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I feel like I've used this Magnetic Fields song already. Oh well, I don't care. It's a game thread for the fucking Perds, we'll be lucky to break 16 posts on the night.
Predators fans are a weird lot. They're oddly impressed by their mediocrity, as if anything they do that's better than losing all 82 games is a cause for celebration and a reason to extend both No Neck and Dye Job into the 25th century. I'll spar with them on the internet and be like "don't you think it's time to go from Point B to Point C and finally have a coach who doesn't just play to not lose?" and it's always this same smug "um, excuse me. We're an emerging market. We have an internal cap. To get the results we get with such limited resources...yeah, I think we'll keep doing what we're doing." Okay, fine, enjoy spinning your wheels forever. I don't give a shit. Better for us. Worse for the rest of the league who has to watch this dead spot keep slogging their way to 93 points and a first-round out because God forbid anyone fire Barry Trotz, the greatest coach who ever lived for getting a team with Shea Weber and Ryan Suter to beat Anaheim in the first round once. And they love that they coordinate "you suck" chants. Wow, you're creative.
This year's forward corps is particularly galling in its island-of-misfit-toys nature: behold, Matt Cullen, Matt Hendricks, Viktor Stalberg, Eric Nystrom. I mean, these are the sorts of names that just sort of float around in the ether of the hockey mind because you hear them and they register as NHL players but you don't really associate anything with them. That's my assessment of Stalberg and he fucking played here for three years. Man, my guy Sam Fels really swung and missed casting his lot with Stalberg and ripping on Shaw these last couple years, didn't he? I get that he was going for a Bernstein thing where he disavows the hard-working fire-and-the-passion fan favorite and talks up the "complicated" project who is unjustly marginalized for not being a white anglophone American, but the problem with that was that in hockey, sometimes the hard-working guy really is better because a certain kind of working hard can really pay off, as we saw with a guy who gets to the front of the net and cleans up garbage vis-a-vis a guy who speeds down the ice and forgets what to do next. Stalberg has been a healthy scratch in Nashville on multiple occasions, by the way. They look solid at defense with Weber, Josi, Klein, and Jones. Hutton and Mezanec have been filling in for Rinne (still out with E. coli in his hip) admirably as of late, but I don't trust that to hold up with Carter Hutton much longer. They're outplaying their scoring differential by a significant margin, and that rarely lasts over the course of a season. Bottom line, though, they're going nowhere this year as an average team in a loaded division/conference, but they have no assets worth renting out, so they'll just do their thing all year and nothing will matter. Oddly effective power play, though, which I'll wager comes from Weber firing slapshots and either scoring on them or having someone up front deflect them in.
Bickell is back in the lineup, so it sounds like he'll be at #3LW and put Saad slightly out of position. Sounds like Kostka will play at #6D and help to bust up the left-wing lock better than Rozsival or Brookbank could.
Hawks: 24-7-5 (53), 20-9-7 adjusted (47), 47.041 expected
Perds: 16-14-3 (35), no point inflation, 27.824 expected HOLY CRAP GO FALL OFF A CLIFF
Hawks: 3.639 scored (1st), 2.722 allowed (18th), 0.917 differential (2nd)
Perds: 2.333 scored (22nd), 2.697 allowed (17th), -0.364 differential (22nd)
Hawks: 29/121 24.0% on the power play (4th), 79/107 73.8% on the kill (29th)
Perds: 20/100 20.0% on the power play (9th), 91/107 85.0% on the kill (8th)
Might want to watch out for those special teams, huh.
_________________ 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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