The Two-Line Pass

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For whatever reason, it seems as if mediocre defensemen will dominate the trade market this year, and I don’t really know how much sense it makes. Jordan Leopold became the latest of these blueliners to get traded yesterday, moving to St. Louis for the absurdly high price of a second-round pick, just days after Douglas Murray got two out of Pittsburgh.

Is that the market? A mid-to-late second rounder for guys with little actual value and negative corsi relative numbers? Ridiculous. To put it another way, apparently the Blackhawks were in hot pursuit of Lubomir Visnovsky before the Islanders signed him to a big-money extension, and that’s because he has actually been good this year. But having been spurned, they will instead move onto other potential targets like Mark Streit (negative corsi), Robyn Regehr (negative corsi), Jay Bouwmeester (negative corsi), and Ryan Whitney (negative corsi).

It’s come to this, I guess. It seems unlikely that any of these players apart from Bouwmeester will actually help a team be good at hockey — this assumption is based on Bouwmeester largely enjoying a career offensive year despite an extremely low PDO, and playing heavy minutes against the toughest competition on the team for a mostly garbage club — but nonetheless, teams will be happy to pay extremely high prices for these guys. I can’t even begin to imagine what Bouwmeester fetches from whatever team is desperate enough to pay Calgary’s ransom, which will no doubt be boosted appreciably by the team trying to save face after getting robbed in the Iginla deal.

I have something going up on Puck Daddy tomorrow morning about how the market is largely going to be dead, and I believe that rather firmly. The only guys that are going to be moved are guys like Leopold and Murray, who are of little consequence, and whose former teams will be better for having moved them off their rosters. That’s even leaving aside whatever returns they fetch. Which again, seem to be considerable.

The trade deadline is almost by definition always a buyer’s market, and with so few sellers out there, the old adage about teams paying gallon prices for a quart of milk seem more likely to ring true now than not. But if the Blackhawks, or whoever, end up paying that for the defensemen being bandied about in the market these days, they’ll be getting closer to a pint.

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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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(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.

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(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.

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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!

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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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’.