Corey Crawford – Page 18 – Faxes from Uncle Dale

Everything Else

The Secrecy To Nowhere Leads To Me, Q, Kid Rock, Why Hockey Is The Circus Clown Of Sports

By Sam Fels January 19, 2018 2593 0

Took a few days off myself during the bye and let the proletariat handle it. So clearly there’s some stuff to get through since if you give the Hawks enough time without any games they probably will trip over their own dicks.

-I can’t add too much to what Pullega and Rose have put up over the past couple days about Corey Crawford. It’s once again proof that trying to shroud yourself in secrecy just isn’t going to work.

Some people want to claim that the Hawks and really most NHL teams’ sprint to the stronghold of information blackouts springs from the NFL’s. NFL coaches are a poisonous combination of paranoid to the point of tin foil chapeaus, while also convinced of their own genius that their systems and gameplans should be studied at Wharton if not The Louvre for generations (though a fun game might be getting NFL coaches to define The Louvre, if not spell it). This is what happens when you give guys a full week of nothing to do but convince themselves of threats as they work 19-hour days and can’t remember the names of their daughters.

I don’t think hockey’s comes from that. It’s part that, sure, but hockey coaches and execs have always been too dismissive/stupid/mealy-mouthed to actually share information. The fear has always been that if you announce a player has an ankle problem, every player on your next opponent is basically going to do everything up to and including chair-shots on said ankle. Hockey being hockey, this isn’t totally far-fetched.

But with the Hawks, they should have learned long ago that if you have a period of silence, anything and everything is eventually going to fill up that void with all sorts of noise and you’re going to end up speaking about it anyway. And that’s where the Hawks find themselves.

I don’t know what they hoped to gain by plugging their fingers in their ears and shouting the chorus to “Caravan” as a team policy. This was always going to happen. Maybe they feared exposure of once again not handling a head injury correctly. Here’s an idea, and I know this is totally out there but maybe next time just handle the head injury correctly?

-This Crawford stuff has buried another nugget from Hawks fans’ favorite radio host Dan Bernstein on 670 The Score. While discussing the Crow weirdness he also let it be known that behind closed doors Joel Quenneville is still seething about the trade of Niklas Hjalmarsson. I couldn’t help but joke in my head that when the discussion on the afternoon show turned to whether or not Hawks fans watched other teams that maybe they should ask if the coach does as well.

By any measure, Hjalmarsson has been bad on a really bad Coyotes team this year. And if you were paying attention you saw a precipitous decline in the second half of last year. While his shot-blocking certainly got the most slobber treatment from Eddie O and apparently Q himself (and this is something that really needs to stop because you shouldn’t aim to be blocking shots as a go-to), that was far from Hammer’s most important attribute. While he was a stay-at-home d-man, he had greater mobility than most who fit that role. Which meant much like Keith and Oduya and even Seabrook back in the day, he could step up at his line and squeeze the space for opponents while not having to fear being beat to the outside. In addition, there may not have been a better Hawk d-man at making that 5-10 foot pass under duress, often blind, from the corner or below the goal line to the front of the net to a waiting Hawks center to release all the pressure and get the Hawks out of the zone.

Well, Hammer lost the step that allowed him to step up at his line. He lost the half-step to make that and other breakout passes as often as he could. And that’s not going to get better.

But it certainly explains the Connor Murphy scratchings at the slightest misstep #5 makes. It would hardly be the first time that Q has tried to either make a point to his GM, or simply stick it to him. Brad Richards starting behind Andrew Shaw on the center depth chart to start a season comes to mind, as does Steve Montador starting a season on the wing or Antoine Vermette playing a wing after arrival. There are others. Murphy is being held to an at-times unfair scale simply because his coach cries on a framed picture of a certain Swede before going to bed at night. Even with that, he’s been the Hawks best d-man by some distance this season.

This is where you wish the Hawks though they could be as transparently operated as both baseball teams in town are at the moment. Because if Stan truly envisioned this as a “transitional” season, and his quotes suggest he very well might have, he’d finally have a cudgel over his coach. If this is about getting the Schmaltzes and DeBrincats and Forslings of the world grounded, as well as getting Murphy into the Hawks’ “Martz-ian” system, Stan would have evidence to take to his bosses/fans about how his coach is getting in the way. And it would keep Q in line or maybe Stan would finally get to hire his own coach that he actually has a relationship with.

Instead, we get more of the same push and pull between coach and GM, and at this point it’s tiresome for all.

-I don’t know there’s much more I can add to the hysterical-if-it-wasn’t-sad choice of Kid Rock to perform at the All-Star game. The best case scenario for the NHL is that they’re just wildly ignorant, which isn’t encouraging. The simplistic explanation is that someone simply saw a google photo of him in a Red Wings jersey at a game and thought that was enough. Does he still do that now that they suck? Or is he more in the CM Punk fashion where he’s only around if it helps his brand?

Once again hockey has quivered in fear of a portion of the fanbase it would actually probably rather do without, and that’s the old angry white guy. And yes, if you listen to Kid Rock you’re old now. Sorry. You also suck, and I would gladly trade my life to bring Warren Zevon back to his only long enough so he could impale Kid on a flaming spear for stealing his song.

It’s that fanbase that keeps hockey from banning fighting which it would really like to, or enforcing the rules even harder to open up the game, or heavily suspending players for hits to the head/dirty play. But no, the NHL is terrified that the angry white dude who measures his own dick by how “tough” he perceives the sport he watches to be we’ll up and leave if they ever did any of this. You and I both know he won’t, because he has nowhere else to go (unless they did all this and Vince McMahon was convinced he could start an XHL and oh god this is going to happen isn’t it?), but the NHL has always operated out of fear and ignorance. Which is why they won’t backtrack on this either, although they’ll continue to celebrate Will O’Ree and Hockey Is For Everyone and You Can Play right along with it. Good stuff there.

Which is why it will always be a joke to most everyone else.

Everything Else

There Ain’t No V in Concussion, My Frent

By John Pullega January 18, 2018 2935 0

With most vacations, the vacation itself is a thousand times more stressful and frustrating than whatever it was you were trying to get away from. This bye week is no different.

As Rose covered yesterday, the Hawks announced that Corey Crawford had vertigo-like symptoms. Then, later on yesterday, Scotty Bowman went on (BIG VOICE GUY) BOB MCCOWN’S PRIME TIME SPORTS hullabaloo and said, with nary a quiver in his voice, that Crawford was really suffering from post-concussion symptoms (2:02:30 in the clip). Later that day, Lazerus reported that Scotty was “guessing” and not sharing insider information.

This, of course, is Grade A fucking NARRATIVE horseshit (on the organ-I-zaton, not Lazerus).

The Blackhawks have a long and infamous history with deflecting and mismanaging concussions.

Recall that legit 17-seconds legend and meatball superhero Dave Bolland faced schoolyard giggles, and pointing and laughing at how long it took him to recover from his concussion back in 2011, all the while dealing with depression, that common ghoul that tends to walk hand in hand with brain injuries.

Recall that one of the reasons Jeremy Morin got shipped out the first time was because he took too long for everyone’s liking coming back from a concussion in 2012. And before he got shipped out, he fought everything in sight to show Q the MORE that the Hawks’s brass always complained wasn’t there. If there’s a better way to proactively protect a player with a history of brain injuries than having him get punched in the face over and over to prove that he’s willing and able to flex nuts, I’d like to hear it.

Recall that in 2014, after Toews got splattered on the boards by Dennis Seidenberg—subsequently grabbing his head and skating with the grace of a drunk with puke in his shoes—neither Quenneville nor the Hawks’s training staff had the foresight to take him off the ice immediately, instead opting to let him finish off a power play. This came after 2012, when Toews played several games with a concussion before getting shut down.

Recall that Steve Montador’s family still has a lawsuit pending against the league that alleges, among other things, that Montador received four concussions over three months with the Blackhawks.

The vagueness and silence always evolves in the same way, from “upper body injury” to “dealing with some soreness” to “we’ll see.” Then, when it becomes more apparent that someone’s going to be out for an extended time, upper body turns into dizziness or, in Crow’s case, vertigo. That way, when the diagnosis the brain trust refused to admit all along becomes the diagnosis they’re forced to admit, they can throw up their hands and say, “Whoa, we just thought it was something less serious. Honest!” And when you’re named in a lawsuit that claims that your team put Montador in a position to have not just one, but FOUR concussions in just three months, contributing to his CTE and death, feigning ignorance is really all you have left.

And King Dickhead Gary Bettman—who gives mid 90s Hunter Hearst Helmsley a run for his weaselly heel money—plays a role in how teams handle concussions. Let’s not forget that the NHL is still embroiled in a lawsuit that alleges that the league failed to ensure the safety of players’ brains, letting them play through concussions and other head injuries with full knowledge of what that could lead to and without telling them.

As the face of ownership, Bettman ought to have to answer for the defense calling players participating in the lawsuit “mere puppets” on a “cash grab” (which, probably not coincidentally, echoes a common defense we heard surrounding Doughty and Garbage Dick in the past).

He should be able to offer at least some sort of explanation for why the NHL still refuses to acknowledge the link between CTE and head trauma.

If you want to go to John Galtian levels of selfishness, Bettman should have to answer for why the owners he represents are so willing to mishandle their assets to the league’s detriment, letting star players on popular teams that line the league’s coffers suffer long-term injuries, vicariously damaging the league’s bottom line in the process.

Instead, we get radio silence, and status quo reigns.

But back here, given the Blackhawks’s experience with concussions, at what point do Quenneville and Bowman say enough? It may not be their job to diagnose brain injuries, but it IS their job to, in the most heartless terms, protect their assets. Is this middling season of what-ifs and maybes really worth the long-term health of the best goaltender the Hawks have had since Belfour? Apparently, because they brought him back off a concussion awfully fast, yet again.

Don’t ever let anyone tell you that any athlete in Chicago sports history ever got Dangerfielded more often than Crow, from fans and franchise alike. He doesn’t deserve any of this, as both a player and a person.

So here we sit, having to wonder what the fuck is going on with the Hawks’s best player amid innuendo from the team and silence from the league. And because we can only guess at what happened, that’s what I’m going to do.

Since Evgeni “My Face Looks How My Name Sounds” Malkin railroaded Crawford in November, Crawford’s been dealing with a concussion. Because the front office and coaching staff are either too stupid to know or too callous to care, they sent Crawford back out too early in an attempt to salvage points they desperately needed for the deep playoff run they envisioned to wash the taste of two quick exits out of their mouths.

When Crawford’s performances betrayed his health against Dallas and New Jersey in December, the Hawks took advantage, using them as cover to justify taking him out for undisclosed reasons. The undisclosed reason, of course, was a concussion that Crawford should not have been playing through.

With vocal skepticism mounting, the organ-I-zation dripped rumors about vertigo, which is close enough to a concussion to feign ignorance, be believable, and take some of the liability off the team’s latest botch. Then, when people expressed outrage at the possibility that the Hawks knowingly trotted Crawford out too soon, Stan Bowman called his father to take the bullet and indirectly admit that Crawford indeed did have a concussion (or post-concussion symptoms), because he knew it would bounce off the venerable and untouchable Scotty much more easily than it would Stan, given his office’s egregiously bad history with concussions.

Finally, Scotty’s walk back was the little injection of controlled confusion the organ-I-zation needed to have everyone following the drama throw up their hands and say “Oh, who knows?!” Lather, rinse, repeat.

The excuses for Crawford’s absence smell an awful lot like organ-I-zational horseshit. But when the guys running the team and the league have shown time and again that they can be gigantic asses about handling head injuries, should we expect anything else?

Everything Else

So Full of Artless Jealousy is Guilt, it Spills Itself in Fearing to be Spilt

By Rose Rankin January 17, 2018 3449 0

As the last few weeks have limped by with a Crawford-less Blackhawks team, the questions and murmurs about what the hell is really going on with him have grown in volume and intensity. But now we’ve gotten word from nebulous sources via a Sun-Times piece by Mark Lazerus that Crawford has “vertigo-like symptoms” and may be out the rest of the season.

Cue this:

OK, hysteria aside, what now?

Fake News? We’ve made it no secret here that the NHL’s convention of not telling anyone shit about what’s happening with players pisses us off to no end. The league as a whole practices this nonsense, and the Hawks in particular are offenders in this regard. And when I say “what’s happening with players” that extends beyond injuries, which of course are always categorized in the non-helpful, binary world of “upper-body” or “lower-body,” as if there weren’t myriad variations among the parts of those halves. I also mean personnel decisions (this is where the Hawks are most problematic). Whether it’s something like moving Top Cat to his off side, marooning Keith with Cody Franson for a quarter of a season, throwing Kempny in the Sarlaac pit, what have you (and these are just some recent examples), the Hawks’ decisions about who plays when and where are given the air of secret priestly knowledge by the club, which cannot be shared with the illiterate peasants. And this Crawford situation has been shadier than most injury or personnel non-announcements. Was he rushed back from a lower-body injury earlier in the season? Their “upper-body” designation when he went back on IR would say no, but I’ll tell you honestly I wasn’t really convinced at the time. Taking them at their word, one would think concussion, but then with no timetable for his return and zero information from the team, speculation grew that it was something more sinister, which wasn’t helped by some cryptic quotes from Toews last weekend about how “He’ll do what he can to get himself better….” Is it really a concussion? Probably. It’s probably some brain-related issue just by virtue of him being a goalie who gets hit in the head with discs of hard rubber flying at enormous rates of speed. But admittedly, “vertigo-like” symptoms is a diagnosis just specific enough to make fans think, oh, OK, it’s a head issue, yet vague enough that it could be something really serious, like say, keeping him in net for a while when he already had a concussion. With this club’s history of obfuscation, I’ve got no reason to believe this is actually vertigo and not a more serious concussion issue, short of an official announcement with some actual medical information.
The Trade Deadline. Given the Hawks, uhhh, issues this season, there has rightly been speculation about whether they should trade for a top-tier player who could get them into the playoffs, or if they’re in some rebuilding-on-the-fly mode (again, that whole non-communication thing). Crawford’s Vezina-quality season up to the holidays made a stronger case for landing an Erik Karlsson or Oliver Ekman-Larsson (or someone else, there have to be a couple other d-men out there, these are just the two most tossed-around names). The problem with any of these moves is of course the harsh reality of the salary cap, which would likely mean needing to move Anisimov and his banged-up ass, but they managed to swap Panik for a younger, faster Duclair, which gave me some optimism that Bowman can still sell magic beans to the other dipshit GMs in this league. However, now you have to ask if putting Crawford on LTIR and the resulting freed-up cap space would allow them to get a comparable goalie and/or any other top-tier guys. The former seems unlikely (who’s out there that could play at the level Crawford was?), and with another trade the risk of having to sweeten any deal by including some of the young guys goes up. Is it worth it to trade Schmaltz, Kampf, Hinostroza, or, god forbid, Top Cat? If the Hawks were going to be able to capitalize on what was likely Crawford’s last excellent season (now “likely” seems to be “definitely”), before Toews declines more precipitously, Keith gets slower, and Kane eventually joins them, then a case could be made that trading away our future would be worth it for the present glory. The same goes for a situation where they land a dark horse Vezina candidate to replace Crawford plus another defenseman. But that looks to be a pipe dream now. As much as I dislike rebuilding-on-the-fly with seemingly little direction, I’d rather see the Hawks pause for a moment and figure out what the fuck they’re going to do with these guys, unless there is some perfect maneuver out there that only Stan knows about. I may be an illiterate peasant, but I’ve got my doubts about that.
The Jeff Glass Experience. So in the short term, meaning like next week when they come off the bye, Q needs to get over whatever allergic reaction he’s having to Anton Forsberg, or conversely get over whatever infatuation he has with Jeff Glass, and let Forsberg play consistently. Forsberg hasn’t been lights-out, don’t get me wrong, but we can’t have Glass flopping all over the crease against the Lightning or the Leafs next week (or the Islanders, for that matter). Whether playoff hopes are dashed or not with the Crawford news, there is still no reason to shatter Forsberg’s confidence any further by playing a quadruple-A level goalie instead of him (also where the fuck is J-F Berube? Does he have vertigo too?). I’m quite confident that Glass will get way more playing time than he should, and an already desperate and confusing goaltender situation will only get worse. But it’s just a few weeks until pitchers and catchers, right?

Everything Else

Game #44 – Jets vs. Hawks: Spotlight – Hellebuyck, Carry This Baggage Out

By Sam Fels January 12, 2018 2712 0

You may feel like you’ve heard Connor Hellebuyck’s name forever now. Some of that is the bloated coverage that Canadian teams get, combined with the vision that Hellebuyck was going to be the final piece to get the Jets over after years of falling short. It didn’t work out that way until this season, with Hellebuyck top 10 in wins, save-percentage, and goals-against. There might be a feeling of, “IT’S ABOUT TIME” with Hellebuyck. But when you look at it, he’s actually come to the fore much quicker than most goalies do.

One of the more perplexing aspects of watching the NHL and how teams are run these days is how it’s pretty clear that no team really understands goalies at the point. There doesn’t seem to be a common theory or process on developing them like there are in other positions. Of the current top goalies by save-percentage, five came from Europe (Vasilevskiy, Bobrovsky, Lundqvist, Rinne, and Andersen). three came up through college teams (Hellebuyck, Quick, and Gibson) and two from juniors (Crawford and Mike Smith). And generally, that’s how it goes. Most from Europe, some from here but no tried and true factory.

We can kind of conclude that coming through college is probably the least likely way to produce a goalie. Starting in 2010, here are the goalies who finished top ten in the nation in save-percentage in an NCAA season and played an NHL game: Ben Scrivens, Carter Hutton, Cam Talbot, Hellebuyck, Aaron Dell. That’s it. Real murderers row, huh?

What the top goalies do have in common is that it took a while before they got where they are now. As you know, Corey Crawford spent five years in the AHL before becoming a starter in the NHL, and it took another two seasons in the NHL before he got a ticket to the luxury suite with the free food and sadly all the Rise Against shows he could go to. Andrei Vasilevskiy had two years in the KHL and then a three-year apprenticeship with Tampa. Bobrovsky had four seasons in the KHL and two seasons in the NHL with the Flyers before he won his first Vezina in Columbus in 2013. Even Henrik Lundqvist had three years as a pro in Sweden. Rinne had two years in Finland and three years in the AHL. Gibson did three years in the AHL.

The list expands beyond that. Tuukka Rask had two seasons in the AHL and three seasons either backing up or splitting starts with Tim Thomas. Cary Price needed three to five seasons in Montreal before he became CAREY PRICE, as you may remember there were a good deal of Habs fans that wanted him shipped out instead of Jaroslav Halak (never let it be said that Habs fans know any more than your average lamppost about hockey, even if they speak French). Price is just about as pedigreed as you can get coming into the league as well. Only Jonathan Quick took less than the five years as a pro before becoming a bonafide starter, and we can have the how-good-actually-is-Quick debate all day.

It may just be that goalies take longer to become ready for the rigors of starting in the NHL than anywhere else. After all, they’re the only players out there for 60 minutes, and they’re the only ones whose mistakes or brilliance decide the outcomes of games alone. Teams that draft goalies, whatever round, probably should know they’re going to have to spend four to five years with their minor league team or backing up an incumbent before they can turn things over to them. You might be seeing that with Malcolm Subban in Vegas now.

Goalies are probably the closest to baseball pitching prospects. Other than the truly special, you better be patient and hope nothing goes wrong.

Game #44 Preview

Everything Else

Game #41 – Oilers vs. Hawks: Spotlight – An Overworked Cam And Magic Talbot

By Sam Fels January 7, 2018 1805 0

We make a lot of fun of Peter Chiarelli here… so let’s do it some more! One aspect of building a team these days that seems to get overlooked is a backup goalie. Teams really need to have one that they can trust with 20-25 starts, or get them out of a stretch if a starter were to get hurt, because the days of goalies being able to carry 75 starts and then four rounds of playoff wins are behind us. Quite simply, teams need to find a backup goalie who can “take the ball.”

The Oilers have ignored this, and now may have something of a multi-year problem on their hands. Unless the acquisition of Al “Some Guy In Bensenville Beat Him Like A Rented Goalie At Rat” Montoya works out gangbusters.

Cam Talbot started 73 games last year. And he was pretty good, with a .927 at evens and a .919 overall. Certainly better than the Oilers have gotten in net for a long time. But those 73 starts clearly took a toll, as Talbot’s SV% has dropped to .905 this year and .922 at evens, with his shorthanded mark falling off a cliff that fell off another cliff, from .874 last year to .800 this year.

It’s not a new phenomena, and some goalies have been able to handle that kind of workload for a few years. Talbot’s 73 starts were the 14th highest total in the past 10 years. The most were Martin Brodeur’s matching 77 starts in ’07-’08 and then ’09-’10. In the middle of those, Brodeur got hurt and missed 40 games, and he never approached a .920 SV% again. Then again, Brodeur was already in his mid-30s at this point, where Talbot is only 30 now.

Evgeni Nabokov started 71 games in ’09-’10 for the Sharks at 34 and was never the same. Ryan Miller made 76 appearances at 24 and was able to have excellent seasons after, but never made more than 69 appearances again after that. Mikka Kiprusoff made more than 70 appearances for the first time at age 29, much like Talbot, and again at 30, and then was terrible for two seasons before regaining form at 33, all while making 70+ appearances. Marty Turco made his first 70+ appearance season at 28, and then was awful the next season before rebounding for a couple more. Cam Ward made his only 70+ appearance season in 2011, and he’s never been the same.

Jonas Hiller, much like Talbot, took a while to wrestle a full-time starting gig of his own. He got it in ’11-’12 with the Ducks, made 73 starts at 29. He never started more than 50 games again and had only one more season of an above-average save-percentage after that. On the other side, Braden Holtby made 73 appearances three seasons ago, and then won a Vezina the next season. Jonathan Quick made 70+ appearances in 2015 at 29, missed all of last year, and is now once again have a plus-season.

So it goes both ways, but clearly handing someone around 30 that many starts when they haven’t consistently done it comes with great risk. And it’s just not something Cup-winners have done of late. Matt Murray played 49 games last year, and the year before that was a late-season call-up. Corey Crawford has never started more than 60 games. Jonathan Quick played 49 and 69 games in the Kings’ two Cup years. Tim Thomas played 57 games. Antti Niemi didn’t even become the starter until March. Marc-Andre Fleury made 57 starts.

The Oilers almost certainly don’t have to worry about this this year, as getting into the playoffs is going to be a minor miracle. But this is clearly something they’re going to need to figure out for next year.

Game #41 Preview

Everything Else

Atop The Sugar Pile – 2018 Inaugural Edition

By Matt McClure January 2, 2018 2281 0

With the Hawks shuffling back and forth from east to west coast and back again, it’s time to reassess how things are trending heading into the new year.

Everything Else

Game #36 – Hawks vs. Canucks Preview/Car Wash: West Is That Way

By Sam Fels December 28, 2017 2052 0

vs.

RECORDS: Hawks 17-13-5 Canucks 15-17-5

PUCK DROP: 9pm

TV: NBCSN Chicago

CANADA’S WARMEST CITY: Nucks Misconduct

It’s not quite the new year yet. It’s not even halfway through the season yet. And yet, it feels like the Hawks have to turn a new leaf right now, that this is a pivot point to their season. They had a four-day break, they went into it with two losses that weren’t good, and now are staring up at a lot more than they’re used to. And it feels like if they don’t pick it up right here on this Western Canada swing, they’re going to be staring at the lights the rest of the season.

Let’s start with the Hawks, because they are not bereft of news. The big one, and the one with the potential to be the iceberg to this liner, is that Corey Crawford is back on IR. The Hawks aren’t saying what it is, they aren’t saying when it happened, and they aren’t saying how long he’ll be out. All of it convinces me it’s the same thing that put him on the shelf the first time and they don’t want to admit it. It felt rushed then, and it feels rushed now. And the Hawks had better hope it’s restricted to just a couple weeks. Any longer, and barring any miracles from Anton Forsberg, and the Hawks could feel some carp swimming around their knees in a hurry.

Remember, the Hawks give up the most attempts per game and are in the bottom-ten in shots against. So even if Forsberg is good, which he’s mostly been this season, the Hawks still might not get the goaltending their hit-and-miss offense. They’ve needed Crow to be THAT good to even get here. So either Forsberg does that, or the Hawks get goals from somewhere else other than Kane’s line, or…. well, I’m out of nautical/sinking references.

The other roster change was the call-up of David Kampf. The Hawks have a need at center, one they won’t address by moving Schmaltz there given what that line has done. Kampf might help, he’s not the end-all, be-all. For right now I’ll just rejoice that it moves either Hartman or Hinostroza back to a wing, and with Top Cat and Kampf that line would at least be really mobile. I don’t know what it does exactly, but whatever it does it’ll do it quickly. But the lineup could honestly look like anything at the start, and even more anything by the 2nd period. These three games will likely see Q throwing just about everything into the pot and hope he gets some flavor out of it. Peanut butter and basil? Why not?!

If the team needs a jump or a confidence-builder, then you can’t ask much more than getting the Canucks right out of the blocks. While they spasmed a hot start, the Canucks have sunk to near the bottom of the Pacific, where they were supposed to be in the first place. Their talent-level is only partially responsible, and their injury list is pretty much responsible for the rest of it. The Sedins are basically just DHs right now, as they never start anywhere but the offensive zone. They make that work, but they are heavily sheltered. The rest is picked up by Brock Boeser, who is the league’s leading rookie scorer and already has one of the best shots/releases in the game. He’s kept scoring even with Bo Horvat out, and now Sven Baertschi has joined him on the trainer’s table, it’ll be a challenge.

But past that this team can’t score, with the lowest total of goals in the conference. And now that Jacob Markstrom has realized who he is, their goaltending has become outhouse-filler. He’s been awful of late, giving up 15 goals in his last five starts and some of them truly terrible. He’s been losing his net and losing the puck, and if the Hawks can’t find a few goals tonight… you can finish this sentence.

The Canucks can’t do much about protecting their goalies either. Chris Tanev is hurt as well, Alex Edler is old and his leaping elbows are even older, and Erik Gudbranson is a cave troll without the weapons or mobility. Oh, and Michael Del Zotto is here to make Gustav Forsling look like Kevin Lowe in his prime in his own end. Thar be gaps here, matey.

The Hawks need this one. The Oilers are at least snapping back into some sort of shape even if it is too late. The Flames can be anything on a given night, but that can also mean completely kicking your ass. And the Hawks very well may need all three of these.

This will be something less than fun. We’ll get through it together.

Game #36 Preview