The Two-Line Pass

The Lead

You may or may not have gotten the memo on this, but Jarome Iginla is a pretty decent hockey player.

Tonight he almost singlehandedly willed the Flames to a 6-3 win over the St. Louis Blues on the strength of a two-goal, two-assist performance. One goal was lucky, one goal was scary, one assist was beautiful and the other was heads-up. If there’s a more complete player in hockey, I’d like to know about him.

Iginla opened the scoring with what can only be described as a goalscorer’s goal, as a bouncing shot from Cory Sarich deflected off the inside of a falling Iginla’s glove and in just 4:14 into the game. His second goal, which came at 17:38 of the first, was one of those vintage Iginla plays where he finds himself in acres of space for some inexplicable reason and loads up a trillion-mile-an-hour snapshot off one foot. How does any team allow Iginla to find himself with a puck on his stick and no defenseman within 10 feet of him? Note to NHL defenses: Giving Iginla this kind of space is not conducive to winning hockey games.

It should be noted, before continuing, that were it not for the play of Chris Mason during that first period, things could have been a LOT worse for St. Louis than 2-0. He made 13 first-period saves and a great many of them were of very high quality. He certainly prevented Iginla from having a hat trick in the opening 20, that’s for sure. And for a while, Miikka Kiprusoff, who had far less work to do than did Mason in making eight saves in the first, made it seem like this game would end up being a goaltending battle. But once Iginla got that second goal, the Flames were off to the races.

Matt Lombardi scored his third of the year early in the second before the Flames defense decided to take 10 minutes off and let the Blues cut it to 3-2 — and Adrian Aucoin’s giveaway on the Patrick Berglund goal was so good he should’ve gotten an assist — before Iginla hefted the Flames onto his back again, setting up consecutive goals from Mike Cammalleri (and what a beauty this feed was) and Aucoin, via an ahead pass to Lombardi that sprang them for the 2-on-1.

From there, the game was academic and Iginla had career points Nos. 796, 797, 798 and 799. To give you an idea of just how important Iginla is to the Flames, he has scored at least one goal in 12 games this year and the Flames are 11-1-0 in them. That’s a .917 winning percentage! When he doesn’t score, they’re 6-10-3 for a winning percentage of .395. That’s an awful big swing, obviously, and it points to both the Flames’ frustrating inconsistency and Iginla’s inherent value to the team. He may be on pace for “only” 44 goals and 98 points now, but if he shows up, the Flames are nearly unstoppable.

As a Flames fan, I wish he’d shown up to more than just 12 of 31 games this year.

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The Lead

Despite having his busiest night of the year, Chris Mason was untouchable tonight.

In his first game back in Nashville since the Preds traded him in favor of Dan Ellis, Mason made 47 saves, a number of them very impressive, and two more in the shootout to record an extremely unlikely but completely deserved clean sheet and 1-0 win.

It was a hell of a homecoming for Mason, but not so much the rest of his team, which was held to just 17 shots and was incredibly lucky to escape with two points. The attack was listless and the transition game was ineffective. The defense? Non-existent, as you’d expect in a 47-shot game in which Nashville only had five power play opportunities. Shots by period for the Preds were 15 in the first, 12 in the second, 11 in the third and NINE in OT. The fact that Mason not only shut them out but didn’t allow six is amazing.

Go have a look at the highlights. There are at least four shots that would have gone in had Mason not been playing out of his mind. After the game, Mason made sure to credit his defense for blocking “a ton of shots” but in reality they blocked two fewer than Nashville (16-14). In all, the Predators attempted 70 shots (six more either went wide and THREE hit the post), so you can’t exactly say the Blues’ D did too good of a job in the “limiting chances” department.

They say a goalie has to take his defense out to dinner when he gets a shutout. The entire team should take Mason out for this one. The amount of work he had to do was ridiculous.

Think the Preds let the wrong goalie go? Even though Ellis is younger by far and led the league in goals-against average last year, his numbers this year have been pretty bad. Even with tonight’s “shutout” (not that he’ll get credit for it), he’s got a .898 save percentage and a 2.90 goals-against that’s up 56 points from last year’s total that paced the league. The fact that he’s 8-9-2 is a small miracle considering he’s given up four or more goals seven times and got the hook after giving up three on 19 against Calgary a couple weeks ago in another.

Mason, who has an awful record at 2-5-0, looks much better by comparison with a GAA of 2.33 (ninth in the league) and a save percentage of .927 (sixth) in limited action. He started out badly with 14 goals allowed in his first four games, but since then he has allowed two in three starts, and he got the loss in one of those.

Maybe it’s a salary issue. Mason makes $3 million against the cap compared to Ellis’ $1.75 million, but I have to imagine the upgrade in stats would be worth that much.

Also, and as an aside, those new Blues jerseys are pure class.

Also also, how awesome is this picture?

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In the first semi-major trade of the season that will actually have a significant impact on both teams, the Maple Leafs acquired the white-hot Lee Stempniak from the St. Louis Blues for Alex Steen and Carlo Colaiacovo.

As mentioned in this week’s WWL, Ron Wilson was disenchanted of Colaiacovo’s lack of fitness, and the Leafs in general had to be unhappy with Steen’s 2-2-4 line through 20 games. Steen’s never scored less than 15 goals in his career and right now he’s on pace for about eight. Colaiacovo has one point in 10 games and is currently injured. Both are signed for next year.

It was also a good move by Toronto to get Stempniak, who has 13 points in 14 games this year and 12 in his last seven, for almost nothing. St. Louis made the deal, I suspect, simply because it needed warm bodies to fill out the lineup every night. There’s no other reason to trade a player as good as Stempniak, who scored 27-25-52 two years ago and is playing at almost a point-a-game pace. The move also clears up about half a million in cap space for the Leafs.

Phenomenal move for Toronto on all fronts, and an understandable one for St. Louis.

“Out indefinitely.”

First it was Erik Johnson getting his season ended by a golf cart. Soon after it was Manny Legace and Ben Bishop. Now TJ Oshie has gone down with a high ankle sprain.

“I was talking to Dr. (Rick) Wright and he told me as far as sports go, ankles are the toughest injuries to put a time frame on,” Blues President John Davidson said Sunday. “We don’t know how long it’s going to be. It’s just a shame because he’s been as good as anybody on our team.”

Great. Now St. Louis can call up.. nobody. Prepetual healthy scratch Yan Stastny will be filling in for Oshie.

Yan. Not Peter. The bad Stastny. Yan. The one who played for like three different organizations in the last four seasons. Yan. Not the guy on the Avalanche. No, his brother. His brother’s name is Yan. The one with nine career points. Yan Stastny.  The one that got traded to Boston for Sergei Samsonov with Marty Reasoner and the pick that became Milan Lucic. Yeah, that Stastny. Yan. So that’s two more words: “Yan Stastny.”

Other exciting Blues news in that link: They might sign Brendan Shanahan, but they might not.

Here’s a live blog of the Minnesota-St. Louis prospects game at the NHL’s Traverse City rookie tournament.

Want rosters? Okay. Minnesota’s are here, St. Louis’ are here.

All updates below the jump.

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We’re now something like 40 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.

St. Louis Blues, you’re on the clock.

Just like in this picture, E.J. has very little help around him this year.

Take a quick look at the St. Louis Blues website and you’ll notice something. There’s not a lot of content about being prepared to win again, or about a big-time free agent being excited to be on the team. Instead, it’s a lot of kids’ stuff.

“PROSPECTS HAVE SOMETHING TO PROVE,” screams the first headline. Clicking on “Learning the ropes,” brings you to a story about David Perron’s rookie season. Click on either of those and you’ll find a story on the right side of the page about T.J. Oshie being a leading Calder Candidate. Four stories in, there’s finally a story on a veteran, in this case new captain Eric Brewer.

The subtle point of this, of course, is to prepare Blues fans for a tough season. How tough? Their big free agent signing this summer was Andy Wozniewski. That’s how tough. And it’s not as though they didn’t have money to spend. Pending the contracts for Matt Foy and Brad Winchester, they’re still going to be about $7.5 million below the salary cap.

Not that it wasn’t tough last year. Fourth-worst record in the league and only 79 points last year. Brad Boyes and Paul Kariya were the team’s leading scorers, potting just 65 points each. Had Boyes, who popped in 43 goals last year to finish tied for fifth with Henrik Zetterberg (lofty company, that) in league goalscoring, had any type of help on his line, he would have recorded far more than 22 assists. As a result of this, the Blues were 26th in the NHL in goals per game at just 2.46 a night.

Their answer to help the offense this summer was apparently Foy, who had eight points in 28 games for Minnesota last year. He is apparently going to fill the vacuum left by the trade that sent Jamal Mayers to Toronto for a 2008 third-round pick (and boy are they hoping James Livingston works out with that pick). Not that incoming rookies T.J. Oshie or Lars Eller aren’t going to be very good players. They are, and we all saw what a pair of good rookies can do for a team in Chicago last year. But Oshie isn’t his University of North Dakota teammate Jonathan Toews, and Eller for sure isn’t Pat Kane.

Eller may have lit up the Swedish junior league his draft year (55 points in 39 games) and his skills are very, very good, but he only scored two points, both assists, last year playing up with the men of the SEL. How he’ll react to the NHL is up in the air, but my guess is that it won’t be jaw-dropping.

Oshie’s a different story. In the largely defensive world of American college hockey, The Oshie, as UND fans call him, scored 142 points in 128 games. That’s insane.

It doesn’t look like the team’s ability to keep the puck out of the net will improve much either. The Blues traded for former Nashville netminder Chris Mason, but his numbers (2.90, .898) last year were more or less in line with St. Louis’ goalie average last year, if not slightly worse (2.71, .900). Manny Legace, meanwhile, is one year slower. The only other netminder they have that’s anywhere near pro-ready, let alone NHL-ready, is 6-foot-7 rookie Ben Bishop, who had a lackluster final season at the University of Maine. Believe me when I tell you that Bishop needs a lot of AHL seasoning. He’d get lit up like Times Square by some of the scorers in the Central division (Zetterberg and Datsyuk, Kane and Toews, Nash, Radulov).

The defense, apart from adding 20-year-old T.J. Fast (that’s a lot of T.J.s!) from the Kings, is more or less unchanged from last year, and it’s still fairly young for an NHL defense. Its seven current players are an average of 25.4 years old.

None of this, mind you, is meant as a means of passing judgment. I know what they are, the Blues know what they are, and you probably do too. I’m just saying, they improved not-at-all in the course of their rebuilding, apart from whatever growth and improvement their rookies and sophomores make. The future is brightish for St. Louis, but it’s not blinding, and it’s pretty far off as well.

For an only occasionally entertaining club last year that had trouble drawing fans (just 83.9 percent of tickets sold last year, 24th in the league) isn’t going to be much more entertaining this year

More after the jump.

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So many crease jokes

You know you’re running low on content for your newspaper’s hockey section when the top story is a three day-old, out-of-date, intricately worked-up graphic about how Dan Hinote will have married a celebrity’s sister last Saturday.

But such is life at the St. Louis Post Dispatch.

“Dan and Amy met (four) years ago through a mutual friend,” Missy Christiansen, Hinote’s sister, told the Rocky Mountain News. “A year later, they saw each other a few times, in Las Vegas and also a weekend in Boston, to celebrate a friend’s birthday. From that weekend that was it . . . it was love.”

According to the RMN, the couple will tie the knot at the Keystone Ranch in front of 400 folks dressed in 1950s-era clothing. The list of attendees will include one of Hinote’s best friends, Peter Forsberg, along with John Michael-Liles and former Blue Shjon Podein.

The rest of the article is a snoozefest, but it does feature one of the least topical, embarrassing references to a movie from over 15 years ago this side of a Bill Simmons column.

Perhaps someone will buy Hinote a new car as a wedding gift. He still drives around a beat-up Dodge Durango that looks like it’s never seen a water hose. In a feature on Stlblues.com, Amy McCarthy tells writer Chris Pinkert that not washing his truck is one of Hinote’s worst habits. “He says, ‘That’s what the rain is for,’” McCarthy said.

“ALLLL-RIGHTTTTTYYY then,” as Jim Carrey would say.

Swing and a miss. Maybe this writer should wear THE MASK so he doesn’t walk around looking DUMB AND DUMBER.

Anyway, the wedding sounds like it was a hoot.

The wedding party of 10 groomsmen and 10 bridesmaids wore traditional garb for the ceremony, but the guests were asked to show up in their favorite ’50s costumes, which would explain the dead celebs who attended the wedding.

Castro, in full military garb and a fake beard, was among the last guests to arrive, which seemed a bit odd because he had a reserved front-row seat on the bride’s side. After the nuptials, Mr. On the Town spotted Castro walking arm-in-arm with the bride’s sister, actress Jenny McCarthy, out to the parking lot.

Was it? Could it have been? Yup, superstar Jim Carrey, Jenny’s beau, slipped in and out of the ceremony almost undetected except when Jenny’s 5-year-old son, Evan, started getting spooked by the get-up. “It’s me, Jimmy,” I was told that Carrey said while pulling down his beard to soothe the troubled young ‘un.

Winner of best costume, by the way?

Befitting the occasion, St. Louis defenseman Jay McKee donned a blond wig, Seven Year Itch white dress and heels. Scary sight. Post cake-cutting, Hinote and McCarthy changed into Danny Zucko and Sandy Olsen costumes.

Last week, Vancouver GM Mike Gillis attempted to sign St. Louis Blues forward David Backes to a three-year, $7.5 million offer sheet. That didn’t go over so well with Blues GM John Davidson, who promptly matched the offer.

See, common courtesy among NHL GMs is that if you’re going to sign a player to an offer sheet, you should first attempt to make a reasonable trade for him as kind of a heads up on the deal. That way, the team that currently holds the player’s rights can weigh the price of the contract against how much it’s worth to them as far as draft picks go.

Gillis failed to offer Davidson such a courtesy.

“The offer was like a Volkswagen for a Porsche,” said Blues president of hockey operations John Davidson, who wouldn’t elaborate on trade details. “It didn’t make any sense at all — not even close to being sensible.”

Davidson said the offer-sheet average was a “little more” than the club was willing to pay Backes, but worth the investment in a player who has been called a future leader with the Blues.

Later in the week, the Canucks acquired former San Jose and Buffalo power forward Steve Bernier in just such a pre-offer sheet deal. He would have cost the Canucks a second-round pick in 2009, but Vancouver was nice enough to throw in a 2010 third rounder for the trouble.

Well today, just to be a jerk, Davidson signed Bernier to a one-year, $2.5 million offer sheet. Vancouver, of course, matched.

“We have a great deal of respect for the St. Louis Blues, John Davidson, Larry Pleau and their management team, said Gillis. “The offer sheet to Bernier is a clear indication of how highly Steve is thought of in our league.”

But here’s why Gillis was secretly cursing Davidson: the Canucks would surely have liked to sign Bernier to a longer deal than that. He hadn’t had an especially great year, and would have come cheaper than he’s probably worth in the long term. Now, Bernier, who is expected to play on a line with the Sedin twins, will be able to cash in on 30-plus tap-in goals that come with playing alongside those adorable, pony-loving Swedes. He’s going to cost Vancouver a LOT more.

One hopes that this is just the beginning of a feud that has the potential to reach Lowe-Burkeian porportions. I’d love to see the Blues sign Sundin to an $11 million contract! That’ll show ‘em!