The Two-Line Pass

Here’s a story you will read in every Canadian newspaper tomorrow.

VANCOUVER — On the game’s biggest stage, and in the most important game of his life, Roberto Luongo ____________ (answered his critics/imploded horribly), spilling thousands of Vancouver fans into the street in paroxysms of ____________ (sheer joy/blinding rage).

Luongo, who in many ways was the crux of the series’ bizarre and numerous turning points, played ____________ (extremely well/mind-bendingly poorly) in allowing ____________ (0/12) goals and turning aside ____________ (14/three) shots in ____________ (60/eight) minutes of action.

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The Lead

Hockey’s biggest rivalry! The 8-6 slugfest from February!

Make no mistake, there was palpable excitement for this Bruins/Habs showdown in Montreal that, while it wouldn’t decide the Northeast Division by any stretch of the imagination, it was certainly going to be a huge boost to whichever team emerged victorious.

Both teams had been off since Saturday night, and had ample time to let the importance of this game marinate. And because this game was so vitally important, Claude Julien, who knows all too well about how much of a pressure-cooker Montreal can be, decided to give the nod to…

Tuukka Rask?

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The Lead

So the Bruins lost to the Sabres tonight. Not really that surprising.

Not that big a deal either. The Bruins have a supercomfortable two-point lead on the Thrashers for the eighth spot in the East and so why not lay down against a team that’s got the Northeast Division pretty much wrapped up by now?

Lots of blame to go around in this loss, as you’d expect. The first two Sabres goals went in off stupid Dennis Wideman who’s been complete crap this year. The third one was also his fault because he turned the puck over and went back to the bench instead of playing the guy to whom he’d just given it, because his stick was broken (or so he’d have us believe!).

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The Lead

The fans chanted for it. The radio talk show hosts blathered over it. The newspaper reporters wrote about it. The bloggers tweeted about it. The players surely discussed it. Everyone ravened for it.

Revenge.

Bloody, swift revenge. Matt Cooke had to pay for his transgressions against Marc Savard. After all, you don’t rattle another team’s best player’s brain around in his skull without paying for it. Certainly not the way Cooke did it: an unprovoked, deliberate ambush designed to do exactly what it ended up doing.

So no sooner did Cooke hop over the boards for his first shift to a chorus of boos from every corner of the arena than Boston’s resident tough-guy Shawn Thornton asked him to answer for his dastardly deed as though this brand of justice ripped straight from the last 10 pages of every awful black-hat-bad-guy Western would somehow lift the fog that crept into Savard’s brain cavity in the immediate aftermath of last Sunday’s blatant headshot du jour.

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The Lead

OH BOY ANYTHING CAN HAPPEN WHEN THESE TWO TEAMS GET TOGETHER!

Yup, I remember when the League was like “Yeah Winter Classic at Fenway you guys pumped?” and everyone was all, “Yesssss do we get to see Ovie play outside because we love Ovie and the rest of the Caps are pretty cool too great job NHL!” And then they were like, “Capitals? Noooo, the Bruins aren’t playing them.”

A little confusing. But okay, maybe the Rangers. Boston/New York. Those towns hate each other. League wasn’t having that either. They said, “How would you guys like to see the Bruins play the FLYERS?” I mean, I guess I kinda do. Two pretty decent teams. Fun hockey can come from that. Oh and they fight a reasonable amount as well. Bonus points there. On paper it seemed like this harebrained scheme might not be the worst one the NHL ever cooked up.

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The Lead

Puck in the slot, Alex Ovechkin streaking toward it, you’re supposed to pick up the trailer.

Do you:

A) Dive at the puck.
B) Try to get in position to jockey with him to disrupt a shot.
C) Intentionally commit slash Ovechkin in the spine and hope they don’t score on the resultant power play.
D) Give Ovechkin 45 minutes to load it up, cock and fire a 620-mile-an-hour shot past Tim Thomas and doom your team to a loss.

Hint: NOT D!

I’m not exactly the world’s foremost expert on backchecking, but I feel like that’s pretty straightforward.

But this play was symptomatic of the Bruins’ entire 4-1 loss to the Capitals tonight. Lazy backcheck, disinterested forecheck, hopeless rushes. It all adds up to a bad loss.

Someone on Twitter noted that Boston fans can expect a similar offensive output most nights this season, and that’s certainly truish. He cited the loss of Kessel as the reason for the drop in production, but really it’s that the Bruins led the NHL in shooting percentage last year, putting 10.9 percent of their shots in the net, a full 1.45 better than league average. Only five other teams (Pittsburgh, Philly, Atlanta, St. Louis and Vancouver) broke 10 percent. The extra 1.45 accounted for an extra 36 goals above average — ironically exactly the number Kessel scored last year — and made the Bruins second in goals for instead of tied for 17th.

So all year, Bruins fans will be scratching their heads saying, “Why isn’t Lucic/Krejci/Ryder/Wheeler/Kobasew scoring like he did last year?” It’s because their shooting percentages were 17.5, 15.1, 14.6, 14.0 and 16.3, respectively and they’re all likely to regress, to varying degrees, toward the mean. Regardless of how well Marc Savard passes (very) or how good the defense is (also very), they simply can’t be expected to total last year’s ridiculous output.

And hey, tonight they went up against a team known for its defense and goalte…

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(Ed. note: As with Monday night, there were no pictures from this game immediately available, so here’s some crap I made in Photoshop very quickly. Love the smudge.)

The Lead

It’s not very often that the first preseason tilt of a team’s campaign tells pretty much the whole story for the remaining games, but the Toronto Maple Leafs came pretty close tonight against the Boston Bruins.

For one thing, they lost 3-2 and you get the feeling that, given the relative quality of the Leafs’ roster as it’s currently constituted, that seems just about right for the majority of the season, doesn’t it? Not that Brian Burke is at fault in this; he was handed a pretty awful team to begin with and has made some shrewd moves to improve it. Enough to make the playoffs? Probably not. But enough to keep Leafs fans entertained? You know it.

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The Lead

The Bruins hadn’t beaten Washington yet this season in their prior two meetings and, in fact, had scored only two goals while allowing an appalling five(!). So the much-anticipated tilt between the two titans of the Eastern Conference, which was to be played in Boston for the first time this season, seemed kinda important.

Not just for the, y’know, points and whatever, but also to prove that Boston could, in fact, have a good offensive game against Washington. In the two earlier games, the Bruins scored once despite 34 shots on goal and then saw Tim Thomas outdueled (by Jose Theodore of all people) and the offense outgunned.

Boston, surprisingly, started nervily. Washington drew a power play just seven seconds into the game and Mike Green bombed one just one second after it expired to give the Caps a 1-0 lead. Shawn Thornton’s nasty backhander at 9:26 that tied the game seemed to catch everyone in the building by surprise, including the aforementioned Theodore, but Michael Nylander put the Caps up again just before the end of the period. Marc Savard eventually leveled with a power play goal midway through the second on a gorgeous feed from the returning Patrice Bergeron, who did not look out of place on David Krejci’s wing.

And Krejci? He bounced the overtime game-winner in off a defenseman’s leg.

So I guess that settles the whole “Boston can’t beat Washington” thing. Sure, they still can’t stop Green or Alex Semin, who assisted on the former’s goal, but at least they have that pesky Alex Ovechkin situation squared away. Apparently the key is to hook him in such a way that he falls awkwardly into the boards and has to go to the dressing room to get his shoulder looked at, as Zdeno Chara did tonight. After that, Ovie looked flustered and had little impact on the game. He was relatively silent (for Ovie) save for a secondary assist on the Green goal and had only one shot all night at even strength, that in overtime.

The Bruins have now failed to beat only two of their opponents this year: the Wild, to whom they’ve somehow lost twice, and the Rangers (somehow), to whom they lost in a shootout in their only meeting.

The ultimate test, of course, comes two weeks from tonight, when they host the only other truly great team in the league: San Jose. They’ll beat San Jose. I don’t doubt that.

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The Lead

Lately I’ve been trying to tone down the Jack Edwards bashing on this blog. It’s beyond going after the low-hanging fruit; it’s more like picking up the half-eaten fruit that’s already fallen on the ground and, frankly, looks a bit shabby.

But what he did today has to be considered inexcusable. With about eight seconds to go in a one-goal game and St. Louis’ goalie pulled, Carlo Colaiacovo picked up a dump-in and began to rush up ice in a last-ditch effort to salvage overtime.

“Eight seconds left,” said Edwards. “It’ll take a miracle now.”

Well David Backes swatted a puck out of midair and somehow kept his stick below the crossbar to level the game with 0.8 seconds remaining, so I guess that qualifies. St. Louis went on to win 5-4 in a shootout. Here’s a video of the frantic final seconds that includes the Bruins missing on two tries at the empty net:

But seriously, what kind of an idiot says something like that as the opposing team is carrying the puck with speed through the neutral zone? Knowing Edwards as I do, it’s not a stretch to say he is the most hilariously biased, repetitive, annoying, awkward play by play guys in hockey (maybe even professional sport), and as much as I would prefer the Bruins not give up points to any Western Conference team, I was filled with such glee that Edwards had seemingly jinxed his team that I couldn’t believe it.

And that final goal in regulation was just the cherry on top of probably the best single period of hockey this year. The Bruins entered the third trailing 2-1 and scored three goals in the space of 1:39 thanks to a 5-on-3 power play during which they scored twice and a goal just seconds later by Zdeno Chara right off a draw. The game looked well in hand. But then St. Louis scored on a power play of its own with 1:20 or so to play to cut the lead to one before that remarkable tying goal.

So as much as the Blues can thank David Backes’ ability to somehow not play that puck with a high stick, I think Andy Murray should be wrapping up a nice fruit basket for Edwards right about now.

And by the way, this game wasn’t even aired in St. Louis, which is at once sad and hilarious.

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The Lead

For those that missed the Bruins/Canadiens game tonight, you missed, without hyperbole, probably the best game of the season to date.

Despite being an essentially meaningless mid-January game (insofar as the Bruins and Habs ain’t exactly jockeying for position in the standings), this matchup had all the drama, pace and excitement of last year’s outstanding playoff series. The Garden was packed and rocking from the time the first puck dropped to the final whistle when the Bruins emerged with a fairly convincing 3-1 victory over the hated and red-hot Habs.

Tim Thomas and Jaroslav Halak were both outstanding, making 34 and 26 saves respectively, but the true star of the game was Zdeno Chara, whose big, power play point shot beat Halak twice and who ate up nearly 32 minutes of ice time for Boston.

There was a fight, pretty little passing plays and there were hits. Lots of hits. On paper, the Habs actually won the physical battle, outhitting the Bruins 28-23 thanks to Mike Komisarek’s ridiculous 11 checks.

I don’t know if there’s a way to watch the entire game online through some kind of NHL game archive, but this is a game you need to see. It was so good that even Jack Edwards was tolerable.

If this had been Game 7 of a late-round playoff series, people would be raving about this game for years to come.

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