The Two-Line Pass

The Lead

If past performance is indicative of future results, and we have at no point in the history of performance-to-result comparison been given any reason to find that this is not the case, then Antti Niemi is going to concede roughly 213 goals on 214 shots in the next game and Chicago will lose and therefore it will be all Niemi’s fault.

Hell they talked about it at length on Versus tonight so it must be true.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Lead

For a while there it was pretty cute.

“Ha ha ha,” the hockey world said, “Chicago sure is playing pretty bad.”

But we were saying that two weeks ago, when Chicago had been playing badly for a week. At the time, they’d won just one of their last five, and needed OT to beat the Kings (and we all know how crap they’ve been of late). But now? It’s officially time to start fretting.

Chicago lost tonight. To St. Louis. And gave up four goals on 30 shots. The sad part? That’s almost an average goaltending performance for them, at least of late.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Lead

We were given a whole slew of reasons to think the Ducks are the most revolting franchise in the NHL tonight.

As though we needed more.

Tonight, of course, saw James Wisniewski up and run Brent Seabrook, a former teammate, in retaliation for an innocuous hit on Corey Perry who, let’s face it, deserves any hit he takes.

Now, before all you Ducks fans start crying about it being a headshot and boo hoo Corey Perry’s just playin hard out there, let’s keep two things in mind. First, it could only technically a headshot because Perry put his head down around crossbar height (and even then, his arm got in the way of the Seabrook hit) and second, Seabrook had already committed to the hit but Perry turned at the last second and it otherwise would have just been your standard shoulder-to-shoulder check.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Lead

Sometimes life just isn’t fair.

The Blackhawks came into tonight’s game in San Jose having lost in regulation just once since Oct. 30, going an absurd 8-1-1 in their last 10 and outscoring opponents — get this — 36 to 19. And the last three games of that stretch, in which they went 3-0-0 and outscored Calgary, Edmonton and Vancouver 13 to 3, were on the road and in the space of four days.

And it still hadn’t gotten ridiculous. Not by a long shot.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Lead

Was hockey kidding? How can two consecutive games be THAT freaking awesome?

In 126:22 of hockey tonight, we were treated to 21 goals on 135 shots and more lead changes than any normal person could possibly consider rational.

Take the Penguins/Capitals game for example, the sixth in a now-seven-game series that has lived up to every inch of its lofty billing and will make the Conference Finals (be they against Boston or Carolina) look like the worst kind of anticlimax. It was 1-0 Pens after one. Then the Caps score twice. Then Geno Malkin levels inside of 30 seconds to go in the period and it’s 2-2 through two. Then all hell breaks loose.

Kris Letang scores on the power play at 4:40 of the third. Brooks Laich answers 58 seconds later and Viktor Kozlov puts his team up just 29 seconds after that (with a special tip of the hat to Hal Gill, who’s pictured above). But then Sid Crosby, clearly the best player on the ice in this series, scores with just under five minutes to go in the period to force overtime. That’s where The Steckel came in to pop in his second goal in this series, both of which have been game-winners.

Then go have a peak at that Chicago/Vancouver game. No Game 7 necessary there, eh? Nah, Patty Kane took care of that. Hat trick for the kid. Lead changed five times in that one. Home team won before their huge home crowd which, for the year, officially topped one million fans tonight, a good fifth of which might’ve turned up to see them play last year.

And that game was a lot like the Pittsburgh game in that many of its goals came in bunches. The two goals in the first were scored exactly two minutes apart. Three of the four in the second were scored in the space of 4:32. The first two in the third came 1:58 apart, and the last four were in 4:02. It was nuts. And despite having three separate leads, Vancouver only actually found itself ahead of the Blackhawks for 4:43.

There was just no unseating the Blackhawks or Caps tonight. Awesome night of hockey.

The Lead

(I know, I know. You guys don’t like it when I talk about the Flames (or Bruins, for that matter). I did it too often at the beginning of the season and got enough e-mail about it that I pretty much stopped doing it entirely. But tonight, my boys kinda forced my hand. I hope you’ll appreciate my lack of choice in this matter.)

Imagine the perfect postseason game, if you will. Lots of physicality? Nice, close, exciting game? A bit of nastiness? Yeah, that sounds about right.

And that was exactly what everyone who watched Game 3 of the Calgary/Chicago series got, and Calgary pulled the series back within a game thanks to an impressive 4-2 victory. The game was back-and-forth, the tensions high, the boardwork consistently more like a near-brawl. Frankly, I have to admit that I gave the Flames no chance in this series coming in, and certainly not after the first two games last week, in which the Flames cranked out maybe 30 combined minutes of attentive, hardnosed hockey and suffered a pair of well-deserved losses because of it.

Not tonight. The Flames, no doubt fueled by an electrifying Saddledome crowd, played maaaybe five minutes of the type of hockey that typified the first two losses of the series, and that led directly to Chicago’s opening salvo, a Patrick Sharp goal on a power play caused by an Olli Jokinen roughing call that is actually in the dictionary next to “Rockhead penalty” (It is, I checked).

But after that, it was pretty much 55 straight minutes of Calgary doing the ony thing that was going to make it successful against a team that had so harangued it in the two showdowns in Chicago: hit everything. It was interesting to note that, in the first period on Saturday, Calgary dished out 21 hits and entered the dressing room up 2-0 as a result, but then saw the game slip away as, over the next 40 minutes, it only mustered 16 checks and pretty much let Chicago go where it pleased.

No such luck for the Blackhawks tonight. Calgary had 15 hits in the first period, 17 in the second, and 13 in the third. That’s 45 hits in 60 minutes, and the Flames were never more than plus or minus two on the overall average in any period. That indicates that the Flames, instead of playing wild, emotional hockey and having that flatline in the later stages, they kept everything at a steady level, just below the point of boiling over into something more volatile.

Things got nasty at the end, of course. No team likes getting pounded physically AND losing. And so all the childish trash talk to Jarome Iginla (which Pierre McGuire said is some of the worst he’s ever seen) and the near-fights and the crosschecks and the facewashing is understandable. And it’s going to make for some badass hockey on Wednesday.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Lead

Here is how terrible my life is: Midway through the Flames game I was invited out to enjoy a few beverages with some friends of mine. This was acceptable to me as the Flames game was on Versus and not just Center Ice, and thus I was assured that more or less any sports bar I went to would have the game. When I left, it was 1-1.

While driving there, I was informed via phone call that Mike Cammalleri had put Calgary up 2-1 with about 16 minutes remaining. By the time I arrived at my destination though, it was tied again, and I watched the remainder of regulation with bated breath hoping that my dear Flames would somehow pull out a miracle victory in hostile territory against a team to which they had lost 11-3 on aggregate in Chicago.

But then the Blackhawks won on a Marty Havlat goal just 12 seconds into overtime. Except I didn’t see it. The reason for this is that each table at this bar had its own individual television, and my friend insisted we change the station because he had bought a lottery ticket and he wanted to see if he won any money.

He obviously did not.

What happened instead was I was teased into believing that the Calgary Flames, who have been playing abysmal hockey since the trade deadline, had the slightest bit of a chance to win *a* game in this stupid series. They had, to that point, dictated flow and pace through sheer force of will and physicality, but because my stupid retard friend can’t get even one out of six numbers to match the lottery draw, I missed the Flames reassurance that my complete lack of faith in them was entirely justified.

My friend, who is not a hockey fan, did not quite understand just why I was so incensed. And I told him I wished that only lottery he won was derivative of a Shirley Jackson short story.

Read the rest of this entry »

The perfect marriage between Jonathan Toews and Patrick Kane might finally be over. Their feud over which one gets votes onto the All-Star team has spilled from the dressing room and onto the internet, where the two forwards are now waging a bitter war for votes.

Toews, for example, believes Kane to be a liar and a turncoat. Not the kind of guy you’d want representing your Chicago Blackhawks at the All-Star game.

Kane, on the other hand, doesn’t think we should trust someone that can’t spell “Taves.”

Brian Campbell, by the way, is your third-party candidate.

Things are only going to get worse come January.

(Big ups to Trevor Bird on this one.)

The Lead

After Ben Guite scored maybe the ugliest goal I’ve seen all year late in the first period, I was a little worried how things would turn out for Joel Quenneville’s new team against his old one.

The Blackhawks had opened the game with a wide advantage in shots and puck possession, but the Avs closed both late and headed into the dressing room up a goal thanks to a Ben Guite marker that was just hideous. I don’t know what Quenneville said between periods, but it worked. The Blackhawks came out guns blazing and picked apart Colorado for a 6-2 win.

Andrew Ladd’s goal 3:54 into the second period tied the game and Troy Brouwer’s first NHL goal put the Blackhawks up for good. Both were the result of hard work that the ‘Hawks had let flag in the latter stages of the opening period, and they seemed determined not to let it happen again. As with the last Blackhawks game to be featured in this space, the difference in the game came down to coaching. Quenneville identified the problem that his team had and corrected it in the space of a 15-minute intermission. Tony Granato, his replacement behind the Colorado bench, did not.

And that’s why Chicago dissected the Avalanche with surgical precision in the final two-thirds of the game. It wasn’t that the stars showed up for an especially big night on the back end of a stretch that saw the Featherheads win three games in four days. Patrick Kane, Jonanthan Toews and Brian Campbell were just fine, but they weren’t Kane-, Toews- and Campbell-level performances. Instead, Quenneville got production out of guys like Ladd, who scored twice, Brouwer, who’d never done so before, Cam Barker, who has spent part of this season in the minors, and Patrick Sharp, who also scored twice and looks like he’s worth every penny they gave him this summer. These aren’t exactly perennial NHL All-Stars, but because the Blackhawks up and down the bench have bought into Quenneville’s system, they are 5-1-2 since he came aboard. After that shaky first period, in which the teams both had 11 shots, the Avs were outshot 26-15 in the final two periods, and 11-5 in the final one. They were also outscored 6-1.

For vast stretches of the third period, especially, it seemed like the Blackhawks were playing pickup hockey. The way they held the puck was just unbelievable, and the crowd gave them several standing ovations just for keeping it in the zone for 45 seconds to a minute at a time. The Avs were running around in circles trying to dispossess Chicago’s third and fourth line to no avail. The best evidence of this was on Chicago’s fifth goal, where Dustin Byfuglien received a bouncer from Dave Bolland, shrugged off Joe Sakic’s coverage along the endboards (no small feat, that), drew John-Michael Liles in below the goal line and no-looked it to Ladd, who scored an absolute cracker of a wrister in acres of space. It was a beautiful example of how work along the boards will always create space in danger areas, and it was the kind of hockey the Avs played so well last year. Byfuglien being roughly the size of a horse helps as well.

This has to feel good for Quenneville. He was unceremoniously fired because he couldn’t make it deep into the playoffs with a team backed by Jose Theodore and Petr Budaj, and really, who could? Budaj gave up another six-spot tonight on 37 shots and was hopelessly out of position and Theodore’s busy being thoroughly inconsistent at worst and mediocre at best in Washington. He might run into a similar problem down the road in Chicago (is anyone sold on the Khabibulin/Huet tandem in the playoffs?) but right now this team is firing on all cylinders. It seems like there’s very little that can stop the momentum they’ve built up over the last four da.. oh, they don’t play again until Sunday.

Read the rest of this entry »