The Two-Line Pass

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“Ah well,” people who believed Jay Feaster didn’t completely bungle the Jarome Iginla trade and totally embarrass himself and his organization in the process, “you can’t judge or blame him by this.”

Last week on Puck Daddy I broke down some of the many reasons you very much could blame Feaster for punting the Iginla deal, despite the player’s last-minute mind-change, but as I said then, those who would prop him up in this vague manner had half a point at the very least.

And hindsight being what it is, it’s now officially extremely easy to look back and giggle with schadenfreudian delight at the thing they often said next: “Let’s see how he handles the rest of this dismantling.”

Make no mistake about it: Iginla being traded signalled the long-awaited switch in managerial philosophy that no, this crap team wasn’t going to magically get good with the passage of time, and last night’s move of Jay Bouwmeester to St. Louis put an exclamation point behind that point. When or if they hopefully are able to unload Miikka Kiprusoff on anyone dumb enough to take him aboard it will also have been double-underlined and circled a few times, and have arrows drawn to it.

Those three have long been the standard bearers for the Flames’ appalling lack of intellectual honesty — that’s Feaster’s term, by the way, not mine — about the quality of their team, and to see two of them go now is no small miracle. The only hindrance to moving Kiprusoff, and this is on Feaster too, is that he’s now too old and bad to fetch much of a price, and also he doesn’t seem too amenable to going elsewhere given that his wife had a baby just a few weeks ago.

So okay, if we can’t judge Feaster on the return he pulled for Iginla, and we’re unlikely to get the chance to do so for a Kiprusoff deal, then the only lens through which we can view him with total clearheadedness is apparently the Bouwmeester trade. And he ate it hard, as Feaster is wont to do. (Ed. note: This was not originally intended as a fat joke, at least not consciously, but could certainly be viewed that way in hindsight.)

The return for what some see as a steady, 29-year-old defenseman with one year remaining on his contract (whose numbers might only look bad because he’s playing 30 minutes a night against the toughest competition the Flames see by far and is by the way on one of the worst teams in the league) was much the same as what Feaster pulled for a declining, 35-year-old forward who is a pure rental. Except for the fact that it was worse.

Where Iginla earned Feaster a return of two middling prospects with marginal chances to become NHL regulars as well as a late first-round pick, he didn’t even get that much out of St. Louis. Oh, the two middling prospects with marginal chances to become NHL regulars came, for sure. But that first-round pick? A bit muddier. They don’t get it if St. Louis misses the playoffs this season, and will instead have to settle for a fourth-rounder and whatever first-round position the Blues pull next year.

So yes, let’s judge Feaster by that: A far more desirable player than his captain, whom he could have moved to any team with the interest, couldn’t even fetch the same return. The reason for this is obvious, though. Other GMs know Feaster is horrible at his job and are looking to rob him blind at every turn. One of the pitfalls of being in open rebuild, I suppose, but when Douglas Murray and Robyn Regehr are fetching a pair of second-round picks, not even being able to get that much for someone who’s demonstrably better than both of them is a true sign of how bad this guy is at his job.

And of course, when considering just how dumb he is, one must also note that he actually said, perhaps in an attempt to save face, that this move frees up a lot of cap space for next season. Some people never learn, I guess.

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For whatever reason, it seems as if mediocre defensemen will dominate the trade market this year, and I don’t really know how much sense it makes. Jordan Leopold became the latest of these blueliners to get traded yesterday, moving to St. Louis for the absurdly high price of a second-round pick, just days after Douglas Murray got two out of Pittsburgh.

Is that the market? A mid-to-late second rounder for guys with little actual value and negative corsi relative numbers? Ridiculous. To put it another way, apparently the Blackhawks were in hot pursuit of Lubomir Visnovsky before the Islanders signed him to a big-money extension, and that’s because he has actually been good this year. But having been spurned, they will instead move onto other potential targets like Mark Streit (negative corsi), Robyn Regehr (negative corsi), Jay Bouwmeester (negative corsi), and Ryan Whitney (negative corsi).

It’s come to this, I guess. It seems unlikely that any of these players apart from Bouwmeester will actually help a team be good at hockey — this assumption is based on Bouwmeester largely enjoying a career offensive year despite an extremely low PDO, and playing heavy minutes against the toughest competition on the team for a mostly garbage club — but nonetheless, teams will be happy to pay extremely high prices for these guys. I can’t even begin to imagine what Bouwmeester fetches from whatever team is desperate enough to pay Calgary’s ransom, which will no doubt be boosted appreciably by the team trying to save face after getting robbed in the Iginla deal.

I have something going up on Puck Daddy tomorrow morning about how the market is largely going to be dead, and I believe that rather firmly. The only guys that are going to be moved are guys like Leopold and Murray, who are of little consequence, and whose former teams will be better for having moved them off their rosters. That’s even leaving aside whatever returns they fetch. Which again, seem to be considerable.

The trade deadline is almost by definition always a buyer’s market, and with so few sellers out there, the old adage about teams paying gallon prices for a quart of milk seem more likely to ring true now than not. But if the Blackhawks, or whoever, end up paying that for the defensemen being bandied about in the market these days, they’ll be getting closer to a pint.

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(Ed. note: This is a sponsored post for Sarah Barnett (Happy birthday!). 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.)

Hi! I’m writing these posts to benefit 826 Boston, a nonprofit writing and tutoring center for area kids at which I volunteer. If you want to make a donation, you can click right here. Thanks!

In the NHL today there are many famous rivalries. Bruins and Canadiens always gets interesting because of how much those two teams seem to legitimately hate and want to seriously injure each other. Blackhawks and Red Wings will always have a place in the hearts of Original Six fans and those who currently like seeing Chicago beat up their ancient rival. The Battles of Ontario and Alberta have a certain colloquial charm even if those four teams have generally been unwatchable in the last several years.

But I think that the hockey world at large has largely seized on the somehow-still-burgeoning Battle of Pennsylvania between Pittsburgh and Philadelphia and said that yes this is definitively the best rivalry in the league. Any arguments to the contrary seem rather silly.

Let’s put it this way: That insane series the two played last year, which only went six games but somehow contained 56 goals — a number I had to look up and then quadruple check because it doesn’t seem like it could be in any way correct — and featured suspensions and controversy and guys in bear suits and all that acrimony, was only in the first round. Hell, the Senators played in the first round. Who cares about the first round? Imagine if there was actually a lot on the line besides getting some tee times squared away before the beginning of May. If this series had been, say, the Eastern Conference Final instead of one of eight first-round matchups, someone might actually have died. I mean that. Zac Rinaldo or someone would have pulled a knife out of his sock and stabbed someone on a defensive zone faceoff.

This series, and this rivalry, takes on such import that it led Peter Laviolette, who when he isn’t blindly defending the borderline criminal acts of his team’s dirtiest players seems like a fairly rational fellow, to proclaim that after a single series in which he had 6-8-14 against the Penguins’ defense that Claude Giroux was the best player in the world, usurping the crown held by Sidney Crosby, who himself had a paltry 3-5-8 in the same stretch. Much was made of this proclamation, which a short time later was brushed under the rather lumpy-looking rug under which all embarrassing things related to embarrassingly wrong statements from members of the Flyers organization are banished once Giroux went 2-1-3 in a four-game sweep by New Jersey in the next round.

And now these two teams face each other once again tonight in a game that probably won’t feature between 10 and 13 goals, but then again it looks like Marc-Andre Fleury and Ilya Bryzgalov get the go tonight, so I also wouldn’t want to totally rule out that exact thing happening. Giroux, after a dreadful start, has 19 points in his last 16 games, and Jake Voracek has a team-leading 27 in 24. Meanwhile, Crosby leads the league with 36 points in 23 games (no fair) and Evgeni Malkin is on 23 points in just 19 games. James Neal is at 22 in 23, including 14 goals, and somehow Chris Kunitz has 12-16-28 in 23 as well.

These are teams that can score, and do it a lot. And they can also beat each other up. After a kind of disappointing opening game of the season, their last matchup, on Feb. 20, featured 11 goals and 48 penalty minutes. So, you know, something entertaining is probably going to happen.

Don’t forget to donate to 826 Boston. Thanks again.

(Ed. note: This is a sponsored post for Steve Dangle. 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.)

Hi! I’m writing these posts to benefit 826 Boston, a nonprofit writing and tutoring center for area kids at which I volunteer. If you want to make a donation, you can click right here. Thanks!

Noted video blogger (”vlogger”) and dumb Canadian idiot Steve Dangle proposed perhaps the most interesting of the sponsored topics yet. It’s one I’ve subsequently been thinking about a lot.

“Maybe [write about] who the next Calgary Flames are going to be. And by that I mean the next team to be totally screwed.”

Damn, that’s one hell of a good thing to think about. The obvious answer would be the Buffalo Sabres, who seem hellbent on turning Thomas Vanek and Ryan Miller into the next Jarome Iginla and Miikka Kiprusoff circa 2008 or so, the only good players on a team, surrounded by detritus and with their own skills fading slowly at first, and then with alarming rapidity.

Another pretty good answer would probably be the San Jose Sharks, who tried as the Flames did to force their way back to Stanley Cup contention with greybearded veterans and in doing so not only missed the boat on that, but also cost themselves several years worth of good draft picks.

You might even be able to say it’s true of the Carolina Hurricanes, treading water in mediocrity forever after one totally shocking and perhaps undeserved Cup run (the difference being they won and Calgary didn’t). The ‘Canes have since drafted Jeff Skinner, and probably won’t be so foolish as to trade him as Calgary did with Dion Phaneuf, but otherwise have a relatively bare cupboard and an aging-but-not-good-enough core, led until only recently by a bad coach.

But then last night, I figured out the perfect candidate for which team will be the next one to be as hopeless as the Calgary Flames are currently. It’s the Calgary Flames. Yesterday was perhaps the most embarrassing day in that franchise’s history, which, given the quality of the franchise’s management in the last several years, is really saying something.

It all began bright and early on Thursday morning in Calgary, when Jay Feaster pulled the trigger on the trade the brought ex-Flame Brian McGrattan, who is awful, back to Calgary for a minor league prospect in an attempt to become “tougher to play against.” Normally, this would be fine. Except McGrattan was on waivers one day earlier and cleared because no one claimed him. Baffling stuff, except that adding McGrattan would have pushed Calgary up to the league’s 50-contract limit. I conjectured that this was a precursor to some other kind of move that would necessitate them taking on an additional deal, and well hey look at that I was right.

Jay Feaster, of all people, was finally the one GM in the league smart enough to give Colorado’s Ryan O’Reilly the $5 million a season he wanted and deserved, and he did so through an offer sheet after apparently trying in vain to pry O’Reilly away via trade (astronomical asking price for a division rival, and all that). This was something that wise fans of a number of teams league-wide had been clamoring for since the O’Reilly situation turned truly acrimonious in Denver, and that Feaster jumped on the grenade was a bit of a surprise given how judicious such a move — which would only have cost Calgary a first- and third-round pick — was. With that having been said, the way Feaster structured O’Reilly’s contract also allowed the center to get a massive qualifying offer when the two-year deal expired, but that was less of a concern, largely because everyone was still sitting somewhat agog at the fact that Feaster made a pretty shrewd managerial move, as is generally the opposite of his wont.

However, the CBA certainly allowed Feaster to sign O’Reilly to that offer sheet, just as it allowed Colorado to match that offer and get all mad, which GM Greg Sherman did within a few hours.

In fact, that decision to match came midway through the Avalanche’s game that night, which rather coincidentally was being played against Calgary at the Pepsi Center. But hey, at that point, things were going very well for the Flames, as they were up 3-0 and looking like they would cruise to a win that would catapult them to a tie for 12th in the West with Edmonton. Instead, they gave up five of the game’s next six goals and lost 5-4 in regulation because the Flames are an embarrassing conflagration of a disaster.

That capped a pretty ugly night for the franchise, which has had too many of those to count on a couple dozen hands in the last calendar year. And then it got worse.

What most people, including the Flames organization, didn’t realize (or at least forgot) is that Jay Feaster is constantly skirting the borderline between incompetence and outright negligence. This morning it came out that what Feaster apparently didn’t know was that it also stated that if he had to bring the center onto the roster, he would have to first put him through waivers, where someone would have almost certainly claimed him. (Colorado was under no such restriction because he was their own restricted free agent and therefore had no waiver requirements.) So Calgary would have lost both those two picks and Ryan O’Reilly in the space of a day, for no reason at all other than Jay Feaster not knowing how the CBA works. Which, I am to understand, is a pretty large part of his job.

Now, that this didn’t happen is entirely a function of Sherman also not being a very smart GM. Because while he would certainly love to have O’Reilly back on his team (though perhaps not at that price point) having the opportunity to not only get two free draft picks, which were likely to be quite high, while also completely screwing a division rival that you now had a pretty decent reason to dislike.

But at least he got something out of the deal, and that something is a very good young center. Calgary got nothing but another regulation loss, a player no one wanted on waivers, and a whole lot of derision.

No one’s knocking them off the perch as the NHL’s most miserably-run franchise any time soon.

Don’t forget to donate to 826 Boston. Thanks again.

Hi! I’m writing these posts as part of a Write-A-Thon to benefit 826 Boston, a nonprofit writing and tutoring center for area kids at which I volunteer. If you want to make a donation, you can click right here. Thanks!

You knew it would come to this eventually. Owners, let’s say the ones in small markets where they have a tenuous grasp on a small and already-kind-of-disinterested fanbase, are starting to get a little edgy about the whole work stoppage thing lasting too much longer than it already has.

From Bruce Garrioch (I know, I know):

“My guess is you’ve got about 10 teams that are pretty nervous right now,” said a league insider. “But (Bettman) has the power of the executive committee behind him.”

That’s where the conversation begins and ends. The league has 30 owners, and one-third of them are “pretty nervous” about the lockout.

Again, it’s very easy to guess that those owners aren’t exactly the league’s money-making engines and therefore their opinion matters almost exactly squat. Now, Garrioch characterizes some owners whose teams very likely do manage to turn a profit as being among those who want this lockout ended, and I thought that was interesting. Geoffrey Molson, for instance, is termed a “dove,” and that’s kind of understandable. A Habs game is a license to print money. The same is true of Terry Pegula, who has all the money he could ever need (he’s the fourth-richest NHL owner, and soon to be the third since the Kings’ Phil Anschutz, who’s No. 1, is selling), and very legitimately seems to just love hockey.

But Garrioch also says that other owners who might be getting edgy are the Rangers’ James Dolan, who runs Madison Square Garden, and the Flyers’ Ed Snider, who runs Comcast. Now maybe his league insider told him that specifically, and Dolan has stated in the past that he doesn’t want a lockout but he’s also not exactly sweating the Rangers’ revenue given the number of other events he could host at MSG if he so desired. But really, we’re supposed to believe Ed Snider is so consumed of his desire to win a Stanley Cup that he’s willing to give the players what they want?

These guys have often been counted among the true hawks on the Board of Governors, alongside bloodthirsty warmongers like Boston’s Jeremy Jacobs, Calgary’s Murray Edwards and Washington’s Ted Leonsis, who would stop at nothing to fracture the union, put it back together, then shatter it again. I sincerely doubt that a missed preseason and two weeks of canceled dates — not even canceled games! — would be enough to move the needle for two of the league’s best-known, revenue-generatingest owners. Maybe you don’t think they’d have the power to pull one of their counterparts aside and say, “Let’s cut the crap or we’re gonna rain hell on you.” They’re not Nashville and they’re not Florida. They have clout, and they wouldn’t remotely be afraid to use it.

It’s far more likely that the guys nervously adjusting their ties and tugging at the collars are the ones whose teams lose money anyway, but you could have guessed that at the start.

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The Lead

A couple years ago I apparently signed up for something through the Calgary Flames’ official website because they clearly have my email address on file. Occasionally I’ll get emails about special tickets being put on sale just for people like me a few hours before game day.

I don’t mark them as spam, I don’t look for a link to unsubscribe myself from this list. I sit there and I say, “Oh look another email from the Flames about tickets what a nice organization they sure do care about me even if I’m probably their only sworn American fan within 1,500 miles of the Atlantic Ocean. ” Not that I read these emails beyond the subject line. Again, I’m about 2,200 miles from the Saddledome. These on-sales literally couldn’t matter less to me.

But I guess my point is that I’m a hell of a goddamn Flames fan. I’m such a good fan that I will let them try to sell me crap I don’t want just out of my desire to support them in any way possible.

So fanatical for this team am I that I have, in the past three weeks, watched every single one of their uniformly hideous games.

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The Lead

Preemptive warning: For some reason people get vaguely upset when I write about the Flames (because, presumably, there are my favorite team and this is somehow offensive?). This is going to be one of those times. Also, if you have an ultra high-res copy of the above picture I want to see Olli Jokinen’s excited face as large as humanly possible for some reason.

It’s pretty impressive, what’s happening here. Jarome Iginla is hefting the Flames on his back for what has to be like the 300th time and making them, kicking and screaming, not-terrible despite their best efforts.

By anyone’s definition, he had a slow start, scoring just two goals and two assists in eight games and everyone was like “Old man Iginla’s finally lost it.” Peep these stats though: 14 goals in his last 14 games, 11 in his last 10, seven in his last five. Handful of assists thrown in there as well. I guess ya take that if you’re Calgary.

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The Lead

Well, the Avs did it again tonight and all you doubters can just go ahead and groove on that.

We all heard the talk at the beginning of the year; about how they’d finish dead last in the West, how there wasn’t anyone on the team that was any good and how you couldn’t enter a season with a goaltending tandem of Craig Anderson and Petr Budaj and still expect to win any significant number of games.

And with tonight’s 3-2 win over Calgary on the second night of a road back-to-back, those doubters were once again proven to be 100 percent WRONG.

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The Lead

Okay, seriously, I watched the third period of the Flames game and that was it. And while I did see Jarome Iginla wrist the absolute hell of a shot (one of my favorite things in the world, by the way), and also some crazy Freddy Sjostrom goal, then Mark Giordano fighting someone and finally the Flames winning a game and not looking like garbage doing it.

I think I’ve been dosed with hallucinogens or something and I need to go lie down.

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The Lead

Calgary lost 6-5 in overtime. They led 5-0 nine minutes into the game.

There are no words to adequately express my rage.

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