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Game #31 – Canadiens vs. Hawks Spotlight: The One That Truly Hurts

By Sam Fels 1649 0

We’ll be honest, and some of you already know. The one prospect that the Hawks gave away that we thought they’d regret the most was Stephen Johns. The need on the blue line is rather obvious now, and it was obvious before Niklas Hjalmarsson and Duncan Keith starting slowing down. It felt like Johns was brought along just slowly enough to dive in with both feet when he did make it to Chicago.

Of course, he never made it to Chicago. He as a make-weight to get rid of Patrick Sharp’s bloated contract, and all the Hawks had to show for their patience, development, and extra cash they threw at Johns was a couple months of a truly bewildered Trevor Daley. That’s pretty bad. But then again, Johns has battled injury and three different coaches in Dallas, without ever really grabbing hold of a top-four spot on their defense.

Which means it’s not as bad as Phillip Danault.

Danault did make it to Chicago. More impressively, he gained Joel Quenneville’s trust. But not quite enough to be considered untouchable when it came to time to load up on veterans for 2016’s ill-fated playoff run. Danault netted just about the same nothing that Johns did, as Dale Weise and Tomas Fleischmann did just this side of jackshit when they were here. Weise couldn’t even gain the trust from Quenneville that Danault did.

What patience might have gotten the Hawks.

This will hurt to read. Danault currently has the eighth-best Corsi-percentage of any forward in the league. He has the 10th-best relative-CF%. He has the eighth-best xGF%, and the 15th-best relative-xGF%. Danault simply has been one of the best two-way forwards in the game. He won’t ever produce that much offensively, but he keeps the puck in the right end of the ice just about as much as anyone in the game right now.

Oh, and he does all that while getting the least amount of offensive zone starts on the Canadiens and facing the toughest competition.

Danault flashed this while on the Hawks, being dogged on the puck and responsible in his own zone. He was perfectly poised to take over from Marcus Kruger, which is exactly what the Hawks told him he would be doing when he arrived in the organization. And yet he was gone before Kruger was.

You can’t help but wonder what the Hawks might have done they had just forced Danault into the playoffs and have Q use him. Would they have felt the need in 2017 to panic and trade for Artem Anisimov if they already had another center behind Toews? Could they have moved Saad along for defensive help they so clearly needed? Perhaps a different winger?

What would it look like now? Could they have gotten Schmatlz even easier assignments with Toews and Danault around to take the harder ones? Could they do that now with Strome? You wonder

Danault isn’t breaking the bank at $3.0M for the next two years. The Hawks probably could have found a way to keep him around, especially if they weren’t tossing more at Anisimov? Where could that savings have gone?

You could go down this road with Teuvo Teravainen as well, maybe Schmaltz one day. Maybe even Ryan Hartman, though that seems a stretch. At least Hartman netted something in return. When deciding to go all-in for a Cup you better know you have a serious chance. That ’16 Hawks team was seriously flawed–it was one line and a struggling defense behind Keith and Hammer. Was it worth losing Danault’s future over?

Hindsight is 20-20, but that’s how you get in messes like this.

 

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Game #31 – Canadiens vs. Hawks Q&A: Andrew Berkshire From…Well, Everywhere

By Sam Fels 1599 0

You can catch him a lot of places, so we recommend you just follow Andrew Berkshire @AndrewBerkshire and at his tumblr andrewberkshire.tumblr.com.

The Canadiens started out hot, but have cooled off of late. What fueled the former and what’s the cause of the latter?
Hot starts from everyone new really helped the Habs this year. Tomas Tatar has been amazing through two months of the season, and so has Max Domi to an even greater degree, at least offensively. Couple that with Jeff Petry and Brendan Gallagher starting off the season the same way they played last year and it’s a good recipe for success. Claude Julien was able to run four scoring lines of various quality early in the year before injuries began to hit, and the Canadiens have started to come back down to earth where their true talent level is of late.
Max Domi has 30 points in 28 games. Is it more than just the 19% shooting-percentage for the little turd?
The high shooting percentage is absolutely a huge part of it, but it seems like the Canadiens’ system is tailor made to make Domi look good this year. When the Canadiens play with speed and attack the offensive zone with control, Domi looks like an elite player, but when the Canadiens have trouble attacking off the rush, he’s much more neutralized.
Is this finally the Jonathan Drouin “awakening?”
For the first month of the season, Drouin was riding Domi’s coattails quite a lot, I thought he looked pretty lost and was constantly making junior hockey moves and getting caught. The last month he’s been playing what Pierre LeBrun would call ‘Big Boy hockey.” Whether it’s a permanent awakening for him is up for debate, but the effort level is there.
How do the Habs plan to turn over what is still a pretty hilarious blue line? Kids we should know about?
On the right side the blue line isn’t too bad, with Shea Weber and Jeff Petry leading the way and Noah Juulsen being the young kid that’s not known enough around the league for how good he is. The left side is an absolute mess, even more so now with Victor Mete losing the coach’s confidence and being sent to the AHL. Eventually Mete will establish himself as the team’s top left handed defenseman. Until then, there’s no one in the organization that’s immediately available to solve this.
How long did it take before you could spell “Kotkaniemi” without looking?
Surprisingly, it wasn’t that long. Niemi helped with the latter half, and then it was just Kotka, which is pretty simple to remember. It’s nowhere near as tough as Vasilevskiy, for example.

 

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Game #31 – Canadiens vs. Hawks Douchebag Du Jour: The Worst Of The Q Tree?

By Sam Fels 1603 0

Hey, even Bill Belichick has a shit coaching tree. So maybe it’s just a thing that happens.

While the Hawks spiral more and more toward the seventh level of hell, the idea that Joel Quenneville is a hockey genius continues to grow. And maybe he is, though he wasn’t getting much more out of this team than Jeremy Colliton is. But an argument against that is that seemingly anyone who has worked for or with him, by his choice, ends up being an idiot.

Mike Kitchen hasn’t even been whispered for a head coaching job, even though he was Q’s right hand guy for years, because his tenure in St. Louis went so badly and pretty much everyone knows he’s a moron. Jamie Kompon got a coaching job in the WHL, fucked that up hard, and now is nowhere. We’ll see where Kevin Dineen and Ulf Samuelsson end up. Wouldn’t hold out much hope. Even Mike Haviland, who wasn’t Q’s guy but worked under him for the first Cup win, only managed a college head coaching job.

Marc Bergevin was actually with the Hawks before Q was, but had a major hand in bringing him to Chicago and might have been part of the plan all along. He has worked with him in the past. Bergevin was hired as an assistant for Denis Savard, who was fired mere weeks later. Hmmm…

And he’s been accidentally face-fucking the Canadiens as GM for years now.

We don’t have to go much deeper than Shea Weber for PK Subban. Trading Pacioretty for peanuts might get there as well. The Karl Alzner signing. Sergachev-for-Drouin. Two draft picks for Andrew Shaw, one of which just happened to be Alex Debrincat. There’s more, but we don’t want to be rude because French-Canadians are so considerate.

Bergevin might be saving himself by turning over the team to a bunch of fast, young forwards, but the blue line is still a mess (recurring theme, it seems). And he was the first Q guy to get his own job from the Hawks. But in six season at the helm in La Belle Province, he’s seen the Habs win all of three playoff series. They have won the division three times, though one of those was with essentially someone else’s roster.

Maybe that makes Q a genius, in a strange way, because he’s had to overcome the idiocy that he surrounds himself with. Not one of Belichick’s assistants has ever risen above the level of “chucklehead” when given their own head coaching job. Or maybe Bergevin is more off the Stan Bowman tree, as he served as assistant GM longer than he did as assistant coach. Either way, it’s been great television.

 

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Game #31 – Canadiens vs. Hawks: Lineups & How Teams Were Built

By Sam Fels 1453 0

Notes: Julien has been able to change his ways and this team plays much faster than past iterations. The top-nine here is very quick, which should go well for the Hawks…Weber just returned from injury…if you think Manning is bad, at least the Hawks didn’t sign Karl Alzner…Price has been bad for two straight seasons, which is a worry at $10 million per year…Petry is having something of a renaissance…Domi has three goals in his last 11 and two of those came in the same game…

Notes: The headline is that Connor Murphy returns tonight, for now at the expense of Gustav Forsling, who was informed that he was hurt. The Hawks have been shopping Rutta and Manning to everyone to try and clear up the logjam, and those phone conversations must be comedy of the highest order…Crow was a little better against Vegas, but he gave up at least two goals he can’t and his rebound-control still remains iffy…Collition apparently is going with the “pairs” system in his lines, in that Saad-Toews, Kane-Anisimov, and Top Cat-Strome will always be together and they’ll make up the rest.

 

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Angry At Numbers: The Colliton Effect After 15

By Sam Fels 2038 0

I know that’s going to make a few laugh. I won’t stop you.

Jeremey Colliton has now gotten as many games as Joel Quenneville did this season. They each were behind the bench for 15. Obviously, at the top the records are pretty clear reading. Q went 6-6-3, whereas Colliton is at 3-10-2. Q had three regulation wins, Colliton two. It doesn’t make for a pretty sight.

Before we dig deeper, it was thought before that Colliton faced the far tougher schedule. And that will be true when this month is over and the Hawks wade through the Jets twice more, the Avs twice, the Preds, the Sharks,  and Stars (and you thought it couldn’t get worse!). The numbers don’t particularly bare that out.

The points-percentage of the teams the Hawks faced with Q behind the bench was .546. With Colliton it’s .561. For reference’s sake, the former mark would see a team collect 89 points over a full season, the latter 92 points. So just about equal, with a shade harder for Colliton.

But that isn’t the whole story. Q got to see the Ducks when they were awful, and Colliton when they were playing much better, but Q also got the Blues three times which would drag the points-total average down as well. Make of all of it what you will. Those marks will probably look different at the end of the season when teams like the Rangers  and Coyotes settle in more where they should be. Right now, it seems like things are neutral in that sense.

Anyway, let’s go into the metrics.

The Hawks had a 51.5 CF% under Quenneville. That’s dipped to 50.0 even with Colliton. Their scoring-chance share has gone from 49.1 to start the year to 48.2 now. If you can believe it, their high-danger scoring chance percentage has actually improved, from 43.6% under Q to 46.3% now (neither being an acceptable number).

What Colliton really hasn’t gotten is a save, anywhere. The even-strength save-percentage under him is .908, where it was .914 for Quenneville. Now you may say that the save-percentage would of course go down because the Hawks are giving up so many more chances under their new, ever-so-handsome coach. Is that so?

They’re actually giving up slightly less attempts per game at evens now, 57.1 vs. 58.8 before. They’re giving up one more shot per 60 at evens, from 32.4 to 33.3 now. Surprisingly, they’re giving up noticeably less scoring chances per 60, from 31.1 to 27.4 under C. And they’re giving up less high-danger chances per 60, from 13.8 per 60 to 11.7.

Now, a drop from .914 to .908 at even-strength may not sound like much, and it isn’t really, it’s about three more goals. It’s just where those goals go. If they got the Hawks to overtime in one-goal games, Colliton’s record might read 3-7-5, or if overtimes went their way a couple times, being as random as it is, it could be something like 5-6-4. Or maybe they all come when the Hawks are getting blown out anyway and it doesn’t matter. We can say, either way, that Colliton’s ride while bumpy has been also unlucky (last night being a perfect example).

On the other end of the ice, the Hawks have seen a noticeable reduction in their attempts for per 60 and their shots for per 60, while their scoring chances for and high-danger chances for have remained about steady. So while the team’s shooting-percentage has remained around 7.5% for both coaches, there’s less shots for them under Colliton to cash in on. Again, the difference in shots means the Hawks have missed out on a goal and a touch more, but not enough to wet oneself over.

As silly as it sounds, because they are bad defensively either way, the Hawks have actually slightly improved in their own end under Colliton, but still have a long way to go. They haven’t gotten a save, and their offense is going the wrong way. That could be to the league just closing up a little as a whole. It could be DeBrincat going cold, though some of that is usage. It could be the constant line-shuffling. It could be all of it.

None of it is pretty.

 

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Tonight I’m Gonna Rock You Tonight – December 6th

By Sam Fels 1045 0

First Screen Viewing

Bruins vs. Lightning – 6:30

I’m not sure how the Bruins are doing it. They are missing pretty much all of the blue line they started with, and Patrice Bergeron. And sure, they’ve lost pace with the Sabres, Leafs, and tonight’s opponent, Lightning. But they’re still comfortably in a playoff place, and you have to figure there’s a run coming when everyone is healthy. If everyone is healthy. Meanwhile, the Lightning are simply clocking people left and right, even if they haven’t separated from the Leafs yet. Though soon enough.

Second Screen Viewing

Wild vs. Flames – 7pm

Calgary is coming off putting up nine on the Blue Jackets, and beating some other slapdick team on their recent two-game road trip. The Wild won’t get the benefit of seeing Mike Smith, though both he and Big Save Dave were pilfered by the Jackets. The Wild have hit a bit of a rut and are losing pace with the Jets, Avs, and Predators, which isn’t surprising because they don’t have the weapons those teams do. And the Knights are getting awfully close in the rearview mirror for the last wild card spot.

Other Games

Red Wings vs. Maple Leafs – 6pm

Avalanche vs. Panthers – 6pm

Blue Jackets vs. Flyers – 6pm

Islanders vs. Penguins – 6pm

Canadiens vs. Senators – 6:30

Capitals vs. Coyotes – 8pm

Predators vs. Canucks – 9pm

Devils vs. Kings – 9:30

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Game #30 – Hawks vs. Knights Preview, Travel Expense Report – All These Things That I’ve Done

By Sam Fels 1660 0

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Game Time: 9:00PM CST
TV/Radio: NBC Sports Chicago, SN affiliates, WGN-AM 720
Indecent Proposal: Sin Bin, Knights on Ice

Because getting territorially dominated by a Randy Carlyle coached team without two of its best ice flipping defenseman wasn’t insulting enough, the Hawks now have no time to even sit in the corner and feel shame for it with a tilt tonight in Vegas against a Knights team that completely clowned them on national TV and in their own building two weeks ago.

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Game #30 – Hawks vs. Knights Spotlight: Patches Sliding Toward Becoming Poor Violet?

By Sam Fels 1601 0

There’s a school of thought that hockey players, especially forwards, peak at the age 0f 27. Some punch through that, such as Sidney Crosby, Evgeni Malkin, perhaps Patrick Kane, Joe Pavelski, and this could go on. But for the most part, it’s true. Max Pacioretty was thought to be a player who wouldn’t fall victim to that. Maybe we all should have been paying more attention.

Since he came into the league full-time in 2011, Patches is 9th in the league in goals. He trails Ovechkin, Stamkos, Tavares, Pavelski, Seguin, Benn, Malkin, and Kane. Those are obviously some names. When one of the top-10 scorers in the league goes on the market, teams pay attention.

More impressively, Pacioretty got there playing without any prime centers in Montreal. Some names that Patches had to run with are David Desharnais, an aging Thomas Plekanec, Alex Galchenyuk, Phillip Danault, and Andrew Shaw (boy that guy really needs to write a book on how to fall upwards). And yet Pacioretty produced.

But dig a little deeper, and the warning signs are there. This is the fourth-straight season that Pacioretty’s attempts per game have dropped. Same story with his shots-on-goal per game. And it’s the same with his individual expected goals per 60 minutes of even-strength time.

Patches has been able to overcome that so far this season by rocking a much higher shooting-percentage than he has in a few years, of 11.3 at evens, which is his highest since 2013-2014, and overall 15.2% which would be a career-high. But he’s doing that with worse shots. That’s not a sustainable model. Then again, Cody Eakin isn’t exactly a huge improvement over the mishmash of whatits he had in Montreal.

Which really makes one worry about the four next years when he’ll be making $7 million. That takes him to 34 years old, or seven years past his prime. It could get icky.

As we said with the contract that Marc-Andre Fleury got when the Knights were in Chicago, just because GM George McPhee had all the cap space in the world to throw around didn’t mean he had to. Patches still qualifies as one of the best scorers in the game, but that has a shelf-life. Perhaps Tavares was never going to listen to him, though he presents the same problem as Pacioretty in that he plays a slower game. Doesn’t seem to be affecting him in Toronto, though. What about Erik Karlsson? Or waiting for Panarin?

McPhee had such a cushion that he’ll get out of it. Only the raise to William Karlsson is on the horizon, and everyone else is pretty much set. The Knights will have $11 million in space in the summer as of now, minus whatever raise Wild Bill gets. Two years from now Cody Eakin and Ryan Reaves are off the books. But there might not be too many more contracts for him to hand out before it’s trouble.

None of this means that Pacioretty is going to be a detriment. He’ll probably get a team 20-25 goals for another few years simply because he can be a bad-shot maker. Hell, get him a prime center some day and it might juice him a little. He’s just not going to be, or likely isn’t, what the Knights had hoped they had traded for.

 

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Game #30 – Hawks vs. Knights Q&A: SinBin Vegas (Again)

By Sam Fels 1670 0

Ken Boehlke is one-half of sinbin.vegas. This was the Q&A we did with them when the Knights were in town just a couple weeks ago. Follow them @SinBinVegas.

We know the Knights benefitted last year from insane goaltending along  with their more than solid even-strength play. But having among the worst save-percentage and shooting-percentage this season seems a violent market correction. Is there something systemic here more than just rotten luck?

What it really comes down to is Grade-A scoring chances and the subsequent execution of them. Early in the season the Golden Knights were having a hard time creating anything in the dangerous areas (in the house, if you know that term) but what was worse than their inability to create the chances was a consistency in not finishing those chances when they did arise. Luckily, as tends to be the case in hockey, that has turned recently, especially since they’ve begun to play more
Pacific division teams.

How big is the injury to Paul Stastny?

To be completely honest, it hasn’t had a major impact to this point. It’s the loss of Haula that seems to be more of a detriment to the team. Stastny certainly would have been, and hopefully will eventually be, a nice center for the 2nd line, but Eakin has stepped in incredibly well and appears to be thriving with goal-scorers on his line again. The loss of Haula however has definitely taken an level of speed away from the team and at times they don’t look like the quick, ferocious, probably considered annoying team that won the Western Conference. They’ve been searching for anyone to make the 3rd line go since Haula’s gruesome injury, but it hasn’t really happened yet. Would they be better with Stastny back? Of course, but if you gave me one or the other right now, I’d rather have Haula.

And the suspension to Nate Schmidt? While he’s unquestionably a good player is he really a top pairing d-man that a team would miss so heavily?

I’ll be completely honest in saying I heavily underestimated the impact Schmidt would have in the lineup upon his return. When a guy is out for the first 20 games of the season and the last memories of him are the Cup Final when not a single defenseman was any good, there certainly has to be a level of skepticism about how good the player really is, especially a player who has only a one year track record of being a top pair defenseman. But this guy is everything and more on the ice that made the hockey world realize that he’a a top 20 defenseman in the league and maybe even better. He’s kind of been this a stabilizing force to the defense in that they aren’t allowing an odd-man rush a period anymore, but it’s added an element of transition back into Vegas’ game and most importantly, it’s meant the return of Colin Miller and Shea Theodore to more familiar, less defensively responsible, roles. All of that was a long way to say, YES, Nate Schmidt is that good.

Max Pacioretty started slow, there was concern, and now he’s bagged six goals in four games. Was this just a product of all scorers going through hot and cold streaks?

I don’t think it was simply a cold streak that a scorer tends to go through. We’ve all seen those cold streaks and they tend to mean lots of great saves against, post hits, miraculous backchecking, and the likes. That’s not what this was for Pacioretty. He was just not good. He wasn’t creating much by means of scoring chances and he was uncharacteristically a liability defensively. When I say he was bad, I mean, he was legitimately one of the worst forwards on the team. However, he’s definitely not that anymore, and it’s not because he’s scored a bunch of goals recently. It seems to have much more to do with
his linemates. Playing with Alex Tuch isn’t as simple as it would seem. He’s so much faster than he looks and he plays with a power that’s not horribly common in the NHL. Pacioretty seemed to always been a half  second behind Tuch, likely because he didn’t expect Alex to be able to pull off some of the stuff that he does. Now, Pacioretty expects Tuch to win every puck, to undress guys at the blue line, and to fire passes through people every shift. Pacioretty is starting to find himself in much better positions when Tuch and Eakin create turnovers, and the three of them are starting to look dangerous every single time out as a unit rather than individually. Pacioretty told me about two weeks ago that he thought he was thinking too much and it was slowing him down. That’s a huge problem when you play with Tuch. That appears to be over
and the flood gates might just be open.

 

 

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