The Two-Line Pass

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I didn’t get a chance to write about this yesterday (Iginla trade, laughing at Phoenix, etc.) but it seems that Matt Cooke accidentally ripping through Erik Karlsson’s achilles tendon also had the added effect of separating Sens owner Eugene Melnyk from all reason or cognitive functions.

Melnyk is now in the midst of paying actual forensic investigators to prove definitively that Cooke ended Karlsson’s season intentionally. Which he certainly did not. Actual forensic doctors have already weighed in and said things about how there’s probably no way to judge intent in an injury like this. But to be fair, there’s no way the guys or gals who took Melnyk’s money to conduct such a study were going to pass up the likely-minimal-work-for-big-payday job this eccentric whose pharmaceutical company was once investigated by the SEC was all too eager to hand out in his righteous quest for satisfaction from the villain Matt Cooke who hasn’t done anything particularly villainous in a few years now.

And the rant in which he revealed this investigative intent sounded like someone reading a manifesto aloud. How much force would it take to have a skate blade go through a sock, a “sub-sock” (whatever that is), then skin, then muscle, then sheath, THEN tendon? Well yes, Eugene, that’s how cuts work. You didn’t need to hire anyone from the cast of CSI: Miami to tell you that. And as to actually answering the question, I would guess that the answer is something along the lines of “about as much force as is generated by a 200-pound man with little knives attached to his feet stepping downwards as he would normally.” That’s probably about approximately roughly more or less exactly the right amount. Unless Karlsson has about four inches of sheath over his tendon, in which case let’s throw Matt Cooke in jail forever.

As if Jeremy Jacobs spending more than half a million dollars on municipal elections in some craphole richboy town in Florida didn’t provide us with enough evidence that North America’s super-rich have too much time and money on their hands, as well as an almost uncanny ability to hold petty grudges and behave like spoiled children. You know who else was sad to see Erik Karlsson go down for the season? Hockey fans. It’s fun and great to watch him play, and the NHL is poorer for having lost him for the year. But this? It’s beyond stupid. Obviously. Goes without saying. That Melnyk would even deign to waste anyone’s time with this, let alone league officials, while his team is pretty comfortably in a playoff spot, shows just how far up his own ass this guy has his head stuck.

Just imagine the outcry if Mario Lemieux had done something similar with Sidney Crosby’s first concussion, opening a Jim Garrison-style investigation into David Steckel and highlighting how Crosby’s head moved back and to the left on impact. That would have added a crazy amount of fuel to the fire about how much the Penguins whine to the league when something doesn’t go their way, and for once, that fuel would have been rooted in truth and not jealous perception.

None of that for Melnyk though. Mainly because he’s already widely regarded as a joke.

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Lost in all the Jarome Iginla-related madness of last night was a leak from league marionnette/insider Darren Dreger, who noted that the NHL will likely make a decision about the Coyotes’ future before the playoffs start.

This, to me, seemed like the slightly more surprising news of the night, though perhaps it’s important to note that it was also far less fraught with drama. Iginla was always going to get traded, though to have had so many balls in the air at once in the final hours was a little surprising. The Phoenix saga, though, looked like it could have gone on forever and ever in perpetuity for two reasons:

1) The NHL clearly wants this market to work so, so, so badly.

2) Glendale seems more than happy to shovel millions of dollars onto the fire to keep the team there for reasons no one seems all that clear on.

But now maybe, just maybe, Phoenix is out. Unless they can get a buyer to keep them there before the playoffs start toward the end of April. Which they so obviously will not that even keeping up the pretense seems laughable.

S o where could this team up and move to as soon as this summer? Kansas City, Quebec City, and Seattle (no City). Those all make some amount of sense, probably not in that order though. Kansas City seems the biggest longshot, Quebec the most probable, and Seattle the sexiest for the league but not necessarily the best fit. The argument against Kansas City is that it’s an unproven market that has been trying for years to generate interest in a team to no avail. The argument against Seattle is they don’t have a rink yet. The argument against Quebec City is the NHL doesn’t want any more god damn teams in Canada and also it would make realignment even worse than it already is.

Then again, there’s rumors — of which I buy none — that Ice Edge could be trying to wade back into the waters and make something work in Phoenix, which seems a fool’s errand at best and the potential to be a nuclear-level disaster at worst, and I’d be inclined to lean far more toward the latter.

This is all perfectly logical stuff. No one give’s a heckaroo about the Coyotes in Phoenix, and the good people of Quebec City would sure like to see NHL hockey; using the Winnipeg model of success, getting any team, even if it’s the Thrashers, into a smaller market with a diminutive rink is a license to print money. Which seems to me, from a business standpoint, to be preferable to throwing it down a hole and hoping all the stacks of bills one day end up being high enough that people are at least impressed by that.

But then I’m not Gary Bettman and I didn’t insist on keeping a team in Phoenix even as it drew like 6,000 people a night, or try to unload the team to a snake-oil salesman who wears bad suits and wouldn’t reveal any of his shadowy, possibly-nonexistent “investors.” So what do I know?

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If Shane Doan didn’t score 50 points a year, and if he wasn’t such a good quote, people would see him for what he is: A dirty player who has little respect for his opponents, who dives to draw calls, and who if he were a lesser talent would regularly be run down in much the way Patrick Kaleta is today.

The long history of Doan intentionally trying to hurt his opponents is fairly well-documented. Just last March he was suspended three games for elbowing Jamie Benn in the face only a week after being fined for boarding Mark Giordano, both of which were less than 18 months after he threw a dirty, late, lateral headshot on Dan Sexton. No one really cares about any of that, though, because none of those guys were in any way injured on the plays, though they easily could have been.

When you talk about guys who don’t have respect for their opponents, it’s easy to excoriate the ones who suck at hockey, or the ones who do it without “backing it up.” But because Doan is willing to fight, and because he’s a captain, and because he’s seen as a good guy for sticking with Phoenix when he could have cashed in elsewhere with considerably more franchise stability this summer, no one really cares about that. Certainly, a Ryan Miller-type on the Coyotes would never say he has to get his act together.

The latest incident for which Doan completely escaped any sort of blame despite being hilariously antithetical to the general decorum of the sport was last night, when he and Kings rookie Jake Muzzin accidentally collided knee-to-knee because both were watching the play, and not each other. Admittedly, this is a scary kind of play under the best circumstances because you never want to see someone get their ACL blown out, but Doan was crouched on the ice in the fetal position for a few seconds before getting up and charging at Muzzin. In attempting to get to Muzzin who may have stuck his leg out on purpose for all Doan knew since he, like the defenseman, wasn’t paying attention. Only a linesman’s preemptive intervention stopped Doan from taking a few pops in on Muzzin before the kid even dropped his gloves, and despite the fact that he threw off his gloves while wearing a visor (a no-no in the NHL rulebook, you’ll remember), he was inexplicably not even assessed a penalty.

Doan and his teammates also spent the remainder of the game trying to fight Muzzin every time the kid came over the boards. Which was odd because, unlike Doan himself, his teammates no doubt had an actual look at what happened on the play and could likely see that it was innocent, but you have to stand up for your captain and so forth.

This is blatant reputationism from the officials and the people covering the game, who, had it been, say Brad Marchand or Raffi Torres doing the same, all we’d be hearing about today was how this is the kind of stuff that needs to be run out of the game immediately, and is yet another sign that NHL players don’t take safety seriously.

But because it was Shane Doan, and he was in The Heat of the Moment, and also playing his ass off in that game (he finished with both of Phoenix’s goals. on 11 shots and 13 hits in just under 19 minutes!), it barely warranted a tongue-clucking. I suppose I should get used to that. He’s way too honest a player to ever get called out by anyone.

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(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.”)

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So there is a lockout and it sucks and everyone hates it.

The players all have to go play in Siberia and the fans don’t have good professional hockey to watch on national television and the owners lost $100 million by not having a preseason. Boo hoo. And so how do we remedy all these things? Or at least the ones that matter to the owners?

That’s right: Replacement players!

Or, to put it another way, “That’s right: Scabs!”

Yeah, apparently Bill Watters, who used to be somewhat noteworthy in hockey but now isn’t any more for reasons that will soon become obvious to even the uninitiated, floated the idea that the league might be preparing, at some indeterminate point in the future (either near or far), to begin hiring scab players to potentially draw fans fed up with this, the league’s second lockout in eight years.

This would, ostensibly, be done as a means of “breaking” the NHLPA’s resolve but would more likely accomplish pretty much nothing. Consider this: Which AHL players, apart from the old guys who have been around that league forever, would accept a job in the NHL as a scab, especially if they thought the PA might blacklist them for doing so, as the MLBPA did with guys like Kevin Millar back in 1995.

Again, the older AHL veterans have little to lose — they weren’t going to make it to the show anyway — and there would probably also be more than a few North American-born Euro-league veterans who might feel the same pull to return home, maybe make slightly more money than they are playing in Minsk or whatever, and so forth. When the real NHL players come back, they’re right back to Europe and generally unaffected by the whole thing.

But think about the quality of play here: older AHL veterans, European players, maybe a few guys who are technically NHLers but at the end of the road and looking for one last contract (Tomas Holmstrom, I’m looking at you), and that’s it. The owners would then expect fans, corporate sponsors and the like to come back and watch that in exchange for considerable amounts of money. Oh yes, I can just see folks clamoring to see Jason Krog come back to these shores and rain wholesale havoc down on the John Grahames of the world, or NHL.com repeatedly naming Brian Willsie as the First Star for December. The demand for that would be huge.

Say, what’s average attendance in the AHL? Call it like 6,000? That’s probably a bit lower than what whatever the Maple Leafs trot out would draw, or whatever, but how badly do you think empty seats outnumber fans to watch games between the Coyotes and Blue Jackets? Eight to one, or 10 to one?

For this to work, it would have to work league-wide, and Don Fehr isn’t a punk who’s just going to fold under this kind of pressure. Because he knows you’re not going to watch that replacement player garbage.

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

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There is, I suppose, something to be said for loyalty.

And also, I further suppose, something to be said for being willing to take a $21.2 million, four-year payday at the age of 36 when your production is at what is basically a career low. So yeah, Shane Doan is back in the desert, with a contract that will pay him $5.3 million against the cap until he’s 40.

Good deal for him, a very, very bad deal for the Coyotes, and one that doesn’t exactly flatter the league’s “We’re paying the players too much money,” stance.

Doan is, it should be said, is still a very effective hockey player and a much-respected leader, but any time you’re agreeing to pay someone that kind of money into their 40s, you are taking on egregious risk, especially because this is a 35-plus contract (though one supposes it’s fair to note that the Coyotes are never going to be in danger of bumping up against whatever salary cap ceiling is put in place in the next few months). Nonetheless, this deal makes sense when viewed through the lens of, “Shane played with this franchise for a long time so…,” and nothing else.

He had 22 goals and 50 points last season. He was eclipsed in both by Teddy Purcell, Jiri Hudler and Pascal Dupuis, none of whom are making Doan Money for the very simple reason that they are not worth Doan Money. Neither is Doan.

In the past four seasons, we’ve seen his point totals go from 73 (when he was 32) to 55 to 60 to 50. Is it that unfeasible that commensurate declines occur over the NEXT four seasons? It’s difficult to imagine a world in which Doan can’t put up more than 40 points in a season, but then it’s equally difficult to imagine one in which he’s playing his current style at 38 or 39 years old.

And all of this goes without mentioning that, yes, Doan is a bit of a soldier. He agreed to a deal in principle with Greg Jamison’s ownership group, then signed it, despite the fact that Jamison doesn’t yet own the team. It seems like he will in the relatively near future, but nonetheless, he doesn’t now, and the various entities in Glendale (City Council, ballot initiatives, sales taxes, conservative thinktanks, etc.) seem to take some amount of perverse pleasure in actively trying to ruin things at every turn.

It’s clear Doan isn’t committed to the city, but to the franchise that drafted him, which he’d better be because just like there’s no guarantee he’ll be playing hockey this season, there’s also no guarantee that he’ll be doing so in Glendale next season. This is all very strange, quite frankly.

Too much money for too many years to a 36-year-old from a team with no owner and a terribly uncertain future? Maybe Bettman’s right after all.

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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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