Baseball

Trading Quintana, DH, Other Stuff

By Sam Fels 1774 0

Dreary Fridays lend themselves to notes and the like. So we’ll do that for baseball too today.

-As the Cubs still look for ways to dig under the luxury tax threshold like Fantastic Mr. Fox, one option that will probably gain steam (if it hasn’t already) is moving along Jose Quintana. It certainly wouldn’t cause the hysteria that a trade of Kris Bryant or Willson Contreras would. Q doesn’t have the same sheen as those in the eyes of Cubs fans, mostly because he walked into Theo Epstein’s office in July of 2017 with a shotgun and made him give up Dylan Cease and Eloy Jimenez for him, both of whom has since shot to multiple All-Star game appearances

Wait, I’m being told that’s not what happened. Huh.

Anyway, the actual act of finding takers for Quintana should be far easier than for Bryant and Contreras and their rightly astronomic prices. Quintana does make essentially nothing for this season–$10.5M–which for a #3 or #4 starter is still a bargain. and Q was a little better by some metrics than you might think, with a FIP under 4.00 and a fWAR of 3.5 (much higher than Darvish, to illustrate). Teams are going to want that.

Still, on the other side of the coin, there’s something more depressing about trading Q. With Bryant and to a lesser extent Contreras, while the main goal has always been the money there was a companion argument of replenishing the pipeline with some arms the Cubs simply don’t have and at least providing more that will be here after 2021. If you squinted, you could see the benefits of it while acknowledging they don’t come close to outweighing the drawbacks.

But with Q, you feel it’s just a salary dump. Surely you wouldn’t get anything in the rotation in return that was cheaper, unless it was a flier on some prospect or two. And they almost certainly wouldn’t be anywhere near major league ready. Which means you would have stripped your rotation even further, and the rotation wasn’t good enough last year after Hamels got hurt. Which means you rotation would be the Kyle Hendricks (pretty much a known at this point), the hope that Yu Darvish’s second half is the new normal, the four-to-five innings you’re getting out of Jon Lester at 36, and then praying to whatever god happens to be listening at that moment (hat tip to The Dag for that one, and also hit me up).

Doesn’t really feel like you’re going anywhere with that, does it?

Even sadder, there hasn’t been any mention of the Cubs getting below the the luxury tax this year so they can spring out ahead of it the following season with no repeater penalties, as the Yankees and Dodgers have done in recent years. You would think the theory was that by that time the money from Marquee would allow the Cubs to do that, except now the prevailing wisdom is that they’ve royally boned this whole network thing, sparked by not having a deal with Comcast yet, and that windfall might never actually come. Say, why does Crane Kenney still have a job?

The fear is that the Cubs will always want to be below the luxury tax, which means they might lose more than you already thought they were going to before the Free Agent-acolypse of the winter of ’21-’22. Or at least until we know what a new CBA looks like, which means the Cubs might be half-assing two seasons instead of one. That’s fun.

Of course, there’s always the hope the Cubs could make a baseball trade for Quintana, or at least use what little wiggle room it would give them to bolster this year’s roster with…well, maybe it’s best to not look at what’s still available. This was all well-timed.

-Kris Bryant and the Cubs settled for $18.6M and avoided arbitration. Hopefully this isn’t the last time they talk, and that money is going to seem a complete joke if he stays healthy all season and put up another 7-WAR season.

-Jayson Stark was having some fun today about predictions for the coming decade, and one idea I’ve kicked around here before. It’s bringing a modified DH to the NL and AL, where your DH stays in the game as long as your starter does. Basically instead of one guy hitting for a spot, he hits for a specific player. From there, you’d have to pinch-hit for every reliever or let them hit for themselves.

It seems to split the happy medium of those who cling to the “strategy” of the NL game and those who have no need to see pitchers hit anymore. How long do you leave your starter in? If he’s getting torched and has to go in the 2nd, how do you stretch your bench throughout the rest of the game? Would relievers who can go multiple innings be even more valuable? Could you leave in another DH for a reliever who does go two or three innings and whose spot comes up multiple times? Would this end the idea of an opener?

To me all those questions are kind of exciting. Certainly with a 26-man roster now the answers are a little more available. I hope this is what they go to soon.

-There’s also a bit about automated strike zones, and how they zone will probably have to be amended to deal with the strict interpretation that cameras would give you. I say “FUCK. THAT.” The example Stark uses is a pitch that nicks the bottom of the zone and a catcher catches an inch off the ground.

But that’s been the problem. Strike calls shouldn’t have anything to do with where the catcher catches it. Hitters shouldn’t even be looking at that, and neither should umps. That’s where the zone is, so adjust. It might lead to some ugly arguments or controversy for a couple months, but you’d get past it. I suppose it won’t be the end of the world if the zone is moved to the top of the knees or wherever, but the idea that we’ll all lose our shit because of where the catcher catches a pitch is the exact problem we’re trying to solve.

Hockey

Boqvist, Nylander, Colliton, And Other Thoughts On A Dreary Day

By Sam Fels 2158 0

Not much more to discuss after last night’s loss, as Rose summed it up pretty well. So we’ll clean through what we can.

-The Hawks will run to the stronghold of the excuse of injuries, and that has some validity. Without Saad and Strome, this team is missing two of a top six that never really had a six until Kubalik proved he was worthy of it (and you could probably still argue on a good team Kubalik is a great third-liner). That’s going to be too much for this team to overcome. Until they return, you’re probably going to see a few more two-goal games or four-shot periods and the like.

Still, I won’t hear much about adding Andrew Shaw to that list, because that’s pining for the idea of Andrew Shaw and not what was reality. You could do that when he was healthy. He didn’t provide much forecheck, hardly any scoring, and basically the only thing you got above a “meh” level was dumb offensive zone penalties.

That doesn’t mean it’s not somewhat embarrassing to get clowned by a coach who has had one practice with his new team. John Hynes might fall on the “Moron” side of our binary Moron/Not A Moron coach rating system, but his Devils teams were a nightmare for the Hawks the past couple seasons. And that’s because they had enough speed for Hynes to simply let them loose on the forecheck and there’s nothing the Hawks can do about it. Or they won’t.

Most teams don’t have to worry about leaving a third man high on the forecheck or not, because if they send two forwards aggressively they will likely cause a turnover. The Hawks have never been instructed to A. move the puck along quickly and B. have their forwards in spots to aid that if they have been. They’re either too far deep along the boards where one forechecker can get to both he and the d-man or they’re floating somewhere out in the neutral zone, stationary. The Hawks don’t time this well. What the good teams are doing is flipping pucks into the neutral zone as the forwards are charging out of the defensive end. They’re leading them.

The Hawks, because their players demanded they play this way and the front office went along with it to basically cut Colliton off at the knees, send their forwards early. So even if the d-men have time to get the puck out there, everything is a jump-ball. Hynes knows enough to know this and harasses the Hawks d-men below the goal line with all of his d-men and third forward “above” the Hawks forwards, or closer to the puck. So when there is a turnover, they’re better positioned and it’s ya-ha time.

Secondly, Hynes is yet another coach who knows the Hawks “system” in their zone is still easily pierced by a simple weave either by the circle or out at the line, where a forward carries the puck from down low to out high and a d-man switches spots with him. You saw it last night on the first goal, where Boqvist has to go chasing Filip Forsberg all the way out to the line, and hence ends up running an incidental screen on Kane chasing Josi, leaving the latter a free lane to the net. Seeing as how Forsberg’s back is to the goal and he’s moving in the wrong direction, it would seem prudent for Boqvist to pass him off to whatever forward is there because there’s time to do so without providing a four-lane high way to the slot. But no, we continue to see this.

-Speaking of Boqvist, he had a rough one last night. On the ice for the first two goals, flailing wildly on the first and caught flat-footed after Keith was stripped on the second. And then he couldn’t out-skate Nick Bonino for the first empty-netter, though he might have gotten confused whether it was Bonino or the puck he was supposed to chase. And he was at the end of a shift, so maybe judging his speed then isn’t the fairest. There were always going to be nights like this, and you’d dismiss them as just that if you thought it was part of a proper learning curve.

Still, we haven’t seen Boqvist move through the gears at all except for brief flashes in the offensive zone. What’s been frustrating for me is that as soon as he gets the puck in the defensive zone, his feet stop moving. What’s supposed to make Boqvist special is that he can squirt out of trouble with the puck and move the Hawks up the ice with a couple opposing forwards caught. He’s supposed to a risk-taker, just like Josi is and always has been. Sure, there will be some ugly turnovers that way but this is a team that desperately needs to play in space and can’t always hail mary its way to that. It needs a quick turn or spin out from behind the net and suddenly it has possession with speed and teams backing off of them.

I don’t know if this has been an organizational treatise to Boqvist, and they’ve been lording over him for a year and a half now, or just a teenager still trying to come to terms with the top division. But if he’s just going to immediately become a statue when in possession in his own end, then all you’ve got is a more skilled Erik Gustafsson. That’s not nearly enough.

-I can’t call Alex Nylander the dumbest Hawk I’ve ever seen, because that’s a hell of a competition. But man is he making a case. We’ve seen the repeated failure to gain the red line for a dump-in to change. Or the blind chases to find space when it was detrimental. He added a new one last night on the power play in the 3rd when Kubalik (I think) had the puck on the right half-wall and Nylander simply skated right at him motioning for him to switch spots like they were messing up a dance routine and they were told to take five. Doofus, he had the puck, maybe play off of him and naturally get to your spot instead of ruling yourself out as an option?

The too many men he forced was the capper though. Everyone in the arena and on TV could see the Hawks were changing and he had the puck on the opposite side of the ice under no pressure. So there’s no way he couldn’t see it. A simple shovel into the Preds zone and everything was fine. Instead, he passed it into a sea of red jerseys, where the absolute best result would have been for every Hawk to avoid the puck until the change was complete and probably result in the Preds grabbing it. And that’s if everyone was looking at him, which no one was because they were changing and just expecting a dump-in.

This might go down as one of Stan’s worst moves, which is saying something because Jokiharju maxes out as a nice, second-pairing player. But Nylander simply has no feel for the game, no instincts, and it’s getting worse. How do players like this get taken in the first round at all?

Hockey

Game #45 – Predators vs. Hawks Spotlight: Poile’s Last Stand?

By Sam Fels 1428 0

One of the things people marvel about the Nashville Predators is their stability. John Hynes, hired this week, is only their third coach in the 20 years of their history. They’ve only had one GM, and that’s David Poile. Something about southern loyalty or whatever. One might have to ask though…why?

Because when you total it up, the Preds record of success doesn’t really justify keeping things the same this long. There are two division titles, both in the past two years, and one Final appearance. The latter was their only journey even beyond the second round. It’s always spurious to judge a team merely on playoff success, because the sport itself and the playoff structure can be so random. But we’re talking about 20 years here.

On regular season parameters, the division titles could be a touch misleading. There have been regular 100+ point seasons, including three of the last five. If you’re gobbling up over 100 points, where you finish in the division is again, sort of random, basically however many overtime or shootout points you or the teams you’re competing with have gathered.

Still, this isn’t like the Lightning who kept losing to the eventual champion. The Preds lost to those same Hawks in ’15 that the Lightning did, and outplayed those Hawks for at least three of those six games and saw Pekka Rinne undo all that work. But last year they lost to the ultra-boring Stars and the year before that it was the Jets, and each of those then bit it in the next round.

Still, after 20 years, you’d think more than one Western Conference championship would be required to keep David Poile in the GM chair. And he may be out over it now.

Poile fired Peter Laviolette, because the Preds have been amongst the favorites for a few years  and are currently out of the playoff picture. The pressure is clearly being felt, and expectations are clearly not being met. This isn’t just a good time for home and visiting fans alike anymore. The feeling that the Preds might miss their window is starting to get palpable in Tennessee.

How much responsibility does Poile take for this season? Or last? Well, last year is a mixed record. The pickup of Mikael Granlund made all the sense in the world on paper. Is it Poile’s fault that Granlund completely flattened out upon arrival? You could make the argument either way. The acquisitions of Brian Boyle and Wayne Simmonds only made the Preds slower and dumber, and harkened back to the 1st round pick given away for Paul Gaustad. It’s something that Poile has had a weakness for during his entire tenure. They certainly didn’t provide enough dash to get through the blockade the Stars were putting up in the first round.

This year? Again, Granlund not adapting to a team and style that should have hit him between the eyes isn’t totally on Poile. He sacrificed PK Subban because they had depth on the blue line, which they always seem to have, so they could sign Matt Duchene. And yet even with Duchene, no forward is scoring at a top-tier, first-line forward rate. Forsberg leads with 30 points in 36 games. Duchene has 29 in 39, which is kind of what he’s always been. This has been a bugaboo of the Preds for a while, no true game-breaker up front other than maybe Forsberg, and you still have to do some back-bends to call him that.

But then, most GMs’ and coaches’ fortunes simply hinge on PDO, and mostly on their goalies. The Preds do everything mostly right. They’re top-ten in Corsi and expected goals percentages. They have the puck most of the time. What they can’t get is a save, and especially on the penalty kill. The Preds have a .798 SV% on the kill, which has sunk both Rinne’s and Juuse Saros’s overall SV% below .900. Is that on Poile? Because if you go by the chances their PK is giving up, the Preds actually have a good kill. But it doesn’t matter if the goalies let every chance in. Certainly no one was advocating for the Preds to make changes in the crease in the offseason, if Rinne is turning into dust now.

But it’s never that simple in these calculations. If the Preds miss out, you have to feel there will be a house-cleaning. One wonders what Poile thinks he’s going to get out of John Hynes, who only had a good season in New Jersey when Taylor Hall said so. It reeked of a desperate move without a plan. Was Hynes really in the wings all the time to replace Laviolette? If so, why? Lavvy certainly has a shelf-life, but is it his fault that Rinne nor Saros couldn’t stop a sloth on the penalty kill? Did Poile only pull the trigger when Hynes became available?

Maybe Hynes knows how to get Ryan Johansen away from the postgame spread and playing like a top line center again. Maybe he can juice Viktor Arvidsson. But what’s clear is that the Predators aren’t content to be everyone’s cute little getaway anymore, and perhaps for the first time since they actually played games, they might be on the lookout for a new GM.

 

Hockey

Game #45 – Predators vs. Hawks: Hedley Lamarr’s Mugs, Pugs, And Thugs

By Sam Fels 1020 0

Ryan Johansen – Treat Boy here always gets labeled as one of the top centers in the game, and we still can’t figure out why. His numbers the past two seasons mirror that of Jonathan Toews, and everyone’s relatively sure he looks like the host of “Tales From The Crypt.” RyJo Sen played his ass off just long enough in 2017 to get a fat new deal from the Preds, and then he became a fat new deal. The dude has one 70+ point season. When the Preds get bounced early again, it’ll probably be because Ryan O’Reilly or Nathan MacKinnon hand him his considerable lunch.

Matt Duchene – Rich kid face with an Oakland booty!

Austin Watson – Any day now, David Poile is going to yell, “I’m so fucking glad we have Austin Watson” at some female reporter. Except it’s Nashville, so that’s probably like an every day thing there.

Hockey

Game #45 – Predators vs. Hawks: Lineups & How They Were Built

By Sam Fels 1033 0

Predators

Notes: Preds didn’t skate this morning so this is how it looked against Boston. The injured don’t figure to return other than maybe Fabbro, so it’s probably the same lineup again…Rinne had an .885 in December, but Saros wasn’t much better and has probably missed the boat to take over the starter’s job at any point in Music City…The Preds have gotten rolled in their past two games possession-wise, which is fine against the Bruins but against the Ducks?…Josi has an 11-game point-streak, in which he’s amassed 19 points…

Hawks

Notes: Hawks only had an optional skate, so we don’t know exactly how they’ll align without Strome. One would think Kane would slide up, but that makes for an absolutely barren bottom six. Then again, it was always going to be that if this team suffered injuries…Caggiula has said he’s been ready to play but the coaches told him the shitter’s full. Strome’s injury puts paid to that, but they might want to slide Highmore back in instead…Crawford will start for the third straight game…After putting the Hawks down two men twice on Tuesday, maybe Smith sits instead…

Baseball

Is This Anything?

By Sam Fels 1652 0

I guess this is what we Cubs fans have been reduced to this winter. Considering whether or not something that would normally sound like galaxy-brained four-dimensional chess that everyone would  laugh out of the room is actually a thing worth pursuing. Or even based in any kind of reality. But hey, the way things are going with the Cubs, maybe it’s better to just live in a fantasy world.

So here it is: A second report connecting the Cubs to Nolan Arenado. It seems utterly ludicrous, and the kind of thing you wouldn’t get away with in MLB The Show, but here we are. The Cubs won’t pay Kris Bryant but they will pay Arenado the $70M he has the next two years and then the ensuing $199M over the five years after that if he doesn’t opt out in 2021. Say, wouldn’t somewhere around $35M keep Bryant, the better player, around for a while? Well, this is where you have to start moving pieces around in dimensions and methods that don’t exist, so let’s look at the viability of everything suggested here by Brett, Passan, and others.

One, the big flashing light on Arenado. He plays in Coors Field, and if you take him away from that, you’re only getting an above-average offensive player. That has some legs. Arenado’s career slash-lines on the road: .265/.323/.476 for a 109 wRC+ or .336 wOBA. Not exactly Vegas-neon there, is it?

Let’s try and be a little more fair. Last year, Arenado ran a 118 wRC+ away from home. But the year before that it was 104. But in 2017 it was 126. So he’s not incapable away from Coors, it’s just hard to know exactly what you’d be getting, though you’d be sure it would be less than the sum of what you get with half a season amongst the thin air, weed, and every third person in attendance owning a brewery. I would also point out that when not at Coors, Arenado plays most of his road games in San Francisco, San Diego, or LA which are bad hitter’s parks. But that’s a bit of a stretch. Also, as Brett alludes to here, there is a school of thought that bouncing between altitude and not-altitude affects players negatively. Which is true.

Still, Arenado hits the ball really hard, with a 42% hard-contact rate and we’ve talked at length how the only Cub to manage that last year was Schwarber and Castellanos. You’d like to think that would play anywhere, but you can’t be sure. And Arenado doesn’t strike out much and makes much more contact than most of the hitters in the lineup, which the Cubs could certainly use.

Ok, now here is where it starts to get really nuts. The idea is that the Rockies would somehow be slaked by receiving Willson Contreras and Jason Heyward in return, which would free the Cubs up to trade Bryant for ready or near-ready pitching and players from another team. This seems a little backward, as most likely part of the bounty gained from trading Bryant would have to go to prying Arenado loose. Because simply getting Contreras back and Heyward’s contract doesn’t seem near enough for a team’s best player, especially for a team that would be signaling a complete tear-down by moving Arenado. They’d want young players, prospects and such.

Yes, the Rockies would get to save some $28M in real dollars between Arenado’s and Heyward’s salary the next two seasoins, but you’d have to subtract whatever Contreras gets in arbitration and also consider the fact that Contreras is just a year younger than Arenado. Also, the Rockies would be losing the production of, y’know, NOLAN ARENADO, and replacing some of it with the scarecrow production of Jason Heyward. And that’s assuming you get Heyward to agree to this, which is no gimme.

Then, and you’re going to have to stick with me here, the Cubs would take the money saved by not paying Bryant his arbitration award to sign Castellanos, which arguably would be about the same thing. So they’d lose something like $45M in luxury tax dollars but bring back $35M in Arenado, and then basically swallow that up and more by re-signing Castellanos. Which would still leave them over the luxury tax. Everyone got that?

Even if we ignore all that, would the Cubs be better? It’s not clear. Arenado is certainly an upgrade defensively, and the Cubs would have one of the best left sides of the infield of all-time between him and Baez. They’d lose a little in offense, which they would gain back by having Castellanos in right. Though that outfield defense might give all that advantage back. And we still have no idea what Victor Caratini is over a full season offensively and it almost certainly isn’t anywhere near what Willson gives you.

Basically this feels like a lot of running all the way out to come all the way back and pretty much end up where you were in the first place.

The whole thing would hinge on what the return is for Bryant, and how much that helps you starting in March and how far away the rest of it would be. Which we have no idea about, and the packages that have been whispered from DC or Atlanta get a big “FUCK OFF” from me.

What I will say to all of this on the positive side is it’s odd to me that Castellanos remains on the free agent market. Most every other big ticket item has signed, which if you wanted to convince yourself of it could mean he’s waiting for something. He’s not short on suitors, we know that. We know he loved it here, we know the Cubs loved having him here, but the hoops to jump through still seem far too small and far too numerous (other than Ricketts remembering he comes from one of the richest families in the world and not really sweating luxury tax and revenue sharing fees).

I will say that if by some acid-induced vision the Cubs pulled this off, and the return for Bryant was huge and its impact at least close to immediate (say no player ready later than 2021), then shuffling these chairs to remain stationary actually sets you up better for the future. Right now, other than Hoerner and Alzolay if you squint, what the Cubs will be in ’21 and ’22 (assuming they sign ANYONE) is on the field now (if you want to mention Amaya or Davis or Marquez here, fine, but I bet they would be part of anything for Arenado too). Which…is not ideal. You could swallow it, is what I’m saying.

But the amount of moving parts here, and the amount of things that could go wrong is just kind of mind-boggling. I’m going to go ahead and say this isn’t anything.

Hockey

Don’t Speak, I Know Just What You’re Sayin’

By Sam Fels 1954 0

I should admit right at the top I always had a distaste for No Doubt, which is saying something as I was 13 when Gwen Stefani hit the scene and that really should have been enough for any boy that age. It wasn’t. I guess I’ve never been happy.

Anyway…

I won’t be the first to point out that it’s awfully curious, or perfect in another sense, that the first time Stan Bowman was publicly available to the media is halfway through the season and when the Hawks had gone 7-3-0 during a 10-game stretch. Something about GMs in this town. You can’t find Ryan Pace with a strike team during the season. I’m not sure GarPax knows where the media room is. Only Hahn and Epstein seem to be around for you whenever, but maybe that’s just the nature of baseball and being there every goddamn day.

Whatever Stan had to say, and we’ll get to it, should be couched by this fact: though the Hawks had won 7 of 10, they were still six points out of a playoff spot before last night’s game with three teams to leap. The current last wildcard holder (Winnipeg) is on pace for 95 points. The Hawks would have to amass 51 points in their last 38 games to get to that mark, if that’s even enough by the time we get to April. Or like, 23-10-5. Basically at a 30% higher pace of points-per-game than they are managing now, and that’s with the added injuries.

The Hawks are wedged in the standings between two teams that fired their coaches. Two teams that think where they are is unacceptable. It’s important to remember all of this.

“I think we’ve played our best hockey, probably over the last couple weeks, looking at our record,” Bowman said. “It did take a little bit of time to get everything together. We did have spurts of it earlier in the year where we played well, but we couldn’t sustain it enough probably to get enough wins on the board. We’ve played better lately and now we’ve got to build on that, so consistency is probably the hardest part to nail for this team so far. Because we show when we play the way we want to play …”

I’ve been harping on this all season, but it’s infuriating to hear the team still fucking cling to this. The Hawks are not bad because they are inconsistent. They are inconsistent because they’re bad. There seems to be this delusion around the whole organization that some devine force is going to descend from the heavens and bestow them consistency. I hate to keep pulling out this GIF and repeat myself but it seems to still apply wholly…

Either the vets are simply too old to give you 82 games of dominance (Keith, Toews, Crawford), or the kids are still learning (Dach, Boqvist) or are simply not that good (everyone else). The way this team is constructed, they basically have the equal amount of players who will improve and grow and those who will continue to decline, which is a great way to remain right where you are.

“…we’ve had pretty strong goaltending all year, so that’s been the bright spot for our team, given us a chance even some nights when we didn’t play well at all we would have a chance to come back and win some games.”

Here is something that should be keeping Bowman up at nights, if not gotten him fired already. It’s the SV%s of the teams around the Hawks in the standings:

San Jose – .889

Nashville – .887

Minnesota – .895

Over in the East…

Montreal – .897

Buffalo – .900

HAWKS – .911

Here are some teams that have gotten similar goaltending to the Hawks…

St. Louis – 1st in West

Colorado – 2nd in West

Islanders – 2nd in Metro

What this should mean to Stan, or any right-thinking human getting the requisite amount of oxygen, is that the rest of the team is an utter disaster when you’re getting contender-level goaltending. In the NHL, that’s really supposed to be about 75% of the battle. If you fuck that up, you’ve really accomplished something wondrous. Stan talking about the goaltending isn’t him extolling the virtues of his team. It’s providing rope they should have hanged him with long ago.

“Well, we’re right there,” Bowman said. “We’re a little bit behind the pack — a couple points. But it’s a pretty tight pack that are fighting to get into that spot. It’s been basically half a season. We’ve got a lot of hockey left…”

I understand that the Hawks have to sell the rest of the season, even though they have the sellout streak and there are good seats still available every game (still working that one out). So Stan can’t come out and declare that they’re toast. Still, six points out of the playoffs is miles away. MILES. Three teams to leap, and you just lost another game to a direct competitor (which I guess the Flames are right now). The Hawks have more regulation wins than seven teams. Seven. Right there? Where is right there? If this were a woman telling you you were right there you’d know for sure she was faking.

“There’s a lot of teams that are going through injury troubles,” Bowman said. “The encouraging thing is seeing how our guys have responded with having a lot of established veteran players (out). They play a pretty big role on our team and they’re all out, but our team’s found a way with a different group, a different mixture here, to get some wins. That’s a good sign.”

Or could it be that your veterans just sucked? de Haan is certainly a miss, and so is Saad, but the latter’s only been out a couple weeks. Andrew Shaw provided you nothing. Drake Caggiula provided you nothing. Brent Seabrook provided you nothing. I’ll have some patience for the injury-angle, more when we know what Strome is dealing with, but only so much.

““We’re not focused on past years,” Bowman said. “We’re looking at this year where we are right now. We’ve had a pretty good stretch recently. We’ve got to continue to do that. If we’re able to build on the way we’ve played the last few weeks I think we’ll put ourselves in a nice spot over the next month.”

Not focused on past years, eh? I don’t even know what to do with this, so I’m just going to leave it alone. And you’re not going to build on how you’ve played the past few weeks, because your team has spent the past two seasons proving that it can’t.

“The focus right now is to just stay in the present and look where we are and build on these next few games and keep going.”

And here’s the big problem. The Hawks can’t focus on the right now. Focusing on merely the right now, and not even correctly, is how you get the slapdash offseason of throwing de Haan, Maatta, and Lehner to the wall, trading Jokiharju and then ending up with the playing time he would have needed and deserved but not having him here to take it. Having no sense of a long-term plan is how you end up continuing to kowtow to Seabrook until you have no choice but to send him to a farm upstate to avoid further embarrassment. You can’t just keep focusing on now, because it’s your job to map out how the Hawks get back to the top in the future. And they’ve done exactly none of that.

This blog is over.

 

Hockey

Game #44 – Flames vs. Hawks Preview: Trying To Find The Heart

By Sam Fels 1588 0

vs.

RECORDS: Flames 22-17-5   Hawks 19-18-6

PUCK DROP: 7:30

TV: NBCSN Chicago

COVERED IN HORSESHIT: Flames Nation

This week, the Hawks get a chance to put a couple things…well, not right but at least improve. One is their home record. They moved just over .500 with the win over Detroit, but they simply have to be better on Madison St. Second, they can get a couple wins over teams around them in the standings, which they can claim they are competing with for wildcard spots. They did get one over on the Flames last week, which was a departure, but generally this has been a sore spot for them. Calgary is visiting tonight and Nashville on Thursday, and those just happen to be two of the three teams between them and the final playoff spot.

Obviously, not much has changed with Cal and Gary since these two spent New Year’s Eve together (I assume loudly singing along to Lizzo like everyone else). They beat the Rangers at home on the 2nd and then snuck out of St. Paul with a shootout victory on Sunday. So the issues are basically the same. As we like to say around these parts, they can’t hit a bull in the ass with a banjo. They have the fourth-worst SH% at evens in the league, which belies the talent on display here through Monahan (Lisa needs braces…), Gaudreau, Tkachuk, et al. You still have to figure that will correct at some point and send the Flames toward the automatic spots in the Pacific, which they’re only two points behind and two of which are occupied by the Coyotes and Oilers. Most would guess those teams will deflate before the end of the season.

Still, something is more amiss up in Southern Alberta. This team was something of a possession monster under Bill Peters, which is something he just tended to do for his teams (as well as kick them and be racist toward them). This year, even before his dismissal, that’s not been the case. Some of it is Mark Giordano aging, and some of it is just no one else stepping up to fill in some of that gap. Recently they’ve split Gio and T.J. Brodie, perhaps to get some more push from a different pairing. But Brodie’s always been a bit lost without Giordano, so that’s a risk.

Another problem for them is a top line that just hasn’t fired at the pace they’re accustomed to. Monahan and Gaudreau have been point-per-game players before, and neither are there at the moment or anywhere close. Gaudreau especially seems to have eschewed getting to the middle of the ice, and is doing something of a mini-Getzlaf act on the outside. This has hurt Monahan’s game, as he thrived on the havoc Johnny Hockey used to cause in the offensive zone. They attempted to replicate this by moving Mikael Backlund to wing on the line and getting him in the middle, but that had middling results. Now they’re shuttling Elias Lindholm between 2C and 1RW, which is also having the benefit of making it clear what the Flames need to go get before the deadline.

Either way, this was a team that until the last meeting had given the Hawks fits, because it’s one of the many that is significantly faster than them. They weren’t much at the races against the Hawks for the first 30 minutes last Tuesday, allowing the Hawks a 4-0 lead. But once they realized they were about to be embarrassed, traffic flowed in only one direction and the Hawks were even somewhat lucky to get out of there with a rare regulation win. You can expect the Flames to be a little more attuned tonight.

Still, their goaltending has been a little wayward. Big Save Dave has given up 11 in his last three starts (including the Hawks game), and Cam and Magic Talbot gave up three at home to the Rangers. So maybe the Hawks can find some joy there.

As for the Hawks, I wouldn’t expect any changes. Robin Lehner wasn’t in the starter’s net at the morning skate and is still working through his minor leg problem. Look for him Thursday. There’s no reason to change any of the lineup, though Dennis Gilbert took a shot off the ankle at practice. But that couldn’t make him any slower. Maybe Fetch slides in for him, which whatever. After scoring his first NHL goal it would be heavily cruel to sit Dylan Sikura and lose the confidence he just gained. So Alex Nylander’s useless ass can stay in a suit.

As we’ve said, this is a part of the schedule the Hawks can make their season meaningful in. The Flames are a confused bunch, and the Preds even more so after firing their coach. The Ducks suck, and then they’ll get two games against either a rebuilding dreck like the Senators or yet another confused bunch in the Habs before having to try and catch the Leafs in Toronto. Either you are or you aren’t, and these next two weeks should tell us which. Even if you think you already know.