The Two-Line Pass

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I figured by now that I would be able to write a quick little blog about whatever trade had happened by noon or so, and get the hell outta here for the day and just check my phone a bunch. As you know by now, no dice.

As of 12:19 p.m. Eastern, there have been no trades. Not one. Not a single friggin’ trade. There’s nothing to analyze. Not that it’s stopped TSN from analyzing what might happen, because TSN is the worst.

There was a thing James Duthie said earlier in the day about how the average first trade in the last few years takes place around 10:25 a.m. or so. This did nothing to prevent his show from starting at 8 a.m., and they mostly talked about nothing for the two and a half hours before most even anticipated anything happening. Which tells you everything you need to know about this kind of crap coverage.

So here’s what I’m going to do: I’m just going to write what happens on TSN until I want to kill myself, then I’m going to stop. Here goes nothing.

They’re talking about the Canucks. And that means they’re talking about Roberto Luongo. Did you know he’s on the block? James Duthie just said Mike Gillis has been one of the “more busier” GMs on deadline day, so now there is an in-depth discussion of how he hasn’t called anyone and no one has really called him today. Farhan Lalji with the big scoop that Luongo is in the building for practice, because, you know, the team scheduled practice.

“We have a trade, and… kind of,” Gord Miller intones with something resembling enthusiasm for reasons I think I’ll never understand. It’s a minor-league deal: Max Sauve from Boston to Chicago for Rob Flick. If you’ve heard of them, get a life. “I don’t know that it’s worth analyzing,” Duthie says. He’s right. On Twitter, though, Darren Dreger gave this one four exclamation points.

More Canucks talk. Forward depth is an issue, they say, because everyone’s injured. Booth, Kesler, that guy I forget already. And now they’re talking about the Zack Kassian trade and how successful it wasn’t. Oh god it’s Pierre McGuire. This might be a very short post. After he talks about the Canucks’ power play issues, talk circles back to Luongo. He has a “gargantuan contract.” Good analysis here. Will there be a compliance buyout? Oh man this is rough.

Now they’re going to Ryane Clowe on the phone. He’s got nothinge to saye. Duthie asks if it’s hard to go to a team “you’ve been trained to hate” which is just about the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. Clowe isn’t sure why he doesn’t have more than no goals this season. “That happens sometimes,” he says. I mean I guess so, dude.

They go to commercial just as my desire to blow my brains out reaches its apex, but not before playing some hideous song on the way out. I’m not doing this any more.

But here’s the thing, right? This is literally all this show has been for four and a half hours at this point. I think TSN should mail checks to everyone (like me) dumb enough to watch this for so long. I have so much more I could have been doing with my life than seeing someone cut to Mike Milbury and Keith Jones like their opinions on who should go where, or anything really, are worth literally even hearing at this point. How do you get Milbury on TV during trade deadline day and not at least make fun of him for the Yashin thing. Like, that’s gotta be your logical bare minimum, right? Further proof that this show should be nuked from orbit.

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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.)

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!

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: 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:

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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.

Don’t forget to donate to 826 Boston. Thanks again.

Here’s a story you will read in every Canadian newspaper tomorrow.

VANCOUVER — On the game’s biggest stage, and in the most important game of his life, Roberto Luongo ____________ (answered his critics/imploded horribly), spilling thousands of Vancouver fans into the street in paroxysms of ____________ (sheer joy/blinding rage).

Luongo, who in many ways was the crux of the series’ bizarre and numerous turning points, played ____________ (extremely well/mind-bendingly poorly) in allowing ____________ (0/12) goals and turning aside ____________ (14/three) shots in ____________ (60/eight) minutes of action.

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The Lead

If past performance is indicative of future results, and we have at no point in the history of performance-to-result comparison been given any reason to find that this is not the case, then Antti Niemi is going to concede roughly 213 goals on 214 shots in the next game and Chicago will lose and therefore it will be all Niemi’s fault.

Hell they talked about it at length on Versus tonight so it must be true.

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The Lead

The Edmonton Oilers have won three straight games.

I’ll say that again: the Edmonton Oilers have won three straight games. Against NHL teams.

And not just any NHL teams either, if that’s what you’re thinking. They’ve beaten the Sharks, Red Wings and now the Canucks. From last Friday until right this very minute, the Oilers have picked up literally 1/8th of their entire win total.

I don’t know why this is happening. Every day, another Oiler seems to come down with some sort of crazy injury — I think I read Andrew Cogliano contracted a case of Fisherman’s Madness or something — and another tragedy, beyond even living in Edmonton, befalls the squad itself. Today’s hysterical mishap saw Devan Dubnyk (who has a girl’s name) get an “infectious gastrointestinal disorder” which in my medical opinion basically means his butt is infected.

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The Lead

And you thought the circus wouldn’t be showing up at GM Place for another few weeks when the Olympics came to town and “circus” had the word “media” in front of it.

Saturday night brought us Lasergate, which sounds like some sort of bad Jean-Claude Van Damme straight-to-DVD sci-fi movie, but it was, instead, some Canucks fan attempting to shine a laser pointer into Miikka Kiprusoff’s eyes during play and generally making everyone upset.

It continued tonight, only nobody used any Nikola Tesla-type inventions. Instead, it was the referees who performed in Ring 2 of this particular three-ring fiasco. The entire third period of what had been a good, hard-fought game between the Canucks and Predators, was turned into a joke by Stephane Auger and Dennis LaRuse, who, you may remember, screwed the Red Wings earlier this year.

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The Lead

Andy Murray knows a lot about hockey. You can go ahead and ask him about that sometime.

Maybe you haven’t heard about how Andy Murray gets things done. Getting a team with a ludicrous amount of injuries to key players into the playoffs last year? Yeah, that’s him.

Andy Murray is a brilliant coach. Know how he keeps his guys motivated? He tells them they suck. Really. He makes up brilliant sayings all the time, like, “Arrogance breeds complacency and complacency means you are going backwards.” Don’t want that, can’t have that. Not on this Blues team.

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The Lead

Sentence I’d never thought I’d type ever: “Andrew Raycroft was considerably better than Roberto Luongo tonight.”

Indeed, it was that Raycroft made 11 saves on 12 shots, while Luongo made eight on the same number. Really. I don’t want to start making wild assumptions here, just three games into the season, but there’s got to be something seriously wrong, physically, with Bobby Lou (more like Bobby Loo, and that’s a joke for all my British readers), right?

He might have been helpless on the goal from Antoine Vermette, and it looked like one of his defenseman got a piece of the Rusty Klesla marker, but the goals from Kristian Huselius and Nikita Filatov? Yeah, he’s gotta get those. The Huselius goal especially was just ugly. An unscreened wrister from the circle, no matter how hard, shouldn’t be beating Roberto freaking Luongo middle glove. It should be a physical impossibility. He barely even reacted as it rocketed past him.

Luongo just doesn’t seem himself, as the Raycroftian stat line this season more or less bares out. Granted, the defense hasn’t been helping him much, and his run support to this point has been virtually non-existent, but this is the guy Hockey Canada wants repping the country on its home turf come the Olympics? The way he’s playing right now, Belarus would give them a game (and by that I mean lose 11-1, not 11-0).

Hockey Canada should really consider having a look at Steve Mason, the kid at the other end of the ice who made a number of spectacular saves and isn’t making Andrew Raycroft appear to be a viable option as a starter. At least he couldn’t be any worse than this Luongo joker.

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