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Game #40 – Wild vs. Hawks Q&A: Whatever, Vikings Suck

By Sam Fels 1971 0

Ben Remington covers the Wild for ZoneCoverage.com. You can follow him on Twitter @BenRemington. 

The Wild have had an ugly December that have seen them tumble down the standings. What’s been the problem?
From an eye-test perspective, the scoring has dried up something fierce, and the loss of Matt Dumba recently has definitely exacerbated that. On paper, the stats back that up. Since December 1, the Wild are 30th in the league in Shooting% at a paltry 7.1%, and have scored the least amount of goals in the NHL (23 in 10 games…woof).
Devan Dubnyk struggled mightily in November with an unsightly .882 SV%, but seems to have turned a corner, and is sitting at .916 in December. The defense is playing pretty solid, but they’re giving Dubnyk no margin for error, and he’s not quite up to the task of standing on his head every night. Wild fans have long lamented the Wild’s inability to finish, and this time, it’s popping up in the regular season with regularity, rather than only happening in the playoffs.
The Wild don’t score a ton. Eric Staal has 12 goals. The Wild weren’t counting on anywhere near 42 again like last year, were they?
I don’t think so, but they were certainly expecting a good season, which I think he’s close to. Staal is a really interesting topic for Wild fans, partly because of those 42 goals last season, there’s a decent sized crowd that want to see him re-signed. There’s also plenty of folks who think when you win in roulette like you did with his contract, you don’t place an even bigger bet on the exact same number on the next roll.
That being said, the Wild are woefully, woefully thin at center, and Staal is the the only true first line center this franchise may have ever had. Take a look at the panic that ensued after Mikko Koivu missed a few games to get an idea of how important Eric Staal is to this team right now. Charlie Coyle has again been hokey-pokeyed into playing center, but he’s not exactly flourishing at the position, not that he was at wing, and he could very well be playing in a new sweater soon.
Ryan Suter is on pace for a career-high in points. How has he remained so effective into his 30s and could he send some notes to Duncan Keith?
Suter has really changed his game a bit, as my friend Tony Abbott from The Athletic wrote about last week. Suter’s been a tad more aggressive on offense lately, but it has caused a handful of defensive breakdowns, which is uncharacteristic. It could be his pairing with Dumba for most of the season that has him so offense-happy, or it could be a change of heart in relation to what’s fun about playing hockey after his ankle basically exploded late last season and almost ended his career.
So I guess if you want Duncan Keith to see the light, maybe a ‘Misery’-type lower body injury? If it doesn’t get him playing better after he recovers, it would be cathartic for some Hawks fans, at the very least.
If the Wild can’t pull out of this spin and miss the playoffs, will Bruce Boudreau face some heat? It’ll be three years without a playoff series win, and a new GM in town who might be tempted to find his own guy…
That’s a very real possibility. We Twins fans just saw Paul Molitor canned more or less because he wasn’t the current GM’s hire, and that could very well be Bruce’s fate if things don’t turn around. It’s really unfortunate, because I think Boudreau is a good coach, and his time with a lackluster Wild roster has somewhat tarnished his reputation, but that could very well be a chicken and egg situation.
But Paul Fenton seems fairly happy with Bruce, and I think he’d be more apt, and probably better off, making some worthwhile changes to the roster first before he gets rid of Bruce. That could just be the Bruce fan in me talking though. He’s a great coach to cover, especially contrasted with Mike ‘Cold, Wet Blanket’ Yeo. Bruce might just need an ‘NHL 24/7’ type rant on the Wild to turn things around, if he hasn’t given them one every game yet.

 

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Game #40 – Wild vs. Hawks Douchebag Du Jour: Jason Zucker And The Myth Of A Hawks Killer

By Sam Fels 1550 0

Maybe it’s just us, but we’re fairly sure we’re not alone in hearing Jason Zucker’s name and thinking, “Oh that guys just kills us.” There’s certainly a litany of names that conjure up the same thought. Vladimir Tarasenko is probably the leading one, though he tends to score against everyone (when he cares, which isn’t now). Cody Eakin seems to be another one with two teams. Andrew Cogliano was another. You probably have your own you identify that way.

The thing is, Zucker isn’t really. He has seven goals in 23 regular season games. Which isn’t a bad record, it’s just not what you think it is. Must be the playoffs, right? Nope, two goals over two series and nine games. The one where the Wild really gave the Hawks trouble, 2014, he was injured and didn’t play.

And yet it feels like he is, doesn’t it? Every time he scores against the Hawks you can’t help but feel, “That guy again?!” Maybe it’s because we used to get him confused with Erik Haula. Maybe it feels that way because every player on the Wild is basically indistinguishable from the next one so any goal scored by them feels like it’s scored by Zucker. Does it really matter if it’s Zucker or Granlund or Niderraiter? Same guy, right? Maybe we just thought this for so long we can’t get rid of it now, whether it’s true or not.

Maybe it’s that games against the Wild, even when the Hawks were good and the Wild were bad/nondescript, were still mightily annoying. They always were too hard and involved some late equalizer the Hawks should have never given up or Dubnyk makes 37 saves for no reason. And we just take it out on Zucker.

Or maybe it’s just he really is a hockey version of some go-go Twin that led them to a lot of regular season success than never meant anything. Jason Kubel or Nick Punto with skates (more the latter). Maybe it’s just Minnesota sports in general, where if Dante Culpepper got to play against the Bears every week he’d be in Canton. And yet they never do anything either.

Maybe that’s it. Minnesota sports don’t matter and spending any emotion on them is a waste of time. Yeah, that’s it.

Fuck the Vikings.

 

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Game #40 – Wild vs. Hawks: Lineups & How Teams Were Built

By Sam Fels 1324 0

Notes: The big story with the Wild is that Matt Dumba is going to be out for basically the rest of the season. Outside shot he could be back at the end of March, but without him they lose a ton of their get-up-and-go from the back. It’s basically Spurgeon now…they’ve moved Coyle back to center, which means six more weeks of winter…Koivu has been demoted, so you can see how his season is going…Dubnyk was awful in November but seems to have rebounded the past few weeks…Granlund hasn’t scored since November 29th…Parise was on fire a couple weeks back, with 13 points in 14 games, but hasn’t scratched in his last four at all…

Notes: Not much change here. Not sure why Sikura gets the demotion when he and Top Cat seemed to have struck up an understanding and it’s unclear what you want out of him on a fourth line. Look for this to last a period…Gustafsson is so unpredictable that he’s basically forced Keith to iron out and pull back his game a bit, which is fine with us…why is Forsling starting so often in his zone?…Delia looks to get the start after Ward’s tour-de-stupid on Sunday. If he plays well, he should keep rolling until he proves he can’t anymore, and that includes South Bend…

 

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Game #39 – Panthers vs. Hawks Spotlight: Is This It, Bobby Lou?

By Sam Fels 1592 0

He won’t start tonight, so Hawks fans may not get another glimpse of Roberto Luongo. This also may be the final time he steps inside the United Center, which will be something of a relief for him. He’ll also take some of our best memories with him.

Luongo has battled injury problems this year, and he’s already 39. When he has been in the lineup, he hasn’t been terribly good, barely clinging onto a .900 SV%. He hasn’t been helped by a Panthers blue line that would be the equivalent of button-mashing, but .900 is .900.

The confusing part for Luongo and the Panthers of course, is that he’s coming off a superb year. He was .929 last year. So did the injury take that much of a toll? Has he aged in just a few months? Does it happen that quickly? No one’s going to have the answers.

There are contract considerations. Luongo has one of those extra-special cap-circumventing deals. His hit is $5.3M, but his actual salary is only $3.8M. That drops to $1.6M next year, and $1M the following two seasons. $3.6M is a lot of money to you and me, but is it when you’ve already banked $60M of a $64M contract? We don’t think Bob is going to come up with a skin problem like some others who had similar contracts, but…

The Panthers won’t mind much if Luongo heads for the hills. The recapture penalties are mostly going to hit the Canucks, who signed him to that deal. So they won’t be pressuring him either way.

What Luongo will be taking with him, should he retire after the season, is one of the more remarkable goaltending careers in NHL history. He’s already put up two of the best seasons a goalie over 35 has. He’s had nine seasons over .920, which not even  Dominik Hasek managed.

Sadly, Luongo won’t end his career with much hardware. He never did win a Vezina. He famously never did get that Cup, and a Jennings Trophy is all he’ll have. Those playoff meltdowns are going to mark whatever he does, be they the surrender in Game 6 in ’09 to Patrick Kane or the series-long dissection by the Hawks in ’10 or the Game 7 spit up in ’11 when the Canucks were on the precipice. Luongo will retire with career .918 SV% in the playoffs, which is hardly embarrassing, but is anyone going to remember that? Life in sports is rarely fair.

He’ll also go as one of the biggest Hawks foils from their golden era. It was the Canucks own craziness that churned Luongo’s brain, and the ovation welcoming him into Game 6 in ’11 when Cory Schneider got hurt, after Luongo had been pulled as starter, is one of the louder ones in United Center history. It was as if he tried to escape and couldn’t. He thought the demons were excised in Game 7, but were they really?

His battles with Kane and Dustin Byfuglien will live in Hawks history forever. Those series against the Hawks and the ’11 Final poisoned the water for him in B.C. for pretty much ever, which led to his trade to Florida. Strange that the Canucks haven’t won a playoff series since.

Luongo probably deserved better. One wonders if anyone will ever recognize it.

 

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Game #39 – Panthers vs Hawks Q&A: Todd Little From LitterBoxCats.com

By Sam Fels 1642 0

Todd Little is the sole proprietor of LitterBoxCats.com. You can follow him on Twitter @toddlittle827. 

Been a disappointment for the Panthers this season, who some thought could make a playoff push. Is it just down to goaltending or is it more than that?
It’s kind of been a chicken and egg thing between the goaltending and the defense being the main culprit in the Panthers maddeningly slow start. There are times the goalies, James Reimer, in particular, let in Charmin-soft goals, but with the way the defense turns the puck over and yields countless high-quality chances to the opposition, one wonders if any keeper could shine in Florida’s crease right now. In addition to that mess, the only thing the Panthers have been consistent at in 2018-19 is being inconsistent.  Depending on the game or period, they look like one of the better teams in the league, and at other times they look destined for a top-five pick in the draft. One wonders if the Cats made the right choice in hiring the inexperienced Bob Boughner. His system and game management have both been called into question and it doesn’t look like the effort is there all time, and on top of that, players are allowed to make the same mistakes over and over with little to no consequences.
On the bright side, Jonathan Huberdeau is on pace to shatter his career high in points and assists. What’s been the difference there?
Now 25, Huberdeau is more mature and has worked on getting stronger the last couple of offseasons. Huberdeau got off a decent enough start while on the second line. Once he was reunited with Aleksander Barkov on the first line, along with new acquisition Mike Hoffman, was when he really caught fire and has put up 23 points in the last 13 games. If Huberdeau can keep this torrid pace up, he might be looking at his, and the franchise’s, first 100-point season.
What’s the deal with this blue line? Dale Tallon fought hard to keep some of the younger players, which obviously, frustratingly cost the Cats Reilly Smith and Jonathan Marchessault. And yet it’s hard to see why. Fill us in. 
I wish someone could fill me in on this. The way that Tallon handled the expansion draft still has many of us scratching our heads. Sure, they wanted Vegas to take Reilly Smith’s contract, but exposing Marchessault was just plain dumb. There had to have been a better way. None of the defensemen they protected was worth doing so and that is becoming more and more obvious, painfully so, as time goes on. The Panthers defensemen don’t seem to have much interest in playing proper defense and are lacking in physicality. Not quite sure if the meat of the problem lies with the players, who are individually talented, or Bob Boughner’s system, but something is seriously amiss with this group.
How much has Vincent Trocheck’s injury been a culprit?
Before he was hurt, Trocheck was having a bit of a tough go of it. He was collecting points on the power play, but struggling in other areas. That said, Vincent is one of Florida’s better players, a true gamer, and it was just a matter of time before he turned things around. They miss him badly and will be a better team when he comes back.
So what does the rest of the season hold? And beyond?
The rest of the season likely holds more of the same. The Panthers have shown no sign of being able to win or even play well on a consistent basis. The five-game winning streak in early November looks like it might end up being the high point of the season. Throw that streak out and they have only won back to back games once… that’s right, once. Beyond that, hard to say. The Cats have serious issues on defense and in the net, not sure how that get fixed anytime soon.

 

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Game #39 – Panthers vs. Hawks Douchebag Du Jour: If Dale Tallon Can Build A Cup Winner So Can I

By Sam Fels 1525 0

Obviously, we’ll always have a soft spot for Uncle Dale around these parts. Fuck, we named the goddamn site after him, or his malfunctioning fax machine. The way he was torpedoed here in Chicago is still a mark of shame that McDonough will never answer for. And he’s still the architect of one of, if not the, most talented teams in this era of the NHL.

One wonders now how that ever happened.

Tallon has spent the past two years borking the Florida Panthers, seemingly in a quest to disprove the “Computer Boys” that ran the team for a season and a half when he was kicked upstairs. Except that involved gifting Jonathan Marchessault and Reilly Smith to the Golden Knights for nothing, and they ended up forming two-thirds of one of the most devastating lines in hockey last year. He’s constantly bleated on and on about being tougher to play against, except the defense he’s constructed in incredibly easy to play against because they suck out loud. In true Tallon fashion, they’re all sizable. In true Tallon fashion, they can’t do much else but be big, aside from Aaron Ekblad and Keith Yandle, we guess.

In his time at the helm, Tallon has added Aleksander Barkov, Jonathan Huberdeau, and Ekblad to the team. But they were all top-three picks, which is pretty much his legacy here in Chicago. He’s just competent enough to not fuck up a top-three pick, which really should be something just about anyone with the right amount of oxygen intake should manage. There hasn’t been much else. Vincent Trocheck is a good piece taken in later rounds, but the Panthers continue to languish. There’s been two playoff appearances in a decade, and nary a series win. Both seem to have been engineered on goaltending from either Luongo or Craig Anderson.

Remember, Tallon’s major accomplishment in Chicago was adding Jonathan Toews and Patrick Kane, also both top-three picks. And he got lucky that the Penguins and Blues opted for players that weren’t Toews. Niklas Hjalmarsson and Marcus Kruger were nice, late-round additions as well, but that’s just about the sum of Tallon’s drafting here. And trading for Martin Havlat and signing Marian Hossa. Let’s give him that as well.

Tallon isn’t the worst GM in the NHL. Probably not even close. But he’s also far from a genius, and give anyone a couple of top-three picks and they just might create a dynasty.

But hey, he took those players. That’s more than Stan or McDonough can claim.

 

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Game #39 – Panthers vs. Hawks: Lineups & How Teams Were Built

By Sam Fels 1288 0

Notes: Couple big misses for the Panthers as both Bjugstad and Trocheck are out…this was the lineup yesterday afternoon in Detroit, but Alex Petrovic could slot back in on defense…the top line is on fire, as Huberdeau has 16 points in his last 10 games and Barkov 13…Hoffman only has four in his last 12 games…Reimer has given up 10 goals in his last two starts…

Notes: Ward is going to start, even though Delia should…unlikely to see any changes with the Hawks on an actual winning-streak…expect to see Nilsson slot in where SuckBag was and where Kruger would normally go. Only other option is to slot Anisimov back to center and slide Kampf down, but that third line has been too effective to break up…

 

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Game #38 – Hawks 2, Avalanche 1: But I Say It Just To Reach You, Delia

By Sam Fels 2015 0

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Back when the Hawks played games that mattered, or back when they all mattered, I used to take unique joy in games they simply gutted out. There weren’t that many, after all, the Hawks mostly won on talent and structure back then. But every so often, in a stretch of seven games in 11 days or back-to-backs or both or whatever it was, the Hawks would simply win a game because they decided they were going to. It was as if their will was just stronger than most other teams’. They could be sloppy, they could be tired, they could be hanging on by their nails, but they would almost always find a way.

So it was nice to visit that again, even if it doesn’t signify much.

The Hawks were not good tonight. Or maybe more accurately, they were very far from sharp and most likely exhausted. It was their seventh game in 11 days, and they were playing at altitude against a rested Avalanche team that’s at least got the most devastating line in hockey. No, it wasn’t art. But hey, it got there. And they got a goalie win out of a kid they may want to count on pretty heavily in the not-too-distant future.

Does it mean anything? Well, I don’t think it means nothing. When the Hawks spent 10-15 games or whatever giving up the first goal, or the first three, the fear or thought was that this team wasn’t giving its coach the time of day. That he was merely drawing up things and talking to players who weren’t interested or listening. Well, the Hawks had every reason to toss this one in the rubbish when they showed up, and a lot of teams would have. They didn’t, and though it wasn’t artful or close to it, they gave a shit. That’s at least a start.

Let’s to it…

The Two Obs

-Have to start with Collin Delia. He was the only reason the Hawks got a point, much less two. When Delia sees the play and the puck, he looks far smoother than he did in a cameo last year. He looks in control. The problem, and what he’ll have to work on, is tracking the puck. It felt like he had a hard time at points following the puck through bodies and legs at times, and on another night a team would have picked the open nets he was leaving. That could be nerves. That could be the frantic nature of the game. It’s just one game.

He should absolutely get the start Sunday. As we’ve said earlier, the Hawks have something of a free hit to get a look at a goalie they might just think is their one of the future. There’s no reason to not think that, given what he’s done at the AHL. He’s earned the right to at least get a look at this level. Give him Sunday’s start. If he plays well, give him the 27th. And keep giving them to him until he takes the role or shows that he needs more seasoning. There’s nothing to lose here, and Cam Ward has been around long enough to know the deal.

-The metrics are fucking ugly, but the one that sticks out is the third line. Kampf, Sikura, and Top Cat got high marks. Top Cat is not a third line player, as we’ve gone over at length, but this line is ticking. We wrote off Sikura after a few games last year and not making the team out camp, mostly because we’re assholes. But this looks to be where he’ll be best used. A middle-six winger who isn’t asked much but can take advantage of some sweetheart matchups. He’s been unlucky to not score yet, and I’d wager when he gets one he’ll get a few. There are some hands there.

-The power play didn’t score, but it still looks far more lively with Gustafsson running things. It comes from various angles, it doesn’t have Kane simply Carmelo-ing the puck, and tonight they even tried the high tip from Toews in the middle. What a world.

-The PK gets some stripes tonight, going five-for-five against a team with that kind of weaponry. It did it basically on scrambling on guts, but that’s enough.

-While Gustafsson flashes in the offensive zone to make you think that as a third-pairing bum-slayer on a team that’s worth a fuck he could outscore whatever his defensive problems are, Gustav Forsling simply sucks deep pond scum. He hardly ever flashes anything offensively, and that means you can’t justify how woeful he is in his own zone. For the Avs lone goal, he checked the wrong guy into the boards, and then stood behind the net and simply watched Kerfoot pass to the slot for Compher where he should have been standing.

Sure, give him the rest of the year to prove he can be anything, but I’ll tell you what I’m betting you’ll find out.

Onwards…