The Two-Line Pass

The Lead

Okay, I took like 100 allergy medicines a few hours ago and they’re reaaaally starting to sink in here, so I need to make sure what I saw earlier tonight was correct…

It was Game 7. The third-seeded Devils. At home. Up 3-2. Just 80 seconds to go. Best goalie ever. Best defensive team ever.

And they LOSE? To CAROLINA? On a goal by ERIC STAAL?

Look, I understand the Hurricanes played New Jersey real tight all year, but this is terrible. There are no words for how embarrassing this is. These goals that beat Marty Brodeur were both from bad angles and really, I don’t know how either went in.

The good news was that both teams brought it tonight, I guess. Excellent hockey game. But the way the Devils lost is seriously unconscionable.

I honestly don’t even know what to say, really. And this allergy medicine isn’t helping me think with any great degree of lucidity (although I was able to use the word “lucidity” properly so who knows what goes on?). I honestly just don’t get it. I like Killa Cam Ward and everything, but how does he outduel Marty freaking Brodeur?

Here’s some more bad news, by the way. You’ve got two days without hockey with which to deal. Regular season baseball or the NBA playoffs are our fallbacks.

That, like the Devils loss, is totally unacceptable.

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The Lead

And thus the 100th (well, 99th) season of Les Glorieux ends not with a bang befitting the Best Team in Hockey History, but rather a soft, impotent whimper befitting the team that so spectacularly crapped the bed for more or less an entire season.

And how poetic, too, that it was the mighty Bruins of Boston, Kings of the East and Conquerer of All, who put the Bleu et Blanc et Rouge out of its pitiable misery with yet another 4-1 win that was, perhaps, even easier than the lopsided scoreline belies.

I mean, you would have thought that a team with the Habs’ amount of talent, that took the East with so little effort just one year ago, would have at least put up a fight. It was, after all, the season of wonderful memories of Cup Champions past. It seemed like any time anyone turned over to a Habs game, they were trotting out a fourth-line guy that won 14 Cups in 12 years to drop the first puck while the current-day Canadiens stood around wearing ridiculous uniforms before losing 3-1 on Hockey Night in Canada to, like, the Thrashers or someone.

It seems like the mere aura of all those warm memories — broadcast countless times on RDS in all their fuzzy, buzzy black-and-white glory, no doubt — would have at least transfered to the 100th iteration of Les Habitants through osmosis. I bet if you added it all up, the number of Cups won by former Canadiens that were honored this season stretched well into the thousands. You’d think the spirits of Rocket Richard and Toe Blake and Jacques Plante would have worked some form of other-worldly magic to at least have one of the games in Montreal, the celebrated hockey city of old, not be a total blowout.

And yet here we are. Can the Canadiens really have just been handed their marching orders by the Bruins? Can it really have been just four games that decided the series? Can they have really given up four goals a night? Can they have really scored just two themselves? The ghosts of 100 years of hockey excellence surely looked on tonight, etherial arms folded in consternation, ghostly heads buried in embarrassment, vaporous mouths agape in shock. Their brilliant past, so exalted for close to eight months, spat upon by a bunch of no-trying layabouts who surely wouldn’t have even been good enough to lace Yvonne Cournoyer’s skates.

So shameful. So hilarious.

What’s French for “sweep?”

(…And you thought I’d go on and on about the Flames.)

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The Lead

The Detroit Red Wings might’ve beaten the St. Louis Blues 5-0 tonight, but they also might have lost a whole lot more.

Early in the first period, Marian Hossa fired a shot at the Blues’ net at the tail end of a rush and was hit, completely legally mind you, by Roman Polak. This caused him to fall onto his stomach and slide face-first into the boards, where he lay on the ice for 10 minutes while medical personnel fitted him with a neck brace, loaded him onto a stretcher and took him to the hospital as a precautionary measure. Hossa waved to the crowd on his way off the ice, could move all his extremities and never lost conciousness.

This after he just missed two games with a stiff neck.

It’s excellent that Hossa is fine because that’s a scary situation. But what does this do for Detroit? What kind of time is he going to miss, if any? If he does, what kind of moves does Detroit make to make up for his absence ahead of the deadline? Lots to ponder.

Just be glad Hossa’s okay.

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Last night I mentioned Iginla’s awesome goal that went off the inside of his glove and in. Well, reader/YouTube hockey legend DayWalk3r sent along this video of TSN’s top 10 goals scored off body parts. Pretty outstanding stuff.

Here is the Good night I wrote on last night’s Canes/Flyers game after my power went out, as my computer battery was dying, and without an internet connection. Thus, all opinions on this game are not fact-checked and therefore should not be expected to be anything approaching what experts would call “accurate.” Enjoy your weekend.

The Lead

Paul Maurice and the Carolina Hurricanes deserve eachother.

In the few games since Maurice has taken over the ‘Canes’ coaching duties, they have, like the Toronto teams he coached before getting fired, not played a full 60 minutes. The fact that they had a four-goal lead on the Flyers early in the second period and still lost 6-5 in a shootout tells you everything you need to know about where this team is going to be once the playoffs roll around. Hint: Not in them.

The ‘Canes got a goal from Eric Staal just 61 seconds into the game and had additional scores from Sergei Samsonov, Matt Cullen, Joni Pitkanen and Staal again all wrapped around a Scott Hartnell tally and the game seemed, for all intents and purposes, to be over very, very early. Anterro Nittymaki was fighting the puck, and had been all night, and was getting no help from either his defense to turn aside the great number of shots he was facing, or the offense to at least chip away at the lead.

But when Staal scored his second of the game to make it 5-1, Carolina just stopped playing. They sat and watched as Hartnell scored again to make it 5-2 in the third period and then completed his hat trick mere minutes later to cut the Hurricane lead to two. When Scottie Upshall scored not long after that, someone should have been been begging Maurice to use his timeout. The Flyers, on their home ice, were surging and the crowd, which had been pretty much silent right from the first Carolina goal, was now alive. They and their team had sniffed blood on the Hartnell hattie, but tasted of it when Upshall shoveled it past Mark Leighton.

But Maurice just stood there behind the Carolina bench, arms folded as ineffectually as his team’s play. That signature “I am gravely disappointed in this team” look was creeping onto his face once again. So when the Hurricanes gave Philly a late power play and Simon Gagne chipped in a garbage goal from the side of the net to even the game, it’s hard to imagine that anyone in the building was shocked. The Hurricanes, after all, had not only let a team that had lost just once in regulation in its last 10 games up off the mat, it performed a full-on necromancy of that team and the entire crowd along with it. Where once there was death, there was now nothing but life, and the only astonishing part about it was that the ‘Canes didn’t give up the game-winner soon after and lose in regulation.

They at least got it to overtime and, despite Philadelphia taking a penalty to make it 4-on-3 for the final few moments, failed to at least salvage an overtime win. The shootout, obviously, was a no-doubter. Both of Philadelphia’s first two shooters scored, and Niitymaki fittingly stopped both Hurricanes shooters.

There might be a little bit of talk in the papers about how the ‘Canes played well enough to win, but they didn’t. It was just another game where they, like Eric Staal often does, didn’t play a full 60. Heck, a full 40 might’ve been enough to win the game given how lifeless Philadelphia looked for half the game. The point is that no team in the NHL should ever, ever lose a game it leads by four goals. Drop all five guys behind the blue line if you want, who cares? The Hurricanes need wins and this has to have been worse than any loss Peter Laviolette went through this year. I can’t imagine what it’s like to be a Hurricanes fan right now. This team is not only getting bad breaks off the ice (the ineptitude of the front office, the injuries, etc.) but now they can’t even win a game where they put up a five-spot and lead by four? That’s mortifying.

Just take the flag on the front of those hideous black jerseys and paint the whole thing white. Your season’s over.

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Reader Robert Soderlind sent this in while I was out participating in the American night-before-Thanksgiving tradition of drinking with people you haven’t seen since you graduated high school:

Anyone that gets deked out of their Vapours by Johan Franzen (and isn’t within three inches of the crease) probably isn’t doing their job properly.

Ryan O’Byrne, who had his second gaffe in as many games, got smoked like a Lucky Strike on this one by a guy whose skill is bordering on Jeff Taffe levels of mediocrity.

Seriously, the Habs need to trade O’Byrne to a junior B team in Chicotoumi yesterday. At this point, NHL players are just embarrassing him.

The Lead

The Washington Capitals called Olaf Kolzig their goalie for 16 years and they treated him well. When they call him their opponent, ehhh not so much.

Kolzig, who was greeted with chants of “Olie, Olie,” a long standing ovation and a video tribute, gave up goals on Washington’s first two shots by Tom Poti and Mike Green, respectively, and Eric Fehr added another before the first period was over. The Caps cruised from there to a 4-2 win over the still-hapless Tampa Bay Lightning.

The Capitals did all that despite really not playing very well. That first shot of the game, while it found the back of the net, also took 8:20 to materialize, which, against Tampa’s defense, is embarrassing.

More embarrassing though was the way Tampa played in front of Kolzig, who was hardly to blame for coughing up the four-spot. Newly-acquired Steve Eminger was just outstanding in being on the ice for all three first-period goals and did nothing to stop almost any Washington play from developing. All three, in fact, came on similar transitions where two forwards broke into the zone, collapsed coverage to the puckside and dumped it to the other wing for a trailer. Every time. It worked several additional times per period and the Lightning either never picked up on what’s a fairly simple break-in play or are simply too bad to do anything about it. In any event it created far more chances than Kolzig or Barry Melrose can have liked.

The Bolts at least started trying by the time the middle of the second period rolled around and the game was already a foregone conclusion. Gary Roberts scored a pair of power play goals, one late in the second and the other with 26 seconds to go in the game.

Oh and that last Washington goal? Kid you may have heard of, one Alex Ovechkin, scored it on a nice redirection of a pass from Alex Semin for his third of the year. It was Ovie’s first goal in almost exactly a month and was greeted with another standing ovation from the crowd at the Verizon for his troubles. He hadn’t gotten on the scoresheet since Oct. 11 when he netted a pair against Chicago. Ovie also had an assist on Greenie’s goal. The Semin helper boosted his point total to 22, tying him for the league lead with Evgeni Malkin, which I guess you’d call pretty good.

And across the ice from Kolzig was the real goaltending show. Longtime Kolzig backup and good buddy Brent Johnson made 34 saves to help Washington to the win, something Jose Theodore would not have come close to doing.

But for me, the real story is that the problems in Tampa deepen evermore. There’s no way a team with any pride allows its teammate to get punked out by his former club in his first game against them. Not that badly at least. The quote-unquote defensemen in front of him, most notably Eminger and Lukas Krajicek in the first period, should be ashamed of themselves for leaving Kolzig out to dry like that.

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Presented without comment: the biggest abortion of a breakaway in the history of the National Hockey League, and perhaps organized hockey in general, from last night’s Sens/Flyers game.

Kudos, Christoph Schubert. This is hockey history.