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Hawks are at home, and so maybe this should wait until their return engagement, but fuck, I might forget it. The clock is running out on the good old Nassau Coliseum, and this makes me sad. I have a soft spot for the Islanders and a weird fascination with Long Island as a cultural entity. It's a monster of a book, but I feel that The Power Broker is one of the most important pieces of American writing and necessary in understanding why our country, particularly our suburbia, looks the way it does today (namely, that Long Island's roads were designed by a man who didn't drive). In an ironic twist, I logged my hours and hours of reading it on Amtrak trips. As for the team itself, there's a tragic beauty to the way they were built from the ground up out of nothing but a desire to cockblock the WHA, and then won four straight championships before fading away and spiraling into year after year after year after year of abject humiliation. Take your pick: no series wins since 1993, the fisherman sweater, selling the team to a guy who lied about having money and went to prison for it, the Alexei Yashin buyout, the Rick DiPietro buyout, the Rick DiPietro career. But they still have their four straight Cups, and they'll tell everyone about those glory days every single chance they get as they sit and fail in their dying suburban wasteland. They're Al Bundy.
I always thought it was neat that Long Island had its own team, and now, even though the Barclays Center sits on top of a LIRR terminal, they're going to be a Brooklyn team, engaging in the same bald-faced pandering to the precious little shits that populate that borough nowadays. They're even doing all their advertising in stark black/white and the Nets' signature typeface. They've already played a preseason game in Brooklyn, and it's horrible. Due to cost-cutting, the Nets' architects had to design the seating bowl to be basketball-only, even though they knew the Isles were probably coming in anyway. The end result is that you have people in the upper deck who can't see past their own blue line, corners at angles that make no sense, and a sea of empty space behind the home goalie's net. Meanwhile, Nassau, for all its faults (leaking roof, asbestos), was designed for hockey and pretty much hockey only, with basketball, concert acoustics, and corporate blowjob suites hardly taken into consideration. It's a relic of a grittier, grimier NHL that hadn't yet gotten around to worshiping at the altar of big business. And yet the terrible reality is that while no one can actually see the game they're paying to see, the luxury suites are expected to increase the Isles' revenue geometrically.
So it sucks that they're going into such a paradoxically good and bad situation just as they're on the cusp of doing something really special with the pieces they've put together. I guess imagine if Wirtz died and so the Blackhawks somehow started playing their games at Loyola's fieldhouse. They're good hockey fans out on the isle, and it's about time they get to see a decent team again. (True, they had those Yashin & Friends teams in the early '00s that were designed to finish eighth, collect playoff revenue, and go away quietly, but no one cares about that.) Also, if you ever get a chance to drop in on MSG+, Howie Rose is one of the better hockey voices around. He, like Foley, sort of gets lost in the shuffle to the rest of the country that always gets Forslund or Beninati or the execrable Doc Emrick, but, also like Foley, has accrued the credentials to tell shit like it is sometimes and just lay into people and teams. Guy got his start with WFAN and now calls the Mets in the summer and the Isles in the winter. What suffering. Mac or B&B should really have him on in advance of their second game.
ANYWAY THE GAME. It's a battle of old Russian goalies, as Khabibulin will take the first half of the back-to-back while Evgeni Nabokov starts for Long Island. Our penalty kill is shitty. It should work on being less shitty. Rozsival should get to playing again already. Hayes is useless and should stop being here. Handzus is old and slow and it's getting more and more inexcusable that we're not going Saad-Sharp-Hossa on the second line.
John Tavares is one of the best players in the league. Matt Moulson is his passenger and nothing more, but knows it and will be set up for dangerous plays. Kyle Okposo has been a pretty good player for what feels like some time now. Cizikas seems to be their Shaw type, and I heard his name a lot in the playoffs last year.
I don't want to say the Hawks need to win this game, but they're five points back of the Colorado Avalanche, who are doing their annual thing where they treat every goal like it won the Stanley Cup, then everyone smacks them around, and they go back to sucking. I still think this is the weakest of the four divisions by far, but it'd be nice if the Hawks didn't settle for that.
_________________ Molly Lambert wrote: The future holds the possibility to be great or terrible, and since it has not yet occurred it remains simultaneously both.
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