Tag: hockey

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The 2023-24 Maple Leafs

There are about 10 or 11 teams in the very competitive NHL that could make a serious run at the Stanley Cup this year:

Winnipeg Jets
Vancouver Canucks
Boston Bruins
Colorado Avalanche
New York Rangers
Florida Panthers
Dallas Stars
Vegas Golden Knights
Toronto Maple Leafs
Carolina Hurricanes
Los Angeles Kings

Several teams are not far behind this cluster and could easily make a run at the playoffs if they get hot.  It is a very competitive league and, as has been observed, winning the NHL championship is likely the most difficult challenge of any major team sport.  It is long, hard, and grueling.

I have been a Toronto Maple Leaf fan since about 1967– I am so old that I actually saw the Leafs win a Stanley Cup (in 1967).  I remember that at that time, they were close behind the Canadiens for the total number of championships: it was 13 to 11.  Since then, it has become 24 (!) to 11.

The Leafs have a notoriously bad record in recent years in the playoffs.  They actually have a good record of making the playoffs, each of the past seven years, but, with the exception of last year in which they eliminated Tampa Bay, they have not won a single series.  It is a stain on the careers of Austin Matthews, John Tavares, William Nylander, Mitch Marner, and Morgan Rielly, none of whom have performed particularly well in the playoffs.  It is an even bigger stain on their goaltenders, Jack Campbell and Frederick Andersen, neither of which have been able to “come up big” in decisive playoff games.

This obscures the fact that the Leafs do have a very good team.  They can score goals but their defense is suspect.  Their No. 1 goalie, Ilya Samsonov, is a wreck and has been demoted and their next most auspicious candidate, Joseph Woll, is injured.   Matt Murray– last I heard– was hurt and will not return (I think he was moved to Pittsburgh, last I heard).   Martin Jones has stepped in and is currently performing exceptionally well.

No Leaf fan can forget how they led the decisive game 7 against Boston 4-3 in the third period a few years ago only to see Frederick Andersen allow three highly questionable goals, including the egregious one through the five-hole that gave up the lead.  The Leafs lost 7-4 (one empty net goal).

The Leafs have lately looked pretty good, with Martin Jones in net.  But so has Winnipeg, Edmonton, Vancouver, New York Rangers, and Boston.

I am optimistic– I always am, this time of year, recently– about the playoffs.  The Leaf “core four” (Nylander, Matthews, Marner, Tavares) are a year older.  Tavares in not getting more effective, but the other three are entering the years in which most athletes are in their prime.  They also have the bitter experience of losing in the first round in six of the last seven playoffs (and the second round last year) to teams that appeared to be inferior to them.   They should know now how much grit, consistency, and determination is required to win a seven-game series.   They should be tougher, more resilient.  Matthews in particular seems to have stepped up his game.

I am suspicious of Nylander– he can be brilliant but he also gives the puck away far too often and sometimes seems to be coasting outside the blueline waiting for a pass.  Both he and Marner make risky passes and it’s hard to assess whether the pretty goals they generate outweigh the ugly goals they give up.  One immediately remembers overtime in a game against Boston this year in which Nylander turned back with the puck– a thing he likes to do too often– and fell.  He just fell, giving up the puck to the two deadliest forwards on Boston (and the game-winning goal).  The other night, he was coasting to the bench while Colorado was in full press mode towards the Leaf net.  They scored.

There is also hope in regard to the Leafs 3rd and 4th lines, and other secondary players like Matthew Knies who is improving in every game.   Jarnkrok in particular has become more effective, Domi is showing some determination and more skill, and Robertson occasionally threatens.

On defense, Rielly is actually playing better than he did last year when he seemed to be struggling at times and lost his instincts for contributing on offense.  Brodie and Giordano or good– not excellent– Liljegren seems to be improving.  McCabe can be forceful.  Timmins and Lagesson strike me as filler material.  They could use another good pick-handling defenseman.  The need a good defensive defenseman even more:  they often mishandle the puck in their own corners and end up running around chasing while the opposition sets up.

The Leafs made what I consider a major blunder is allowing Justin Holl to walk– I thought he had improved significantly over the past few years and  he is playing pretty well for Detroit– and an even bigger blunder is signing forward Ryan Reaves (thank goodness he’s out right now) and an incomprehensible blunder in signing John Klingberg (out for the season, I believe), who has a career -40 rating.

When Woll returns, will he be as effective as he was at the beginning of the season?  Will Jones continue his solid performances?  We haven’t seen Dennis Hildeby in action yet– he is a great unknown, a large (for goalie– for anybody) player at 6′ 7″ and 200 lbs.  The Leafs will almost surely start him at some point in the near future, for there is a perception out there that the Leafs have overworked their #1 goalies the last few years perhaps contributing to their disappointing performances in the playoffs.

So, as usual, I will expect the Leafs to finally advance further than the first round this year.  I expect Matthews, Marner, and Nylander– with their increased experience– to contribute more.  Matthews in particular seems more able than ever before to summon his formidable talents into a gritty two-way game that can actually redirect the teams momentum at crucial moments.   I hope the Leafs do pick up a solid defenseman somewhere for the playoff run.   And then we have to hope that Jones and Hildeby or Woll perform well.

Tavares?  Tonight, against Detroit, he was worse than ineffective.  He gave the puck way, lost almost every battle for the puck along the boards, and seemed slow and lethargic.  He was so awful I wonder if he is hurt.

The NHL is a very tough league.  The Leafs have shown this year that they can beat any team on a any given night.  Perhaps this is the year they finally show that they can win a seven-game series against a tough opponent.  If they do, they need the “core four” to perform well but I expect they will win only if they get unexpected contributions from players like Knies, Jarnkrok, and Domi.  The impact of sensational players like Matthews is generally not as great as most people think it is.  (I thought the Blue Jays were deluded in their vain attempt to sign Ohtani in the off-season: for the same money, they could have improved themselves at four or five other positions and that would have had a bigger impact on their overall success.)

Look at the winning teams for the past decades: they are comprised of a star or two, yes, but more importantly an assembly of strong secondary talents, reliable goal-tenders who don’t allow soft goals at crucial moments of the game, and defensemen who, once they have the puck, can smoothly move it out of the defensive zone to forwards who have positioned themselves to receive it and advance into the other team’s zone.  Justin Holl’s major fault, until last year, was the frequency with which he blindly shot the puck along the boards to the opposition point man, or passed the puck to players who were either being checked or didn’t exist.  Jake Gardiner, before him, was even worse at that.  This is the play before the play that results in cheap goals against.   Teams don’t win championships with great saves by their goalie (though Montreal, with Carey Price, came close a few years ago).  They win by preventing those chances in the first place.

The Leafs appear to me to have improved in this area.  Until recently.  They have recently looked weak and disorganized.  Both the power play and the penalty kill have been atrocious.

Given the level of talent on the club, you have to look elsewhere.  I believe it’s time to fire coach Sheldon Keefe.

 

 

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The 2021-2022 Maple Leafs

It seems incredible that a Canadian NHL team has not won the Stanley Cup since Montreal did it in 1993.

Yes, 1993.  29 years ago.

I said last year that the 2020-21 Montreal Canadiens were probably the least talented team to ever make the Stanley Cup Finals.  I seem to have been vindicated in my opinion by their performance this year: they are nowhere near the level they seemed to reach in the 2021 playoffs.   Really good teams rarely fail to perform well in the years just before and after a championship appearance.   Even after the loss of a star player, most great teams will have a core of solid talents that carry them through the early rounds.  My theory was that their progress then was largely due to Carey Price and sheer determination and hustle and a bit of luck (the Leafs were very close to eliminating them in the first round).  This year, the Canadiens lost Price to personal issues and collapsed as a team.  It will be a while before they return to a competitive level, though perhaps not as long as we used to think.  NHL teams lately have shown a remarkable ability to rebuild quickly.

The Leafs have what is probably the best team they have ever put on the ice, with the exception of goal-tending.  Austin Matthews may well be the best over-all player in the NHL this year; Mitch Marner is not far behind– if he is behind.  Marner’s incredible vision on the ice is remarkable.  In a game tonight against the Islanders, he made a back-handed pass right onto the tape of Nylander’s stick that seemed jarringly unlikely given his position, headed into the corner.  He has an uncanny awareness of where the spaces are, where his team-mates are, and who is a position to shoot.  He does this a lot.  How many goals would Matthews have if he were playing with someone else?  But then, how many assists would Marner have?  Last night, in the absence of Matthews,  Marner set up Nylander several other times but Nylander missed all except one, and that one squiggled through the goalie.

One commentator tonight (April 23) mentioned, in an off-hand manner, that Marner might be “underrated”.  I think he’s right.  They showed a list of the top five candidates for the Hart trophy:  the leading scorer of the past 3 months was not on the list.  Yes, that’s Mitch Marner.

Michael Bunting is supposed to be the gritty line-mate to compliment Marner and Matthew’s finesse but it would be useful if he receive passes with a bit more dexterity and cash in on some of the golden opportunities his line-mates give him.   Why do other teams hate him?  Sure, he draws a lot of penalties, but he’s not really a “dirty” player.   But other teams tend to go after him for some unknown reason.

In addition to Marner and Matthews, the Leafs have several pretty good secondary offensive threats, particularly in Nylander, a mysterious player who often seems to be punching the clock, until you notice that he has 6 goals in the last 8 games.  Where did they come from?  He often misses the net, because he always tries for the corners, usually the upper corners, but his shots are crisp and quick, he’s a great puck handler, and he is very fast.  He may score 50 some day.  John Tavares should be providing more of a threat from the 2nd line than he currently does.  He’s just not as sharp as Marner or Matthews but I give him credit for grit and determination for a good player past his prime.

Ilya Mikheyev is also impressive.  The Leafs have had speedy forwards before but often without a deft touch at the net (Russ Courtnall, Kasperi Kapanen): Mikheyev shows signs of figuring out how to actually get it past the goaltender once he has broken free of the defense, which he does a lot.  Alex Kerfoot is a threat– like Tavares, gritty and persistent, and he’s also pretty fast.  Pierre Engvall has good nights and may end up being a key part of the team if it advances.  He is big but also quick and a threat on the penalty kill.

Jason Spezza should really sit down.  He’s just not that quick anymore.  When is the last time he got a goal?  Filler.  He seems like a likeable guy but, sheesh, the Leafs are gunning for playoff success here and I really believe a younger talented player like Blackwell would be more helpful than Spezza at this point.

On defense, I believe Reilly may be over-rated.  Yes, he’s a good skater and gets a lot of assists, but he also occasionally rushes to the net and shoots right at the goalie’s midsection, or he rushes down the ice, blowing past players to the left and the right, then he dumps the puck in.  Tonight, he broke in alone on goal and couldn’t manage to do anything except fall down in front of the goalie as the puck slid away.  Still, it’s very hard to measure the defensive impact of a player who, through good skating and puck handling, minimizes the time the other team spends in possession of the puck.   It’s one thing for a defenseman to block a shot; it’s even better if the other team never got the shot in the first place.

Mark Giordano is not bad.  He seems reliable.  Ilya Lyubushkin is a question mark: he often just fumbles around with the puck, unsure of where to go or what to do.  Jake Muzzin is okay and a balance to the more offensive-minded partners on defense.   Brodie makes a lot of mistakes lately.  Justin Holl made a lot of mistakes earlier in the season but has improved though he still makes bad decisions in his own zone– turning around and going back and getting trapped in the corner, or passing to someone who is about to be checked.   Actually, he does that a lot.  Timothy Liljegren has been playing well lately, going to the net when the opportunity presents itself.  Rasmus Sandin makes mistakes but also looks promising.

The Leaf’s biggest 5 on 5 weakness is their inability to break up the play when trapped in their own zone: the puck seems to ricochet around the boards from one attacking defenseman to another until they can force a scramble in front of the net or a one-timer from the side.  Buffalo, for some reason, seemed adept at breaking up that kind of zone trap against the Leafs,  but the Leafs seem flummoxed by that kind of action in their own end.  They chase and  scramble along the boards and then give up the puck.

The real problem– and Leafs’ management knows it — is that, aside from a spell earlier in the season, Jack Campbell has not been reliable in goal, and Petr Mrazek has been awful.  Erik Kallgren showed some promise but has also had disastrous nights.  At one point, it appears that Kyle Dubas was involved in secret negotiations for Fleury from Chicago but they fell through, and it’s Campbell, probably, for the playoffs, and I shudder to think the Leafs might be involved in some close games.

In the last few years, Frederick Anderson fooled fans by making a brilliant save or two and then losing sight of a shot from the point, or losing track of the puck in a scramble in front of the net and giving up a cheap goal.  Fans tend to judge goalies generously if they make a spectacular save or two, but the really great playoff goalies are consistent.  Nothing is more depressing than to see a team make a gritty, determined effort to tie the game only to see a fluke shot go in at the other end, something that happened regularly with Frederick Anderson, memorably against Boston two years ago.   And nothing gives a team more confidence to make daring attacks than a spectacular save by their goalie after one of those daring attacks goes wrong, as Price did last year for Montreal.

Any of about a half-dozen teams or more could win the Stanley Cup this year:

  • Toronto Maple Leafs
  • Colorado Avalanche
  • Florida Panthers
  • Tampa Bay Lightening
  • St. Louis Blues
  • New York Rangers
  • Minnesota Wild
  • Carolina Hurricanes

Another half-dozen, including Boston and Pittsburgh, have an outside chance of pulling a few upsets in the  first or second rounds of the playoffs.

There is no magic formula to determining who is most likely to win.  There are always surprises and disappointments.  On paper, the Panthers and Avalanche would be favorites, but both are beatable– any team is– on a good night for the other team  (the Panthers, at home tonight, just barely escaped with an overtime victory against the Leafs who had the better chances in the 3rd period).  Over a best of seven series, good luck, great goal-tending, and that intangible, random, thing we sometimes call “focus” or “inspiration” or “grit” can play a huge role in determining the outcome.  We’ve all seen teams with amazing scoring prowess suddenly totally smothered by disciplined defensive team with great goal-tending.   It happened to Toronto, Vegas,  Pittsburgh, and Colorado in 2021.   It could happen to any of the great offensive teams this year, Florida, Toronto, and Colorado.

The Leafs have gone 17 seasons without winning a single playoff series, and are 0-8 in potential series winning games over that stretch.  That may sound really, really awful, but keep in mind that it’s a big league and those numbers are not all that unusual.  There are teams that have done even worse.

What the Leafs have going for them is, firstly, that they have the best winning percentage in the NHL against playoff opponents (and the worst against teams that are not going to make the playoffs), and, secondly, Matthews and Marner both have a year of additional experience and a painful awareness of how awful they were last year in seven games against Montreal (Matthews: 1 goal, 4 assists; Marner:  0 goals, 4 assists).   Matthews in particular seems determined to add more grit and aggression to his performance and seems, at times, more capable of willing himself into a more dominant role against even formidable opposition.

We’ll see.

Tonight (April 24, 2022) the Leafs beat Washington in a shoot-out despite being badly outplayed through most of the game.  The Leafs’ performance was not reassuring in reference to their playoff prospects.  My impression is that teams that are capable of tight defense tend to prevail over teams that emphasize offense.  The Leaf defense tonight was often terrible, leaving players uncovered, allowing breakaways, giving the puck away, and endless chasing in their own zone.  Quite often, Washington simply pushed Leaf players aside and took the puck.

And yet, the Leafs scored two goals in the later stages of the 3rd period, by Mikeyev and Spezza(!), including one with the net empty, to overcome a 3-1 Washington lead and take it to overtime– where they took a penalty.  In the shootout, almost everybody missed until Kerfoot managed to tuck one in to win the game.

Erik Kallgren, it must be said, did marvelously well in the shoot-out, stopping every attempt except the very first one.

I don’t get why it isn’t obvious to the Leafs that they need a different strategy for breaking up plays along the boards in their own zone.

I also can’t comprehend why anyone in the Leafs’ brain trust actually believes the back-pass on the powerplay is even remotely useful.  I’ve been watching them do this forever and it mostly fails.  Why does anyone think it is working?

 

 

 

 

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Boogaard Boogie

After Derek Boogaard died, from a combination of prescription pills and alcohol, it appears, the Minnesota Wild held a tribute to their former enforcer showing video clips from his career, including all three goals that he scored over seven years. It showed him interacting with fans and children, checking opponents hard, skating, shooting.

The tribute video–five minutes long– didn’t show a single fight.

Didn’t Don Cherry have a say in the choice of clips to show? In the context of what happened to Bob Probert Rick Rypien, Derek Boogaard and Wade Belak, Cherry’s comments earlier this season are obscene.

It has become more and more evident with research that the brain damage suffered by many NHL “enforcers” is not the accidental result of the occasional bad hit: it is endemic to the role itself, to the battering that all enforcers endure on a regular basis. It is not a matter of if but when brain damage occurs, and once it occurs it spreads, and once it spreads it cannot be stopped or rescinded. It clots the brain cells, disconnects synapses, tears at the very fabric of the tissue. It is an enormous price to pay for the fans who sit behind the glass happily jumping and waving and hooting at the destruction of a man’s personality.

Hockey at its best is the best sport: nothing else has the sustained thrust and counter-attack, intensity, elegance, or flow of an intense contest between two well-matched teams. No other sport has faster breaks, more dramatic shifts of momentum, more sheer grace than hockey when it is at its best.

Why the league would choose to sell it on the basis of grown men battering each other’s faces into oblivion is beyond all sensibility.

In my opinion, shoot-outs are pretty boring. It makes hockey more like football: let’s all just stand around and stand around and stand around– oh wait! Somebody…. never mind. Let’s stand around some more…

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The Long Lost NHL Code of Humble Celebrations

Are there people who think it’s really cool when a batter like David Ortiz stands in the batter’s box and admires his own hit? Even when it doesn’t go out. And it hits the wall in left-center field and stays in, and the delay cost Boston a base, as it did tonight against the Jays?

It’s repulsive. I hope I never see a Blue Jay do it.

I once copied a bunch of old video tapes of NHL hockey from the 1970’s to DVD for a friend at work. These were tapes of games from 30-40 years ago. The most striking thing about hockey then compared to now? When a player scored a goal, he modestly skated back to his bench, or to center ice, and his team-mates practically had to chase him down to be able to pat him on the back and congratulate him.

It was considered unseemly back then for a player to open celebrate his own achievements.

Who likes this showmanship, this preening, arrogant posturing? Are there fans out there who thrill to Ortiz’s snarling self-satisfaction? There was a near-brawl in Anaheim in late July when Jared Weaver reacted to some show-boating by Carlos Guillen by nearly beaning Alex Avila. In the head. With a fast ball.

He shouldn’t have done it. But why is there so little comment about the showboating?

I freely admit it: I hold a minority position here.  Most people I know love the showboating.  They are wrong.

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2010 Winter Olympics

The great baseball writer, Bill James, pointed out that the difference in ability between the most famous and successful ball players in the major leagues and the top tier of potential replacement players in the minor leagues is really not all that great. We think the difference is monumental– because the media give obsessive, monomaniacal attention to the players at the top level. We think, what will the Yankees do without Derek Jeter– they’ll never win another World Series! But the reality is that Jeter is only a bit better than his top potential replacement, and that difference is just a small portion of the abilities of the New York Yankees as a whole. In other words, the Yankees will generally do just about as well without Jeter as with him.

Want proof? Check out the stats of any team that trades away (or loses) one of their famous superstars. You will find that they often perform as well or even better without him.

Or all you have to do is study the stats. Pick any moment during the regular season and look at the key statistical measures of performance in baseball. Recognize all the names? Probably a few, but not all of them. Over and over again you will find the names of people you never heard of, in the top ten in the league in ERA, or OPS, or fielding percentage, or what have you. (One obvious current example: Jose Bautista from the Blue Jays leads the league in home runs.) You ask yourself, who are these nobodies? How can they possibly be in the top ten when I’ve never heard of them? The answer is, those nobodies are usually younger players who are actually performing at a higher level than their famous team-mates are. They are often actually performing better than Derek Jeter. They are often paid 1/10 or less what the famous team-mate makes.

To add to the distorting effect, established players who had big years in the past are often rewarded with huge contracts on the expectation– almost always erroneous– that they will do the same or better in the future. Then, because they have big contracts, the can’t just sit on the bench making the manager look like a fool. They must be put into the field to “prove” that the team made the right decision in giving him a big contract. Often, a superb prospect languishes on the bench, waiting for the star to come out of his slump… so he can be traded.

That seems to shock some people who seem to have this naive faith in the media to correctly size things. Why would there be 25,000 articles about Jeter and only one article about his potential replacement, if they were roughly comparable? Well, obviously because you can sell more newspapers if you can convince the general public that Jeter is very, very, very important, and that his performance on the field is nearly god-like, and that the Yankees would be a gang of pus-spurting whinnying whine-bots without him, and they need to read about him.

It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy: you will want to read about Jeter because we put him on the cover of Sports Illustrated. You will want to see “Avatar” because every general interest magazine in the country has run an article about this movie– as if they just decided to do that on their own, and you want to watch Barbara Walters interview Sandra Bulloch because Sandra Bulloch is very important and brilliant because Barbara Walters allowed her to suck up to her and snag an interview.

Which leads me to my point: it should surprise nobody that the Swiss Olympic Hockey team is competitive with both Canada and the U.S. even if most of the Swiss players are nobodies. They are not famous, but they are not all that far below the NHL’s best in terms of talent and ability, and it only seems shocking to us that Sidney Crosby couldn’t single-handedly destroy them.

The shock of the Olympics hockey tournament for me was not the Swiss or the Americans. It was Canada defeating Russia– manhandling them, really– 7-3. I cannot recall a game in which, in international competition, Canada so dominated an extremely competitive opponent. It may have been the best game ever played by a Canadian team in World competition. All right– I’m exaggerating. I don’t know. It’s just the best, most complete game I’ve ever seen Canada play. They were intense and fast and crisp and utterly at ease tearing circles around a very, very good Russian Team.

I suspect that the reason Canada had trouble with the Swiss and the Americans and the Slovakians was because they didn’t get a 3-goal lead. Instead, with a 2-goal lead, Babcock chose to go to a 1-2-2 formation and play defense. This, of course, is a repudiation of the strategy that proved successful, and an attempt to embrace a failed strategy instead. The Americans must have thought, “thank God they stopped trying to score on us– we were getting creamed.”

Baseball teams, famously, do the same thing when they bring in a defensive replacement for the good hitter who can’t field very well. If this improved your team’s chances of winning, why not do it from the start? Your good-hitting/poor-fielding player may well already have cost your team the runs that give your opponent the lead, and the defensive player won’t hit the home-run in extra-innings that wins the game. It’s not logical.

The this way, the manager can claim that he managed and take credit for good luck.

 

“I’m living proof that dreams do come true.” Ozzy Osbourne.

The most charming moment of the Olympics: Charles Hamelin’s girlfriend Marianne St-Gelais going nuts during the final laps of the 500 metre race as Hamelin pulled ahead and then hung on to take the gold medal. St-Gelais also medaled, silver, in the women’s 500m.

I would give her a medal for her performance in the stands, for pure, unadulterated joy.

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Pull the Goalies

I have been thinking about this particular problem for years. Why is it a good strategy for a hockey team to pull their goalie in the last minute of a hockey game when they are trailing by one goal, but not a good strategy at any other time?

I’ll tell you right off the bat that I have a strong suspicion that almost every one uses this strategy because it’s always been used, and everyone else does. There is not a single coach, manager, or player who has any credible proof that it’s a good strategy. All of the evidence is anecdotal and religious in nature.

I believe that it is actually a bad strategy and that a team has a better chance of tying the game by keeping their goalie in the net. Sound strange?

The assumption at work is that by removing the goal-tender and adding a skater, you thereby increase your chances of scoring to an extent that more than offsets the rather obvious disadvantage of not having a goalie and thereby increasing the other team’s chances of scoring on you.

It is immediately obvious that this strategy is flawed in terms of logic. If removing your goalie and adding a skater gave you a real advantage, teams would do it all the time. Obviously nobody does. So why do teams think that doing it in the last minute of a game is different?

In defense of the strategy, people will argue that you only pull your goalie when you have possession of the puck and you are headed for the other team’s end. They argue that the attacking team will summon remarkable strength and courage in the face of adversity that will somehow bend the rules of logic and result in an advantage that no coach, in the history of the NHL, has been able to demonstrate under any other circumstance.

Having possession of the puck improves your chances for a few seconds, but it doesn’t really address the issue. Teams obtain possession of the puck in their own end dozens of times during a game. If that strategy works in the last minute, there’s no reason why it wouldn’t work in the first minute. Why not pull your goalie every time you have possession of the puck and start a rush out of your own end? Because the other team might get the puck back and score on you? How is this different in the last minute of a hockey game?

I suppose you could argue that 60 seconds is not long enough for the other team to get a good shot at your net. If that was true, we would rarely see an empty net goal. But we see them all the time.

There is another weird consideration. The defending team will quite often change it’s style of play as well– though not as much as they used to. The defending team will suddenly retreat behind their own blue line and form a box. When they get possession, instead of rushing down the ice and trying to score– precisely what the attacking team does not want them to do– they skate up to centre and then take a pot shot at the net. Often, they take the opportunity to change lines, on the weird assumption that the other team is going to get the puck back almost immediately and renew the attack.

The shot from centre doesn’t go in very often because usually one or more members of the attacking team are able to get back on time to block it, and the defending team doesn’t try to create a sustained counter-attack. But it does go in often enough to really finish off the team that is trailing.

We will never know the truth until some coach somewhere decides to go a season or two without ever pulling the goalie. But that would require genuine leadership. It would require genuinely independent thought. It would require someone unafraid of heresy.

The NHL does not even know when the first goalie was pulled. The New York Rangers, coached by Frank Boucher, are credited with inventing the move, in 1939 or 1940 or 1941 (like I said, the NHL doesn’t know).

I wrote here that nobody tries this strategy at any time other than the end of the game, but there was a game, years ago, in which the strategy was employed throughout. The circumstances were thus: two teams were going to be tied in points on the last day of the regular season. The team with the most goals (not the best differential, I note) would be the one to advance to playoffs. So when one team realized it was going to lose this critical game, they began to pull their goalie at every opportunity, in order to try to score as many goals as possible. Think about that. In other words, they acted as if pulling the goalie really was a good strategy. But if I remember correctly, they gave up as many or more goals than they scored.

The result, of course, was a chaotic, bizarre game that called the very integrity of the sport into question. The NHL changed the rules next year to ensure that this circus would not happen again.

[Added 2008-11]

It took me a while, but I finally found an online reference to that game referred to above. It was New York in 1970, in the 1969-70 season. Eddie Giacomin was in — or out of goal. The reference I found didn’t mention the other team involved or the final score.

I came across a report about a study last year that claimed to objectively prove that the strategy of pulling your goalie was, in fact, demonstrably effective. I won’t be convinced until I have a look at the study.

[Added 2022-05]

I did find that study and analyzed it.  The study shows only a tiny, marginal benefit to pulling the goalie.  But the study has one very significant flaw:  not one single NHL team will not pull their goalie in the final minute of a close game so it cannot compare the results with teams that do.  However, the in KHL (Russian NHL) pulling the goalie is quite rare: the prevailing belief there is that it is not a net benefit.

 

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Don Cherry’s Violence in a Bottle

It is believed by some that if you ban fighting in hockey, the incidences of other infractions– high-sticking, elbowing, slashing– will increase, because hockey players have a certain amount of brutality in them, and if it doesn’t come out in the fists, it has to get out somehow. (Lord knows, Don Cherry wouldn’t want it to emerge in the form of sexual aggression or we might have hazings.)

Is that true? I don’t know of any research that supports this belief, but I’m sure that a lot of people believe it anyway because it seems to make sense and because “experts” like Don Cherry believe it.

I think it is an unexamined belief. I don’t know of any study that shows that it’s true. I know Cherry often liked to claim that European players were dirtier than their brawling North American counter-parts because instead of punching each other in the face like good honest all-American hockey players do, they supposedly hacked at each other more often with their sticks.

Don Cherry also believes that helmets’ lead to people hitting each other on the head. Why would you hit someone on the head if he didn’t have a helmet on?

To injure him?

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Cherry Pie in the Face

Hockey Night in Canada should fire Don Cherry.  The man is a complete fraud.

Don Cherry is a former NHL coach.  I emphasize the word “former”.  After short tours with the Boston Bruins and Colorado Flames, nobody wanted him anymore.  He was offered a post on Hockey Night in Canada.  He’s been there ever since, telling everyone else how to run their hockey teams.

His one virtue is he speaks his mind without thinking– if you can call that a virtue.  It is entertainment, but I wouldn’t call it a virtue.  For some reason (well, the reason is obvious– it wins viewers), Don Cherry is allowed to speak his mind on HNIC when nobody else is.  Remember Dave Hodge was fired for flipping a pencil when HNIC declined to switch to the last few minutes of an important game in Montreal instead of going to advertising.

Cherry lambastes coaches, referees, and players– especially European or Russian players–during the intermissions of hockey games.  You get the impression that if only Don Cherry were in charge of the Leafs or the Flyers or the Canadiens, the Stanley Cup would be a sure thing.

But wait a minute!  Don Cherry is in charge.  Don Cherry owns an Ontario Junior “A” hockey team called the Mississauga Ice Dogs.  Wow.  This team must be doing really great, right?

The Mississauga Ice Dogs are currently on pace to set a record all right.  It has about 8 wins.  It is about to set a record for the fewest points ever for a Junior “A” franchise.   The Ice Dogs have one of the top positions in next year’s OHL Junior “A” draft sown up.  But the most talented eligible players don’t want to play for Don Cherry’s team.

One of the biggest problems with the team is that many of the employees are members of Don Cherry’s family.  Another problem is that Don Cherry hires a coach, puts him in charge of the team’s performance, and then second-guesses all of his decisions.

And, of course, Cherry doesn’t want any Russian or European players on his team.

The result of these policies is that the Ice Dogs are the worst team in junior hockey.  Cherry should admit he doesn’t know anything about hockey.  He just mouths off at every opportunity.

It’s time for Hockey Night in Canada to bring in an expert analyst instead.

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Freddy Shero’s Legacy

The last time the Toronto Maple Leafs faced the Philadelphia Flyers in the playoffs, Roger Neilson was behind the Leafs’ bench and Fred Shero was behind the Flyers’ bench, and the series consisted mostly of a sequence of mad brawls followed by flurries of penalties and goals. The Flyers were known as the “Broad Street Bullies” for their style of hacking, hitting, and chopping their way to victory.

The Flyers won that series. This year, the Leafs won. The Leafs won a playoff series without ever scoring more than 2 goals in a single game. Ironically, this is the long-term result of the style of play popularized by those Shero Flyers years ago.

What Shero realized before anyone else did, was that the officiating in the NHL had reached a kind of regulatory quandary by the early 1970’s. The NHL was busy trying to sell hockey to expansion U.S. markets and it was widely believed that U.S. audiences were more attracted by fisticuffs and brawling than the slick play-making of teams like the Canadiens and Maple Leafs or Red Wings. So fighting was “good” for hockey. But even hockey has rules. If players like Ken Linseman of the Flyers got penalties for all the rule infractions he committed, the Flyers would lose every game.

Fights or no fights, sports fans hate losers, so the NHL had to find some way to allow the violence to continue, while giving dirty teams a chance to win.

Now, nobody that I know of ever actually came right out and said, “hey, let’s just call the same number of penalties on both teams no matter who actually breaks the rules”. They didn’t have to. You heard it from coaches and managers and sports analysts and Don Cherry. They used euphemistic phrases like, “let the boys play”, “the referee shouldn’t become part of the game”, “they play an aggressive style” (not a dirty style– “aggressive”). I’m sure that within the private offices of the NHL, more explicit instructions were issued.

The strategy was very simple. There are a thousand interactions in any particular game of hockey that could, with a stretch of the imagination, be called a penalty. So the referees would occasionally call a penalty when a thug like Dave “Hammer” Schultz tried to take somebody’s head off, but the next penalty would inevitably be called on the other team. Schultz could hook, hack, chop, grab, elbow, and punch a dozen players and get one penalty. A few minutes later, Borje Salming would lean on a player in front of the net and get called for interference. Even-steven. If a referee ever dared to call three penalties in a row on the same team, coaches, players, and managers screamed bloody murder– the referee had broken one of the unspoken rules of the game: he had actually penalized the team that committed the most infractions!

The end result was that teams like Philadelphia, and, later, New Jersey, could commit hundreds of fouls and still win, because no matter how many fouls Philadelphia committed, the other team would get just about as many penalties. Philadelphia rode this strategy to a Stanley Cup. New Jersey learned to simply mug players in the neutral zone less conspicuously than the Flyers, but it worked just as well and they won several Stanley Cups.

Well, even the NHL has some shame. After a few years of pronounced media coverage of the “Broad Street Bullies”, the NHL decided to make a relatively modest attempt to eliminate fighting. They started handing out serious penalties for actual fisticuffs, especially in the playoffs when fighting seems more… “unseemly”. But it did not eliminate the officiating style that permitted teams to get away with thousands of little infractions. Teams like New Jersey refined the schtick, with holding, interference, and obstruction, refined to a high art. Because it didn’t look as dirty as a Ken Linseman cross-check or a Bobby Clarke slash, the officials tended to let it go. New Jersey was able to win a Stanley Cup with its “neutral zone trap”. The drawbacks, however, were obvious: scoring decreased and many hockey games became nothing more than a long boring sequence of impeded skaters and incomplete passes.

The lack of scoring alarmed the NHL. Next to fighting, fans want to see scoring. They tried various strategies, adding space behind the net, trying to call more “obstruction” penalties, and so on. But ingrained habits are hard to change. The referees keep drifting back to their old style of indifference and equity, just like the umpires in baseball keep calling the same ridiculously low strike zone.

If you look at the over-time stats for the past year in the NHL, the numbers are truly embarrassing. Only a small percentage of the games ended with a victor. And everybody knows that a tie “is like kissing your sister”.

And thus we have the 1999 Toronto-Philadelphia series. During the regular season, Toronto scored more goals than any other team in the NHL. Philadelphia was in the middle of the pack, but it was clear that their strategy depended upon the ability of their huge defensemen to impede, obstruct, and interfere with their faster opponents.

It is a bit of the miracle that the Leafs won, and the way they did it is telling: they simply did to the Flyers what the Flyers intended to do to them. The Leafs only scored about six goals altogether. Well, all right: they scored about 10. They held the lead, all told, for about ten minutes over six games. Unfortunately for Philadelphia, those few minutes were always at the end of the game.

The winning difference was Curtis Joseph, who seems to be able to make the big stop when it is most needed, and the Leaf forwards, almost all of whom can shoot, who were able to get a goal when it really counted: in the last minute, or in overtime.

The biggest irony was the series deciding goal– on a power play with three minutes left. Toronto had been called for five penalties in a row in the second and third periods, and Philadelphia had been unable to cash in. If anyone had a right to complain, it was Toronto: the referees (two of them now) broke the unspoken agreement– they called real infractions, even if all of them went against the same team. When they finally did call a Flyers’ penalty, it looked like something they might have let go in the Dave Schultz era.

The Flyers complained bitterly about it afterwards. They ought to be ashamed of themselves. They lost the series because of their pathetic inability to score during five consecutive man advantages, including 3 in a span of 7 minutes, not because of the one Leaf goal at the end.

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Black Eye for Canadian Athletes at the Olympics

CBC Radio just reported on a “visit” by Canadian Olympic athletes to a Japanese elementary school near Nagano. This event had been planned months ago and the school had been told that even Wayne Gretzsky and his wife might show up.

Well, the only people who showed up were a few Olympic Committee Functionaries and Atina Ford, an alternate on the Canadian Women’s Curling team. The entire event became a dismal embarrassment to all concerned. The children had prepared elaborate gifts and ceremonies, and games designed to include the honored athletes. The teachers had brushed up on their English and arranged an assembly and invited parents.

Atina Ford saved the day to some extent. She is a teacher by profession, and she quickly gathered the children around her and got some games started and had the children laughing and clapping. The Japanese were exceedingly polite and gracious, but there was no hiding the crushing disappointment, especially among the staff of the school who had been preparing for the event for three weeks.

I surprised myself at how ashamed I felt about the behaviour of the Canadian athletes, far, far more ashamed than I did about Ross Rebagliati testing positive for marijuana. In the back of my mind, I think I understand how busy their lives are and how it must feel to have everyone clamoring for a piece of you all the time. But this story twists a knife in your guts. Maybe it’s because we do know how busy our athletes are: signing endorsement contracts, going to parties, receiving congratulatory calls from the Prime Minister, posing for pictures, exchanging Olympic paraphernalia with other athletes, meeting with their agents, their trainers, their personal chef, or whatever… and none of them had a few moments to spare for a group of hopeful Japanese school children?

I just know that when our athletes find out about this humiliating situation, a number of them will step forward and immediately schedule a visit to the school as soon as possible. If they do, we’ll know they really do have class, and all will be forgiven. If they don’t, I know what my strongest memory of these Olympic games is going to be.

* * *

What’s all this blather about how beautiful and elegant and graceful the figure skaters are? As far as I’m concerned, Joan McCusker of the curling team is the only goddess on ice at these Olympic games.

 

* * *

The Canadian men’s hockey team is far more dominant than I think most people give them credit for. I’ll go on record: they will stroll into the Gold Medal. Remember, you heard it here first.

March 8, 1998: Obviously, I was wrong. However, I will observe that Canada lost to the eventual champions, Czechoslovakia, by the slimmest of margins. Then they lost an embarrassment to the Fins, but did anybody really believe the Canadians cared deeply about the Bronze medal?

* * *

The Canadian women’s hockey team deserved to lose, but I wish they had won just so I wouldn’t have had to watch the U.S. women actually sing their national anthem after receiving their medals. Don’t they know that you’re supposed to just move your lips up and down vaguely so, just in case anyone accused you of patriotism, you could always say you were mouthing the Lord’s Prayer or just chewing gum instead?

Anyway, Women’s hockey should not be an Olympic sport. There were only two countries in serious contention. It was a medal giveaway for the U.S. and Canada. Come back when there are at least six contenders.