Here in Chicago, we usually don’t get much of a spring. Even with the temperate/weak-ass winter we had this time around, the April-May stretch bounces between glimpses of actual summer and then visions of November. Usually in this place it’s just cool and gray until somewhere around Memorial Day, and then the next day is gorgeous and it’s summer/construction. We don’t slowly ramp up to summer. It just arrives like Monty Python’s foot.
So rites of spring, we don’t really recognize them. We see leaves on trees but are suspicious. Our allergies kick up at various times, so it’s not much of an indicator either. We have to make up our own. The ivy showing up on the outfield wall at Wrigley. Streetfests and outdoor music festivals start releasing their schedules and tickets go on sale. Sadly, shootings go up, if it’s even possible at this point.
And oh yeah, the St. Louis Blues reveal that nothing has changed, and they’re still a collection of dumbasses trying to play a game the sport has long ago left behind.
I suppose one of the main drawing points to another Penguins-Capitals series was that it was always likely to generate controversy, given how often these two teams have met, how hyped it’s been, and how the fanbases feel about each other. Make no mistake, a lot of the furor over Niskanen-Crosby: In Your House is one set of fans/media reacting to the other and then ratcheting up over reactions to that.
This isn’t just about this particular incident, and we’ll get to the others. As far as this one, I’m just not buying Eddie Plugs’s or any Caps fan/coach’s excuse on it, and it isn’t just about this one in particular. Yes, things happen fast on the ice. Why we love it. But the reason those dudes are out there and we’re sitting here is because they have the reaction time to deal with how fast things happen out there.
Sure, it happens too fast for Niskanen to plan it all and consider the consequences and the particular angle he’d like to take to Crosby’s face. But don’t tell me after watching him follow-through on it he didn’t see a window to Crosby’s head and take it. I just don’t buy anything else. And Niskanen’s previous behavior in this series does him no favors either.
You can see just how weird hockey is with the two narratives going around right now. Let’s follow them.
This weekend, one team came out of the gate roaring in a playoff game. They first 16 shots at the opposing goalie, and only give up five. But the opposing goalie has an answer for everything, and then their own goalie suddenly forgets how his limbs work for just one period. Suddenly, they’re in crisis.
Another team comes out roaring, also at home. They outshoot their opponent 29-14 in the first 40 minutes of their game. And while the opposing goalie was good, they found a way to get one goal in their period of pure dominance, and that’s the difference.
And coming out of those games, the Capitals are doing it all again and are an utter mess, whereas the Predators are sitting in the proverbial catbird seat. And really, the only difference between the two was that Cody McLeod was able to corral a puck in the air and a bounce off the outside of the net, and the Capitals got no such bounce.
As much as it’s been built up, even by just me, certainly the first round of Caps-Penguins didn’t disappoint. It was just about as fast as you could hope, close, with the biggest names stepping to the fore. And yes, I mean Nick Bonino, of course.
In truth, the Caps were pretty much all over the Penguins for most of the game, kicking them around in shots and possession, the latter to the tune of a 65% adjusted Corsi-share. The Caps can get push from all three pairings from Carlson, ShattenKevin, Orlov, and even Schmidt. The Pens aren’t short of go even without Letang with Hainsey, Schultz, and Daley but it’s just not the quality of what Washington is rolling. And you don’t want to be in a place where you really have to depend on Schultz and Daley, however good they’ve looked in black and gold.
The West kicks off tonight, so let’s get the previews done before we settle in for what really is shaping up as a pretty intriguing second round (except for Sens-Rangers, and that has Erik Karlsson).
HOLY FUCKING SHIT CAPITALS-PENGUINS!!!
Look, any hockey fan worth his or her salt has known this was going to happen in the second round and that it’s essentially the Stanley Cup Final. Barring some injury weirdness or Henrik Lundqvist going Fantastic Four in net or something equally unpredictable, either of these teams is going to annihilate the Rangers or Senators. These are the two best teams in the NHL by some distance. This is the Steamboat-Macho Man to the Final’s Hogan-Andre The Giant. I doubt we’ll remember the Final as much as we’ll remember what might happen here. Instead of rolling our eyes at the same matchup for the second year in a row and our exhaustion of the NHL trying to force this down our throats for years before both teams were ready to provide classic series years in a row, we should just be anxious to watch the best the sport is going to offer.
It’s our post-mortem podcast. A bit shorthanded as Slak and Matt are on assignment, so Feather and I go through the Hawks’ crash out, the comments coming out of it, the firing of Mike Kitchen and Ted Dent, and what may come this summer. It’s action packed!
It won’t for most Hawks fans, as we know that the majority of the fanbase heads over to Wrigley once the Hawks are done (and a few lost and desperate souls head to Comiskey, which they should because the food and beer is so much better), but the NHL playoffs do continue once they’re out of it. And they kick off tomorrow night in the West, before we get to what will be the main event on Thursday in the East. And we don’t have much else to do, so let’s preview both series.
Predators vs. Blues
This is probably too distasteful for most Hawks fans, but I don’t really have any bile for the Predators. I think you all know how I feel about the Blues. Luckily, I think the latter is up against it.
We have our first shot fired in what will apparently be Hawks-acalypse ’17. Today Mike Kitchen was fired as assistant coach, and it’s kind of amazing he was still around to be fired. But we’ll get to that. There are a lot of angles that would be a ton of fun to speculate on from this and could turn out to be utter horseshit. But we’re going to do it anyway because…FUN!
First off, I’m dying to know whose decision this actually was. There’s almost no way it was Quenneville’s, because Kitchen has been an extension of Q his entire career. It’s hard to believe that Kitchen could have been doing anything that drastically different this year than he ever has, and even Q would have to recognize the historic and epic failure of the penalty kill in the season’s first month was A. a perfect storm of events and B. really had no bearing on their playoff ouster.
So did Stan Bowman fire Kitchen himself? Or did he make Q do it? How much of a fight did that cause? Oh god just hook it to my veins!
It will be the longest summer for the Hawks since 2008. Even when they bit it in the first round in ’11, ’12, and last year, they at least made it to the last week of April. They barely cleared Tax Day this time.
So there’s going to be plenty of time for the Hawks to diagnose their issues and then prescribe what they want to do about it. Fifth Feather was correct last night, in that you can’t make rash decisions on a small set of games. Let’s go back to 2012. You actually forget how good that team was in the regular season, the second half without Toews. They finished with 101 points, and after that nine-game losing streak that nearly killed us all, they actually went 16-5-4 with Patrick Kane as the #1 center.
But they got goalie’d by Mike Smith, Toews wasn’t in any condition to be playing, and Crawford threw up all over himself. You’ll recall after that series there were plenty of calls for heads to roll, trade Kane for Ryan Miller, and how the 2010 Cup was a total fluke. You’ll also recall that this is when the rumors of Q and Stan Bowman not working well together and Q batting his eyes to Marc Bergevin in Montreal started to swirl. This supposedly caused McDonough to sort it all out, which led to Mike Haviland being turfed as an assistant and the hiring of Jamie Kompon, whatever that did for you.
McClure’s recipe to beat the Blackhawks in the post-season remains undefeated – Either control 55% of the play or have your goalie stop at least 95% of the shots he faces. For the Predators, Pekka Rinne stopped 98% of the shots thrown his direction. That is the biggest reason for the Hawks season ending in 4 games and why this was their worst/shortest playoff appearance in this era.
While the broadcast booth, head coach and talking heads tried to downplay the lack of Hasek-like saves from Rinne in this series, he still stopped nearly every shot thrown his direction. And that’s not something you could say in his previous two appearances against the Blackhawks in the playoffs.
Surely, a goal like this was the result of hard work, determination, guts, grit, blah, blah…
Rinne was excellent in this series, stopping every shot he needed to. That was the biggest difference. Pure and simple.
On the other side, Corey Crawford was nearly as good. The problem was his team only scored 3 goals in 4 games and only one in 5-on-5 play. Crawford kept the Hawks in the game, once again, while Nashville teed off in the first period looking to end it early. Of course, his team couldn’t get anything past Rinne.
Ok, fine. Let’s get to it.
–The Predators second goal was the perfect microcosm of this forgettable series. The Hawks have a dominating shift where the Predators couldn’t touch the puck for a solid minute. Rinne makes a couple key stops; Viktor Arvidsson gets sprung on a break because the Hawks were gassed at the end of a shift, he finds the trailing Colton Sissons while Brent Seabrook somehow loses his stick. Crawford makes a terrific save, doesn’t know where the puck is, feels it hit his arm and then reacts by throwing it into the empty net.
With ten minutes left in the third and a two goal deficit, that was pretty much it for the Hawks.
What a fun series.
I’m not sure there’s really anything else to say about this game. It went just like the other three. The Hawks looked good for stretches; Nashville looked better and every time the Hawks looked like they may score, Rinne made a save. Then Nashville would come down and score off a shot that deflected off three sets of blades, a stick, a visor and the corpse of Johnny Cash.
–It would’ve been nice to see Kempny’s speed in a series like this. It would’ve been even better if he didn’t get his first sniff in an elimination game on the road. Tonight, Kempny created chances in the offensive end with his feet by breaking through Nashville’s neutral zone trap a few times. Alas, his usage at the end of the season made it impossible to play him more than 8 minutes he got tonight as he would’ve been prone to a few more mistakes as the ice time increased.
To be fair, though, Johnny Oduya played his best game of the series but that’s after three games where he was abysmal.
–How do I even begin to try and explain how or why Nashville looked so much faster than the Hawks over the course of these 4 games? I really can’t. After the last couple years where the Hawks clearly were getting out skated by teams (Really, I thought the 2015 series against Nashville looked just as heavily tilted towards the Predators at times but the Hawks somehow managed to win 4 games. Because hockey and they wanted it more or something like that), I thought they addressed this issue heading into the season.
Surely, 109 points and their place in the standings is a good indicator they were on the right track. Schmaltz, Hartman and Hero were all younger, quicker and faster than Andrew Ladd, Tomas Fleischmann and Dale Weise. Brian Campbell, Kempny and (bad) Oduya were all upgrades over Omer Svedberg and Erik Gustafsson.
The more I think about it, I’m leaning heavily in the direction that the Hawks really emptied their tanks chasing this division title back in February and March. When it came to going to the reserves here in April, they had nothing left.
We discussed this on the podcast quite a bit but this was the first time in the Quenneville era the Hawks kept the pedal to the metal in the final couple months of the regular season. It meant they won the division and clinched home ice throughout but that doesn’t do a whole lot of good when you only muster 3 goals in 4 games of the playoffs.
This doesn’t mean they should’ve scratched Kane, Toews or Keith for games in February like they’re the San Antonio Spurs but maybe they didn’t have to go for broke every game during that stretch. Or maybe they shouldn’t have been playing Kane or Toews for 20+ minutes a night when they didn’t have to.
–As for what’s ahead, we have plenty of time to pontificate about the future of this roster. There are some areas that are in need of an upgrade but they certainly don’t need any kind of major overhaul. It’s very easy to overreact after a series like this because it all looked so terrible. You only needed to watch five minutes of the post-game show to know that Jamal Mayers should be allowed nowhere near hockey personnel decisions. And I’m sure his opinion aligns with 99% of the CSN viewing audience.
Obviously, the hard cap will force some key changes to be made but that’s not anything new. If there are issues taking place behind the scenes, (i.e. an LA/Sutter situation) that changes the dynamic of what may happen but there’s no inclination of something like that at this moment.
I’m not nearly as pessimistic as Sam and don’t believe any windows have been shut permanently. All you have to do is look at teams like Anaheim, Nashville, San Jose, or Pittsburgh as teams of recent vintage whose proverbial window was closed and yet, they’re all still playing with a real shot at winning it all this year. Calgary was some scary, young fast team that lasted as long as the Hawks and were ousted by a team with Kevin Bieksa playing big minutes. Edmonton will most assuredly fuck up whatever they have plenty of times in the coming seasons. Things aren’t as bad as they may seem right now.
Hockey will continue to be the most weird, unpredictable sport from year to year. That you can bet on.
–Thanks to everyone for reading, listening and sending in your questions this year. Hard to believe we’ve been doing this for 9 years now. I’ve mentioned this before but I thought this season (at least the regular season) was probably the most fun since 2013. Of course, the playoffs were as miserable as all of last season but at least the Hawks were nice enough to end it as quickly as they could.
It goes without saying that we’ll still be around in the months ahead. Free agency and the draft will be here before we know it. For the Hawks, it shaping up to be a pretty active time.
