The Two-Line Pass

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I read the Ryan Getzlaf contract extension news yesterday and, unlike many times when I’ve joked about such a problem, I actually thought the details contained in that first tweet about it were the result of a typographical error.

Granted, Getzlaf is having a phenomenal year as a 27-year-old with nine goals and 18 assists in just 22 games, and has been an elite forward in the league since his third season (save for a bit of a hiccup last year thanks to his shooting at literally half his career percentage). But at the same time, an average of $8.25 million a season for the next EIGHT years? That is a pretty sizable raise from his current cap hit of $5.325 million and, I don’t think, all that reasonable. Again, the guy is 27 years old. Now he’s signed until he’s 35. The odds that he can put up the kind of numbers he’s putting up this year in even half those next eight seasons seems rather low.

But moreover, I wonder what this means for everyone else on the Ducks. I’m pretty sure it means Teemu Selanne isn’t coming back. I’m also fairly sure it means either Corey Perry isn’t getting re-signed or Bobby Ryan is getting traded in the offseason or both.

Why it’s such a weird move is that the Ducks are obviously not going to start paying everyone. They’re not a cap ceiling team, falling about $15 million short of the limit this year, so to give one player that much money — about one-eighth of next year’s cap, which you’ll remember is going to fall, and about 20 percent(!) of what they have committed to the 15 players currently under contract — seems a little crazy. Especially because that player is Ryan Getzlaf. That’s Eric Staal money, and while I’d put him on roughly the same level as Eric Staal in terms of quality across the league, Eric Staal is also dramatically, almost hysterically overpaid; he shouldn’t be the fourth-highest cap hit in the league, because that’s insane.

Evgeni Malkin’s contract is up after next season. Think he looks at the Getzlaf contract and does the finger thing for money at Ray Shero? Because I sure do. He has four (soon to be five) seasons better on a points-per-game basis than anything Getzlaf produced before this year. The Penguins better be ready to fill Mario Lemieux’s pool with money for Geno to swim in.

While the ink was still wet on that contract, someone said this is another case of the NHL’s middle class disappearing, and maybe all that is true. But it seems more likely that this is just a case of a team signing a dumbass contract that doesn’t make any sense. It seems more like what happens when a team that has the ability to overpay their stars does so. This is a deal that affects no one but the best players on their own teams. It matters for Malkin. It matters for Tom Vanek, whose deal is up after next season as well. But those guys were going to get roughly this kind of money regardless of whether Getzlaf signed for $8.25 million or $1.25 million.

It doesn’t matter to the NHL’s rank and file because the Ducks were never going to spend beyond Getzlaf and their other stars anyway. That’s why no one ever complains or even talks about how bad Staal’s deal is: because no one besides the Hurricanes has to care about it. It plays no role in the market because everyone knows it’s ridiculous, and it gets filed away in their minds as such. It’ll be the same with this Getzlaf deal.

With that having been said, $8.25 million a year to Ryan Getzlaf is a pretty bad contract.

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(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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(Ed. note: This is a sponsored post for Corey Blauss (again!). 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!

No. 1 centers are very hard to come by in the NHL, and have been for rather a long time. While there are 30 guys currently filling the role of No. 1 center on NHL teams, probably only about half the teams in the league actually have one, and a few of them have two (Pittsburgh certainly among them).

One team that is rather fortunate to have a No. 1 center is also one that probably doesn’t get enough credit for doing so. The Boston Bruins’ top-line pivot is Patrice Bergeron, and if he’s not one of the top centers on the planet I’ll just about eat my damn hat. The interesting thing about Bergeron, and why he’s often not involved in such discussions the way Stamkos and Crosby and Malkin and Toews are is that Bergeron never puts up the numbers his counterparts do. He only has 5-13-18 in 19 games this season (including 1-2-3 in tonight’s loss to Montreal). That obviously isn’t a ton, but it’s more or less in line with what he’s done over the course of his career. The fact that his career best was 73 points in 81 games in 2005-06, when he was just 20 years old, is in some ways disappointing. But since that time, he’s also developed into perhaps the premier two-way center in the league.

Let’s put it another way: There are a lot of centers Canada can take to the Olympics every four years. Last time out, Bergeron happened to be one of them. Filling the nets isn’t his modus operandi; the most goals he’s ever scored in a season was 31, and that, too, was in 2005-06. But he’s so good that arguably the best hockey team ever assembled by an entity aside from USA hockey brought him on board nonetheless.

And then there’s obviously the faceoffs. Bergeron is currently fourth in the league at winning them. The year before, he was second. And prior to that, he was tied for eighth and fifth. You have to go all the way back to 2008-09 to find the last time Bergeron wasn’t top-10 in the league at the dot, and even then, he was only 12th at 54.5 percent. That, too, helps Claude Julien to trust him everywhere.

There’s not a more do-everything-right center in the league than Bergeron, who gets minutes in all situations against top competition in all three zones. He’s just so reliable, quietly excellent, and clean. He rarely gets sent off for committing penalties, with only 168 PIM in nine seasons. And that doesn’t mean he’s not a physical player, because as evidenced by last night’s game, he’s more than willing to take the body and play along the boards, even after suffering two concussions in the middle part of his career. Physical play without incurring too many penalties — never more than 28 in a season! — indicates clean, smart play. And having a player with this level of skill on the ice and never putting his team down a man is incredibly valuable.

While there are a few teams that wouldn’t swap their top-line centers straight-up for Bergeron, the vast majority would do so in a heartbeat and walk away laughing at Bruins GM Peter Chiarelli for his having been so dumb. Not every day you say that about someone who topped out at something like 22 goals 64 points over the last seven seasons.

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(Ed. note: This is a sponsored post for @67sound. 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!

The prospect of losing a defenseman of the quality of, say, I don’t know, a Chris Pronger, just as a for-instance, must be terrifying to a few GMs around the league. I say that it’s only concerning to a small number because defensemen of Chris Pronger’s quality aren’t exactly the most common sight in the NHL these days, or indeed, league history. Chris Pronger, you see, is very, very, very, veryveryvery good.

But that’s what happened to the Flyers, and it wasn’t a Pronger-quality defenseman they lost to a concussion, it was Pronger himself. Which is probably worse because that guy has a tendency to forcibly drag bad teams by the hair into Stanley Cup Finals pretty regularly. That’s how it went with the Oilers in 2006, that’s how it went with the Flyers in 2010. The 2007 Ducks, it should be noted, were a good team.

That left Paul Holmgren in a sticky situation, as did his losing Matt Carle to Tampa on a not-so-great contract that he was probably right in not attempting to match. The Flyers blue line last year, after the Pronger injury, was famously thin, and given the number of goals the team scored last season (264, third-most in the league), it must have occurred to Holmgren that he could trade from one of his positions of strength to bolster one of his positions of weakness.

And so it was that he resolved to swap out freshly-extended James van Riemsdyk, who had a disappointing season in 2011-12, for a defenseman around which he could begin rebuilding his tattered blue line. Instead of doing that, though, he traded the former No. 2 overall pick for Luke Schenn.

Right now, that decision constitutes one of the most immediately-lopsided trades in recent NHL history, potentially ahead of James Neal and Matt Niskanen going to Pittsburgh for Alex Goligoski (there is some debate because it took Neal, now a 40-goal scorer alongside Evgeni Malkin, about half a season to find his legs in the Eastern Conference). After scoring 11 goals in 43 games all of last season, van Riemsdyk now has 11 in 19, but the shocking part is that it comes with an at least semi-sustainable shooting percentage of 15.9; at least he’s not like Brad Marchand shooting in the high 30s and low 40s all season.

This is, it should be noted, quite the departure for van Riemsdyk, whose career high in three prior seasons was just 21 goals in 75 games, and really only received his six-year, $25.5 million deal on the basis of his being electrifying in the Flyers’ run to the Cup Final. But that, one supposes, is the inherent risk of trading an extremely high draft pick who is entering the prime of his career for, well, Luke Schenn.

Schenn has been, hmm, there’s got to be a word for it… terrible doesn’t cover it, nor does disappointing. Okay, I guess Schenn has been upsetting for the Flyers so far this season. It’s tough to saw what he was brought in to do, exactly, but suffice it to say he hasn’t been doing whatever that was. This was most evident when the Flyers and Maple Leafs met two weeks ago, and van Riemsdyk’s new team torched his old one 5-2, and in which he blew Schenn’s doors off to score his then-eighth of the season. You can see that pictured above.

The two teams meet again tonight and with Toronto playing as well as it has (7-3 in the last 10, comfortably in a playoff spot) and Philly currently ninth in the East with 19 points from 20 games and a minus-4 goal differential to the Leafs’ plus-9, well, you can’t exactly expect good things for the defenseman in that deal.

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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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It can be said, for sure, that many old-timey hockey guys don’t have a firm grasp on the ways in which statistical analysis of the sport is revolutionizing it, and our understanding thereof. It can also be said that they likely don’t want to have a firm grasp of that kind of thing. I saw the trailers for “Trouble with the Curve.” I know how the game be.

But that kind of lack of understanding was perhaps never more evident than a recent interview Preds coach Barry Trotz gave ESPN’s Craig Custance, in defense of the largely indefensible contract his team recently extended to Paul freakin’ Gaustad. You remember that one, right? It was for four years and $13 million. For a grind-line guy who, yes, is very good at faceoffs. Isn’t that right, Barry?

“Paul Gaustad fits perfectly to the needs of the Nashville Predators,” he told Custance.

That may very well be true. The Preds were tied for 21st in the league last season with a faceoff percentage of just 49, and Gaustad was seventh in the league at 57.3. That’s a huge jump and if you can use him situationally — then get him the hell off the ice — to win a draw on a crucial power play or late in the game. That’s totally fair. Trotz also notes that he’s a great leader and sets a sterling example for the Preds’ terribly young roster. Less important, but okay, whatever.

Then came the money quote:

“If the game is on the line, Paul Gaustad will be taking that draw. You’re up a goal with a minute left in the game, Paul Gaustad is out there. Is he worth 10 points a year? Probably.”

Well, uhh, how to put this nicely? Paul Gaustad’s ability to win close-and-late draws is worth 10 points a year in the way that Trotz’s neck is reminiscent of a giraffe’s. In that it is not in any way.

Let’s look at the basic facts. Paul Gaustad’s corsi relative last year was an astonishingly bad -11.5, though it must be said he didn’t exactly play slouches giving that he is a checking line center. That number means when he’s on the ice, his team gives up a lot more shots than it produces, regardless of how many draws he wins in vital situations (still less than three out of every five).

Let’s remember that this contract came after the Predators traded a first-round pick to acquire him, and a 14-game regular season in which Gaustad compiled a staggering 0-4-4, and 1-1-2 in 10 playoff games. So it’s not as though even basic counting stats are in any way helpful in vindicating this contract.

But okay, maybe all that isn’t fair. Let’s look at the point shares Gaustad earned last season for both Buffalo and Nashville, according to Hockey-Reference. If you guessed 1.2, you are correct. That’s KIND of close to 10, right? Hell, by this metric, Gaustad has only racked up 14.1 points for his teams in nine NHL seasons, so it’s not like last season was even an aberration.

For comparison, here is a list of skaters who WERE worth 10 or more points last season: Evgeni Malkin (15.7), Steven Stamkos (14.7), Erik Karlsson (13.1), Shea Weber (11.4), Marian Gaborik (11.2), Alex Pietrangelo (11.2), James Neal (11), Zdeno Chara (10.9), Claude Giroux (10.6), Ilya Kovalchuk (10.5), Jason Spezza (10.5), and Jordan Eberle (10.3). In short, the elitest of elite players. And only those players.

Granted, all those guys make a hell of a lot more than Gaustad’s $3.25 million, but 1.2 point shares is more in line with what Jim Slater and Nate Guenin provided to their teams last season. If you think you should be paying a player of Nate Guenin’s caliber that much more than league minimum, please get out of the NHL.

Although, now that I think about it, it occurs to me that Trotz might have meant “points” as in “goals and assists,” and Gaustad is certainly worth that.

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!

It’s often easy to overlook just how much better than everyone else on the planet the average NHL player is when it comes to playing hockey. We see them do things every day that to them are routine but, to the rest of the world, are impossible. To make us get up out of our seats, an NHL player has to do something 1 percent of the .00001 percent are capable of doing.

If nothing else, this lockout reminds us that man, NHL players are really, really, really good. Joe Thornton, for example, is now routinely being called a bit past his prime, having put up a mere 77 points last season. Similarly, we’ve often heard Rick Nash called overrated since all those trade rumors started cropping up, and that might be true given that his 30 goals and 59 points were both personal lows not seen since 2006-07.

But despite being no longer as good as they perhaps once were, recording nearly a point a game, or scoring 30 goals, is still really difficult in the NHL, and indicators that those who do are still very good indeed at this sport. And so it was that Joe Thornton, consummate playmaker, and Rick Nash, lethal goalscorer, combined to disembowel their opponents in their first game for Swiss A League team HC Davos.

Those poor Rapperswil-Jona Lakers. They didn’t know what hit them. And even if they did, it wouldn’t have mattered very much at all. Thornton and Nash combined for six points — three goals to the latter, three helpers to the former — in the first period of a 9-2 win in which they both ended up adding one more assist before it was all over.

Now to be fair, the Swiss A League isn’t exactly the KHL when it comes to having NHL-ready talent, but these guys aren’t bad or anything. Granted, the best way to describe the most noteworthy players on either team aside from Thornton and Nash is “NHL washouts” but still, being edged out of the NHL isn’t really an indicator that you’re Bad At Hockey. It’s an indicator that you’re not in that fraction of a fraction of a percent who is good at NHL hockey. The Lakers’ roster boasted 2003 Hobey Baker winner Peter Sejna, who got a few cups of instant coffee with St. Louis, as well as Robbie Earl, once a member of the Leafs and Wild. David Aebischer came on in mopup duty too, and in true Aebischer fashion gave up six goals on 32 shots in 40 minutes.

Ignore all the chest-puffing out of Russia about how that nation’s domestic league is nearly on par with the NHL, because it isn’t. Evgeni Malkin may not have been able to torch slightly better players in one game so far, but if Nash and Thornton are combining for eight points in their first game of an even somewhat comparable league, that’s a pretty good indicator that, when things are going well for even a declining NHL player, they can still embarrass everyone else alive.

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!

Yesterday was the first day in the KHL for a few NHL players, and as you might imagine, things over there are a little different.

For one thing, they all speak this weird language I can’t seem to understand. Don’t know what that’s about. More importantly, though, the way in which the sport is played is way, way different. Part of that is by virtue of the fact that they play on the larger, Olympic-sized rink over there, which changes almost all parts of the game. Angles are different, the speed is different, the approach is different.

But the other thing to keep in mind about the KHL is man oh man are the players in it ever bad. Like, really, truly not very good players. This is the example to which I always point when the subject of the KHL’s relative quality comes up, but man, Kevin Dallman is the best defenseman in that league by any standard year-in and year-out.

And as a consequence of the league’s players being not very good by comparison with those in the NHL or, now, the AHL too, the hockey is one hell of a lot more dangerous.

For more, let’s take a mind-journey to scenic Magnitogorsk, located just several hours’ drive from beautiful and glorious Kazakhstan, where NHL superstar and best-player-on-the-planet-last-year Evgeni Malkin played before a SOLD-OUT CROWD (of 7,500) in his first KHL game since that time he literally had to run away from his team overnight to join the Penguins.

The below video, which I got from Puck Daddy but was posted by the official KHL YouTube account, is entitled “Zubarev meets Malkin / Zubarev’s huge hit on Evgeni Geno Malkin.” The descript read, “Andrei Zubarev welcomes Evgeni Malkin in the CHL great power moves.”

I’ll put this in terms you can understand, Kontinental Hockey League: That hit ain’t huge or great, it’s низко. Or, for you English-only readers: Low. It was super-duper low. Dangerous as hell. The point of contact was Malkin’s knee. Imagine if, in his first game in the KHL, some crummy defenseman with four career NHL games to his name (and those in ATLANTA!) had blown out Evgeni friggin’ Malkin’s left knee? Fortunately, that’s not the one that’s had all the surgeries, because otherwise holy christ.

And just so we’re clear, the subtext of that KHL description (of a hit that, in the NHL, would be worthy of supplementary discipline), is that Malkin — again, the best player in the world this past year — was unprepared for the KHL. “WELCOME TO THE LEAGUE, GENO. Not just anyone can make it here, as evidenced by Brandon Bochenski having 104 career points in 89 games.” It’s all hubris, and certainly guys like Zubarev are looking to make a name for themselves by blowing up Malkin at every available opportunity.

What are the odds Sid Crosby saw that hit and decided maybe he’ll just stay the hell home? His first game against Vityaz Chekhov and they’d be taking him out of the rink on a stretcher.

But, okay, let’s give Zubarev the benefit of the doubt here. Maybe he didn’t want to try to low-bridge a countryman and international hockey superstar. Maybe he’s just too awful to have not done so.

In either case, let this be a lesson to all you NHL players out there: Some nobody is very likely to either try to end your career or do so inadvertently. Best to stay home and play pickup games with the boys.

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The Lead

Evgeni Malkin caught a lot of crap around this time last year for his subpar performance in the playoffs. He scored 18 points in his first nine playoff games, but only four in the last 11 and everyone was all, “WHERE’S GENO!?”

This year, you could have said that for maybe six or seven games from the last few against the Flyers (he had seven points in the first three games against Philly and only two in the remaining three) to the first or four against Washington (a so-so 1-2-3 in three and a minus-3). And since then, it’s been really, really bad to be a goalie playing against the Penguins.

Here, now, is a list of things at which, it suddenly occurs to me, Evgeni Malkin is fairly good:

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Mmmm borscht

If you’re ever in Magnitogorsk and looking for a place to eat, why not swing by Evgeni Malkin’s VIP Zone restaurant, where vistors will get all the fun and ambience of a Siberian gulag.

Barred windows and ceiling, lamps designed as police flashlights, barbed wire and excerpts from the Russian Penal Code are significant parts of the interior design at VIP Zone, Magnitogorsk. You can have a seat on a plank-bed (there are comfortable chairs for the more delicate) and eat your food with an aluminium fork. When you have finished, waitresses dressed in striped prison wrappers will bring you a bill dotted with fingerprints.

‘I wanted to open a restaurant that would be something absolutely new, like nothing before it,’ Malkin told Komsomolskaya Pravda daily.

Well mission accomplished. Know why no one would have thought to make a prison-themed restaurant, Geno? Because it’s a terrible idea.

But say you’re looking for an upscale experience and still want to feel like you’re on the set of “Oz.” Malkin has the solution.

VIP guests are taken to the ‘chief’s office’ - a room in crimson with heavy furniture and portraits of Soviet dictators like Stalin and Beria, donning maps marking all the Russian prisons.

‘Designers suggested making it look like a maximum security prison. I now plan to establish a network in other cities,’ he added.

Great, another chain restaurant. Hell, the Hard Rock Cafe is barely a good idea and people actually like going there. And for a country like Russia to have as much of a history of.. let’s say unjust prison sentences, maybe you don’t want to go around bringing that up or indeed trying to make money from it.

But wait, there’s more!

In spite of the grim interior, the food is nothing like prison meals. However, you can order authentic chifir — a popular Russian prison drug made from tea. And if a visitor drinks too much, the person is driven home in a police car.

And by “driven home” they mean strangled.