Game #61 Preview
First Screen Viewing
Lightning vs. Capitals – 6pm
The two first-placed teams in the East have a get-together tonight in the DC. Some will bill this as a possible conference final, but we all know the very slow Caps are going to spit it in round one or two because that’s just their way. Anyway, this is about as good as you’re going to go do tonight, and the Lightning are still pretty entertaining. If they’re locked in and focused tonight, a true demolition of the Caps will have their always level-headed fanbase in their usual mood-changers.
Second Screen Viewing
Kings vs. Jets – 7pm
You saw the Kings last night, who actually played with a desperation not seen by them in a while. They’ll have to back it up tonight against a far better Jets team that is still hanging with the Predators and Knights for the top of division and conference. They’re still without Trouba but the Jets are on tilt everywhere else.
Other Games
Panthers vs. Maple Leafs – 6pm
Blue Jackets vs. Devils – 6pm
Canadiens vs. Flyers – 6pm
Predators vs. Red Wings – 6:30
Sharks vs. Blues – 7pm
Bruins vs. Oilers – 8pm
Avalanche vs. Canucks 9pm
Right at the top, let me say that the Hawks and the United Center handled Saturday night’s stupidity and ugliness about the way you’d ask. They ejected the fans, banned them, and their statement hit all the notes you’d require. Getting their players in on it is a good idea as well, to try and be thorough. While I would suspect these four fucksticks were probably saying ugly shit far longer than when Devante Smith-Pelly had had enough, that’s dependent on the fans around them calling them out before then. The United Center or Hawks can’t force people to do that, and when it became obvious to everyone they did what they should.
If I could lend one quibble, it would be to release their names publicly, and give the other four teams in town the option of banning them from their games as well. This kind of ugliness should result at least in public shaming and in reality, loss of job and a few other things. You may say it’s thought police, but there are few companies and agencies and whatever else that wants to be associated with that kind of prejudice and hatred. And that’s what it is.
The problem for the Hawks here is that it’s started a ball rolling that I don’t think they’re in any way prepared for.
Because if the policy in the United Center and for the Hawks is that racism will not be tolerated in the stands, then those who show up in full headdresses can’t be allowed on the concourses. Those two jackwagons who used to paint themselves red (and demanded free programs from me once because they painted themselves red in one of the funniest moments during my eight years standing outside Gate 3) can’t be allowed in the arena. Otherwise, what you’re saying isn’t “racism won’t be tolerated in the United Center,’ but “racism that gets caught on camera and marked out by players so that we can no longer put our head in the sand and have to act is prohibited.” That’s not taking a step, that’s not promoting tolerance. That’s just hoping you don’t have to talk about these things ever again. That’s not the way forward.
Ah, but then if you do take that step of not allowing the headdress wearers and face-painters, then you’ve basically admitted your logo has to go. Maybe the name, too. While a professional team has yet to change its name away from a Native-American connotation, you have to feel like it’s not going to be too long now. Marquette and North Dakota have, of course. While the Hawks do keep a constant line of communication and work with local groups and tribes, we could probably easily find tons that are insulted by the imagery.
The Hawks can point to Cleveland or Atlanta or Washington and say they’re waiting on them, and that Washington should have to go first because their name is an actual slur. But the “Well they’re doing it!” is not an acceptable defense. Someone is going to take the first step, and if you’re as progressive and “on the cusp” as the Hawks are desperate for you to believe they are, it should be them. We here know that’s bullshit, but hey, I’ll play their game for a minute.
Of course, what the Hawks are really terrified of is the backlash from the unwashed section of their fanbase. And for a team that’s already seeing empty seats pop up at their games, they’re probably petrified of more. But what we know is that those fans aren’t really going anywhere and will be the first to buy the new jerseys and two, they’re probably the types to spout racist shit and are the exact type of people you just said won’t be tolerated in the arena.
And yes, I’m well aware of what this blog was called for nine years, and the reaction I’ve had in the past to those who suggested I should change it. Not all lessons are learned quickly.
Basically, the Hawks have painted themselves to a corner to where they can’t half-ass this. If racism isn’t allowed in any way in your arena, and you take those steps, then they’re going to have to take all the steps. Otherwise they’re not trying to eradicate that element out of their fandom. They’re just trying to not end up in headlines and online videos.
And that’s not enough.
In the next seven days or so, the biggest drama in the NHL will almost certainly be where, and if, Erik Karlsson is going to be traded. If the Sens were sensible, and they’re not, they’d move him before the deadline. His peak value is now, as any team that acquires him will get two playoff runs with him instead of one, should he be moved at the draft. They’d also obviously have first shot at signing him to a long-term deal, a deal that will certainly crack the foundations of any team.
The question should be is if the Kings are in the same spot with Drew Doughty.
The differences between the Kings and Senators aren’t as big as you think. The Kings are still scrapping for a playoff spot from the Pacific, two points out of both the third spot in the division and the last wild card. The Senators are at the beginning of a rebuild, and have to figure out who they’re going to build the future around whether Karlsson is there or not. But are the Kings so ar away from that?
They may think that if they can sneak into the bottom seeds, maybe catch the Knights or something in the 1st round, Quick gets hot again as he was at the beginning of the year, they could make some noise. But there’s a lot of ifs there, even if Jeff Carter coming back is a huge boost.
Beyond this season though, there are issues. Doughty is going to command $10 million a year, you’d have to think, or close to it, when he hits the market in 2019. The Kings are already committed to paying Carter and Dustin Brown $11 million combined until 2022, unless of course a lockout and compliance buyouts save them in Brown’s case. They’re paying Kopitar $10 million until the wheel in the sky stops turning. Adrian Kempe, Alex Iafallo, and Michael Amadio are going to get raises after this season, though probably modest ones. They’ve just taken on Dion Phaneuf’s $5.2 million hit for…reasons. Basically, they’re not fitting in another $9-$10 million player in Doughty.
The other question is how much more are the Kings going to get out of this group? They’ve gotten a renaissance year out of Kopitar, and he’s 30. Carter is 33. Martinez is 30. Quick is 32. If they figure they’re going to be toast when Doughty goes UFA anyway, they might want to at least inquire if they could find their next #1 d-man or center in exchange for him.
That’s if you don’t think this Kings ship has already sailed. Since their 2014 championship they’ve missed the playoffs twice and gotten clocked in the first round by the Sharks in 2016. They look headed for either of those results again. That might be it, so what would you be holding onto?
It would take some real stones for any GM to basically wave the white flag on this season and cash in on Doughty, even more so a first-year GM in Rob Blake. Doughty is basically carrying the team again from the back, with by far the best relative Corsi and expected goals of any d-man. His 41 points are second on the team to Kopitar’s. Again, the easiest path is a hit and hope in this spring, and the one almost every hockey team chooses.
But with Phaneuf’s contract it’s hard to see where the Kings could add this summer to take one last swing with Doughty in town. Stranger things have happened, but perhaps the Kings should have one eye on tomorrow instead of both on what might be today.
Game #60 Preview
We found @atf13atf digging through our trash one day. Not for food, just because it was his thing. Turned out he was a Kings fan. As all the other Kings fans wouldn’t piss on us if we were on fire, he’ll have to do.
Dion Phaneuf?
Last week’s blockbuster trade with Calgary for Dion Phaneuf boosts an already strong defense featuring Drew Doughty, Matt Greene, and Rob Scuderi. Just over a year removed from being the Norris Trophy runner-up, Phaneuf turns the Kings from a team just sneaking into the playoffs into a legitimate threat. In fact, all of the Kings’ acquisitions this year have been home runs. Coming into the Olympic break, both Mike Cammalleri and Jussi Jokinen have 26 goals in 60 games. Even Phaneuf has scored 10 himself. It seems unlikely that the Kings would pass San Jose or Phoenix, but if they come in hot as a lower seed, they could be an early roadblock to the Blackhawks’ effort to return to the Western Conference Final.
What do you mean the Kings traded Cammalleri FOR Jokinen? And then lost Jokinen on waivers? They got Phaneuf from Ottawa and he sucks now? No Olympic break this year? The Blackhawks are 11 points out and there’s a team in Vegas? Toto, I have a feeling we’re not in 2010 anymore.
The Kings have gone 6-11-0 since the turn of the year. What went off the boil?
Start 9-2. Follow by going 1-7. Win six in a row, then get swept out of the New York Metropolitan Area. Lose six in a row to start the new year, bookend the All-Star Break with a pair of Jonathan Quick dodgeball tryouts. Pass Go and collect free wins against Glendale and Edmonton, lose narrowly to Stanley Cup contenders in Tampa and Pittsburgh, while giving up a touchdown to Carolina in between. Add a few wins against Atlantic Division bottom-feeders, and some losses to Pacific rivals here and there, and you have the entire Kings season. It’s been a trip.
Are the Kings in the same spot with Drew Doughty that the Senators are with Karlsson? IF he won’t sign they have to move him, right?
As of right now, the Kings seem fully ready to park the Brinks truck in Doughty’s driveway, and he seems fully ready to sign for the delivery. If he ever left Los Angeles, he would probably need to find a new lawyer or three, among other things.
Things kind of went south on Alex Iafallo, didn’t they?
He started off the year looking fast, but shooting a hair over one percent. He finally broke through for a second goal around the start of December, before racking up minuses and eventually taking a few healthy scratches around the new year. In the past month, Iafallo is back to playing 15 minutes a night and has scored four goals with three assists.
What’s been the key to Kopitar’s bounce-back season? Hawks fans would be particularly interested in the answer…
Last season, Anze Kopitar started slow coming off a busy September with an Olympic qualifier for Slovenia and playing for Team Europe in the World Cup Of Hockey. On November 11, with only eight points in 15 games, Kopitar injured his hand in a game against Ottawa and kept quiet about it. A few months ago, Kings president Luc Robitaille described the effects of the injury on Kopitar: “He couldn’t shoot for three months. That hurt his numbers. The goals weren’t there because he couldn’t shoot.” The numbers back it up: four goals from the injury through February, and six goals in 19 games to close out the year.
Blackhawks fans better hope it’s that simple.
Where do the Kings go from here? If they miss the playoffs then it’s Blowup City, right?
At the risk of hoping the team doesn’t put too much stock into a four-game sample before the deadline (at Chicago and Winnipeg, home against Dallas and Edmonton), it’s still entirely up in the air. The Kings don’t really have a great stock of pending UFAs to sell, unless someone really wants Darcy Kuemper for some reason, so it would have to be a bigger piece (Muzzin? Martinez?). Of course, their huge acquisition might cost nothing: Jeff Carter, whose last game was the night of the most recent Cubs win, is set to rejoin the team at practice this week once the road trip ends.
Game #60 Preview
It’s only his first year in the GM’s chair on Figueroa, but Blake’s deadline push-in for Dion Phaneuf doesn’t bode well for Kings fans.
Dion Phaneuf has always been massively overrated. Hockey GMs and media have always been distracted by the noisy things he does. He makes big hits, he takes big slappers, he yells at his teammates a lot convincing them he’s a leader. It’s the kind of thing you always hear about in the sport.
But Phaneuf has never driven play. He’s never helped his team create more chances than they give up. It’s been six years since he scored more than 31 points, or more than 10 goals. He’s not really an offensive weapon, and he’s never been all that good defensively. You think you hate Brent Seabrook…
And the Kings problem has always been they’re slow. They used to play slow under Sutter, they want to play faster under John Stevens, but only Doughty and Martinez can really go anywhere. How does Phaneuf help the Kings keep up with Vegas or Nashville or Winnipeg in the first round, all possible opponents who can really move? He’s just going to have that same confused gape on his face he had in Calgary, Toronto, and Ottawa when none of those teams really went anywhere.
In addition, Blake has now taken on his ridiculous contract. He’s signed until 2021 when he’ll be 36. That’s a boat anchor.
Lastly, Phaneuf is the kind of player that quite simply is being phased out of the game. All d-men have to be able to move and get up and join the play now. Even if you’re a “stay-at-home” guy, you have to be able to win races and open yourself up to pass out of the zone. Phaneuf can’t do that at 32. How’s that going to look at 34?
Whatever, not our problem.
Game #60 Preview
vs. 
RECORDS: Capitals 33-17-7 Hawks 24-26-8
PUCK DROP: 7:30
TV: WGN
THE NATIONALS HAVE NEVER WON A PLAYOFF SERIES: Japers Rink
At this point, we should just enjoy every game for the singular event that it is. I guess. So tonight is the one time per year that Alex Ovechkin comes to town, and if you’re headed to the UC tonight remember that you may be seeing the greatest goal-scorer of all-time (if you adjust for the era and such). So that’s cool. Other than that… well, it’s more to the Lance Bouma-Tommy Wingels Showcase Showdown.
When looking at the Caps, it’s actually really hard to tell just what the hell they’re doing at the top of the Metropolitan. Maybe it’s just that division is so bad, or was until the Penguins turned on lately. For fuck’s sake, the Flyers are in third in that division. Did you know that? No, you didn’t, because you don’t ever think about Cold Ones. And you don’t know who the hell is on there anymore. And they’re in third.
The Caps are a bad possession team. They’re a bad defensive team, as they actually have a worse expected goals-against than the Islanders, and the Islanders defensive policy is to fart into the wind. The Caps haven’t even really gotten a high-level of goaltending, as both Braden Holtby and Phillip Grubauer are carrying SV%’s right around league average. Holtby of late has been terrible, with an .898 in February. At least Trotz has figured out to not punt him out there 70+ times a season.
What the Caps do is shoot well, with the league’s best SH% at evens. The Caps have never needed to dominate games possession-wise with the skills of Ovie, Backstrom, Oshie, Kuznetsov, and they still have bottom-six finish with Eller, Connolly, and Vrana. They get some help in that area from the back end as well, with Carlson and Orlov each having over 20 points (and Carlson over 40). But the extent at which they’re overcoming their deficiencies so far makes you believe this is all a house of cards. And of course, once the Caps spit it in Round 1 or 2, we’ll get the now springtime tradition of Caps and turning their road jerseys into home ones by opening up a vein or six.
The Caps busted a modest two-game losing streak by stuffing the Wild but good on Thursday. They’ve been ho-hum this month, going 3-2-2 and giving life to the division chase of Pittsburgh. The Pens are three points back but have played two games more, so it’s still a ways to go but if the market corrects on the Caps before the playoffs, you can see where this is going.
Still, for tonight, it’s an awful lot of firepower for the Hawks beleaguered defense and goalies and… you know, let’s just change this to “beleaguered Hawks.” The Caps can get you from three lines and the power play is always something you don’t want to mess with. Trotz likely won’t hold anything back tonight, as the Hawks look like easy prey to just about everyone right now. The word’s out that if you get the Hawks in any kind of antsy situation, they’re probably going to find a way to lose and/or pack up the cats. So Washington will be looking for an early lead to get themselves an easy night. Not like the Hawks can score three goals anyway.
For the Hawks, lineup changes look like Connor Murphy will be punished for catching a rut on Thursday in Quenneville’s every increasingly-logical world. David Kampf also looks like he’ll draw back in for Tomas Jurco, so he can center Duclair and Anisimov for seven minutes or so. Everything else should stay the same, and Forsberg will get two straight starts if you can believe it.
Nothing to do now but play spoiler and see how much Schmaltz, Top Cat, and now Dahlstrom can grow. At least the Hawks showed some chutzpa on Thursday. That’s another thing to watch, whether Q can keep them trying until the end. We have so little to hang on to.
Game #59 Preview
Barry Trotz has been one of our favorite pin cushions since we started this madness, not just because he kind of looks like one. His Predators teams tended to drive us nuts, and then their fans drove us nuts because they kept claiming they didn’t trap. And now Trotz has etched his name right next to Bruce Boudreau’s in Capitals lore, coaches of great teams that kept finding ways to burf in the 2nd round of the playoffs.
Because of that, you probably didn’t realize how good Trotz’s record is as a coach. Once the Predators actually came of age, back when the NHL made expansion teams earn it, since ’03-’04, 11 of 14 teams of his have reached 90 point or higher. 10 of them made the playoffs. He’s fifth all-time in regular season wins. He’ll go down as one of the greatest coaches of all time, in that sense.
And yet… in hockey, no one cares if you don’t make it count in the spring. Trotz’s teams have never seen a conference final. Some of them most certainly should have. The 2007 Predators and 2012 Predators probably should have. The past two Capitals teams almost certainly should have. Maybe Trotz can’t help running into Mike Smith the one season he had taken eye of newt and became a different being. There isn’t much Trotz can do when Braden Holtby’s level drops just enough to be surpassed by Matt Murray. And yet we keep saying these things about Trotz and his teams, don’t we?
And now Trotz finds himself in the last year of his contract, something you don’t see coaches get to very often. It feels like this year, he’s either got to break through or he’s out. One wonders how many coaches the Caps get to try before they have to start all over. They’re not there yet but they’re getting closer.
That doesn’t mean that Trotz should be written off completely. Because there’s another coach who was thought of the A-t0-B-but-not-C guy. He had coached nine playoff teams with two organizations without ever seeing a Final. It was thought he couldn’t find a way to get through either. You might have heard of him. Joel Quenneville. On his 11th playoff team and 13th season of coaching, Q finally broke through. It can take that long.
Which makes for an interesting discussion around these parts, does it not? If this season ends in a divorce between Quenneville and the Hawks, and if another shortened spring means that Barry Trotz doesn’t get another contract in Washington… would he be a candidate here? He’s certainly familiar to the Hawks after his years in Nashville. He would have the instant respect of players who know his name and methods, something to not be underestimated when you’re dealing with a roster that has multiple multi-Cup winners on it. His Caps and Preds teams, at least at times, played a style that meshes with what the Hawks want to do.
But that playoff record. It didn’t scare the Hawks off Quenneville, although that was for an organization and fanbase that didn’t really know any better. It was also with a powerhouse roster, which any new coach wouldn’t get here. Now the Hawks and their fans are at least slightly more clued in. Would they accept a coach who hasn’t “gotten it done?”
A discussion for somewhere down the road.
Game #59 Preview
