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Night Songs – Stanley Cup Final Game 4

By Sam Fels 2046 0

And now we’re on the brink, though everyone already writing the tributes to the Capitals might want to check their history when leading a series 3-1. Even this grouping, for the most part, was around when they blew one of these to the Rangers three years ago in one off those Caps-Rags series we’ve all tried to burn from our collective memories. So yeah, if you love history and gremlins and such, you know this one isn’t over.

As the Caps were laying the wood to the Knights last night, there were far too many top-of-the-profession writers remarking on how the “magic” had run out for the Knights. They’re either willfully trying to push an angle that doesn’t exist, or they’re collectively stupid. Or both, I suppose.

If you watched the last round for the Knights Who Say Nee, even though it ended in five games it was hardly a dominating effort. The Jets ran the show for long stretch of that series, and yet kept running up against a very toothy wall in Marc-Andre Fleury. .950. There’s nothing else to say. There’s no planning or method to defeat a goalie who is throwing a .950 at you. If you can’t really conceive of that, just know with a goalie playing that well it takes 40 shots to find two goals, and even if your goalie is paying really well the other team can probably find two bounces off something for two of their own. At the very worst, Vegas was always gaining a shot at a coin-flip. This is the sport, really.

.845

That’s Fleury’s SV% in this series. And sure, it’s not like the Capitals are just a bunch of escaped wildebeests that got loose or something. Kuznetsov, Ovechkin, Backstrom, Oshie, Carlson, with help from Eller and his ilk, there’s a lot of talent here even if they lost some from previous seasons. But .845 is .845, and you’re going to lose when that happens. The Knights are losing, plain and simple.

Mostly, if you go by the underlying info, the Knights and Caps have been pretty much even, with the Knights just shading it. Some of that is they’ve been chasing the game more than any other series, but the fact that they’re chasing the game is down to Fleury suddenly turning into Tigger as much as anything else. This is still a team that’s basically one line, whatever inflated narrative Eddie and Pierre want to make about Reaves and Nosek on the 4th line, and it’s not really built to come from behind.

Sure, the Caps are fast enough to try and attack the defense of the Knights, which is not gifted with the puck other than Schmidt (and Engelland is AWFUL and the Caps have finally showed that). But the Jets did too, they just didn’t have an answer for the final boss in the crease. He’s basically provided the Caps a cheat code.

-While it’s been easy to discuss how the Knights are made up of players nobody else wanted (which isn’t totally true, I’m sure the Pens would have loved to keep Fleury as a backup, except you don’t pay backups $6 million and Fleury wouldn’t want to be that anyway. James Neal, Schmidt, Theodore, one or two others are players that those teams would have loved to keep but thanks to the expansion and cap rules, they simply couldn’t), the Caps have their fair share of weird pickups.

Oshie was acquired for Troy Brouwer (a deal I actually liked for the Blues at the time, and now Troy Brouwer has turned into a Jalopy). Michal Kempny…well, let’s not do this again. Lars Eller was discarded by two teams who didn’t appreciate him for Jaro Halak and and two 2nd round picks. As strange as it sounds for a 1st round pick, Kuznetsov actually slipped farther than he should have because teams knew he wouldn’t come over from the KHL for a few seasons. Matt Niskanen was allowed to walk from Pittsburgh.

It’s not just the Knights who can profit off the idiocy of others.

-What the Knights also can do like every other team is act like a bunch of asshats when they’re getting their dicks handed to them on the scoreboard. There’s Ryan Reaves doing Reaves things because his team is fucked for the night, which proves exactly nothing.

While Gerard Gallant is going to walk with the Coach Of The Year award, and he should, keep in mind he couldn’t keep his team wrangled in last night when the contest was over and they ended up losing without any class (and don’t fool yourself, there is not such thing as “message sending.” It’s just childish, bad losing). He’s also the coach who in two straight games when his team needed a goal and his net empty put Reaves out as his extra skater because he somehow doofus’d his way into two goals in two games (one a penalty). Even the best at the moment are prone to moments of completely, blithering stupidity.

Everything Else

Night Songs – Stanley Cup Final Game 2: I’m Incendiary Too, Man

By Sam Fels 2055 0

For most of the past few years, one of the main discussions in the game and outside of it is how to improve scoring. And we here have tried to point out that scoring isn’t the problem, action might be. There have been half-hearted attempts to try and open the game, but mostly it’s to increase power plays which will increase goals, and the hope is that the even-strength game will then open up out of fear of the power plays. It’s never quite worked, though scoring was up a tick this year.

Game 1 of this Final was used as proof that lots of goals means lots of excitement and that this is what the game should be aiming for. As I said after Game 1, I’ll go for this fractured, frantic contest every day ahead of a 2-1 truck-pulling-a-stump-fest. That doesn’t mean I need every game to be 6-4. In fact, I would prefer 6-4 to still be the rarity, so that we can enjoy them every time instead of just getting accustomed to it and it becoming lacrosse.

Last night was proof that you can still have the speed and the raucous pace that doesn’t lend itself to intricate passing or build and all the excitement that comes with it and have the goalies be a part of it, too. Big saves, like Holtby’s with less than two minutes to go but Fleury has a few himself, are just as exciting as goals sometimes. It’s a big moment. It’s a game-changing moment. Games pivot on these just as much as they can goals. Hockey doesn’t need goals, goals, goals. When it’s open like these two games have been, it gets goals but it also gets these goalies doing amazing things, too.

In essence, hockey has something of a similar problem that baseball has at the moment. They have these great athletes at the goalie position, but they don’t get to do enough to show it thanks to defensive systems that are meant to stop pucks from ever getting to them to stop. To choke off space so that shots aren’t even attempted. Goalies now are just reacting to angles and cutting off the lower part of the net. A lot of their saves are on shots they never really saw. Much like in baseball, you have athletes all over the field but you don’t get to see them make plays much because everyone is striking out or hitting homers.

We really can see what these goalies can do when they have to stare down open shooters or have to deal with passes across the slot and such. And that’s fun too! When Carlson gets to let loose freely from the top of the circle and Fleury is coming out to meet him, that’s as close to an Old-West gun-fight as you’re going to get in sports. It’s unique to hockey, because we don’t know the result. Sure, LeBron can roll to the hoop and be met by a defender, but whichever way that goes it’s one basket. If you’re one-on-one with a goalie in soccer, you’d better fucking score.

Hockey needs to find a way to get more of those moments per game. What are you going to remember more, any of the goals from Game 1 or Holtby’s save from Game 2?

-As for the game itself, the Caps seemed to weather the storm and then got the better of the middle 30 minutes or so by letting Carlson, Orlov, and Niskanen just skate past the forecheckers of the Knights. It’s a risk if you can’t get away from them, but trying to complete any pass under that sort of pressure is a bigger one. When any of them beat the first guy and caught the second forechecker going the wrong way, suddenly they had a plethora of space and odd-man rushes with possession. The Caps made plenty off that, then pushing the three back for Vegas, or just the defense, back off their line and then making plays just inside the Vegas line. Orpik’s goal came from that, because once they beat the forecheck and just kept going the backtracking forwards weren’t there.

Fleury didn’t cover himself in glory, as he was by the slots at the Mirage for Eller’s goal, way overplaying Kempny who had a man half on him. The other two goals he’s not going to do much about, but this is what happens with Fleury. When he’s really feeling himself he gets way aggressive, because he’s still one of the more athletic goalies around. But it’s a very fine line, and once he goes over the edge on it he can look very flappy/swimmy/sprawly. If he doesn’t get on the other side of that line, the Knights are going to be up against it.

Everything Else

Fallacies, Vegas, And Whatever Else In This Goofy Final

By Sam Fels 2072 0

Not that I normally like to waste any more space on Tom Wilson than I have to, but here we are. It’s the NHL, so even after a frantic and exciting, if not elegant. opener to a very intriguing Final one of the main talking points remain the #43 Dipshit Train.

Still, I have to love the pure illustration of where hockey is in the sporting consciousness and the major tenets of the sport getting torn to shreds. Let’s review.

It’s hard to argue that Wilson didn’t at least commit an interference penalty, which he eventually got when one of the linesmen went to the two refs and said, “I don’t know if you’re blind, clueless, a total coward or all three, but you have to do something here.” Sadly, as all NHL refs do at this point in the season, they looked for any way to not grant a power play, and called the Knights for investigation of what happened to their brained teammate. In reality, Wilson was out to injure Marchessault and I’m guessing the only reason he didn’t hit him in the head is because he simply missed. Wilson should be suspended, probably for the rest of the series, but because the NHL is afraid of yelling white men (and even worse if they’re associated with Vancouver), he isn’t.

And it’s in that yelling that I find so funny. Contrast it with the current controversy in baseball. Whenever we get a hit like this in hockey, there are more than a few and far too many who will shout something like, “Well he should have had his head up!” or “You can’t admire your pass in this league!” or “He turns at the last minute!” (this last one is sometimes true and muddies up the water a bit, which provides far too much shelter for those who still type with one finger at a time). And yet they maintain a prominent position in hockey. Now take Anthony Rizzo’s slide/dragon screw to Elias Diaz. Yesterday we had Joe Maddon go full-on belch about how Elias Diaz shouldn’t play the position if that’s how he’s going to end up.

And everyone thinks Maddon is idiotic for saying such a thing. We don’t get into blaming the victim in every other sport. When someone gets clobbered in the NFL, rarely do you hear someone say, “Well he shouldn’t have been running a post!” And if someone does they probably worked for the Bears until this offseason. No one claims an NBA player shouldn’t leave his feet for a shot or rebound if he doesn’t want to land on someone’s strategically placed foot when coming back down. Yet in hockey, somehow there’s always a case to be made against the injured.

Yes, hockey is a faster game and the decisions come much quicker. These are also players who have done nothing else for most of their  lives, including school, and have been trained to make decisions and plays at that speed. You and I can’t, but the reason they’re in the league is that they can. The one second Wilson had is equivalent to the two or three any free safety would have sizing up a receiver. And yet every time he does this, enough people including the league’s disciplinary committee, can throw enough shade at the one being hit to weasel out of a hard decision.

Secondly, and Ryan Lambert already got to this, is the fallacy of having a goon on your team prevents this. In the most deluded minds of the hockey world, Ryan Reaves’s presence deters this. Except he wasn’t on the ice. And when he was, Wilson wasn’t. And the knowledge that they could be on the ice together didn’t stop Wilson. Maybe Reaves fancies himself a real scorer now with two goals in two games, though he had to commit a penalty to get one that a once-again sack-less ref didn’t whistle.

“Oh sure”, some will say, “but Game 1 of the Final is too important of a time to do that stuff.” Which only makes the other side’s argument. If it’s needless and pointless at the most important times, then it’s pointless and needless at all the other times, too. And it makes any player like Wilson only feel more free to wreak such havoc in a game in November because what does a penalty or fight matter then?

I’m all for all of these fig leaves falling to the wayside. It’s a slow process, though.

Everything Else

Night Songs – Final Game 1: The Reactors Won’t Take It…Just FYI

By Sam Fels 2155 0

So that’s what Game 1 in 2010 looked like to everyone else.

It’s been a while since we’ve had two teams that haven’t been anywhere close to this in the Final, or at least hadn’t been in recent history. Basically 2012, and neither the Kings or Devils played a system that could get loose at times. The Penguins had been there the past two years and still had players who had been there seven years before, and the four before that were populated by the Kings or Hawks. So it’s not a huge shock that nerves might have gotten the better of both sides, at least to open Game 1.

At the top, before going any further, let me say that and I and most every other hockey fan would take last night’s disjointed, frantic, kindergarten recess of a hockey game as entertainment every damn time over whatever shlock a trapping or conservative or outright scared team like the Kings, or one coached by Mike Babcock would offer. It was fun, if not particularly graceful, and if that’s what the series ends up being, so be it.

But for all of the gushing, and it was exciting, it wasn’t particularly good. Or particularly well-executed, let’s say. The Knights force such a pace, and we saw this in last year’s Final too, that it’s hard for either team to play what you’d call a “smooth” game. It’s very hard for teams to complete passes, and it’s very hard for their to not be turnovers and defensive breakdowns, such is the rate that everything is happening. And it’s open and there are chances, but they’re not built out of skill or brilliance so much as just cracks forming, Which is fine, it’s just not art. Only Carlson’s goal that tied the game at 3 last night would you say was well-worked, along with Nosek’s winner. But the latter had Devante Smith-Pelley make a mistake to lead to it (and the make sure everyone in the arena and at home knew how upset he was with himself. Oh my god so upset. Look at how upset he is everyone! Can’t you see how upset he is?! ARGH SO UPSET!). And Carlson’s goal was the result of Marc-Andre Fleury looking like the drunk trying to negotiate his keys at 4am. Still, better than most alternatives.

The Knights don’t really care if their passing isn’t crisp, as they don’t really attempt that many. They chip and flip pucks into the neutral zone and only worry about passes when they’re on the rush and the offensive zone. I don’t know if the Caps can play like this and win four of the next six, but we’ll find out. They’ll feel they missed a real opportunity because Fleury wasn’t all that good and you probably have to win the “Fleury Isn’t Fleury” game this spring. Then again, MAF was always do for some kind of regression, be it now or October.

Of course, this wouldn’t be the NHL if it didn’t have its head in its ass at crucial points. And when you have Ryan Reaves and Tom Wilson out there, your game’s head is going to be even more firmly lodged in its colon. I have always fucking hated the policy refs have in the playoffs of swallowing the whistle and “letting the players decide.” All that is is abdicating responsibility and sinking into spinlessness for those who are supposed to be officiating the game. Ryan Reaves is a dolt, and he essentially “cheated” to score the equalizing goal in the 3rd. The players have decided. A superior player in Carlson has good position on him and Reaves illegally moved him. The players have “decided” that should be a penalty. The refs have “decided” to simply give Vegas a crucial goal. I’ll forgive a missed call here and there in the neutral zone where a lot more has to happen before it results in a change on the scoreboard. This led directly to a goal, and a big one. That’s not the players deciding. That’s the refs deciding by losing any gumption to do their jobs.

As for Wilson, in a league that made sense and wasn’t afraid of yelling old white men (and it’s not the only one, as you can recall the Yuri Gurriel fiasco from the last World Series), Tom Wilson would be thrown out for the rest of the Final. This is a repeat offense. It was an attempt to injure, and calling it “finishing a check” is the height of idiocy. There was nothing to be gained from clobbering Marchessault three seconds after he had the puck, other than to knock him out of the game. And it was from the blind-side, so it’s not like he was “pressuring” Marchessault.

Wilson quite simply is a menace, he’s a hazard to his fellow professionals and tossing him for the rest of the most important series the sport has to offer might finally be the lesson that gets through his and any other’s leaden skull. Just fucking chuck him. The league will be better off without him.

Everything Else

Remembering The 2016-2017 Nashville Predators

By 1742

Once again, we were asked to give a eulogy for Yahoo!’s Puck Daddy Blog. We drew the last straw, and got the Predators. Here it is. Enjoy. 

Ladies and gentlemen, we’ve come here once again to bur….you know what, it doesn’t feel right this time. Because… is this really a funeral? In most ways, it feels like the Nashville Predators were born this spring. As we all know, you’re not actually a hockey town, or even a section of civilization, until Canadian hockey media discovers that you’re a better place to watch a game than a freezing barn in Guelph, if that’s even a real place. Welcome to the big time, Nash-Vegas. You’re now officially on the sanctioned list for Globe and Mail writers to come and get drunk and fall down.

(Other areas on the list include Bob McKenzie’s lake house, Winnipeg and Tony Twist’s St. Louis-style hot dog stand. Congrats, everyone. You’ve made it.)

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Meaning

By 2085

Such a weird league. We have spent most of the past two years, if not longer, complaining that the salary cap has essentially made the differences between teams smaller and smaller, to the point where they’re hardly noticeable at times. How the shootout and stupid overtime system and the even dumber points system makes the standings somewhat fake a lot of years, and keeps teams bunched together while also making it nearly impossible for anyone to pass anyone.

And yet we sit here, with three teams having won eight of the past nine championships. And the one outlier in that group, the Bruins, played for another and lost to one of the three. So four teams have taken up 11 of the possible 18 Final slots. Stretch it back a round, and those four teams have taken 16 of 36 conference final spots, with the Kings, Hawks, and Penguins each losing one or two in that frame.

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Watch The Weather Change

By 1457

If you’re a fan of watching storylines change on a nightly basis and watching teams try and counter one another, this is a series for you. And yet it feels like when each of these teams plays its best, or the best it has in this series, they lose.

The Penguins probably played their best game of the Final last night. They figured out something that the Hawks only figured out far too late, the Blues simply aren’t capable of, and the Ducks are too stupid. They didn’t have any forwards fleeing the zone, coming deeper in the defensive zone on breakouts to try and relieve the pressure, and break up the ice as a five-man unit. It’s really the only way to deal with the Preds’ pressure. You have to be an outlet for the defense under their ridiculous forecheck and then you need options coming through the neutral zone with the Nashville d-men standing up at their line and the forwards closing in from behind.

The Penguins did it, caused the Preds more problems than they’d seen, and got the equalizer from Crosby after forcing the Preds into a shoddy line-change after sustained pressure.

But there’s a problem with that…

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Everyone Knows This Is Somewhere

By 1434

The Stanley Cup Final’s first visit to Music City resulted in the largest explosion of think pieces from national hockey writers expressing amazement that anywhere below the 49th could show such passion for the sport. It was rather hilarious in its naivety and its patronization. But that’s kind of what the hockey media specializes in these days.

This blog followed the Hawks down to Nashville in 2012. Neither of those versions of those teams were all that impressive. The Hawks got smoked by the Preds that night, as Corey Crawford delved into his one and only case of the yips in his career. And we all had a blast down there. It didn’t matter. It’s amazing what happens when you put an arena right in the middle of everything, especially in a place like Nashville which never needs an excuse for a drink and a time.

There’s a reason so many Hawks fans flocked there that they had to try and put in rules to stem the tide. And it’s not because Nashville is all that close. It’s because it’s been that much fun for a really long time now.

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Fascinating And Meaningless, All At The Same Time

By 1374

Once you get past the Predators’, or more to the point their fans’, constant bed-wetting over the refs (and really a lot of people’s), or the heavier amounts of bullshit we saw last night when the game got out of reach, there is something of a fascinating clash of styles going on here. And also an excellent example of how in hockey there really is only so much you can control, and it’s rarely enough to ensure things swing your way.

I guess you could call it that… except it’s probably not the Penguins plan to get throttled for huge swaths of the game and then pray that Matt Murray can bail them out of it. If it is… well bully for them.

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Well That’s One Way To Do It

By 1561

When I said I couldn’t quite get a handle on this series, I wasn’t saying I expected to see the weirdest Final game of my lifetime (and feel free to correct me on this one). We may never see a team that has won three rounds to get here go 37 minutes(!) without a shot again. And we’re even less likely to see any team come close to that and still win. That was an all-timer. But I suppose in a building where less than a week ago an entire crowd was going apeshit over a puck that went on top of the net and not in it, anything is possible.

I actually had some flashbacks to the 2010 series against the Predators watching last night, and even some of the one in ’15. You’ll recall seven years ago in the first three games the Preds simply sat on the boards at the points in the Hawks’ zone, essentially trapping there instead of in the neutral zone. They dared the Hawks to go up the middle or try and find the time for flips out to center, and it took Brian Campbell’s return and a wake-up from Quenneville (and a small, boneheaded play from Martin Erat that I certainly don’t think about every single day) for the Hawks to crack it.

It was some of the same stuff last night.