The Two-Line Pass

(Ed. note: This is a sponsored post for Matt. 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!

One subject you hear brought up a lot in sports, for some terrible reason, is that such-and-such a team has the best fans or is the Mecca of hockey, or other such nonsense that matters approximately zero percent. It’s all pointless, specifically because the fans of the Philadelphia Flyers are clearly the greatest, and it’s not even close.

If you are a fan of, say, the Red Wings, or the Penguins, or the Canadiens, or even the Lightning, you might have a bit of a beef with this, but in reality you are dumb and wrong about it. Consider this: Would you still be a fan of a team that is this bad despite having a bunch of reasons not to be?

The Flyers spend money, which is good for fans, but they do it in a maddening and embarrassing way — the Ilya Bryzgalov contract, the Scott Hartnell extension, the Kimmo Timonen deal, etc. — which is bad for fans.

The Flyers routinely draft exciting young talent that are able to be incorporated into the NHL lineup, which is good for fans, but they then trade them away for seemingly no reason whatsoever — Jeff Carter, Mike Richards, James van Riemsdyk, etc. — which is bad for fans.

They routinely make the playoffs due to their traditional regular-season dominance of most of the Eastern Conference, which is good for fans, but then get crushed by vastly superior teams with actual defense and goaltending — the Devils, the Bruins, the Blackhawks, the Penguins, etc. — which is bad for fans.

They have many players on the roster who would do anything to win, which is good for fans, but a number of them are also extremely dirty and play only in an effort to hurt people, then get suspended — Zac Rinaldo, Harry Zolniercyzk, Tom Sestito, etc. — which is bad for fans.

They have an owner who wants to win at all costs, which is good for fans, but in doing so he routinely meddles in the affairs of the men he pays a lot of money to operate the team, and in doing so generally just messes everything up — acquiring Ilya Bryzgalov, making a run at Shea Weber, etc. — which is bad for fans.

They also never give up on their goals of being the best in the league, which is good for fans, but end up falling short in the most hilarious ways possible — the Patrick Kane overtime game-winner, the defense completely melting down last season, getting swept by the Bruins, etc. — which is bad for fans.

It’s not easy, is what I’m saying. But despite all that, no one else in the NHL cares enough about their dumb teams to slash the tires of any car in the parking lot with Quebec plates or beat a Rangers fan half to death. Except Flyers fans. They are truly the greatest.

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

(Ed. note: This is a sponsored post for Julie Veilleux. 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!

A quick look at Carey Price’s stats this year and you’re probably like, “Ah, he’s not doing that great.” Wrong, idiot.

His 16 wins this season lead the league, which is all well and good but tells you nothing. His save percentage is just 23rd in the NHL at .912, and he’s tied with noted bum-who-backed-into-being-on-the-best-team-in-the-league Marc-Andre Fleury. His GAA is a fairly pedestrian 2.34, good for 14th (though it would also be the lowest of his career if it held up, due to Montreal having been bad so often in recent years). This is, you see, a fairly mediocre season for Price.

But here’s the thing, right? Remember that time the journalist brought up that his wife didn’t understand why the Habs kept giving Carey Price starts, and Bob Gainey suggested — like a complete jerk — that his wife didn’t understand a damn thing about hockey and maybe should get back in the kitchen, because Price is a thoroughbred. Gainey may not be out in front of feminist causes, or even those related to hockey since he was forced to step down about a year later, but he was absolutely right about Price. That kid is definitely a thoroughbred.

Yawn dismissively at the middle-of-the-pack stats all you want, but when it comes to even-strength save percentage — widely considered to be the best way to assess a goaltender’s talent as an individual player — is really good. Among goalies that have played more than 20 games, Price’s stat in this category is .929, tied for fifth in the league with potential Vezina winner Tuukka Rask, and surprisingly-good Braden Holtby. His stats would be doing one hell of a lot better if the Habs’ penalty kill wasn’t running at 17th in the NHL; his save percentage when the other team is on the power play, over which he has relatively little control, stands at .821, thanks to 19 goals conceded on just 106 shots. That’s 63rd among all goalies, and only Ondrej Pavelec is worse among those with 20-plus appearances. You don’t want to be the guy just above Pavelec in any category.

If the Habs’ PK (not Subban) was any good at all, people would be crying over how good Price has been this season. Certainly he’s one of the biggest reasons the team is a point out of first in the Eastern Conference with a game in hand. There’s all that garbage about how your goaltender has to be your best penalty killer, but that’s not really true, and Price is showing why. He’s nearly superhuman this year, and would be considered as such if a few more things broke his way.

There’s a reason price has played the second-most games of anyone in the last three seasons (behind only Pekka Rinne, who also had the benefit of playing behind two of the best defensemen in hockey that whole time; Price played behind Hal Gill for a lot of it). It’s because Carey Price is awesome. Think about it.

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

(Ed. note: This is a sponsored post for Jo Innes. 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!

If there’s one thing the Senators need in their attempts to make the Stanley Cup Playoffs for the second year in a row, it’s… well obviously it’s for Erik Karlsson’s achilles to reassemble itself 100 percent and be ready to play tomorrow.

But if there’s two things the Senators need it’s… okay well I mean there’s Jason Spezza getting healthy too, but that’s going to come relatively soon, I’m pretty sure. But if there’s three things the Senators need, well, I could do this all day. The fact of the matter is that one thing the Senators definitely did not need is to acquire Matt Kassian from the Minnesota Wild for a 2014 sixth-round pick yesterday.

Here’s a real quote from general manager Bryan Murray on why the Senators went out and acquired a player who has nine games under his belt this season, all of them at the AHL level:

“He’s a big strong guy, he’s a very physical player, he’s a very willing combatant. With the number of young players and injuries we have on our roster, there has got to be a sense of comfort that they can go out and play without being pushed around, which has happened a couple times here so we just felt it was a need and an addition that, given the opportunity to get one, a guy like this, a big guy, he’s a young player and we’re hoping that he’ll work with our coaches and be a real contributor to our team.”

That’s an awful lot of words to say, “The other teams in the Northeast have some fighters and we don’t,” but that’s the general thrust of it. At 6-foot-4 and 232 pounds, Kassian is a big boy. He also sucks at hockey. And so the Senators’ decision to use him in the lineup (albeit “at the coach’s discretion,” according to Murray) seems like it would be not at all conducive to winning.

It’s true that the Senators didn’t have a true fighter in the lineup. Hit-and-run pukes like Chris Neil don’t count, because he at least has some amount of value to the team outside punching guys in the face. This reeks of remorse for letting Zenon Konopka walk, coincidentally to the Wild, and even then, at least Konopka wins draws pretty effectively. The list of hockey things outside of fighting that Kassian does pretty effectively begins and probably ends with skating without falling down most of the time.

It seemed to me that the Senators were a just-okay hockey team last year, but one that wisely stepped out of the Northeast Arms Race that saw Montreal and Buffalo bulk up in order to better physically compete with the Bruins and Leafs. Somehow, their currently being fifth in the East despite being not-that-great and then suffering all those catastrophic injuries on top of it isn’t enough for Murray, and he has to try to make Paul MacLean waste a roster spot to put this bum into the lineup five minutes a night.

I’ll remind you again that Kassian only has nine games this season in the AHL. Obviously losing a sixth-round pick next year is almost the NHL equivalent of giving up nothing, but even that’s too much. The only thing I can think is maybe Murray thought he was getting a steal by acquiring Zack Kassian from the wrong team.

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

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!

It’s easy to get caught up in the ongoing storylines of this abbreviated NHL season. The Blackhawks are unstoppable. The Rangers are garbage without Rick Nash (but really great with him). The entire Northwest is pretty bad. The Flyers keep losing and have negative-a-million games in hand on everyone. The Habs are a big surprise atop the East. The Ducks are the second-best team in hockey somehow.

But one thing that seems to have escaped notice, and perhaps understandably, is that the Florida Panthers are terrible. Like, extraordinarily so. Worse than Columbus. The Columbus Blue Jackets are worse than them at hockey despite the fact that the Panthers play in the worst division in hockey (teams in the Southeast average 22.2 points, and Carolina has the lowest point total among division leaders with just 27).

To make matters worse, you could probably put up a pretty decent argument that the Panthers are lucky — just as they were last year when they inexplicably made the playoffs thanks to all those dumb shootout wins — to be in the position they are. That’s because their goal differential this season is minus-30. In 24 games. By comparison, the next-worst negative goal differential belongs to both Columbus and Buffalo at minus-15. But perhaps the best way to illustrate how bad it is to be minus-30 in 24 games is to say that the Blackhawks are plus-32 in the same number; the Panthers are almost as bad this season as Chicago is good.

Now, to get under the hood a little bit, there are a lot of pretty decent reasons why the Panthers are so bad after making the playoffs, and a lot of it has to do with the fact that they shouldn’t have made them last year. This was a poorly constructed, incredibly lucky team whose current leading scorer is Tomas Fleischmann, with 17 points. Fleischmann is a fine enough hockey player overall, but if he’s your team’s best point producer, your team has problems. The thing is, though, he’s not their best player, because that honor goes to rookie Jonathan Huberdeau, who has 11 goals and is the only Panther with a double-digit total in that regard, and only Tomas Kopecky, at nine, is even close.

Then there’s the goaltending situation. Suffice it to say that entering any two consecutive seasons with a two-man rotation of Jose Theodore and Scott Clemmensen will guarantee you one ghastly campaign at the least, and that’s certainly borne out by the results this year. Theodore leads the team with four wins in 14 games, thanks to his .893 save percentage and 3.29 GAA. Clemmensen’s stats are nearly a full goal and .041 worse, which is saying something. And just so you don’t think it’s entirely a function of those guys just being crap goalies (they are) Jacob Markstrom’s .913 save percentage in four games with Theodore on the shelf isn’t great, but it’s still only enough to keep his GAA barely lower than 3.

This is, and always was, a pieced-together team of mediocre veterans and too-young kids that was always going to be pretty bad team, made worse by Stephen Weiss nursing a wrist injury all year that recently ended his season (and by the way he’s going straight to the UFA market in July). It’s unlikely that anyone gets fired over how terribly things are going because last season was an aberration, and moreover no amount of silly free agent spending was going to patch over the fact that the team was clearly undergoing rebuilding work when Dale Tallon was brought aboard. If anything, last year hurt them in their efforts to achieve those ends.

This is more in line with what fans who actually want to see the team succeed long-term should be cheering for. Even if watching them is painful and sad.

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

(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.

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

(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.

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

(Ed. note: This is a sponsored post for @thebuck9. 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!

As you all likely well know about me, I am very open to the opinions of others, even if they challenge my own, and so when the guy whose Twitter name is listed above said I should write this sponsored post about how the Leafs wouldn’t be in a playoff hunt if not for the work of Colton Orr, that gave me a lot of pause.

After all, if Randy Carlyle is playing the guy as many minutes as he has been in recent weeks, and the Leafs keep winning (if you ignore last night, which was clearly an outlier in expected results) doesn’t that tell you everything you need to know about the value guys like Orr provide? Carlyle, and every other NHL coach who routinely puts fighters in the lineup, have been around the game a lot longer than me and likely know a thing or three about what motivates professional hockey players, and makes teams win. Randy Carlyle has 555 NHL wins and one Stanley Cup more than I do, so it’s tough for me to sit in judgment.

Let’s think about it another way, on a more macro level: Remember that game a few Saturdays back when Toronto went into the Bell Centre and stomped Montreal’s guts and teeth into a fine, unrecognizable paste? Sure you do. Do you also remember how did they do it? With tough guys in the lineup, that’s how.

Here’s the box score. What do you see? Three fighting majors handed out, all of which the Leafs decidedly won thanks to the top-quality pugilistic efforts of Mark Fraser, Mike Kostka and Frasier McLaren. Colton Orr also played nearly five minutes that night, likely because the Habs were already so intimidated (as evidenced by Brendan Gallagher’s diving penalty early in the second period) that they didn’t need to put the big guns out there. Someone would have gotten killed.

Or how about the example of a young man on the Phoenix Coyotes run by the name of Paul Bissonnette, otherwise known as BizNasty? His team is technically ninth in the Western Conference, but tied with eighth-place San Jose at 21 points. But they just beat the Vancouver Canucks, and Bissonnette is a big reason why. He has three points in his last three games, tripling his total in 31 last season and 48 the year before.

In furtherance of this theory, I also took a look at HockeyFights.com to see the team leader board. The Leafs, a playoff team, have more fights than anyone else in the NHL. The Philadelphia Flyers, also a playoff team, are tied for second with 18. The Vancouver Canucks, also a playoff team, are fourth with 16. The Dallas Stars and Montreal Canadiens, playoff teams both, are tied for fifth with 12. The Los Angeles Kings, also a playoff team, are tied for eighth with 11.

So that’s six of the league’s top 10 fighting teams in the playoffs. And here’s another fun fact for all you punk pacifists out there: When the Bruins won the Stanley Cup two seasons ago, they were also second in the league in fights. That tells you everything you need to know, and stands as evidence enough that there’s a strong correlation between playing so-called “thugs” and winning hockey games with regularity.

Figure it out, and give Colton Orr 20 minutes a night.

(*This post tagged under “Arguments an idiot would make.”)

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

(Ed. note: This is a sponsored post for Noha Beshir. 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!

It seems like about a million years ago that the Canadiens let their best defenseman sit out for a few weeks but man was that ever a dumb decision, huh?

Boy, PK Subban is a good defenseman, and with him the Habs have pretty well taken off under new coach Michel Therrien, where before he rejoined the team they were merely “surprisingly good.” Don’t everybody all look at once, but the Canadiens are improbably atop the Northeast Division, ahead of even their biggest rivals in Boston, and tied for first in the conference, which doesn’t seem like it should be possible.

And obviously it’s not just PK Subban who’s driving the Habs to these wins, but he’s second among defensemen on the team in relative corsi, though he has been used in a somewhat limited role, getting just under 20 minutes a night. But hey, it’s also difficult to argue with results. The Habs won seven of their first 11 games with Subban in the lineup this season, and that’s kind of a decent amount. Two of their losses also came in a shootout, although it was to Buffalo and most recently the Islanders, so that’s a little embarrassing.

(An unsponsored aside: All this, by the way, goes without mentioning that Max Pacioretty has been mindbendingly amazing this season, and that’s apart from his superhuman ability to suffer horrific injuries. He has 13 points in as many games, but do you want to see some bonkers stuff? Behindthenet.ca has his relative corsi at 39.5, which is crazily high. He also has a PDO of less than 1000, and is one of the few Habs who do, indicating that where most of his teammates have been getting a lot of bounces, he hasn’t been. So the fact that he’s unlucky and playing this well is kind of a little bit impressive I guess. When his PDO corrects a little bit he can probably expect to get even more points going forward, which doesn’t seem fair, but here we are.)

Certainly, no one expected them to be anywhere near this position, and even as they try to suck all the fun out of Subban’s game by banning all that “brash” stuff (CODEWORDS!!!) he used to do, he doesn’t seem to be be suffering any ill effects. If anything, maybe you’d like to see him pick up the scoring a bit, because he only has seven points, and the one he got last night was his first in four games. But still, he’s helping to make this excellent season from Carey Price possible, and that’s something.

The question becomes one of whether the Habs can keep this going, and while the answer seems to be something like, “Probably not at this level,” they haven’t been so lucky percentages-wise that they’re going to drop off the face of the earth at some point like the Wild did last season. They’re closing in on being halfway to the 50ish points that will probably be required to get into the playoffs, which most of us probably expected would be a threshold they’d cross around late March, not mid-February.

I don’t really get it, and I’m sure Habs fans don’t care, so I’m just going to say this is all because of Subban coming back. Screw it.

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