The Two-Line Pass

The Lead

Opponent with a marquee name. Check. Eight goals in regulation. Check. Six-round shootout. Check. Home team wins. Check. Stereotypically apathetic professional sports market. Check. All of that in the American southeast. Check and mate!

Atlanta 5, New York Rangers 4 in a shootout. Yup, Gary Bettman’s dream for the New NHL was fully evident tonight.

Except the announced attendance was 13,157. And from watching on TV between periods in the Calgary game, I’d wager a good 35 to 40 percent of those were no-shows. I mean, Philips Arena looked like what a ghost would scribble down if you asked him to draw a ghost town. There was NO ONE in the building. And I’m judging that on the basis of other Thrashers games I’ve watched this year, so that’s SAYING something.

Last Sunday on Puck Daddy I noted that the Thrashers are really pushing hard to get the paid attendance up to an average of 14,000 so they could get some revenue-sharing money. Can’t imagine that campaign is going especially well, eh?

I’m not saying people should be lining up around the block to watch a Thrashers-Rangers game that means exactly zero in the grand scheme of things; the Rangers have a playoff spot all but locked up much to my chagrin, the Thrashers have nothing to play for, and Atlanta wouldn’t care about the Thrashers if Andre 3000 was asked to quarterback the power play (and don’t think they haven’t kicked that idea around the front office).

I just figure that, if *I* ran the Thrashers and *I* needed paid attendance to go through the roof in my remaining six home games or whatever, I’d start selling tickets for 50 cents a pop and offer a $1 cash back reward for each ticket purchased. Who cares at that point? Defrauding the NHL is the least of that team’s worries. Todd White’s on their top line for chrissakes.

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The Lead

This is going to shock you, but Kari Lehtonen is going to be a restricted free agent this summer.

No no, I’m as surprised as you! Because it wasn’t that he’d allowed just five goals on 121 shots and posted two shutouts over the four games preceding tonight’s Thrashers/Capitals game. Obviously.

No, he felt he’d have to top that with a 49-save performance in Atlanta’s utter dismantling of the Southeast-leading Caps, who came into the game with the fourth-most goals in the entire NHL, 5-1. It was a performance so good that the people over at NHL.com who decide these things deemed nine of his saves to be highlight-reel material. Nine. That’s a lot of highlights for most total GAMES on NHL.com, and Lehtonen got that by himself (’course, the Atlanta defense had a big hand in that by helping him not at all.

But the best came in the third period when somehow Alex Semin got all alone in front of the net and Lehtonen went all the way across the crease and stacked the pads to kick it out.

It was a stunning performance, ruined only by a goal from Eric Fehr with 1:15 to go.

Facing 50 shots from Washington, even without Mike Green in the lineup and 20 of those coming from Alex Ovechkin, Nicklas Backstrom and Semin by themselves, AND living to tell the tale? That’s awful impressive.

Don Waddell must be wondering if he should’ve traded Lehtonen at the deadline after all, because that Finnish son of a bitch is going to cost a lot of money or at least make him play a lot more Final Fantasy. Either way, it’s a bad situation.

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From the Organization that Can’t Do Anything Right™ — the people that brought you hits like “Erik Christensen: First Line Center,” “Vowing to Make the Playoffs With an Unbelievably Bad Team,” and “Alienating Every Star or Potential Star” — comes another terrible decision.

This time, it’s a new third jersey and, like the Thrashers themselves, it stinks on ice.

Yeesh. I understand season ticket renewals are in the crapper in Hotlanta, but to pretend you’re a basketball team just to put asses in the seats is low-rent.

(And don’t expect the crowd in the background to get much bigger than that once the season starts.)

Compare those jerseys to that of the Atlanta Hawks from a few years ago:

Pretty hard to believe no one saw this ripoff similarity and said, “Yeah, maybe we stay away from this.” It’s not like people go to Hawks games either.

And no, you’re not counting wrong, that’s four assistant captains. But the fun doesn’t stop there, because Mathieu Schneider is an assistant captain too! The Thrashers have said they’re naming a captain “soon” but, uhh, you guys host Washington on Friday, sooooooo…

Shovel this load of crap on their continuously growing pile with their inability to sign the only person on their team worth showing up for (the erstwhile Mr. Kovalchuk) and ability to make their phenom goaltending prospect demand a trade by promising him things and not backing them up, and you’ve got a top-flight organization.

At least Lil Jon shows up to games! Get T-Pain or Lil Wayne and maybe hip hop fans will care.

In a stunning move, the Thrashers have traded Ken Klee, Brad Larsen and a prospect of little consequence to Anaheim for Mathieu Schneider.

Well, okay, it’s not all that stunning. The Thrashers are now on the hook for Schneider’s $5.75 million contract but have the No. 1 defenseman they desperately needed, and the Ducks just saved themselves $3.7 million against the cap. That’s some Teemu Selanne money right there.

By adding Schneider, the Thrashers have essentially achieved their objective of dramatically changing their defense.

It is important to note, however, that “changing” and “improving” have two entirely separate definitions.

A top four of Schneider, Ron Hainsey, newly re-signed Tobias Enstrom, and (maybe) rookie Zach Bogosian isn’t bad by any means, but the Thrashers seem, at least by USA Today’s Kevin Allen’s reckoning, to be operating under the impression that they’ll have the remotest chance of making the playoffs. A clue: No. This is still a team with no forward depth and a very questionable goaltending situation, and having three puckrushing defensemen who range from good (Schneider) to iffy (Hainsey) in their own zone isn’t exactly the recipe for success that’s going to get the Thrashers out of the basement.

I hate to disagree with Kevin Allen, but even with this trade, the Thrashers are still the absolute worst team in the NHL and they’ll still score only about 150 more goals than Ilya Kovalchuk’s total. Call me when Atlanta trades for a center.

What this is for the Thrashers, really, is smart asset management. Come deadline time, they’ll be able to get a lot more for a few months of Mathieu Schneider, in his declining years though he is, than Ken Klee and Brad Larsen. If this is the best deal Burke could get, the five or six we heard about the other day had to have been just atrocious HFBoards-type proposals.

Darryl Sutter once put forth the theory that there are maybe 15 actual top-line centers in the National Hockey League at any time. He offered no further definition of what makes or doesn’t make a player a No. 1 pivot.

But assuming that he’s right (the number might be slightly higher than that but the theory’s more or less correct), that leaves at least 15 without a true No. 1 center. This year, Atlanta is absolutely one of those teams. Why?

Meet “No. 1 center” Erik Christensen.

It’s more than 2,300 miles from his home in Edmonton to his job in Atlanta, but Erik Christensen drove it gladly, and not just because he sat behind the wheel of a BMW while Slayer songs blasted from the speakers.

Christensen was driving toward opportunity, the kind of opportunity he has waited for all his life. The Thrashers plan to make him their first-line center.

ERIK CHRISTENSEN? The 25-year-old third-round pick who has never played a full NHL season in his life, was injured three different times last season, who has a career points-per-game total of .46 and averages 12:52 of ice time a night? THAT Erik Christensen is who you want centering Ilya Kovalchuk?

Yes, as it turns out. How does a local paper spin that to sound positive?

With Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin skating on the top two lines, the Penguins didn’t know what to do with Christensen. His playing time varied between low and very low, about 12-1/2 minutes per game.

…

“We certainly are going to give him that opportunity,” general manager Don Waddell said. “He’s got the skill level and the skill set to play with guys like that.”

“He’s got a really good shot. He’s got quick hands. He’s a good skater. He’s a strong skater,” Thrashers coach John Anderson said.

Except none of that is especially factual, and nothing Waddell says can qualify as truth. This is such fact that, in my quest to find any NHL highlights of Christensen as a means of vindicating him, I a) found none, and b) stumbled upon a post at the Pensblog that said “Even Erik Christensen would have scored” in the 82-0 Bulgaria game. Great site though the Pensblog is, I’m sure even they would admit to blind homerism in most cases. When they’re not backing up a well-thought-of former Pen, that player must have been quite bad.

But the best part of the article — the most laugh-out-loud, fall-down hysterical paragraph — started like this…:

Christensen has proven he can score when given the chance.

…And ended like this:

His 54-goal, 54-assist season for Kamloops six years ago gave him the Western Hockey League scoring title.

SIX YEARS AGO! IN JUNIORS! Just put him down for the Art Ross now then.

Poor Kovalchuk. He must just pick up the AJC every day and sob into his Cheerios. How can any team play this as a good thing? One imagines Kovy and his wife will begin boxing up their belongings around late December, when the Thrashers are already out of the playoffs. Hopefully the Thashers can at least offload him for another future top-line guy like Stefan Ruzicka.