Hockey

Game #57 – Hawks vs. Canucks: Lineups & How They Were Built

By Sam Fels 935 0

Hawks

Notes: We’re assuming this bullshit with Strome is over after one game and he’ll slot back in for a game the Hawks simply have to have. Then again, they had to have last night and here we are. Fuck, maybe he’ll even be put back at center which is, y’know, the position he plays!…It’s funny that the same day the Sun-Times wrote an article about how Dach has earned Colliton’s trust, his line continues to get clocked possession-wise as Tippett was able to get Draisaitl out against him a ton. That’s no knock on Dach (HA!), because he’s a goddamn teenager and the learning curve is steep. It’s a knock on Colliton and what he’s looking for…

Canucks

Notes: Pretty long injury list for the Canucks, as Boeser won’t make the bell tonight along with other depth forwards. But then McDavid not playing didn’t fucking matter, so whatever…Miller is on a real heater right now, with 20 points in his last 17 games and a strong case for the Selke…Horvat has killed the Hawks lately, with six points against them in the last five games between the teams…

Baseball

There Is No Perfect Playoff System

By Sam Fels 1429 0

I, much like you, made that sound that comes when you surprisingly belch up some vomit and have to swallow it back down when I saw the proposal for a new playoff system in MLB. It’s been obvious for a while that Rob Manfred doesn’t even like baseball, or if he does he doesn’t have any clue on how to make it better and more attractive to a new generation. So we’ll just turn it into The Bachelor or something? Who fucking knows. The more I think about it the more baseball is headed the way of horse racing, and it’ll be me and a bunch of altacockers watching it praying we can make it back to the car before shitting ourselves before too long.

When stuff like this comes out, and it’s been this way for longer than I’d care to think about, we all just dismiss it as “cash grab.” Because we know that’s Manfred’s job, to make the owners more and more money. And more playoff games mean more ratings for TV networks which means better ad rates and you know how the whole cycle goes. I mean, at some point there are so many playoff games they cease to be unique anymore and maybe ratings would flatten out but I guess we’re a long way off from that.

I don’t know if I’m getting my anarchist clothing on and preparing my bow but it does feel like the more we dismiss and acquiesce the more the things we love are altered or mutated beyond recognition and we’re the only ones who suffer. And yet it feels like there’s little we can do other than stop watching and/or caring, and again, we’re the only ones who get punished in that scenario. The owners and Manfred are unlikely to notice we’re gone. I doubt there will be a baseball revolution/uprising anytime soon. If there is, I have a whole list of people I’d sentence to death by exile.

Playoff expansion is all about keeping more fans of more teams interested throughout a regular season that feels too long at times. It’s here that many have pointed out you wouldn’t have so many teams drawing flies and the generally lost and bewildered only if you didn’t have so many bottoming out in a “rebuild,” most of which never actually top out either. Perhaps the introduction of a salary floor not all that far from the luxury tax would keep more teams competitive for the playoff spots you already have cut out? I guess I shouldn’t sit on a hot stove waiting for that to happen, though it feels like that should be one of the first bullet points from the MLBPA in new CBA negotiations. I guess the best I can hope for there is that Tony Clark can spell “salary floor.”

None of this fixes what’s really wrong with baseball, and even the playoff system. And I don’t know that there’s a solution to any of it. From where I sit, here are the problems:

  1. Wildcards are being competed for by teams with wildly different schedules, which isn’t fair.
  2. Baseball doesn’t really lend itself greatly to playoffs?

I’ll deal with the first and see if I’m even capable of dealing with the second later. Right now, a system that would be as near as perfect as you could get would just be the three division winners. Because they would really only be competing against teams playing the same schedule, and hence we get a fair idea of who was the “best” out of that. There’s no sliding records or whatever. Everyone in the Central played everyone else in the Central 19 times, and everyone else in the NL six or seven. Sure, there’s a little variance with these “natural interleague rivals” but I’m not going to kick a fuss over one or two games.

But even that wouldn’t completely work, if you were to give a bye to the team with the best record. Because they’ll have achieved that record playing a wildly different schedule than the other two teams, so we don’t have any idea how they compare really. And the six or seven games they had against each other wouldn’t be enough of a sample.

And of course, that wouldn’t be enough playoff teams to suit everyone. We’re not going back to four divisions and only the winners move on to the postseason, even if that makes the most sense.

I would say that expansion to 32 teams, which also seems inevitable somewhere around here, would allow for the opportunity for either eight divisions of four with only the winners moving on, or the truly revolutionary and close-to-my-heart tiered leagues of 16 teams with promotion and relegation. Fuck, in a vacuum, cutting the minor leagues loose and making them just lower league baseball could even add to this, where Des Moines and Charlotte could actually play their way into MLB II or whatever and compete with Pittsburgh and Detroit or whatever. But that’s about as galaxy-brained as it gets. Even though the Premier League’s popularity continues to grow and no one here is suggesting they change their ways.

But MLB won’t go for the eight-division look because someone will complain about the likelihood of one or two divisions being so much weaker than the others. This is what happened in the NHL. You’ll recall the current format was just supposed to be four divisions with no conferences, and four teams from each would make the playoff and then the four winners from there would be re-seeded for the semifinals. It sounded great, kept teams competing for things while playing the same schedule, and would have been at least unique. It was the players who balked, with the above reasoning. Which gave us this dumbass wildcard system.

What promotion/relegation fans are really trying to get at is keeping teams at every point in the standings competing for something. And I guess this is what this proposed MLB system takes a swipe at. Teams at the top are haggling over the bye, teams in the middle trying to get in. It doesn’t do anything for the bottom, which is the real problem, but I’ll let go of that dream. Right now, once the Dodgers get 10 games up on the Padres by what, May 1st, there really isn’t much for them to play for. Sure, the winner of the coin flip, which went excellently for them last year. But getting to miss a whole round probably has more advantage.

This always wades back into the meaning of the regular season, but that gets harder to define. When we had only four playoff teams, what did the regular season mean to teams in third through seventh? For every Braves-Giants ’92 epic, there were probably five pennant races that never actually developed as some 94-win team won by eight games and everyone knew it was over somewhere in August. Is that better? Maybe, I’m not sure either way.

If you’re like me and trying to figure out how to get the soccer model into American sports, essentially you need to keep in mind that along with avoiding relegation there’s “mid-card belts.” Like Champions League or Europa League places. As well as separate cup competitions. American sports simply don’t have these. Which is something the NBA is taking a look at, but the cup competitions don’t really work without the lower league teams competing. Now, let college teams and D-League teams take their shot and we might have something. Either way, it’s hard to juice the middle of the standings here. This is their attempt, as wrong as it may feel.

And really, we know that as dramatic as they can be, playoffs in baseball are weird. It’s kind of a different game than what we see in the regular season. Some sports lend themselves to that kind of thing or feel. I would say that hockey and basketball, but baseball and soccer don’t. It’s just the nature of the games. There’s no getting rid of them of course, but it’s not really the best way to determine a champion.

Baseball is all about how you negotiate so many damn games over six months and the accumulation of wins over that stretch. You can’t even use the same lineup every time, as you have to change pitchers. And then all of the sudden we flip a switch and one game matters over all, just over 0.5% of what you just played. It’s kind of injected drama and meaning.

Perhaps actual swift marketing men who loved the game could find a way to make the regular season more meaningful to people. Perhaps every sport could do more to make winning the regular season championship, the best test we have as flawed as it is, something to be celebrated. To separate it from the playoff champion. That’s beyond me, but until we do that, I don’t think anything is going to work perfectly.

This proposed system still sucks, though.

Hockey

Game #56 – Hawks vs. Oilers Spotlight: Leon Draisaitl’s Funny Numbers

By Sam Fels 1314 0

There’s a statistical quirk to Leon Draisaitl’s league-leading points-total (85). The German has a chance to be the first player to lead the league in scoring while being a minus-player, as he’s currently -11, since Wayne Gretzky pulled it off 28 years ago with the Kings. Does it mean anything? No, probably not, but it’s fun to think about. And it’s fun to dig deeper into.

First off, Draisaitl’s -11 is something of a false flag. The Oilers have scored 51 goals at even-strength when Leon The Ladies Man has been on the ice, and given up 53. He’s had the misfortune of being on the ice for eight shorthanded goals against, which is just kind of the worst luck possible. No one would pin that on a specific player, but certain bad bounces or misplays or a lack of saves.

Still, it’s hard to believe that the Oilers can’t even do better than break even when Draisaitl or even Connor McDavid are on the ice, which gives you some indication of just how big of a talent drop-off there is from them to the rest of the Oilers. For comparison’s sake, both McDavid and Draisaitl are in the top-ten for the amount of goals scored at evens when they’re on the ice, but they’re the only ones who don’t have a significantly positive goals-percentage for that work (Panarin leads with a 59-31 split).

It’s easy to point to the .897 SV% the Oilers get when Draisaitl is on the ice and say that’s the culprit right there. And it sure explains most of it. And if you dip into expected-goals, trying to measure the kinds of chances they’re producing, Draisaitl is again in the top-ten. But he’s also in the bottom-five in expected goals against, which has nothing to do with his goalies (so’s Patrick Kane, in case you want to detect a pattern). Now, you’d probably say the Oilers would be content just trading chances when Draisaitl and/or McDavid are on the ice, given that they’re always more likely to bury more of them than the opposition. But that hasn’t really happened, as we’ve seen, thanks to their goaltending. Both McDavid and Draisaitl have seen more pucks go into the net than they “should” have, given the expected numbers. But again, if everything was working out as it “should” the Oilers would still be just about even with them on the ice.

Another strange quirk is that no one’s metrics seem to get that much worse away from Draisaitl than they do with him. Some of that is that when they’re not on the ice with him, they’re on the ice with McDavid, and that will always even things out for just about anyone that can stand up in a pair of skates. Still, see for yourself:

Leon Draisaitl – Teammates – On Ice – Natural Stat Trick

When you get to relative metrics, Draisaitl is behind the team-rate, though in the past he’s had some years significantly ahead of it when it comes to expected goals.

All of it makes for a slightly more muddled picture than we might have thought before. Here’s a player that is consistently in the top five in scoring in the league, and this year he’s done it with a fair amount of time at center away from McDavid. The Oilers are in the playoff chase for once, so it would seem pretty clear that Draisaitl is a league-foundational piece. And yet you look a little deeper, and also consider how the Oilers have gone nowhere almost all the time, and it feels like a ton of scoring that’s just spinning wheels.

Now, put a real goalie behind Draisaitl and he’s probably +20 and the Oilers would be running away with the Pacific. Or maybe a defense that could limit chances would help. But it’s fun to consider what is actually going on instead of what we’re told surface numbers mean.

Hockey

Game #56 – Hawks vs. Oilers: Hedley Lamarr’s Mugs, Pugs, And Thugs

By Sam Fels 1073 0

These affront-to-The-Lord Orange Jerseys: It’s so sad, because the throwback blues of the 80s Oilers are almost perfection. They pop off the screen in HD. They harken back to the only time the Oilers mattered, which you’d think they’d want to hold onto given they’ve spend nearly three decades in the wilderness since. And now these orange things, which look like a hallucination on bad shrooms, don’t even have the right shade of blue. When will teams learn brighter is better? Their Alberta neighbors to the south get it, as the Flames are going all-retro next season. Imagine the old blue Oilers skating against the old school whites of the Flames? That’s a slice of heaven there. Instead, we’re left with this trash.

Zack Kassian: Look, we’ve all dreamed of punching a Tkachuk, whichever one happens to be available at the time. And maybe Kassian had a point with Tkachuk running around and then not answering for it. Except you can’t jump the guy and punch him on the ground. Also, Kassian is a doofus. And hiding behind some “code” or “hockey ethics” only makes you a bigger one. He can fuck off, except the Oilers just extended him believing that his production with McDavid is what he really is, instead of realizing some jerkoff peeing in the sink in the 300 Level of Rogers Place could get 10 goals on his wing.

Mike Smith: Too bad Shaw won’t be around for this one. We’ll just have to settle for Smith torpedoing the Oilers playoff chances in the last week of the season, which you know he will.

 

Hockey

Game #56 – Hawks vs. Oilers: Lineups & How They Were Built

By Sam Fels 1022 0

Hawks

Notes: Hawks obviously don’t skate in the mornings anymore but we assume Lehner will swap out with Crawford going tomorrow in Vancouver, especially after a loss…With no McDavid, all Colliton has to worry about is Draisaitl, Harder to manage that on the road, but see if he tries to get either Carpenter or Toews out against him, or if Tippet is keen on getting him out there against Dach or Kampf’s line as well…Boqvist could have played in Winnipeg it seems, so we expect him to go tonight. And the Hawks need him…

Oilers

Notes: Boy, this is a rough looking bunch without McJesus. Haas is the most likely to slot up to second line duty, but it could be anything. Only one line to watch out for now…Nurse is about to sign a two-year extension to take him to UFA, which ruins that dream for us again…If Gagner has another eight-point night the Hawks need to fold…Koskinen could go but Smith has rattled off a couple wins here so we expect it’ll be him…

Baseball

Maybe It’s All Cole Hamels’s Fault

By Sam Fels 1743 0

With pitchers and catchers starting to trickle in to Mesa, or even the full set being there based on the pics flowing out, I’d like to start getting away from writing about luxury tax penalties and revenue sharing rebates and the like. The problem is its utterly impossible to do with the Cubs, because so much of what this season is gong to be has hinged and will hinge on that, and we’re still here.

I’ve spent the whole morning trying to reconcile these two pieces, one is Craig Edwards at Fangraphs today talking about how the Red Sox savings on trading Mookie Betts and David Price is really about just saving on payroll this year with the “savings” on penalties from taxes and revenue sharing not all that high. The other is from Brett Taylor a couple months back which set the Cubs world alight that really explained what was going on with the Cubs’ quest to get under the luxury tax this year. You probably read that one.

The conclusion of the latter was basically that the real punitive measures would arrive in 2021 if the Cubs didn’t get under the threshold this year, while Edwards is basically saying for a team like the Red Sox (and by extension the Cubs, because they come from the same neighborhood) the difference is basically negligible. There are a lot of variables, and mostly ones I can’t straighten out in my head.

Basically, what I can conclude from my addled brain is that it wasn’t so much actual payroll the Cubs have avoided the past two winters, but long-term commitments that would have left them with no choice but to be over the luxury tax this season and next. Perhaps if Bryce Harper or Manny Machado would have signed a one-year deal, they would have done that. Clearly, that was an impossibility. Which really means we can’t pass final judgement on what the Cubs are doing, though we can come pretty close, until we see what 2021 has in store. And that’s both if they manage to get under the tax this year or if they don’t.

What’s also clear is that the Cubs real crime was going over the tax last year and having a mediocre season. Which is exacerbating the perception of the problem. Had the Cubs won the division last year (which they still should have) and then say taken the gift the Braves gave the Cardinals in Game 5 in the same fashion before getting brained by the Nats, the angst is probably a lot lower. But because of the way the season ended, the urgency of the fanbase to claw back what was lost or not achieved can’t be matched by the front office. Which is piling on top of 2018, which came down to bad sequencing. Again, having one good day against either the Brewers or Rockies then instead of two bad ones chances the perception. While no one would ever be happy with a “step back” at any point, perhaps you could stomach it just a touch easier if there were one or two more playoff series wins banked than the current five the Cubs have over the past five seasons.

Which makes you wonder what the Cubs would be doing now if they hadn’t exercised Hamels’s $20M option last year. Had they known he would go on the shelf for a month or more (not hard to forecast given his age) and then be gasoline when he came back, they clearly wouldn’t have. That doesn’t mean the Cubs would have simply lost $20M on their payroll, been under the tax, and not have to worry about third-straight-year penalties before a new CBA kicks in as they are now. There still would have been a hole in the rotation, and perhaps they would have just filled it with Chatwood, and probably been even worse than they were, at least in the stretch when Hamels was healthy.

But that’s the rub. They were kinda shit anyway, and now have to go through all these austerity measures without any recent glory to ease the pain. And you and I are left to identify what is the number on financial losses, or rebates gained really, that we can find acceptable for the Cubs to justify whatever it is they’re doing now. That’s impossible to do without seeing their books, which we’re never going to.

I heard Sahadev Sharma on the Effectively Wild podcast today say that ideally, at least to Theo, he would get to pull a Yankees 2016 and somewhat rebuild on the fly, flogging big pieces midseason in a down year to turn around quickly. Except that oversells what the Yankees got for Chapman and Miller. Yes, they got Gleyber, but he didn’t turn the Yankees around on his own. For Miller, they got Clint Frazier whom they barely use and Justus Sheffield whom they punted for James Paxton which worked out ok for 150 innings.

The major contributors to the Yankees were already in the system or there (Judge, Gardner, Sanchez, Tanaka) or acquired cheaply or on the market (Chapman again, Green, Ottavino, Happ, Urshela), and they didn’t even get anything from Stanton (whom they essentially just bought) or Severino (their product). It’s not that easy.

The Yankees ended up winning 84 games that year (sound familiar?), but they had much more ready to rise the following season. The Cubs don’t have an Aaron Judge in waiting to arrive next year to join whatever the haul might be for a midseason trade of Kimbrel or Quintana or Bryant. They have like, Brailyn Marquez. And what they do have that could blend in 2021 with whatever they get from whatever they throw overboard this July is only around for one or two years. It’s not long term like the Yankees were locked in for.

Basically, as we get ready to start this season, it’s clear that everyone’s to blame. Welcome to Cubs baseball.

Hockey

Power Play, Roster Management, And Other Monday Tidbits

By Sam Fels 1616 0

Cleaning up some stuff before the back-to-back gets going tomorrow night.

-It’s clear to everyone that the power play has become an issue. Well, that’s been obvious to everyone for a while. Now it’s become a blot on society. Last night was one of the worst performances we’ve seen from it in years, and that includes some of the Quenneville power play incompetence. Not only did it not produce anything but actually was a detriment in that it gave up a ton of chances against. The reasons for that are clear, but we’ll circle back.

For me, the power play issues haven’t been as big as some might think because the PK has been so good. There’s a theory out there, and one Quenneville almost certainly believed in, that if your PP% and your PK% add up to 100, then you’re fine because you’re breaking even and you can win the games at even-strength. Which you should do if you’re a good team. This is why Q never really gave a shit about the power play (it was bad for most of his time here even with the wealth of talent on it) because his PK was always very good and the team was very good at even-strength. That’s what mattered. The Hawks only have 25 goals with a man-advantage, but they’ve only given up 26 shorthanded. So essentially, they’re even.

However, we know that the Hawks aren’t a good even-strength team, and they need to be better than just even if they’re going to go anywhere. I might wish for them to be a good ES team, and that would be the ideal outcome, but as last night was Exhibit AAG or whatever they’re just not going to be.

It’s particularly frustrating that the Jets had this so well clocked, because one, they’re one of the worst PK teams in the league and two, Paul Maurice is one of the bigger inattentive dopes behind a bench in the league. So the cat is obviously clearly out of the bag.

The whole league knows what the Hawks want to do, and the Jets last night were even content to let the Hawks enter the zone. Because they knew how it was going to go down. There would be the drop pass to Kane, who would gain the line and then spray out a chipped pass to Toews on the boards and on the rush. You feel like this should be a good thing, as scoring off a rush on the power play is allowed and the Hawks should try and do it more. But the Jets were also clear that Toews having the puck outside the circle wasn’t really a threat, and as long as they closed off the passing lanes to the middle and had one forward behind him for the bump-back to the point, they were covered. Not only were they covered, but when the puck was turned over the Hawks would have at least three, if not four, skaters ahead of the puck, whether that turnover was along the boards behind Toews or a blocked pass to the middle that same forward trailing Toews could pick up the pieces to. That’s an odd-man rush every time the other way.

Without Adam Boqvist, this is hard to change. Erik Gustafsson, though he thinks he does and can occasionally miracle his ass through a couple checkers, does not have the speed to weave through the neutral zone. The fix, or one solution at least, is obvious and we’ve been screaming for it for a while. Boqvist, and only a handful of times, needs to fake that drop pass to get the first PK’er behind him, and then take the line himself. Given his skills he should be able to find space amongst three opponents, or even two if he can beat one with his feet (which he should). This should back up all four penalty killers after a short time, so that the long-loathed drop pass to Kane has the effect desired of him attacking four guys basically standing still. It also opens up those wings a bit more, so Toews isn’t blanketed when he gets the puck along the wall.

Freeing up Boqvist is about more than the neutral zone, though. He doesn’t shoot enough when the Hawks are set up, and for a while the Hawks should be looking to open him up, not doing everything in service to the cross-seam pass from Kane to Top Cat that teams figured out months ago.

The Hawks have the right set-up right now, as Dach, Boqvist, and Top Cat give Kane three-right handed options looking at him from the right wall. This is what you want. But the Hawks are too consistently placing Dach at the net instead of the high-slot, or having Toews in the corner and no threat of going to the net because Dach is taking up that space or his reluctance to simply try and slam it home. They’re not making that PK’er low on that side make a decision. He can simply leave Toews alone and block up his passing lanes. Toews also hasn’t really been the guy in front much, but it’s in his locker and would be more valuable bouncing between there and the corner than Dach abandoning the high slot to go down low as well.

The other option is to let Dach run stuff from the other wall with Kane, Gustafsson, and Toews looking at him from those spots, with maybe Strome down low? But that’s just a mirror of what we’re talking about. That could leave you with a second unit of Boqvist, Top Cat, Saad, Kubalik and Idiot du Jour which is better than what they’re rocking now.

It’s really not that far away from being threatening. But they have to make these changes.

-Lots of talk recently about how DeBrincat can’t seem to buy a bucket, and he was especially awful last night. His turnover on the PP led to the shorthanded goal which changed the game, and the whole night he just seemed like his gloves were filled with rubber cement. Rough nights happen, whatever.

Still, and this is more of a product of my unmatched skill of being unobservant, I only noticed today that the DeBrincat-Kampf-Strome line is starting just 33% of its shifts in the offensive zone. Which really doesn’t add up. The temptation is to rant and rave about Colliton, and he is the one making the decisions. But it’s kind of another example of the misshapen nature of the roster.

You want to use Kampf as a checking center, because that’s what he does. But the Hawks don’t really have the wingers to go with him to do that and have a “3+1” model that I think they’re shooting for. Smith is too slow, Highmore too inexperienced and bad. Nylander? Forget it. So you have Kampf and Carpenter and that’s about it.

The urge is then to say that Kubalik-Toews-Caggiula should take some more defensive starts to get Strome and Top Cat up the ice more, but we’ve remarked the past two seasons that Toews isn’t really a do-it-all guy anymore who can push the Hawks into the offensive zone from the defensive one consistently. So if you started the top line in their half more often, you just might lose out on some of the scoring they’re providing right now.

Top Cat’s line needs to start up the ice more, but there is no perfect solution.

-Another weird number: Maatta’s and Koekkoek’s metrics being so in the black (52.4 CF%, 55.1 xG%) while only starting 40% of their shifts in the offensive end. Maybe this is a way to juice Top Cat’s line a bit, catching the right matchups and seeing if they can’t get up the ice more. Maybe it’s all an illusion. But the Hawks need to try everything at this point.

Hockey

Game #55 – Hawks vs. Jets Preview: Sundays Are For Peg’ing

By Sam Fels 1537 0

vs.

RECORDS: Hawks 25-21-8   Jets 28-23-5

PUCK DROP: 6pm

TV: NBCSN Chicago

QUEEN ELIZABETH IN THEIR LIVING ROOM: Jetsnation.ca

It’s at points like these that you can understand Jonathan Toews’s frustration with the schedule of the NHL. There’s no logical reason that instead of spending consecutive Sundays in Winnipeg, with having to swing out to Western Canada in between, the Hawks and Jets couldn’t play just two consecutive games against each other and keep everyone more comfortable. But that’s not the world we have, so the Hawks will begin and end this vital road trip in Winnipeg. It’s even more of a bitch because you have to bus in every time, because they don’t have an airport as you know.

However it’s laid out, the Hawks can shape the rest of their season with this trip, both good and bad. The Hawks enter tonight three points back of the last wildcard, but with three teams to leap to get there. But the next five games are all against teams around them. Even if the Oilers and Canucks are a bit separated, it’s not hard to see how either or both could slip right into range over the coming weeks. Given how the Pacific can’t seem to stop stepping on a rake this season, any and all combinations out of there are possible.

The Jets come in having beat the Senators yesterday at home, and have also clubbed the Blues twice in the last week while also taking the Predators or OT. They’re three points ahead of the Hawks, but have played two games more. So you can see why this is a pretty big game for the Hawks. It’s your customary four-pointer.

The story remains the same with the Jets. They are woeful structurally, and do their best to try and outshoot and outscore it with their wealth of top line talent. It’s been harder for them this season, as the defense has been truly wretched with the departures of Jacob Trouba and Dustin Byfuglien. They haven’t been helped by injuries, but through the combo of that and general helplessness they’ve played 10 different guys. Morrissey and Pionk have been the only constants, and the only ones they can even dream of counting on.

Connor Hellebuyck has combined with their top tier scoring to keep them afloat, with a SV% of .920 while being under siege most nights. He didn’t start yesterday so he was saved for the Hawks, which makes you think the Jets think they need this one badly too.

As for the Hawks, they’ll be something of a lineup shuffle, at least as much as there’s been of late. Adam Boqvist will be given a little more time to heal his shoulder made of cardboard, so Nick Seeler will make his Hawks debut. Don’t expect much, and if you get a game where you barely notice him, so much the better. He’s slow, he had a tendency to be dumb, so this might be Connor Murphy’s biggest project of the season. They’ll be paired together tonight. Matthew Highmore will also come back in for Alex Nylander on the fourth line.

Three points is a bigger gap than it sounds in this everybody-gets-a-trophy NHL, but it’s also not insurmountable. The Hawks have to not get buried on this trip. 3-2 is probably the minimum they need, though 2-2-1 probably won’t kill them. But none of these teams on the schedule are monsters. The Hawks have already beaten the Jets twice, and soundly, and outplayed them for long stretches of their OT loss to them. The Oilers, Canucks, and Flames can all lay an egg on any given night, and the Hawks have wins against them this season.

This is supposed to be where it gets fun. The Hawks can make it so.

Hockey

Game #55 – Hawks vs Jets Spotlight: Ehlers Choice

By Sam Fels 1251 0

We’ve perhaps, although maybe this is just our tendency to toot our own horn, led the charge on labeling Patrik Laine a passenger on the Jets. This will be the third straight season, likely, that he won’t live up to that 44-goal campaign he had. They’ve bent their team around him, they’ve given him a prove-it contract, and they’re mired in the muck. There are plenty of other factors, like Dustin Byfuglien fucking off to the ice fishing hut and Jacob Trouba escaping as soon as he could , which has stripped their blue line bare.

But perhaps they can find more answers in exchange for Laine, because they have a ready-made replacement on their top line in Nikolaj Ehlers.

The weird thing is, it seems like GM Kevin Chevyldayoff already likes Ehlers more than Laine, and has for a while. Whereas Laine went through a whole drama about his second contract, Ehlers was given one as soon as possible that will take him in unrestricted free agency in five years. There was no hesitation, as he was signed to it a full season before his entry level deal was up.

And there was little reason not to. Ehlers was coming off a 64-point season, which he would match in the first year of this contract. And while the Jets have always been a weird team in the sense they’ve usually been able to outshoot what their metrics say, Ehlers was the one player who had great underlying numbers. He has consistently been way in the black in Corsi and expected-goals, and this year his mark in the latter is a full six points above the team-rate. When he’s on the ice, the Jets have the puck more than they do when anyone else is out there.

Ehlers can’t manage the goals and points-total of late of Laine, but that might have a lot to do with getting less than half the power play time that Laine does. The first PP unit for the Jets has four forwards, the top line (Laine-Scheifele-Connor) plus Blake Wheeler. And they stay out there as long as they can. So Ehlers and the rest only get slightly more than a minute of time with the man-advantage.

You wonder what Ehlers might do with it, as he has the same amount of even-strength goals and points as Laine’s floating ass this year as he did last year. Other than his 20-PPG binge of ’17-’18, Laine hasn’t put numbers up on the power play that Ehlers would find impossible to reach.

Without the Finn, and a top line of Ehlers-Scheifele-Connor, the Jets would still have Wheeler, Copp, Roslovic, and a few forwards to make for one of the better bottom sixes in the league. The question is what Laine’s value is now. He only has one year on his second deal, though it’s only at $6.7M and he’ll still be restricted when it’s up. Can the Jets still get a top pairing d-man for him? It’s what they need desperately, as they lost both they had for this season and beyond.

Perhaps it’ll depend on how this season finishes for both. The Jets are in a scrap just to make the playoffs, and neither Ehlers or Laine have proven to be playoff dynamos yet. But if Ehlers comes to play these last 25 games or so, and Laine continues to wait for the game to come to him every night, the Jets’ roadmap should be obvious.