The Two-Line Pass

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The Maple Leafs are, as I’ve said before, not a particularly great hockey team, nor are they a particularly well-managed or well-coached hockey team. But I did think they were good enough to get into the playoffs if their goaltending held up.

It largely has. And as a result, the Leafs are currently sitting sixth in the East, seven points up on the Islanders, who are just below the postseason cutoff, and they’re looking pretty comfortable, even if they have won just three of their last 10 games (yuck). How comfortable? James Mirtle tweeted this morning that by his count, because the Leafs currently have 40 points and the rest of the East sucks, that the Leafs can go just 5-7-2 in their remaining 14 games and be more or less assured a playoff spot.

Which is crazy. They’ve almost done everything in their power to not make the playoffs, including playing their worst players more minutes than one of the best point-producing and possession-driving centers in the league this season, leaving a high-quality offensive defenseman in the AHL in favor of Korbinian Holzer, and been absolute crap in the shootout. But it’s all been to no avail.

The Leafs are probably going to make the playoffs. They’d need to collapse way more significantly than they did last season, and in 14 games that doesn’t seem all that likely, especially given how soft their schedule is. In all, 10 of their remaining games are against teams below them in the standings, including the Hurricanes (bad), Flyers (worse), Devils twice (okayish I guess), Rangers twice (still underperforming), Islanders twice (dreadful), Capitals (woof), Lightning (crap), and Panthers (the worst).

I can’t be too sure whether lot of people will try to paint this as somehow being a result of their canning Brian Burke being the reason that the Leafs are actually good enough to make the playoffs finally, but I’m going to err on the side of caution and say they obviously will. Only a person like Burke saying that he set the table for the Leafs’ moderate success this likely playoff season — not coincidentally the only one in which James Reimer has been remotely healthy in the last three — would be viewed as being some sort of derogatory misrepresentation of fact. But what has Dave Nonis done this season? Anything of note besides strand Jake Gardiner in the minors for too long? The answer is nothing. That’s it.

So it seems like at long last Toronto is going to have its playoff team. Which is probably something it should or even would have done last season. But moreover it looks like people in the media up there might have to actually say moderately nice things about the things Brian Burke has done in constructing this team and maybe even setting it up for the future. Either that or it’ll take some serious logical acrobatics to avoid doing so. That’s the really mind-blowing thing about all this.

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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!

Alexander Semin at $7 million this season is looking like a pretty good gamble for the Carolina Hurricanes, because he’s on 26 points in 24 games and really carrying the load offensively to help Eric Staal and Jiri Tlusty look good.

Alexander Semin at $7 million next season, and the one after that, and the one after that, and the one after that, and the one after that probably isn’t going to be quite as good a gamble, because the ENIGMATIC Russian forward, while very good, is also 29 years old and will be 34 when this contract expires. Apart from wondering how much of this production was the result of his playing for a contract and all that stuff after a weakish final two seasons in Washington, you also have to wonder what the actual heckaroonie Jim Rutherford is thinking with how he approaches the makeup of his roster.

Up front, he is now giving Eric Staal $8.25 million, Semin $7 million, Jordan Staal $6 million, Jeff Skinner $5.725 million, and Tuomo Ruutu $4.75 million against the cap starting next season, and all are signed through at least 2015-16. On top of that, mediocre goalie Cam Ward’s $6.3 million cap hit extends through that season as well.

What you’ll notice there is that five of the six highest-paid guys on the Hurricanes are forwards, and perhaps only Skinner is really going to be worth the cap hit he carries three years from now. Both Staals probably already aren’t. Ward (not a forward) also isn’t.

Altogether those contracts are worth a combined $38-plus million against a cap coming in at $64.3 million next year. You’ll notice, by the way, that none of these contracts begin to address Carolina’s real problem, which is that their defense isn’t very good. Joni Pitkanen and Tim Gleason, at $4.5 million and $4 million, respectively, are the highest-paid defenders on the team. The former is good but not great, and probably plays more minutes than he should because of how bad his counterparts are. The latter plays less than 20 minutes a night for a reason.

Ah, but there’s Justin Faulk and Jamie McBain to consider on the blue line, and though Faulk is the best defender on the team, McBain is also pretty good, and both are due raises from their RFA contracts in summer 2015, when all the above guys are still on the books save for Pitkanen and Tlusty, whose contracts expire at the same time. Admittedly the cap will likely have gone up by then, but Tlusty, McBain and Faulk are all likely to be due sizable raises coming off these RFA deals in which they played very well. Where does the money come from?

More immediately, though, is that Rutherford put Jussi Jokinen, one of the team’s better forwards, on waivers for reasons unbeknownst to rational thought. Sure, Jokinen’s goal and point totals aren’t great, but at just $3 million and with his underlying numbers, he’s going to be a bargain for whoever claims him by this time tomorrow. That clears out $3 million against the cap this summer, sure, but the team still has just over $9 million in space with 16 players under contract. Where do you get seven useful players for $9 million?

Those are problems good teams can worry about, one supposes, but the Hurricanes are, you’ll recall, not a good team. They’re currently ninth in the East, though only a point back of the Rangers, who are a very good team that is just underperforming significantly for reasons no one seems to understand.

It’s very difficult to wrap one’s head around why Rutherford is so intent on getting rid of useful players and also signing strange long-term deals that prevent him from adding more who will actually help his team make the playoffs for the first time in what will soon be four years. But then I haven’t been an NHL general manager since 1994.

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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!

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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(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.

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The Lead

How you know Toronto had a bad night: they lost to Carolina 5-4 in a shootout. No, it’s true!

I’m not enough of a masochist to actually sit down and watch a game between the two worst teams in the NHL (and besides I was already planning on subjecting myself to the Blackhawks/Flames game that ended up being evocative of a scene involving a pinball machine in The Accused), but holy crap on a platter. It was like a regional sales convention of failure.

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The Lead

Poor, poor Cam Ward. He makes THAT stop and in doing so not only keeps his team within one, but also basically sparks the Hurricanes to a comeback in a game in which they were being pretty well handled by the defending Stanley Cup champs. And his boys can’t even pull out a W for him?

The Canes may have forced OT, but the Pens won in a shootout because Carolina got one goal from its SIX shooters. Too bad, really. That’s probably going to stand up as save of the year.

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The Lead

Kinda funny, I guess, that Scott Walker was the guy to eliminate Boston.

I mean, you knew it wasn’t going to be Sergei Samsonov, who had gotten to the bottom of his “lucky goal” supply earlier in the game. You knew it wasn’t going to be Rod Brind’Amour, who was taken to the dressing room earlier in the overtime and never came back. You knew it wasn’t going to be Erik Cole, who hasn’t scored in about a trillion straight playoff games. You knew it wouldn’t be Eric Staal, who once again had as little effect on tonight’s proceedings as his little brother Marc.

And you knew it wasn’t going to be anyone on the Bruins, who despite scoring both their goals because they had big bodies like Byron Bitz and Milan Lucic going at the front of the crease, never really went to the front of the crease with any great regularity in the overtime period of what was a supremely entertaining game, even if it was a little sloppy because of the circumstances.

It was certainly the most evenly-played game of the series. Wild swings of momentum back and forth led many people to whom I talked to say something along the lines of “Well the Bruins/Hurricanes HAVE to score soon.” They didn’t. Almost all of the goals, save for the Byron Bitz tally that opened the scoring, came on the counterattack. And none was more counterattack-y than Walker’s, which came on a Ray Whitney shot off the transition designed to do exactly what it did: get a fat rebound into the slot that someone could take a whack at. Now, I don’t know why Thomas came out so far to challenge and tried to punch it away instead of backing off a little and smothering it, but I also don’t know why he was so eager to play the puck at every opportunity once overtime hit.

Sure, the Bruins kind of poured it all out in overtime. They had no interest in playing conservative hockey, as it really was not their wont all year. Why start now? But Thomas was uncharacteristically aggressive, I thought, even by his typically challenge-minded standard.

So the puck fell to the guy the Bruins probably least wanted to score an OT series-winner (with all the other Hurricanes in a dead heat for second-to-last). And he scored the knockout blow.

At least he kept his gloves on this time.

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Well apparently, three-ish days after the fact, “Bubba” over at Canes Country is getting after me for my criticism of Eric Staal over at Puck Daddy.

The crux of my argument was this: If I were a ‘Canes fan, I would be incredibly frustrated by the inconsistent play of Eric Staal. This was somehow massively offensive and tipped off a 700-or-so-word rant about what a clown I was (well, they kind of lumped me in with Mr. L. Gregory Wyshynski as though we were the same person. We are not).

So here is my retort, because, as the person that e-mailed me this told me, I need to “Smarten up,” which is something moms say.

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Is Carolina kidding? They fire Peter Laviolette after the Canes jump out to a 12-11-2 start. Am I missing something here? They’re THREE POINTS back of the division lead! THREE! In THAT division! Do you realize how easy it is to make up three points when you’re playing the Panthers, Lightning and Thrashers 18 times a year?

The fact that the ‘Canes are underperforming this year is hardly Laviolette’s fault. There are the injuries to Justin Williams and David Tanabe that have kept them out since the end of September, there’s Eric Staal’s hideous performance so far this season (he’s had exactly two multiple-goal games this season), there’s the fact that the team, on paper, is pretty goddamn bad. I mean, look at that roster. What’s anyone supposed to do with that? And yet they’re still a game above .500 because Laviolette is a damn good coach.

And the replacement is Paul Maurice? The guy that wasn’t good enough to get a Maple Leafs team like the one they had two years ago into the playoffs? The guy that Carolina already FIRED? He isn’t a good coach. He just isn’t. He’s had losing seasons in seven of his 10 in the NHL. You don’t call a guy like that and offer him a job, regardless of the fact that he helped take your team to the Stanley Cup Finals in 2001-02. It’s ridiculous. What, was Jacques Demers not available?

In the hopes that it’s not too late to squeeze Maurice out, I have composed a list of five better candidates for the job.

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So today the NHL announced that it had rejected the Carolina Hurricanes’ extension of Eric Staal’s contract for the low, low price of $57.75 million over the next seven years.

“It was just too stupid to tolerate, even for us” sai…

Wait that’s NOT why?

The issue with the contract pertains to the wording of the clause. The contract that was rejected by the league specified that his no-trade clause kicked in on July 1, 2010, when he is scheduled to become an unrestricted free agent.

Apparently the problem is that, if Staal doesn’t play those two seasons, which he will unless something goes terribly awry, he won’t be eligible for unrestricted free agency. So they have to change it to “as soon as he’s eligible for unrestricted free agency.”

Come on, NHL. Someone needs to let the Hurricanes know that what they did was flat-out wrong, for both the franchise and the league. Though one supposes that if the Jeff Finger contract is allowed to stand, this one looks like a stroke of frugal genius in comparison. Ah well.