The Two-Line Pass

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.

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

As we all know by now, the Capitals, in a desperate bid to get anyone in the Beltway area to go out with Jeff Schultz (owner of the NHL’s least proportional ears), have started have started Club Scarlet, a club for female Capitals fans only.

And they’ve caught a surprising amount of flak over it, for reasons that I don’t quite understand.

But I did some digging and found that there are several other clubs that only people of a certain background can join.

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Earlier this week, when Joe Sakic severely injured his hand in a snowblower accident, it may have come as a shock to many.

But to true historians of the game, it was just another in the long list of Hockey Hall of Famers who have injured themselves in some way thanks to some common and avoidable household injuries.

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Is Carolina kidding? They fire Peter Laviolette after the Canes jump out to a 12-11-2 start. Am I missing something here? They’re THREE POINTS back of the division lead! THREE! In THAT division! Do you realize how easy it is to make up three points when you’re playing the Panthers, Lightning and Thrashers 18 times a year?

The fact that the ‘Canes are underperforming this year is hardly Laviolette’s fault. There are the injuries to Justin Williams and David Tanabe that have kept them out since the end of September, there’s Eric Staal’s hideous performance so far this season (he’s had exactly two multiple-goal games this season), there’s the fact that the team, on paper, is pretty goddamn bad. I mean, look at that roster. What’s anyone supposed to do with that? And yet they’re still a game above .500 because Laviolette is a damn good coach.

And the replacement is Paul Maurice? The guy that wasn’t good enough to get a Maple Leafs team like the one they had two years ago into the playoffs? The guy that Carolina already FIRED? He isn’t a good coach. He just isn’t. He’s had losing seasons in seven of his 10 in the NHL. You don’t call a guy like that and offer him a job, regardless of the fact that he helped take your team to the Stanley Cup Finals in 2001-02. It’s ridiculous. What, was Jacques Demers not available?

In the hopes that it’s not too late to squeeze Maurice out, I have composed a list of five better candidates for the job.

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So today I’m just looking around at old college hockey teams and I come upon a name I vaguely recognized: Ben Lovejoy. Kid went to Boston College and was pretty good from what I remembered, but I kind of lost track of him after he transferred to Dartmouth and out of Hockey East.

Well turns out he’s playing for the Baby Pens now and has his own blog, which is seemingly independent of the team’s website. That’s awesome. I wish more players would do that so we can get stories that are actually funny or interesting, rather than some middle-of-the-road defenseman saying, “Went to practice today. It was really hard but we’re playing good hockey right now and we’re just focused on doing our jobs.” No one cares.

But Lovejoy, in his two posts this season, has been pretty funny. The story he posted Friday was a riot.

A fan made a mixtape called “Songs about Love(joy)” full of songs where the word “love” is used in the title.

Every time the word love was mentioned for the rest of the CD, the song would cut out and a voice would come on and say, “joy.” For the next 8 tracks on the CD, they all did this. It was one of the funniest, and creepiest, things I had ever heard. I was almost embarrassed that someone had taken the time to make a CD like this for me. After listening to the CD (not the whole thing, just skipping from track to track) I took it out and put it in the side panel of my car door where it stayed for a month or two.

Eventually, a teammate found the CD by accident and brought it to the dressing room, much to the delight of all of Lovejoy’s teammates. Danny Richmond has since burned a copy of the CD for friends and family and put it on his iPod.

We really, really need to get some audio of this mixtape.

Nothing inspires confidence in the stock market like Gary Bettman and the New York Islanders.

After Bettman and the second-worst team in the league rang the opening bell, the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 100 points from 9,321 to 9,228 in literally a minute. No kidding. Right away.

The Fed had to step in around noon and cut interest rates by half a point just to keep everyone from killing themselves over how bad the Islander offense is going to be this season. It worked for a little while, and the Dow surged back to 9,590 around 2:30.

Then everyone remembered that the Islander defense features Jack Hillen and Brett Skinner, and the market promptly dropped 300 points again.

The Islanders should try to sign Brendan Shanahan or Mats Sundin quick to save those of us on Main Street from the meltdown on Wall Street. At least, that’s how I *think* the market works.

When the two Philadelphia-based pro hockey teams, the Flyers and Phantoms (their AHL affiliate across the street), meet, you’d think there’s a pretty decent chance that the team that went to the Eastern Conference Finals last year would come out with an easy W.

Think again.

In the last game that will ever be played at the historic Spectrum, the Phantoms took it to the Flyers in what was reportedly a largely boring affair and emerged with a 4-2 victory. The Flyers played at the Spectrum until ‘96, when they moved across the street to the Wachovia Center. Since then, the Phantoms have played there instead.

Talk about embarassing. There’s no way the Flyers should have lost this game. The goalscorers for the Phantoms were Jared Ross, Patrick Maroon, Claude Giroux and Andreas Nodl. I consider myself pretty plugged-in hockey-wise, and I don’t think anyone who’s not an NCAA hockey fan such as myself would know who Ross is. Maroon I’ve actually never heard of. Giroux and Nodl were Philly’s 2006 first- and second-round picks, respectively.

It wasn’t like the Flyers trotted out the B team either. With most the NHL making last cuts Tuesday, the Phantoms WERE the B team. The Flyers, meanwhile, had Dany Briere, Mike Richards, Simon Gagne, Mike Knuble, Scottie Upshall, Jeff Carter, Kimmo Timonen, etc etc. Pretty much the team that’s going to threaten in the Atlantic this year.

Okay, to be fair, the AHL side was not without help. They got a ringer in the form of Anterro Niitymaki, who played the whole game for the first time since his surgery. At the other end, Marty Biron gave up two goals in his two periods, and JS Aubin gave up the other two in the third.

If you’re on the Phantoms, you’re feeling pretty good right now. If you’re Dany Briere, you might want to consider killing yourself. This might be the funniest thing that happens all year.

"I don't know what's worse, these shirts or our chances of ever winning a Stanley Cup again"

(Ed. note: A few days ago, I posted a story about Rick DePietro meeting some pro wrestlers and made a few jokes about how bad the Islanders are. This did not sit well with Island residents.

Said IaM Polynomial C of Islander Mania, the official message board of the New York Islanders:

Whoever that guy is, he obviously is full of ****. Probably a Rags fan or just somebody who REALLY hates the Isles.

Neither in fact, I just go for easy targets because I’m lazy. Whatever the indignities hurled my way — being called a Ranger fan! — it appears that trashing the Islanders will get my hitcount up, so here we go again.)

For Islander fans, no news should probably be considered good news.

I’m no expert, but if Sports Illustrated does a 27-page photo essay on your team, you don’t want the following words in its opening paragraph: “Wallowing in mediocrity,” “almost comical ineptitude,” “14 losing seasons.”

But that’s how SI’s spread on the Isles started. And it really only got worse from there.

It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when the Isles’ catastrophic slide began, but the 1988-89 season seems as good a place as any. Under Terry Simpson, the third-year successor to legendary coach Al Arbour, the team opened by winning only seven of its first 27 games, prompting GM Bill Torrey to bring back Arbour — to no avail. The Isles finished tied with Quebec for the NHL’s worst record (28-47-5).

Ouch.

SI goes on to detail the many ways in which ownership and management drove the team straight into the ground since those glorious years of the late 1970s and early ’80s, and the adjectives are perhaps not as flowery as Isles fans would like.

Just to hammer the point home and really stir the pot over at Islander Mania, who here recognizes these guys? SI is so full of ****, probably Rags fans or a publication that REALLY hates the Islanders.

Funny, that doesn't LOOK like franchise goalie Rick DiPietro!

Might wanna run this one through spellcheck one more time, Dan.

Dany Heatley is coming out with a book this December, according to amazon.com.

According to the cover, it is tentatively titled “Dominant Dany Heately,” which would be a bad enough title if they hadn’t spelled his last name wrong.

Apparently the editor has rejected a list of promotional slogans for the book, but Two-Line Pass has gotten hold of a few:

“It’s okay to READ and drive!”

“Crossing blue lines, and double-yellows, at breakneck speed.”

“Skating on all charges.”

“Leave off the extra N for ‘never winning a Stanley Cup!’”

Eh, I got nothin’.