The Two-Line Pass

The Lead

The fans chanted for it. The radio talk show hosts blathered over it. The newspaper reporters wrote about it. The bloggers tweeted about it. The players surely discussed it. Everyone ravened for it.

Revenge.

Bloody, swift revenge. Matt Cooke had to pay for his transgressions against Marc Savard. After all, you don’t rattle another team’s best player’s brain around in his skull without paying for it. Certainly not the way Cooke did it: an unprovoked, deliberate ambush designed to do exactly what it ended up doing.

So no sooner did Cooke hop over the boards for his first shift to a chorus of boos from every corner of the arena than Boston’s resident tough-guy Shawn Thornton asked him to answer for his dastardly deed as though this brand of justice ripped straight from the last 10 pages of every awful black-hat-bad-guy Western would somehow lift the fog that crept into Savard’s brain cavity in the immediate aftermath of last Sunday’s blatant headshot du jour.

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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.

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The Lead

Ah the tantalizing mystery of the Orient.

It’s been a long time since even hardcore hockey fans here in North America have seen Jaromir Jagr play. Two years ago, he took his ball and went home — well, “home” — to the KHL and has literally spent those seasons playing in freaking Siberia for Avangard Omsk.

How far away from his last NHL team, the New York Rangers, is Omsk? Well, to give you an idea of how remote it is, the nearest semi-major Russian city appears to be Kurgan (pop. 345,000 or roughly the size of Santa Ana, California), a 325-mile drive down M-51. Whatever that is.

So I figured it’d be interesting to see how this once-great superstar was playing in what must be the dying years of his career. If his skills had deteriorated in the intervening time since his last NHL season, in which he scored 71 points in 82 games, how bad was that erosion? By the look of things, it had to be considerable, right? I mean, he hasn’t yet scored at a point-a-game pace in a league that plays on that offense-increasing, 200-by-100, international-sized sheet of ice in a league that unironically considers Kevin Dallman to be its best defenseman. He had to be crap at this point, which would be understandable since his NHL debut came when Sid Crosby was three years old.

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The Lead

I remember like two weeks ago or something the Sens fired Eli Wilson, their goalie coach for the previous two seasons. The Sens had just lost five straight and allowed 26 goals in their previous six games, which is of course a crazy-ass number. But people still snickered.

“Fire the goalie coach?!” they scoffed. “Fire the goalies!”

The move was most often compared to rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic in such a way that they are all precariously stacked on top of each other before being dropped directly off the back of the ship. A real who-cares move from a floundering franchise desperate to scapegoat someone in no real position of authority.

I get that sentiment.

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The Lead

A couple years ago I apparently signed up for something through the Calgary Flames’ official website because they clearly have my email address on file. Occasionally I’ll get emails about special tickets being put on sale just for people like me a few hours before game day.

I don’t mark them as spam, I don’t look for a link to unsubscribe myself from this list. I sit there and I say, “Oh look another email from the Flames about tickets what a nice organization they sure do care about me even if I’m probably their only sworn American fan within 1,500 miles of the Atlantic Ocean. ” Not that I read these emails beyond the subject line. Again, I’m about 2,200 miles from the Saddledome. These on-sales literally couldn’t matter less to me.

But I guess my point is that I’m a hell of a goddamn Flames fan. I’m such a good fan that I will let them try to sell me crap I don’t want just out of my desire to support them in any way possible.

So fanatical for this team am I that I have, in the past three weeks, watched every single one of their uniformly hideous games.

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The Lead

Let me tell you about my new favorite sight of all time.

That sight was the American flag being raised to the rafters of some podunk rink in some backwater city in some unimportant province in quite literally the most worthless country in the world.

The United States may have needed overtime to beat Canada (and the officials), but by God, they did it, and I’m pretty sure George Washington is somewhere grinning a big, goofy wooden grin right in John A. MacDonald’s smug little stupid face.

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The Lead

In the past I have been dismissive of the Kings’ success. I’ve said that their offense doesn’t exactly fill me with wonder, that their defense is a mishmash of mediocre-at-best veterans and Drew Doughty, and that the goaltending provided by Jon Quick — ahem, “Olympian Jon Quick,” as the Kings broadcast was so eager to remind us tonight — hasn’t left me optimistic about The Future of American Goaltending.

It’s games like tonight that highlight why.

Oh yes, on the scoreboard the stomped the everliving crap out of the Sharks. No way to candycoat a 6-2 thrashing like that. Not from a Sharks point of view, at least. You could even go so far as to say that Quick was under heavy fire tonight, facing 47 shots and somehow standing up to all but two of them.

But you could also make the argument that the Kings, as they have so many other times this year, backed into what appears to be a convincing win that should have been anything but.

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The Lead

Martin Brodeur, like the team with which he has spent every single game of his career, has his critics.

They say the Devils, thanks to their mastery of defensive hockey, are boring. They say their approach robs the game of its fast-moving, free-flowing charm. They say that along with stifling their opponents’ offensive chances, they also strangle out any enjoyment to be derived from the sport. They say they’re responsible for the decline in the sport’s popularity and therefore the 2004-05 lockout.

He did it all behind a dull team, so it somehow only kind of counts. Makes perfect sense.

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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.

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The Lead

So tonight the Flyers are beating the Caps by two late in the second period, right, And Philly’s a pretty good team with depth at pretty much every position and they’re not exactly wont to give up leads.

But the Caps had it figured out from the get-go: put your three best players, all three of which play different forward positions, on the same line and see what happens. What happens, of course, is that those three players combine for 4-5-9 and the Caps win 4-2. Nicklas Backstrom had the biggest night, scoring the tying goal and assisting on all three others. Alex Ovechkin ran his goal total to 11 in as many games with his brace tonight. Alex Semin went 1-2-3, and his goal was an absolute snipe.

So it stands to reason, then, that Bruce Boudreau would say this after the game, per Wyshynski’s Twitter: “Who knows where [they]‘ll be on Thursday.” YEAH BRUCE JEEZ WHO KNOWS?

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