🏒 And… right on schedule, the NHL’s Department of Player Safety delivers another laughable slap on the wrist, this time rewarding the Devils’ Evan Rodrigues for his blatant, Zorro-like spear to the throat area of Vancouver’s Marco Rossi. No one should be surprised. Rodrigues spent the previous three seasons skating for the Florida Idiots, where such tactics were commonplace. Equally ridiculous was the officials’ decision to assess only a double minor for high-sticking.Watch the replay here. If that isn’t spearing, what is?
🏒 Over the past five NHL regular seasons, Juuse Saros leads all goalies with 311 starts, followed by Connor Hellebuyck (309), Andrei Vasilevskiy (296), Ilya Sorokin (281) and Igor Shesterkin (277). Three Russians, one Finn and one American. Not a Canadian in sight. For a country that likes to call itself the home of hockey, we seem to have misplaced the keys to the goalie factory.
🏒 If an NHL power forward won 16 of 17 puck battles in the trenches, he’d be considered untouchable when other teams came calling with trade offers. Yet only days after Toronto’s John Tavares won 16 of 17 faceoffs against Nashville, multiple talking heads and writers are calling for him to move to left wing, citing his age and questionable foot speed. Granted, Tavares’ first few steps from a standing start are hardly elite. Then again, they never were. But as this highlight confirms, once he gets moving, he has no trouble getting where he needs to go.What do winning puck battles and winning faceoffs have in common? Puck possession. Which tends to come in handy when you’re trying to win a hockey game. Perhaps that deserves a little more attention than Tavares’ time in the 40-yard dash.
🏒 One of the best gigs in baseball has to be first base coach. You get an up-close view of the action, remind the newly arrived runner how many outs there are, and yell “Back!” whenever the pitcher attempts a pickoff. Nice work if you can get it. Does hockey offer a similarly glamorous assignment? You bet. Meet the Penalty Box Guy. Between opening and closing the gates to the sin bin, he enjoys a front-row seat to players exchanging vulgar insults, offers the current inmate a sip of water or an ice pack for his bleeding knuckles, and even gets a little camera time when handing the referees their tablets for a video review. Yep, the official Penalty Box Guy. All the perks of NHL employment without ever having to explain a power play. A career that would make any parent proud.
🏒 Speaking of the PWHL, we sometimes wonder what pioneering hockey broadcaster Foster Hewitt would make of his famous signature call “He shoots, he scores!” becoming “She shoots, she scores!” Then again, he might be equally perplexed by the now common “He shoots, he scores, it’s under review”
🏒 We’re not nearly as quick as some hockey pundits to slap the “injury-prone” label on a player. Most hockey injuries are random, which is why some players rarely miss a start, while others have endured more than their fair share of injuries. Recurring problems deserve scrutiny, of course. But a broken hand from a slash, a knee damaged in an awkward collision and a foot fractured by a blocked shot don’t necessarily reveal some fatal flaw in a player’s durability. Sometimes they reveal that he plays hockey. Yet when that player becomes a free agent, his injury history is suddenly treated as a guaranteed indication of things to come. “Signing him? Too risky. Move along” they say. Nonsense. Yesterday’s bad luck doesn’t guarantee tomorrow’s injury. And a spotless injury record doesn’t come with a lifetime warranty.
🏒 How did the famous “Gordie Howe Hat Trick” (a goal, an assist, a fighting major) find its celebrated place in hockey lore anyway? After all, the truth is he only did it twice. I don’t recall any baseball historians referring to a bunt single, a home run, and a caught stealing play as a “Babe Ruth Hat Trick”. Then again, the only thing Babe might have stolen was a hot dog and beer when his manager wasn’t looking his way.
🏒 Without the aid of actual statistics, we remain convinced that NHL skaters approaching the net on high-speed breakaways are putting the puck into the back of the net far more often than the slow, meandering shoot-out attempts that have become far too common. Most of these boring game-on-the-line attempts are an embarrassment to the sport. Are players actually focused on winning the game, or are they trying to out-style or out-cool or out-dangle their counterparts? Is an appearance on YouTube more important than two points in the standings? No wonder Tampa’s Nikita Kucherov described today’s game as “very dumb” and “low IQ”.
