Chicago to St. Paul is 345 miles as the crow flies, the greatest distance of any series in the second round (LA-Anaheim: 27 mi, Boston-Montreal: 250 mi, NYC-Pitts: 315 mi). COULD THIS ARDUOUS JOURNEY LEAD TO INCREASED FATIGUE?
Recent Historybeat them in the first round 4-1 while Mike Yeo made his puzzled face at all times:
10/26: Minnesota 5, Hawks 3
10/28: Hawks 5, Minnesota 1
12/5: Hawks 3, Minnesota 4
1/23: Minnesota 2, Hawks 1
4/3: Minnesota 2, Hawks 3 (SO)
14 goals scored, 14 goals allowed
7 points given, 4 points taken
Minnesota: 199 goals scored (2.427, 24th), 198 allowed (2.415, 7th), +1 differential (4th)
Hawks: 261 goals scored (3.183, 2nd), 212 allowed (2.585, 12th), +49 differential (16th)
It's not the same Wild team as last postseason. It's not even the same Wild team as this regular season. Backstrom is hurt again, Harding's MS is flaring up, and Darcy Kuemper was re-concussed at the end of Wednesday night's game, so they're down to their fourth-string goalie, the lightly disgraced Ilya Bryzgalov. You remember he signed a HUMAHNGOUS BEEG contract with the Flyers, sucked up the joint because he can't play for shit outside of country-club markets, took a 66%-OF-HUMAHNGOUS compliance buyout and went into some sort of exile before returning to the league via the Edmonton Oilers, kind of another exile unto itself. He wasn't any damn good there, and with Martin Jones emerging in Los Angeles, Ben Scrivens was in turn sent to North American Siberia and quickly established himself as the real-ass goalie the Oilers have cried out for. He's also really good at Scrabble. Bryzgalov, being crappy and only having a Scrabble rack for a name that cannot be played for a triple word score by virtue of being a proper noun, was traded to Minnesota for I don't remember or care what, and now against all odds, here he is.
The Wilds also acquired Matt Moulson from Buffalo by way of Long Island, the other side of the Thomas Vanek trade/unmitigated disaster. Moulson doesn't have anyone as good as John Tavares to clean up for, but between Parise, Koivu, and Coyle, it's not like his teammates generally suck. Speaking of unfortunate Long Island trades, Minnesota flipped glorified goon Cal Clutterbuck for the hysterically bungled Swiss prospect Nino Niederreiter, who finally found his footing and scored the series-winning goal. Mikael Granlund will be an All-Star in time. They can score, they just chose not to this year, apparently. Neither did the Kings, for that matter, and look how they flipped the switch.
Yeah, Minnesota won the season series, but I don't think the Hawks won a season series with anyone in the division but Dallas and Winnipeg, and Winnipeg was only four games and also
fucking Winnipeg that can't do anything right ever. Whatever: we knocked out the Blues, the Avs were just dispatched, and the Perds took their dominance of the Hawks all the way to the 11th pick in the draft. What's mildly concerning, though, is that only one of those losses, the 2-1 coma on ice in St. Paul, came during the protracted dark night of the soul we call "the whole second half of this season." The Hawks were actually rolling along quite well when they got edged in October and December. If I remember correctly, Jason Pominville had a lot to do with one or both of those wins, and while he missed a lot of last year's series, he's very much good to go for this one.
The key, now as last year as forever for the time being, is to wait out the Ryan Suter/Jonas Brodin pairing, which we might as well concede up front will completely erase Jonathan Toews like they did last year. Suter leads the league in aggregate time on ice with 208:32, or just over ten complete periods, no big deal. His Swedish sidekick trails by about forty minutes, but you can be reasonably certain that Yeo will have them conjoined at the hip for the purpose of taking away our stars -- a concept not unfamiliar to the Twin Cities, whose own Stars were taken away 21 years ago. But even if they play 32 minutes a night, that's 28 minutes that you're staring down the likes of Nate Prosser or Jared Spurgeon: dumb and short is no way to go through life, son.
The hockey probably won't be very pretty: rarely is it with this dump-and-chase team, and a gameplan that forces patience on the part of the Hawks certainly won't help. They're not as effective on the dump-and-chase as St. Louis, who themselves are not as effective as Los Angeles, but it's been good enough in front of crackerjack goaltending. Whether they'll get that from Laika the Space Dog remains to be seen. They're also not a bucket of dipshits like the Blues were: just 8th in times shorthanded this year at 250 to the Blues' 293. The Hawks cannot REPEAT CANNOT be as fucking sloppy as they were in the last round: the Wild ran a respectable 45/252 power play this year and have the right kind of personnel to cash those in. This is a series that has Andrew Shaw written all over it, Ben Smith too: with our first line inevitably rendered useless, we'll need greasy goals by the gallon. It'd be a great time to use Jeremy Morin for that reason, too, but I'm sure we need Brandon Bollig to sit on the bench and stroke his beard for the 58 1/2 minutes a night that he's not on the ice. I can see Morin coming in contingent on a Game 1 pantsing, but not otherwise.
Minnesota overachieved against an Avs team that double-plus overachieved. By rights, this should be a Hawks win in 5 or 6. I wish the Wild ill.
_________________
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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