The Two-Line Pass

The Lead

The fans chanted for it. The radio talk show hosts blathered over it. The newspaper reporters wrote about it. The bloggers tweeted about it. The players surely discussed it. Everyone ravened for it.

Revenge.

Bloody, swift revenge. Matt Cooke had to pay for his transgressions against Marc Savard. After all, you don’t rattle another team’s best player’s brain around in his skull without paying for it. Certainly not the way Cooke did it: an unprovoked, deliberate ambush designed to do exactly what it ended up doing.

So no sooner did Cooke hop over the boards for his first shift to a chorus of boos from every corner of the arena than Boston’s resident tough-guy Shawn Thornton asked him to answer for his dastardly deed as though this brand of justice ripped straight from the last 10 pages of every awful black-hat-bad-guy Western would somehow lift the fog that crept into Savard’s brain cavity in the immediate aftermath of last Sunday’s blatant headshot du jour.

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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

For the Pittsburgh Penguins, this journey began on a Saturday, Oct. 4 at 2:30 in the afternoon. At least back in home in the Eastern time zone. But they were, instead, playing the Ottawa Senators at 8:30 p.m. Stockholm time, 4100 miles from home.

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“It was a really tough decision for me to make. When I compared the two teams, I felt like I would have a little better of a chance to win the Cup in Detroit.” - Marian Hossa, July 2, 2008.

Regardless of whether or not the Red Wings beat the Penguins later tonight, Hossa was pretty much wrong. If Detroit pulls out the victory on its home ice, Hossa will happily lift the Cup, but that won’t have made him any more correct that Detroit gave him “a little better of a chance.”

Hossa, though you might not know it from his play in this series (0-3-3, plus-1) or indeed the whole playoffs (6-9-15, plus-6 in 22 games), is a game-changing player. That he took the smaller paycheck to have a better shot at the Cup might seem like some sort of magnanimous “I’m not in it for the money” type gesture, and certainly I don’t begrudge him that. It’s just kind of a dick move.

But that’s old news, obviously. So here we are more than 11 months later, and it all comes down to one game between the one he chose and the one he snubbed to see which team wins the Cup. All things considered, it’s more or less a 50-50 chance that everything works out in what he’d consider to be his favor.

But what this point ignores is that the Red Wings now have just as good of a shot of winning the grandest prize in all athletic competition as do the Penguins, and that’s with the whole “We have Marian Hossa on our team” affect. WITH Hossa, the Red Wings were more or less a dominant force, even when saddled with some of the worst goaltending in the NHL for the entirety of the regular season. WITH Hossa, the Red Wings rolled through Columbus in four games, struggled to down Anaheim in seven, dispatched Chicago in five and now stand on the brink against Pittsburgh.

Meanwhile, WITHOUT Hossa, the Penguins struggled mightily before they dumped Michel Therrien. And without Hossa, they became inarguably the best team in the NHL under Dan Bylsma (I mean, they’ve lost 10 games in regulation since Bylsma took over on Feb. 16). And without Hossa, they snuck by Philadelphia in six games, struggled to down Washington in seven, dispatched Carolina in four and now stand on the brink against Detroit.

Clearly, Pittsburgh and Detroit are two very even teams, but imagine where the former would be if it were plus-Hossa and where the latter would be if it were minus-Hossa. Pretty easy to imagine that Pittsburgh would have been a better team if Hossa, who scored 40 goals this year, was the one getting one-timer feeds from Crosby or Malkin instead of, say, Petr Sykora (25), Ruslan Fedotenko (16) or Miroslav Satan (17).

Obviously there are some mitigating factors here: Might the Pens have fired Therrien had their record been slightly better? Might they have had the cap room to trade for Chris Kunitz and Bill Guerin? Might they never have discovered the power of a barbecue pork burrito? Tough to say, obviously. But Marian Hossa makes Pittsburgh, like any other team he happens to be on, better, and conversely a Hossaless Detroit worse.

A better Penguins team would have beaten a worse Detroit and Hossa would have already lifted the Cup by now. Just sayin’.

The Lead

Evgeni Malkin caught a lot of crap around this time last year for his subpar performance in the playoffs. He scored 18 points in his first nine playoff games, but only four in the last 11 and everyone was all, “WHERE’S GENO!?”

This year, you could have said that for maybe six or seven games from the last few against the Flyers (he had seven points in the first three games against Philly and only two in the remaining three) to the first or four against Washington (a so-so 1-2-3 in three and a minus-3). And since then, it’s been really, really bad to be a goalie playing against the Penguins.

Here, now, is a list of things at which, it suddenly occurs to me, Evgeni Malkin is fairly good:

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The Lead

In a lot of sports, you hear close games refered to as “a chess match” and coaches as “tacticians.”

But for some reason, coaches in hockey don’t seem to get the credit that say, a football coach or baseball manager does. A hockey coach, the majority must suppose, is one that can give a good speech during intermission and maybe get the power play humming along above 22 percent. But other than that, you let the boys hop over the boards and your job is done until it’s prudent to use your one timeout.

But a coach’s job, as we saw tonight, is about far more than simply sitting on a one-minute team talk for most of a game, if not for its entirety. What Dan Bylsma did to Paul Maurice in tonight’s third period was nothing short of a master class in hockey stratagem.

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The Lead

Uhhhhhhhhhh…?

So the Capitals, right, they had a hell of a Game 6. On the road, they’re trailing 1-0 and go ahead 2-1. Then they’re trailing 3-2 and go ahead 4-3. Then they win it in overtime. Awesome game. Fun stuff for everyone. And they were headed home, where they were decidedly difficult to play against (they lost three of their seven previous home games there but none by more than a goal).

And then THAT happens? I mean, what the hell? This was the most entertaining series in the playoffs thus far, and everyone on the planet was talking about how glad they were that The Hockey Gods had blessed us with a seventh game of this magnificent series. And then the Caps give up two goals in EIGHT SECONDS in the first period and the game is completely over.

The silence in the arena, no doubt, was deafening. Just the sound of skate carving ice, puck hitting blade, and 18,277 people rubbing their eyes in disbelief.

This couldn’t be how the Capitals, who bravely fought off elimination against a New York Rangers team that (let’s face it) had no business giving them a series in the first place, and who went toe-to-toe with Crosby and Malkin for six games, and who had gotten a strong series from a cast of supporting characters that ranged from guys you’d never heard of to guys no one had ever heard of, went out.

I mean, SIX TO TWO? There aren’t words to properly quantify just how inexplicable I find this. And really, how could anyone, even the Penguins have foreseen this? A 2-0 lead through one, regardless of how far apart the goals were scored (still, eight seconds?), is almost understandable. Giving up that third goal just 28 seconds into the third, yeah, that gets into noodle-scratchin’ territory. The fourth goal like a minute and a half after that? Mouths agape, no doubt. Heads hanging on the bench, for sure.

But goal No. 5? Abandon all hope and maybe try to get out of the building without giving up the extra point. My friend commented to me that 5-0 is a difficult score from which to claw back in baseball, and that’s pretty much the long and short of how dismal the night was for the Capitals.

And that Sidney Crosby scored the goal to put Pittsburgh up five after Alex Ovechkin cut the lead to four was just about right, wasn’t it? I mean, those two were throwing haymakers all series. But while Ovie’s goal might have earned him the upper hand in the points category (he finished 8-6-14 to Crosby’s 8-5-13 — and the fact that those totals are in a seven-game series boggles the mind), Crosby’s, fittingly, closed the book on what was once the most unbelievably awesomest series since the lockout.

We got everything we could have asked for in these seven games. We got star power. We got excitement. We got engrossing, beautiful skill. We got a bit of nastiness. We got not one, not two, but THREE overtime games. And then tonight we got a virtuoso performance by the player the NHL considers its best chance to brush off the dust of the mainstream media’s neglect.

So the league got what it wanted, too.

(And we also got proof that hockey is a sport no one will ever truly figure out: Tom Poti finished plus-2.)

The Lead

Was hockey kidding? How can two consecutive games be THAT freaking awesome?

In 126:22 of hockey tonight, we were treated to 21 goals on 135 shots and more lead changes than any normal person could possibly consider rational.

Take the Penguins/Capitals game for example, the sixth in a now-seven-game series that has lived up to every inch of its lofty billing and will make the Conference Finals (be they against Boston or Carolina) look like the worst kind of anticlimax. It was 1-0 Pens after one. Then the Caps score twice. Then Geno Malkin levels inside of 30 seconds to go in the period and it’s 2-2 through two. Then all hell breaks loose.

Kris Letang scores on the power play at 4:40 of the third. Brooks Laich answers 58 seconds later and Viktor Kozlov puts his team up just 29 seconds after that (with a special tip of the hat to Hal Gill, who’s pictured above). But then Sid Crosby, clearly the best player on the ice in this series, scores with just under five minutes to go in the period to force overtime. That’s where The Steckel came in to pop in his second goal in this series, both of which have been game-winners.

Then go have a peak at that Chicago/Vancouver game. No Game 7 necessary there, eh? Nah, Patty Kane took care of that. Hat trick for the kid. Lead changed five times in that one. Home team won before their huge home crowd which, for the year, officially topped one million fans tonight, a good fifth of which might’ve turned up to see them play last year.

And that game was a lot like the Pittsburgh game in that many of its goals came in bunches. The two goals in the first were scored exactly two minutes apart. Three of the four in the second were scored in the space of 4:32. The first two in the third came 1:58 apart, and the last four were in 4:02. It was nuts. And despite having three separate leads, Vancouver only actually found itself ahead of the Blackhawks for 4:43.

There was just no unseating the Blackhawks or Caps tonight. Awesome night of hockey.

The Lead

New coach, same crappy Penguins.

Pittsburgh had a nice afternoon date with the dead-last Islanders and you’d've thought they’d come out skating hard and fast and using their copious skill to dominate the often-shaky New York defense. Gotta figure they’d prefer to have done better than a 3-2 overtime loss to the worst team in the NHL.

But, well, uh.. I dunno what happened. They only scored two goals in regulation on 37 shots but still allowed 30. Sid Crosby and Evgeni Malkin, despite having 50-plus minutes of combined ice time, totaled just two points.

All of which is to say that all of Dan Bylsma’s talk of the Penguins using their speed was sadly not taken to heart by his new charges, and it would appear that, even after one game, the team has not been suddenly shocked into playing what you’d call “well.”

Losing to the Islanders is tough to swallow at any point in the season, but when the team seemed so listless and more mediocre than it should have been, for any number of reasons (injuries, coaching, etc.), it’s tough to imagine why they wouldn’t be all fired up to kick the absolute hell out of the poor, unsuspecting Islanders.

But instead they didn’t score early, or even the first goal of the game, and they made Joey MacDonald look like Dominik Hasek. Great start to the new era. And what’s that? Therrien still thinks these clowns are going to make the playoffs?

No wonder they don’t let him coach in the NHL any more.

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The Lead

Forget all the dickpunching and whining and diving for which Sidney Crosby’s been called out lately. It’s become quite clear that the guy plays with a different rulebook than most other NHL players, and that’s just one of those things you have to accept as a fact of life. It’s the same reason elite pitchers get strike zones you could drive a truck through and NBA defenses couldn’t properly cover Michael Jordan.

So when Crosby reached out and poked at an Evgeni Malkin knuckleball that was dangerously close to being a high stick and scored the against Buffalo in overtime to win 4-3, was there any doubt whatsoever that the goal would stand?

It was a marginal call to be sure. One of those ones where Penguins fans would likely see it as close but clearly a legal play while Sabres fans broke down the footage like the Zapruder Film. It would, of course, be very difficult to make a proper judgment given the available angles. But because of the Crosby factor, what the hell, let’s call it a goal and hit the bar. The officials could huddle around monitors or get the war room in Toronto breaking everything down, but the eventual result, regardless of whether or not it was a high stick, was so plain. It’s not like this was Ryan Stone tipping a puck home. Crosby hadn’t scored in nine games and why not, right? The Pens needed the win anyways.

I’m not even saying it wasn’t a goal or, even if he had played it with a high stick, there was sufficient evidence to overrule the call on the ice. I like Crosby just fine and I have no love for either the Sabres or Penguins. But this is the kind of thing that stokes the ever-burning fires of deep-seated Crosby hatred among NHL fans, particularly those in the Eastern Conference. The calls always go the Kid’s way and they always will. Everyone just needs to accept that. We’ll all be better people for it.

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