Hey! The ice of Boston is muddy and reflects no light in day or night. However, the ice of Washington might catch too much glare from the sun and delay the game, which is supposed to start around noon but might start around 3 instead.
This feels pretty perfunctory as far as Winter Classics go for a number of reasons. For one thing, 105,000 for Leafs-Wings at the snowy Big House feels like it was the zenith of this whole outdoor game thing. Unlike so many prior Winter Classic matchups with historic rivalries, this one is basically just a matter of feeling good that traveling Hawks fans will help sell the joint out. And as for Washington, they're only really getting the game because between Buffalo, Boston, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, New York x2, and Detroit, everyone else in the northeast has gotten one (the NHL's crackerjack geographers want us to believe that Detroit lies in the northeastern United States). Even poor forgotten Hartford got to put on an outdoor game at the AHL level. So DC was the only one left. In fairness, the locals have done a good job supporting the Caps since the first Ovechkin run-and-gun era started in earnest in 2007-08, and I'd wager that the Caps are now bigger among Northern Virginia suburbanites and DC yuppies than the Wizards are.
Also perfunctory is that the Crapitals are puttering away in yet another playoff-bubble season where they'll either get devoured by the Pens or Isles, finish fourth and get crossed over to face the Lightning, or finish fourth while an Atlantic team crosses over and takes their spot. Unlike the Hawks, who are trying to win their last championship of their current era, there's really no window or trajectory for what the Caps are doing. The best they can hope for is to do what the Devils and Rangers did and wait for the rest of the playoff teams to drop out -- and then lose to the Kings.
Let's talk for a moment if we may about a neckless shithead who isn't Brian Urlacher. For years and years, the go-to line on Nashville was that they were hamstrung by "the internal cap" and below-average drafting, yet they would always overachieve because the great Barry Trotz harnessed obstruction and some basic geometry to elevate the Perds to the lofty height of losing in the first round. Now Trotz is finally out of Nashville, replaced by a guy whose coaching more or less consists of shouting at people and scrunching his face up, and Nashville's typical roster composition of Weber, Rinne, tweeners, and other people's garbage is tearing up the league with no sign of stopping. Why, it's almost as if stifling all offensive creativity and relying on the left-wing lock at all times might not be such good coaching after all! The Caps are doing better under Trotz now than they were under Adam Oates last year, but whereas Trotz is simply overrated by hockey people who venerate tenure for the tenure's sake (see also: Shane Doan), Oates was an incontrovertibly shitty coach who has no business behind a bench in this league. (The Devils hired him as an interim coach last week anyway.)
OH, FINE, MOM, HOW'S WASHINGTON?!?
For the Washington offense, it's Ovechkin, Backstrom, Green, and whichever Russians of the moment. They fortified the blue line in theory by getting Orpik and Niskanen from the Pens in free agency, but the Caps still aren't quite excelling at preventing goals against. That's probably because their goalie, Braden Holtby, is a great big turd, the one who just a few weeks ago lost a record 20-round shootout because he blew five game-winning saves in a single shootout. His stats have him somewhere in the top 15, but I'm not convinced at all. Anyone who talks up Holtby is just doing so because we're in a historic dearth of Canadian-born goalies and people need to get excited about someone other than Roberto Luongo or Carey Price.
The Hawks have stumbled in the last three with a win, a loss, and a regulation tie, but they straightened up and put the Avs away eventually, and they did get the shootout win against the Perds after I went to sleep. Nonetheless, I can see this game going down like the Stadium Series game against Pittsburgh, where our team just straight-up outclasses theirs. With the best team in the league against an average team in the East, that's what ought to happen.
I woke up at 3 a.m. with the radio on, and that Gladys Knight and the Pips song on about how she'd rather live in his world with him than live in her own world alone, and I lay there, head spinning, trying to fall asleep, and I thought to myself, "Oh, Gladys, girl, I love you but,
oh, get a
life!"
Happy New Year and go Hawks!
Hawks: 25-10-2 (52), 20-11-6 adjusted (46), 51.346 expected
Caps: 18-11-7 (43), 17-15-4 adjusted (38), 41.212 expected
Hawks: 35.4 shots for (1st), 28.8 shots against (14th)
Caps: 30.1 shots for (14th), 28.3 shots against (10th)
Hawks: 3.027 scored (3rd), 2.081 allowed (1st), .946 differential (1st)
Caps: 2.889 scored (8th), 2.528 allowed (13th) .361 differential (13th)
Hawks: 7.9 PIM/game (2nd), 3.18 minors per game, 7 majors
Caps: 10.5 PIM/game (19th), 3.75 minors per game, 16 majors
Hawks: 26/139 18.7% on the power play (16th), 95/105 90.5% on the kill (1st)
Caps: 25/109 22.9% on the power play (4th), 91/117 77.8% on the kill (25th)
_________________
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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One of my daughters just said who is this old dude singing words I cannot understand
