Faxes from Uncle Dale

Category: Hockey

  • Game #54 – Bruins vs. Hawks Preview: Why Are The Women Frustrated?

    Game #54 – Bruins vs. Hawks Preview: Why Are The Women Frustrated?

    vs.

    RECORDS: Bruins 32-10-12   Hawks 25-21-7

    PUCK DROP: 7pm

    TV: NBCSN

    THEY’RE ALL AEROSMITH’S DRUMMER NOW: Stanley Cup Of Chowder

    After stealing a point last night by only playing for the third period, the Hawks will have the degree of difficulty seriously upped on them tonight to get three of four points, or even two. The Boston Bruins stroll in, also having played last night, and having won their last four to the tune of 15-4 aggregate. So yeah, this isn’t the Wild.

    We wrote this about the Bruins when the Hawks were there in December:

    And with this cushion in the Atlantic, the Bs don’t really have to fear a flattening out or market correction. 14 points even at this stage is a gargantuan lead, and unless both Halak’s and Rask’s head fall off and roll into the Charles, they’re not losing that. So they can look forward to at least the first two rounds with home ice. Their season is almost accomplished and we’re weeks away from Christmas.

    Yeah, about that.

    Thanks to the Lightning finally gaining consciousness and a serious case of, “What the fuck is going on here?”, the Bruins are only up five points on them and have played a game more. So that lead-pipe-cinch of a division crown isn’t so lead-pipe-cinch anymore. So what happened?

    Well part of it is an ungodly number of losses after 60 minutes. The Bruins have 12 overall, with only Detroit and Ottawa the only other ones even in double-digits. Flip half of those the other way, which easily could have happened because it’s a lottery, and not only are the Bruins running away with the Atlantic but the entire NHL as well. The Bruins have lost seven games in OT or a shootout in just the past two months. And even still, the Bruins have gone 12-7-6 since the last meeting with the Hawks, which is more than acceptable. It’s not their fault the Lightning have gone 29-1 or whatever.

    Overall, the story hasn’t changed that much for the Bs. They’re a decent-to-good metric team. They don’t create as many chances or attempts as the other teams in the top ten, but they bury more of them because they have Pastrnak, Marchand, Bergeron, and Krejci. And they’ve become very tight defensively this season, as they’re the best team in terms of xGA/60 and fifth best in attempts-against. Throw in remarkable special teams (top three in both) and great goaltending, and you see where they raft of OT/SO losses belie what this team actually is. The +44 goal difference, best in the league, is a much better indicator of what this team is.

    It’s easy to dismiss the Bruins as just one line, and they do have arguably the best line in hockey still. But that is somewhat unjust to David Krejci, though he basically only gets offensive-zone starts now. Charlie Coyle has been of use as well, but this team is a touch short on the wings behind Marchand and Pastrnak, and probably DeBrusk. McAvoy and Chara are pretty much mine-sweepers now, and they’ve been very good at it, with Grzelcyk and Krug doing most of the pushing and creative work against lesser competition. Carlo rounds out a pretty solid if unspectacular blue line.

    Tuke Nuk’em and Jaro Halak might be the best duo in the crease in the league, with bother over .920 and Rask in the Vezina discussion. Before the deadline, they’ll be looking for wingers, but this is a serious contender once again.

    Which makes the Hawks’ task that much harder Given their position, they can’t just write off too many games as luxury items. Especially after not getting both points last night. Whom Colliton wants to match up with Bergeron and Co. will be the main watch tonight. It’s not something he’s shown a talent for, and really the only candidate is Kubalik-Toews-Caggiula. Maybe reuniting Kampf and Carpenter somewhere would be another, but don’t count on it. As good as the Bruins are, stopping their top line from putting up three or four goals is still the main task. And staying out of the box.

    The Hawks sprung a surprise on the Bruins at The Garden, but once the Bruins actually started paying attention the world collapsed around the Hawks’ ears. Toews saved them in OT. Maybe on the road and the second of a back-to-back will keep the Bruins fro totally focusing. That’s the main hope. The Hawks season will hinge on the following road trip. But it would be nice to have points here in the bag before it.

     

  • Game #54 – Bruins vs. Hawks Spotlight: Zdeno Chara And Hockey’s Missing Sliding Scale

    Game #54 – Bruins vs. Hawks Spotlight: Zdeno Chara And Hockey’s Missing Sliding Scale

    In our Hedley Lamarr segment today, we proposed that come the summer, whenever the season ends for the Bs (after beating the Leafs in the 1st round of course) it’ll be up to the organization to tell Zdeno Chara it’s time to go. Hell, if the Hawks can do it to Brent Seabrook, right? Because the numbers aren’t kind to Chara so far this season. And we’ll come back around to this.

    The argument went that Chara was exposed in the playoffs last year, as tends to happen to 41-year-olds who are playing NHL hockey for seven and eight months. The Corsi and xG%s were the lowest of his career in the postseason last year, and the past two postseasons has seen him be on the ice for more attempts, chances, and expected goals against than ever before. He’s played every game this year, so it’s hard to see how the Bruins are going to keep him fresh for another run through April and May.

    That seemingly has carried over into this year, where again, Chara’s metrics are the worst of his career. And he appears to be dragging down Charlie McAvoy as well, who is supposed to be the Bs main puck-mover. McAvoy hasn’t scored this year, and his possession-numbers are also the worst of his career. And both of their metrics are off while spending most of their time behind Pastrnak, Marchand, and Bergeron. That’s not good.

    But dig a little deeper, and you get to where the hockey-analytic movement has a gap. McAvoy and Chara are starting the least amount of shifts in the offensive zone than they ever have. Chara is starting just 34.5% of his shifts in the offensive zone, and nowhere else in his career has that ever been below 42%. And usually in his time in Boston, he’s been around 50% there. If you go by starts, which includes more than just faceoffs, it’s just 33%. That’s never been below 41% in his career. He and McAvoy are something of defensive stoppers now.

    So how do you judge sinking possession numbers when they’re starting their shifts in different areas now? That they have to go the full length of the rink to generate attempts and chances instead of just halfway or less? That their opponents are starting much closer to the Bruins net than they did before with Chara on the ice? There’s isn’t a slide for that yet. There’s isn’t a ballpark adjustment. There’s isn’t a wRC+.

    And at the end of the day, Chara is on the ice for 1.9 GA/60 at even strength, which is the lowest mark since 2013-2014. They still decide who wins by who scores more, or who scores less. The Bruins get amazing goaltending from either Rask or Halak, so that’s part of it. Chara is on the ice for more attempts against than he has been in years, but his xGA is the lowest it’s been in four seasons. So even with those dungeon starts, he and McAvoy have limited chances better than they have before. Maybe it’s not time to call time on Chara yet.

    You can see where if the Bruins win the Cup, Chara can ride off into the sunset, as the only Bs captain to raise the Cup twice since Orr. He’s already the only one to do it once since Orr anyway. The Bs aren’t really that capped out, with $19M in space now and only Krug, Grzelcyk, and Debrusk as probably-should-keeps, and Krug is debatable at that level. Halak is FA as well, but you can find a #2 netminder lots of places.

    Chara and the Bs will know the answer by how he plays in the playoffs. If a team scars him like the Blues did last June, then we’ll know it’s time to go. And if no one does and he wants to play some more, maybe it’s not that clear of a refusal.

  • Game #54 – Bruins vs. Hawks: Hedley Lamarr’s Mugs, Pugs, And Thugs

    Game #54 – Bruins vs. Hawks: Hedley Lamarr’s Mugs, Pugs, And Thugs

    Brad Marchand – The only one that matters. Or doesn’t matter when the games get important, as we found out last June. And June ’13. Marchand would want you to believe he’s the ultimate pest. What he is is a coward. Pests know what they are, and just annoy, poke, and cause penalties. They don’t duck every plausible challenger and then essentially jump noted goon Nikolaj Ehlers like Marchand did last week. And they certainly don’t pose after it, as Marchand desperately did to try and be considered a toughie. Eventually everyone is going to learn what the Blues did last year, which is if you just leave Marchand alone and don’t give him oxygen, he goes away. He’s a Bergeron and Pastrnak passenger, and the Bruins will learn that again this spring at some point. They always do. Usually about the time Marchand goes for a line change when he’s supposed to be defending.

    Zdeno Chara – A first-ballot Hall of Famer, but it’s going to be up to the Bruins in the summer to tell him no more. Was horribly exposed in the playoffs last year, and the Bs brought him back because they can’t seem to say no. In an East that should see the Bs have to get past  some combination of Tampa, Toronto, Carolina, Washington, Pittsburgh, Chara’s plodding ways and wingspan that less and less can make up for it are going to be a detriment again.

  • Game #54 – Bruins vs. Hawks: I Make A Lot Of Graphs

    Game #54 – Bruins vs. Hawks: I Make A Lot Of Graphs

  • Game #54 – Bruins vs. Hawks: Lineups & How They Were Built

    Game #54 – Bruins vs. Hawks: Lineups & How They Were Built

    Bruins

    \

    Notes: Tuke Nuke ‘Em started last night against Vancouver, so it’ll be Halak tonight. He had a rough January as he put up an .886 in the month…Pasta is on another heater, with nine points in his last six games…Krejci also has seven points in his last six, and Debrusk is coming along with him…

    Notes: We missed our guess last night, so it’ll be Lehner tonight for sure. Had a rough start his last time out so he should be raring to go…Koekkoek got awfully Koekkoek-y last night so maybe we’ll see Seeler sooner on the road trip than we thought…the Saad-Dach-Kane line had a bad night last night but hopefully they stick with it longer…so did Keith and Boqvist, despite the latter scoring. Those have been piling up for them, and while we’d like to see Boqvist with Murphy at some point there just isn’t a way to lineup the rest of the defense to work along with it…

  • Game #53 – Sometimes It Snows in April. Sometimes I Feel So Bad – Hawks 2, Wild 2 (Wild Win Anime-Drawing Contest)

    Game #53 – Sometimes It Snows in April. Sometimes I Feel So Bad – Hawks 2, Wild 2 (Wild Win Anime-Drawing Contest)

    Box Score

    Natural Stat Trick

    Since Prince’s untimely death, there hasn’t been a redeeming quality to speak of regarding Minnesota. And for the first 50 minutes tonight, all was as it has ever been since then. But a flutter puck and bad-angle goal later, the Hawks were on the brink of being one point back for the second wild card spot. They managed a point from it all, and they were fortunate to get even that. Let’s clean it up.

    – Bruce Boudreau has made a career out of winning games that his opponents can’t be bothered to play during the doldrums of the season. Tonight’s first 50 minutes was a master class in that style. The thing is, the Hawks don’t have the luxury of falling prey to a team that’s playing like it’s the last week in April with a spot on the line. But there they were, dragging ass and just hoping that Crawford would pull them out of the sling, which he almost did. It’s hard to find an excuse for it.

    Through the first two periods in fact, just two Blackhawks had CF%s that weren’t in the negatives: Gustafsson and Murphy. The Wild kept the Hawks on the perimeter as is their wont, and the Hawks 10,000-pass setups were even more useless than they usually were.

    – If the Hawks are going to rat fuck their way into the playoffs—and I still think they will—it’s going to take the kind of small miracles we saw from Boqvist and Maatta. Adam Boqvist was having a putrid game until his goal. He and Keith got clobbered in possession, but more worrying was how tentative Boqvist looked on the power play again. After the Koivu trip on Kane, Boqvist looked like he was going to charge through the neutral zone ass ablaze, only to just stop along the far boards in the neutral zone and nearly turn it over. When the Hawks finally got the puck in, Boqvist did end up turning it over anyway.

    Boqvist occasionally flashes a charge only to curl back, and you have to imagine it’s by design. But we’ve seen what happens when he’s tentative, and it’s not pretty. When he just says “fuck it,” like he did on his wrist-shot goal, good things tend to happen. His wrister was more of a floater than a snapper, but he’s got a real weapon with it regardless.

    – Olli Maatta was also having a terrible, terrible game prior to his goal, which is one of the more absurd goals we’ve seen this year. He was on the far boards and managed to pot the shot far side. Sometimes it doesn’t need to make sense.

    – Alex DeBrincat needs a fucking hug. He had two or three quality chances snuffed or overshot, and you can see it’s really taking a toll on him. On his near breakaway off the Donato turnover in the first, Top Cat had a couple of steps on Donato. But as the play developed, it looked like DeBrincat was skating through sand. Donato managed to catch up and bother DeBrincat while he shot, ruining the chance. Him coming around in these last two months is going to be crucial to any playoff hopes the Hawks will have.

    – Kirby Dach makes me forget about Bowan Byram sometimes. He was a beacon light in the third period, and nearly scored a highlight-reel goal after completely breaking Jonas Brodin’s ankles in the near circle. There’s such fluidity to his skating and puck handling. Plus, he’s now on a four-game scoring streak (1 G, 4 A) after going 12 games without. He’s going to be special; it’s just a question of whether it’ll be here when it all comes together and whether it will matter when it does.

    – Connor Murphy was outstanding tonight. He broke up a Foligno breakaway halfway through the first and should have had a primary assist late in the second, if not for Brandon Saad passing up a gaping net to pass to a heavily covered Patrick Kane in the crease.

    – Erik Gustafsson had a stereotypical Erik Gustafsson game. His fancy stats were nice (65+ CF%, 75+ xGF%), he tallied an assist, and then he turned the puck over in OT, leading to the loss. He hasn’t been an open sore lately, but we also had 10 days off, so that’s probably factoring into the memory of him.

    You’ll take the one point because they really didn’t deserve any. A win tomorrow could put them within one point of the second wild card spot. What a world.

    Onward.

    Beer du Jour: Michter’s Small Batch

    Line of the Night: You best believe this was a Mute Lounge Game.

  • Game #53 – Hawks vs. Wild: Gamenight Gaggle

    Game #53 – Hawks vs. Wild: Gamenight Gaggle

    Everything you need for tonight’s clash in St. Paul. 

    Preview

    Spotlight

    Hedley Lamarr’s Muggers, Buggerers, And Bushwhackers

    I Make A Lot Of Graphs

    Lineups & How They Were Built

  • Game #53 – Hawks vs. Wild Preview: At Least We’ve Got You Beat

    Game #53 – Hawks vs. Wild Preview: At Least We’ve Got You Beat

    vs.

    RECORDS: Hawks 25-21-6   Wild 23-22-6

    PUCK DROP: 7pm

    TV: NBCSN

    ONE GOOD DOSE OF THUNDER: Hockey Wilderness

    The Hawks will conclude their mini-trip out of the bye week in St. Paul tonight, before returning home for all of one game and then heading back out where they came from for another five games. That’s some brilliant scheduling if you ask me! You can feel Toews’s rage without much effort. But the Hawks won’t have a lot of time or cause to bitch, because every point is valuable and though the travel schedule might not make much sense the opponents on offer are certainly gettable. That for sure describes the Minnesota Wild these days.

    While the Hawks are certainly in the thick of the playoff race, mostly because it came back to them, they aren’t really away from anyone. The Preds and Jets are right there with them. The rest of the division is pretty much out of touch out ahead in the distance. Except for the Wild, whom the Hawks can kind of put out of their misery tonight. That sounds silly to say with 29 games left after this one, but a regulation win would put the Wild five points in arrears and that’s a massive gap. Not that it’s one the Hawks couldn’t cough up, but let’s say it’s unlikely. And the more teams you can cull from the chase the better off you are.

    It’s not hard to pinpoint where it’s gone wrong for the Wild. While Bruce Boudreau continues to conjure up his magic potion of not really being a great Coris team but an excellent expected goals team – i.e. the Wild are content to give up attempts but don’t give up good chances–that doesn’t really matter if your goalies can’t stop a sloth in the sand. The Wild give up the least amount of xGA/60 and scoring chances per game in the league, but their SV% is bottom-10 with both Alex Stalock and Devan Dubnyk especially facing the wrong way and identifying cloud shapes most of the time. That’ll torpedo most teams, and so it has done with the Wild.

    Which might just be enough to torpedo Boudreau out of a job come April.  It would be a second-straight playoff-less season, and the team probably needs an overhaul, and there’s a new GM on board these days in Bill Guerin and his weird face. It might not be totally fair to Gabby, but dem’s da breaks. The Wild certainly score enough to be better than this, at 3.06 per game, and their defensive structure has kept the task to a minimum for the goalies. But they haven’t been up to it, and if you were to swap goalies with the Hawks the Wild most definitely would be in the playoff picture if not up among the top three in the Central. Also when your goalies suck it’s hard to have anything near a decent penalty kill, and the Wild very much don’t, second-worst in the league. They’re not good enough to outscore teams by two or three at evens.

    Which is saying something for Gabby, because the Wild feel like they’re short on frontline talent once again. Zach Parise these days is a tweener between a first and second line player, and the advanced age of Eric Staal might make him that as well. Mats Zuccarello has always been that, as has Jason Zucker (and he’s missed a fair amount of time this year as well). Kevin Fiala might actually be proving to be something more than sarcophagus filling with 28 points, but he’s not providing what Mikhail Granlund used to (but certainly isn’t now). That Rask-for-Nino trade was such a disaster that Rask is a healthy scratch tonight. There isn’t a lot here, and you can’t say Boudreau isn’t maximizing it.

    The blue line is still very solid and finally healthy, as you can do a hell of a lot worse on a top-four than Suter, Spurgeon, Brodin, and Dumba. That’s how the Wild keep things pretty limited in their end, even if it is all getting undone by the men in the mask.

    No changes for the Hawks other than it looks like Lehner will get the start with Crow getting the slightly tougher assignment of Patrice And The Pips tomorrow night. New boy Nick Seeler, who is neither loose nor tight, won’t make his debut against his former team tonight and let’s just hope he’s ballast for the rest of the season. You don’t want this rockhead taking regular minutes, believe us.

    The key tonight for the Hawks is getting to the middle of the offensive zone. The Wild are more than happy to let you putter around the perimeter and try and thread a needle through to the net from there. Suter and Brodin especially play economical defensive games where they let things come to them and simply prod you back outside the dots or behind the net. So players like Kane and Dach and Strome and Top Cat, the ones who can conjure something out of nowhere will have to, and players like Toews, Kubalik, and Saad who can get to the middle through power will need to do some of that as well. If you can get the shots, the Wild goalies will give you goals.

    It’s a big ask to get four of four with the Bruins waiting tomorrow, though they’ll also be on the second of a back-to-back, on the road, the Hawks have been great with those all season, and they’ve caught the Bruins napping before this season. Still, these two points seem pretty vital before that road trip that is going to determine the rest of the season. They’re right there, so take them.

  • Game #53 – Hawks vs. Wild Spotlight: After The Gold Rush

    Game #53 – Hawks vs. Wild Spotlight: After The Gold Rush

    You may not want to hear that it was over seven years ago that Ryan Suter and Zach Parise shook the hockey world, or at least tried to, by signing matching 13-year contracts, worth $98M. What’s even funnier is that they still have five more years to run, though one wonders if they’ll actually finish them out. Parise especially could be an LTIR ghost one day, given that something falls off of him getting the paper every morning. Sometimes that thing is his coach.

    As these things tend to do though, what once seemed outlandish cap hits have come back to be more than reasonable. It could be argued that the first pairing minutes Suter still supplies at a $7.5M hit is something of a bargain. Sure, Suter isn’t going to score at what first pairing d-men do now, but he’s going to be in the tier right below that. And his defensive metrics are still pretty glittering. His style of game should last for as long as he wants it to, because of its efficiency. Suter only has the 11th-highest cap hit among blue liners now, and you’d certainly rather pay him that Byguflien’s bloated ass (when he’s actually playing) or Brent Burns or even OEL and you could have a lengthy debate about Subban and Trouba.

    Parise is a harder case. Health was always going to be a problem for a winger that plays a power forward game with bantamweight size. Parise has missed 98 games in the eight seasons he’s spent in St. Paul, which is hard to hold against him. He’s only scored more than 30 goals once as a member of the Wild, but has produced 25 or more three times. Is $7.5M for a second-line winger justifiable? Yeah, probably now, if on the high end. Though at 35 now, it’s unclear how long he can keep putting up 25 goals. To be fair to him, he’s on pace for that this year.

    The question for the Wild isn’t what they got from Parise and Suter, because they got pretty much what they paid for. It’s what having them on the roster has cost them or kept them from getting. The Wild were never able to pair Parise with a #1 center. Some of that is a failing of their system, whether it was being too infatuated with Mikko Koivu, Mikail Granlund’s inability to be anything, or Eric Staal showing up on the scene too late.

    It’s not Parise’s fault that the Wild haven’t been able to draft and develop much more than Jason Zucker or under-appreciating Nino Niederreiter.

    Suter on the other hand has been part of good blue lines. Most teams would swap out their top pairing for Suter and Jared Spurgeon, and Matt Dumba has been an excellent second-pairing guy for a few years when healthy. Maybe they needed one more, but it’s not been nearly the most glaring hole on the Wild for this stretch.

    And it’s neither Parise’s or Suter’s fault that Devan Dubnyk’s short spasm of brilliance either ran into the Hawks at the peak of their powers or came apart in the playoffs. And even when he was good, they didn’t have enough firepower.

    It seems the Wild are definitely headed backwards now. They’re last in the division, and there isn’t really anything on the way to juice the team. After flogging Neiderreiter and Granlund last year, there isn’t much for the Wild to throw overboard now for futures. Especially as they were basically traded for nothing, depending on what you value Kevin Fiala as. And if you spend anytime thinking about Kevin Fiala, it’s probably time to have a hard look at your life.

    Which makes it a question what the legacies of Suter and Parise will be. Certainly they probably did enough themselves, but the idea was that they would bring the Wild to prominence. They’ve won two games beyond the first round so far. It’s probably important to remember that at the time of the signing, the Wild were still struggling to come to terms with the post-Lemaire era. They hadn’t made the playoffs in four seasons and hadn’t won a series in eight. They needed something to get back on the map again, and to give their fans some reason to watch them over the Gophers, which most of them would rather be doing anyway.

    It was probably worth taking the shot. But if you don’t do anything other than that, you end up with this.

  • Game #53 – Hawks vs. Wild: Hedley Lamarr’s Muggers, Buggerers, And Bushwhackers

    Game #53 – Hawks vs. Wild: Hedley Lamarr’s Muggers, Buggerers, And Bushwhackers

    Bruce Boudreau – He’s been around longer than we have, which says something as even Quenneville had a break in there, and he actually won something. It would appear Gabby has run out of magic, as even his structure-less, got get ’em scouts ways can’t conjure anything with this squad. But that won’t keep people from bleating on about what a coach he is, given his….(checks notes) one conference final appearance as a head coach. Maybe it’s not fair to judge him solely on his playoff record, but when you’ve had so many kicks at the can, what else is there? But he’s always willing to give a quote, he looks like a muppet, so everyone loves him.

    Ryan Hartman – Seems a long time ago that the Hawks tried to sell this guy as part of the future. And now he’s on his third team’s fourth line trying to impress with his half-assed pest ways. Feels more and more that the Hawks drafted him simply because he was from here. Here’s a fun game, Adam Erne, Jacob de la Rose, and J.T. Compher were all taken right behind Hartman in the 2nd round that year. How many goals against the Hawks could we have saved if the Hawks had just taken Compher?

    Nick Seeler – Doesn’t play much, but earned himself permanent pressbox duty with a litany of dumbass penalties and…wait, what happened?