Every morning we cut right to the heart of the previous night’s playoff action.
Blues win Game 7 over Dallas: At least it’s fucking over.
Well that was quite the party. And like any good party, everyone worth a shit now leaves before they stick around past the point that all the creatures of the night do. You know those people, the ones who a Saturday night turns into a Sunday afternoon with the curtains drawn. They where all black and love to tell you about the weird sex they have. That’s where the Columbus Blue Jackets find themselves…amongst the New Order records. No one wants to be the last to leave.
What a historic spring for the Jackets. Causing one of the biggest upsets in first-round history, they’ll join such luminaries like the ’91 North Stars, the ’93 Blues, the ’93 Islanders, and ’09 Ducks in the pantheon of…wait, you don’t remember any of these teams? Of course you fucking don’t, because they’re nothing more than quirky trivia. Something that helps you win the three free rounds at a pub quiz while you pretend you’re having fun. But hey, that’s more memorable than the Jackets have ever been.
We’ll spend the next day or two wading through various love letters and bouquets thrown at Jarmo Kekalainen, a man who has been allowed to be GM for six years with one playoff series win, no division titles, and never actually earning home-ice in a playoff series. What a record! Oh how he went for it! Oh what dash he showed! Why don’t more GMs show such gumption, they’ll cry!
Yes, selling out your future for six playoff wins so that your two most important players tell you to do one a couple weeks later than they were going to truly is foresight. It’s a wonder Jarmo isn’t a goddamn Vulcan. And when Duchene and Dzingel see Panarin and Bobrovsky fuck off, we’re sure they’ll be heavily tempted to commit their futures to a rest stop between known cultural centers of Cleveland and Cincinnati. Wonder how much longer Zach Werenski is going to want to commit to North Louisville after all that as well.
This is what you don’t get, Columbus. Once a college town, always a college town. Just because you’re strangely podunk and the home of an insurance company that keeps foisting Peyton Manning on the nation like a proud mother doesn’t mean you’re a destination. You go to Columbus, you stay for a few years, you get measurably dumber and then you move on to fix that. Those who stay around their college towns after graduation are always desperate and weird. If you’ve seen Buckeyes fans gather in Evanston or whatever Wrigleyville/Lincoln Park Date-Rape Palooza bar they call home, you know of where we speak. It applies to the Jackets, too.
You needn’t sweat it. Your contemporaries the Minnesota Wild haven’t accomplished anymore than you. You two are what everyone thinks millennials are. Bad clothes, bad decisions, loud noises and few accomplishments. At least the Wild actually got a free agent or two to show up. And no, Nick Foligno wanting to stay doesn’t count. That’s more of a metaphor than you’re prepared to face right now.
Everything will be fine, you say. Cam Atkinson and his recent damn fine impression of Patrick Roy era Gabriel Landeskog is still here. So’s Pierre-Luc Dubois. Josh Anderson and whatever brains didn’t leap out his ear thanks to McAvoy last night are too. Jones and Werenski. We’ve got a base. You sure do. Those 89 points that base will collect as they stare at whatever punter is in net wondering how that went in will be glorious. We’re sure you’re looking forward to it.
While the press lavish praise on Jarmo, because he gave them so much to write about, one has to ask if the truly brave call wouldn’t have been to cash in on Panarin and Bobrovsky for actual assets that will be around Ohio longer than until the keg goes dry. Perhaps something lasting instead of a cheap thrill and a parlor trick. These same writers will be doing “Was It All Worth It?” articles in March when the Jackets are five points out of a playoff spot. This will of course follow the “No One Believed In Us!” articles that come in November when the Jackets have the same five-game winning streak every team does.
No, the coach will still be a bullhorn, and his boring-ass style and hard-ass ways are going to get a lot more scrutiny when there are more losses than wins. And then one might wonder just how many more coaches Jarmo “Balls To The Walls” Kekalainen gets. And then won’t those make for some fun Athletic posts?
Face it Columbus, no one wants to be there. No matter what any player or team does it’ll be Page 2 behind which OSU running back showed up to spring practice in a Tesla. Oh wait, I think Urban Meyer is bending over again to show just how much this means to him. It doesn’t even matter that he’s not coaching anymore, he cares so damn much he’s killing himself out there!
You’re just a misplaced SEC town with the hillbillies to match, except you didn’t bother to include Nashville’s nightlife or music scene. You’re a jumping off point, and will always be leverage to get somewhere better. Which is just about everywhere. Rick Nash was only the first. He’ll hardly be the last. But hey, you’ve got a cannon, right?
There isn’t much left to say about Alex DeBrincat that we haven’t already said a few hundred times in this space or the podcast. If you’ve missed it, I will catch you up – he’s really damn good. I never ever ever want to forget that the Blackhawks got him with the pick that they acquired from Montreal in exchange for Andrew Shaw, which is the most Montreal shit of all time. After a good rookie season in 2017-18, he followed it up with an elite 2018-19. Let’s dig in:
82 GP – 41 G – 35 A – 76 P
49.68 CF% – 46.47 xGF% (5v5)
It Comes With A Free Frogurt!
DeBrincat quickly cemented himself as the third best forward on the team this season, proving that he doesn’t need to be just Patrick Kane‘s running mate to produce. That’s not to say that he didn’t spend a good amount of time with Kane or didn’t play well when with Kane, but he also spent enough time playing at a high level away from ol’ Garbage Dick to prove that he’s capable of essentially carrying a line’s offense on his own. It certainly helped that he got paired up his OHL running mate back in Dylan Strome not long into the season, but I would argue that Top Cat did more to elevate Strome’s game than the other way around.
One of the most important non-linemate developments for Top Cat this season was his development as a power play assassin. Obviously the improved power play was a huge credit to Jeremy Colliton, and there are very few players who both helped cause that PP boom and benefited from it as Top Cat. He scored 13 of his goals on the PP, and added 11 assists on that unit as well. That equates to nearly one third of his goals, assists, and points coming when on the ice with the extra man, which will certainly help inflate the numbers, but is also just what offensive dynamos like DeBrincat are supposed to do on the powerplay. For context, Nikita Kucherov had 15 of his 41 goals, 33 of his 87 assists, and 48 of his 128 points on the PP, and all of those numbers are more than a third of the total production. So not that anyone was really doing so, but don’t let the heavy amount of PP production make you think his production numbers are any less impressive.
Top Cat is proving to be far and away Stan Bowman’s best draft pick and may even be a large reason that Stan still has a job. Despite being picked 39th overall in the the 2016 draft, Top Cat has the fourth most total points of any player picked in that draft, and has a better PPG at 0.78 than two of the players above him in Patrik Laine and Matthew Tkachuk, who both sit at 0.76. Granted, that’s pretty minimal difference, but it’s still better and I am a homer so we’re counting it as a win. Thanks.
The Frogurt is Also Cursed
Yet again I find myself in a position where trying to find anything negative to say about Top Cat is a bit of a stretch. However, as I thought more about it I realized that there was one thing that kinda bothered me as I thought more about it, though I usually think of it as entertaining and fun. And that is his desire to throw his body around a bit and play a bit of a tough guy when the opportunity is presented.
It’s not that he is a stupid player when it happens – he only took 15 total PIM this year, which is more than fine. But he sometimes works his way into scrums and did get involved in one fight this year, which is one more than I want to see him have. I know hockey has “The Code” and everybody us out there wanting to stick up for their team, but Top Cat should leave that to his less technically gifted and more ham-brained teammates. It’s not a major issue, and usually in the moment I find it cool, but I quickly switch to dread over the thought of him getting some bullshit injury from off a cheapshot from some dipshit in a scrum. Let’s just avoid the possibility all together, okay?
Anyway, Top Cat is great and I love him. Pay the man.
Previous Player Reviews
We’ll never know if John McIsaac and Kelly Sutherland had thoughts of Vegas-San Jose Game 7 traipse through their head when trying to assess a penalty to Charlie McAvoy last night. It would not be a surprise if it did, and what happened to those officials. Officials want to rise to the top of their profession just like anyone else, and seeing their colleagues hung out to dry and then sent home for the summer certainly could easily have been a factor.
Make no mistake, Charlie McAvoy should have been given a major penalty, booted, and suspended for multiple games. He left his feet, came from the blindside, and hit directly to Josh Anderson’s head. I don’t know what other qualifications you need.
But the because the NHL is so terrified of pissing off its knuckle-dragging fans and media (probably more the latter), because for some reason it’s mortified at the thought of a Don Cherry or Brian Burke rant on Canadian television about how the game is lost, this is what we get. A minor penalty, which won’t do much to deter hits to the head that the league claims it wants to do away with to preserve the safety of its players.
And because officials have seen what happened to other refs who have deemed to punish to heavily, they are gun-shy. NHL officials always have been, and while I try and give them as much credit as I can because the refs in other sports can be so awful, they often lean too far the other way. “Let the players decide,” is a fine mantra, but lean into too far and you’ve ended up ignoring what the players have decided. When one player forces another into a penalty/foul, they have decided that one team gets a power play. When you ignore that, all normal hockey goes out the window and you bring your star players down to the level of those who can’t emerge from the muck. You may bitch about NBA refs being too obtrusive, but the NBA playoffs are still a stage for the best they have to do what they do and they dominate the headlines (some of that is the difference in the sports). When you’re asking Nathan MacKinnon or the like to survive being tackled and now possibly beheaded at every turn, you ground down what makes them rise above the rest, and hence their team.
That’s also the not the exact discussion here. When the league threw its refs from San Jose-Vegas under the bus, it pretty much pulled the rug out from under all the refs. The idea, in theory, is that the officials are the representatives of the league and are administering the game. All the NHL has done is create a separation, make it seem like they work for the teams now, and leave the refs on their own. Which would undermine their authority.
And that gets even more undermined when they’re terrified to make the right call, for fear of being singled out by the league again. No team deserves an apology for a ref’s call. The ref didn’t make the Knights give up four power play goals in five minutes. The refs didn’t make them not score in overtime against a depleted and exhausted team. The refs aren’t why the Knights lost.
Bad calls happen to every team, and it’s part of the accepted system as currently fashioned. The refs weren’t looking out to screw the Knights, the only situation that should have earned an apology. If the league thought those refs made the wrong call, there is a grading system in private already in place and they should have just been quietly not assigned the next round. All referees accept this when they take the job.
“Not deciding the game” is also a red herring for officials. After all, not making a call can swing an outcome just as much as an over-aggressive call. Last night’s miss on McAvoy probably didn’t cost the Jackets the game, but you can see where a similar one would. And now if the league were to suspend McAvoy, which it should, it will be publicly hanging out their refs to dry again. It will have no choice.
The league could help refs of course by clearly outlining that any hit to the head is a major, game misconduct, and a suspension whether you meant it or not. Do you want these hits out of the game? Miss on the high side then. It can’t get more clear-cut than McAvoy’s hit last night, but there will be others. You’re not going to change the behavior and make players adjust how they play until there are serious consequences, no questions asked. It will be an uncomfortable six months, or full season, with some questionable decisions and old men yelling at clouds before they soil themselves.
And then it would change. Players wouldn’t take hits they weren’t sure of. Muttonheads who can do nothing else would be out of the league, and that would be a good thing. Players adjust. Look at what happened with interference calls and slashes and hooks. They’re still around, but players know the deal and play the game differently. It’s pretty simple.
The league needs to back its officials, even when they’re wrong. It’s part of the game right now, and they need the support. Did Marc-Andre Fleury apologize to the fans for turning into Wile E. Coyote for a period? No. His mistake(s) were no less than the refs. It’s just a matter of degree. The refs won’t call this how it should be if they don’t think their bosses have their back. The refs are out there in the field of play and take the brunt. They’re the ones enforcing the decisions made above them. They’re the ones influencing games, rightly or wrongly. How can they do that when they feel they have no backup?
Every morning, we cut right to the heart of what happened in last night’s playoff action.
Bruins eliminate Jackets: Good fucking riddance.
Avalanche tie Sharks 3-3: Only fucking series worth watching.
Oh right, the Islanders.
It’s not easy to wipe away the buzz and impact of sweeping a long-time tormentor with just the flick of a wrist, but then nothing has been normal about the Islanders since…well, ever. You’re supposed to carry the momentum of a franchise-turning win like the first-round sweep of the Penguins into something that will define this era and be remembered for a while. Scoring five goals in the next four games, including getting two and a half games against the perpetually bewildered Curtis McElhinney reduces that first round to odd trivia shared in various Long Island and New York bars where Tammy from Queens will offer to blow you in the bathroom but won’t remove her bubblegum to do so.
The Islanders sold their soul already, assuming they had one. You can’t blame them, really. This is a franchise that has managed consecutive playoff appearances just once in the past 15 years. So you see why they turned to Barry Trotz, the Jose Mourinho of hockey (though about 1/130th of the asshole). You’ll get results, your defense will improve, but good god it will be about as entertaining as checking your dog for fleas. And if you give him a historic collection of offensive talent, he just might get your team to grunt and belch to a Cup (though it’s important to note no other Trotz team has ever made a conference final, which seems his destiny in wherever the Isles call home). There’s definitely a floor you acquire with Trotz, you’re just going to end up on it if you watch them for more then two weeks straight.
You’ll hear a lot over the coming weeks about how the Isles future is so bright after this. Yes, clearly a GM who has acquired Matt Martin twice and Leo Komarov for a second team, who has openly admitted he hates playing players anything, and is managing a team with literally no home is sure to steer this club into the sunshine. Nothing hockey players love quite like shaving every day and having to throw a dart to remember where the home game is today! Certainly worked out well for the last big free agent the Islanders had, all the way back to last summer. Can’t help but notice Brock Nelson and Anders Lee haven’t re-upped yet. Perhaps they and their agents are going over the Lamiorello, “Every player is overpaid,” comment and wondering just how much they enjoy life between the highways of Long Island and commuting an hour to an arena where the structure and the fans are constantly off-center.
And the Islanders need them, and then probably another two top six forwards. See how they do that when they’ve never been a free agent destination before. Thomas Vanek once went here to die, I think. Andrew Ladd did die, and he’s only got four years left on his deal. If you sign in Brooklyn in the summer you’re going to end up smelling like Brooklyn in the summer…sweat and mistakes. No, the Isles acquire players when they essentially become Australia and other teams send their unwanted contracts there just to get them off the books. And then they stay, because much like a prison a lot of Islanders realize they don’t belong anywhere else.
Still, this is the Metro Division and you can stay around the top merely by floating for a while. The Penguins are exhausted, the Flyers, Rangers, and Devils are too busy trying to give themselves enemas orally. So maybe your future can remain bright by doing literally nothing and watching everyone else fuck up. That must be what Isles fans are getting at. Assuming both their goalies don’t quit the team to go build the wall on the Texas border themselves, or bring guns into the dressing room (which is hilarious, because would the NHL actually punish anyone for doing that?).
But hey, the Islanders have now won a round in consecutive playoff appearances, which they haven’t done since 1985. And yes, those playoff appearances are three years apart, but when you’re an Isles fan or player you have to grab onto whatever you can. That, and perhaps the most boisterous atmosphere in the league, for the 10 games the Isles play on Long Island that is. Just another lesson in how Brooklyn pretty much ruins everything. Tell us about your parking lot tailgates again though, which you have to have because there’s literally nothing else in Nassau. Is Nassau even a place? I don’t know and I don’t care and no one else does either. It only is inhabited because Robert Moses built a kingdom on getting white people to flee black people. And the only team that belongs in Brooklyn plays in Chavez Ravine.
So farewell to the Islanders, who will spend the next few years wondering if an arena can be built next to Belmont Race Track, which will hinge basically on how to get at train to go backwards efficiently. No really, it will. You have to take a moment to realize the wonder of a sports organization longing to get to a nowhere place like Elmont, NY. Every other team wants to get downtown, the Islanders want to get to a freeway exit. That pretty much tells you everything you need to know.
We made it through the defense, everyone. I know, it wasn’t pretty, but we did it. Now onto the forwards where the situation is…better? It’s better, right? Yes, it couldn’t be worse than the defense, so yes.
When Brendan Perlini and Dylan Strome came over in the Schmaltz trade, Perlini was actually the more known quantity and Strome was the question mark who hadn’t really realized his potential. That’s not how the narrative played out once they got here, though, as Strome found his groove and ended up being one of the Hawks’ best players (and a rare pleasant surprise in a season of mostly unpleasant ones). Perlini, on the other hand, was a bit of an enigma with the Hawks, having one burst of scoring and playing decently on the second line, sandwiched by benchings and periodic irrelevance. Let’s dig in:
(With the Hawks): 46 GP – 12 G – 3 A – 15 P
45.4 CF% – 40.4 xGF% [5v5]
It Comes With a Free Frogurt!
Brendan Perlini had basically one really good week. OK, that’s not entirely fair, it was like two really good weeks. Between March 2nd and March 16th, he scored eight goals in seven games, including his first-ever hat trick against his erstwhile team, the Coyotes. And all of that was extremely fun and when you’re scoring, everything is great.
Aside from that stretch, Perlini was a serviceable linemate for Strome and Top Cat on the second line. As a line, their possession at 5-on-5 wasn’t exactly stellar, especially considering that these guys weren’t taking dungeon shifts (49.5 CF% with 68% oZS). Still, he was able to be in the right places at mostly the right times and proved he can play well when on a line with other good players…I know, what an accomplishment, right? But this is where we’re at, and we’ll take it. His shooting percentage jumped from a sickly 5% with Arizona in the first part of the season to 15.6 with the Hawks, showing that Perlini can be effective given the right tools to work with.
The Frogurt is Also Cursed
Perlini seems like kind of a character, and to me that’s not a bad thing. The dull facelessness of hockey players, which is an all-too-common occurrence when the majority of your athlete population consists of rural Canadian white kids with a seventh-grade education, is irritating and tiresome. So I’m cool with players actually speaking their minds and having a personality, and so much the better when they have perspective on life and playing a professional sport. However, it seems that Perlini’s outlook may just be fucking with his give-a-shit meter, which hovered dangerously low at times this season for a guy still proving he’s a top-six player.
If you’re Patrick Kane and you’re being lazy and it leads to a dumb turnover, you’re going to get away with it. If you’re Brendan Perlini, clearly you won’t, as his benching and scratching shortly after his scoring streak showed. He was particularly lazy against the Sharks in March when the Hawks ostensibly were still shooting for a playoff spot, and Beto O’Colliton stapled his ass to the bench and then made him sit in the corner and think about what he did for a little while.
Now, was that totally deserved? Eh, maybe Colliton was making sort of an example of him, but again, you’re Brendan fucking Perlini, you better act like a try-hard. None of his numbers—possession, scoring, high-danger chances, nor that shooting percentage—were good enough to justify him not at least trying his damndest to win puck battles consistently. This team is also slow, so as a younger guy on the second line, he needs to bust his ass to push the play, and besides, Dylan Strome isn’t fast either so it’s really not asking all that much effort-wise.
Can I Go Now?
Perlini deserves another chance next season, and even if he doesn’t stay with Strome and DeBrincat he can probably be a decent bottom-sixer. Let’s say he ends up being “a guy”…at least he’s a 22-year-old guy and not Artem Anisimov, an older and even slower guy. He’ll also be a cheap signing, maybe around 1 mildo or so. And who knows, maybe he’ll do some peyote in the desert or something and have a revelation about working his ass off.
Previous Player Reviews
Every morning, we cut right to the heart of the previous night’s, or weekend’s action.
Carolina eliminates Islanders: Good fuckin’ riddance.
Boston takes 3-2 lead on Columbus: What the fuck ever.
St. Louis and Dallas tied at 3: Fucking torture.
San Jose leads Colorado 3-2: Fuckin’ yeah buddy.
Game 1 Box Score: Cubs 4, Cardinals 0
Game 2 Box Score: Cubs 6, Cardinals 5
Game 3 Box Score: Cubs 13, Cardinals 5
Let’s get it right at the top here. Back in first place. Best winning percentage in the NL. Best run-differential in baseball. Won seven in a row. 16 of 20. It was utterly pointless to be trying to tear your heart out of your chest with your fingernail after nine games. Everyone has a bad nine games. Fuck, everyone has a bad 20 games. I understand the microscope is more focused at the start of a season. I understand it was an unpleasant winter and everyone already had the knives out and wanted to be the first to say, “I told you so.”
But it was always a good offense. Possibly great. It was always potentially a really good rotation, and one that survived an IL stint to Jon Lester. You have those two things, the pen doesn’t matter as much. The Cubs have six players with a wRC+ of 115 or higher. The only regulars who aren’t there are Schwarber, Zobrist and Descalso. And Schwarber’s is 129 over the past two weeks.
So yeah, I don’t want to hear it. This is a really good team, a team that is essentially the one that won 95 games last year and gets to use Yu Darvish and a healthy Kris Bryant. It’s been even able to carry a struggling Zobrist. They’re really good. Everyone on board.
Let’s do the thing:
The Two Obs
-I find it funny that it took Hendricks and Contreras about an inning or two to figure out that the Cardinals were trying to jump on The Cerebral Assassin early in at-bats, proceeded to cut through them like a daisy cutter, and yet the Cardinals never bothered to try anything else. Hendricks threw seven pitches in the 7th. Nine in the 8th. 10 in the 9th. Good thing they hired Shildt full-time, huh?
-Saturday, the right decision was definitely to walk Schwarber to get to Taylor Davis. That doesn’t mean Michael Wacha had to throw him a batting practice fastball that any competent profession baseball player is going to hurt. I thought the Cardinals were smart?
-Yu Darvish is Javy Vasquez. If you remember Little Game Javy, as Yankees fans so lovingly referred to him as, he had five or six different pitches, all of them effective. But it Javy’s world, and apparently Yu’s, no one should make contact on him. Which means he pitches that way, which means he misses, which means walks, which means problems. Until Yu starts pitching to contact and taking the strikeouts when they’re there, this is what you’re gong to get. He’s never had great control, but it’s within him, he simply chooses not to. Remember, before he got to Chicago the previous two seasons saw him carry a BB/9 under three. He’s at 7.44 this year. It has to stop.
-I don’t really care how the Cubs pen does it, but they’ve been among the best in baseball since the first week. And I don’t care. It’s a bullpen, it doesn’t have to make sense.
-This is the rotation the Cardinals are going to take us down with? Ok.
-Quintana wasn’t as vintage as he’s been this year, but he was able to muscle through it which is a really good sign. Also helps that the Cubs catch everything and play defense all over the field.
-Between Bryant, Heyward, and Baez, Cardinals fans aren’t going to know who to boo when the Cubs go down there later this month. And I’m fine with a team of villains.
Onwards…
Before the playoffs, SinBin.Vegas (a Knights blog I’ll check out when I need to update myself on said team) wrote a post about how Brent Burns was actually an advantage for them in their series against the Sharks. I thought it was yet another product of unearned arrogance for a team and fanbase that hadn’t even been in existence for two full seasons yet, even though I’ve never really rated Burns defensively either. I figured he could out-produce and out-push whatever mistakes he makes in his own end, as he pretty much does during the regular season.
This has been Burns in the playoffs:
Last night was especially gruesome if you’re a Sharks fan, and truly rewarding if you’re into absurdist theater. Let’s start with Colin Wilson’s goal that pretty much ended Game 4 as a contest:
When Rantanen loses the puck into the slot, you’d assume that Burns would just slap it away on his backhand or smoothly let it roll to his forehand and then skate it out. Instead he attempts…I don’t even know…a Cruyff turn? The result is him banging it off his skates and leaving it right there for Rantanen to get a second bite at it, which left him the space for that incredible pass to Wilson.
That wasn’t Burns’s only hiccup that turned into an aneurysm, in even that period. On Carl Soderberg’s mystifying miss in the 3rd, Burns follows Matt Nieto into the corner with all the passion of getting his license renewed, and then just kind of skates around back up to the circle like a little league outfielder, while Soderberg is just standing at the side of the net waiting to y’know, score. There were at least two or three other instances in just the 3rd period last night where Burns got scorched, or was just loitering around begging for change I assume like North Shore kids in front of The Alley (sky point), or actively running away from where he was supposed to be.
The highlight had to be Sam Girard coming down the middle on a 3-on-2, and Burns on the right side of the two turning his back on Girard to cover the stationary winger along the boards, who somehow was calculated by Burns with whatever broken slide-rule covered in mustard is in his head to be the bigger threat. Girard faked that pass by like, kind of looking over there and suddenly Burns gave him a runway to the net that O’Hare would pay millions for. It was like when you fake throwing the tennis ball for your dog and they go charging off for five steps and then can’t figure out what they’re doing.
And it’s been like this all playoffs long. All the shit that Erik Karlsson used to get yelled at by red angry men on TSN in the past Burns was actively doing last night and the past three weeks. But because he’s a good Canadian boy it’s rare that this ever gets pointed out. This motherfucker has a Norris! I hate to say Drew Doughty was right, but my lord.
It’s like watching a child lost in the supermarket. You feel sorry for him but at the same time you can’t wait to see how he tries to solve this puzzle. And Burns is just charging through the produce shelves hoping to just run into mom’s knees. You’d think it’s impossible to get this lost in a contained space but Burns seems to find space where there didn’t look to be any space or creates more of it, and all in the wrong way.
It’s honestly been the most fascinating watch in the playoffs. Where will Burns charge off to next? Is he going to be at the circles when the puck is behind the net? Vice versa? Is he going to choose to cover the beer vendor? Will he actually light his beard on fire? You can’t rule any of it out!
It’s just about as freeing an experience in the playoffs. Anything could happen. There is no impossibility when Burns is on the ice. I bet you thought there would never be a rip in the space-time continuum. Buddy, let me tell ya, it could happen. His brains could literally spill out of his ear (which I assume would result in another major to Cody Eakin). He might just leap against the glass like Ron Obvious trying to leap the English Channel. It’s honestly a bucket of rainbows.
Erik Gustafsson must watch Burns and do a Joker impression. “And I thought my jokes were bad.”
