The Two-Line Pass

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Not that anyone has been paying a particularly large amount of attention to the Capitals these days, for reasons that seem to me to be rather obvious, but Alex Ovechkin is shredding every defense he comes across. Which is a weird thing to type in 2013.

I guess it’s notable to say first that the Caps have won four of their last five games, but that’s largely down to the job Ovechkin is doing to put the puck in the net once again. He has, very very quietly, crept up to 31 points in 32 games, owing largely to this streak in which he’s scored seven goals and four assists in the last seven games. Even two weeks ago, the idea of Ovechkin scoring a goal a game would have seemed like a farcical pace for him to keep up for more than, say, one outing, would have seemed silly and wrong and dumb and you would have hollered at whoever wrote it. And you’d have probably been right to do so.

Despite his pedigree as being a world-class goalscorer, Ovechkin had nine goals and 20 points 25 games and looked pretty much bad a lot of the time. Mike Milbury was very upset, as you can imagine. Then, around the time Milbury had his second nationally-televised heart attack in about two weeks, Ovechkin went off.

He was held without even a shot on goal in a loss to the Hurricanes, then the streak began in earnest. During that seven-game stretch, he has piled up 35 shots, which is a good amount. Seven goals on 35 shots is, for you math majors out there, 20 percent shooting, which seems unsustainably high. But then you gotta consider that before that he had nine on 101, which is only like 9 percent, so maybe there’s some middle ground to find there. Interestingly, Ovechkin’s career shooting percentage is only 12, which surprised me, but then you gotta figure he’s closing in on 3,000 career shots in eight seasons, and has led the league in that category in all but one of them, despite the fact that his 50-goal days seem long over.

It’s still tough to imagine Ovechkin magically challenging Steven Stamkos or even James Neal for annual goal totals, but he’s currently tied for sixth in the league and looks to be on a bit of an upswing.

We’ll see how long it lasts, and certainly it can’t go forever, but for right now, it’s lazy, dumb, not focused on hockey Alex Ovechkin who is laughing and feeling good, and Milbury is probably screaming at some 5-year-old child who lost his mommy in a suburban Boston grocery store. No hustle outta that kid.

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One thing that’s definitely true about the Tampa Bay Lightning is that they’re a poorly-constructed team.

From the goal on out, there aren’t too many players in that lineup that you look at and say, “Yes, this is is a guy who can really contribute to a team that can contend for the postseason.”

I thought at the beginning of the year that they could do it just because of how bad the entire Southeast was going to be bad (and it has been; the Jets currently lead it), but obviously it didn’t work out. Maybe I, like Steve Yzerman, thought Anders Lindback would be a better goaltender than he ended up being, but then I’m not paid a couple million a year to make those determinations as Yzerman did, and certainly I had reservations about such a deal that the Bolts’ GM did not. Lindback’s stats are painfully subaverage, at 2.08/.903, and his backup is Mathieu Garon, so the safety net provided Guy Boucher before his firing this morning was essentially non-existent.

This is a goalie who never played without the benefit of a Ryan Suter/Shea Weber pairing eating up half the minutes in every game in which he appeared, and Yzerman gave up a pair of second-round picks last summer as well as a third in this upcoming draft.

This firing is down to roster mismanagement plain and simple, and there are probably very few coaches alive who could get more out of these sad nags he was given than Boucher got. Sami Salo is getting more than 21 minutes a night for the Lightning, in 2013, which is as inexcusable as it is sad for Lindback, who maybe also never had a chance to succeed.

It’s hard to guess what Yzerman expected from this team. Did he think they’d be solidly middle of the pack? I don’t know how many more goals he could have expected Steven Stamkos to score all by himself, but the drop-off from the 22-year-old supersniper to the next-closest goalscorer (rookie Cory Conacher) is 13. Stamkos has an absurd 21 in 31 games. Conacher has eight. Martin St. Louis, Teddy Purcell, and Vinny Lecavalier have seven each. This is a team that was not built in any way to score goals, or even prevent them particularly well, and because someone had to pay for it, it was Boucher, not his boss.

The reason is pretty simple. People think Yzerman is a good general manager. He hasn’t proven himself to be one, but that’s the perception. In part it’s based on how beloved he is for his decades as a player, and moreover it’s because in his first year, he hired Guy Boucher, traded for Dwayne Roloson, and went on a magical run to the Eastern Conference Finals against the Boston Bruins, where they lost in Game 7, 1-0. Huh, no goalscoring there either.

He also handpicked Canada’s 2010 Olympic roster and was widely praised for his genius in doing so, because you can’t imagine how hard it is to choose the right mix of point-a-game superstars and Norris-caliber defensemen and world-class goaltenders that will ensure you get to overtime against a banged-up and not-very-good US roster.

And now the rumor is that it’ll be Lindy Ruff, a respected veteran coach, coming in to replace Boucher. Which, if true, will bring the number of sound managerial decisions Yzerman has made since trading for Roloson to… well, it’ll stay at zero.

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(Ed. note: This is a sponsored post for Matt. If you want me to write about any old thing in hockey, all you have to do is donate $50 below. It’s easy and fun. Bye.)

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One subject you hear brought up a lot in sports, for some terrible reason, is that such-and-such a team has the best fans or is the Mecca of hockey, or other such nonsense that matters approximately zero percent. It’s all pointless, specifically because the fans of the Philadelphia Flyers are clearly the greatest, and it’s not even close.

If you are a fan of, say, the Red Wings, or the Penguins, or the Canadiens, or even the Lightning, you might have a bit of a beef with this, but in reality you are dumb and wrong about it. Consider this: Would you still be a fan of a team that is this bad despite having a bunch of reasons not to be?

The Flyers spend money, which is good for fans, but they do it in a maddening and embarrassing way — the Ilya Bryzgalov contract, the Scott Hartnell extension, the Kimmo Timonen deal, etc. — which is bad for fans.

The Flyers routinely draft exciting young talent that are able to be incorporated into the NHL lineup, which is good for fans, but they then trade them away for seemingly no reason whatsoever — Jeff Carter, Mike Richards, James van Riemsdyk, etc. — which is bad for fans.

They routinely make the playoffs due to their traditional regular-season dominance of most of the Eastern Conference, which is good for fans, but then get crushed by vastly superior teams with actual defense and goaltending — the Devils, the Bruins, the Blackhawks, the Penguins, etc. — which is bad for fans.

They have many players on the roster who would do anything to win, which is good for fans, but a number of them are also extremely dirty and play only in an effort to hurt people, then get suspended — Zac Rinaldo, Harry Zolniercyzk, Tom Sestito, etc. — which is bad for fans.

They have an owner who wants to win at all costs, which is good for fans, but in doing so he routinely meddles in the affairs of the men he pays a lot of money to operate the team, and in doing so generally just messes everything up — acquiring Ilya Bryzgalov, making a run at Shea Weber, etc. — which is bad for fans.

They also never give up on their goals of being the best in the league, which is good for fans, but end up falling short in the most hilarious ways possible — the Patrick Kane overtime game-winner, the defense completely melting down last season, getting swept by the Bruins, etc. — which is bad for fans.

It’s not easy, is what I’m saying. But despite all that, no one else in the NHL cares enough about their dumb teams to slash the tires of any car in the parking lot with Quebec plates or beat a Rangers fan half to death. Except Flyers fans. They are truly the greatest.

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(Ed. note: This is a sponsored post for Julie Veilleux. If you want me to write about any old thing in hockey, all you have to do is donate $50 below. It’s easy and fun. Bye.)

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A quick look at Carey Price’s stats this year and you’re probably like, “Ah, he’s not doing that great.” Wrong, idiot.

His 16 wins this season lead the league, which is all well and good but tells you nothing. His save percentage is just 23rd in the NHL at .912, and he’s tied with noted bum-who-backed-into-being-on-the-best-team-in-the-league Marc-Andre Fleury. His GAA is a fairly pedestrian 2.34, good for 14th (though it would also be the lowest of his career if it held up, due to Montreal having been bad so often in recent years). This is, you see, a fairly mediocre season for Price.

But here’s the thing, right? Remember that time the journalist brought up that his wife didn’t understand why the Habs kept giving Carey Price starts, and Bob Gainey suggested — like a complete jerk — that his wife didn’t understand a damn thing about hockey and maybe should get back in the kitchen, because Price is a thoroughbred. Gainey may not be out in front of feminist causes, or even those related to hockey since he was forced to step down about a year later, but he was absolutely right about Price. That kid is definitely a thoroughbred.

Yawn dismissively at the middle-of-the-pack stats all you want, but when it comes to even-strength save percentage — widely considered to be the best way to assess a goaltender’s talent as an individual player — is really good. Among goalies that have played more than 20 games, Price’s stat in this category is .929, tied for fifth in the league with potential Vezina winner Tuukka Rask, and surprisingly-good Braden Holtby. His stats would be doing one hell of a lot better if the Habs’ penalty kill wasn’t running at 17th in the NHL; his save percentage when the other team is on the power play, over which he has relatively little control, stands at .821, thanks to 19 goals conceded on just 106 shots. That’s 63rd among all goalies, and only Ondrej Pavelec is worse among those with 20-plus appearances. You don’t want to be the guy just above Pavelec in any category.

If the Habs’ PK (not Subban) was any good at all, people would be crying over how good Price has been this season. Certainly he’s one of the biggest reasons the team is a point out of first in the Eastern Conference with a game in hand. There’s all that garbage about how your goaltender has to be your best penalty killer, but that’s not really true, and Price is showing why. He’s nearly superhuman this year, and would be considered as such if a few more things broke his way.

There’s a reason price has played the second-most games of anyone in the last three seasons (behind only Pekka Rinne, who also had the benefit of playing behind two of the best defensemen in hockey that whole time; Price played behind Hal Gill for a lot of it). It’s because Carey Price is awesome. Think about it.

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My deep and abiding love for all things Teemu Selanne is by this point in my life well-documented, and perhaps has reached a point of self-parody. But man do I ever love Teemu Selanne.

At the risk of writing a bit too much about the Anaheim Ducks (who by the way beat the Blackhawks in a battle of the two best teams in the league and held one-time Hart trophy hopeful Patrick Kane minus-4, while Selanne scored the game-winner), it seemed earlier this year that Selanne, at 42 years old, was perhaps winding down his NHL career. The lockout can’t have been easy on anyone, least of all a greybeard by professional athlete standards who has openly talked about the motivation to continue training. Further, he’s an unrestricted free agent after this season and seems unlikely to make the $4.5 million against the cap he currently commands on any renewed deal.

But then in an interview yesterday, about whatever the hell he felt like talking about, he was asked about the distractions that the run-up to the extensions for Ryan Getzlaf and Corey Perry finally worked out. He gave the kind of answer you’d expect about how it didn’t affect the room and all that, but then closed, somewhat apropos of nothing, “If they can play eight more years, I can too. I’m in better shape than they are.”

Teemu, I think I speak for everyone who’s not an inhuman monster when I say, “Yes please.” The prospect of Teemu Selanne playing into his 50s is just about the greatest thing I’ve ever heard in my life. I was not in any way prepared to see him ride off into the sunset after this season, so short as it has been, and so bereft of Eastern Conference road dates.

And obviously I understand that no 42-year-old man is looking to play another eight years in a professional sport as tough as hockey, but just the idea that this might conceivably happen is enough to keep me warm. You also have to wonder what the quality of the Ducks this year might mean for Selanne’s return at least for, say, next season. Is he, like Corey Perry, liking what he sees from his teammates enough that next season is at least a possibility? Let’s hope so. Because Teemu is the greatest.

Teemu forever.

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If Shane Doan didn’t score 50 points a year, and if he wasn’t such a good quote, people would see him for what he is: A dirty player who has little respect for his opponents, who dives to draw calls, and who if he were a lesser talent would regularly be run down in much the way Patrick Kaleta is today.

The long history of Doan intentionally trying to hurt his opponents is fairly well-documented. Just last March he was suspended three games for elbowing Jamie Benn in the face only a week after being fined for boarding Mark Giordano, both of which were less than 18 months after he threw a dirty, late, lateral headshot on Dan Sexton. No one really cares about any of that, though, because none of those guys were in any way injured on the plays, though they easily could have been.

When you talk about guys who don’t have respect for their opponents, it’s easy to excoriate the ones who suck at hockey, or the ones who do it without “backing it up.” But because Doan is willing to fight, and because he’s a captain, and because he’s seen as a good guy for sticking with Phoenix when he could have cashed in elsewhere with considerably more franchise stability this summer, no one really cares about that. Certainly, a Ryan Miller-type on the Coyotes would never say he has to get his act together.

The latest incident for which Doan completely escaped any sort of blame despite being hilariously antithetical to the general decorum of the sport was last night, when he and Kings rookie Jake Muzzin accidentally collided knee-to-knee because both were watching the play, and not each other. Admittedly, this is a scary kind of play under the best circumstances because you never want to see someone get their ACL blown out, but Doan was crouched on the ice in the fetal position for a few seconds before getting up and charging at Muzzin. In attempting to get to Muzzin who may have stuck his leg out on purpose for all Doan knew since he, like the defenseman, wasn’t paying attention. Only a linesman’s preemptive intervention stopped Doan from taking a few pops in on Muzzin before the kid even dropped his gloves, and despite the fact that he threw off his gloves while wearing a visor (a no-no in the NHL rulebook, you’ll remember), he was inexplicably not even assessed a penalty.

Doan and his teammates also spent the remainder of the game trying to fight Muzzin every time the kid came over the boards. Which was odd because, unlike Doan himself, his teammates no doubt had an actual look at what happened on the play and could likely see that it was innocent, but you have to stand up for your captain and so forth.

This is blatant reputationism from the officials and the people covering the game, who, had it been, say Brad Marchand or Raffi Torres doing the same, all we’d be hearing about today was how this is the kind of stuff that needs to be run out of the game immediately, and is yet another sign that NHL players don’t take safety seriously.

But because it was Shane Doan, and he was in The Heat of the Moment, and also playing his ass off in that game (he finished with both of Phoenix’s goals. on 11 shots and 13 hits in just under 19 minutes!), it barely warranted a tongue-clucking. I suppose I should get used to that. He’s way too honest a player to ever get called out by anyone.

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So it wasn’t all that long ago that I wrote a thing saying the Ducks gave Ryan Getzlaf a silly amount of money for a bad number of years.

Then they gave Corey Perry the same number of years and even more money. I don’t understand it at all, but this time for a very different reason. If you’re going to give Getzlaf $66 million over eight years, then yeah you probably have to give Perry $3 million on top of that just out of consideration for the time he won a Hart Trophy and dragged a crap Ducks team screaming into the playoffs. That just about covers the added revenues from those few extra home dates, doesn’t it?

And the thing is, too, that it always stood to reason that if the Ducks kept Getzlaf, they would likewise keep Perry, considering how long they’ve been running buddies and how valuable they both are to the franchise. But the decision to keep them together also necessitates some sort of trade, doesn’t it?

The cap is coming down hard next season, and given who they currently have on the roster, the Ducks will be spending a whopping $21.975 million tied up in Getzlaf, Perry, and Bobby Ryan. About one-third of the $64.3 million salary cap next year. That’s not counting Cam Fowler’s $4 million, or Jonas Hiller’s $4.5 million (neither of which look like particularly prudent deals), which bumps the total amount being spent on just five players, three of whom are forwards, to $30.475 million, more than 47 percent of the cap.

This says three things:

1) Saku Koivu and Teemu Selanne, both of whom are free agents in July, will not be returning for victory lap seasons unless they come in at significant discounts, which they probably won’t. If you didn’t get out to a Western Conference game to see them live one last time, you blew your chance.

2) Bobby Ryan’s getting traded. He’s affordable, he’s younger than the other two, and unlike Perry and Getzlaf, his deal doesn’t have any restrictions on trades. Add in the fact that he’s been a repeated trade target (or at least is purported to have been) over the last however-many seasons, and it’s looking like he better start going through his house with a label maker.

3) The Ducks are going to be terrible.

Even getting out from under Ryan’s contract and replacing it with a slightly comparable player — the number of players who averaged 30 goals a year in the last four seasons, 11 fewer than Ryan’s total over that span, checks in at 18 — is unlikely; by my count, not one of them has lower cap hit than does Ryan. Having so little flexibility under the cap to sign, take on, or call up about seven guys (Anaheim has 16 signed for next season right this second for $53.484 million) doesn’t speak too well of how all this is going to work out.

Especially when you consider how hard Viktor Fasth is going to regress to the mean either later this season or into the next one. And how they’re going to have to unload Ryan. Or, if they somehow avoid doing that, dealing with the generally low quality of player they’ll be able to squeeze onto the roster will help to ensure a season as bad as this one was expected to be.

The best part about all this, by the way, is that an actual thing Corey Perry said after signing his team-dooming extension was that he was encouraged to stay by the Ducks’ strong performance this year. Yeah, Corey, about that…

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Yesterday’s Bruins/Capitals game was a very interesting contest for a couple reasons. First, it was a chance to the Caps to prove they are at least a half-decent team (they aren’t), but moreover it was perhaps the first in a long line of impressive wins by Boston, which is for my money the best team in the East on paper.

The Bruins physically intimidated, beat up, and most importantly crumpled the Caps up like tissue paper en route to a dominant 4-1 win, and Washington didn’t like it one little bit.

I don’t know what they thought they might see when they went into TD Garden, but the sight of a team with the third-most fighting majors in the league this season, with four guys who have engaged in three or more scraps, should have been enough for the Caps to say to themselves, “Well, we have approximately no actual fighters in the lineup, so maybe we just try to stick to our game so we don’t get the absolute Christ beat out of us.” It didn’t happen that way, which should have come as a surprise to no one considering the Bruins just lost to this same not-good team in overtime not that long ago.

The festivities really and truly began when Alex Ovechkin crosschecked Brad Marchand in a way that one of the dirtiest players in the NHL didn’t particularly care for. Obviously, Ovechkin wasn’t about to drop the gloves with anyone for any reason, so Marchand went around looking for someone else to oblige him. Mike Ribeiro stepped up to the plate for reasons I still don’t remotely understand (it was his first career fight) and got fed a number of decent shots.

Then Matt Hendricks and Nathan Horton fought when the former more or less jumped the latter off a draw, and Horton left the ice bleeding. Boston didn’t like that, so a little later on, Shawn Thornton tried to get Hendricks to answer, and the Capitals’ one actual kind-of fighter wisely demurred. But when Adam McQuaid got involved, he took that opportunity instead and got pounded for his efforts. Boston ended up winning 4-1, because of course they did, and the Caps weren’t feeling too good about any of it after the game.

There was a lot of talk about what a “joke” it all was, and how the Caps shouldn’t have allowed themselves to stoop to Boston’s level in this way. I don’t know about the joke part; you don’t go into Boston and expect a gentlemanly game free of checking, especially if you’re going to throw around crosschecks like Ovechkin did, and you sure don’t jump one of the team’s better goalscorers in an effort to swing some momentum back your team’s way. What did they expect to happen? Thornton wasn’t about to challenge him to pistols at dawn; don’t walk down that side of the street if you don’t want to get pulled into a dark alley and mugged.

Even after this, the Caps kind of acted like babies, with both Ribeiro and Hendricks getting into it verbally with fans who taunted them, and I guess that kind of underscores just how frustrating yesterday was for a team everyone thought would be much better than it is.

But this is what the Bruins do. This is what they’ve done for years. You kind of can’t be shocked when one of them tries to hit your teammate in the face at this point. You really can’t be mad about it. But I guess when you’re 14th in the East, you have a lot to be mad about in general.

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Darcy Regier isn’t known around the NHL as a guy who is really smart and good at his job. Or at least, he shouldn’t be. Sure, he’s long-tenured, having been the Sabres’ GM since 1997, but that, like Lindy Ruff before him, doesn’t mean he’s done well in the last few years.

He didn’t used to be this bad, of course, but when Uncle Terry came in with and built a Scrooge McDuck vault under First Niagara Center, Regier lost his marbles. Ville Leino, Christian Ehrhoff, Steve Ott, and John Scott. These are the big player acquisitions of the last two summers for the Sabres, and you see now how all of that is working out for them.

And even when he backs into a good decision, such as almost every team ahead of him passing on Mikhail Grigorenko because of xenophobia/stupidity, he can’t resist the chance to screw it all up. There was a time when Grigorenko was considered a top-3 pick in the 2012 draft, but he slipped all the way to No. 12 before Buffalo scooped him up. And it made Regier look really good when the kid actually made the Sabres out of camp.

Then Ruff didn’t seem to like his game much, even after the decision to keep him with the team after the traditional tryout period for all junior players in the NHL. Grigorenko was routinely a healthy scratch, which is something that people might point to as turning out okay for Steven Stamkos. But even when Ruff was fired, Ron Rolston also didn’t seem to have much time for the Russian, and over the course of the season he averaged just 9:45 a night.

The Sabres sent Grigorenko back to Quebec yesterday, after 22 NHL games in which he went 1-4-5, and in doing so wasted a year of his entry-level contract. I don’t doubt that Grigorenko was perhaps simply not ready for the NHL, but this whole thing has been mishandled from the start, as you might expect with Regier involved.

The GM said of the decision that it was a benefit to both parties to send him back, which seems specious. Grigorenko will undoubtedly benefit since, you know, he gets to play actual hockey again (he had 29-21-50 in 32 games for Quebec before joining the Sabres post-lockout). I don’t see how any of that benefits Buffalo.

“There’s benefits for us … We got to know his game,” Regier actually said as though video and in-person scouting don’t exist.

You know what? Just read every quote in that article and look at how hard Regier is trying to spin how badly he and his two coaches handled things with this kid. The amount of spin is actually almost admirable. But the fact of the matter is that Grigorenko now has just two years left on his deal instead of three, because they just couldn’t bear to send him back after the five-game junior player evaluation period. In the 17 games after that, Grigorenko saw 15 minutes or more just once, and got 10 or less in 10.

That, to me or any other logical person, probably isn’t worth the year of his entry-level deal they torched. But again, Regier has shown no compunction about wasting Terry Pegula’s money or goodwill, so I don’t know why we ever expected any less.

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