The Rockford IceHogs dropped their only game on the schedule this week. The Hogs are in action Tuesday at the BMO Harris Bank Center, where they will host Milwaukee before heading to Manitoba this weekend.
One area Rockford should not be short in is the crease. By my count, there should be four candidates for the job of guarding the net. Apparently three guys weren’t enough for the IceHogs. Or…maybe someone is on his way out.
Sometimes I wonder how much the Hawks were scarred by having Kevin Hayes spurn their advances and head to free agency after completing his college career. They’ve certainly never let that happen again, though I don’t know how much of a threat that was with any of their college prospects. There were some whispers that John Hayden was looking longingly at the open market, so the Hawks signed him up last night. And they did it by promising he could get int eh lineup this season, thus burning one of the two years on his ELC and getting him to a second contract that much quicker. Because that went so well for Kyle Baun Baun Kyle Baun Baun, Drew LeBlaahhhhh, and all the other jokers the Hawks have punted into a game from the college ranks at the end of a season.
I’ll admit to having been a touch worried about Corey Crawford lately. It was starting to look a bit last year. In both seasons, for the first half of the campaign Crow was asked to perform miracles and paranormal phenomenons to keep the wolves from the door. Last year, under the weight of all that he faded at the end, and was only good in the playoffs which wasn’t good enough. We don’t know yet if this year will see the same fade, but of late he just hasn’t been as good as he was earlier in the year. He’d strung four great starts together, but then there was Detroit–where he admittedly didn’t have any help either. And it’s kind of what we’ve seen from Feb. 1 on.
Today was definitely vintage Crow, which gave his teammates the platform to capitalize on the opportunities they did create. And there’s your difference. The Hawks finished theirs because of their greater top-end firepower. Kane, Panarin, and Hossa on the scoresheet. The Wild didn’t. And this is almost certainly how it will go in May when these two teams see each other again.
Let’s clean it up:
vs 
Game Time: 11:30AM CDT
TV/Radio: NBC, TVA-S, WGN-AM 720
Makes No Sense At All: Hockey Wilderness
Late season, weekend matinee games suck out loud regardless of the two teams involved. The thought process behind having them is clear, with both college and pro football shuttered for their respective seasons, and baseball yet to move north from Arizona and Florida, there is a void that can be filled by the Winter Tenants for viewership when there’s really only Law & Order: SVU reruns on elsewhere. But the vast majority of hockey games are played at night, and professional hockey players, like all athletes, enjoy their ya-ha time after a game and generally keep later hours. There is always at least a 24 hour break going into them so it’s not totally cutting into physical recuperation the way Thursday Night Football does, but circadian rhythms are still fucked with, and now past the deadline there are many teams who are just playing out the string. Couple that with the overall quality of the league due to a flat salary cap, and it’s left an absolute dogshit product on the ice on par with Thursday Night Football by any absolute or relative measure. And on top of that Daylight Savings just kicked in, so now two teams who at least on paper who are still jockeying for the top spot in the Central and the West, are effectively facing off at 10:30AM local time, all for the sake of courting viewers that the NHL is never going to grab. Nice work everyone.
I suppose it’s fitting that in the first day of the post-Cutler era the Hawks showed about as much verve as he was falsely accused of showing on some gamedays (#CuttyForever). I’m not going to put any more focus onto this wrap than the Hawks did in this game tonight, so here’s a musical representation of just how interested the Hawks were in Joe Louis Arena tonight:
vs. 
RECORDS: Hawks 42-19-5 Wings 25-29-11
PUCK DROP: 6:30pm Central
TV: CSN, NHLN for those not around here
THE UNMENTIONABLES: Winging It In Motown
ADJUSTED TEAM CORSI %: Hawks – 51.2 (9th) Wings – 47.4 (25th)
ADJUSTED TEAM xGF%: Hawks – 49.2 (17th) Wings – 47.3 (27th)
POWER PLAY %: Hawks – 19.3 (15th) Wings – 12.6 (Dead Ass Last)
PENALTY KILL %: Hawks – 77.2 (27th) Wings – 81.3 (13th)
The last game at the Joe. There probably won’t be any tear shed by any Hawks fan. I suppose there’s some feeling of lost that this is basically the last “old” building in the league, and it’s going to go the way of all the others. Soon, the Wings will move into yet another faceless, corporate, sterile building to go with their faceless, sterile team. But for Hawks fans, the amount of fucksticks and shitheels that used to grace the surface at Joe Louis Arena will mean sentimentality will certainly be at a minimum.
It’s gonna die. All things do, but we’ve waited for this one for a long time now. It should have died a while ago. It should have died in 2013, but Columbus spit up all over themselves. It was so close. And then Bruce Boudreau had to go and give it credence by then spitting up all over himself in a Game 7 at home, the first time he’d done it with the Ducks but the fourth time overall after departing DC. It shouldn’t have had to come to that.
And then they fucked off to the Eastern Conference, after Quenneville woke up just in time in 2013 to save us from the ultimate embarrassment. Had they stayed in the West beyond the lockout year, this streak would have died ages ago. Oh sure, they stretched the Lightning to seven games by some miracle once, and have gotten clocked twice more. They’ve never been a threat. And now that the East has finally usurped the West as the power conference, even though they play in the far worse half of it, they’re going to miss out. It’s finally over.
Well that’s a funny looking strike.
These are the games that really annoy fans like you and us, and not because the Hawks got goalie’d by the Ducks backup. That happens. It’s hockey. This is why it should have been Andy Warhol’s favorite sport, because any jamoke in the gear can have his night. Bernier’s actually been really good the past few appearances, so whatever.
No, what’s annoying is you’ll see a bunch of utterances and belches from players and coaches about how they didn’t get traffic, or didn’t get the greasy goal, or their shot selection is off, because no one can ever admit the guy in the other crease was just better than everyone else. There was nothing wrong about what the Hawks did tonight. They had traffic. They had chances. Another night, they go in. This was not another night. Move on.
Anyway, guess we’d better clean it up.
vs.
RECORDS: Ducks 34-22-10 Hawks 42-18-5
PUCK DROP: 7:30 pm Central
TV: CSN
GOT A RIDE AND A REASON TO IGNORE YOU: Anaheim Calling, Also Jen Neale of Puck Daddy tweets about the Ducks a lot @MsJenNeale_PD but she’s a gross girl who eats her own boogers and possibly worms so don’t talk to her
ADJUSTED TEAM CORSI %: Ducks – 50.2 (18th) Hawks – 51.2 (9th)
ADJUSTED TEAM xGF%: Ducks – 52.2 (7th) Hawks – 49.1 (18th)
POWER PLAY %: Ducks – 19.0 (16th) Hawks – 19.4 (15th)
PENALTY KILL %: Ducks – 84.8 (6th) Hawks – 76.9 (27th)
It came a little later than usual, thanks to injuries, but the Hawks are going to have their usual “New Toy Night” tonight after the trade deadline, as Johnny Oduya will bring that life-affirming beard back out onto the UC ice tonight, opposite his muse of yore (if two seasons ago can be considered “yore.” I’m not too clear on what the qualifications on “yore” are) Niklas Hjalmarsson who will also return from tonight.
If you’ve followed this site and/or read the program we used to do back when I wasn’t completely dead inside, you know exactly how I feel about the Anaheim Ducks. While the conjecture of recent years has been to move/fold the Coyotes or Panthers or Hurricanes, I would offer up Anaheim as simply the worst hockey market imaginable and not only would I fold the Ducks but I would then implode the Honda Center, then light the remains on fire, then light the ashes on fire, and then essentially neuralize every hockey fan everywhere so we could forget they ever existed. This is one of the dumber fanbases in one of the more terrible places in the country, despite the “happiness” contained just down the street from the Ponda Center, and quite frankly their one Stanley Cup should be erased from the record. A Cup that essentially convinced far too many hockey fans, and basically everyone in the O.C., that the Ducks won the Cup because they fought a lot and turned Brian Burke into a goddamn folk hero which we’re still fucking plagued with. Luckily, one result of that was the Leafs spinning their tires for a good few more years when they bought into that bullshit, so silver linings are always there if you look hard enough. Still, really all Burke did for that champion Ducks team was have the ingenious idea of acquiring two of the greatest d-men of all time in Neidermayer and Pronger. How brilliant.
And why yes, I was in the building in 2007 when Teemu Selanne scored a hat trick against the Hawks, which in no way will be the central point of my note when you find me hanging from a ceiling beam down the road sometime. Also, while we’re on the subject, if a player had the same production curve at the same age as Selanne in baseball, wouldn’t we be all chanting, “H-G-H!” at him? Just a question. But I guess when you’re white and good with the media we don’t do that type of thing, huh?
