The Two-Line Pass

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Yesterday I wrote about teams deluding themselves into being buyers because they’re so close to a playoff spot, and probably paying too-high prices for too-bad players, and sure enough, not a minute before I opened the window to write this post, Darren Dreger tweeted maybe the dumbest thing I’ve read in two weeks:

“CBJ will be a buyer. Columbus would be willing to part with 1 of their 3 first rnd draft picks for a scoring forward.”

A lot of questions come to mind in reading this. Like, “What?” and “Huh?” and “Why would they do that?” and “Seriously?” and “This is an April Fool’s joke, right?” and “No seriously Dreger, is it?” and “What do you mean it’s not?” and “Can you believe how stupid the Blue Jackets are?” and “Wait Scott Howson isn’t their GM any more?”

Tough to answer any of those questions, except maybe the last one. This seems an incredibly foolish tack to take, but on some level it’s an understandable one. This is a new management group, with John Davidson having been brought in over the summer and Jarmo Kekalainen just a few months into the job, and maybe they want to make a bit of splash by acquiring whatever will pass for a “big name” at this deadline — 682-year-old Jaromir Jagr? — and show fans they’re serious about competing for the playoffs. Columbus is already holding onto eighth in the West, but is just a point up on St. Louis, and the Blues have three games in hand.

Therefore, going out and getting someone certainly bolsters their chances for making the postseason, but here’s another question you should feel free to ask JD or Jarmo if you happen to bump into them: “To what end?” The Blue Jackets are third-to-last in goals scored league-wide, which is why they want forward help, but any team gripping as tightly as they are to that spot with their minus-10 goal differential isn’t going to find anyone anywhere worth enough to make them competitive. Remember that Chicago’s goal differential is currently plus-52 better than theirs, and then tell me why this willingness to deal is even remotely existent.

There’s a middle ground between trading a first-round pick for a rental, and selling. That’s standing pat, which most teams would probably be wise to do over the next two days or so. The focus for Columbus should be trying to get the best return possible for their efforts to sell off their good players (Rick Nash, Jeff Cater, etc.) by getting as many high first-round picks as they can, and while the Rangers are doing their best to accommodate those needs by being tied with the Islanders, Los Angeles and the Blue Jackets themselves are doing Kekalainen no favors. Trading one of those — you’d think it’d be the Kings’, but then you also don’t know just how intent they are on securing said scoring forward — seems remarkably ill-advised.

Yeah, the Blue Jackets have made the playoffs once since they existed, and they got swept out of the first round. So here’s one last question: “Don’t you think that a team with 37 points in 36 games probably suffers a similar fate against Chicago, even with this new and exciting forward?” The answer is yes.

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

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!

It’s easy to get caught up in the ongoing storylines of this abbreviated NHL season. The Blackhawks are unstoppable. The Rangers are garbage without Rick Nash (but really great with him). The entire Northwest is pretty bad. The Flyers keep losing and have negative-a-million games in hand on everyone. The Habs are a big surprise atop the East. The Ducks are the second-best team in hockey somehow.

But one thing that seems to have escaped notice, and perhaps understandably, is that the Florida Panthers are terrible. Like, extraordinarily so. Worse than Columbus. The Columbus Blue Jackets are worse than them at hockey despite the fact that the Panthers play in the worst division in hockey (teams in the Southeast average 22.2 points, and Carolina has the lowest point total among division leaders with just 27).

To make matters worse, you could probably put up a pretty decent argument that the Panthers are lucky — just as they were last year when they inexplicably made the playoffs thanks to all those dumb shootout wins — to be in the position they are. That’s because their goal differential this season is minus-30. In 24 games. By comparison, the next-worst negative goal differential belongs to both Columbus and Buffalo at minus-15. But perhaps the best way to illustrate how bad it is to be minus-30 in 24 games is to say that the Blackhawks are plus-32 in the same number; the Panthers are almost as bad this season as Chicago is good.

Now, to get under the hood a little bit, there are a lot of pretty decent reasons why the Panthers are so bad after making the playoffs, and a lot of it has to do with the fact that they shouldn’t have made them last year. This was a poorly constructed, incredibly lucky team whose current leading scorer is Tomas Fleischmann, with 17 points. Fleischmann is a fine enough hockey player overall, but if he’s your team’s best point producer, your team has problems. The thing is, though, he’s not their best player, because that honor goes to rookie Jonathan Huberdeau, who has 11 goals and is the only Panther with a double-digit total in that regard, and only Tomas Kopecky, at nine, is even close.

Then there’s the goaltending situation. Suffice it to say that entering any two consecutive seasons with a two-man rotation of Jose Theodore and Scott Clemmensen will guarantee you one ghastly campaign at the least, and that’s certainly borne out by the results this year. Theodore leads the team with four wins in 14 games, thanks to his .893 save percentage and 3.29 GAA. Clemmensen’s stats are nearly a full goal and .041 worse, which is saying something. And just so you don’t think it’s entirely a function of those guys just being crap goalies (they are) Jacob Markstrom’s .913 save percentage in four games with Theodore on the shelf isn’t great, but it’s still only enough to keep his GAA barely lower than 3.

This is, and always was, a pieced-together team of mediocre veterans and too-young kids that was always going to be pretty bad team, made worse by Stephen Weiss nursing a wrist injury all year that recently ended his season (and by the way he’s going straight to the UFA market in July). It’s unlikely that anyone gets fired over how terribly things are going because last season was an aberration, and moreover no amount of silly free agent spending was going to patch over the fact that the team was clearly undergoing rebuilding work when Dale Tallon was brought aboard. If anything, last year hurt them in their efforts to achieve those ends.

This is more in line with what fans who actually want to see the team succeed long-term should be cheering for. Even if watching them is painful and sad.

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There is a lot of great hockey writing out there, probably. I mean, you hear about transcendent books like Ken Dryden’s “The Game,” or about Red Fisher’s legendary gamers for the Montreal Gazette, but I’ve never read them because I’m not 100 years old. This is the digital age, my dawgs and dawgettes, and as a result we need cutting-edge hot sports takes and we need ‘em 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365.25 days a year. That’s just how the game be.

Which is why we need writers like Craig Remsburg. “Who is Craig Remsburg?” you ask. How dare you. Remsburg is among the one or two greatest hockey writers and thinkers of our day (present company INcluded), and if you need evidence, I would direct you to the magnum opus penned for the Marquette, Michigan Mining Journal on Feb. 3, in the year of our Lord 2013.

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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!

So there is a lockout and it sucks and everyone hates it.

The players all have to go play in Siberia and the fans don’t have good professional hockey to watch on national television and the owners lost $100 million by not having a preseason. Boo hoo. And so how do we remedy all these things? Or at least the ones that matter to the owners?

That’s right: Replacement players!

Or, to put it another way, “That’s right: Scabs!”

Yeah, apparently Bill Watters, who used to be somewhat noteworthy in hockey but now isn’t any more for reasons that will soon become obvious to even the uninitiated, floated the idea that the league might be preparing, at some indeterminate point in the future (either near or far), to begin hiring scab players to potentially draw fans fed up with this, the league’s second lockout in eight years.

This would, ostensibly, be done as a means of “breaking” the NHLPA’s resolve but would more likely accomplish pretty much nothing. Consider this: Which AHL players, apart from the old guys who have been around that league forever, would accept a job in the NHL as a scab, especially if they thought the PA might blacklist them for doing so, as the MLBPA did with guys like Kevin Millar back in 1995.

Again, the older AHL veterans have little to lose — they weren’t going to make it to the show anyway — and there would probably also be more than a few North American-born Euro-league veterans who might feel the same pull to return home, maybe make slightly more money than they are playing in Minsk or whatever, and so forth. When the real NHL players come back, they’re right back to Europe and generally unaffected by the whole thing.

But think about the quality of play here: older AHL veterans, European players, maybe a few guys who are technically NHLers but at the end of the road and looking for one last contract (Tomas Holmstrom, I’m looking at you), and that’s it. The owners would then expect fans, corporate sponsors and the like to come back and watch that in exchange for considerable amounts of money. Oh yes, I can just see folks clamoring to see Jason Krog come back to these shores and rain wholesale havoc down on the John Grahames of the world, or NHL.com repeatedly naming Brian Willsie as the First Star for December. The demand for that would be huge.

Say, what’s average attendance in the AHL? Call it like 6,000? That’s probably a bit lower than what whatever the Maple Leafs trot out would draw, or whatever, but how badly do you think empty seats outnumber fans to watch games between the Coyotes and Blue Jackets? Eight to one, or 10 to one?

For this to work, it would have to work league-wide, and Don Fehr isn’t a punk who’s just going to fold under this kind of pressure. Because he knows you’re not going to watch that replacement player garbage.

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The Lead

Sentence I’d never thought I’d type ever: “Andrew Raycroft was considerably better than Roberto Luongo tonight.”

Indeed, it was that Raycroft made 11 saves on 12 shots, while Luongo made eight on the same number. Really. I don’t want to start making wild assumptions here, just three games into the season, but there’s got to be something seriously wrong, physically, with Bobby Lou (more like Bobby Loo, and that’s a joke for all my British readers), right?

He might have been helpless on the goal from Antoine Vermette, and it looked like one of his defenseman got a piece of the Rusty Klesla marker, but the goals from Kristian Huselius and Nikita Filatov? Yeah, he’s gotta get those. The Huselius goal especially was just ugly. An unscreened wrister from the circle, no matter how hard, shouldn’t be beating Roberto freaking Luongo middle glove. It should be a physical impossibility. He barely even reacted as it rocketed past him.

Luongo just doesn’t seem himself, as the Raycroftian stat line this season more or less bares out. Granted, the defense hasn’t been helping him much, and his run support to this point has been virtually non-existent, but this is the guy Hockey Canada wants repping the country on its home turf come the Olympics? The way he’s playing right now, Belarus would give them a game (and by that I mean lose 11-1, not 11-0).

Hockey Canada should really consider having a look at Steve Mason, the kid at the other end of the ice who made a number of spectacular saves and isn’t making Andrew Raycroft appear to be a viable option as a starter. At least he couldn’t be any worse than this Luongo joker.

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The Lead

There were a ton of really interesting, cool, fun, exciting games last night. A full 13, to be exact. That’s 26 teams. All playing on the same night. A good number of those teams were either fighting for a playoff spot or jockeying for position within the playoffs.

Tonight.. not so much. Apart from the Blue Jackets, who won 4-3 in a shootout over Chicago, there wasn’t really anyone playing that had an actual glimmer of hope that they would, in fact, do anything of note (sorry Buffalo).

So yeah, two whole games tonight. Think the NHL’s Schedulebot 2000 XD (the XD stands for “extra dumb”) could’ve worked it out so instead of 15 games over two nights, we had say seven last night and eight tonight, or the other way around? Because last night I was up until 1:30 watching NHL games and missed about four that I would like to have seen. Tonight I was done by 10:30, having watched parts of two games I had no great interest in (and sorry Columbus), then had to watch the first 30 minutes of Lost on DVR while it was still on. Like some sort of an animal.

!SPOILER ALERT! Some crazy crap goes down and some flashbacks happen and then additional crazy crap goes down. Also John Locke is really Jacob.*

Fedor Tyutin, who’s pictured above (well, not really, but that picture of Pat Kane doing a split while Mike Commodore makes dirt in his hockey pants — or whatever’s going on there — is much funnier than Tyutin scoring the shootout winner), scored the shootout winner.

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The Lead

Not so fast, Blue Jackets!

I was actually uncomfortable watching tonight’s Columbus/Edmonton game. It’s rare that you see a game that thoroughly embarrassing from most college teams, let alone NHL teams with professional ice hockey players. Columbus may have outshot the injury-and-benching-depleted Oilers 39-19, but it was outscored a whopping 7-2. That’s right: Pascal Leclaire, apparently a professional athlete who was in fact quite good last year and not a bison friche puppy in goalie pads, gave up SEVEN goals on NINETEEN shots. To the Oilers.

I honestly cannot think of a worse night from any goaltender in the 15 years or so I’ve been watching hockey on an addictive level. At least, not one that played the entire game.

I don’t like to, and in fact I believe I never have, refered to a beat writer’s musings on a game when giving out my own, but I had to make an exception in this case. Aaron Portzline does a great, great job over at the Columbus Dispatch’s Puck Rakers blog, and his thoughts on tonight’s game were of great importance to me, in no small part because I wanted to make sure what I had actually seen was not some insane hallucination. It wasn’t, and that kind of made my soul hurt.

How could any NHL-caliber goaltender, let alone the one who was among the league’s elite in EVERY statistical category, lay an egg quite so humorously large?

Now, okay, to be fair to Leclaire, he only gave up three goals through the first two periods and the game was, at that point, still within reach, even if the Oilers had a 3-1 lead despite a 29-8 shot advantage for the Beejes. While you never want your goalie posting a .625 save percentage at any point in a hockey game, I can almost see not giving him the hook. Almost. Only two of those goals, after all, were at even strength.

But then the Oilers scored 7:44 into the third to spread the lead even wider and, I’m sure, the patience of those valiant Blue Jackets fans in attendance even thinner. It was Edmonton’s fourth goal on 11 shots. For some reason that I can only imagine involves some sort of sado-masochistic relationship between Leclaire and Ken Hitchcock, Steve Mason stayed on the bench as a fashionable hat model (pick up your official Steve Mason cap at shop.nhl.com!).

Then the Blue Jackets scored to pull within two again. No need to pull Leclaire now, there’s a game to be won! Except Leclaire didn’t stop the flow of blood that was cascading like a river from inside his crease. He instead decided to open the wounds further to facilitate the evacuation of said blood and gave up three goals on six shots in the space of just 2:03. Ballgame.

Portzline reported that after the game, Hitchcock said he didn’t give Leclaire the hook because, “it all happened too quick. If he had it to do over again, he said he would have pulled him after the fifth goal.”

The FIFTH? Why even trot him out there for the third period? Why let him stay in after the fourth goal put Edmonton up by three? How did a three-, four-, or five-goal deficit sneak up on an NHL coach? I understand that the team has little to no faith in any of its goaltenders, but Mason isn’t 12-of-19 bad. In fact, the worst he’s been is 22-of-26 bad. That’s a difference of .214 in the ol’ save percentage category on Mason’s WORST day. They fired Barry Melrose for less than this.

Not that the Blue Jackets helped Leclaire’s cause any. Their play in all three zones was poor, but they were especially woeful in their own end (gasp!). Relatively simple attacking plays were cutting through the Columbus D with surgical precision, and the penalty kill was just atrocious. Any time you give up a pair of PPGs to the Oil on three kills, two of which were abbreviated by previous Edmonton penalties (and one of those was just 29 seconds), you had a Lehman Brothers-type day at the office.

I don’t know who could have enjoyed a game like this. Even the staunchest Oiler supporter must have at least felt the slightest urge to pop in their “Old Yeller” DVD for a little bit of a pick-me-up.

It would be terribly tragic if it weren’t so goddamn hilarious.

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The Lead

What a zany night in Columbus.

Blue Jackets lead by two, Oilers score four straight, Blue Jackets come back with two goals in 54 seconds to tie and then win it with 1:09 to play in regulation. Neither team had the desire to play anything resembling defense, and the Blue Jackets won 5-4.

Not sure what I thought would happen going into a Columbus/Edmonton game featuring Steve Mason and Dwayne Roloson between the pipes, but this was weird even by those standards. If you’re like me and you enjoy a team grinding out 2-1 Ws more than a 13-12 shootout win, this clearly wasn’t the game for you headed into the night, but there was something about the game that had me intrigued.

The game also happened to be the NHL debut of Columbus netminder Steve Mason, who proved not totally incompetent in net. I’m sure that’s a welcome change of pace for the Blue Jackets after that debacle of a performance that Freddy Norrena handed in for most of the team’s overtime loss to the Islanders the other night. I mean, sure, he gave up four goals to the Oilers, who aren’t exactly running the same type of offensive dynamo as the mid-’80s iteration of the team, but most of the goals he did give up (particularly the one to Ethan Moreau, of all people) were absolutely ridiculous snipes.

At the other end of the ice, Dwayne Roloson was a trainwreck. Apart from the very pretty snapper from Kristian Huselius that drew first blood and Derek Brassard’s goal on an odd-man rush, the Blue Jackets scored on nothing but second and third chances that, in most cases, Rolie probably should’ve held onto. He made 33 saves, but if he actually held onto two or three of them, the Oil would’ve walked away with an easy win. Things are never easy in Edmonton, but this would be a much better team if their goalies’ collective goalie stats weren’t 3.00/.899. The fact that seven of their 12 games this season have been decided by one goal is incredible enough, but they’ve been fortunate to go 5-0-1 in those before tonight, and that kind of “success” (it’s luck, really) doesn’t last forever.

To be fair, though, the defending tonight was a total gong show for both teams, but especially so for Edmonton on Manny Malhotra’s game-winner. You have to watch a looooooooot of hockey to see 3-on-2 defense that’s that bad from an NHL team. Honestly, an incredible amount. Both D corps were almost criminally negligent on at least two goals apiece tonight. Kyle Brodziak’s first goal of the year came when he was left alone in the slot for what must have, to Mason, felt like an hour and the low breakdown on Moreau’s shorty was equally bad. For Edmonton, the comedy of errors was highlighted by Malhotra’s late dagger, but not to be forgotten is the standing-around in which the Oilers’ defense engaged for Huselius’ goal. Had the Souray-Staios pairing had pockets in their hockey pants, their hands would have been firmly planted in them. Despite all that stellar defense though, the power plays were still ineffective, going a combined 2 for 11.

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Earlier tonight, Columbus’ Jared Boll went on the IR with a head and neck injury that will have him miss seven to 10 days.

In his place from the Syracuse Crunch comes the No. 6 overall draft pick, Nikita Filatov, who has scored two goals and is a +1 in the two games since the AHL season began.

More to the point, he brings a certain amount of skill to the Blue Jackets that Boll, who is a fine fighter and intimidator, simply cannot. With Columbus scoring just eight goals in its first three games, and five coming in the opener, the team was clearly in need of offensive help.

Filatov’ll do okay in that role and (hopefully) stay up for good.

For some terrible reason (and I’m assuming it’s that they’re among the worst-run franchises in hockey), when Columbus made final cuts today, it kept eight defensemen. Why? Who knows.

Which would be fine, except these are the players they kept up:

Forwards (13): Rick Nash, R.J. Umberger, Kristian Huselius, Fredrik Modin, Jiri Novotny, Andrew Murray, Jason Chimera, Derick Brassard, Jake Voracek, Alexandre Picard, Michael Peca, Jared Boll and Manny Malhotra

Defensemen (8): Jan Hejda, Mike Commodore, Fedor Tyutin, Rostislav Klesla, Kris Russell, Christian Backman, Ole-Kristian Tollefsen and Marc Methot

Goaltenders (2): Pascal Leclaire, Fredrik Norrena

This means that, among the few remaining cuts was dynamic 18-year-old rookie Nikita Filatov, who has been flat-out incredible in his two games for the Jackets this preseason. On Sunday, for example, he helped Columbus beat the Leafs with a goal in the first period and the shootout winner. Said CBJ coach Ken Hitchcock after that performance:

You can see marked improvement every time (Filatov) steps on the ice. … He’s just scratching the surface on what we think is going to be a heck of a player.

This, for those who haven’t been following the goingson in Columbus particularly closely (and who can blame you?), is because Filatov had a hairline fracture in his leg that prevented him from attending rookie camp or showing up to real camp on time.

It’s unfortunate, especially for those of you who, like me, drafted Filatov for your fantasy team. Seemed like a hell of a late-round pick at the time. Handsy Russians usually do okay in Columbus, and Filatov strikes one as much less of a selfish jerk than, say, Nik Zherdev. The problem, too, is that my league is one that does not allow player movement of any kind. I have nine forwards, three defensemen and two goalies for the whole season, and now one roster spot is wasted on a kid that could spend half the year in Syracuse. Don’t they realize this is costing me money?

I now officially hate the Blue Jackets. Seriously, Marc Methot over this guy? Christ.