It was weird not having any hockey over the weekend. I hope this being the third game in nine days will mean more rest than rust, because God knows they've needed the time off.
So anyway, Lou Lamoriello's empire in decline visits Chicago for what I think is the first time since October 2010, and they come in with a .500 record (in point inflation) and third place in what was meant to be the NHL's showcase division but is instead a great big shitpile. This brings me to Part II of my rant about the schedule matrix: oh my god who fucking cares about a Devils game. The Devils will come to Chicago as many times as the Canucks and Red Wings do, which hardly seems right. That they're in third place with a .500 record while at least one very good team will miss the playoffs in the West hardly seems right either. What a fucking mess.
We were talking a little bit about the West/East split in the NHL, where in exchange for getting all the stars and all the attention, the East is doomed to get clowned by Western teams that roll four lines and run strong possession offenses. That's fine, whatever, but what's not fine is that doing a 14/16 split and insisting upon each team playing each team home and away means that for Western teams, 32 of their 82 games are against the flaky-ass East, up from 18. Despite the NHL talking a big game about the importance of conference standings and regional rivalries, they've made it so that a whopping 39% of the West's schedule has little to do with conference standings and nothing to do with regional rivalries. So almost two-fifths of the Western schedule is the bonus round from Mario Brothers, where you jump up and down to collect floating coins from a platform of clouds but don't actually achieve any goals.
Conversely, each Eastern team has to spend 28 games generally getting smacked around. Even the lowly Winnipeg Jets have won 10 of 15 against the East. They just lose against the teams that matter. Hawks are 9 for 12 with the East, with two of the losses being OTLs to the Bolts and then that disaster in Toronto. End result? West teams will all have puffed-up records while East teams will be bad, and even the okay teams will only look okay from beating up on bad divisional teams.
And that's pretty much where the Devils are. Lou Lamoriello has gone from one of hockey's best executives to one of its worst, with a run of decisions that have been no less than stultifying. First you had the infamous Kovalchuk contract which cost them money and draft picks. Then Kovalchuk bailed on them, so under the NHL's new cap recapture rule, they get a small cap penalty for like the next 15 years. (I don't hold this part against Lamoriello; it's basically double jeopardy and ex post facto). The Devils are allowed to pick a year that they forfeit their draft pick. They
didn't pick 2012 for this, when they were set to draft 29th and couldn't have lost a worse pick unless they won it all later. But they were never going to win it all later, because they lost Zach Parise and got nothing. Then they lost David Clarkson and got nothing, though with his dumbfuck act with the Leafs, "nothing" sounds like fair compensation. They drafted 7th this summer but traded the pick to Vancouver for Cory Schneider, who was set to be their starting goaltender until Brodeur decided he wasn't ready to be a backup, half on merit and half because who the fuck are
you to bench Marty Brodeur? Now Schneider is once again the backup, and will be an unrestricted free agent next summer. They've given big money to the overrated Travis Zajac and a five-year contract with a no-move to concussed shit-for-brains Ryane Clowe. I don't know what the hell they're doing. Not scoring, and not winning much, but just staying afloat in a division that's been orders of magnitude worse than anyone expected it to be.
Oh, and Jaromir Jagr is there, too, compiling points for the fun of it. I would expect him to run out of gas by February, but he's been their biggest scoring threat so far with 13+20, nine ahead of the similarly ageless Patrik Elias. They don't score a lot, but they don't give up a lot, either. Goals scored is juuust barely outpacing goals allowed, but that's a fairly recent development on the year. Once again, it's another shutdown penalty kill, something that doesn't surprise me at all. There will always be a Jersey.
But really, you know, I'm perfectly fine with just one Devs game a season. Unlike leagues of wider popularity, the NHL isn't so much a national league as it is a loose confederation of tribes at war with themselves. Games between the Devils, Flyers, Rangers, and Islanders have always been intense on and off the ice -- or at least they were when the Devils played at the Meadowlands and ticket prices were reasonable. Hockey in the northeast is practically a matter of life and death, a far cry from our conference's state of affairs where a Chicagoan can't say "you suck" at a Sharks game without someone calling security. But those sparks just don't fly between Chicago and Jersey, so best to let them have their games with their "friends" and we'll have ours. But this is the way it has to be now, with all these games that are big whatevers. But remember: rivalries count!
Devils: 15-15-7 (37), 15-17-5 adjusted (35), 37.451 expected
Hawks: 25-7-6 (56), 21-9-8 adjusted (50), 49.929 expected (eerily on the mark)
Devils: 2.432 scored (23rd), 2.405 allowed (11th), 0.027 differential (14th)
Hawks: 3.579 scored (1st), 2.658 allowed (14th), 0.921 differential (T-2nd)
Devils: 21/109 19.3% on the power play (11th), 100/116 86.2% on the kill (5th)
Hawks: 31/130 23.8% on the power play (3rd), 89/118 75.4% on the kill (28th)
Hawks are 12th in the league in fewest times shorthanded, trailing such noted chuckleheads as the Sabres, Penguins, and Bruins. That's not eye-popping, but it's a lot lower on the list than they ought to be if they're going to keep getting clowned on the PK. It really belies the "disciplined team" praise they get. They really ought to work on that.
I was going to go with a line from "Hungry Heart" for some awesome synchronicity between the game with New Jersey, the bard of New Jersey, and the recent drama with pittmike, but I found a Springsteen lyric that had "devils" in it and I didn't want to pile on. :/
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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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