The Two-Line Pass

(Ed. note: This is a sponsored post for George Clam. 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.)

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The NHL trade deadline came and went yesterday with lots more action than anyone probably expected — save for maybe Roberto Luongo — but one team that didn’t exactly cover itself in glory was, not surprisingly, the Colorado Avalanche.

Puck Daddy gave the Avs, and GM Greg Sherman, a D+ for their lack of doing anything noteworthy at the deadline despite the fact that they’re dead last in the West (which, by the way, is quite a feat, because they’re in the same division as Calgary). That sounds about right. Ryan O’Byrne to Toronto for a pick, and decent defensive prospect Cameron Gaunce to Dallas for slightly younger, similarly-decent left wing prospect Tomas Vincour. That was it. Sherman didn’t try to unload any of those other contracts he’s been rumored to be trying to offload for some time now.

This is an appallingly bad team with numerous not-great contracts on it. Not that teams are lining up to acquire David Jones and his laughable $4 million a year through 2015-16 cap hit, but making any attempt to shed some of the worse deals weighing down the roster at the deadline — when it’s a seller’s market — seemed more advisable than waiting until the summer. By the way, as if to really show just how off-his-rocker Sherman is in thinking this team is good, he saw the calls he received from other GMs/vultures interested in some of his players as further evidence that he has a solid core in place and should not pursue the wiser course of action of selling anyone off. Even Jay Feaster isn’t that dumb, but one supposes it goes back to “intellectual honesty,” and Sherman is as bereft of that as his team is of playoff hopes.

Fortunately for Avs fans, he doesn’t seem long to hold his seat of power atop the Avs organization, and rightly so, but to say he’s bad at his job is one thing. To say he decided to stand pat is entirely because he thinks this is a team that can succeed at some point in the near future shows he they need to take him out of that office posthaste, preferably Hannibal Lechter-style so he can’t pick up the phone and extend Milan Hejduk for another year.

If he thinks there’s a solid core there, he’s probably not totally wrong, but at the same time, a great way to build around that is to make player transactions and offload some dead weight. That he didn’t do that, well, it underscores why he’s gonna get the axe this summer.

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The Maple Leafs are, as I’ve said before, not a particularly great hockey team, nor are they a particularly well-managed or well-coached hockey team. But I did think they were good enough to get into the playoffs if their goaltending held up.

It largely has. And as a result, the Leafs are currently sitting sixth in the East, seven points up on the Islanders, who are just below the postseason cutoff, and they’re looking pretty comfortable, even if they have won just three of their last 10 games (yuck). How comfortable? James Mirtle tweeted this morning that by his count, because the Leafs currently have 40 points and the rest of the East sucks, that the Leafs can go just 5-7-2 in their remaining 14 games and be more or less assured a playoff spot.

Which is crazy. They’ve almost done everything in their power to not make the playoffs, including playing their worst players more minutes than one of the best point-producing and possession-driving centers in the league this season, leaving a high-quality offensive defenseman in the AHL in favor of Korbinian Holzer, and been absolute crap in the shootout. But it’s all been to no avail.

The Leafs are probably going to make the playoffs. They’d need to collapse way more significantly than they did last season, and in 14 games that doesn’t seem all that likely, especially given how soft their schedule is. In all, 10 of their remaining games are against teams below them in the standings, including the Hurricanes (bad), Flyers (worse), Devils twice (okayish I guess), Rangers twice (still underperforming), Islanders twice (dreadful), Capitals (woof), Lightning (crap), and Panthers (the worst).

I can’t be too sure whether lot of people will try to paint this as somehow being a result of their canning Brian Burke being the reason that the Leafs are actually good enough to make the playoffs finally, but I’m going to err on the side of caution and say they obviously will. Only a person like Burke saying that he set the table for the Leafs’ moderate success this likely playoff season — not coincidentally the only one in which James Reimer has been remotely healthy in the last three — would be viewed as being some sort of derogatory misrepresentation of fact. But what has Dave Nonis done this season? Anything of note besides strand Jake Gardiner in the minors for too long? The answer is nothing. That’s it.

So it seems like at long last Toronto is going to have its playoff team. Which is probably something it should or even would have done last season. But moreover it looks like people in the media up there might have to actually say moderately nice things about the things Brian Burke has done in constructing this team and maybe even setting it up for the future. Either that or it’ll take some serious logical acrobatics to avoid doing so. That’s the really mind-blowing thing about all this.

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(Ed. note: This is a sponsored post for Jo Innes. 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!

If there’s one thing the Senators need in their attempts to make the Stanley Cup Playoffs for the second year in a row, it’s… well obviously it’s for Erik Karlsson’s achilles to reassemble itself 100 percent and be ready to play tomorrow.

But if there’s two things the Senators need it’s… okay well I mean there’s Jason Spezza getting healthy too, but that’s going to come relatively soon, I’m pretty sure. But if there’s three things the Senators need, well, I could do this all day. The fact of the matter is that one thing the Senators definitely did not need is to acquire Matt Kassian from the Minnesota Wild for a 2014 sixth-round pick yesterday.

Here’s a real quote from general manager Bryan Murray on why the Senators went out and acquired a player who has nine games under his belt this season, all of them at the AHL level:

“He’s a big strong guy, he’s a very physical player, he’s a very willing combatant. With the number of young players and injuries we have on our roster, there has got to be a sense of comfort that they can go out and play without being pushed around, which has happened a couple times here so we just felt it was a need and an addition that, given the opportunity to get one, a guy like this, a big guy, he’s a young player and we’re hoping that he’ll work with our coaches and be a real contributor to our team.”

That’s an awful lot of words to say, “The other teams in the Northeast have some fighters and we don’t,” but that’s the general thrust of it. At 6-foot-4 and 232 pounds, Kassian is a big boy. He also sucks at hockey. And so the Senators’ decision to use him in the lineup (albeit “at the coach’s discretion,” according to Murray) seems like it would be not at all conducive to winning.

It’s true that the Senators didn’t have a true fighter in the lineup. Hit-and-run pukes like Chris Neil don’t count, because he at least has some amount of value to the team outside punching guys in the face. This reeks of remorse for letting Zenon Konopka walk, coincidentally to the Wild, and even then, at least Konopka wins draws pretty effectively. The list of hockey things outside of fighting that Kassian does pretty effectively begins and probably ends with skating without falling down most of the time.

It seemed to me that the Senators were a just-okay hockey team last year, but one that wisely stepped out of the Northeast Arms Race that saw Montreal and Buffalo bulk up in order to better physically compete with the Bruins and Leafs. Somehow, their currently being fifth in the East despite being not-that-great and then suffering all those catastrophic injuries on top of it isn’t enough for Murray, and he has to try to make Paul MacLean waste a roster spot to put this bum into the lineup five minutes a night.

I’ll remind you again that Kassian only has nine games this season in the AHL. Obviously losing a sixth-round pick next year is almost the NHL equivalent of giving up nothing, but even that’s too much. The only thing I can think is maybe Murray thought he was getting a steal by acquiring Zack Kassian from the wrong team.

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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 @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.)

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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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(Ed. note: This is a sponsored post for @67sound. 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!

The prospect of losing a defenseman of the quality of, say, I don’t know, a Chris Pronger, just as a for-instance, must be terrifying to a few GMs around the league. I say that it’s only concerning to a small number because defensemen of Chris Pronger’s quality aren’t exactly the most common sight in the NHL these days, or indeed, league history. Chris Pronger, you see, is very, very, very, veryveryvery good.

But that’s what happened to the Flyers, and it wasn’t a Pronger-quality defenseman they lost to a concussion, it was Pronger himself. Which is probably worse because that guy has a tendency to forcibly drag bad teams by the hair into Stanley Cup Finals pretty regularly. That’s how it went with the Oilers in 2006, that’s how it went with the Flyers in 2010. The 2007 Ducks, it should be noted, were a good team.

That left Paul Holmgren in a sticky situation, as did his losing Matt Carle to Tampa on a not-so-great contract that he was probably right in not attempting to match. The Flyers blue line last year, after the Pronger injury, was famously thin, and given the number of goals the team scored last season (264, third-most in the league), it must have occurred to Holmgren that he could trade from one of his positions of strength to bolster one of his positions of weakness.

And so it was that he resolved to swap out freshly-extended James van Riemsdyk, who had a disappointing season in 2011-12, for a defenseman around which he could begin rebuilding his tattered blue line. Instead of doing that, though, he traded the former No. 2 overall pick for Luke Schenn.

Right now, that decision constitutes one of the most immediately-lopsided trades in recent NHL history, potentially ahead of James Neal and Matt Niskanen going to Pittsburgh for Alex Goligoski (there is some debate because it took Neal, now a 40-goal scorer alongside Evgeni Malkin, about half a season to find his legs in the Eastern Conference). After scoring 11 goals in 43 games all of last season, van Riemsdyk now has 11 in 19, but the shocking part is that it comes with an at least semi-sustainable shooting percentage of 15.9; at least he’s not like Brad Marchand shooting in the high 30s and low 40s all season.

This is, it should be noted, quite the departure for van Riemsdyk, whose career high in three prior seasons was just 21 goals in 75 games, and really only received his six-year, $25.5 million deal on the basis of his being electrifying in the Flyers’ run to the Cup Final. But that, one supposes, is the inherent risk of trading an extremely high draft pick who is entering the prime of his career for, well, Luke Schenn.

Schenn has been, hmm, there’s got to be a word for it… terrible doesn’t cover it, nor does disappointing. Okay, I guess Schenn has been upsetting for the Flyers so far this season. It’s tough to saw what he was brought in to do, exactly, but suffice it to say he hasn’t been doing whatever that was. This was most evident when the Flyers and Maple Leafs met two weeks ago, and van Riemsdyk’s new team torched his old one 5-2, and in which he blew Schenn’s doors off to score his then-eighth of the season. You can see that pictured above.

The two teams meet again tonight and with Toronto playing as well as it has (7-3 in the last 10, comfortably in a playoff spot) and Philly currently ninth in the East with 19 points from 20 games and a minus-4 goal differential to the Leafs’ plus-9, well, you can’t exactly expect good things for the defenseman in that deal.

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(Ed. note: I haven’t written a post like this in three years but now seems as good a time as any to do it again because of you-know-what.)

The entire purpose of my entire foray into the hockey blogging world was basically to highlight all the terrible and stupid things that happen in this great sport on a yearly basis. Much of that is driven by the sport’s greatest professional organization (for better or worse (worse)), the National Hockey League, so there was usually no shortage of fodder.

And for a little while (read: two years) after I started, I would compile a list of the dumbest things that happened in the previous calendar year and make fun of them all over again. Then I stopped for no good reason other than I got lazy. Frankly, I didn’t even remember I used to do it until like two days ago. So I decided to do it again. Here are Nos. 10-6 of the worst things to happen in hockey this year, as far as I’m concerned:

Read the rest of this entry »

Hi! I’m writing these posts as part of a Write-A-Thon 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!

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.

Hi! I’m writing these posts as part of a Write-A-Thon 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!

This is something I touched on in What We Learned this week but wanted to look at a little more in-depth here: The idea that Roberto Luongo shouldn’t waive his no-trade clause to go to Toronto because of how they treat goalies there is, in a word, extraordinary.

This was the opinion put forth by Jason Botchford in this Sunday’s Vancouver Province. That, because of all the disfunction surrounding the Maple Leafs’ goaltending position, it would be a miserable time for Luongo. I know, right?

The first thing to note is that the Leafs’ pool of prospects would likely be just as helpful to the Canucks as those coming from the other rumored Luongo destination in Sunrise, Florida. Both would give Vancouver a top-line offensive pick in Nick Bjugstad or Nazem Kadri, as well as some other bits and pieces that would likely prove palatable for Mike Gillis. But from Luongo’s point of view? Yeah, going to Toronto would be a nightmare.

I mean, why would he want to go play in a hockey-crazy market where his every save will be dissected ad nauseum by fans, the overly-picky media and an active and unforgiving blogosphere? Why would he want to be somewhere that constantly reminds anyone who will listen about the size of his cap hit and how his play hasn’t been commensurate with it? On what planet would Luongo allow himself to become the scapegoat of an entire team’s lack of performance the second things go wrong?

Oh, right.

The only difference between Toronto and Vancouver, and the way they treat goaltenders, is that in Toronto, there’s very little chance indeed of actually making the playoffs and then blowing it there. The guy has already been bullied out of the job thanks to repeated hatchet jobs from the press in Vancouver, who hung all the team’s failures not only in losing the Stanley Cup to Boston, but also last year as well, directly on Luongo as though he was the one who personally saw to it that the offense scored just eight goals in a seven-game series. Fans booed him for every goal he gave up, and cheered any time he was pulled in favor of Cory Schneider.

That became a permanent thing in the playoffs. Which, by the way, saw the Canucks get bounced in five games anyway, before the media explained away all that as not being Schneider’s fault in a way they neeeeeever would have for Luongo.

So no, I don’t know if he’d be more miserable with the Leafs. At least in Toronto, if someone comes up to Luongo after the game and tries to tell him how to do his job, there’s like a 60-40 chance it’s someone who’s actually on the team’s payroll.

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