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And when she talked about about the fall, I thought she talked about Mark E. Smith. I never understood at all.
Unusual engagement tonight, as the Hawks are at home on a Saturday night and the Leafs are on the road. Traditionally, the Saturday night Leafs home game was as much an institution of time and place as a 1:20 first pitch on channel 9, while Saturday nights in Chicago belong to the Bulls, but it's not Bulls season yet and the CBC has been feeling the heat in recent years to break up the "Hockey Night in Toronto" monotony, if not to stop spending taxpayer money on NHL rights altogether. But just as if it were in Tronna, WUNNA DOSE GREAT SIX A'CLAHCK STARTS PAT to accommodate the grand old CBC. Game's on 9 for us and the NHL Network for everyone else, and I'll bet you a chocolate malt that the secondary markets that get CSN Chicago but not the channel 9 feed of WGN (Rockford, downstate towns, South Bend, Milwaukee) are blacked out of the NHL Network feed and thus quite dicked.
Realignment will guarantee two games a year between Chicago and Toronto, as it will for Chicago and Detroit, as it will for even Chicago and the Hurricanes. (Ironically, realignment is supposed to "emphasize division rivalries," ostensibly by shortening season series from six to four/five and then taking them away from a bunch of teams.) Under the old schedule matrix, there were only 18 interconference games, one per team with three extras, which for the Canadian teams were used to make sure they played one another home and away at least once (this doesn't count the Jets, who had to play as a displaced Atlanta team for two years and only got around to visiting Edmonton two weeks ago). The Leafs left the Western Conference in '98, and years in which one team didn't even visit the other pretty much killed the old Norris/Original Six rivalry for good. This new matrix won't bring it back from the dead; it's more like digging up some old photos from the crawlspace that you didn't remember taking. I'm too young to have experienced it in earnest firsthand, but there was a stretch when I was in high school where ESPN Classic was always showing old Hawks-Leafs games, and they seemed so much more intense and meaningful than any Nashville equivalents. Also, Maple Leaf Gardens had to be the Tiger Stadium of rinks: people romanticized it for its longevity far more than for any intrinsic old-timey charm. What a dump!
One more not-quick note on realignment. I think it's bullshit. Having to explain the wonky new playoff system to people is a headache. The forced 14/16 split is ridiculous, and for all the talk about how the loss of the Red Wings and upstart Blue Jackets would turn the West into a junior circuit, it's the Eastern Conference that's the runny shits to start the year, losing something like two thirds of the interconference games to date and featuring Buffalo, Jersey, and Philly teams that are so wretched that just to watch their games will prematurely turn your hair white. This is all because the Wings and Jackets were being bitches about having to televise late-starting road games. I'm sure it sucks for people to stay up until 12:30 to watch a Kings game, but staying up until 11:30 is no walk in the park for the CTZ, and yet we still have to, if we so choose. Maybe there just shouldn't be so many western places to go in such a decidedly East Coast league. Unfortunately, this league has a love affair with square pegs, so I expect them to rectify the 14/16 split with two more western teams while the highest demand and readiness for pro hockey is still, now as always, back east. It's a mess.
The Maple Leafs, however, are not a mess. After almost a decade out of the playoffs and a few years of simply alarming mismanagement under Brian Burke, they made it back in last year only to boot a late lead in Round 1 Game 7 to the Bruins. They've really come strong out of the chute this year, having traded for Next Big Thing Jonathan Bernier to shore up in net and our own Dave Bolland for the bottom six, plus paying way too much in free agency for David Clarkson to stand in front of the net and deflect shots off his ass. Even though Burke is mercifully out of MLSE, his toadies in truculence Davey Nonis and Randy Carlyle are still running the show in his blustery stead, so the Leafs continue to play like troglodytes under the pretense of "tough Canadian hockey." It's a little like Burke's old Ducks teams from a few years ago with all the senseless fouls and fights, but without the elite talent of Getzlaf, Perry, Selanne, Pronger, SNiedermayer, and Giguere. Phil Kessel and Dion Phaneuf are no slouches, and they're obviously doing something right to have 12 points and a +9 in a tough division, but it's not the same just yet, if it ever will be.
Hossa missed practice yesterday, which gave the One-Armed Q-dit a spin and yielded something like a Shaw-Toews-Smith first line or something similarly inscrutable. You'd like for Pirri to dress again on the heels of a pretty good game against the Blues. Bollig is a lock to get punched in the face. I'm learning to tolerate Joakim Nordstrom, but that could be Stockholm syndrome (wordplay intended), and I still can't tolerate calling him "Joe-Kimm" like Noah when it's supposed to be "yo-WAH-kim."
Small sample sizes ahoy!
Leafs are 6-2-0, adjusted 5-2-1, and at a pythagorean expectation of 11.198 they're essentially doing exactly what their scoring says they should be
Hawks are 4-1-2, adjusted 3-1-3, and are at 8.298 points in expectation, minor overachievement
Leafs have scored 28 and are averaging 3.5 goals per game, good for 6th in the league, while allowing 19, or 2.375 per game, 10th in the league.
Hawks have scored 19 and are averaging 2.714 goals per game, 16th in the league, 16 allowed, 2.286 per game, 9th in the league.
Leafs power play is 2nd in the league with a 29% conversion rate, 9 goals on 31 tries over 50:06, 7th in time spent...power-playing?
Hawks power play is 15th with 18.5%, 5/27 across 43:47, which ranks 16th.
Leafs kill is 4th, 27/31 for 87.1% across 53:23, which rank 26th in...how do you say this...time not spent killing penalties? They're slobs.
Hawks kill is 29th, yowza, 15/21 for 71.4%. This is across 28:53, which is 4th, and when you process this with the piss-poor rate and the understanding that allowing a goal on a two-minute minor terminates uneven strength, doesn't make you feel good. It's not so much that the Hawks are staying out of the box (26 minors ties them for 9th, which is good, not great) as they're just giving up goals really fast when they are there.
This marks the eighth game and sixth at home, which is an uneasy balance for me. It's good that they're getting points, but "it's good that they're getting points" is what you should be saying about road games whilst saying "fuckin' beat the shit out of those guys, huh" after home games. That this will also be the sixth game of eight against an Eastern team (with two more to come next week on the Florida vacation) also confounds things a bit, as it's hard to think about points given and taken when most of the points they've given have no impact on our side of the newly byzantine standings. In the ones that do, the ones exclusively against St. Louis, they're -3, but +6 against the East. I suppose we won't really get a feel for what this team is made of until they start logging some Western road games, which, short of two quick there-and-back jaunts to St. Paul and Winnipeg, doesn't really happen in earnest until the circus trip. Until then, I guess there's nothing to do but to just get points.
_________________ 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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And of course Bickell is the guy to pot the first biscuit.
