Category: Sports

Three of the four remaining teams in the NHL playoffs value skill over aggression, which is a hopeful trend in the NHL. NHL teams tend to copy success — so the team that wins the Cup sets a template for other teams. And this year, three of the four divisional playoffs were won by the best-skating team in the pool. Pittsburgh, Tampa and San Jose are all built around using team speed to wear down the other team. Only St. Louis beat a team that outskated them — knocking off Chicago — but that took a full seven games. The Blues have players who can skate, but with players like Backes and Brouwer, they are more inclined to wear you down with muscle than foot speed.

And speed has been a real weapon. Almost all of the top 20 scorers are among the best skaters on their teams. And in the East in particular, the Penguins line of Kessel, Bonino and Hagelin made the Rangers and Caps’ lives miserable and Tampa is deep into its second consecutive postseason largely on the strength of its Triplets line (particularly with the injury to caption Steve Stamkos).

Among recent winners, Chicago has been the model for skating teams, with LA and the Bruins preferring a grind-it-out, face-to-the-boards approach to creating offense. But its hard to imagine the Blues getting past the Sharks, let alone whoever comes out of the East (I had Pittsburgh before the playoffs started and haven’t seen anything to change my mind).

With a little luck, we’ll see more teams choosing to try to outskate instead of outmuscling their opponents over the next few years.

Here’s the thing the Washington Capitals are failing coming to grips with: The team is built around a winger. So what?

Teams that win championships are built down the middle. If anything, the Caps are regular-season overachievers, not playoff busts. They are OK down the middle — Evgeny Kuznetsov might, possibly, be in the discussion of elite centers at some point down the road but neither he nor Nicklas Backstrom are at the Toews / Crosby level and while Braden Holtby is in the discussion for best goalie in the league I would still take Ben Bishop in a heartbeat. OK isn’t good enough.

A few observations:

In the 50 years of Conn Smythe winners, the trophy has gone to wingers eight times. Defensemen 10 times. Goalies and centers 16 times each.

The wingers in reverse chronological order are Justin Williams, Patrick Kane, Claude Lemieux, Mike Bossy, Bob Gainey, Guy Lafleur, Reggie Leach and Yvan Cournoyer. None of these guys were obviously the best players on their teams: Williams had Quick / Doughty / Kopitar; Kane had Toews / Keith; Bossy had Trottier / Potvin / Smith; Leach had Clarke / Parent; etc., etc.

The last Stanley Cup winning team where you could convincingly argue the team (not just playoff) MVP was a winger AND that player won the Smythe was the 1977 Montreal Canadiens (Guy Lafleur). But his “supporting cast” included Lemaire, Robinson, Cournoyer, Gainey & Dryden, so it was hardly Guy or Bust.

You win down the middle, you win with depth. The Devils won without an elite center … but Scott Stevens, Scott Niedermayer, Marty Brodeur and trap, trap, trap. All the Caps are missing are all of those things.

I would argue that, rather than being playoff “failures” with Ovie, the Caps have reached their predictable level. Zero teams built around a winger — any winger — have won a Cup in the last 50 years. (I don’t remember the Gordie Howe Red Wings well enough to discuss them in detail, so if you want to argue that Delvecchio, Red Kelly and Terry Sawchuk were window dressing, have at it … but it’s telling that the best pure shooter of that generation was Bobby Hull, and even with fellow Hall of Famers Stan Mikita on the other wing, Pierre Pilote on defense and Glenn Hall in goal, they won one Cup, in 1961.)

All of which brings me to Exhibit A, at the top. The 2006-07 Mighty Eggplants of Anaheim. Teemu Selanne was their leading point scorer, a winger and a sniper with attitude and a mostly one-way game (sound familiar)? But what looked at the time like the “supporting cast” turned out to be Ryan Getzlaf & Corey Perry, they had Scott Neidermayer and Chris Pronger on defense and great goaltending. Kuznetsov is already older (23) than Getzlaf was (21) and there’s nobody on the Caps D who will ever be mistaken for Neidermayer / Pronger.

• (Paul Kariya, also in the picture, was already gone by then, another example of not winning with a team built around a winger).

So enjoy watching Ovechkin, Caps fans. He’s an exciting player and might well win a Cup by being traded to a championship team or, like Selanne, he might hang around long enough for the next generation to help push him along. But he’s not the right cornerstone for a winner.

So apologies to Boston Bruins fans. I’m not a Bruins hater (I started watching hockey about the time Robert Gordon Orr started getting paid to play it so I’ve always had a soft spot for them), but living in New England means getting doses of NESN coverage and there’s nothing that makes a thinking person critical as fast as listening to a homer.

But that said … I think Zdeno Chara is a big part of what’s wrong with the Bruins. I don’t mean that he’s lost a step from his already ponderous skating. Having the reach of a battleship goes a long way toward excusing having the turning radius of one and he’s still strong, mean and a good positional player. I mean his leadership.

Now maybe in the rest of the hockey world there’s been more questioning of the on-ice leadership of the Bruins than here in the Northeast, but the local coverage has pretty much focused on the usual breathless (and uninformed) debate over whether the coach is getting fired. I’m agnostic on that one, btw: Claude Julien won a Cup with a goalie playing like Mad Etta from W.P. Kinsella’s The Fencepost Chronicles. (Mad Etta was the medicine woman of the Ermineskin tribe in Kinsella’s short stories. Pressed into action as the goalie for the local hockey team in a tournament on the grounds she weighed 400 pounds and so filled the net (think Devan Dubnyk, only shorter), she quickly tired of the shots hurting her, so she weaved a few charms and the pucks stopped hitting her — or going in the net). Although that’s possibly less magical than Julien getting Boston’s jingoistic fan base to forgive him for being French. Against that success is a series of late-season & playoff failure.

But nobody seems to be calling out the on-ice leadership of a team that for years has failed to win the Big Game down the stretch. Since Chara took over as captain in 2006-07, here’s how the Bruins finished their seasons:

06-07 They were a last place team, finishing up the year on a 1-10-1 run that really only affected their draft place.

07-08 Lost to Montreal in Game 7, first round.

08-09 Won first round 4-0, lost to Carolina in Game 7, second round.

09-10 Won first round, 4-2, lost to Philadelphia in Game 7, second round.

 

11-12 Won President’s Trophy, lost to Washington in Game 7, first round.

13-14 Won first round, 4-2, lost to Montreal in Game 7, second round.

14-15 Lost their last three games to finish three points behind Ottawa, which won its last three (and six of seven) for the last playoff spot.

15-16 Lost three of last four games (including a rousing 6-1 home defeat in their final game) to miss the playoffs by a single point.

You’ll note I skipped over two seasons. in 2012-13, the Bruins famously came from behind in the third period of Game 7 to beat the Toronto Maple Leafs (ouch). Lost in the noise was the fact the Bruins had home ice, finishing just one point behind Montreal for the division title and were overwhelming favorites, especially once they went 3-1 up in the series. Were it not for that one great period, this would have gone down as one of the biggest choke jobs in the entire string. Instead, the went on a run, making the Finals where, with a chance to force Game 7 and under two minutes to play, they gave up two goals in 17 seconds. Hey, it made Dave Bolland a crapton of money as a free agent.

And of course they won it all in 2010-11, but it’s worth asking if that’s because of Chara’s leadership or Tim “Mad Etta” Thomas in goal.

But teams win games and lose games. The thing that has always bothered me about Chara was how the Bruins violate the cardinal rule of hockey teams: What happens in the room stays in the room.

Boston traded away Tyler Seguin, Phil Kessel and Dougie Hamilton, and each time the team let it leak that the player had “character issues.” It’s bad enough when a front office type says something like that, but when the captain stands up publicly and disses a former teammate (teammates in this case), I think that says as much about the captain’s leadership as it does about the supposed bad apples.

Kessel, at 19, underwent surgery for cancer, played 70 games as a rookie and won the Masterton Trophy for dedication to hockey. He then increased his point totals successive seasons, and led the Bruins with 36 goals in his third and final season there before being run out of town as a 21-year-old. Yet Chara says the Bruins did everything they could for him. Bullshit. Kessel doesn’t look like a workout maniac, yet he has played every game in 7 of his 10 NHL seasons, reportedly finished at or near the top of the Leafs fitness tests every year and was easily team USA’s best skater at the 2014 Winter Olympics.

Having not learned their lesson (in part because Toronto gifted them with the second overall pick in the Kessel trade), the Bruins then ran that pick, Seguin, out of town as a 21-year-old after three seasons. The knock on him was that he didn’t produce in the playoffs, which was true in 12-13. In 11-12, however, he finished with three goals in seven games, which put him ahead of David Krejci, Brad Marchand, Milan Lucic and Patrice Bergeron combined. So a 21-year-old maybe didn’t work as hard as he should have in the weight room or maybe stayed out too late and he definitely had a bad playoff. But then management — with the captain’s public support — scapegoated him. Double bullshit. Predictably, they did it again with Hamilton.

And the Boston media, who with the exception of Fluto Shinzawa don’t strike me as the hardest-working crew ever, are always happy to play along. This is especially true when it comes to maintaining the old Big Bad Bruins / Don Cherry image of a lunch pail team (although Cherry, not a moron despite his persona, was happy to pick up Rick Middleton as a 22-year-old for his team and if there’s one player Kessel reminds me of, it’s Nifty Middleton: Great skater, great goal-scorer, pudgy, lackadaisical checker and positional nightmare.)

Good teams find ways to work all kinds of players in. Great captains teach 20-year-olds how to play and act like pros, on and off the ice. Crappy captains call out 20-year-olds publicly.

Look, without being a player on the team, nobody knows how a guy is as a teammate, or a captain. But from the record I have to say that from this distance, Chara looks like a crappy captain.

 

The big story down the stretch last year was whether journeyman goalie Devan Dubnyk was the second coming of Tim Thomas … a goalie overlooked at the NHL level until he was in his late 20s who suddenly blossoms into a legitimate Vezina candidate. Minnesota — with really no good options — gambled that the answer was yes and gave Dubnyk a big new contract.

Now I confess I’m a skeptic in the first place, because even during his hot streak last year, I kept waiting for Dubnyk to get lit up because I just don’t see him as an elite goalie. That sort of happened — he had a so-so playoffs (.909 save percentage, goals against over 2.50), but he wasn’t embarrassingly bad.

Embarrassing was with Nashville, where he had a .200 save percentage while shorthanded. It’s a really small sample, just 5 shots, but one save on five shots is almost impossibly bad for a guy as big as Lennie Small as Dubnyk. Fact: When you’re six foot six, pucks gotta hit you. So no, Dubnyk is not sub-.900, mediocre AHL goalie bad … in part because he’s too damn big to be awful. But I don’t see a lot besides big. He’s not overly quick, he doesn’t get side-to-side better than he needs to. For a while last year, with his confidence up, he made saves he shouldn’t have. But I don’t see him able to do that year after year (and he didn’t in the playoffs) because pucks get through him. That is to say, once in a while, he gets into position on a shot but doesn’t manage to stop it. Maybe it takes a little deflection or there’s a screen or maybe he just doesn’t track it right. It doesn’t take a lot of those to turn all-star into alright. Over 50 33-shot games, a .925 percent goalie stops 1,525 out of 1,550 shots. A .909 goalie stops 1,500. So far this year, Dubnyk is a .909 goalie.

Just before I started this, I flicked over to watch a couple of minutes of him going back to Edmonton, where his career began and there was Dubnyk letting in a 50+ foot slapshot that put his team behind, 3-2. Minnesota came back to gift Dubnyk with the win, his fifth of the year, but that was despite their goalie, not because of him. 

Over his NHL career, Dubnyk has been a .916 / 2.67 goalie and that’s what Minnesota should expect. On a defensively aware team with Ryan Suter playing 26 minutes a night in front of him, that is enough to win a lot of games, but it’s not going to win you a Cup Tim Thomas, Jonathan Quick, Patrick Roy, “thou shall not pass” style.

Watched chunks of the first games for Carey Price (OK, so I was watching the Leafs) and Tuukka Rask. Here’s a prediction for those of you in hockey pools:

Buy Price, sell Rask.

Being bullish on Price is easy. He’s the best in the world at his position right now; the Habs have a contending team built on defense and he won about all the trophies he could last season. Based on what he showed last night, he hasn’t lost a thing. Price was the first star in a 3-1 Montreal win and never looked like being beaten on a straight shot. As the Leafs’ color commentator noted fairly dryly, he is weak on the double deflections. Now the Leafs aren’t going to scare anybody this year — having Marc Arcobello or Peter Holland steaming down the slot on you isn’t the mindf**k that it might be with, say, Sidney Crosby or his winger, that Kessel fella — but Price wasn’t ever out of position. Most of the night the puck just hit him. That doesn’t happen if you’re not always where you oughta be.

Rask was in net for five of six against the Bruins one night later, as the Winnipeg Jets ripped the B’s a new one on opening night in da Gahden. It was more a collective collapse than crappy goaltending, but that’s why there should be a big “sell” light flashing over Rask’s head, before the Bruins roll up too many of these nights. Rask himself is only two years removed from winning the Vezina as the league’s best goalie, so a lot a people like him. I don’t, or at least not much. He’s not the wild man Tim Thomas was as far as position & fundamentals, but he’s no Carey Price, either. Rask has for years gambled: overplaying shots and angles, relying on athletic talent and good defense to cover up when he guesses wrong. It makes him a better-than-average shot stopper, but it also leaves him needing to be acrobatic to stop pucks a more orthodox goalie wouldn’t think twice about because he’s out near / past the top of his crease when a more orthodox goalie (Price, Roberto Luongo, Henrik Lundqvist) has stayed at home to wait for the puck. He also gives up a crapton of big, fat rebounds, often back into the slot.

You can get away with that when your D is near-his-prime Zdeno Chara and Dennis Seidenberg and Johnny Boychuk and the whole team is focused on defense first. It’s a nice luxury to not have to worry about rebounds because any forward looking for one is going to have to go through a meat grinder to get to one — and then they’ll be about to be drilled for touching the puck. But when your defense is old (Chara), defensively suspect (Torrey Krug) or just useless (Adam McQuaid) rebounds are a problem. And when your team is modest at best at goal scoring, like the Bruins figure to be, you wind up playing behind which leads to turnovers, odd-man rushes & etc. and the whole team defense thing becomes more an aspiration than a habit.

A rare few goalies do well behind that kind of team — Grant Fuhr is the best I ever saw at shrugging off horrible team defense. One game I recall the Oilers had a one-goal lead and were killing the clock — and a penalty — late in the third.  Despite this, Paul Coffey saw a chance to jump into a rush up ice and took it, creating a three-on-two at the other end. When they didn’t score, however, it immediately turned into a three-on-one coming back at Fuhr, who gave up the goal without really ever having a chance at stopping it after a nice passing play. A lot of goalies would have been furious at Coffey’s lack of discipline, but Fuhr just laughed and shrugged it off after the game, saying that was Paul playing Paul’s game.

I don’t see that in Rask … his game isn’t right for it; his record doesn’t show it. He’s only played No. 1 minutes twice — in 2013/14 when he won the Vezina behind that savage defense and last year, when he dropped out of the top 10 in save percentage and goals against average. With the defense shakier than it was last year, I expect Rask to be middle-of-the-pack statistically, which is about where I rate him as an NHL goalie. At some point this year, those Tuuuuuuuuu chants might well turn to boos.

UPDATE: Just saw the highlights from the Tampa Bay win and it’s worse than I thought. Rask was at least partially at fault on three of six goals against — one was a deflection that the highlight package didn’t do a slow-mo on, but goalies (even Price) need to get lucky on tips … although a goalie on his game would want that one back. Steven Stamkos’ blast and the last one Rask gets a pass on, but he got caught too deep and too tight to the near post on the first Tampa goal, leaving plenty of room for Brian Boyle to shoot at when the pass came back to the slot; then he let one under his pad short side on a shot from Jonathan Drouin when there was nothing for him to do but shoot (as in, there was no pass play) and Rask also got beat five-hole on a deke by Brian Boyle (Boyle, ffs, not the niftiest stickhandler in the league).

Rask is going to have to improve to be average this year.