Faxes from Uncle Dale

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  • Game #58: Hawks 8, Flames 4 – Gotta Put the Hard Times on Poor Choices, Gotta Put the Good Ones on Luck

    You may have been surprised when you woke up and saw the Hawks score from last night (because I’m fairly confident you weren’t staying up late to see it–only losers like myself, Sam, Matt, and about four other cretins would actually spend a Saturday night that way). And you probably thought, wow, maybe some shaky defense but that’s a dominant offensive performance. The thing is, though, it wasn’t. The score doesn’t really reflect the game itself, but please understand I’m not complaining. I’m just scratching my head, and have been for over 12 hours now. I suppose that after getting shut out on a bazillion shots by Vancouver, a correction was due and boy did it happen. But it didn’t inspire the confidence that you would think an 8-goal performance would. Let’s break it down:

    Box Score

    Natural Stat Trick

    –The first period was all Jonathan Toews, and honestly I’m here for it. He scored 30 seconds into the game, on the first shot on goal, which should tell you how the night went for David Rittich. Not long after that, Toews made smart plays behind the net to hold onto the puck on the power play, and fired a perfect pass to Dominik Kubalik for the second goal. The captain was even busting out the Patrick Kane spin-o-rama move. And that was all fine and good. The bizarro nature of the game was already happening early on, though, with the Hawks ending the period up in shots (12-8) and possession (52 CF% at evens), and yet tied in goals and it felt downright shaky at times. Also strange (well, it’s kind of normal now but it SHOULD be strange) is their special teams–in the first period they were dominant on the penalty kill, and thank christ for that. However just moments later when the Flames pulled a Hawks and took a too many men penalty, the Hawks couldn’t even get out of their own zone, much less get INTO the offensive zone to do anything. It was, as I kept calling it on Twitter, confounding.

    –And then the second period happened and I’m still confused. The Hawks were not good, not by any stretch. Calgary lapped them in shots (14-7 in favor of the Flames), and the Hawks managed just a 38 CF%, but they scored 4 goals in the period. Two of those were from Alex Nylander so what the fuck is that about? The first one from Brandon Saad was off a gorgeous no-look pass from Patrick Kane, so it was lucky in that the Hawks finally got control of the puck for a few seconds, and since Kane and Saad are both good, they took advantage. That’s sort of how the rest could be explained too, I guess. The few moments when the Hawks could hang onto the puck, they scored. There ya go, people, there’s some quality analysis for you. But in all seriousness, Nylander’s first goal was off a steal, perfectly executed in the middle of the ice, Alex DeBrincat‘s (yay for this guy finally!) was thanks to Dach’s work behind the net and a quick passing sequence from Dach to Strome to DeBrincat, and Nylander’s other one…whatever. They just exploded with a handful of really good plays, while otherwise they were chasing and running around like rabid raccoons and getting skulled in possession.

    –So all that offensive production is great, but they also conceded a few, right? Unfortunately 50% of the goals given up can be laid squarely on Adam Boqvist, who did not have a good night at all. On both Sam Bennett s and Elias Lindholm‘s first goals, Boqvist just didn’t pick up his man and left Lehner totally exposed. The offense made up for the shitty defense so it was fine, and as we’ve said, Boqvist is going to have mistakes, but it still wasn’t a confidence builder.

    –And then, to top it all off, the Hawks still sucked in the third and yet piled on more goals. The weirdness just didn’t stop. In fact, when Lindholm scored his second goal, on the power play about five minutes into the third, everyone was palpably nervous that the Hawks were going to blow it. I think the team themselves expected to blow it, given the fact they got outplayed in every way except the one that counts. The Flames outshot the Hawks 20-9 in the third. Please think about that–it’s more than double the amount of shots the Hawks had, and mind you, that’s following the second where they were equally terrible. The difference of course was Robin Lehner, who, up until the third didn’t actually look that great but he turned it on when he had to. As mentioned, his defense wasn’t doing him a lot of favors, but he was giving up a lot of rebounds and his positioning wasn’t too solid through two. He figured it out for the third, though, and definitely bailed the Hawks, until Kane’s empty netter put the game away.

    –The Flames really should be kicking themselves in the ass for this one, because not only did they totally outshoot the Hawks on a night when our goalie wasn’t actually lights-out the whole time, the Flames also had three power plays in the third period and still managed to lose. Also Matthew Tkachuk is awful and made about 50 bad turnovers, so that was entertaining. Rittich got pulled in the second and rightfully so, but Cam Talbot wasn’t any good either (a .692 SV%, lmao).

    So it was all very strange, but it wasn’t boring. And if the Air Raid Offense is the best we can muster because our defense sucks, so be it. (Let it also be known that Erik Gustafsson still sucks and Boqvist is not the only defenseman who wasn’t at the top of his game.) Onto Winnipeg tonight, where it’s once again a “must-win” if you’re still deluding yourself that this team has a chance at the playoffs. Onward and upward!

  • Game #58 – Hawks at Flames Preview – Still Going At It

    Game #58 – Hawks at Flames Preview – Still Going At It

    @

    Game Time: 9:00PM CST
    TV/Radio: NBC Sports Chicago, CITY, CBC, SportsNet, SN360, WGN-AM 720
    Which One Of My Garbage Sons Are You?: Flames Nation, Matchsticks & Gasoline

    So coming into this Western Canadian swing of five games, the Hawks were probably going to need three regulation wins to keep themselves reasonably fighting for a wild card spot in the west. To this point they have gotten exactly zero points in the first three games, so tonight in Calgary and tomorrow back in Winnipeg are absolute must wins. Generally those go about as well for the Hawks as hoping an unattended dog doesn’t eat a burger off the kitchen counter, but they’re going to play them anyway.

    (more…)

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

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

    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.

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

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

    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.

  • Game #58 – Hawks vs. Flames: I Make A Lot Of Graphs

    Game #58 – Hawks vs. Flames: I Make A Lot Of Graphs

  • Game #58 – Hawks vs. Flames: Lineups & How They Were Built

    Game #58 – Hawks vs. Flames: Lineups & How They Were Built

    Hawks

    Flames

  • Long Journey To The Middle

    Long Journey To The Middle

    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.

     

  • We’re Locked Into This

    We’re Locked Into This

    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.

  • Desipio Podcast: Pointless Exercise

    Desipio Podcast: Pointless Exercise

    In case you didn’t know or were wondering why I don’t do a Cubs podcast along with the Hawks one and occasional White Sox one, well I do my dudes! It’s just with Desipio. This week…well, like all weeks I just yell a lot. Way more than Live From The Five Hole. Well I get pissed goddammit!

    Desipio Podcast: Pointless Exercise

  • What’s So Scary About Jay Bouwmeester

    What’s So Scary About Jay Bouwmeester

    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.