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Game Time: 9:30PM CST
TV/Radio: NBC Sports Chicago, SportsNet+, SN360, WGN-AM 720
Slaying The Dragon: Nucks Misconduct, Canucks Army
After a thoroughly embarrassing performance in Edmonton last night, the Hawks have no time to regroup as they continue their Western Canadian tour in Vancouver tonight against the Canucks, and just in time for Sedin Twin Night as 22 and 33 go into the rafters at Rogers Arena.
We didn’t ask for this. The Canucks made it so. One, they have such a nondescript team that we’ve already highlighted Quinn Hughes and Elias Pettersson so who gives a fuck about anyone else now? We didn’t pick this fight.
So the Canucks are having the Sedin Twins jersey retirement against the Hawks. Bet they think that’s pretty cute. Better yet, we’re pretty sure if you asked them, the Canucks brass would tell you they picked this date because the greatest Canucks victory ever came against the Hawks. Let’s review, shall we?
That victory, the dragon-slaying as it’s known up there, was merely the Presidents’ Trophy winner avoiding blowing a 3-0 lead to an overmatched, exhausted, and undermanned Hawks team. It should have only been relief, not a marker. Jake Dowell and Fernando Pisani got serious run for that team. Ryan Johnson did too. This was hardly the juggernaut that had gone upside the Canucks head the previous two seasons.
And that’s the thing about the Canucks and the Sedins. They can look back and try and claim how much those series with the Hawks meant, but it doesn’t mean the same here. Sure, the Canucks were part of it, but as Hawks fans and they cherish the one series win over Detroit (kind of the same thing as ’11 for the Canucks, except it resulted in a Cup win and had much more history to it) far more than anything then happened with Vancouver. Or the win over the Bruins. Or the two battles with the Kings. Hell, the Hawks have the same playoff history with the Predators.
If the Canucks and Sedins wanted to be truly apt, they would stand in the shadows during the ceremony tonight, because that’s all they did when it mattered. Especially Daniel, or Shooty-Twin. Are they the greatest Canucks of all-time? Absolutely. Should they walk into the Hall of Fame? Of course. Their numbers should have been retired immediately upon retirement. But they can’t ever shake the legacy that they couldn’t bring Vancouver what it doesn’t have, and were some of the biggest reasons they don’t.
2009 against the Hawks: Daniel had two goals, both in Game 6 when his team forgot to play defense.
2010 against the Hawks: Daniel didn’t score once.
2011 against the Bruins: One goal.
Daniel would go on to score one playoff goal in 11 more playoff games as the Canucks still look for their first series victory since going to the Final in ’11. Haven’t managed one yet. Henrik continued to put up assists through all this, as he Getzlaf’d his way through games on the outside while watching it all pretty much pass him by. And it’s not like they found success before this in the postseason. Daniel had two goals in 12 games in 2007 and the record will read 25 goals total in 102 playoff games. Henrik managed 78 points in just about the same amount of playoff games, but ask Canucks fans if they remember any.
Sometimes it’s not fair to judge players on what happens just in the playoffs. The competition kicks up, teams are focused on stopping you, and in a handful of games the percentages and bounces can just abandon you even if you’re doing everything right. But at some point, when you’re the top line players and the biggest reason your team is there in the first place, you have to stand up and be counted. It didn’t stop Toews. Or Kane, Or Crosby. Or Malkin. Or Ovechkin. Or Kopitar. But it stopped the Sedins, multiple times.
Vancouver can ignore it for a night. Maybe even a lifetime. But it’s part of the record in the rest of the hockey world. So have your ceremony against the Hawks if it makes you feel good. No fanbase or team knows the truth better.
Antoine Roussel: Honestly, we kind of miss having him out of the division. While the marriage of him and Vancouver is perfect, and even more so as they grossly overpaid him, now that he’s on the West Coast, never on our TV, and has got his money his antics don’t even really exist. And this dude tried so hard to be considered annoying. Like he tried harder than Springstreen tries to convince you just how hard it is to play his shit-ass songs. That’s so hard! Ah well, nothing lasts forever, especially the truly wonderful.
Alex Edler: The elbows still work.
Adam Gaudette: Isn’t it weird that given a chance, Dylan Sikura’s running buddy at Northeastern has carved himself out a role on a third line for a team basically running a 3+1 model? Isn’t that strange? Wonder where else that could happen?
Notes: We’re assuming this bullshit with Strome is over after one game and he’ll slot back in for a game the Hawks simply have to have. Then again, they had to have last night and here we are. Fuck, maybe he’ll even be put back at center which is, y’know, the position he plays!…It’s funny that the same day the Sun-Times wrote an article about how Dach has earned Colliton’s trust, his line continues to get clocked possession-wise as Tippett was able to get Draisaitl out against him a ton. That’s no knock on Dach (HA!), because he’s a goddamn teenager and the learning curve is steep. It’s a knock on Colliton and what he’s looking for…
Notes: Pretty long injury list for the Canucks, as Boeser won’t make the bell tonight along with other depth forwards. But then McDavid not playing didn’t fucking matter, so whatever…Miller is on a real heater right now, with 20 points in his last 17 games and a strong case for the Selke…Horvat has killed the Hawks lately, with six points against them in the last five games between the teams…
I, much like you, made that sound that comes when you surprisingly belch up some vomit and have to swallow it back down when I saw the proposal for a new playoff system in MLB. It’s been obvious for a while that Rob Manfred doesn’t even like baseball, or if he does he doesn’t have any clue on how to make it better and more attractive to a new generation. So we’ll just turn it into The Bachelor or something? Who fucking knows. The more I think about it the more baseball is headed the way of horse racing, and it’ll be me and a bunch of altacockers watching it praying we can make it back to the car before shitting ourselves before too long.
When stuff like this comes out, and it’s been this way for longer than I’d care to think about, we all just dismiss it as “cash grab.” Because we know that’s Manfred’s job, to make the owners more and more money. And more playoff games mean more ratings for TV networks which means better ad rates and you know how the whole cycle goes. I mean, at some point there are so many playoff games they cease to be unique anymore and maybe ratings would flatten out but I guess we’re a long way off from that.
I don’t know if I’m getting my anarchist clothing on and preparing my bow but it does feel like the more we dismiss and acquiesce the more the things we love are altered or mutated beyond recognition and we’re the only ones who suffer. And yet it feels like there’s little we can do other than stop watching and/or caring, and again, we’re the only ones who get punished in that scenario. The owners and Manfred are unlikely to notice we’re gone. I doubt there will be a baseball revolution/uprising anytime soon. If there is, I have a whole list of people I’d sentence to death by exile.
Playoff expansion is all about keeping more fans of more teams interested throughout a regular season that feels too long at times. It’s here that many have pointed out you wouldn’t have so many teams drawing flies and the generally lost and bewildered only if you didn’t have so many bottoming out in a “rebuild,” most of which never actually top out either. Perhaps the introduction of a salary floor not all that far from the luxury tax would keep more teams competitive for the playoff spots you already have cut out? I guess I shouldn’t sit on a hot stove waiting for that to happen, though it feels like that should be one of the first bullet points from the MLBPA in new CBA negotiations. I guess the best I can hope for there is that Tony Clark can spell “salary floor.”
None of this fixes what’s really wrong with baseball, and even the playoff system. And I don’t know that there’s a solution to any of it. From where I sit, here are the problems:
I’ll deal with the first and see if I’m even capable of dealing with the second later. Right now, a system that would be as near as perfect as you could get would just be the three division winners. Because they would really only be competing against teams playing the same schedule, and hence we get a fair idea of who was the “best” out of that. There’s no sliding records or whatever. Everyone in the Central played everyone else in the Central 19 times, and everyone else in the NL six or seven. Sure, there’s a little variance with these “natural interleague rivals” but I’m not going to kick a fuss over one or two games.
But even that wouldn’t completely work, if you were to give a bye to the team with the best record. Because they’ll have achieved that record playing a wildly different schedule than the other two teams, so we don’t have any idea how they compare really. And the six or seven games they had against each other wouldn’t be enough of a sample.
And of course, that wouldn’t be enough playoff teams to suit everyone. We’re not going back to four divisions and only the winners move on to the postseason, even if that makes the most sense.
I would say that expansion to 32 teams, which also seems inevitable somewhere around here, would allow for the opportunity for either eight divisions of four with only the winners moving on, or the truly revolutionary and close-to-my-heart tiered leagues of 16 teams with promotion and relegation. Fuck, in a vacuum, cutting the minor leagues loose and making them just lower league baseball could even add to this, where Des Moines and Charlotte could actually play their way into MLB II or whatever and compete with Pittsburgh and Detroit or whatever. But that’s about as galaxy-brained as it gets. Even though the Premier League’s popularity continues to grow and no one here is suggesting they change their ways.
But MLB won’t go for the eight-division look because someone will complain about the likelihood of one or two divisions being so much weaker than the others. This is what happened in the NHL. You’ll recall the current format was just supposed to be four divisions with no conferences, and four teams from each would make the playoff and then the four winners from there would be re-seeded for the semifinals. It sounded great, kept teams competing for things while playing the same schedule, and would have been at least unique. It was the players who balked, with the above reasoning. Which gave us this dumbass wildcard system.
What promotion/relegation fans are really trying to get at is keeping teams at every point in the standings competing for something. And I guess this is what this proposed MLB system takes a swipe at. Teams at the top are haggling over the bye, teams in the middle trying to get in. It doesn’t do anything for the bottom, which is the real problem, but I’ll let go of that dream. Right now, once the Dodgers get 10 games up on the Padres by what, May 1st, there really isn’t much for them to play for. Sure, the winner of the coin flip, which went excellently for them last year. But getting to miss a whole round probably has more advantage.
This always wades back into the meaning of the regular season, but that gets harder to define. When we had only four playoff teams, what did the regular season mean to teams in third through seventh? For every Braves-Giants ’92 epic, there were probably five pennant races that never actually developed as some 94-win team won by eight games and everyone knew it was over somewhere in August. Is that better? Maybe, I’m not sure either way.
If you’re like me and trying to figure out how to get the soccer model into American sports, essentially you need to keep in mind that along with avoiding relegation there’s “mid-card belts.” Like Champions League or Europa League places. As well as separate cup competitions. American sports simply don’t have these. Which is something the NBA is taking a look at, but the cup competitions don’t really work without the lower league teams competing. Now, let college teams and D-League teams take their shot and we might have something. Either way, it’s hard to juice the middle of the standings here. This is their attempt, as wrong as it may feel.
And really, we know that as dramatic as they can be, playoffs in baseball are weird. It’s kind of a different game than what we see in the regular season. Some sports lend themselves to that kind of thing or feel. I would say that hockey and basketball, but baseball and soccer don’t. It’s just the nature of the games. There’s no getting rid of them of course, but it’s not really the best way to determine a champion.
Baseball is all about how you negotiate so many damn games over six months and the accumulation of wins over that stretch. You can’t even use the same lineup every time, as you have to change pitchers. And then all of the sudden we flip a switch and one game matters over all, just over 0.5% of what you just played. It’s kind of injected drama and meaning.
Perhaps actual swift marketing men who loved the game could find a way to make the regular season more meaningful to people. Perhaps every sport could do more to make winning the regular season championship, the best test we have as flawed as it is, something to be celebrated. To separate it from the playoff champion. That’s beyond me, but until we do that, I don’t think anything is going to work perfectly.
This proposed system still sucks, though.
Ooooooh boy. Jeremy Colliton has done it this time. You want your thoughts buddy? I got your thoughts. Let’s get right into it:
– The Blackhawks failing to beat the Oilers without Connor McDavid is embarrassing, but the reality is that this truly is not on the roster of players on the ice tonight. Sure, the typical characters had their typical characteristic moments – Adam Boqvist got a little floaty in his own zone, Erik Gustafsson got caught out of position, Alex Nylander failed at competency, etc. You get it. But at this point, those things are somewhat expected, and they’re also things you can live with because none of them are true killers (well, Gustafsson’s shit can be, but it wasn’t tonight). No, this all comes back to Jeremy Colliton. What is about to follow is my somewhat raw feelings on this sad excuse for a hockey coach.
– Let’s start with Jeremy Ventura’s first mistake of the day, which was healthy scratching Dylan Strome. In a game that the Hawks needed to win to keep themselves in a spitting distance of the playoff hunt, he scratches one of his three best centers to play Alex Nylander *and* Matthew Highmore. Because when you have the chance to scratch a guy with 30 points in 44 games this season in favor of two guys who don’t know which net they’re supposed to be shooting at, you gotta do it. This man couldn’t coach a high school team.
– Now let’s get to the power play, which was complete ass cheeks for the second straight game that also resulted in an embarrassing loss in Western Canada when you needed a win. And hey, I am no scientist, but maybe the fact that Zack Smith and Erik Gustafsson are on your PP1 while Alex DeBrincat and Adam Boqvist are on your PP2 has something to do with that? Maybe because that PP1 with Smith and Gustafsson also features three other lefties so you’re cutting yourself off from a whole fucking side of the ice? Who’s to say really? Certainly not Coach Mayor Pete. This man’s couldn’t fight his way out of a wet paper sack with scissors.
– And then there was just the flat out lack of preparation. The Oilers took the lead in this game just 73 seconds after puck drop, and that was because the only time the puck left their offensive zone after puck drop was when the Oilers made an errant pass and sent it back down the ice themselves. It had nothing to do with the Blackhawks generating any sort of defensive pressure or offensive transition. And that is because Jeremy Smooth Brain’s system is such a mess that even the McDavid-less Oilers know that all you need to do is skate fast around them and the system collapses because you have forwards deep and defensemen near the blue line. Seriously, the Oilers scored their goal on a transition that started with Alex DeBrincat getting burned at the point of the Hawks offensive zone (not that they were doing anything worthwhile in there) because he was the last man recovering after being behind the net defending. That is a system that makes absolutely no fucking sense, constructed by a man who’s brain is so smooth you could bowl with it.
The players might share a small part of the burden for not just coming out with a sense of urgency in a game that was clearly must win, but it’s still the coach’s job to motivate his team to get up for these kinds of games. To convince them that they are important and why. And he clearly didn’t because he clearly cannot. He is a dead man walking.
– The only player in this game who does get a portion of the blame though is Robin Lehner, who had a rough first 40 with some truly mind-numbingly stupid moments. Playing goalie is very hard, and Lehner has been fine this year so I don’t want to make more of it than is necessary, but there were a few times where he thought he had the puck and he just didn’t, and it cost the Hawks at least one goal if not more. Again, it doesn’t need to be a big issue, but it was a problem tonight.
– Hawks go next tomorrow in Vancouver, and lucky me, I don’t have to watch that one.
– Fire Jeremy Colliton!!!!
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Game Time: 8:00PM CST
TV/Radio: NBC Sports Chicago+, WGN-AM 720
Church Of McJesus Christ and Leon-Day Saints: Oilers Nation, Copper n Blue
Well, the Hawks certainly won’t be able to say that they weren’t the beneficiaries of a bit of good fortune during whatever this so-called playoff push might become, as word just before press time leaked out that Connor McDavid will miss 2-3 weeks with a thigh bruise, which certainly puts him out for tonight’s tilt in Edmonton, and may very well keep him out of the lineup for the UC rematch the first week of March.
There’s a statistical quirk to Leon Draisaitl’s league-leading points-total (85). The German has a chance to be the first player to lead the league in scoring while being a minus-player, as he’s currently -11, since Wayne Gretzky pulled it off 28 years ago with the Kings. Does it mean anything? No, probably not, but it’s fun to think about. And it’s fun to dig deeper into.
First off, Draisaitl’s -11 is something of a false flag. The Oilers have scored 51 goals at even-strength when Leon The Ladies Man has been on the ice, and given up 53. He’s had the misfortune of being on the ice for eight shorthanded goals against, which is just kind of the worst luck possible. No one would pin that on a specific player, but certain bad bounces or misplays or a lack of saves.
Still, it’s hard to believe that the Oilers can’t even do better than break even when Draisaitl or even Connor McDavid are on the ice, which gives you some indication of just how big of a talent drop-off there is from them to the rest of the Oilers. For comparison’s sake, both McDavid and Draisaitl are in the top-ten for the amount of goals scored at evens when they’re on the ice, but they’re the only ones who don’t have a significantly positive goals-percentage for that work (Panarin leads with a 59-31 split).
It’s easy to point to the .897 SV% the Oilers get when Draisaitl is on the ice and say that’s the culprit right there. And it sure explains most of it. And if you dip into expected-goals, trying to measure the kinds of chances they’re producing, Draisaitl is again in the top-ten. But he’s also in the bottom-five in expected goals against, which has nothing to do with his goalies (so’s Patrick Kane, in case you want to detect a pattern). Now, you’d probably say the Oilers would be content just trading chances when Draisaitl and/or McDavid are on the ice, given that they’re always more likely to bury more of them than the opposition. But that hasn’t really happened, as we’ve seen, thanks to their goaltending. Both McDavid and Draisaitl have seen more pucks go into the net than they “should” have, given the expected numbers. But again, if everything was working out as it “should” the Oilers would still be just about even with them on the ice.
Another strange quirk is that no one’s metrics seem to get that much worse away from Draisaitl than they do with him. Some of that is that when they’re not on the ice with him, they’re on the ice with McDavid, and that will always even things out for just about anyone that can stand up in a pair of skates. Still, see for yourself:
Leon Draisaitl – Teammates – On Ice – Natural Stat Trick
When you get to relative metrics, Draisaitl is behind the team-rate, though in the past he’s had some years significantly ahead of it when it comes to expected goals.
All of it makes for a slightly more muddled picture than we might have thought before. Here’s a player that is consistently in the top five in scoring in the league, and this year he’s done it with a fair amount of time at center away from McDavid. The Oilers are in the playoff chase for once, so it would seem pretty clear that Draisaitl is a league-foundational piece. And yet you look a little deeper, and also consider how the Oilers have gone nowhere almost all the time, and it feels like a ton of scoring that’s just spinning wheels.
Now, put a real goalie behind Draisaitl and he’s probably +20 and the Oilers would be running away with the Pacific. Or maybe a defense that could limit chances would help. But it’s fun to consider what is actually going on instead of what we’re told surface numbers mean.
These affront-to-The-Lord Orange Jerseys: It’s so sad, because the throwback blues of the 80s Oilers are almost perfection. They pop off the screen in HD. They harken back to the only time the Oilers mattered, which you’d think they’d want to hold onto given they’ve spend nearly three decades in the wilderness since. And now these orange things, which look like a hallucination on bad shrooms, don’t even have the right shade of blue. When will teams learn brighter is better? Their Alberta neighbors to the south get it, as the Flames are going all-retro next season. Imagine the old blue Oilers skating against the old school whites of the Flames? That’s a slice of heaven there. Instead, we’re left with this trash.
Zack Kassian: Look, we’ve all dreamed of punching a Tkachuk, whichever one happens to be available at the time. And maybe Kassian had a point with Tkachuk running around and then not answering for it. Except you can’t jump the guy and punch him on the ground. Also, Kassian is a doofus. And hiding behind some “code” or “hockey ethics” only makes you a bigger one. He can fuck off, except the Oilers just extended him believing that his production with McDavid is what he really is, instead of realizing some jerkoff peeing in the sink in the 300 Level of Rogers Place could get 10 goals on his wing.
Mike Smith: Too bad Shaw won’t be around for this one. We’ll just have to settle for Smith torpedoing the Oilers playoff chances in the last week of the season, which you know he will.
