The Two-Line Pass

The Lead

Okay, seriously, I watched the third period of the Flames game and that was it. And while I did see Jarome Iginla wrist the absolute hell of a shot (one of my favorite things in the world, by the way), and also some crazy Freddy Sjostrom goal, then Mark Giordano fighting someone and finally the Flames winning a game and not looking like garbage doing it.

I think I’ve been dosed with hallucinogens or something and I need to go lie down.

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The Lead

Calgary lost 6-5 in overtime. They led 5-0 nine minutes into the game.

There are no words to adequately express my rage.

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The Lead

A thing I predicted: The Coyotes would make the playoffs. You could also file that under “A thing everyone on the planet thought was lunacy.”

And certainly, I get why. People looked at the Coyotes, who made very few “impact” personnel changes in the offseason (and by “very few,” I clearly mean zero) and in fact took on almost nothing but bad salary in the form of other teams’ unwanted contracts, and saw what they saw last year. Phoenix was a bad team by any metric, one that often seemed not only lost but beyond rudderless to boot, and so the fact that they added contracts that seemed to have negative value to an already-woeful lineup seemed the last shovelful of dirt on the whole Hockey In the Desert experiment, and, most would argue, with good reason.

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The Lead

Mike Richards really doesn’t get enough credit.

If I were to ask you to ballpark his production over the last two seasons, what would your guess be? Something like 100, 110 points maybe? Pretty respectable, eh? Yeah, try 155. One hundred and fifty-five points in 152 games. Goal totals: 28 and 30. Set your watch to that kinda production.

I understand he’s the Flyers captain, but can you think of a quieter point-a-game guy in the league? The guys ahead of him on the point totals list are routinely mentioned as being top-whatever in the world, and somehow Mike Richards has to sit there and have everyone act like he doesn’t put up huge numbers? You hear Eric Staal’s name brought up a lot more than you do Mike Richards’, and for what? One extraordinary season three years ago? Richards is every bit the player Staal and unlike Staal, who is overrated, he’s critically underappreciated.

Look at the goals he scored tonight, picking up a hattie as his Flyers crept by the Capitals in a really great 6-5 overtime win. The first two were absolute snipes the quality of which we haven’t seen since Dealey Plaza, and the third was one of those Johnny-On-The-Spot plays that good players always seem to be in position for.

Let’s put it this way: Alex Ovechkin is a man on a mission this year, yeah? Line of 6-3-9 in three games. Third player ever to score like that to start a season. That’s crazy. For real. And Mike Richards was considerably more impressive than him tonight. Wrap your head around that.

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The Lead

Puck in the slot, Alex Ovechkin streaking toward it, you’re supposed to pick up the trailer.

Do you:

A) Dive at the puck.
B) Try to get in position to jockey with him to disrupt a shot.
C) Intentionally commit slash Ovechkin in the spine and hope they don’t score on the resultant power play.
D) Give Ovechkin 45 minutes to load it up, cock and fire a 620-mile-an-hour shot past Tim Thomas and doom your team to a loss.

Hint: NOT D!

I’m not exactly the world’s foremost expert on backchecking, but I feel like that’s pretty straightforward.

But this play was symptomatic of the Bruins’ entire 4-1 loss to the Capitals tonight. Lazy backcheck, disinterested forecheck, hopeless rushes. It all adds up to a bad loss.

Someone on Twitter noted that Boston fans can expect a similar offensive output most nights this season, and that’s certainly truish. He cited the loss of Kessel as the reason for the drop in production, but really it’s that the Bruins led the NHL in shooting percentage last year, putting 10.9 percent of their shots in the net, a full 1.45 better than league average. Only five other teams (Pittsburgh, Philly, Atlanta, St. Louis and Vancouver) broke 10 percent. The extra 1.45 accounted for an extra 36 goals above average — ironically exactly the number Kessel scored last year — and made the Bruins second in goals for instead of tied for 17th.

So all year, Bruins fans will be scratching their heads saying, “Why isn’t Lucic/Krejci/Ryder/Wheeler/Kobasew scoring like he did last year?” It’s because their shooting percentages were 17.5, 15.1, 14.6, 14.0 and 16.3, respectively and they’re all likely to regress, to varying degrees, toward the mean. Regardless of how well Marc Savard passes (very) or how good the defense is (also very), they simply can’t be expected to total last year’s ridiculous output.

And hey, tonight they went up against a team known for its defense and goalte…

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(Ed. note: Can you believe neither the AP nor Reuters had a picture of these three from tonight’s game?)

The Lead

It’s entirely likely that none of the three will be in the NHL by the time the puck drops on the real live NHL season. But over the last few days, Brian Burke has gotten a real good look at what could, within a year or two, develop into a very, very good scoring line and, unlike pretty much every line in the entire NHL, could be composed entirely of young players that went the college route.

The trio of Tyler Bozak, Christian Hanson and Viktor Stalberg, all of whom gave up some NCAA eligibility to join the Leafs, have been absolutely magic together, combining for four goals in the three games during which they’ve played as a line. Stalberg, a product of the University of Vermont, got the Leafs on the board tonight with assists from Bozak, who played two years at the University of Denver, and Hanson, who skipped his senior year at Notre Dame to go pro.

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The Lead

And there it was, the first gigantic hit of the hockey season. Dion Phaneuf on Kyle Okposo.

But given the time of year, this hit has already sparked a good amount of debate (covering several topics) among the Twittering and Facebooking and Messageboarding folks that care far too much about this stuff.

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The Lead

Remember back after the Habs got demolished in the playoffs and some reporter told Bob Gainey all about how even his wife was questioning Gainey’s use of Carey Price in the playoffs?

Well now I gotta wonder if the Habs can get her signed up to be GM, because Jesus tapdancing Christ on a grizzly bear, Bob Gainey has lost his goddamn mind.

We all thought he was a little bit thick for taking Scott Gomez’s retardo contract off Glen Sather’s hands, giving up New York native Chris Higgins and extremely promising defensive prospect Ryan McDonagh in the process.

“But hey,” the few Habs fans who weren’t cutting letters for death threats out of magazines might’ve been saying at the time, “Gomez is still a pretty decent player, and if they can get him a decent trigger man, it might be worth it.”

Well Gainey heard those calls, then went out and dropped $11 million a year on Brian Gionta — no doubt hoping to rekindle what my Devils fan friend calls “that ‘03 magic” — and Mike Cammalleri. So they now have a quote-unquote top line that makes 18.357 million dollars combined against the cap but only scored 75 combined goals, which, you will note, is about $244,760 per goal. Which, you will further note, sucks.

And maybe the staunchest of Habs supporters would say even that’s not SO terrible, all things considered because, hey, Alex Ovechkin makes $9.538 against the cap and he scored 56 goals this year, which means he was paid about $170,321 per goal. The dropoff’s not THAT precipitous.

But can the Habs really afford to drop that much per goal for an entire top line, especially one that’s taking like 30 percent of your cap space away, when their defense last season had more holes in it than the average kitchen sponge? Before the real Habs diehards (i.e. members of Gainey’s immediate family) say oui, let’s not forget that Gainey replaced a 27-year-old Mike Komisarek with a 35-year-old Jaro Spacek, and at a discount of just $700k per year, and 34-year-old Hal Gill, who is awful.

And maybe even that would be fine IF HE HADN’T ALREADY TRADED RYAN MCDONAGH LIKE A LUNATIC IDIOT.

By Christmastime, when the Habs are 12 points out of the playoffs, Gainey better be praying he can pick up a new vocation. Maybe that reporter’s wife can teach him to be a baker.

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The Lead

Chris Osgood could learn something from Rob Scuderi: don’t let the rebounds get too far in front of you.

While the former gave up the game’s first goal because he let Jordan Staal’s shot on a 2-on-1 get pretty well near the faceoff dot (plenty of room for Staal to corral the rebound and put it past him to draw first blood), Scuderi went into a butterfly nice enough to make Patrick Roy smile and stopped not one, not two, but three extra-attacker shots from Johan Franzen before Marc-Andre Fleury finally covered the puck. Detroit fans better hope Ozzie was taking notes from the bench. Stick save, kick save (and a beauty!), toe save.

And here’s how you know Rob Scuderi had a good game beyond that: he was credited with a hit and four blocked shots tonight. And, despite making those three actual saves on Franzen, was credited with just one inside of a minute to go. Translation: he stopped at least six shots from getting to the net. And in a 2-1, back-against-the-wall Game 6 victory after his team got curbstomped on Saturday, that’s pretty goddamn good.

But even beyond Scuderi’s third-period contribution (he and D partner Hal Gill, who blocked two shots of his own, were seemingly omnipresent for the final 15 minutes or so), the Pens also got a massive, massive game from Brooks Orpik, Scuderi’s old runnin’ buddy at Boston College, where they played three years together and won a national title in 2001.

Orpik, who apparently is never one to be outdone by an old college buddy, only turned in six blocked shots and four hits. It wasn’t exactly the Free Candy game (seven hits, four blocked shots, and yeah, I looked it up) all over again, but it was close enough.

And together, the former Eagles positively silenced the two guys that had given them hell during Game 5 in Detroit: Henrik Zetterberg and Pavel Datsyuk. The prior game, you’ll recall, saw the two European superstars combine for a goal and three assists, a plus-3 rating, and eight shots. It was a resoundingly loud performance from a pair that seemed intent on closing the series out as soon as possible. But in this game, where three of the four defensemen charged with silencing the Red Wings’ best players were Americans (damn you, Gonchar!), the Swede and the Ruskie were nearly whisper quiet, combining for no points, a minus-2 and six shots.

But that was the difference between Game 5 and tonight: the Penguins got back to what good Canadian — well, North American — boys do: take the game to the boards and just beat the hell out of their opponents. Don Cherry (or his American equivalent (George W Bush?)) would be so, so proud. The Penguins ruled the dashers with an iron fist and in fact board control led directly to the game-winning goal by Tyler Kennedy.

It was interesting, too, that while the Sid Crosbys and Evgeni Malkins tried to play the game through open ice, much like Zetterberg and Datsyuk, they, too, were rendered largely ineffective in their own right. Dan Bylsma, undoubtedly playing with the benefit of being up a goal for close to 39 minutes, saw this and was able to adjust. He leaned heavily upon the role players in the third period and, to his credit, the plan worked.

In all, the Pens blocked 20 shots and doled out 35 hits. There’s going to be a lot of black-and-blues at the morning skate tomorrow, but they’re fine with it, I’m sure. Because at least there is a tomorrow.

The Lead

Sometimes you catch lightning in a bottle.

You’d think a 2-1 overtime game was some sort of defensive struggle, the type of game that the mere thought of having it on national television makes Gary Bettman sit bolt upright in bed and wake his wife to tell her about the horrible, Lovecraftian nightmare he just had in which “The Fastest Game on Earth” was reduced to some type of a 200-foot, 64-minute goalline stand in football with no one scoring ever and people in the Sun Belt turning off their televisions in disgust and major advertisers angrily calling NHL ad reps to pull all their commercials and every rink having 1,200 people in it, none of whom are happy to be there and all of whom want their money back right this second and it will be poor li’l Gary stuck holding the check for this league that overexpanded and crashed and burned under his watch and David Stern will laugh at him and deservedly so.

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