Game #66 Preview
In the interest of full disclosure, I missed like 50 minutes of this game. I forgot it was a day game and I had work. However, I really saw all I needed to see, based on early reports from the game not much happened. But those last 12-ish minutes that I did see were very good. Let’s dig in, breaking down the four goals I witnessed after turning it on at 3-1:
– I cannot tell you how much joy I got out of turning on the television to see Drew Doughty being led to the penalty box only to throw a fucking temper tantrum because his little shitstained diaper hadn’t been properly changed. He slammed his helmet and whined at the referee, earning a second penalty and giving the Hawks 4 minutes of penalty time. They didn’t do much with the first half of it, but were able to keep at it and eventually Wide Dick slammed home a one timer off a rebound to make it 3-2.
– The next goal was a direct result, in my opinion, of Nick Schamltz being really fucking good at hockey. He got a long, cross ice pass floated to him near chest height, which he expertly knocked down with control. Then, being alone in the zone, he slowed up and evaluated the ice with his SuperMan vision (no I am not being hyperbolic) while letting his teammates get up ice, before making a good pass for Dahlstrom to hit a one timer toward the net. That resulted in a really terrible clear attempt by something called Derek Forbort, which fell right to Vinnie Hinnie and he squeaked it through Jonathan Quick’s five hole. Yeah it took a little help, but none of it is possible if Schmaltz doesn’t knock down that tough pass, then have the presence of mind to wait for his teammates and giving Dahlstrom a nice pass to hit toward the net. 3-3.
– I don’t know what got into the power play tonight, but I kid you not they scored two power play goals in one period in this game. I am not entirely sure if it was on purpose, but Kane and Toews found themselves flipped in the formation, with Toews on the right board in one-timer position while Kane was weak side. Kane got the puck at the half board and fucked around with it as he wont to do on the power play, and must admit I loudly groaned while watching him fiddle with it with seemingly no plan. But then, miraculously, he actually waited a passing lane open, and fed Toews with a nice little cross ice pass. Toews settled it for a beat before firing past Quick low blocker side. 4-3.
– The fifth goal was an empty netter that was hilarious because #1 Kane absolutely did not have to put it home. He was all alone on a “breakaway” with just 3 seconds left, but he put it in the net anyway with 2.9 seconds remaining which is just great. But the Kings then wet their diapers even more, as they are known for, with Anze Kopitar, Drew Doughty, and Jonathan Quick (who wasn’t even on the ice!) slamming their sticks in such embarrassing fashion you could actually hear audible gasps from the Staples Center crowd on the television. 5-3.
– Just to circle back, the Hawks whole comeback was the result of known fuckstick and giant pissbaby Drew Doughty shitting his diaper in the penalty box because he wasn’t happy he was sent to timeout. That is extremely my shit. I am still in favor of the quasi-tank, but beating the Kings like this, and having it be a result of Doughty being a baby, is so satisfying.
– Another takeaway from this game – that didn’t look like a team that has quit on it’s coach. After a truly shitty second period when they gave up 3 goals, they could’ve taken their ball and gone home. They battled. Don’t count Q out of that job just yet.
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Game Time: 3:00PM CST
TV/Radio: NBC Sports Chicago, NHL Network, WGN-AM 720
Harboring A Fugitive: JFTC
After getting their dicks thoroughly knocked in the dirt in the Bay Area on Thursday night, the Hawks make their way south to face the Kings on Figueroa, bringing this fetid garbage season one game closer to mercifully ending.
While a lot of people within the community known as “Hockey Twitter” last year were stumbling over themselves to point out what a bad year Jonathan Toews was having last season, which wasn’t entirely accurate but no one ever accused hockey fans of being smart, they were missing out on a truly poor production year from Anze Kopitar.
Kopitar and Toews both had historically bad years (for themselves) on the score sheets in 2016-17, but with both of them you didn’t have to look far to discover the most likely root cause – luck. Both Kopitar and Toews shot career low percentages last year, with Kopitar scoring 12 goals on 8% shooting, down from a now-career mark of 12.4, while Toews scored 21 goals on 10.6% shooting, down from a now-career mark of 14% (but we’ll touch on that in a second).
The underlying numbers for both guys were still pretty good last season, though. Kopitar accounted for 54.55% of attempts when he was on the ice, while Toews was able to control a not great but still fine 52.4% of attempts. You can see in the image below that they both were still elite in terms of possession, with the only blip for either one being Toews’ struggles with zone exits last year.
This year is a completely different story for Kopitar, who has enjoyed a nice “bounce back year” as he has 27 goals and 70 points already in just 65 games, on a pace to best his career high of 81 points. He’s already surpassed his number of assists from last year, which we know isn’t directly tied to but still correlated with his play, bit the uptick in goals comes from a predictable place – his luck got better. He’s shooting a career best 17% this season. Kopitar’s shot shares have actually been worse than he showed last year, as he currently boasts a 51.67 CF%.
On the other hand, this season has just been a double-down on last year for our own Fearless Leader. While his underlying numbers are still phenomenal – a 57.65 shot share is just about world-beating status – his production has only gotten worse, as he has just 16 goals and 40 points. And if you’re an intuitive individual who can pick a theme, you probably already know that shooting percentage is playing a part. Toews is shooting a new career low 8% this season. If he was shooting his career average of 14%, he’d have about 26 goals right now, and we’d be looking at 50 points, which would be far more encouraging.
But that 14% career shooting mark for Toews is now skewed by the two poor-shooting years he’s had this season and last. Before 2016-17, Toews was shooting 15.1% for his career – so it isn’t a huge difference, but it’s there. And if you project that shooting percentage onto Toews’ current season, he’d have 28 goals – oh hey, more than Kopitar.
And here’s another handy visual just to show you how Toews’ underlying numbers are either better than or at least right there with Kopitar’s this season.
The point of all this is to say that luck is a fickle bitch in hockey. McClure has said it a few times, but if teams like Vegas are gonna be able to skate by on 69% shooting this year, the bell has to toll for someone, and that someone has been the Hawks. But if you’re a Jonathan Toews doomsayer – and you don’t want to be – Anze Kopitar is a perfect example of how everything can still even out for the Blackhawks’ captain.
Game #65 Preview
Not much has changed and Sam’s on vacation so here’s @Atf13atf’s answers from the last time we did this.
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 #65 Preview
In a way I feel kinda bad for Dion Phaneuf because he got out-douchebagged by Sean Avery, who, if there were a Douchebag de Jour Hall of Fame, would definitely be a first-ballot candidate. No one should have to listen to that piece of human trash insult them or their significant other. BUT THAT’S NOT WHY YOU CALLED. Phaneuf qualifies for douchebag status simply because he’s an albatross. He’s never lived up to the hype that he generated in his first season, and while I can’t blame the guy for taking a big payday (I would do it in a nanosecond and anyone who says otherwise is a liar), I can blame him for generally sucking.
Phaneuf was hailed like he was the second coming when he broke into the league with the Flames way back when in 2005. He was a BIG BODY and fooled everyone by scoring 20 goals that year. Yes he managed to rack up impressive points for the first couple years, but by the time he hit the quarter-century mark the precipitous decline had begun.
It just proves how many morons really run teams in this league that Phaneuf could pull in a 7-year, $49 million contract from the Leafs in 2014, and that the Senators would be like, “sure, sounds like a great deal” just a couple years later. And that Rob Blake would say nearly the same damn thing this year—although at the very least he got Ottawa to eat a quarter of that salary, proving just how badly the Senators wanted to move him.
As I said, the contract isn’t Phaneuf’s fault, but for a guy who costs that much it’d be nice if at least his possession numbers would be on the positive side (they’re not), or perhaps his giveaways-to-takeaways wouldn’t scald your eyeballs (they do). I’m not even suggesting that as a defenseman he needs to keep up the scoring of his very early years, but jesus at least pull off the basic aspects of your job description. He’s been skating by on an undeserved reputation for years (SEE WHAT I DID THERE), and that’s only going to get worse as he ages.
Possibly the funniest part of all this is that other players don’t fall for any “he’s a leader” bullshit, going so far as to vote him the Most Overrated Player in 2010. Granted, that was eight years ago (good lord I’m old), but his play and the contract drama of the intervening years have done nothing to reverse that perception at least with multiple fanbases—I can’t say what the players may still think. And yes, those were apoplectic Canadian fanbases, but American ones are onto him too.
All Phaneuf has going for him on a Kings team with better defensemen than him is to remind himself that the front office hates Marion Gaborik even more than his dumbass contract. He’s a slow, oafish defenseman with an absurdly large contract and that’s what he’ll remain…we wouldn’t have any idea what that’s like, would we?
Game #65 Preview
Like a Crave Crate, the Hawks were great through the first five. The rest was a blackout of shit, snot, and puke. There’s not much to learn from a drubbing like this, but let’s see what we can find. Sometimes there’s a penny in those sliders. To the bullets.
– J-F Berube, despite giving up six goals through two periods, didn’t look terrible. The only goal that was really on him was Vlasic’s “fuck you” at the end of the second, but at that point, his confidence is shot. No use keeping him out there. He managed to look good when he wasn’t getting hung out to dry, but those moments were few and far between.
– Carl Dahlstrom looked like a guy who’s played fewer than 10 games in his career tonight. He was directly responsible for the Sharks’s first three goals. On the first, he made a questionable pinch with Schmaltz near the puck after Highmore Salvador Dali’ed a shot off the far boards, running into Schmaltz and kicking the puck straight to Pavelski, who started an unbelievably pretty passing cycle with Donskoi and Burns.
The second was a complete circus. Gustafsson passed into Vinnie’s skates, and while Gustafsson tried to recover, Dahlstrom got caught starting to leave the zone early. He then set a pick on Toews, allowing the puck to squirt past a falling Gustafsson for a 2-on-0 that Berube had no chance on. It was Dahlstrom’s bad positioning that set that goal up.
On the third, Dahlstrom took a shot from the blue line that Labanc blocked, then got out raced by Labanc. After the initial rush failed, Dahlstrom floated to his off side to cover after Gustafsson hit the ice to block Labanc’s original attempt, then seemed to fall asleep, letting Tierney behind him and Gustafsson, who slid a quick pass past a confused Gustafsson to a wide open Labanc.
I’m willing to write this off as simply a bad game from a young player, and I hope that Dahlstrom can grow into positional awareness. But tonight was not one for his reel.
– Dahlstrom was noticeably awful, but the Hawks’s D-corps looked bad as a whole. Keith took a retaliatory penalty late in the second after Sorensen overpowered him with a semi-slash. Connor Murphy fell down a few times and was embarrassed by Timo Meier’s speed in the first. Jordan Oesterle tipped a puck into his own net after a Goodrow pass attempt from behind the net. While Oesterle had some bad luck on that tip, no one on the backend stood out, and for a team that relies as heavily on plays coming from the backend as the Hawks do, this is about the result you’d expect out of the effort.
– On the plus side, Duclair looked spry, even though he couldn’t finish a 1-on-0 in the second or his penalty shot in the third. He had the worst 5v5 CF% of all Hawks though, for what that’s worth on a complete blowout.
– Alex DeBrincat continues to impress. He had a few prime opportunities that Jones stuffed him on, but it’s still a joy to watch him get to all the right spots. At some point, he’s going to play with Schmaltz and Kane regularly, which ought to start tapping into his potential more directly. You’d like to see it now, but Q’s line choices continue to be a mystery.
– Matthew Highmore debuted tonight and did about as much as you could expect. His far-too-wide shot in the first triggered the Sharks’s first goal following Dahlstrom’s misguided pinch, but he was also in decent position for a tip off a DeBrincat wrister from the high slot in the second. He didn’t make the tip, but he had the right idea. Not much to take away from him tonight, but he wasn’t a complete zoo.
Games like these make it hard to say “everything will be better next year when Crawford comes back.” While Corey definitely is the difference maker, the Hawks have some huge questions to answer on defense going forward. It’s frustrating to watch this team have no answers, but that’s the kind of year it’s been. Take it on the chin and move forward is the plan.
At this point, all you can do is look for development and improvement from the younger guys. Tonight saw DeBrincat look great, Schmaltz look good, and Duclair look outstanding at times. The rest may have been garbage, but there are positives strewn among this shit.
We’ve got 17 more games to see what we’re doing going into the off-season. Onward.
Beer du Jour: Jefferson’s Whiskey with a High Life back.
Line of the Night: “Quite a debut for Matthew Highmore. He won’t forget his first NHL game.” – Chris Cuthbert, with the Hawks down 7–1.
