The Two-Line Pass

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Yesterday I wrote about teams deluding themselves into being buyers because they’re so close to a playoff spot, and probably paying too-high prices for too-bad players, and sure enough, not a minute before I opened the window to write this post, Darren Dreger tweeted maybe the dumbest thing I’ve read in two weeks:

“CBJ will be a buyer. Columbus would be willing to part with 1 of their 3 first rnd draft picks for a scoring forward.”

A lot of questions come to mind in reading this. Like, “What?” and “Huh?” and “Why would they do that?” and “Seriously?” and “This is an April Fool’s joke, right?” and “No seriously Dreger, is it?” and “What do you mean it’s not?” and “Can you believe how stupid the Blue Jackets are?” and “Wait Scott Howson isn’t their GM any more?”

Tough to answer any of those questions, except maybe the last one. This seems an incredibly foolish tack to take, but on some level it’s an understandable one. This is a new management group, with John Davidson having been brought in over the summer and Jarmo Kekalainen just a few months into the job, and maybe they want to make a bit of splash by acquiring whatever will pass for a “big name” at this deadline — 682-year-old Jaromir Jagr? — and show fans they’re serious about competing for the playoffs. Columbus is already holding onto eighth in the West, but is just a point up on St. Louis, and the Blues have three games in hand.

Therefore, going out and getting someone certainly bolsters their chances for making the postseason, but here’s another question you should feel free to ask JD or Jarmo if you happen to bump into them: “To what end?” The Blue Jackets are third-to-last in goals scored league-wide, which is why they want forward help, but any team gripping as tightly as they are to that spot with their minus-10 goal differential isn’t going to find anyone anywhere worth enough to make them competitive. Remember that Chicago’s goal differential is currently plus-52 better than theirs, and then tell me why this willingness to deal is even remotely existent.

There’s a middle ground between trading a first-round pick for a rental, and selling. That’s standing pat, which most teams would probably be wise to do over the next two days or so. The focus for Columbus should be trying to get the best return possible for their efforts to sell off their good players (Rick Nash, Jeff Cater, etc.) by getting as many high first-round picks as they can, and while the Rangers are doing their best to accommodate those needs by being tied with the Islanders, Los Angeles and the Blue Jackets themselves are doing Kekalainen no favors. Trading one of those — you’d think it’d be the Kings’, but then you also don’t know just how intent they are on securing said scoring forward — seems remarkably ill-advised.

Yeah, the Blue Jackets have made the playoffs once since they existed, and they got swept out of the first round. So here’s one last question: “Don’t you think that a team with 37 points in 36 games probably suffers a similar fate against Chicago, even with this new and exciting forward?” The answer is yes.

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The Maple Leafs are, as I’ve said before, not a particularly great hockey team, nor are they a particularly well-managed or well-coached hockey team. But I did think they were good enough to get into the playoffs if their goaltending held up.

It largely has. And as a result, the Leafs are currently sitting sixth in the East, seven points up on the Islanders, who are just below the postseason cutoff, and they’re looking pretty comfortable, even if they have won just three of their last 10 games (yuck). How comfortable? James Mirtle tweeted this morning that by his count, because the Leafs currently have 40 points and the rest of the East sucks, that the Leafs can go just 5-7-2 in their remaining 14 games and be more or less assured a playoff spot.

Which is crazy. They’ve almost done everything in their power to not make the playoffs, including playing their worst players more minutes than one of the best point-producing and possession-driving centers in the league this season, leaving a high-quality offensive defenseman in the AHL in favor of Korbinian Holzer, and been absolute crap in the shootout. But it’s all been to no avail.

The Leafs are probably going to make the playoffs. They’d need to collapse way more significantly than they did last season, and in 14 games that doesn’t seem all that likely, especially given how soft their schedule is. In all, 10 of their remaining games are against teams below them in the standings, including the Hurricanes (bad), Flyers (worse), Devils twice (okayish I guess), Rangers twice (still underperforming), Islanders twice (dreadful), Capitals (woof), Lightning (crap), and Panthers (the worst).

I can’t be too sure whether lot of people will try to paint this as somehow being a result of their canning Brian Burke being the reason that the Leafs are actually good enough to make the playoffs finally, but I’m going to err on the side of caution and say they obviously will. Only a person like Burke saying that he set the table for the Leafs’ moderate success this likely playoff season — not coincidentally the only one in which James Reimer has been remotely healthy in the last three — would be viewed as being some sort of derogatory misrepresentation of fact. But what has Dave Nonis done this season? Anything of note besides strand Jake Gardiner in the minors for too long? The answer is nothing. That’s it.

So it seems like at long last Toronto is going to have its playoff team. Which is probably something it should or even would have done last season. But moreover it looks like people in the media up there might have to actually say moderately nice things about the things Brian Burke has done in constructing this team and maybe even setting it up for the future. Either that or it’ll take some serious logical acrobatics to avoid doing so. That’s the really mind-blowing thing about all this.

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(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.

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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.

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Hey guys let’s say you’re an NHL player. You’re wearing lots and lots of armor these days, aren’t you? Well, it didn’t always used to be that way.

People talk about Gump Worsley with a lot of fondness. Gump Worsley was a moron. He was the last goaltender in the National Hockey League to play without a facemask. Meaning that while he and his counterparts were regularly catching sticks and pucks in the face, and all the rest of them said, “Enough of that,” Worsley hung on and continued to play without a mask, and it was only after he was hit in the face with a puck and knocked unconscious by it that he said, “Hey a thing on my head that would make it so I didn’t get KOed in the middle of a game is not such a bad idea after all.”

Here’s a real quote from Worsley, who I swear to god was the stupidest person alive: “My face is my mask. If goaltenders were afraid of being hurt, they wouldn’t be out there at all.” And on soldiers who wear helmets , Worsley probably would have said they were big stupid babies and why were they fighting the god damn Jerrys in the first place if they didn’t wanna get shot at.

But at least Worsley ultimately relented. You can’t say the same for Craig MacTavish, who played his entire NHL career without a helmet. Craig MacTavish, too, was an absolute dumbass. Even after the league said, “Jeez I think maybe all these guys should be wearing helmets so their brains don’t spill out all over the ice the second someone accidentally knocks them onto the ice. It seems like ice and all these boards and this plexiglass are all really hard,” he kept right on not-wearing it.

Why did MacTavish play 16 seasons in the NHL, where there are sticks and skates and pucks and guys trying to knock you down at really high speeds, without a helmet? Because screw it, that’s why. ”It was just a comfort thing for me,” he said. I’m not a doctor, I admit, but it seems to me that wearing a helmet and being slightly uncomfortable is probably preferable to getting your skull cracked open and being extraordinarily uncomfortable and also dying, but again I have no medical training.

That MacTavish and Worsley escaped with their health — Worsley didn’t die until 2007 presumably from natural causes like being hit in the face with a frozen rubber disc, and MacTavish still has enough of his mental faculties left to work for the Edmonton Oilers (though quantifying those faculties, given the circumstances, may prove a bit tricky) — but people still talk about them with their chin rested on upturned hands. It’s romantic, isn’t it, that these dinosaurs were allowed to walk the earth along with real people who figured out that playing without a helmet or a goalie mask was remarkably stupid and they shouldn’t have been doing it all that time. Ahhh, those were the days, when catastrophic head injuries were, y’know, just one of those things. The occasional on-ice death. Who cares?

Now the latest front in this war against players being willfully stupid and putting themselves in incredibly dangerous positions has been visited upon the New York Rangers’ Marc Staal (and by the way, both Worsley and MacTavish were also Rangers so maybe that’s A Thing). He got hit in the eye with a puck just last night when a shot deflected off another player and rose up into his face. Wow that’s crazy and scary and sad and probably really dangerous.

And would it surprise you to learn that the reason he got hit in the eye with that puck is that a thin piece of plastic which adorns the helmets of a healthy percentage of the NHL’s players these days was somehow notably absent from Staal’s own headgear? It wouldn’t at all, you say? Hmm that’s interesting because it seems to me like if you had the choice between putting a little clear thing on your helmet so very few things could hit you in the eye, and not doing that, you’d choose the former option. Maybe I’m just being naïve. When asked about that kind of thing, lots of players who don’t wear visors say stuff pretty similar to what MacTavish said about helmets. This after AHL players in 1999 and 2006 both lost their eyes to on-ice accidents which could have easily been avoided had they just been wearing the right, and readily-available equipment. Or how about when pretty much the same thing happened with Bryan Berard and Steve Yzerman?

I know, it’s a real bold stance to go out and say, “Gosh I think these players should be wearing visors.” Daring stuff by me. And there are fears that if the NHL starts mandating them that this somehow constitutes paternalism, and boy you’re not even tough if you wear a visor and isn’t this a man’s sport? I don’t know, though. As cool as it would be to see NHLers skating around wearing eye patches I feel like blindside hits would go through the roof, and damn if the NHL Department of Player Safety isn’t trying to legislate those out of the game.

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I remember two summers ago when the Washington Capitals signed Tomas Vokoun. In my view, he had been one of the premier goaltenders in the National Hockey League for several years by that point, having posted a save percentage of less than .910 just once in the previous eight seasons.

That’s a lot of really good work, and a lot of it had been done in anonymity because his two teams during that time were the Nashville Predators and the Florida Panthers, not exactly the most-watched or best teams in the league by any stretch of the most fanciful imaginations.

So when the Caps signed him, ostensibly to replace Semyon Varmlamov (who had previously been traded to Colorado under hilarious circumstances) and serve as a bridge and mentor to either Michal Neuvirth or Braden Holtby, I figured that you could put a fork in the Eastern Conference. It was all over. The Caps, behind Alex Ovechkin and Alex Semin and Nick Backstrom, and in front of Vokoun, whose save percentage in the previous three seasons never dipped below .922, were going to win it in a runaway.

Obviously, that didn’t happen. In fact, Vokoun lost his job late in the season and only ended up playing 48 games, his lowest single-season total since 2006-07. His save percentage slipped to just .917 because of good-but-not-great even strength work (.927, tied for 13th among goalies with 40 appearances or more), and for some strange reason he was catching a lot of blame, didn’t see a second in the playoffs, and decided to ship up to Pittsburgh this summer.

And where he was less than his usual self but still above average last season, this year he is white-hot garbage. He’s gotten into seven games, including last night’s debacle against the hated Flyers, and has a save percentage of just .899. At even strength, it’s just .918, having conceded 12 on 147 shots.

So what happened to this guy? Is he just old? Like, old as hell? All of a sudden? He’s 36 now, sure, and that’s not exactly conducive to running into the best years of your career unless you’re Tim Thomas or Dwayne Roloson or whatever. But to drop off a cliff that suddenly is a little surprising. You can pin it on a small sample size, one supposes, but the teams Vokoun has played aren’t exactly all world-beaters.

Apart from a bizarre and out-of-character shutout against the Rangers on Jan. 31, Vokoun has allowed three goals or more in every start this season, including six on 32 last night against the Flyers. And worse, he’s just looked bad on most of them. He was a good three feet out of the crease (and replaced by five teammates) on that fire-drill first goal. Wayne Simmonds torched him at the side of the net on the second and went around him like he wasn’t even there. Gave up a massive rebound on Jake Voracek’s third goal. As with the first goal, he was way out of position for the fourth, also by Voracek. And on the sixth and deciding goal, he let a Voracek shot from behind the goal line beat him.

Ugly stuff, and perhaps the consequence of One Bad Night. But man, it seems like he’s having more and more of those these days, and that goalie who used to be really good but fly under the radar now has everyone’s full attention because he’s embarrassing himself on national television.

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You knew it would come to this eventually. Owners, let’s say the ones in small markets where they have a tenuous grasp on a small and already-kind-of-disinterested fanbase, are starting to get a little edgy about the whole work stoppage thing lasting too much longer than it already has.

From Bruce Garrioch (I know, I know):

“My guess is you’ve got about 10 teams that are pretty nervous right now,” said a league insider. “But (Bettman) has the power of the executive committee behind him.”

That’s where the conversation begins and ends. The league has 30 owners, and one-third of them are “pretty nervous” about the lockout.

Again, it’s very easy to guess that those owners aren’t exactly the league’s money-making engines and therefore their opinion matters almost exactly squat. Now, Garrioch characterizes some owners whose teams very likely do manage to turn a profit as being among those who want this lockout ended, and I thought that was interesting. Geoffrey Molson, for instance, is termed a “dove,” and that’s kind of understandable. A Habs game is a license to print money. The same is true of Terry Pegula, who has all the money he could ever need (he’s the fourth-richest NHL owner, and soon to be the third since the Kings’ Phil Anschutz, who’s No. 1, is selling), and very legitimately seems to just love hockey.

But Garrioch also says that other owners who might be getting edgy are the Rangers’ James Dolan, who runs Madison Square Garden, and the Flyers’ Ed Snider, who runs Comcast. Now maybe his league insider told him that specifically, and Dolan has stated in the past that he doesn’t want a lockout but he’s also not exactly sweating the Rangers’ revenue given the number of other events he could host at MSG if he so desired. But really, we’re supposed to believe Ed Snider is so consumed of his desire to win a Stanley Cup that he’s willing to give the players what they want?

These guys have often been counted among the true hawks on the Board of Governors, alongside bloodthirsty warmongers like Boston’s Jeremy Jacobs, Calgary’s Murray Edwards and Washington’s Ted Leonsis, who would stop at nothing to fracture the union, put it back together, then shatter it again. I sincerely doubt that a missed preseason and two weeks of canceled dates — not even canceled games! — would be enough to move the needle for two of the league’s best-known, revenue-generatingest owners. Maybe you don’t think they’d have the power to pull one of their counterparts aside and say, “Let’s cut the crap or we’re gonna rain hell on you.” They’re not Nashville and they’re not Florida. They have clout, and they wouldn’t remotely be afraid to use it.

It’s far more likely that the guys nervously adjusting their ties and tugging at the collars are the ones whose teams lose money anyway, but you could have guessed that at the start.

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The Lead

(I know, I know. Shut up.)

Derek Boogaard hadn’t scored a goal since January 7, 2006.

Four years, 10 months and three days later, he scored again, taking the puck coast to coast and rifling a slapshot past Michal Neuvirth to put the Rangers up 3-2 on the Capitals midway through the second period.

Since then, a new president got elected and already got halfway through his first term. There have been three Olympic Games. Conan O’Brien hosted three different late night talk shows. Alex Tanguay and Olli Jokinen played for the Flames twice. The Tampa Bay Lightning went through three owners, four coaches and four GMs. Twitter started existing, then became stupid. Some idiot gave Derek Boogaard four years at $1.625 million per. And so forth.

In scoring, he snapped a 235-game streak without a goal. The longest active streak in the league. And it came unassisted. None of the above was in any way a typo.

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Don’t forget about the prizes!!!

The Lead

For those of you unlucky enough to have actually sat through James Cameron’s epic “Avatar,” who then found yourselves additionally luckless to have suffered through tonight’s Ranger game, which was broadcast in 3D, you probably noticed some parallels.

When Avatar begins, there is a single blue speck floating apparently nearer to you than the screen. You can almost touch it. As the hero, whose name I forget, pulls himself from some sort of cryogenic sleep pod and out into the cabin of the ship, the full scope of the movie’s groundbreaking film-making is made apparent. You’re overcome with a definite sense of wonder at what you’re experiencing.

Likewise the first period of the Rangers/Islanders game. The Rangers came out flying, particularly and not surprisingly driven by the Gaborik line, pouring 15 shots on net, getting a little physical and generally outplaying the Islanders. They paid for every mistake they made. For most of the 20 minutes, it looked as though the visitors were standing still while Gaborik picked up a pair of first-period points, and it was 3-0 by the first intermission.

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