Category: Sports

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.

 

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.