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Chicago hosts Chicago Junior with an ungodly Sunday home puck drop of 8 p.m., which will feel like 9 p.m. for those of us who still feel like we're on Daylight SavING Time. ING. ING, ING, ING. It's not a bank.
I was ready to write a game thread that was just about how much the Jets suck: Evander Kane is either hurt, disgruntled, or both; they're in a meat grinder of a division and they're the meat, and bigfan's guy Kevin Cheveldayoff has dropped the first two syllables of his last name and just become "Day Off," doing fuck-all to improve his team since being installed upon the move from Atlanta except draft high from sucking all year. Here's something wack: until just a few weeks ago, he had never traded a roster player for a roster player. Every trade had included picks or prospects on one side or the other. FINALLY, he traded for Peter Budaj of the Canadiens...then promptly waived him and demoted him to St. John's, making him no longer a roster player. So yeah, was gonna go on about how the Jets suck.
But then, to my horror, I plugged the numbers in and saw that adjusting for point inflation, the Blackhawks and the shitty Winnipeg Jets have the same record: four outright wins, five outright losses, and two games taken to the shootout. I also noticed that Ondrej Pavelec, last year's worst full-time goaltender, has been outlandishly competent, starting all but one game (which the Jets lost) and posting a 2.10 and .921. That's nothing to write home about, but consider last year the guy broke 3.00 in GAA and only barely stayed over .900. The Jets are bad, but not that bad; the talent at the top of the depth chart -- Bryan Little, Evander Kane, Blake Wheeler, Jacob Trouba, Andrew Ladd -- is such that so much as league-average goaltending would have them in the wild card bubble. It's really more that their bottom six and their blue line past Trouba and Enstrom (Buff's back at forward, last I checked) are crap on a stick.
The Jets kill penalties fairly well but also take a lot of them, with Byfuglien and Wheeler combining for the lion's share with 57 PIMs out of 156, nearly twice Chicago's 82. They suck on the power play. Don't give them a chance to change that; we know about Buff's ass better than anyone.
This needs to be the game where the floodgates open and the Hawks, after night after night of puck-chucking that leads to nothing, just completely punish some sorry-ass team. The Jets are about as sorry-ass a team as we're going to see for a while, so if it's not tonight, you'd better put some scuba gear on because this thing could go down, down, down in a hurry. And if it's not, we'll all just shrug our shoulders and say the numbers will even out eventually and hope the Avs stay bad long enough for us to finish in a playoff spot!
Jets: 5-5-1 (11), 4-5-2 adjusted (10), 8.372 expected
Hawks: 6-3-1 (13), 4-5-2 adjusted (10), 13.420 expected
Jets: 29.9 shots for (15th), 27.3 shots allowed (5th)
Hawks: 38.9 shots for (1st), 27.5 shots allowed (8th)
Jets: 1.818 scored (28th), 2.273 allowed (11th), -455 differential (T-24th)
Hawks: 2.455 scored (21st), 2.000 allowed (3T-5th), .455 differential (T-9th)
Jets: 14.2 PIM/gm (28th), 12:18 less PP time than PK time (26th)
Hawks: 7.5 PIM/gm (2nd), 16:35 more PP time than PK time (2nd)
Jets: 3/37 8.1% on the power play (27th), 39/45 86.7% on the kill (7th)
Hawks: 9/47 19.2% on the power play (16th), 32/35 91.4% on the kill (3rd)
These guys suck. Go Hawks.
_________________ 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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