The Two-Line Pass

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You’ll recall that the Detroit Red Wings used to be considered the gold standard among NHL teams in terms of being well-run and also being exceptionally good at the sport of hockey. These days, uhh, not so much.

The first and most obvious fact here is that the Red Wings sit just sixth in the Western Conference as of this writing, just a point up on disappointing San Jose, three up on St. Louis, and four ahead of Dallas, all of which have a game in hand on the team that seems to have been completely thrown off by the loss of Nicklas Lidstrom. I guess it’s understandable that you’d not be quite so good when you lose the second-best defenseman of all time, no matter how old he is, and also Brad Stuart and probably a few other guys too, and replace them with Carlo Colaiacovo and a rookie.

On the other hand, with Lidstrom’s retirement seems also to have come this very bizarre and almost inexplicable loss of whatever mojo the Wings once had as well. Just yesterday, Ken Holland — long one of the most beloved and seen-as-brilliant GMs in the league for reasons that border on the inexplicable — was saying how he doesn’t know what’s going to happen with Pavel Datsyuk come the summer, alluding to the potential of his bolting for the KHL after his deal expires in 2014 because at 34 he’s older than almost all of us probably think of him as being. The Ken Holland of, say, three years ago would have had that extension agreed-to in principle three years before that, and everyone would be laughing and happy about it the whole time.

Then there’s the fact that he’s considering trading Valtteri Filppula, who, like Datsyuk, is older than anyone probably considers him to be. He just turned 29 despite everyone in the league checking their watches and wondering if this season, this one right here, is the one in which he finally at long last breaks out and becomes a Datsyukian or Zetterbergian talent, which he never will. Will the Red Wings trade him at the deadline? Tough to say, but the fact that it’s even up for discussion is, again, indicative of some rather deep problems inherent in the way the team is run.

However, Holland did make one move yesterday that could reinforce his singular genius among those who don’t need to be sold on his singular genius. He signed NHL-ready NCAA free agent Danny DeKeyser to an NHL deal, beating back a pack of ravening GMs for the honor. People want to play for Detroit. People want to play for a winner. People want to play for Mike Babcock. Well, yes and no. The Red Wings also told DeKeyser he could start playing for their NHL club straightaway, which is a position in which most pundits would probably figure they’d see, say, Edmonton or Columbus, and not the mighty Winged Wheels for whom everyone has only the most endless of praise.

What ever happened to that Red Wing mystique? Being a mediocre team this late in the season is something you might be able to write off as being a result of the shortened schedule and some weird luck. Not knowing what’s going on with Pavel Datsyuk’s chances of leaving the continent is something you might be able to write off as being just one of those things with guys wanting to go home and make a crazy amount of money tax-free. Considering trading Valtteri Filppula before the deadline is something you might be able to write off as shrewd GMing if Holland doesn’t think he can re-sign the winger, but might also be a sign that they just don’t think they’ll be competitive. Roping in a sought-after college free agent is something you might be able to say is the result of Detroit being one of the most desirable destinations in hockey, but could just be because they don’t have any better options on the blue line.

It’s all very confusing and weird.

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(Ed. note: This is a sponsored post for Matt. 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!

One subject you hear brought up a lot in sports, for some terrible reason, is that such-and-such a team has the best fans or is the Mecca of hockey, or other such nonsense that matters approximately zero percent. It’s all pointless, specifically because the fans of the Philadelphia Flyers are clearly the greatest, and it’s not even close.

If you are a fan of, say, the Red Wings, or the Penguins, or the Canadiens, or even the Lightning, you might have a bit of a beef with this, but in reality you are dumb and wrong about it. Consider this: Would you still be a fan of a team that is this bad despite having a bunch of reasons not to be?

The Flyers spend money, which is good for fans, but they do it in a maddening and embarrassing way — the Ilya Bryzgalov contract, the Scott Hartnell extension, the Kimmo Timonen deal, etc. — which is bad for fans.

The Flyers routinely draft exciting young talent that are able to be incorporated into the NHL lineup, which is good for fans, but they then trade them away for seemingly no reason whatsoever — Jeff Carter, Mike Richards, James van Riemsdyk, etc. — which is bad for fans.

They routinely make the playoffs due to their traditional regular-season dominance of most of the Eastern Conference, which is good for fans, but then get crushed by vastly superior teams with actual defense and goaltending — the Devils, the Bruins, the Blackhawks, the Penguins, etc. — which is bad for fans.

They have many players on the roster who would do anything to win, which is good for fans, but a number of them are also extremely dirty and play only in an effort to hurt people, then get suspended — Zac Rinaldo, Harry Zolniercyzk, Tom Sestito, etc. — which is bad for fans.

They have an owner who wants to win at all costs, which is good for fans, but in doing so he routinely meddles in the affairs of the men he pays a lot of money to operate the team, and in doing so generally just messes everything up — acquiring Ilya Bryzgalov, making a run at Shea Weber, etc. — which is bad for fans.

They also never give up on their goals of being the best in the league, which is good for fans, but end up falling short in the most hilarious ways possible — the Patrick Kane overtime game-winner, the defense completely melting down last season, getting swept by the Bruins, etc. — which is bad for fans.

It’s not easy, is what I’m saying. But despite all that, no one else in the NHL cares enough about their dumb teams to slash the tires of any car in the parking lot with Quebec plates or beat a Rangers fan half to death. Except Flyers fans. They are truly the greatest.

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Just days after Ilya Bryzgalov went out and said the Flyers were more or less finished this season if they got swept in their home-and-home by the division rival New Jersey Devils, his team went out and laid a serious egg in Newark, where stinkers that bad usually don’t get noticed because New Jersey smells bad and that’s the joke I’m doing.

The final score said 5-2 to the Devs, and that might not have even told the full story about how putrid Philadelphia was in the game. If New Jersey opening the score just 2:02 into the game was the first nail in the coffin for the Flyers’ season, Adam Henrique putting his team ahead just 37 seconds after Jake Voracek tied it midway through the first didn’t help at all. Ilya Kovalchuk’s shorthanded goal at 17:18 was probably just about it for Peter Laviolette’s prospects of taking a whack at turning the team around. The Flyers mustered just 14 shots over the final four minutes and ended the game with 25. A truly pathetic display.

After the game, the Flyers themselves said all the right things about how their performances in the last, oh I don’t know, 28 games are on them, and not their coach, in whom they still believe deeply and for whom they have nothing but the utmost respect. But the fact of the matter is that the old adage about not being able to fire the players stands true, and we have to be days, or even hours, from seeing Laviolette shuffling out of Wells Fargo Center with a box full of stuff from his desk in one hand and a ficus in the other. As with other teams which experienced colossally mismanaged offseasons (Detroit, Buffalo, etc.), the problems now being experienced on the ice are hardly the coach’s fault, but the axe dangles nonetheless above Laviolette, who otherwise has such a pedigree that you’d think it would be enough to save him from one bad season.

It won’t.

Philadelphia’s defense is held together with duct tape and the memory of Chris Pronger, and little more. Luke Schenn being out with the flu last night probably didn’t help, and Luke Schenn’s not that good. Bryzgalov has caught a lot of the blame for this failure, because that’s who Philadelphia writers decided long ago was the cause of all the team’s ills, and it’s not that he’s without fault, but the problems are so much deeper than just him that it’s reductionist at best and willfully ignorant at worst to hang all this around his neck like a particularly unfortunate ancient mariner.

The Flyers are behind the Islanders in the standings. That’s what it really boils down to, and Paul Holmgren, bad though he may be at his job, has a ready-made scapegoat in Laviolette. He hasn’t given the coach the fabled “Vote of Confidence” that often portends a firing, but if Bryzgalov’s ominous prediction is right then by this time next week we’ll be talking about new Flyers bench boss Lindy Ruff. And won’t that just be a hell of a lot of fun?

But if even Ruff isn’t able to turn this team around (and he isn’t!) then there’s always the amnesty buyout period this summer that’ll see the goalie go too. And if THAT doesn’t work, well, I’m sure Holmgren will come up with another person to blame.

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

(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.

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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!

There is certainly a sense of entitlement among those in Detroit. This much is indisputable.

Red Wings fans, for instance, are a generally insufferable bunch of paranoid babies, who can’t believe that any team other than their own is allowed to win games in the National Hockey League. But it’s easy to see why: Their favorite team behaves the same way.

Remember that whole debacle about the league trying to re-configure the conferences so that the Winnipeg Jets were no longer playing in the Southeast Division? Yeah, it was really more about getting the Wings out of the Western Conference. Because apparently Gary Bettman promised he would do that at some point during the last round of league re-alignment. That the Players’ Association vetoed the move, which makes sense because the re-alignment plan, as proposed, was flatly and plainly terrible, must have surely kicked off dozens or more temper tantrums around the front offices at Joe Louis Arena.

You see, the Wings believe they deserve preferential treatment. They complain about how much they have to fly despite the fact that no one in their division is especially far away from them, the farthest being Nashville at 450 miles or so. Meanwhile, Vancouver plays in the same division as Minnesota, 1,800 miles away.

None of this has anything to do with anything except to illustrate why Jimmy Devellano was probably surprised that his open complaining would lead to fines for the Red Wings in excess of $250,000, according to various reports. Tough break for the NHL’s answer to Veruca Salt.

Devellano, as senior vice president of the Red Wings, wasn’t necessarily out of line in saying that the league’s owners view players and team employees as cattle (that is, if people paid hundreds of dollars every night  to see cattle mill about in holding pens, as they do to see hockey players play hockey). He’s probably right in fact. But that whole line of talk isn’t exactly a good thing to go around bringing up when the league, which is not preventing Devellano from getting paid for doing his job by the way, is trying not to look like a bunch of Monty Burnsian villains.

Bill Daly said the comments were, “neither constructive nor helpful.” Again, that’s accurate, but only because it is properly characterizing the league’s position.

The point, though, is that Devellano, likely only made these comments because he felt that he, like his team, is largely bulletproof from this kind of action. That’s Detroit’s wont. He’s likely mad that, according to a Toronto Star report (in which he was quoted), the Winter Classic could be canceled as early as November if there’s no labor peace before then.

Compared with the money the team would rake in for hosting the Winter Classic and many other events throughout that week, the $250,000 he just lost the Wings is a drop in the bucket. At most, in Devellano’s book, that’s an acceptable loss.

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!

After swinging and missing so hard that he pulled a back muscle in pursuit of Ryan Suter or Shea Weber — either seemed the would-be heir apparent to the legendary Nicklas Lidstrom on Detroit’s blue line — or even Sami Salo apparently, he was facing quite the quandary. On the one hand, he could sit in his office and cry all summer at the state of his blue line, on which the two marquee players are Niklas Kronwall and … Ian White (I guess?). Or he could go out and sign someone else who doesn’t suck.

In the end, he kind of reached a happy medium. After signing absolutely no one all summer long, the Red Wings consummated their rumored courtship of defensive stalwart … Carlo Colaiacovo (I guess?) on Friday, the day before the CBA expired.

To be fair to Holland, and I’m really trying here, the money and term for Colaiacovo are really not that bad. Two years and $5 million total. The issue, I guess, is that the Red Wings, whom we’ve always heard are the model franchise all others aspire to be and for which all players want to play, struck out until CARLO COLAIACOVO came down the pike. Carlo Colaiacovo, whose games played has topped 70 just once in his entire NHL career, which began in some capacity in 2002.

I don’t know how the Red Wings sell this to their fans, near-blindly loyal though they are. “Hey guys. Remember Nick Lidstrom? Well he was so good at playing defense, as we’re sure you’re all aware, that almost all the other guys on our team basically played against nobodies and actually didn’t do very well against them, relatively speaking. To fix this, here’s Carlo Colaiacovo. He would have been our best non-Lidstrom defenseman last season.”

Look, it wasn’t exactly a buyer’s market for defensemen out there this summer, or any position, really — thus, Detroit’s acquisition of Jonas Gustavsson for some horrible reason — but when this is your fallback plan, your fallback plan was not very good at all. Especially when everyone spent all season talking about how the Wings had $20 million in cap space that they’d happily spend willy-nilly and get young in the process.

If nothing else, this is starting to look very much like Holland making a serious attempt to prove his fabled drafting acumen once and for all. With the team he has now in place, he is giving Jimmy Howard the chance to prove something.

Howard’s contract is up after this season, and if he puts up even remotely respectable numbers behind this defense, he might actually be the best goaltender in NHL history (well, behind Chris Osgood). Then, all that extra cap space that Holland saved not signing anyone worth mentioning this summer is going to come in real handy.

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Detroit, as the Red Wings supporters are so eager to point out any time you bring up anything even remotely critical of the city itself, its residents or anything else even tangentially involved with it on any level, is a town that has been through a lot lately.

And while I have no ill feelings toward the team itself (despite its penchant for crybabyism over any number of perceived slights), I think the fans of this team and I have built up enough enmity over the past year or so that I would like to put it through just a bit more.

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The Lead

I’ve been sitting here for a while now trying to think of the best way to write about this Sharks/Red Wings game, which certainly had its share of storylines.

Goal reviews, both upholding the original calls and overturning them. An absurd call for a penalty shot that ended up not mattering. Clowncar goaltending of the highest order from both netminders, who each gave up no-angle goals. Joe Thornton having his best game of the postseason, and maybe the best postseason game of his career. Pavel Datsyuk looking pretty damn bad all night. The exchange of bad line changes that led to Detroit’s ultimate ruin.

In short, the game itself was a mess.

And really, that probably tells you everything you need to know about these Detroit Red Wings of 2010.

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