Your Semi-Regular Reminders

Things sports fans need to be reminded of...

What Your Choice of Pittsburgh Penguins Jersey Is Really Saying For You

NHL replica hockey jerseys are expensive.

Hockey used to have a real working-class ethic in the US; historically when someone says "hockey fan" they think of a guy missing a couple of teeth who has to get up early to unload railcars or something, when in fact there are a lot more NHL fans who look like Margot Robbie than you would imagine.

Staaled Out

To quote a video game a friend of mine wrote, do you want to know what the definition of insanity is? Roughly speaking, it's trying to win year after year with the same core of "stars" that has failed to make the playoffs in ages.

The MOST IMPORTANT sporting news YOU WILL EVER READ!

Before:

Heart to Heart

In the NHL preseason, Rich Peverly of the Dallas Stars underwent a procedure to address an irregular heartbeat.  Medical professionals monitored his health throughout the season.  It wasn't enough.  Less than a minute after finishing a shift 6 minutes into tonight's game against the Columbus Blue Jackets, he collapsed on the Stars' bench, and the ensuing emergency and concern caused the game to be called (it's postponed until an as yet unscheduled time).  For the record, he is alive and as well as can be expected in this situation.  When he came to and was able to talk to Stars' coach Lindy Ruff, he asked about the progress of the game.  You can't say for sure that there was no damage, but it's a good sign, I think.

Short term, this game was postponed, and Dallas' game tomorrow against St. Louis may also be postponed.  I'm not sure about tomorrow, but today, anyone suggesting any other course of action is wrong.  This impacts fans, and the teams, but those things are manageable.

The medium term repercussions are obvious.  Peverly will be out for some time to recover and determine his future with regards to hockey.  He's not a prolific scorer, but he has 30 points in the season, that's important.  Dallas' players will have to manage their emotional state, after experiencing an event like this.  Game schedules will have to be rearranged.

Long term, the NHL and the organizations involved in this come out smelling like roses.  He survived, with most if not all of his faculties intact.  His wife was present at the arena or at least able to get to the hospital with him.  The management of this medical emergency couldn't have been better, and the NHL is acknowledging the concern of the fans, both for Peverly as a person and for the more business oriented side of things.  I reserve judgement on how they will handle the people who came to see a game and only got just over 6 minutes of hockey.  But I think they'll do the right thing, for once.

10 Things We Learned About Hockey At Sochi

1. Going into the Olympics, people figured the US men's team was maybe the 3rd-4th best, with a puncher's chance of bringing home gold. Halfway through, after the US beat up on the international hockey equivalent of Louisiana-Monroe and got a lucky break against Russia, they were the favorite for gold. They ran into some teams that could play defense and ended up 4th, which is pretty much A)the story of U of Miami's football season and B)what we all expected in the first place. And yet, somehow this has become a tremendous disappointment. Perspective. It ain't what it used to be.

He's My Cherry Pie!

Don Cherry is an idiot.

He says that the 15 game suspension to Shawn Thornton was too much.  Now, let's get the accusations of Homerism out of the way:  yes, I am a fan of the Pittsburgh Penguins.  Yes, Thornton concussed Brooks Orpik, who is a Pens player.  Therefore, I can be accused of bias.  Let me nip that in the bud here:

1>  No player deserves to get slewfooted, knocked down and punched in the head twice while flat on his back on the ice.  Ever.  Not even Eric Lindros.

2>  James Neal got 5 games for kneeing Brad Marchand in the same game.  That's hardly enough.

3>  Puck Daddy (Yahoo's hockey blog) agrees with 15 games.

To get back to Don Cherry, this is a guy gets mad when the Toronto Maple Leafs don't have any players from Ontario.  Talk about Homerism.  No wonder they missed the playoffs for so many years.

Another point against him:  You fight, you get hurt.  Really?  I think fighting has its place in the NHL, but the guy is basically condoning concussions.

He's a dinosaur that needs to shut the hell up, and preferably soon.

I wear my visor in a fight*

The NHL has implemented a rule where, if a player gets in a fight (where they get a 5 minute major for fighting, instead of the 2 minute roughing call) and removes his helmet, he gets an additional 2 minute minor for unsportsmanlike conduct.

It's been stated that the reason for this rule is to avoid concussions.  But it's really just a way to penalize fighting even more than it already is.  And I think it's a dumb idea.

Let's be clear here:  the staged fights you see when the guys drop their gloves just after a face-off need to stop.  The players are transparently attempting to pump up the energy of the team, and it's generally transparent.  Although this one (Max Talbot vs. Dan Carcillo in 2009) was an example of one that broke that mold, leading to the Pens eliminating the Flyers.

But a spontaneous fight, where the players just start smacking the living bejeebies out of each other because one guy smashed the other guy into the boards, that almost always results in a momentum shift.

There are also logistical issues with this.  What happens when a guy knocks the other player's helmet off?  What happens if the cause of the fight was a guy high-sticking someone and knocking it off?  Are they penalized then?

I think it's a bad rule, and the NHL should feel bad.




*Sung to the tune of that great 80s hit "Sunglasses at Night".  Yeah, it's a reach.  Deal with it.

You Dropped a Bomb On Me, Baby...

Dig if you will, a picture, of the Boston Bruins and the Chicago Blackhawks engaged in a triple overtime thriller in Chicago.  It’s past midnight on the east coast, and everyone is thinking “End this!  I have to get to work in the morning!”  Andrew Shaw of the Blackhawks delivers a redirection that goes in on Tukka Rask, ending the game.  This being on NBC, Pierre Macguire jumps over the boards, or at least climbs over them slowly, and grabs the guy who potted the game winning goal.  “Tell me about the goal.”  Standard stuff.

Andrew Shaw then drops an f-bomb on national TV.  LIVE!  OH THE HUMANITY!

Two days later, TWO DAYS, there’s an article on Puck Daddy, Yahoo! Sports’ hockey blog, about how Shaw’s mother and the mayor of his hometown ‘absolve him’ for popping the f-word¹.  According to wikipedia, a network is not required to censor foul language between 10PM and 6AM.  So, evidently people are up in arms over something the FCC doesn’t care about.  You know, the FCC with the over-strict decency rules.

David Ortiz got away with it after the Boston Marathon bombings, and that was during prime-time.  So, I think Andrew Shaw gets a pass on this one.

¹ I’m aware of the irony of complaining about censorship and then self-censoring by not using the word in question.  I didn’t want to fuck up and offend someone.²

² Oops.

Pens-Islanders Game 5

Last night the Pittsburgh Penguins played the New York Islanders in game 5 of their 7-game series.  The series had been tied 2-2 going in.  The Pens won 4-0.  Some disconnected observations:

• Marc-Andre Fleury looked distracted and slow in the Penguins 6-4 loss in game 4. Backup Tomas Vokoun was an absolute wall, by contrast. Vokoun made very few spectacular diving upside-down Spider-Man saves in Game 5, but he never got so far out of position that he was forced to do such nonsense.

Guest Post: Don't Leaf Me This Way

From Friend of Sportsthodoxy Bill Fisher

Last night, in the NHL, the New Jersey Devils played the Toronto Maple Leafs. The Leafs haven’t won a Stanley Cup since I was 5 weeks old. I did the math. This year, they’re going to make the playoffs. They won’t win the Cup; there are too many better teams out there (like, say, the Penguins, the Blackhawks, the Separatists...I mean the Canadiens). The Devils aren't going to make the playoffs, so they’re not going to win the Cup either.

The interesting thing about the game last night is that the Leafs had 13 shots on goal. That’s about half as many shots on goal as you might expect to see. The Devils had 32 SOG, in comparison. Why the big difference in number of shots? To paraphrase the Admiral in charge of the Rebel forces at the Battle of Endor, “IT’S THE TRAP!”

A quick summary of the Neutral Zone Trap, as created by the Devils: one forward covers the puck carrier, preventing a pass down the ice. The rest of the team clogs up the boards (2 per side) so that a side pass can be broken up easily and stop the attack. Now that the two-line pass is allowed, the trap is less effective, so instead, defensive-minded teams switch to a ‘third man high’ system, where effectively they have three defenders.

Neither of these defensive structures is at all entertaining.

One thing that makes hockey interesting is the natural speed of the sport. This year, the fastest skater in the NHL went about 30 MPH (I had to do more math). And he’s got knives on his feet. You don’t want to mess with a guy with knives on his feet (unless you have them too). Now, let’s take that really fast guy with knives on his feet and have him skate at 30 MPH into a brick wall. That’s entertaining once. Maybe twice. Then, you just feel bad for the guy bloodying his manly chin on a boring brick wall.

Maybe in the next year or two, we can hope the Devils will move out of a defensive mindset and start being more offensive. Although, being from New Jersey, maybe they’re already offensive enough.

A Visit to the Hockey Hall of Fame

You know you want to touch it...

The Hockey Hall of Fame doesn't want you to find it.
You can see the outside of its Great Hall from the street, easily enough. Walk down that sidewalk on Yonge and you're mere meters from the Stanley Cup. But that's not where the door is. No, to get inside, you need to go around the corner, into a mall, down the escalator into a food court, reverse direction (without signage) and then and only then will you see the two smiling young ladies who are happy to take your ticket money, sell you a program, and let you into the Hockey Hall of Fame. At no point did I need to wander into a disused lavatory with a sign that read "Beware of the Leopard", but it was a near thing.

***

Pens-Lightning

Monday night I attended the first hockey game that I've seen at the Consol Energy Center*. The Pittsburgh Penguins played the Tampa Bay Lightning. Although the Pens have sold out their last 260+ games, tickets aren't too hard to come by (they're downright easy to get online at a minimal markup). It's just that I'm super-lazy.

Random observations:

Pittsburgh fans know their hockey. They cheered when Pascal Dupuis managed to get the puck juuust far enough forward to avoid an icing call when his line was gassed and needed a change.

The steepness of the nosebleed
section gave my wife vertigo

Maybe I watch too much soccer**, but the number of stoppages in play and TV timeouts are far more annoying at the arena than they are when watching on TV.

The in-arena intermission balloons have gotten bigger since my last hockey game. I saw the ghost of Steve Fossett dangling from one of them.

Hockey players are terrible at nicknames.  Kris Letang is "Tanger," James Neal is "Nealer," Tyler Kennedy is "TK." Jordan Staal, when he was here, was known as "Staalsie," and when he left he was replaced by Brian Sutter, who is known as "Sutsie." Really.  If other sports adopted hockey-style nicknames we'd be reading about Strassburger and Beat-a-double-murder-rap-sie***.

I find the nickname "Sid the Kid" annoying, so that leaves us with only two Penguins players with decent nicknames: goaltender Marc-Andre Fleury is "Flower," and center Evgeni Malkin is "Geno."  ("Geno" is such a yinzer nickname for the Russian Evgeni that it almost hurts.) Flower and Geno both had great games last night.

Malkin, as you may know, had been out for the last week with a concussion suffered in the Pens' previous game against the Lightning****. Malkin's unassisted tying goal in the third period was one of the most exciting hockey plays I've seen since watching Jaromir Jagr score while sliding on his face in the late 90s.



This was a good time. In theory I'm buying into a season-ticket plan next year and I'll get to five games. Can't wait.

* I saw a few games at the old Igloo. The Consol Center is a serious step up.
** I watch too much soccer
*** And with that the "number of posts since the last Ray Lewis joke" meter resets to zero
**** Fans around me assumed that this concussion, rather than casual barbarity, was the cause of Deryk Engelland's dustup with Pierre-Cedric Labrie about twenty seconds into the game.

Redemption, or Not

(inspired by a Twitter conversation with Hal Mangold (@AtomicOvermind) who has been threatening to write for us for years in much the same way Vermont keeps threatening to secede)

Hockey's an unusual sport in a lot of ways. It's played on a sheet of ice; the players wear razor-sharp blades and collide with one another all the time; it's so exhausting that a one-minute shift is considered long. And it's the only sport that Québécois parents allow their children to play*.

Violence isn't unique to hockey, certainly. Longtime readers** know that I dwell overmuch on the long-term effects of injury in the NFL. Hockey suffers similarly.

But really, only in hockey do you have the guy with the designated role "enforcer," or "thug."  The guy whose job it is to try to injure other players, or to retaliate against those that have injured your players.  The guy whose job it is to pick fights with the guys in the other shirts.

Matt Cooke isn't exactly the Pittsburgh Penguins' enforcer.  But he has a reputation as an instigator, and as a dirty player, based on hits like this one:

Penguins management didn't protest the suspensions that Cooke received from this hit and another, near the end of the 2010-2011 season. Cooke was known for committing these kinds of fouls, but the Pens front office was getting tired of it.  Especially after a couple of deliberate head-shots that ended up damaging superstar Sidney Crosby's brain.  Crosby ended up losing over a year of playing time, and the Penguins joined the chorus calling for greater penalties for headshots.

Penguins GM Ray Shero said, essentially, that he wasn't going to try to protect Matt Cooke anymore; he didn't want Cooke committing these kinds of hits, and that Cooke didn't have much of a future as a Penguin if he didn't shape up.

And then something amazing happened: Cooke shaped up.

In the 2010-2011 season, Cooke played 67 games. He had 129 penalty minutes, roughly one 2-minute minor per game. He scored 30 points***.  That's less than half a point per game.  He only played 67 games, in part because of 14+ games worth of suspension.

In the 2011-2012 season, Cooke played all 82 games.  He had 44 penalty minutes -- that's around one minor penalty every 4 games, and the lowest total of his career.  He also scored 38 points, the second-highest total of his NHL career.  Cooke became a Penguins attacker worth taking seriously.

He spent a lot of time watching film, reviewing his hits, and figuring out ways to play effectively without always going for the biggest his possible.  He also received counseling and therapy in light of his suspension and his wife's life-threatening kidney illness.

The 2013 season has been a weird one, of course, thanks to the lockout. It's hard to extrapolate players' statistics for the season based on just the 14 games the NHL has had so far this season.

Before last night, Cooke's penalty minutes per game remained low (8 minutes in 13 games); his scoring is below his average from last year.  But then last night Cooke went somewhat recklessly into Ottawa's Erik Karlsson, and Cooke's skate blade went 3/4 of the way through Karlsson's achilles tendon.  Karlsson's out for at least the next 3 months. He may have lost his season.

Hockey fans -- particularly including Ottawa fans -- went nuts. Same old Cooke. Last year must have just been an aberration. He's a dirty player, he should be thrown out of the league, he did it on purpose, etc.

The NHL said there was no sign of intent.  Cooke was penalized, but he won't be suspended.

I don't know.  The Matt Cooke we've seen over the last hundred games isn't the same guy we had on our hands before. Which guy committed the hit last night?

Once somebody turns around, how many screwups are they allowed?

* I kid. The Québécois and me go way back. I believe they're also permitted to play badminton.

** Both of them!
*** For those unfamiliar with hockey, players are credited with one point for a goal or an assist.

Wins & Losses

Listen, hockey fans, or recent convertees to hockey fandom*. I know that many of you are fans of American football, a sport in which you only get 16 regular-season games.  In a sport with so few regular-season games, every win indicates that your team is ULTIMATE AWESOME MONGO POWER and every loss indicates that you SUCK FOREVER AND FIRE THE COACH WHAAARGARBLE.

But in hockey, even in this Godforsaken year, we still get 48 games.  Your team is going to lose some of them. Don't panic.

It may feel like five losses when your team loses to the Maple Leafs 5-2.

But I checked the rulebook! It still only counts as one loss. Even when you lose to the Maple Leafs 5-2. Even when -- and I double-checked this -- both your biggest stars score, in your home opener before a record sellout crowd. Still just one loss. Still got 45 games left in the season. Don't panic.  Hockey's not football.

* I don't know who this would be. Presumably the lockout alienated a bunch of casual fans. Typically such things don't increase fandom. But maybe you like Wil Wheaton or something and have decided that if a guy THAT cool likes hockey, you should check it out? I don't know. Moving on.

Games

I took the kids to see The Hunger Games over the weekend. Excellent movie, and very true to the book. Jennifer Lawrence was excellent and I particularly enjoyed Elizabeth Banks's work as well.

As you no doubt know by now, in the dark future of The Hunger Games, a group of teenagers is forced to fight, suffer, be maimed, and die in a televised competition for the general public's entertainment.

It's a good thing it's fiction. How barbaric it would be if that were real!

Dudes Who Are Preternaturally Good At Their Thing

Lionel Messi is arguably the greatest soccer player in the world. One of the things that makes him great is that he refuses to go down even when being fouled. Plenty of soccer players "dive," that is, hurl themselves to the ground and pretend to have been grievously fouled after the slightest contact. Not Messi.

The Pittsburgh Penguins' Evgeni Malkin suffers a bit by sharing a team with Sidney Crosby. Malkin is merely incredible while Sid is unearthly. Sid's out, though, and Evgeni has stepped up his game something ferocious. Shades of Mario Lemieux.