and embarrassing antics after a loss to the Bruins in early November.

“Tonight, it was idiotic and stupid,” Modano told reporters after Avery and teammate Steve Ott argued with referees and fans. “It was one of the most embarrassing things I’ve seen. If that’s what we’re going for, then they need to find me an office job.”

“It was dumb penalties, dumb situations, that’s kind of been the trend all season,” Modano said. “There’s no mental toughness. We’re allowing the refs to get involved in the game with and spending more energy on them than the details of winning the game.”

Because that’s important to this non-story.

We all know Sean Avery is an agitator on and off the ice and says WACKY things that piss people off. If Iginla had gotten over it already, shouldn’t everyone else?

Watching the New Jersey/Tampa game last night, I couldn’t help but notice that Ryan Malone was almost unnoticable. That got me thinking: The Bolts just paid him $31.5 million for the next SEVEN years, and so far they’ve gotten two goals and a -2 in 11 games in just 15:31 of ice time a night. Barry Melrose, in what may be his only good move of the year so far, seems to have plopped Malone on the third line on a permanent basis. Still, It’s an embarrassing purchase for the Lightning’s new ownership, especially when you factor in the cost of the third-round pick they gave up to negotiate with him before free agency actually started.

But was it the worst signing in the NHL this offseason?

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Last night, buried deep within the writeup of the Anaheim-Detroit game last night, I talked a little bit about the dirty hit Chris Pronger put on Pavel Datsyuk. Here’s the video of the hit.

For all the people that bitched at me via e-mail about my stance on the Weight hit on Sutter, this is what I consider to cross the line. That’s a dirty hit. Look where the puck is in relation to the collision, look how Datsyuk can’t even fathom that someone would come in on him at all, let alone come in high. But this is typical Chris Pronger, trying to gain an edge by taking a run at a team’s star player. And as is typical of the NHL, the officials looked the other way because, hey, it’s Chris Pronger and he plays physical hockey.

I agree with Jordin Tootoo, who did an interview with Wyshinski on the issue. “Hitting’s part of the game. It’s a man’s game. You gotta keep your head up there.” Absolutely. Perfectly put.

The point is also made that Pronger is a full 6-foot-6 and thus most of his hits are to the head, which is true enough. But there’s no excuse for this hit at all. It’s not part of the game, it’s part of Chris Pronger’s desire to drill every opponent’s top forward any time he can. The fact that he didn’t get penalized in the game isn’t surprising, nor will it be surprising when the league doesn’t do a thing about this.

But with a history like Pronger’s, the league has to do a better job of supervising him. The reason this is a special case is that Chris Pronger is a special kind of scumbag.

Earlier this morning I read an article about how Ryan Hollweg wanted to get back to his physical game in the Leafs’ Thanksgiving afternoon game with the Blues.

So I’m watching the Leafs/Blues game just now, and exactly four minutes of ice time after he returned from a two-game suspension for picking up three game misconduct penalties for boarding in his last 41 games, Hollweg got a five-minute major and a game misconduct for boarding.

He PASTED Alex Pietrangelo, St. Louis’ first-round pick in this past draft, well after the play. It was a revolting play from a revolting player. Incidentally, the boarding call that got him suspended last time also came against the Blues in an Oct. 1 exhibition game.

This will result in his third suspension since March 26 of last season, when he got three games for (you guessed it) boarding!

A couple things occur to me here.

1) Tom Renney is a saint for keeping this guy under control as long as he did. There is clearly something wrong with Ryan Hollweg if he’s offending this much. Like “Chris Simon” wrong. He has almost no control over his aggression, and he’s going to seriously hurt somebody one of these days.

2) The League has to do something more than a two- or three-game suspension here. Giving up two games and $5,000 in fines clearly means nothing to him, and the NHL has to take a much harder tack to send the message that this type of play is COMPLETELY unacceptable. Both of the first two suspensions of the NHL season will have been dealt to Hollweg, and both for the same offense. It’s ridiculous.

3) I retroactively support Chris Simon.

Okay, so if you’re a fairly faithful reader here, you’ll have noticed that I’ve just stopped doing season previews. There’s no reason for this other than they’re a pain in the ass to write and research and I more or less hate doing them. Thus, I am not going to continue, especially given that the season starts like tomorrow and I have 15ish more teams to do. Nuts to it. I don’t wanna pump out 15,000-plus words that four people will read and probably hate me for (”DOESN’T THIS GUY KNOW (DECENT PROSPECT) GOT CUT FOUR MINUTES AGO? AND HE SPELLED THAT FINNISH PLAYER’S INDECIPHERABLE NAME WITH AN EXTRA A! WHAT AN IDIOT,” is about the average message board post regarding a season preview).

So as a means of expediting things, here’s what would have been the end result: standings and award predictions (with reasoning). Keep in mind these are all remarkably stupid opinions, but they’re mine and it’s my blog, so I have a right to them.

Those’re all after the jump.

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We’re now something like four days out from the start of the NHL season, which means I have to kick these season previews into overdrive because I’m a lazy idiot. This is mainly for two reasons: 1) I am lazy and there’s no way I’ll do one of these every day, and 2) These started early enough that if I just stop doing them entirely you’ll have forgotten by October anyway. Oh and I guess also to show off my near-infinite knowledge of the National Hockey League. I’ll be previewing the teams in reverse order of finish in the 2007-08 season. Please note, though, that this is the opinion of one man, however smart and handsome he may be.

Nashville Predators, you’re on the clock.

There’s been a lot of talk about the Predators this summer, and all of it has focused on bad things.

A member of the ownership group turned out to be a fraud (and really, with a name like “Boots,” who didn’t see that coming?) and one of their best players was all like, “Screw this, I’d rather play in Russia.”

More after the jump.

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Know who’s getting screwed by this economic crisis, and not just financially? It’s you!

Well, not you, specifically. But hockey fans and the NHL itself. Everywhere across the country, the NHL beat is getting cut from major newspapers.

In Florida, the Palm Beach Post reassigned Panthers beat writer Brian Briggane to the Miami Dolphins and will no longer staff home or away games, instead relying on those always-interesting AP stories, or worse, dumping a short write-up of the games into the briefs on the agate page.

The Los Angeles Times, of all papers, will have just one hockey beatwriter to cover both the Kings and Ducks. Helene Elliott, a Hockey Hall of Famer, will stay on to do columns, but the Times likely felt it couldn’t let her go or reassign her only because she is in the Hockey Hall of Fame, and to do so would have been a travesty. The Times laid of 13 of its 135 employees off over the summer, and that included their Ducks guy.

But it’s not just the non-traditional hockey markets that are axing people. Even in Philadelphia, long-time writer at the Inquirer and a personal favorite of mine, Tim Panaccio, was strongarmed into accepting a buyout after being taken off the Flyers beat and put on the Eagles instead (which is just a despicable way to force someone out).

Panaccio says he was told by the newspaper’s sports editor, Jim Cohen, that hockey was “an irrelevant sport” and that in Philadelphia, the Eagles “far outweighed anything else.”

Panaccio was replaced on the Flyers beat by a former high school sports reporter who was the Philadelphia Phillies’ backup reporter.

A few other papers will see coverage reduced in word count or page space. What the smart papers, like the Washington Post, are doing is putting more coverage online (The Sports Bog and Tarik El Bashir’s Capitals Insider are also favorites of mine). This is a good idea and what every paper in the UNIVERSE should be doing.

And yeah, what the hell, this affects me too. I used to be the Bruins/pro hockey writer (closest thing they had anyway) for a medium-sized paper in Massachusetts and I got laid off a while ago too. Now, as I understand it, the paper will have minimal (if any) Bruins coverage until late in the season, save for the aforementioned AP stories. This blog was originally intended as a supplement to my coverage in that paper, but I saw the writing on the wall and went with anonymity for a few weeks while the paper slowly moved closer to axing a whole mess of people. I’ve debated continuing to keep my name out of all this, but I frankly don’t see the point any more. This whole industry’s a mess, and we as fans of the sport are just lucky the NHL has been so quick to embrace New Media.

So yeah, I’m Ryan Lambert and I used to be a hockey writer. What’s going on?

We’re now something like five days out from the start of the NHL season, which means I have to kick these season previews into overdrive because I’m a lazy idiot. This is mainly for two reasons: 1) I am lazy and there’s no way I’ll do one of these every day, and 2) These started early enough that if I just stop doing them entirely you’ll have forgotten by October anyway. Oh and I guess also to show off my near-infinite knowledge of the National Hockey League. I’ll be previewing the teams in reverse order of finish in the 2007-08 season. Please note, though, that this is the opinion of one man, however smart and handsome he may be.

Buffalo Sabres, you’re on the clock.

I think this is probably the hardest team to get a read on in the NHL.

On the one hand, you’ve got loads and loads of talent. On the other, well, talent doesn’t always get you where it does on paper. Case in point, LAST year’s Buffalo Sabres, who despite losing just Chris Drury (meh), Dainus Zubrus (meh) and Dany Briere (actually damaging), saw their goal total drop from 298 in 2006-07 to 251 last season.

More after the jump.

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