Everything Else

Night Songs – There Isn’t A Record Of Anything Until There Is

By Sam Fels 2040 0

It’s probably harder to compare to other eras, but it feels like across all sports we’ve seen the breaking down of a lot of “truths” the past 15 years or so. “Truths” in that teams that would never win or couldn’t get past a certain point have done so. I suppose it starts with the Red Sox in 2004. Then the White Sox…wait, that never happened. Sorry. But then the Colts, who it was thought would never break through (PUKE). Phillies. Saints. Hawks. LeBron. Giants. Bruins. Kings. Seahawks, though they didn’t really have the tradition. Royals. Cleveland in any way. The small matter of a plucky baseball team on the Northside. Eagles.

Not that that list is completely correct. The Royals had won somewhat close to that before, but you get it. And now the Capitals are going to play for the Cup. It’s not a total, out-in-the-wilderness story, because if you really rack your memory files you may recall that the Caps were in the Final in ’98. You don’t remember anything about that series, because it lasted just two games and then afterwards the Caps became the first team to surrender, such was their outsized deficit in every category to Scum. I think Peter Bondra was on that team? I know it didn’t matter, and the Caps basically were stand-ins and and extras for the rest of the league until Alex Ovechkin showed up. The only other memory I, and probably every other hockey fan my age, have of the Caps before Ovie was Dale Hunter poleaxing Pierre Turgeon ten seconds after Turgeon scored to essentially send the Caps out of the playoffs in 1993.

But since Ovie debuted, and ever since he basically became the game’s greatest scorer–and that’s what he is, given the environment and style of the game today–the questions have followed of when he will win a Cup. The skepticism started before he’d ever played a game, given his nationality and given the leanings of hockey media. They only got louder when it took Sidney Crosby, with whom he has been and will be forever linked through no doing of his own other than playing in the same conference, only took three seasons to get to a Final and four to win it. Being that he wasn’t born on these shores, and being that most of hockey media has never had the patience to mask its xenophobia with much more than a Kleenex,  the questions and commentary quickly gained a sharp edge.

And Ovechkin and the Caps kept running into the same wall. Well, two walls. Either it was the second round or it was the Rangers. The latter doesn’t make any sense, because the Rangers have never been remarkable in any way other than their goalie. The former did, because it was usually Crosby waiting. But Crosby had Malkin. And Crosby had a goalie playing out of his mind, be it Fleury or Murray. Ovie had Backstrom, but something always went wrong, and it was never Ovie. Oh sure, he took the blame. And he never shied from it, because that’s what you do when you’re the face of a team for over a decade. You could tell it hurt him. You could tell he cared, perhaps too much, which frustrated the amassed writers as it robbed them of a favorite cudgel that they used to beat players from the other side of the Atlantic. How could our beloved trophy mean as much to “dem ferners?!” But it was obvious it did to Ovie. So they had to find other things. So did his coaches and team. He didn’t backcheck. He only cared about scoring. He didn’t work hard enough. Bruce Boudreau, Dale Hunter and Adam Oates tried to cover their own incompetence by throwing Ovechkin under the bus, and given they were “good hockey men” it must be true, right? Perhaps Trotz’s greatest move upon arriving was just letting Ovechkin be Ovechkin and not prepare him as a human shield when things went wrong. Strange how Trotz and Ovie are now where those three coaches have never and will never be, mostly because Hunter really likes yelling at children.

After the last two years, when the Caps were probably the best team in the league and absolutely no one thought they would beat the Penguins and then promptly didn’t, you’d be forgiven for thinking it would never happen. They had their best bullets, they missed, and you know the lesson when you come at the king.

You could write all those things about Barry Trotz as well, who is also here for the first time. He’d never been this far either, and was discarded from a team that thought he couldn’t ever get them there. While it hasn’t always been the most pleasing on the eye, Trotz has coached the hell out of this team. They’re not as good as the Lightning. They might not be as good as the Penguins, whatever the standings might have said. Maybe they are. And they’ve roundly beaten both at times. Sure, maybe they got bounces in Game 7, but they earned their spot there by beating the shit out of the Bolts in Games 1, 2, and 6. They also did so in Game 4, and didn’t get the luck. The Caps have trapped at times. They’ve attacked weak points furiously at others. They’ve done everything, and Trotz has gotten this team to buy into whatever he’s asked that night. This is his masterpiece.

And here they are. They’ve broken through, with one more step to go. Should they get four more wins, there won’t be too many teams that will remain “cursed,” as bullshit as that term is. Ill-starred maybe. The Canucks for sure, who have lost two Game 7s in the Final without ever winning. I guess the Leafs, their fans do talk about it on occasion. The Blues, though there’s nothing epic so much has comedic about their history. But the Sharks haven’t been around long enough. Neither have the Panthers. Or the Jackets. No one cares about the Senators enough, and same thing. The Flyers would like to tell you it’s them, but it isn’t really.

The list is dwindling. And that’s the thing about sports. As Barry Petcheskey pointed out on Deadspin today, “the story is always being written.” Whatever narrative is current among your team, it’s not forever. Even if it takes 108 years, in some cases. The Caps were that team. Now they may not be. Some times hockey just bends that way. Sometimes sports bends that way. 1000 monkeys and 1000 typewriters and such.

Go get it, Alex. You’ve more than earned it.

Everything Else

You Get What Anyone Gets: Saying Goodbye To The Winnipeg Jets

By Sam Fels 1835 0

The Canadian drought for a Cup goes longer. But the drought for Canadian cities with an airport had died in the first round anyway.

The Winnipeg Jets saved us from yet another flurry of stories and videos about how “NASHVILLE HAS SUCH A UNIQUE” atmosphere from Canadian writers who forgot the place existed from last spring. so we thank them for that. They also punched a variety of holes in the Pekka Rinne myth, and then watched the puck squirt through them for all the goals they would need. So we thank them for that, as well.

But in the end, they couldn’t save us from the new golden children, and we scorn them for that. And now that flurry from last spring will be replaced by a bunch of oh-so-clever headlines from pale-ass Toronto writers like, “Did You Know You Can Have Fun In Vegas?” or “Hey There’s Gambling Here!” or “Steve Simmons Gets His Ass Kicked In By Stripper.” Thank you very fucking much, Jets. We just can’t wait.

In all honesty, this has been a long time coming for the Jets, who should have been at this stage at least two years ago had they not kept trying to foist Ondrej Pavelec on the world in some elaborate prank/gaslighting to convince us all that we don’t exist. What’s that? Ondrej Pavelec? No, he’s totally real. I’m serious. He was their starter for years! Really? Yes, he probably works in a garage somewhere now smoking unfiltered cigarettes before a woman in white pants yells at him for five minutes. Oh, apparently he plays for the Rangers. Same thing.

Anyway, Pavelec or Michael “Hanging In There” Hutchinson always combined to torpedo this uber-talented Jets team year after year. They got some help from Paul Maurice of course, whose philosophy before this season was “MEAT!” The Jets routinely were the dumbest team in the league, and compounding that was they had one of the worst penalty-kills to go along with all those penalties they took as Pavelec looked like being attacked by bees in net while Dustin Byfuglien looked on with an expression on his face that said, “Can you get sick from combining Butterfingers and popcorn?”

Ah yes, Byguflien. Big Buff. DAT BIG BUCK GUY. Once again became the darling of hockey analysts everywhere because he banged in a few goals, pried multiple guys off a scrum who weren’t really doing anything anyway like he was a bouncer at a Harvard bar, and had a few guys try and check him and rebound off the creamy-nougey of his middle. You have to hand it to Buff, he’s excellent at PR because all of those things distract from the three to four times per game he would get caught ahead of the puck before it had even exited the Jets’ zone and he’d have to scramble back. Ha, Buff “scrambling.” There’s a term for you. Right up there with, “Roenick thoughts.”

Anyway, Maurice got away from that this year, as you can’t really ask any coach to take less than four fucking seasons to figure out that he has one of the most talented forward groups in recent vintage and should probably get them to play at evens and the power play as often as possible. It’s a lesson in patience, or dumb luck, as Maurice probably should have been fired two years ago but got to hang around long enough to try this experiment called, “sticking to hockey?” The pinnacle of coaching these days is basically not getting in the way when you have four lines full of skill and Jack Roslovic just waiting around.

And yet it wasn’t quite enough. Maybe it would have been if Patrik Laine’s 1000-yard stare and misplaced beard from the Amish grandmother in Kingpin had been anything more than a passenger for most of the playoffs. Hey Patrik, you’re allowed to do more than wait around for a one-timer. What is it about guys named Patrick? Laine could spend the summer under whatever bridge in Finland he lives going over film of various Knights knocking him off the puck, except there isn’t enough time before training camp.

The Jets might think they’ll be here every year, but the bills are coming due. Trouba, Connor, and Laine are all do extensions in the next year, and Trouba has already tried to escape once. And maybe Blake Wheeler wants to ply his trade somewhere that doesn’t require travel by tauntaun. Paul Stastny says he wants to say and that his family is all for it, proving that either Paul Stastny is drugging his family or literally anywhere is better than St. Louis even when you’re from there.

So this might have been the Jets chance. A first-year team in their way before a chance to play for the Cup. You can’t ask for more…and then Byfuglien skated right by it. Meanwhile, the “loudest building in the league” sounded like a Joni Mitchell soundcheck for the last 40 minutes. You guys want to chip in and maybe inspire? No? Ok cool, go whatever it is you do in Winnipeg for the summer then, which I assume is a whole lot of log-rolling and trying to hit each other with rocks. Oh, and reading Hawks fanfic about trading Toews back there, because that’s something our most unwashed dream about. And in the coming seasons we can get more video packages about the “rivalry” between the Jets and Oilers from the past, where all the old Jets talk about how much they hated the Oilers and Gretzky and Messier respond to questions about it with, “I’m sorry, who?”

It could have been more. It probably should have been. But hey, you’re Canadian. Only so much can be expected. As always, the real cities will take home the real baubles now.

Everything Else

Night Songs – You’re Only Going To Get More Caps

By Sam Fels 1646 0

It was quite the viewing to have the Capitals on one screen last night and the Cleveland Cavaliers on another last night. Both played with a unique desperation and frenzy against teams that not only didn’t match it, they didn’t seem very interested in doing so either. As Ryan Callahan said, “They played like they had to win, we played like we had another chance.” You could put that quote on any Celtic and it would work as well.

The Caps were simply everywhere last night, in the kind of effort I’m not sure you can manage for more than a game or two. But the thing is, they don’t. They have to do it for one more…and then maybe like five or six more against Vegas. But they probably won’t come up against such a sloppy opponent again.

As furied as the Caps were skating in both directions, the Lighting were simply awful. They couldn’t complete two consecutive passes. As the Caps sank deeper and deeper, the Lightning kept trying to make plays at the offensive blue line, and the three times they ran into each other there is a pretty good symbol of how all that went. Victor Hedman went back into witness protection, they didn’t score on their power plays, and that seems to be the impetus for this Lightning team.

Still, I don’t know where this leads us for a Game 7. The Lightning are still the better team, and yet they’ve infrequently been intent on proving that this series. They were clubbed in the first two games, and then “did enough” in Games 3 and 5 while having Vasilevskiy bail them out in Game 4. At some point you’d think they wouldn’t be so flummoxed by Trotz’s defensive ways, and yet here we are.

Still, this is where the Bolts have been before. They beat the Rangers in a Game 7 at this stage in ’15. They lost to the Penguins in ’16 in the same situation. As strange as it sounds, the Bolts really have been part of the league’s aristocracy for a while now. Meanwhile, it feels like the Caps just set themselves up for a greater heartbreak. Unless you really believe these Caps, THE CAPS, are going to close out three straight series on the road. Just doesn’t seem to be their way. What does is finally breaking through to get just close enough to realize they’re just not quite good enough this time around, when their past two teams most certainly were (yes, those Caps teams would have gone on to win the whole thing if it wasn’t for Pittsburgh, I’m fairly sure).

There’s another thing I wanted to get to, a bugaboo of mine for years. These were the postgame comments of Brooks Orpik. The playing surface across the league have been something we’ve been calling attention to for a while. The one here in the United Center was routinely voted among the worst in the league, which didn’t make a lot of sense for a team that was on the vanguard of playing fast and skilled.

Obviously, there are a lot of challenges, given that almost all of these buildings are holding multiple events, not just sharing with a basketball team. It’s May, and especially on the East Coast humidity is going to be a problem. All understandable.

But it affects the quality of the game. The Lightning weren’t good, but they weren’t helped by a puck bouncing all over the place. Trotz and the Caps are right to use that and sag back, because it’s near impossible to pass your way through that when the ice is descending into slurpee. For a league that should be striving to be as pleasing to the eye as possible with passing and skating everywhere instead of guys just battling in the neutral zone like it’s No Man’s Land, this should be something they talk about.

But it isn’t, because whatever fixes are needed to keep all playing surfaces as clean as possible would cost money. So I’ll just shout at the rain some more.

Everything Else

What We Talk About When We Talk About Vegas

By Sam Fels 2563 0

I know. I’m the piss on everyone’s chips. This might start out like that, but I promise not all of this article is going to be that. Swear to God. Not even sure I totally believe it, but it’s the truth. Anyway, with Vegas winning the Western Conference yesterday, all the debate and arguments over what it means about the state of the league, the state of mind of some fans, and a bunch of other stuff that happens when something this unique takes place has basically exploded. Let’s sift through it.

There certainly are a lot of annoying aspects to the Knights, and I feel like I covered most of them here. But that post probably needs updating, and it also skipped a very large, perhaps most-annoying aspect that’s come along with them. This idea that the Knights’ run has somehow “healed” Vegas after the atrocity right before the season. That’s patently ridiculous, cheap, and manipulative, and a few other adjectives as well. This is always a safe-haven  sportswriters run for in times like this, either for easy heart-string pulling or they simply don’t have the capacity to deal with real-life disasters/horror in any real way.

I certainly don’t want to discount that those connected to those killed that night might have found some distraction in the Knights. If they could provide those people with any amount of time of levity, happiness, joy, then that is indeed a wonderful thing. But it’s not “healing.” Those deaths were senseless, and merely serve as a testament to our country’s demented priorities and broken political system.

You know what might “heal?” Meaningful gun control and mental health care expansion in the name of those who passed to assure something like that never happens again. That would mean those deaths weren’t empty or meaningless. A hockey team winning a few playoff rounds do not. And yet you constantly see this listed right next to Fleury’s .947 SV% as a reason the Knights are going to the Final. That’s abhorrent and wrong. It’s also too convenient. So does that mean the Panthers are moral failures because they didn’t make the playoffs after Parkland?  Or various other teams in various other locations of our sickeningly frequent other shootings and mass murder?

It’s a story, but it’s separate to the Knights success and should be treated as such. Yes, I have frequently written about the sports mattering and the connection to those we’ve lost. I wrote a whole book about it, in fact. But after the celebrations and the memories, those people are still gone, and the grieving and processing and healing–if such a thing is even possible–takes place within and away from arenas and stadiums. Secondly, while I wrote about the Cubs World Series win and what it meant to me because of my family, the Cubs were something we actively shared together for my entire life. The Knights didn’t exist before this, so there isn’t that connection for anyone there. Again, if any of those who survived or those connected to those who didn’t could find momentary distraction from the Knights, that’s great. But it’s not the overarching cure-all that every sportswriter is desperate to be, and all those who are desperate for it to be so we won’t talk about some real changes.

That doesn’t mean sports can’t affect things in the rest of the world. Didier Drogba stopped a civil war, for christ’s sake! Colin Kaepernick was able to keep a critically important issue in the public eye without even playing, while also exposing just how deep and cancerous racism is in our country. You may say you knew all along, but I guarantee there are plenty who didn’t realize how deep the problem went and had their eyes opened. They just don’t yell as loud as though who wanted Kap to just go away. It can be done, but it’s extraordinary circumstances like that.

Ok, now that that’s out of the way, let’s talk about the hockey aspect.

Admittedly, this is one of perspective. If the Hawks hadn’t won three Cups recently, I’d probably be livid right now. You get the frustration from some fanbases, but it’s misplaced. Just because your team has been moronically run for decades doesn’t mean everyone else’s has to be. Try and explain “mandatory suffering” to a Yankees fan. It doesn’t have to be that way. Sure, it seems unfair, but it’s not. Something is only “unfair” if you were promised a certain system or process. Sports is not that. You are not guaranteed a win, otherwise what would be the point? It just so happens hockey has a ton of teams that have been run by the stupid, drunk, bewildered or some combination thereof for far longer than any reasonable league should. And because of its lack of attention and/or its stone-resistance to any sort of change, it remains that way. Why are ex-players still getting GM jobs when every other sport has moved on to executive types for that job? Does anyone care Theo Epstein never played the game? The GM of the Warriors never played in the NBA, and that’s the best team of all-time (come at me).

That discussion also goes to age. A 25-year-old Patriots fan would know no suffering. A 40-year-old one would and could regale you with stories of sitting on a cold and uncomfortable bench in Foxboro watching Steve Grogan thrash about (I’ve been through this story). So that doesn’t hold up.

What I think it points at is just how stupid and backward this league is, at least to some people. And yet some of these decisions that landed players in Vegas aren’t as indefensible as it seems. Sure, Dale Tallon should be barred from ever working in the league again, and has basically proven that he got lucky with a few draft picks and was just conscious enough to not fuck up two top-three picks. We’ll circle back to this. Nate Schmidt was a third-pairing player in DC. And rightly so. William Karlsson had done nothing on two teams. The Ducks had three or four young defensemen ahead of Shea Theodore. The Penguins had a better, younger, cheaper goalie than Fleury. Alex Tuch wasn’t going to change the fortunes of the Wild anytime soon. James Neal’s departure sure didn’t hurt the Preds much.

And let’s face it, George McPhee isn’t a genius either. We know he’s not an idiot, he built that first wave of Ovie-era Caps teams. But he’s not redefining anything here. Everything just came up Milhouse.

The one thing to remember is above in this post. .947. That’s all you need to know. Without Fleury, the Jets might have swept this series. They certainly win both in Vegas. .947. He was .927 during the season. Again, that’s pretty much it, along with Karlsson’s 25% shooting-percentage. Look at the top-10 starters in SV% this year. All are on playoff teams.

What I think frustrates people is it is a testament to just how watered down the league is in terms of talent. All it takes to be a playoff team is a goalie playing well and two or three guys with a shooting spike. Which makes it seem random, which makes it seem pointless.

And yet…eight of the last nine Cups have been won by three teams. Now, of those eight Cups none of those teams that won had to play the same team twice in the Final. The Pens beat the Wings, Sharks, and Preds. The Hawks the Flyers, Bruins, and Lightning. The Kings the Devils and Rangers. So maybe it is random until it isn’t. I’m not sure what to make of it.

And yet we can’t have it both ways. The salary cap can’t handicap well-built teams while we also lament that no one knows how to build a team. Yet there doesn’t feel like any GM we can safely say knows what he’s doing completely. We’ve been over Tallon, and he constructed most of a team that won three in six. We could have the Stan Bowman argument all day. No one thinks Ken Holland is anywhere near a genius anymore when he can’t spend as much of Mr. I’s money as he wants. Jim Rutherford inherited a pretty great roster and stocked farm-system, and still gave up a 1st-round pick for Ryan Reaves. Lou Lamoriello had Roman Polak on the team. How deep do you want to go?

When it’s like this the answer is almost always in the middle. Yes, there are a lot of dumb GMs but they also have a near-impossible job thanks to the hard cap. And yet even that could be changing. There’s going to be a big bump this summer, bigger than previous seasons, and that could happen a couple more times before another lockout changes the landscape again.

What we can say is that goaltender is the definitive position in the four major sports right now, because of the flattening of talent-bases across the league. People claim quarterback, but he’s only on the field half to three-quarters of the time. Aaron Rodgers is the best I’ve ever seen (come at me), and he’s been to one Super Bowl because the Packers haven’t been able to figure out anything else around him and some bad/hilarious luck. It ain’t his fault. And goaltender will remain that until teams can amass and keep a level of talent overcome that. And even the Jets, who pretty much have, couldn’t do much with Fleury in this way. .947.

It doesn’t always work like this. Jonathan Quick dragged the Kings to a Final in ’12 but the next Kings team was really fast and really good. You can’t say a team has ridden a goalie only since until Fleury now. Murray was very good the past two years, but not other worldly. Crawford was really good in ’13 and when he straightened out in ’15, but he never carried a .940+. This happens every so often.

What we can hope for is that finally, hockey people will learn. Vegas is built on smaller, faster (and even they traded for Reaves). McPhee and Gallant saw the biggest obstacle to scoring was shot-blocking, and set their team to try and score before that could get set up. Gallant deserves praise for getting his team to skate as hard back as the do forward. But we’ve seen that before, too. Bruce Boudreau has made a career of doing that in the regular season, then acts shocked when teams match that effort in the playoffs. But Dubnyk, Andersen, or whichever goof in DC when he was there couldn’t bail him out the way Fleury has this year. This isn’t new.

Still, a league that eschews “harder to play against” for faster and better could be a better product. The Knights are fucking hard to play against and they don’t need Marchand or Wilson-esque bullshit to be so. They’re just always up your ass because they’re fast and work hard. And you can’t score on their goalie right now.

It’s an anomaly. It’s a strange one. It might never happen again. But there are lessons to be learned.

Everything Else

Night Songs – Round 3 Night 7: Maybe There’s Just No Fighting It

By Sam Fels 1679 0

As I sat last night trying to figure out what I’d say about Game 3 between the Jets and Knights, it dawned on me that pretty much all of it doesn’t matter. I could sit here and talk about the ridiculous pace the Knights played that thing at last night. And I would say there’s no way that can be sustainable, but that’s kind of been their thing all season. Or I could talk about how the Jets slower d-men…which is basically all of them, kept insisting on taking more time with the puck than they were ever going to get. When the Knights are the opponents, you either gotta skate like your ass hair has been lit on fire or move the puck as soon as you get to it. It feels like the best way to play the Knights when they’re in this mood is maybe to not even pass in your own zone. Just get the puck and fire it around the boards and past their forwards and basically do what they do to you. You can also try and pick your way out, which is what the Hawks did in their prime, but that takes such a level of intricacy and precision I don’t know that any team is capable of it. Especially with the not-quite-that-fast blue line of the Jets. What I do know is that the Jets didn’t have time to contemplate Proust on every retrieval like they were attempting to take last night.

Or I thought I could write about how the Jets eventually did adjust, and slowly took over the 2nd and especially the 3rd. And maybe the Knights punched themselves out in the first half of the game, and maybe that will be a problem going forward.

And then I realized that almost none of it matters.

In a normal world, in a normal playoff game, the Jets probably score three goals in the 3rd period. Maybe six. Even when adjusted for score, the Jets had 13 scoring chances in the 3rd alone last night, which is a stupid number (according to Natural Stat Trick). But there’s Marc-Andre Fleury, and it just fails to be anything. Nothing matters, because he’s playing at Tim Thomas ’11 levels. What do you do?

Look at this shit.

There’s no logic to this. Sometimes he’s not even in good position and can just fling himself everywhere like he’s John Fucking McClane and it works. On that first highlight Scheifele should have scored twice. When he didn’t they should have just canceled the rest of the game. Maybe series.

I don’t want to claim there’s a fix, because if there is it’s on a cosmic level instead of a league level. Everything goes in for the Knights on some nights (UGH), and Fleury then does that. And then we’re forced to read a bunch of “Does Pittsburgh Regret…?” articles, even though the Penguins have/had a younger, cheaper, better goalie the past two years. You now who predicted Fleury doing this? No. One. He wouldn’t have even told you he could do this. This is Arc Of The Covenant shit.

Where this series is, the Jets should still feel pretty good. They just have to get one win in Nevada, and another effort with the last half of Game 3 probably sees them get one. I mean it normally would. But this isn’t normal.

But hey, we got another highlight of Dustin Byfuglien dragging two guys off a pile, which he assuredly isn’t doing for the attention it generates or anything, and certainly doesn’t distract cretin hockey followers from the fact that every time he was on the ice last night the Knights got an odd-man rush the other way. In just the first period, McClure texted me, “I’ve counted three times he’s been forechecking below the goal line.” When and if the Knights win this series, I assure you Byfuglien will be on the ice for the killer goal.

Which is fine, because Jacob Trouba has been even worse. And that’s the real problem for the Jets, is they don’t have a d-man who can consistently stand up to this pressure. Maurice will have to figure something out.

Everything Else

Night Songs – Conference Final Weekend Wrap: So That Happened

By Sam Fels 1616 0

One in a state of shock, one game went exactly as planned. It’s the NHL on NBC!

Capitals 2-0 Lightning

I guess this is what everyone else felt last year when watching the Preds roll over the Hawks from the outside. But I think that made more sense than this. At least Game 1 of that series was close. The Lightning haven’t even been in the same zip code as the Capitals. And I can’t believe I wrote that sentence.

I suppose if there’s one thing we can point to, it’s that the Lightning’s blue line was overhyped. But it mostly didn’t matter because their forwards were so good, and there was “God Mode” within Victor Hedman to cancel it out even further. You saw in ’15. So you know it’s there. Well, the Caps don’t seem to care, and have greatly exposed Stralman, Girardi, Coburn and even McDonagh–who’s a good defensive guy but has never been a mover and that’s getting wildly demonstrated. Meanwhile Hedman has been tentative and unnoticeable, which is just really weird. The only d-man who seems to be able to survive the Caps’ forecheck is Sergachev, mostly because he’s fearless and not having to see the best the Caps have to offer. Stralman and Girardi look like they just discovered there’s a bear in their breakfast nook.

It hasn’t helped that Cooper has coached this series with both hands around his neck instead of his usual postgame belt in the shower. His team look completely shell-shocked, and they seem to be playing right into the Caps hands by either not bypassing the forecheck as the Penguins did the past two years or having his forwards help out. Then when the Caps set up three at their own line every Bolt seems content to just charge headfirst into it and lose the puck and the whole thing starts over. And then they panic, and their defense goes charging everywhere in the offensive zone and they’re giving up an odd-man rush a minute.

If there’s one team that could surrender this momentum it’s the Caps. But man they would really have to like, shit themselves to a dysentery-like level. Because it’s one thing to disrupt and it’s another to cash in, and right now at Ovechkin and Kuzentsov and Eller and Beagle, they all can’t miss. It’s been astonishing.

Jets 1-0 Knights

This was more to form, though only one game. But in Game 1, the Knights saw what was always going to be their biggest problem. A team that can play their game, is willing to, and can do it with better talent. The thing with the Knights during the season is it’s hard to find a team in February and January that’s going to want to skate back as hard to catch them going forward. It’s easier to inspire players to bust it up the ice during the season than it is to inspire them to bust it back. Think the mid-2ooos Suns. Or why Tom Thibodeau’s teams want to murder him by Valentine’s Day.

Well, inspiration isn’t a problem in the conference final. The Jets smell it. So they can get back and negate the get-it-the-fuck-up-there ways of the Knights by getting the fuck back there. How many passes did they pick off on what Knights players thought were odd-man rushes only to find a backchecking forward closing it off? That’s how the Knights get you, and if they don’t have it they’re proper fucked.

I don’t know what to make of Byfuglien. Everyone knows I’m probably the polar opposite of his fan but he was marvelous in Game 1. Then again the Knights didn’t try and get him off his game which is so easily done and it was so fast it didn’t matter that he was rarely where he needed to be defensively and he was making so much happen at the other end. Maybe you just accept the show. Anyway, if the Jets get Game 2 tonight in any sort of similar fashion as Game 1 you can start penciling them in. I don’t know what Vegas’s Plan B could possibly be.

Everything Else

Watching The Party – FFUD’s Conference Final Preview: Knights vs. Jets or High Speed Dirt

By Sam Fels 1761 0

 vs. 

 

Now that we’ve officially buried the Predators, it’s time to look forward to the West Final. I feel like we’ve gotten to the point, or maybe I just have personally, where it’s time to stop fighting against the Knights. Because if nothing else, this series is going to be in 5th gear or however long it lasts. We didn’t quite get the Fury Road remake we wanted in the previous round, as the Preds could only win when they pumped the brakes on everything. The Knights aren’t capable, and don’t know, any other way than what got them here.

Goalies: That’s the strange thing about this series, is that no matter the speeds it attains, the vapor trails it leaves, or however many chances are created, it could still end up 2-1 for every game. That’s how well these two goalies are playing.

There’s really nothing to say about Marc-Andre Fleury at this point. He’s clearly gotten hold of some eye of newt or something. You can’t even say his defense helped him out, because he made over 30 saves in the first four games of the San Jose series. Granted, two of those were OT games but that’s still work. A .951 is a .951, much like a football in the groin is a football in the groin. He’s .965 at evens.

The one thing you can say is that Fleury hasn’t really seen a team of assassins in the first two rounds. The Kings plan of attack was hoping the Knights would pass out from boredom. The Sharks had two lines or so going, but without Thornton they were certainly limited. There are no such limits to the Jets, and you feel like Fleury is going to have to come up with a handful of 35-40 save performances just to keep the Knights in this.

It’s kind of weird that Connor Hellebuyck has a .940 at evens and he’s not even close to the other goalie in this series. Hellebuyck was marvelous in Game 7 after being pretty wonky in Game 6. He buckled under the pressure of the Predators at times when they were still trying to drag race with the Jets, and the Knights won’t shrink from that at any point. So he’s going to need more of his 36-save performance form from Game 7 than how he was early in the series.

Defense: You’d say this is the Jets’ biggest advantage, but much like the Penguins before them the Knights do the best they can to take their defense out of the equation. They don’t really care how many chances they give up, especially with Fleury playing like this, as long as they can turn the puck up the other way quickly. Still, that feels like death against this Jets team, who simply have more talented scorers and offensive players and I don’t care if William Karlsson shoots 76% this series. This defense is not keeping this Winnipeg hit squad from creating a ton of chances, and that seems like it’s going to be the end of it. McNabb, Engelland, and Theodore are going to smell distinctly of burnt wood by Game 3.

The Jets might have the same problems. With Byfuglien wandering all over the ice and not showing much interested in either being where he’s supposed to be or ignoring players who don’t matter, there’s going to be plenty of space for the Knights, too. Tyler Myers has some of the same issues and Ben Chiarot looks a lot like the Bears’ free safeties of this decade in trying to cover for him. Trouba and Morrison are going to get a lot of work in this series, and Maurice should be playing them the most instead of DAT BIG BUCK GUY. But he won’t, and he’ll pay at some point. Still, the Jets defense contributes more than the Knights’, and is a little more mobile.

Forwards: This is the fun part. The Knights top two lines have been excellent, but their bottom two weren’t as effective in the second round. Still, it’s packed with speed that’s going to have a lot of space to exploit.

The problem for the Knights is that the Jets have the same thing, except every line they have is better than the one Vegas has. Their top line is better, their second line is better, and so on. The Knights have seen this before, but not over seven games and not this big of a difference. If the Jets can go toe-to-toe with the Preds and beat them to a pulp in that style, they can do the same to the Knights. Like we said in the last round, the Jets only have to match or thereabouts the amount of chances their opponents get, because their talent says they’ll bury more of them. Same holds true here.

Prediction: Obviously, the Knights have something unquantifiable going on here. And if they maintain silly shooting-percentages along with Fleury being a an absurdist exhibition, they can win this. But the Knights need the unexplainable. The Jets don’t. They can skate all day with Vegas, and they have the better players to do it. Something strange definitely can happen here, but you don’t bank on that. Fleury himself probably assures this is a long series. I was tempted to say the Jets in five simply because of the disparity in scoring talent up and down the lineup, but beating Fleury four out of five times, without a return to his previous playoff form, is unlikely. So we’ll call it Jets in 6. 

Everything Else

You Get What Anyone Gets: Saying Goodbye To The Nashville Predators

By Sam Fels 3207 0

You can’t run from who you are.

That’s the lesson for the Predators this spring. They told themselves a lot of things. They did a lot of things above their head the past two seasons. But eventually, the truth always comes back. And the Predators go home before any baubles are handed out, other than the Presidents’ Trophy which will hang around their neck like a boulder. And these days we know that trinket gets won by basic randomness of four or five points over the regular season. But it’ll make a fine banner for the yellow-clad, riddlin’, diddlin’, country fiddlin’ mob to make yet another chant about that involves the word “suck” eight times.

Pekka Rinne came into last spring as a Playoff Fleury – Finnish Model. He miracled three rounds, before turning into pop-rocks-in-soda in the Final. Patric Hornqvist is probably still laughing about that clinching goal he scored from the urinal. That was a warning shot. The Predators did not heed it. He put on a Vezina campaign, which was espionage-worthy cover for what was to come. But deep down you knew this was always there. Has any Vezina winner ever been pulled three times in a series? One has now! Don’t worry, at this time next year Preds fans will be convinced that Rinne will have something new figured out at 36.

But it goes deeper than Rinne of course. Let me present two season stat-lines for you:

79 games, 15 goals, 39 assists, 54 points, +1.24 CF% rel, -0.21 xGF% rel

74 games, 20 goals, 32 assists, 52 points, +4.79 CF% rel, +4.19 xGF% rel

One of those lines is Ryan Johansen’s, who I’m told is part of the new crop of young centers taking over the league and is signed for the next eight years. One is Jonathan Toews’s, who I’m told is clinically dead and his bloated carcass should be served to the lion house at Lincoln Park Zoo as food. By the way, Toews is the second one, the better one. Johansen did manage eight points in this series, which is nice. Mark Scheifele managed seven goals on Nashville ice alone. In case you were curious, Preds fans, that’s what a #1 center looks like. But you aren’t curious. Most people wanna know stuff, Predators fans, but you ain’t even suspicious.

It keeps going. Peter Laviolette basically coached this in the same fashion as an air raid siren. Kevin Fiala went from scoring an OT winner to getting scratched for the fat dude from Bloodsport. Lavvy’s team couldn’t do anything when they weren’t parking a bus in the neutral zone, and now you can look forward to this team quitting on him in November and being out of a job by 2019. You can set your watch to it. Oh and I think the Preds just took another dumb, offensive zone penalty. PK Subban at even-strength showed that “slower” and “roasted” isn’t just on the sign at Jack’s across the street. Hey PK, you were supposed to replace Shea Weber, not emulate him! Kyle Turris apparently played in this series. Much like his entire career, did you know he did? No, no you did not. Turris’s favorite food is a saltine in water. Good thing he’s signed forever to be a myth when it counts.

Will it save us from the holier-than-thou attitude Preds fans and hockey media bestow upon this franchise, only discovering it existed last year? No, probably not. We get it all the time here in Chicago about how the Preds are run “the right way.”

Here’s a phrase for you: Re-signed Mike Ribeiro. Shove your own fist down your throat until you can pop your own belly button out.

This was a team that celebrated welcoming back Mike Fisher, who then went on to be just about the worst forward in the league. He can go away forever now to plan his conversion therapy camp, a lifelong dream I’m sure. Maybe while they’re at it they can figure out what it is Carrie Underwood does for a living. “Carrie Underwood” is just another phrase for “Juliana Zobrist.” Nashville: Give us your talentless, your blonde, your utterly desperate to be relevant. I’m sure Underwood pushed to have one of her songs played whenever Fisher scored. Ha, just kidding, Mike Fisher never scored a goal.

They try to tell you Nashville is the cool place to be now, though how you do that by playing Black Keys after your goals is a real wonder. Just because Jack White chose to live there over Detroit is not something you fly a flag for. “We’re Not Detroit” was the tag line of a spoof video promoting Cleveland, remember. This is still Shit-Kicker-Burgh. They had the CMA awards not long ago. Or was it the NRA convention? Can you tell the difference? I couldn’t!

So now Cellblock and The Yellow Pickup go back home from the summer, rehearsing all those chants that have the same five words. Congratulations Preds fans, your lifted chants make you a run-of-the-mill MLS atmosphere. You must be so proud. Come to think of, Mike Fisher would be a the definition of a big MLS signing, given he’s 93 years old.

The Preds are pretty much jammed into bringing the exact same team back next year, when Rinne will be a year older and mentally broken, Lavvy will be fired, and David Poile can still make a deal to ruin it all. Maybe he can bring Paul Gaustad back. The Jets aren’t going anywhere, either. The Avs, who came a lot closer to pantsing the Preds in the first round than they had any right to, will be better. Corey Crawford likely won’t be hurt. The Stars might actually listen to a coach (yeah, right). It’s not getting any easier for them, and it certainly won’t if Johansen and Subban keep their Chips Ahoy! eating contest going before every game.

So long, Predators. Keep on keepin’ the red out. Maybe you can do a chant about that. We know you won’t have one about winning anything anyone remembers.

 

 

Everything Else

You Get What Anyone Gets: Saying Goodbye To The Pittsburgh Penguins

By Sam Fels 1774 0

All good things…

…or whatever this Pittsburgh Penguins thing was the past three seasons.

I don’t know what the final epitaph for this era of Penguins hockey should or will read. When you repeat as Cup champs you automatically walk amongst the giants of the past. It’s only been done nine times, to repeat as champs, since the ’67 expansion. And only the Penguins themselves and the Red Wings had done it in the past 30 years. So your favorite Roethlisberger-defender in your office decked out in his James Harrison jersey in July (they’ll still wear it, don’t let them fool you) is going to point to that no matter what you say.

And yet the entire time you couldn’t help but ask yourself…was this Penguins team that good?

While Florida is mostly to blame, the Penguins have their hand in this Vegas nonsense as well. Though really, it’s the fault of the rest of the league being categorically stupid. Because if two standard-thinkers like George “Right Cross” McPhee and Gerard “Shawn Burr Had More Skill Than I Did” Gallant could see the Penguins merely getting up the ice as fast as possible to get away from shot-blockers and think, “Hey we can do that and most of this league will be too stupid/drunk when we play them to do anything about it!,” why didn’t everyone else?

Perhaps mostly it’s just an indictment on Dan Bylsma, who had the same talent and just kept balloon-handing his way into first and second round exits. When you have two of the best five centers in the league, the 2nd round is basically your floor.

Either way, the Penguins were able to catch the rest of the league flat-footed when the cap flattened out, and merely played with a “Get The Fuck Up There” mentality that worked against teams that were still focused on getting defensemen who farted a lot. Seriously, they saw Roman Polak in a Final. On a team that TRADED for Roman Polak. I guess it’s something when you can look at your limited team, see a more limited league, and think, “Play faster?” And it works.

It was always a delicate balance. At some point a team was going to get a good goalie performance against them and Matt Murray wasn’t going to be able to channel the lovechild of Achilles and Aragorn. Especially when you go charging up the ice with Olli Maatta’s vacant gape out there. Hey Justin Schultz, you know your partner blows, right? Might want to dial it in a touch. And while you’re at it, get Letang a map.

But it seemed to be that way all series. Penguins fans will tell you Kris Letang is one of the best in the league, and one of these days he just might play like it! And no, trying to disembowel various Flyers, as enjoyable as that might be, doesn’t count. I look forward next year to the continuation of the competition between Phil Kessel and PK Subban as to who can swell more while still being productive. We’re about two years away from Kessel reenacting the post-credits scene to Dodgeball. “Fatty Made A Funny!” And he’ll still pour in 25 goals. Let’s just start calling him “Bartolo” now.

This is probably better than the Pens deserved, after all. They reacted to their consecutive Cups built on speed and more speed by trading a first round pick for Purina Factory resident/superintendent Ryan Reaves. Whom they discarded months later. Jim Rutherford has two rings. The NHL is just one accident after another. It’s like if you made a sports league out of that ball hitting Canseco in the head and going for a homer 10 times a night for eight months.

That’s the takeaway from these Pens teams, basically and indictment of the league. When people ask you about them years from now your reaction is basically going to be, “They were fine, I think?” They’re hockey’s answer to the San Francisco Giants. Multiple championship won by a team mostly made up of “guys” thanks to a league/playoff system that spits out silly results as a function. They were there, they stood upright long enough for everyone else to fall down around them, and then they’re the only ones left to hand a trophy to. Except in the NHL, pretty much everyone is Mike Matheny.

Much like other teams that reigned for a while, the Pens will be brought down by teams doing what they did. The architecture of your destruction is always within the architecture of your success. More and more teams, you hope, are going to play faster and in space and try and get thing done before a team can set up defensively. And attacking Maatta, Schultz, Oleksiak, and Ruhwedel with speed more consistently is going to lead to a lot of Iron City being spilled and thrown. Which is exactly what you should do with that swill. Though in all honesty, it’s no worse or better than Yeungling which we all spent our 20s spraying our shorts over and then you grow up and realize it’s not even Coors Banquet.

I suppose we should thank the Penguins. It’ll be a more entertaining league as more teams take their cues from them. But fuck that. 1992 scars still haven’t healed, and Lemieux is a fuckstick. No woman will ever mean as much to me as the night Darius Kasparitis punched him in the face.

So take your baubles and go, Pens.

 

Everything Else

Night Songs – Round 2 Day 12: All Good Things…

By Sam Fels 1510 0

Let’s jump right into it:

Caps 2 – Pens 1  OT (Caps win….wait, what?)

There’s a lot to take out of last night’s seismic shift. I think the one that sticks with me most is that since the Islanders won four in a row, no team that’s going for its third straight Cup has gotten past the second round. Now, that’s a touch of a misnomer. If Steve Smith hadn’t fired the puck into his own net in ’86 the Oilers almost certainly win five straight Cups, and the Flames back then were actually an all-time great team that just kept running up against probably the best team of all-time. When they went for a three-peat the second time, they had the small obstacle of TRADING WAYNE FUCKING GRETZKY before that season started. Speaking of which, what would Twitter have been like then if the Kings traded Gretzky and then lost to him in the playoffs, and then won a Cup without him the next year? You think the treatment of LeBron is bad?

BUT THAT’S NOT WHY YOU CALLED.

What I’m saying is the Penguins looked a spent force last night. The will was there but the legs weren’t. Because of Burakovsky’s and Backstrom’s absence, the Caps had no choice but to gum this one up, which they did very well. The Penguins the past three seasons have always been a high-wire act, and it’s something of a miracle they’ve gotten as far as they have. Much like the Jets–there’s going to be a continuing theme here–this is not a team really built to bust traps. You’d think they would be with Letang and Schultz but both seem to be better joining a rush than starting one. The Penguins have lived by pushing and pushing and if their d-men get caught so what? Murray will bail them out. He couldn’t any more last night or really this series, and now they’re going home early for the first time since the Hawks last won, 103 years ago.

At some point, Malkin (who clearly is not healthy) and Crosby run out of miracles. It’s also official now that Olli Maatta sucks. I highly doubt the Pens won’t be contenders next year, but it also feels like things need to go right for them a lot. Then again, that’s true of any team.

I got a huge kick out of Pierre McGuire coming to their defense with the players they’ve lost from last year: Trevor Daley, Ron Hainsey, Fleury, Nick Bonino, Ian Cole. The three d-men aren’t any damn good, the goalie wouldn’t be playing for them anyway, and I guess Bonino is fine but was replaced by Derick Brassard is basically the same thing.

For the Caps, it’s impossible to prove if everyone kind of ignoring them this year helped or didn’t matter, but they’ll take it. You can’t help but be happy for Ovechkin, who’s had to eat a lot of shit because his coaches were fucking morons or his goalies weren’t up to it or they just ran up against a better team. Sure, this won’t matter all that much when they’re turned into processed waste by the Lightning, but at least he’ll get a glimpse.

Predators 4 – Jets 0 (Tied 3-3)

We all would have asked for a Game 7, but I’m not exactly encouraged that the Caps and Preds got to where they are today by having to turn the game back to 1997. The Preds did exactly what they did in Game 4, admit they can’t run with the Jets and hence trap the shit out of them and wait for their opportunities. And once again, because Paul Maurice hasn’t quite left his moron tendencies behind, has Dustin “Have You Tried The Nacho Fries?” Byfuglien skating five more minutes than any of his other d-men. Buff is not a trap-buster, he’s too stupid and lazy. He’s going to provide the mistakes the Preds can capitalize on, which they did. Trouba, who admittedly didn’t cover himself in glory on Forsberg’s ludicrous second goal, barely played more than Tyler Myers, who’s doing a damn fine Byfuglien impression himself. When the Preds put this on the Winnipeg defense instead of their forwards, they’re a lot better off.

Again, just like Game 5, the question becomes do the Preds have the gumption to do this at home and bore the shit out of their fans? They won’t care as long as they win, but they didn’t in Game 5 and they got smoked. And again, the margins are small when you do this. They’ve gotten away with it twice but a third might be asking too much. What happens if the Jets can manage to score first? What if all the dumb penalties the Preds are taking, and there’s a lot of them, finally puts them behind when they just want to trap?

They don’t really have a choice. Giving any space to the Jets is pretty much death. We’ll see if Maurice has the light hit him and figures out a way for his team to stop panicking with the puck when faced with three guys back. The Jets are big and fast and there’s really no reason they can’t find something if they just have to keep putting pucks behind the Preds’ defense and win it back. They seemed reluctant to do so last night, instead just turning it over at the blue line repeatedly.

It should be a fascinating Game 7. I don’t know that it’ll be entertaining.