The Two-Line Pass

The Lead

Well now that the Red Wings went into Glendale and kicked the living christ out of the Phoenix Coyotes, the time has come for me to apologize.

You see, as it turns out the team loaded with cagey veteran, hardened by years of deep and trying forays into postseason after immensely successful postseason were just too much for a team with a youthful spark and strong goaltender. Detroit had seen any possible combination of youth and speed and skill and veterans and defense and goaltending and coaching you care to throw at them, and as such it takes a lot to get by them.

Tonight, and ultimately in the series, the Coyotes just didn’t have enough.

And so, after being chirped on Twitter and email and on the Puck Daddy Game 7 chat by numerous Detroit fans, I guess I owe a lot of people an apology.

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The Lead

How awesome was that, right? Freakin’ Coyotes come back from to beat Detroit in the first home game in Phoenix, err, Glendale since I want to say 1642. Unreal. Keith Yandle was better than Nicklas Lidstrom. Wojtek Wolski was better than Henrik Zetterberg. Derek Morris was better than Brian Rafalski. And Ilya Bryzgalov was far better than Jimmy Howard.

Why, it’s almost like Phoenix was the fourth-best team in the league over 82 games this season!

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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

I remember that, like, split second when everyone was like, “Man the Coyotes could end up being good this year.”

Those halcyon days are long gone. Today they sent Kyle Turris to the minors and then blew a two-goal, third-period lead and lost 4-3. To Vancouver.

Ah, a team that once had such great promise. Your Turrises, your Michaleks, your Muellers, your Tikhonovs. Good young core. It’s amounted to crap. The Coyotes are now sitting in 13th in the West after sitting in the middle of the playoff picture for a nice little while there. They’re 2-8-0 in their last 10.

Interestingly they’ve won three games in a row once this season, and apart from a six-game losing streak in November hadn’t lost more than two in a row all year until this most recent skid. I don’t know what gets into this team. They were reportedly awesome last night against Dallas.

Know who’s still great, though? Enver Lisin, baby. After he scored the game’s only goal last night, he netted a real pretty one by creating a neutral-zone turnover and walking the puck through a pair of defenders and beating Luongo clean with a nasty wrister. He also finished a plus-2 to lead all players. Kid can play.

But man, who would want to buy a team that plays like this? Note to Coyotes players: This is not how to keep yourself in a very nice part of the country with attractive women and nice, warm weather. Keep playing like this and your asses are getting shipped to Winnipeg or Hamilton or Nunavut so fast it’ll make Shane Doan get a nosebleed like that redhaired Australian girl from “Lost.”

(P.S. I chose the above picture because it looks like Willie Mitchell might be attempting to take a dump in his hockey pants.)

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We’re now something like 28 days out from the start of the NHL season so I figure this is as good a time as any to start doing the season previews. This is mainly for two reasons: 1) I am lazy and there’s no way I’ll do one of these every day, and 2) This is early enough that if I just stop doing them entirely you’ll have forgotten by October anyway. Oh and I guess also to show off my near-infinite knowledge of the National Hockey League. I’ll be previewing the teams in reverse order of finish in the 2007-08 season. Please note, though, that this is the opinion of one man, however smart and handsome he may be.

Phoenix Coyotes, you’re on the clock.

We saw a little bit of this team’s capabilities last year. Very little. But there’s reason for optimism in the desert.

Yeah, the Coyotes were pretty bad last year. Granted they finished above .500 (by a game) and ended with 83 points in a very strong Pacific Conference that sent three teams to the playoffs and saw two teams get out of the first round (the one that didn’t, Anaheim, lost to Dallas). However, I liked the Coyotes’ style of play last year and could stomach their announcers, so I watched a fair number of their games, and I can tell you what their problem was.

More after the jump.

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Since July 30, things have been different around the Phoenix Coyotes’ front office.

No, they haven’t magically turned into a good hockey team, but what they have done is become a more eco-friendly franchise, taking a cue from both the Players’ Association and the League.

As a way to reduce waste from concession stands, the arena will use biodegradable cups made from corn, which decompose in a few months.

“You’d swear it was a regular plastic cup if you saw it,” said Doug Moss, Coyotes president and chief operating officer. “These are really incredible things.”

Plates and bowls will be made of molded fiber from 100 percent recycled materials, and the utensils will be made of vegetable starch.

ARAMARK, a food-services facilities-management company, is working with the Coyotes to provide the new utensils, plates and cups by October, when the hockey season starts.

Crum said the company is aware of the amount of water and power the arena uses. It is looking into installing timed faucets and using compact fluorescent light bulbs to save water and energy.

That’s pretty rad.

The Flames have been carbon neutral for a few years, and the Bruins are headed that way as well, thanks in no small part to the work of all-around good guy Andrew Ference.

Last year, Ference started the entire Player’s Association on its effort to be carbon neutral. Over 700 of the league’s 900-plus players had agreed to neutralize their 10-ton (yikes!) carbon footprint through last winter before all the teams had even been met with. The NHLPA’s offices in Toronto are entirely carbon neutral, as is the NHL office in New York.

Hockey, for obvious reasons, is probably the most eco-unfriendly sport just because of the amount of energy it takes to run an arena and the rink’s cooling system and everything else.

So kudos to the Coyotes for going green, but I doubt high energy bills are the reason the team is hemorrhaging money.

Dan Carcillo is a monster

Reason No. 163 why Dan Carcillo rules: he sat down with NBC Sports and gave tips to help players be a good NHL middleweight pugilist.

Carcillo had 324 penalty minutes last year (three hundred twenty-four!) in just 56 games despite rarely being the biggest or strongest guy on the ice. Being a total lunatic obviously helps him a lot.

1. You have to want to do it
Unless you’re 6-8, 250 pounds, you should never let a coach force you to fight. I’m a pretty mellow guy off the ice; a lot of people who get to know me say I’m totally different than the guy they see at the arena. But I’ll tell you something my coach, Wayne Gretzky, and my teammates already know: I like to fight.

He sure does. He got into 19 scraps last year, seventh most in the league, against some pretty tough dudes (Jared Boll, Darcy Tucker, Darcy Hordichuk, Dave Clarkson, Raitis Ivanans, etc.) and he even got that sissy Corey Perry to go. And not only does he like to fight, he’s good at it. According to HockeyFights.com, he went 10-5-4 last year.

2. Sometimes, though, discretion really is the better part of valor
I fought Raitis Ivanans in L.A. even though I really didn’t want to. I’d scored a nice goal and was kind of revved up and skating around being an idiot. … We traded punches, he hit me on the forehead and I went down. It was quick, but it was one of the worst beatings I’ve taken in hockey.

Yeah, Carcillo got rocked, but he did open Ivanans up.

3. Even a bleeder has to have thick skin
I know hockey fights supposedly are about showing up — not who wins and who loses — but when you get beat up, it’s pretty tough to swallow.

Watch that Ivanans fight again and try not to feel embarrassed for Danny.

4. Make the guys who really deserve it pay when you have the chance
I had a lot of fun beating up Vancouver’s Alex Burrows this season in Phoenix. He’s just a little rat; he goes around starting trouble but doesn’t back up what he does on the ice with his fists too often. … It was kind of like a caveman beating; he was on his knees and I was whaling away.

Carcillo’s right about two things here: Burrows is a punk and he got his lunch handed to him.

5. Just throw ‘em
Everybody fights differently — and most of it is instinct anyway — but the best middleweights try to grab the center of the other guy’s jersey and just throw and throw.

Watching any Dan Carcillo fight, you can see this is his strategy. He just gets a handful of shirt and rains bombs.

6. But work the body, too
I mean your own body. Summers are tough; everyone assumes we just play golf, but that’s nuts. I took three weeks off after the season ended and then I was back in the gym training, with special focus on my legs and my core.

Apparently the punching alone keeps his arms in shape.

The rest aren’t great, except for the last one, which is an important thing to remember for fighters at all levels.

10. For fighters of all sizes …
Learn where competitiveness ends and chaos begins. I didn’t set out to have 324 penalty minutes. There were too many major penalties and game misconducts in there. I crossed that fine line too often, and I guess I’m still learning where it is. In Nashville, I lost the fight to Hordichuk — my first loss all year — and I got really pissed off and pretty much just lost it. I pushed a linesman, got a 10-minute misconduct and a game misconduct. Wayne got ticked off at me and sent me down to the minors for a week. You talk about a wakeup call. Why would anyone want to mess with his own career like that?

Personally, I watch enough Coyotes games to see that Carcillo has all the raw talent in the world to pop in 30 and still get 250+ penalty minutes. He’s the kind of guy that can turn heads with his hands, be they soft or clenched into fists.