The Two-Line Pass

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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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Alexander Semin at $7 million this season is looking like a pretty good gamble for the Carolina Hurricanes, because he’s on 26 points in 24 games and really carrying the load offensively to help Eric Staal and Jiri Tlusty look good.

Alexander Semin at $7 million next season, and the one after that, and the one after that, and the one after that, and the one after that probably isn’t going to be quite as good a gamble, because the ENIGMATIC Russian forward, while very good, is also 29 years old and will be 34 when this contract expires. Apart from wondering how much of this production was the result of his playing for a contract and all that stuff after a weakish final two seasons in Washington, you also have to wonder what the actual heckaroonie Jim Rutherford is thinking with how he approaches the makeup of his roster.

Up front, he is now giving Eric Staal $8.25 million, Semin $7 million, Jordan Staal $6 million, Jeff Skinner $5.725 million, and Tuomo Ruutu $4.75 million against the cap starting next season, and all are signed through at least 2015-16. On top of that, mediocre goalie Cam Ward’s $6.3 million cap hit extends through that season as well.

What you’ll notice there is that five of the six highest-paid guys on the Hurricanes are forwards, and perhaps only Skinner is really going to be worth the cap hit he carries three years from now. Both Staals probably already aren’t. Ward (not a forward) also isn’t.

Altogether those contracts are worth a combined $38-plus million against a cap coming in at $64.3 million next year. You’ll notice, by the way, that none of these contracts begin to address Carolina’s real problem, which is that their defense isn’t very good. Joni Pitkanen and Tim Gleason, at $4.5 million and $4 million, respectively, are the highest-paid defenders on the team. The former is good but not great, and probably plays more minutes than he should because of how bad his counterparts are. The latter plays less than 20 minutes a night for a reason.

Ah, but there’s Justin Faulk and Jamie McBain to consider on the blue line, and though Faulk is the best defender on the team, McBain is also pretty good, and both are due raises from their RFA contracts in summer 2015, when all the above guys are still on the books save for Pitkanen and Tlusty, whose contracts expire at the same time. Admittedly the cap will likely have gone up by then, but Tlusty, McBain and Faulk are all likely to be due sizable raises coming off these RFA deals in which they played very well. Where does the money come from?

More immediately, though, is that Rutherford put Jussi Jokinen, one of the team’s better forwards, on waivers for reasons unbeknownst to rational thought. Sure, Jokinen’s goal and point totals aren’t great, but at just $3 million and with his underlying numbers, he’s going to be a bargain for whoever claims him by this time tomorrow. That clears out $3 million against the cap this summer, sure, but the team still has just over $9 million in space with 16 players under contract. Where do you get seven useful players for $9 million?

Those are problems good teams can worry about, one supposes, but the Hurricanes are, you’ll recall, not a good team. They’re currently ninth in the East, though only a point back of the Rangers, who are a very good team that is just underperforming significantly for reasons no one seems to understand.

It’s very difficult to wrap one’s head around why Rutherford is so intent on getting rid of useful players and also signing strange long-term deals that prevent him from adding more who will actually help his team make the playoffs for the first time in what will soon be four years. But then I haven’t been an NHL general manager since 1994.

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Not that anyone has been paying a particularly large amount of attention to the Capitals these days, for reasons that seem to me to be rather obvious, but Alex Ovechkin is shredding every defense he comes across. Which is a weird thing to type in 2013.

I guess it’s notable to say first that the Caps have won four of their last five games, but that’s largely down to the job Ovechkin is doing to put the puck in the net once again. He has, very very quietly, crept up to 31 points in 32 games, owing largely to this streak in which he’s scored seven goals and four assists in the last seven games. Even two weeks ago, the idea of Ovechkin scoring a goal a game would have seemed like a farcical pace for him to keep up for more than, say, one outing, would have seemed silly and wrong and dumb and you would have hollered at whoever wrote it. And you’d have probably been right to do so.

Despite his pedigree as being a world-class goalscorer, Ovechkin had nine goals and 20 points 25 games and looked pretty much bad a lot of the time. Mike Milbury was very upset, as you can imagine. Then, around the time Milbury had his second nationally-televised heart attack in about two weeks, Ovechkin went off.

He was held without even a shot on goal in a loss to the Hurricanes, then the streak began in earnest. During that seven-game stretch, he has piled up 35 shots, which is a good amount. Seven goals on 35 shots is, for you math majors out there, 20 percent shooting, which seems unsustainably high. But then you gotta consider that before that he had nine on 101, which is only like 9 percent, so maybe there’s some middle ground to find there. Interestingly, Ovechkin’s career shooting percentage is only 12, which surprised me, but then you gotta figure he’s closing in on 3,000 career shots in eight seasons, and has led the league in that category in all but one of them, despite the fact that his 50-goal days seem long over.

It’s still tough to imagine Ovechkin magically challenging Steven Stamkos or even James Neal for annual goal totals, but he’s currently tied for sixth in the league and looks to be on a bit of an upswing.

We’ll see how long it lasts, and certainly it can’t go forever, but for right now, it’s lazy, dumb, not focused on hockey Alex Ovechkin who is laughing and feeling good, and Milbury is probably screaming at some 5-year-old child who lost his mommy in a suburban Boston grocery store. No hustle outta that kid.

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Yesterday’s Bruins/Capitals game was a very interesting contest for a couple reasons. First, it was a chance to the Caps to prove they are at least a half-decent team (they aren’t), but moreover it was perhaps the first in a long line of impressive wins by Boston, which is for my money the best team in the East on paper.

The Bruins physically intimidated, beat up, and most importantly crumpled the Caps up like tissue paper en route to a dominant 4-1 win, and Washington didn’t like it one little bit.

I don’t know what they thought they might see when they went into TD Garden, but the sight of a team with the third-most fighting majors in the league this season, with four guys who have engaged in three or more scraps, should have been enough for the Caps to say to themselves, “Well, we have approximately no actual fighters in the lineup, so maybe we just try to stick to our game so we don’t get the absolute Christ beat out of us.” It didn’t happen that way, which should have come as a surprise to no one considering the Bruins just lost to this same not-good team in overtime not that long ago.

The festivities really and truly began when Alex Ovechkin crosschecked Brad Marchand in a way that one of the dirtiest players in the NHL didn’t particularly care for. Obviously, Ovechkin wasn’t about to drop the gloves with anyone for any reason, so Marchand went around looking for someone else to oblige him. Mike Ribeiro stepped up to the plate for reasons I still don’t remotely understand (it was his first career fight) and got fed a number of decent shots.

Then Matt Hendricks and Nathan Horton fought when the former more or less jumped the latter off a draw, and Horton left the ice bleeding. Boston didn’t like that, so a little later on, Shawn Thornton tried to get Hendricks to answer, and the Capitals’ one actual kind-of fighter wisely demurred. But when Adam McQuaid got involved, he took that opportunity instead and got pounded for his efforts. Boston ended up winning 4-1, because of course they did, and the Caps weren’t feeling too good about any of it after the game.

There was a lot of talk about what a “joke” it all was, and how the Caps shouldn’t have allowed themselves to stoop to Boston’s level in this way. I don’t know about the joke part; you don’t go into Boston and expect a gentlemanly game free of checking, especially if you’re going to throw around crosschecks like Ovechkin did, and you sure don’t jump one of the team’s better goalscorers in an effort to swing some momentum back your team’s way. What did they expect to happen? Thornton wasn’t about to challenge him to pistols at dawn; don’t walk down that side of the street if you don’t want to get pulled into a dark alley and mugged.

Even after this, the Caps kind of acted like babies, with both Ribeiro and Hendricks getting into it verbally with fans who taunted them, and I guess that kind of underscores just how frustrating yesterday was for a team everyone thought would be much better than it is.

But this is what the Bruins do. This is what they’ve done for years. You kind of can’t be shocked when one of them tries to hit your teammate in the face at this point. You really can’t be mad about it. But I guess when you’re 14th in the East, you have a lot to be mad about in general.

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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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(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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You knew it would come to this eventually. Owners, let’s say the ones in small markets where they have a tenuous grasp on a small and already-kind-of-disinterested fanbase, are starting to get a little edgy about the whole work stoppage thing lasting too much longer than it already has.

From Bruce Garrioch (I know, I know):

“My guess is you’ve got about 10 teams that are pretty nervous right now,” said a league insider. “But (Bettman) has the power of the executive committee behind him.”

That’s where the conversation begins and ends. The league has 30 owners, and one-third of them are “pretty nervous” about the lockout.

Again, it’s very easy to guess that those owners aren’t exactly the league’s money-making engines and therefore their opinion matters almost exactly squat. Now, Garrioch characterizes some owners whose teams very likely do manage to turn a profit as being among those who want this lockout ended, and I thought that was interesting. Geoffrey Molson, for instance, is termed a “dove,” and that’s kind of understandable. A Habs game is a license to print money. The same is true of Terry Pegula, who has all the money he could ever need (he’s the fourth-richest NHL owner, and soon to be the third since the Kings’ Phil Anschutz, who’s No. 1, is selling), and very legitimately seems to just love hockey.

But Garrioch also says that other owners who might be getting edgy are the Rangers’ James Dolan, who runs Madison Square Garden, and the Flyers’ Ed Snider, who runs Comcast. Now maybe his league insider told him that specifically, and Dolan has stated in the past that he doesn’t want a lockout but he’s also not exactly sweating the Rangers’ revenue given the number of other events he could host at MSG if he so desired. But really, we’re supposed to believe Ed Snider is so consumed of his desire to win a Stanley Cup that he’s willing to give the players what they want?

These guys have often been counted among the true hawks on the Board of Governors, alongside bloodthirsty warmongers like Boston’s Jeremy Jacobs, Calgary’s Murray Edwards and Washington’s Ted Leonsis, who would stop at nothing to fracture the union, put it back together, then shatter it again. I sincerely doubt that a missed preseason and two weeks of canceled dates — not even canceled games! — would be enough to move the needle for two of the league’s best-known, revenue-generatingest owners. Maybe you don’t think they’d have the power to pull one of their counterparts aside and say, “Let’s cut the crap or we’re gonna rain hell on you.” They’re not Nashville and they’re not Florida. They have clout, and they wouldn’t remotely be afraid to use it.

It’s far more likely that the guys nervously adjusting their ties and tugging at the collars are the ones whose teams lose money anyway, but you could have guessed that at the start.

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!

The Washington Capitals announced today that in addition to sending a number of their very good young prospects down to play in Hershey of the AHL — including Braden Holtby, Dmitry Orlov, Stanislav Galiev, and maybe one or two other guys I’m forgetting — they would also be sending their coach.

Yeah, I don’t know how or why, but Adam Oates will be the co-coach of the Hershey Bears for the duration of the lockout. Well, I guess the why part is easy enough to explain. Oates had been an NHL assistant for the last three seasons, including two in Tampa (where he worked a lot with Steven Stamkos and probably helped him become the player that’s going to be scoring 60 for a while) and last season in New Jersey. But he hasn’t been a head coach at any level.

Thus, this gives him a bit of experience where the stakes aren’t necessarily high to get on guys who half-ass it on the backcheck and generally learn a little bit more about being a head coach that he would sitting in his office fooling around with MSPaint all day. (I assume the Caps aren’t up on Macs.) Also helps the Caps players who will be playing for him to get a jump on learning his new systems, of which there will likely be many. Probably also doesn’t hurt to be running the same system at all levels of your organization.

But the how, I guess, is less clear. I mean I guess there’s nothing in the rules that says an NHL head coach can’t ride the bus if he so chooses. And what’s really crazy, and being reported considerably less is this whole thing:

Washington assistant coaches Calle Johansson, Tim Hunter, Blaine Forsythe, along with goaltending coaches Dave Prior and Olie Kolzig, will also be involved with Hershey to varying degrees while the NHL season is on hold. Some may assist with the organization’s ECHL affiliate, the Reading Royals, as well.

Man. That’s going to be very good for development of players throughout Washington’s system.

So maybe the real question is why every NHL team, especially those for which their farm team is a short drive away, isn’t doing exactly this. Imagine Danny Bylsma yelling at a ref in Wilkes-Barre? Or Claude Julien drawing up defensive schemes in Providence? Or John Tortorella swearing up a storm over questions he doesn’t like in Connecticut Whale pressers? That would be awesome.

This is something Caps and Bears fans alike should be looking forward to. The former because it will give them and the team’s players a bit of a preview of how they can expect things to go. The latter because, until the NHL starts up again, the power play is going to run at about 40 percent.

The Lead

(I know, I know. Shut up.)

Derek Boogaard hadn’t scored a goal since January 7, 2006.

Four years, 10 months and three days later, he scored again, taking the puck coast to coast and rifling a slapshot past Michal Neuvirth to put the Rangers up 3-2 on the Capitals midway through the second period.

Since then, a new president got elected and already got halfway through his first term. There have been three Olympic Games. Conan O’Brien hosted three different late night talk shows. Alex Tanguay and Olli Jokinen played for the Flames twice. The Tampa Bay Lightning went through three owners, four coaches and four GMs. Twitter started existing, then became stupid. Some idiot gave Derek Boogaard four years at $1.625 million per. And so forth.

In scoring, he snapped a 235-game streak without a goal. The longest active streak in the league. And it came unassisted. None of the above was in any way a typo.

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The Lead

Alexander Ovechkin has 46 goals and 58 assists in 69 games. He’s two points out of the league lead despite having played 10 fewer games than Henrik Sedin, who’s out in front. He’s also a goal back of Sid Crosby in the Rocket Richard race despite eight fewer games played. He’s the league leader at plus-42. He leads the league in shots by a healthy margin. He devours minutes.

And he’s not the Capitals’ MVP.

Washington’s most valuable player, rather, is Nicklas Backstrom, who will likely break 100 points for the first time in his career over Washington’s remaining three games. While Ovechkin is off rifling goal after terrifying goal past opposing goalies (and getting himself suspended), Backstrom is doing everything else that makes the Caps such an offensive juggernaut.

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