The Two-Line Pass

We’re now something like 32 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.

Columbus Blue Jackets, you’re on the clock.

This isn’t the first time the Blue Jackets have dropped big money in the offseason in hopes of reaching the playoffs for the first time in franchise history. Right after the lockout, the team spent tons of cash on over-the-hill versions of Adam Foote and Sergei Fedorov. Fedorov was pulling down $6.08 million on the cap, and Foote was getting $4.6 million.

Money not-so-well spent. In the nearly three years both were with the team (they were traded at the deadline this year to Colorado and Washtington), Columbus won 35, 33 and 34 games. Ouch.

But with that $10-plus million freed up — along with a bunch more from letting some overpaid players go — it allowed the Jackets to either sign or trade for a number of players. It’s been a very busy offseason. Some of the moves help them now, some down the road, and some simply don’t.

The moves at the blue line seem nice. Free agent signing Mike Commodore is well-traveled and a very solid player. He’s well worth the $3.75 million he’ll get the next couple years, but by the end of this five-year deal, I’m not so sure. But maybe one of the best trades of the offseason for any team was what really beefed up the once-thin Jackets blue line. Offloading troublesome winger Nik Zherdev and promising but underperforming center Danny Fritsche for Christian Backman (eh) and Fedor Tyutin (hey!) addresses where Columbus really had problems. Flashy forwards like Zherdev make highlight reels but they don’t play defense, and that’s been Columbus’ problem, theoretically at least.

More after the jump.

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At least there's one reason to watch the Islanders. (Nice shoes, Comrie)

We’re now something like 36 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.

New York Islanders, you’re on the clock.

Funny, isn’t it, how a team with this kind of money and this kind of history can be so blitheringly bad.

I mean, the New York Islanders organization is a positively dreadful one. A quick swing by the Isles’ wikipedia page yields the most hilariously understated subheading: “1995-2000: Management issues.” Yeah, you could say that. Since about that time, the Islanders have traded away more high-quality players (Roberto Luongo, Zdeno Chara, Bryan McCabe, Todd Bertuzzi, Olli Jokinen, the pick that became Jason Spezza, Tim Connolly, Taylor Pyatt, etc. etc.) for very little in the way of good return. They also drafted Rick DiPietro, 15-year man though he is, ahead of Dany Heatley and Marian Gaborik.

It’s difficult to imagine where this team would be today were it not for the hideous mismanagement that has plagued the franchise since the mid-1990s and still maintain the ability to understand why it has any fans left at all. After making the playoffs in four of the previous five years, the Islanders finished dead last in the Atlantic division last season and 25th in the NHL.

This is a team that hasn’t won the division since 1987-88, and hasn’t advanced out of the first round of the playoffs since 1992-93. Its first-round picks have been largely so-so the last 10 years, and still, only four remain with the team (2000’s first overall pick DiPietro, 2002’s 22nd pick Sean Bergenheim, 2007’s seventh pick Kyle Okposo, and 2008’s ninth pick Josh Bailey). The rest were traded for parts that include a quarter-season of Ryan Smyth, AHLer Ben Walter, Mike Peca, and Janne Niinimaa.

The sad part is, things are going to be appreciably worse this year.

A capable new coach has arrived in former Providence Bruins boss Scott Gordon, but this is a team with a serious, serious identity crisis that not even a good coach and better guy like Gordon is going to be able to sort out any time soon. It doesn’t know whether it wants a team of veterans (nine players are over 30, and three of those are 37-year-old forwards) or a team of kids with which to begin rebuilding (only seven are under 27). That’s a fine mix and strategy if you, say, have any chance whatsoever of making the playoffs, or have any real star players in their late 20s and early 30s. But the Islanders don’t have that at all. Their top-paid players as far as cap hit are Bill Guerin ($4.5 million at 37), Rick DiPietro ($4.5 million at 26), Doug Weight ($4.3 million at 37), Mark Streit ($4.1 million at 30), and Mike Comrie ($4 million at 27). Does that seem insane to anyone else?

Granted, most of those guys are gone after this season, but they should be gone right now. Doug Weight was a poor signing from Garth Snow (there has yet to be any other kind) and Mark Streit is a hell of a gamble at $4.1 million per over the next five years. A whopping 34 of his 62 points last season came on the top-ranked Montreal power play, and though he wasn’t getting those points despite being bad, he also benefitted tremendously from playing alongside Tomas Plekanec and Alex Kovalev when the Habs were a man up.

At the other end of the spectrum, some kids will be leaned on very heavily. Okposo, the aforementioned 2007 first-round pick that the Isles violently signed from the University of Minnesota midway through last season, scored five points in his nine games up with the Isles and 28 more in 35 down in the AHL. They’re going to look for more of the same output from him. Another promising thing to which Islander fans to look forward, of course, is the young but very impressive blue line pairing of Chris Campoli and Bruno Gervais. Both are very mobile, and wise beyond their years (though at just 23, each has parts of three years’ experience). The problem is that both are also very injury prone. Campoli has missed 66 games over the last two years, but still put up impressive numbers when he was healthy. Gervais has missed 55. Ditto on the numbers.

What the Isles really need to do is blow it up as soon as the season looks lost (I’m thinking that’ll be around Oct. 8 ) and let the kids get their minutes without those pesky 37-year-olds hanging about and trying to tell them about the good ol’ days when skates cost a Loonie. Snow should get whatever he can and start laying the foundation for the team that might eventually make the playoffs again. Pity he won’t have the job when it does.

More after 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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We’re now something like 48 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.

Los Angeles Kings, you’re on the clock.

These guys are good. The rest.. ehhhhhh.

It’s been a tough few years to be a Kings fan.

The team hasn’t made the playoffs since 2002, but unlike the Penguins, whose success has been built upon years of lucky ping pong ball bounces and on-ice ineptitude, has usually finished high enough to get draft picks outside the top 5. Never mind the bad free agent signings (HOW much for a 37-year-old Rob Blake?) and years without a passable goaltending situation (Garon, Burke, Cloutier, LaBarbera, Cechmanek, etc.), the team has been stuck between rebuilding and trying to win for the last several years. At least, I hope so for their sake.

But that’s different now. The GM Dean Lombardi has probably gambled his job on new coach Terry Murray, who has to make Los Angeles actually care about hockey again the way the Ducks almost did when they won the Cup if the team is going to compete.

Not this year. The Kings are going to be an awful, awful team in 2008-09. Like, real bad. The team finished second-to-last in the NHL last season and got worse. A truly great quartet of forwards in Anze Kopitar, Dustin Brown, Alex Frolov and Patrick O’Sullivan return for the Kings, but they’ve also lost sure-thing 30-goal guy Mike Cammaleri.

Not that offense was ever the problem for L.A. to begin with. The problem is, and has always been, defense and goaltending. So when Blake and Lubomir Visnovsky, the two biggest minutes-eaters on defense, left by free agency and trade, respectively, things got appreciably worse. Offensive defenseman Jack Johnson, he of the 11-point, minus-19 2007-08 campaign, and Tom Preissing, who is actually good, is now the No. 1 pairing in L.A. Preissing, though, has only averaged 20 minutes in a season once in his four-year career.

However, they are buttressed by such blueline luminaries as Matt Greene (career 0.09 points per game and minus-31), Denis Gauthier (four points and a minus-11 in 43 games and no playoff appearances with Philly last year), and Peter Harrold (a veteran of 37 NHL games). That’s it. Five NHL defensemen on the roster. And yes, the Kings are way, way below the cap floor so they’ll have to sign someone, but the list of remaining free agent defensemen is, uh, slim. Big Joey DiPenta, maybe? Marek Malik could be yours for the right price. One supposes that the biggest blueline question centers around whether or not 2007 pick Thomas Hickey or 2008 pick Drew Doughty (both as yet unsigned) are ready. If both are, the Kings might not have too big of a problem keeping the puck out of the n…

Oh wait, the goalie situation. Right. Jason LaBarbera is the No. 1 guy right now (by default more than anything else, like merit), with three rookies vying for the backup role that will likely be won by 26-year-old Erik Ersberg. Ersberg was outstanding in his few games last year, posting 2.48/.927 in 15 games, in which the Kings went 6-5-3. But whether or not he’s ready to play 40, 50, or even 60 games (with those numbers, he’s certainly deserving) remains to be seen. The Kings also have promising 20-year-old QMJHLer Jonathan Bernier who was not-so-good in four games for L.A. last year, and Jon Quick, a UMass product who was impressive in Manchester.

Still, there are too many questions, especially on the blue line, to really give this team any sort of credit this year.

More after the jump.

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We’re now something like 50 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.

Tampa Bay Lightning, you’re on the clock.

This happened FOUR years ago!

It’s a rare thing indeed to see so much upheaval for a team in a single offseason. New owners, new GM, new coach, completely new second line, new contract for the franchise player, and a new rookie sensation. It’s an exciting time to be a Bolts fan, right?

Well, not so fast. Because one thing that hasn’t been improved is the team defense and goaltending, at least not appreciably, or for the present. Trading Dan Boyle, a very good do-it-all defenseman may have yielded a pair of promising blueliners in Matt Carle and Ty Wishart, but neither is ready to be Dan Boyle on Oct. 5. Not even close. The goaltending situation isn’t much better, as obviously-bad Marc Denis has been replaced by obviously-aging Olaf Kolzig, who, at 38, is ancient even by NHL goalie standards. He was the oldest goalie in the league to start more than 50 games and fourth-oldest overall.

Kolzig, like every one of the Bolts’ goalies last year, posted a save percentage under .900 and a GAA around 3 (Mike Smith was 2.46/.906 in Dallas but those numbers dropped to 2.79/.893 in Tampa). Kolzig also had the luxury of playing behind a Washington blue line that allowed 36 fewer goals than did Tampa last year.

The offense, though admittedly upgraded from last year, is still pretty mediocre. Its 223 goals was tied for 17th in the entire league last season, with offensive powerhouse Minnesota (yes, really). All but one team that scored fewer than the Bolts (the lowly Atlanta Thrashers) actually allowed more goals. Some of the “promising” new additions are a trio of Penguins in Ryan Malone (27 goals with Evgeni Malkin sliding him the puck), Adam Hall (2) and The NHL’s Oldest Man, 42-year-old Gary Roberts (3).

Then there’s obviously Steven Stamkos, the big-time rookie who will likely center the second line. Yeah he was picked first overall, and yeah he’s very good, but he won’t make the impact the Lightning need him to make to get to the postseason in his rookie year. It’s very rare that anyone’s that good. Sid Crosby and Alex Ovechkin couldn’t do it, and even though Stamkos has the benefit of having Vinny Lecavalier on his team, that’s still not enough.

More after the jump.

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