Hockey

Game #58 – Hawks vs. Flames Spotlight: Backlund That Thing Up

By Sam Fels 1167 0

It’s hard to believe that Mikael Backlund is only 30 years old. While that’s old in hockey years, we were hearing Flames fans’ excitement about him all the way back during the 2008-2009 season, even before the Hawks put the Flames to the sword in the playoffs. He only played one game that year, and perhaps he never lived quite up to the hopes of being a 1st round pick and a prized prospect for a while. But he’s definitely the cult favorite of Flames Nation. He’s the Fugazi of Calgary, where you only love him if you really know what’s going on.

Most of that is down to the years where he, Michael Frolik, and Matthew Tkachuk formed one of the best lines in hockey. At least in terms of metrics it was. The 3M line started most of their shifts in the defensive zone, and ended most of them in the other end. They were one of the best possession lines in hockey, and the Flames asked them to do just about everything. And they did just about everything.

Starting last year though, Racist Ol’ Bill Peters soured on Frolik pretty quickly, and split that line up more often than you would think, i.e. at all. Lots of others moonlighted with Backlund and Tkachuk, but never quite captured the same magic. And Backlund’s metrics started to slide because of it.

It’s only gotten worse this year, and Backlund has often been used as a winger on the top line to help Sean Monahan and Johnny Gadreau keep the puck. But that’s not really what Backlund is, and it weakened the Flames down the middle as Elias Lindholm was tried as simply an offensive center than the Swiss Army Knife Backlund was and can still be. Recently, they’ve scrapped that and returned Backlund to the second center hole.

The numbers make it pretty clear that when Backlund is centering Tkachuk, things go well. When he’s on a wing with the others, they don’t, as his percentages drop. Seems pretty simple, but a lot of hockey coaches tend to outthink themselves.

The weird thing about Backlund is over the years he seems to do worse the more you start him in the offensive zone. It’s like if he doesn’t have ice to skate into he just backs up to find it. He’s more checking than scoring, though he’s consistently put up 40-50 points. Three years ago, he started just 35% of his shifts in the offensive zone and yet carried a 55% Corsi-share and 52% xG%. This year he’s starting 56% of his shifts in the offensive zone, and he’s below the team-rate in the analytics for the first time in a dog’s age.

Being the sole puck winner from a wing on the top line just doesn’t appear to suit him, and in recent games the Flames have returned Lindholm to that wing. They’ve won three of four with an aggregate score of 18-4 in those three wins. Seems pretty obvious the lineup needs to be tuned a certain way.

Either way, Backlund will remain the die-hard’s favorite, taking on the top lines of other teams and always getting the Flames out of it. At 30 and signed for a few more years could get sticky as he ages, as a $5.3M hit for a checking center seems a bit ambitious. Once Backlund’s scoring dries up there might be questions. But those are a long way off. Right now, he’s the Flames fans smallpox champion.

Hockey

Game #58 – Hawks vs. Flames: Hedley Lamarr’s Mugs, Pugs, And Thugs

By Sam Fels 1095 0

Zac Rinaldo – The Flames of late seem to get the idea that they need to play up-tempo and creatively. So what this collection of puss is doing in the lineup is anyone’s guess. This team certainly had enough of the asshat quotient with whichever Tkachuk is here and Lucic, but this really takes the cake. The cake made of birth-sauce, that is. Rinaldo is one of the bigger pieces of shit in recent vintage, and no one’s been able to explain how he helps. And yet he keeps finding work. In any other sport he would have been drummed out and playing from whichever league was formed by Vince McMahon.

Milan Lucic – Still wasting everyone’s time, except for those of us who like to do comedic writing.

Calgary City Council – You probably missed it, with Calgary all tucked away down there, but the city of Calgary is the latest to bend over for a sports owner and give him money for a new arena that the owner could easily afford himself. They’ll be coughing up over $225M, which they’ll never get back of course. And as we know, the promise of new jobs always seems temporary or never pans out. Maybe one day people will learn. But it wasn’t this day in Calgary.

Baseball

Long Journey To The Middle

By Sam Fels 1665 0

We discussed this on the Desipio Podcast, but I wanted to delve into it a little more. It’s the actual aim of this proposed playoff system in MLB.

First off, it has to be said again that this leaking out of the idea, the trial balloon as it were, is almost certainly an attempt to get people talking about anything else than the Astros, or Jim Crane, or the Red Sox or Cubs simply raising a white flag. While baseball did hand out some contracts this winter and had some stories other than that, nothing has been as big as the sign-stealing scandal or the Betts trade, and as excited as Dodgers fans might be to have Mookie Betts, the optics of it still stink. This is some Wag The Dog tactics by MLB, I’m sure of it.

And we also know the real reason that MLB wants to expand the playoffs is more television money for more playoff games. I don’t know where the saturation point is for that, where people stop caring about playoff games because the number of them don’t make them special anymore. The NBA and NHL would be examples of MLB being a long way off from that, though that’s always been basketball’s and hockey’s system and maybe the perception or feeling is different when you’re changing to get to that. I guess we’ll find out one day.

The cover reason is to give more teams something to play for throughout the season. That’s what they’ll tell you, though. I would argue that the real reason is to give more teams more reason to just aim for 86 wins instead of 95.

That’s why, in hockey and baseball, you see front offices always pumping the idea, “You just have to get in.” With the Nationals being defending champs, it would appear that a champion can be somewhat random. Except that’s the exception. Look at recent history:

2018 – Red Sox: 108 wins

2017 – Astros: 101 wins (legitimate or not)

2016 – Cubs: 103 wins

2015 – Royals: 95 wins

2014 – Giants: Wildcard winners

2013 – Red Sox: 97 wins

So two of the last seven were “outside the box,” as it were. More than a quarter of the time, but still hardly anything like a 50-50 shot.

Now, perhaps with an expansion of middling teams getting a shot, you’d see more and more upset winners. Sheer numbers would tell you that, especially when the system isn’t really weighted to the better teams other than the top one, and they still would have three rounds to negotiate to win the World Series.

This is just an expansion of the “just get in,” theory, which really is just a justification for not putting in the work and resources to build a truly great team. What really is the reward under that system to build a team capable of winning 100 games when winning 88 only requires you to play three more games, and quite possibly all at home? And if more teams under this system come from the clouds to win a World Series, it would only justify staying in the middle more.

The counter to this is that the old, four-divisions-four-playoff teams left too many teams out of it by July and hurt interest and attendance. And I realize we’re never going back to that. But the landscape is so different now. For one, baseball teams aren’t nearly as beholden to their attendance figures for profit as they were. There’s far more avenues pouring into their coiffeurs now. Do they really care if they aren’t drawing that well in August?

Hell, right now we can safely say that Seattle, San Francisco, Colorado, Texas, Miami, Baltimore, Detroit, Kansas City, Pittsburgh have exactly dick to play for. That’s nearly a third of the league. You might be able to put Arizona and Cleveland on this list before a couple months in the season are played. So what’s an unacceptable number of teams not playing for anything? Hasn’t it always been this way? Do we think things would change there with four more playoff spots available? Curious.

But really what they want is not to be held to such a high standard. If you only allowed division winners into the postseason, then everyone would have to aim to get to Dodgers or Yankees or Astros-level (fairly or not). In order to sell excitement to your fans, you’d have to threaten that you’d actually threaten those teams one day soon.

I don’t know that I completely buy the idea that fans won’t show for a team that’s not going to the postseason completely. A good marketing a team along with at least a vision shown by a front office that had demonstrated a desire is enough for most fans to enjoy a day out at the park. It’s still baseball in the summer, isn’t it?

But that would require more work than these assholes are willing to put in. Why pay for a 100-win team when it’s easier to rig the system so you only have to pay for a 86-win one?

They’re all Max Bialystock and Leo Bloom.

 

Hockey

We’re Locked Into This

By Sam Fels 1679 0

Here’s some sobering facts for you, because on a Friday is definitely when you want some sobering facts:

-The Hawks are behind in the standings to five teams that have fired their coaches due to performance reasons.

-There has been a near mutiny in Buffalo due to their performance this season, with fans irate that there doesn’t seem to be any direction to their team. They have two more points than the Hawks in a much more difficult conference.

-The Rangers have four more points, in perhaps the league’s toughest division, in a season where they have made it very clear they are still in the midst of a rebuild and aren’t really trying to make the playoffs.

-The Hawks are 25th in regulation wins.

And the thing is, we’re probably locked into this. There is a little more than a week until the trade deadline, and there are few directions the Hawks can go. There might not be any, in fact. They simply won’t fire Bowman now, because you really don’t want an interim guy handling your deadline independently and then hiring a permanent GM that you only hope is working in the same line as the guy who filled in.

Bowman almost certainly isn’t going to change tack and sell off anything that’s not nailed down, because that would be the second or third time he’s tried to change direction with this team which would mean he really doesn’t have any idea what he’s doing, and he would have to be fired. Except we’ve seen no signal or inclination from Rocky or McD that they’ve even entertained the idea of firing Stan, maybe because they have no idea what to do on hockey matters when Stan’s dad isn’t telling them what to do.

And Bowman is at least smart enough to know not to go hog wild at the deadline to try and scrape into the playoffs and forfeit whatever futures he might have–especially as they don’t have a 2nd round pick this year (they lost it to get Andrew Shaw. More sobering stuff for you). I wouldn’t be surprised if he makes a hockey trade or two that gets them things that can be around for a while, but he’s not going to get any rentals. At least I hope.

But that almost certainly means that nothing will happen before the 24th. Which means the Hawks will lose whatever leverage they might have. Come the summer, they can’t get anything for Gustafsson, or Lehner, or Crawford, as they can all walk. The Hawks will have a 1st round pick, and a still hard-t0-tell amount of cap space because we don’t know if Brent Seabrook is actually dead or just mostly dead and Miracle Max is going to send him out there next fall. You can’t get much for Strome because he’ll still be RFA, though maybe slightly more than we might think. And that’s only if you’ve decided he’s no longer part of your future…and really no one can make that call yet though being healthy scratched by bespectacled brain genius isn’t a terribly good sign.

So maybe we’re asking too much. Maybe we need to start at the ground level here. Maybe what we should be asking is merely for the Hawks to admit there is a problem. Because they haven’t done that yet. The day they fired Joel Quenneville, they said this was a playoff caliber roster. And it hasn’t been close since. So either they were wrong about the roster, or it’s being mismanaged. At this point, all we can really ask is that they even indicate which one they think it is and possibly do something about it. Because…have they?

From last year they added a goalie, which isn’t so much fixing the roster as it is plastering over holes. They added de Haan and Maatta, which was the wrong diagnoses. They added Andrew Shaw, Ryan Carpenter, and Zack Smith, forever chasing the wrong thing like grit and toughness. They give time to Matthew Highmore, Quenneville,and Dennis Gilbert while players like Sikura, Carlsson, and Kurashev barely see the light of day.

I’m just going to be Brad Pitt as Billy Beane in the opening of Moneyball, and simply wait for the others around the table to correctly diagnose the problem before I even entertain any solutions. Just tell me you know that something, anything is wrong, instead of pointing to the banners it increasingly looks like you had nothing to do with every damn day.

Or you can announce another public appearance from Patrick Sharp and Adam Burish. At least then I’ll know.

Hockey

What’s So Scary About Jay Bouwmeester

By Sam Fels 1920 0

This post will pretty much mirror one I wrote years ago on my defunct Liverpool site on SB Nation, now lost to the annals thanks to SB Nation asking me to do a Liverpool blog after they’d already hired The Offside to be their Liverpool blog and leaving me firmly in the lurch…but that’s not why you called. Anyway, then I wrote most of what will follow after Fabrice Muamba collapsed on the field at White Hart Lane, though like Jay Bouwmeester, he eventually was ok. But he was very close to very much not being so.

I always struggle with sports as “escape.” I mean, they are, but we’re never totally disconnected from everything else. Sports play a big role in society, and I quarrel with anyone who tries to ignore that. That’s becoming a bigger and bigger aspect of it these days. Still, there are always times when we watch or attend sporting events simply to enjoy ourselves, to enter this sort of alternate reality where our emotions are tied into something we have no control over. Every one of us has used a trip to Wrigley, or The Rate, or the UC as an excuse to forget our problems and just enjoy the day. It’s not always that, and maybe not even often anymore, but it is that at times. And when it’s not fully that, it’s still an element.

Whatever you or I use sports for, it is not to witness death. We are not the Romans. People may say that those who watch racing watch to see accidents and eventually someone die, but there is something of a separation from it with them inside a car. No one knew at the moment that Dale Earnhardt had died. Or Ayrton Senna. It wasn’t on our cameras. And that’s probably a separate discussion. MMA or boxing an enter the discussion too here I suppose, but I’ve never come across anyone who genuinely watches either in the hopes someone dies. If there are we need to find those people and weed them out. Everyone accepts it could happen, but no one reasonable wants that.

Because if you’ve seen someone die, in whatever forum and whatever relationship to you, you know it’s not something you’d ever want to repeat if you don’t have to. It never leaves you. You carry it forever. If it does, maybe I envy you or maybe I fear you, or maybe both. It’s certainly not something we want out of an experience that is meant to be enjoyed.

But it’s more than that. As loathe as I am to quote or reference Heath Ledger’s Joker, he had a point. It’s not part of the plan.

One of the reasons people watch sports is to watch people do things that almost all of us can’t. In hockey, a lot of hockey fans still play hockey, or played a lot of it at a younger age. And almost none of them can dance through three guys at high speed and go top cheese when reaching the goalie (though most around here will tell you they did just that on Al Montoya at some local rink). I still play soccer and tennis, and I can’t kill a ball out of the air dead and then rifle it in the top corner (I can barely keep from falling over when even trying the first part). I can’t rip a forehand on the run through a foot-and-a-half window down the line at 90 MPH (same as before). I enjoy watching the pros because they can do that, and I have a semblance of a feeling of just how hard that is and even more so how easy they make it look. And they do it against others who can do the same. And even better than that is when they do things that I can’t even fathom being able to do.

These guys, and gals, are the top of the top. They’re in a condition none of us could ever reach. As much fun as we’ve made of him over the years, Jay Bouwmeester is among the top 1% of athletes in the world. Actually, he’s in the top 0.01%. He plays hockey at the top level possible, has for over a decade, which means his conditioning, his reflexes, his reaction time, his instincts, are almost immeasurable. They’re certainly not anything most of us could even dream of having even for a day. It’s the rarest of combinations.

Guys like that aren’t supposed to just drop dead in front of us in the peak of their lives, which he nearly did. It doesn’t add up to what we’ve come here for.

It’s hard to think of a more stark reminder of just how fragile and how nonsensical it all is. If that can happen, or almost happen as it was, to Bouwmeester, there’s no protection for the rest of us. And for most of our lives, most of us shut that out most of the time. You have to, otherwise how the fuck would you ever leave the house? Deep down, you know when your number is up it’s up, and some physical condition that you didn’t know about and couldn’t be easily detected or a truck having its brakes shear or whatever it is can pop up any moment. Quite frankly, I don’t know how those of you who have kids do it, because not only do you have yourself to navigate through all that and cognitive dissonance that takes but then adding others’ you’re responsible for on top of that seems utter torture to me.

I feel like that’s why when these things happen, even though Bouwmeester looks like he’ll be ok and Rich Peverly was ok and so was Jiri Fischer (though there are others who weren’t in other sports), games get postponed. Everything is broken at that point.There is no curtain. I mean, seeing Alex Smith’s leg injury wasn’t that much less disturbing, and many others like it, but that’s part of the game. We and he signed on for that, basically. Seeing Martin Havlat’s eyes roll in the back of his head in 2009 thanks to Niklas Kronwall was pretty damn scary. Ditto Marian Hossa three years later. We knew at the time their lives could be very different after that, though thankfully it doesn’t appear that it was for those two. But, in a sick sense, that’s part of the game. We let in that doubt and fear somewhat when those happened, but it doesn’t take over.

It does when something like what happened to Bouwmeester happens. There’s no “part of the game” to hide behind or use as protection to keep our experience together, and separate from the rest of life.

Maybe this will all break down one day when a player isn’t ok, especially in hockey or in the NFL when someone could not get up forever from something that just happens in game. But for now, we can keep up the facade.

 

Hockey

Now It Is About What You’re Selling, Not What You’re Buying

By Sam Fels 1933 0

Fair warning, everything that comes next in this post is almost certainly fantasy. It’s what the Hawks should do, but almost certainly what they won’t. You know the truth, I know the truth, but the truth hasn’t found purchase in the barren wasteland of the Hawks’ braintrust in a long time. While the Hawks have lost five straight, they will use their effort last night–which was very good–and the unlucky nature of the defeats to Boston and arguably Minnesota as justification that the results will turn around sharpish and they’ll be back in it.

And on the surface, the Hawks can make that argument. They’re six points back with two games in hand on the Yotes and one on the Flames, who just happen to be next up on the schedule. And with as bad as the West is, and with the amount of teams in this jumble, it’s kind of hard to just fall out of it. It’s also nearly impossible to climb into it.

But you don’t need an archeological team to get beneath the surface to see the truth. The Hawks are in last, and they’re two points behind the Wild who very well may be giving up in that they’ve already traded Jason Zucker. This is a team that had to go 12-6-0 just get to get back into the bottom of the conversation of the playoffs. But this isn’t a team that wins 12 of 18. This is a team that wins 12 of 23, as they now have done. That’s who they are.

Right now, the Coyotes are on pace for 89 points. The Hawks are on pace for 83 (EIGHTY-THREE). The Hawks would have to play at a 101-point pace to get to 89, which might not be enough. And I guess, if you were the most cock-eyed of cock-eyed optimist, you could say they already played at a 101-point once for six weeks there. Do you honestly think they have it in them again?

And by every metric, the Hawks are where they should be. They’re one of the worst defensive teams in the league. They’ve outscored what they have created, though they’re built to do that. What’s going to get better here? Certainly not the goaltending. It can’t. Maybe DeBrincat has a two- to three-week binge in him. Maybe the power play binges for no reason other than the sense of humor of the gods. But how much can that rise above the horrific defense? How is this team going to leap over four teams?

So here’s the question the Hawks’ front office has to answer, though we know how they will: While there is value for the younger players to play in games that matter and have stakes, does that matter more than what they can gather long term by selling at the deadline? It’s clear it would not. Long-term, the Hawks are still at least a winger short (likely two) and two d-men short. If they want to say Ian Mitchell is one of those d-men, I’ll take it, but you still need one more. And none of those answers are in the system. The pipeline…she be dry.

So what can the Hawks do here? If you were to separate out Erik Gustafsson, Robin Lehner, possibly Corey Crawford, maybe Drake Caggiula, maybe Olli Maatta and think what you could collectively for all of them…maybe a 1st round pick, a 3rd or 4th round pick, and a prospect or two. The last of which probably won’t amount to more than a couple lottery tickets, but you need lottery tickets. And an additional 1st rounder could be combined with the Hawks’ 1st rounder to acquire an actual piece at the draft. You never know how that will shake out. Or you just use your two first rounders and maybe you get something for 2021-2022. Or maybe you package your first rounders to get into the top five. I don’t know, but what I do know is it gives you options you need.

Because if one summer trade and one free agent signing get you another winger and d-man, and you can solve your goaltending without breaking the bank (i.e. some combo of Talbot, Markstrom, Crawford, Halak, Murray, Greiss, Khudobin, who are all free agents and not all will be ewxpensive), now you’re ready to do more than just scrape in as a wildcard and get your brains beaten in by the Blues.

Maybe if Colliton finally has the mobile blue line–which it would be with Boqvist, Mitchell, Murphy, Keith, and acquisition to come–his high-pressure system has a chance, if you’re determined to stick with it. That’s a discussion for another time.

The biggest frustration with the Hawks over the past couple seasons, distilled down to its essence, is a complete lack of vision. Everything is made up on the fly. In the summer of 2017 it was we have to get younger and faster. So in came Saad and Murphy, out went Panarin and Hjalmarsson. And then that just stopped. Strome isn’t fast. de Haan isn’t fast. Maatta isn’t fast. Gustafsson isn’t fast. Koekkoek isn’t fast. And suddenly it was about blocking shots and being gritty. And all of it has left the Hawks spinning their wheels.

Now’s the time to show you have vision. Yeah, the playoff spot is visible, if you squint. But trust your fans to see the big picture, because they do. They’re dying for the Hawks to see it as well.

If Keith gets pissed off at another lost season, so be it. Is he really going to be a part of your next very good team at 38? Would Kane? Well, there’s your chance to really reset everything. There is opportunity here, if you only see it that way instead of the end.

Where does the vision come from, though? Do you trust Stan to do the sell-off much less the final touches of a rebuild which he hasn’t gotten right yet? Does McDonough know this? Does he have the balls to fire Stan now and get someone in to do this job? Is it too late? Will Stan follow instruction? Will he even get it?

This is the frustration, because we’re pretty damn sure these questions aren’t even being asked in those offices, much less being answered. But it’s time now. You’re done.

Or you can continue to chase this playoff spot you won’t get. Lehner and Crawford can both walk. Seabrook wants back in. You have no prospects. Maybe Mitchell doesn’t want any part of this. Where are you then?

The answer is clear to us. It’s time they see it.

Hockey

Game #57 – An Ache in Your Soul, It’s Everybody’s Goal to Get What They Can’t Have – Hawks 0, Canucks 3

By John Pullega 1655 0

Box Score

Natural Stat Trick

They had 49 shots. They had the puck for almost 70% of the game. They scored zero goals.

They were two points out of a playoff spot just a couple of weeks ago. They have now lost five in a row and have next to no shot.

They aren’t bad because they’re inconsistent. They’re inconsistent because they’re bad.

– At the beginning of the year, the Hawks were an at-best bubble team whose only real shot at a playoff run was the offense bailing out the defense. Tonight was a microcosm of what happens when it can’t. Despite allowing just 19 shots on goal, it was the hideous combination of lack of blue line talent and quite possibly the worst system in the NHL that did the Blackhawks in. Look at what the system shat out on the Canucks’s first goal.

That’s Slater Koekkoek, a defenseman, above the dot covering J.T. Miller on the penalty kill. This is by design. Having a D-man on the PK going up to cover an obscenely low-chance shot instead of the motherfucking slot is what Jeremy Colliton is asking him to do. Holy shit, look at how much space Sutter and Horvat have. It lost them the game.

Here’s another coverage play following Caggiula getting leveled and turning the puck over. Once again, Slater Koekkoek leaves a high-danger area to cover a man in a low-danger spot. Just look at this.

Why? Why are you pointing in this direction instead of sagging back? Because this is what Jeremy Colliton wants him to do. It’s absurd, and it lost them the game. We all know that Slater Koekkoek sucks in general. But a system that accentuates his suck (and the general suckage on the blue line) is something Colliton has direct control over. And he just keeps fucking it up. Over and over again.

We can go on about how Zach Smith and Ryan Carpenter each got more time than Brandon Saad—the Hawks’s hottest scorer over the last eight games, mind you—on the power play. In fact, Saad had no power play time at all. But it really doesn’t matter.

This blue line is too bad, the system is too fucked, and Jeremy Colliton is too blockheaded to fix anything. The best thing he’s done all year is scratch Seabrook, and the shelf life on that accomplishment has passed. He’s walking whiskey dick: a constant tease buried under a mountain of failed deliveries and broken promises. We all saw it coming, and it somehow still stings.

– Corey Crawford did what he could, and that’s all he can do. It’s going to suck watching him leave on these terms.

– Kirby Dach’s hands are still excellent. Once he learns that he can’t make that one extra move he could in juniors, he’s going to score more. He’s a small bright spot to look forward to for the rest of the year.

– Dominik Kubalik is getting first unit power play time thanks to DeBrincat’s struggles, apparently. Though Colliton may not realize it, he IS allowed to put Kubalik and DeBrincat on the same unit, if only he could find a place for Zach Smith and Ryan Carpenter. Kubalik didn’t score, but he wasn’t afraid to shoot, at least.

– Adam Boqvist looked more confident bringing the puck up the ice tonight. He made a few juke moves that ought to make the drop pass obsolete. But until this pretty lunkhead gets the heave-ho, it won’t matter.

What had looked like a relatively weak schedule and a chance to squeak into a weak Conference’s last wild card spot now looks like a month and a half of agony; a slow, painful death rattle that’ll deliver enough slop to let these fucking pigs in the front office think they can still compete. But they can’t, because their coach is a bonafide moron who—despite efforts to convince myself otherwise—really is as bad as we all thought.

Fucking 49 shots. Nearly 70% possession. No goals, and two systemic defensive flaws leading to a loss.

Ya blew it, Jeremy. Ya blew it.

Beer du Jour: Death by King Cake

Line of the Night: “But it was floppin’ around on him.” -Foley on a DeBrincat dump pass.