The Two-Line Pass

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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The Lead

Well now that the Red Wings went into Glendale and kicked the living christ out of the Phoenix Coyotes, the time has come for me to apologize.

You see, as it turns out the team loaded with cagey veteran, hardened by years of deep and trying forays into postseason after immensely successful postseason were just too much for a team with a youthful spark and strong goaltender. Detroit had seen any possible combination of youth and speed and skill and veterans and defense and goaltending and coaching you care to throw at them, and as such it takes a lot to get by them.

Tonight, and ultimately in the series, the Coyotes just didn’t have enough.

And so, after being chirped on Twitter and email and on the Puck Daddy Game 7 chat by numerous Detroit fans, I guess I owe a lot of people an apology.

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The Lead

How awesome was that, right? Freakin’ Coyotes come back from to beat Detroit in the first home game in Phoenix, err, Glendale since I want to say 1642. Unreal. Keith Yandle was better than Nicklas Lidstrom. Wojtek Wolski was better than Henrik Zetterberg. Derek Morris was better than Brian Rafalski. And Ilya Bryzgalov was far better than Jimmy Howard.

Why, it’s almost like Phoenix was the fourth-best team in the league over 82 games this season!

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The Lead

It physically pains me a great deal to write what I’m about to write, so if this post just cuts off at some point, please call 9-1-1 and send them to my place because I have almost certainly gone into anaphylactic shock after having an allergic reaction to believing what I am about to say. Here goes anyway:

The Red Wings got SCREWED tonight and they and their fans have every reason to be OUTRAGED with the League and referees Stephane Auger and Dennis LaRue.

Owwwwwwwww.

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“It was a really tough decision for me to make. When I compared the two teams, I felt like I would have a little better of a chance to win the Cup in Detroit.” - Marian Hossa, July 2, 2008.

Regardless of whether or not the Red Wings beat the Penguins later tonight, Hossa was pretty much wrong. If Detroit pulls out the victory on its home ice, Hossa will happily lift the Cup, but that won’t have made him any more correct that Detroit gave him “a little better of a chance.”

Hossa, though you might not know it from his play in this series (0-3-3, plus-1) or indeed the whole playoffs (6-9-15, plus-6 in 22 games), is a game-changing player. That he took the smaller paycheck to have a better shot at the Cup might seem like some sort of magnanimous “I’m not in it for the money” type gesture, and certainly I don’t begrudge him that. It’s just kind of a dick move.

But that’s old news, obviously. So here we are more than 11 months later, and it all comes down to one game between the one he chose and the one he snubbed to see which team wins the Cup. All things considered, it’s more or less a 50-50 chance that everything works out in what he’d consider to be his favor.

But what this point ignores is that the Red Wings now have just as good of a shot of winning the grandest prize in all athletic competition as do the Penguins, and that’s with the whole “We have Marian Hossa on our team” affect. WITH Hossa, the Red Wings were more or less a dominant force, even when saddled with some of the worst goaltending in the NHL for the entirety of the regular season. WITH Hossa, the Red Wings rolled through Columbus in four games, struggled to down Anaheim in seven, dispatched Chicago in five and now stand on the brink against Pittsburgh.

Meanwhile, WITHOUT Hossa, the Penguins struggled mightily before they dumped Michel Therrien. And without Hossa, they became inarguably the best team in the NHL under Dan Bylsma (I mean, they’ve lost 10 games in regulation since Bylsma took over on Feb. 16). And without Hossa, they snuck by Philadelphia in six games, struggled to down Washington in seven, dispatched Carolina in four and now stand on the brink against Detroit.

Clearly, Pittsburgh and Detroit are two very even teams, but imagine where the former would be if it were plus-Hossa and where the latter would be if it were minus-Hossa. Pretty easy to imagine that Pittsburgh would have been a better team if Hossa, who scored 40 goals this year, was the one getting one-timer feeds from Crosby or Malkin instead of, say, Petr Sykora (25), Ruslan Fedotenko (16) or Miroslav Satan (17).

Obviously there are some mitigating factors here: Might the Pens have fired Therrien had their record been slightly better? Might they have had the cap room to trade for Chris Kunitz and Bill Guerin? Might they never have discovered the power of a barbecue pork burrito? Tough to say, obviously. But Marian Hossa makes Pittsburgh, like any other team he happens to be on, better, and conversely a Hossaless Detroit worse.

A better Penguins team would have beaten a worse Detroit and Hossa would have already lifted the Cup by now. Just sayin’.

The Lead

Actual words written on Puck Daddy today:

Puck Headlines: Has Chris Osgood finally quieted the critics?

• Scott Burnside of ESPN takes a stand against “the ranks of those caterwauling about the Detroit Red Wings goaltending” by interviewing Chris Osgood about his quiet turnaround since his mini-vacation: Four wins in a row, and giving up three or less in each of them. Money quote: “I was kind of expecting to pick up where I left off last year against Pittsburgh … In reality, that’s just not going to happen because that was like a two-month zone. In that aspect, I put too much pressure on thinking I’ve got to be that guy throughout the whole year instead of just playing game by game and being me.” [ESPN]

Well it looks like Scott Burnside better check his hat in the morning, since Chris Osgood just deposited some of his feces on the inside of it, and there may have been some splashback as well.

Ozzie did nothing to disprove any of the critics, giving up three goals on 13 shots to Calgary tonight, all of which were so soft you could easily pass them as the fancy kind of toilet paper. He got the hook after 25:38. Detroit went on to lose 5-3.

But good news, Scott Burnside: he didn’t get the loss! What he did get, though, was the stunning realization that he still suuuuuuuh-huuuuuuuuuuuuucks at goaltending, just as badly as you do at prognosticating.

I imagine Burnside in his Atlanta home, just thinking to himself, “Hmmmm, let me see here. What WILLLLLLLL this goaltender who has been eye-bleedingly godawful all season do? Will he do well enough to win on the best on-paper team in the NHL, as he has for the last week and a half, or will he just revert back to his ol’ 3.whatever/.880whatever self that he’d been for the prior 35 games?” Real friggin’ noodle-scratcher, Burnside. You’re a chucklehead. Go run a lap.

The real victim in this is Ty Conklin, who did take the loss because he had the unmitigated AUDACITY to give up one goal on 12 shots! Unbelievable! If Conklin wasn’t so incredibly familiar with how bad it sucks to be Ty Conklin, I would use this as a prime example.

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The Lead

Okay sure they won in a shootout, but that was an embarrassing performance by the Detroit Red Wings.

In no single period did they crack a double-digit shot total, and had just two shots on goal in the first period. Two! They were 0 for 3 on the power play and only 4 for 7 on the penalty kill. They let a pretty middle-of-the-road, injury-riddled St. Louis team not only hang around but actually dictate most of the game. They were careless with the puck and the only reason they scored three goals was that Manny Legace gave them up on Detroit’s first eight shots, a total that Detroit took 31:21 to reach.

It was truly an appalling game to watch, and frankly the Wings don’t deserve to have snapped their five-game losing streak. They haven’t played like anything resembling one of the four best teams in hockey, and if tonight’s game wasn’t further evidence that Chris Osgood should be bundled off to Uzbekistan for a bag of third-hand pucks and a mule carcass, nothing is.

The Blues, by the way, rolled the formidable defensive unit of Barret Jackman, Carlo Colaiacovo, Jeff Woywitka, Mike Weaver, Steve Wagner, Tyson Strachan and Jay McKee. It’s a wonder that it took the Detroit freakin’ Red Wings an overtime period to get to 20 shots against that. You and your beer league team’s fourth line could put up 20 against them in 60 minutes. No problem.

What a joke.

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The Lead

Whatever the opposite of a goaltending battle is, Versus viewers were subjected to one tonight.

Sure, you can argue that there were a few highlight reel saves and that as a result it’s reasonable to surmise that despite allowing nine goals on 79 shots, both Chris Osgood and Marty Turco weren’t quite so bad as perhaps the statistics would lead one to believe.

You, of course, would be horribly wrong, because both the goals AND the ridiculous stops were the result of neither goalie participating in anything resembling sound positional goaltending. Go look at the highlights. What’s Turco thinking on that first goal? The announcer says it was a deflection, but it wasn’t. On the second goal, Turco overcommits to the puck carrier, Pavel Datsyuk, who once again owned him in a consistent and thorough manner all night. As for the Red Wings’ goaltending, the first two Stars goals were through screens, so no fault of Osgood’s there, but the rest of them.. yeesh.

I have never been a goalie at any level of competitive hockey, but I have to assume that, if I were, it would be a bad thing for me to be lying four feet outside of my crease when the opponent scores an overtime game-winner against me. Right? Maybe any readers out there who are goalies can fill me in.

This game would make a perfect instructional video for every goalie under the age of 10 to learn what not to do. “See, Billy, unlike Marty Turco, you DON’T want try to glove a weak wrist shot and have it hit you in the mask twice in one period.”

Man, I’d make such a good peewee coach.

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The Lead

If this had been 1997 or so, tonight’s game would have been an outstanding one to put on national television.

But given that it’s not 11 years ago, and almost no one from either team in those fabled Detroit/Colorado games that featured so much violence and drama and hatred still remains, only the shadow of a dead rivalry, rather than palpable tension, remained hanging over the Versus broadcast.

Those games, complete with line brawls and goalie fights and probably four or five of the best players in the world, leave fan, media and player alike hoping for something that is impossible to achieve. What remnants may have remained of the rivalry have been rendered obsolete and irrelevant by passage of time.

As a result, tonight’s 3-2 Avalanche win, even though it was a perfectly good hockey game that was ultimately decided by a penalty shot in the third period, was more or less dramaless. Where the Wings/Avs games of old were circle-this-on-your-calendar, not-to-be-missed events, this was in just about every way one of 82 of the schedule.

Maybe it’s because Detroit has positively owned Colorado over the last few years, winning each of the last eight and 16 of the last 18. Maybe it’s because Claude Lemieux and Patrick Roy aren’t around to stir up passion and anger from the strangely emotionless Red Wings, who have spent far too much time playing from behind of late thanks to slow starts and the expectancy that they’ll win simply because they’re the best team just about every night. Or maybe it’s because there isn’t one person on the Red Wings anyone is afraid of.

In any event, the Avs came out completely unintimidated and beat up on Detroit with the counterattack. Both Wojtek Wolski and Paul Stastny scored first-period goals that capitalized on Red Wing mistakes and it was 2-0 Avs just 4:34 into the game. Detroit was punchless and seemed disinterested in the game. The Red Wings only blocked two shots all night, while the Avs blocked 16. There wasn’t a tremendous amount of checking (except for Brad Stuart, who led everyone with six hits), and there wasn’t a tremendous amount of inspired play from the Detroit bench.

Any time Andrew Raycroft completely shows up your team, for instance, you had a bad night. Raycroft stopped 34 of 36 shots in the win, and Detroit didn’t exactly make him earn it either. Lots of shots came from the perimeter, and Detroi’s shot selection in general (as evidenced by the high number of blocked shots) was poor.

Jordan Leopold’s eventual game-winner that came on the aforementioned penalty shot at 1:51 of the third was very nice, and a dagger to the Red Wings, who had been composing themselves a bit for the latter part of the second period. Marian Hossa’s goal to close the scoring was largely unimportant in the grand scheme of the game.

It was pretty sad, really. Versus spent most of the lead-up screaming, “RIVALRY GAME!” and the general malaise in the game from both teams was disheartening. It would have taken Tomas Holmstrom spontaneously combusting at center ice to make it even remotely interesting to someone who remembers watching that Detroit/Colorado game live.

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