Jaw Breaker wrote:
Curious Hair wrote:
Beardown wrote:
How does a team go from the #1 seed last year to missing the playoffs the following year?
Lose a Vezina-level goalie to a concussion and one of the best backcheckers of all time to skin failure.
However, weren’t they also the first 1 seed in NHL (and NBA) history to get swept by an 8 seed, and that was WITH said goalie and backchecker.
The Hawks get off on a technicality because there aren't "8 seeds" in the NHL anymore, just second wild cards, even though we all know the last team into the conference playoffs is the 8 seed -- not that that's keeping anyone any warmer at night.
Quote:
I mean if Crawford is that important then why are you paying Kane and Toews 10 million. If it's all about the great goalie.
As the Hawks evolved (or devolved?) from a possession offense to more of a run-and-gun offense largely due to a weakened blue line that couldn't flip the ice as effectively as it used to, Crawford has been called upon to do more and more, and for the most part he has. The expectation with Scotty Bowman in charge would be that the Hawks goalie would always be a Chris Osgood who only had to be good enough to manage a low number of shots on goal against. Of course, once the defense was down to 2, 7, 4, and some picked-over bones, it didn't turn out that way. Fortunately, Crawford -- who, lest we forget, was drafted out of the trial-by-fire Q with a fair bit of pedigree early in the loaded '03 draft -- was up to the task and has earned his pay.
Now, can the Blackhawks draft/develop their way back to getting by with an Osgood goalie? I don't think so, and that's not an indictment of the Blackhawks, that's just the NHL we have now. As someone who lived through the Dead Puck Era, I want to skin myself alive for saying this, but...the game has gotten too fast. The game more than ever is built around speed and maximizing shot attempts, and while those sound like good things on paper, it has led to a certain artlessness: you're not watching the Red Army out there playing with finesse and creativity, it's just a lot of dump-and-chase back and forth with shot attempts from anywhere you're standing. Patrick Kane is no Connor McDavid in terms of raw speed; the reasons Kane will eventually be the greatest American player of all time are his hands and his elusiveness. That's generational stuff and I don't think Hockey Canada or USA Hockey are teaching or nurturing that skill set. Rather, they seem to be assembly lines for the guys you saw jumping from Wilkes-Barre to Pittsburgh who are fast and north-south but don't have a great deal of creativity. But it works (at least when Sidney Crosby is there). If everyone is gonna be sprinting and puck-chucking for the next few years, you're not going to be able to hide a merely adequate goalie in net.
As for Toews and Kane making too much, they do, and there's no excuse for Toews being as bad as he is, but I will say that the Canadian dollar took a precipitous drop that no one seemed to see coming or could hedge against pursuant to the CBA, so giant chunks of league revenue have been disappearing into thin air on the exchange rate and suppressing the cap. Not much you can do about that unless you're Tampa Bay and you're apparently such a motherfucking wonderland that elite/generational players will leave millions of dollars on the table to play there.
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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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