As the season's second half begins to separate contenders from pretenders, The National's Rob McKenzie takes a look at the week's highs and lows in the NHL.
1. Ovechkin shoots ...
This is Alexander Ovechkin in his office. He sets up his compact workshop around the top of the right face off circle whenever Washington is on a power play. His teammates work the puck around, and Ovechkin shifts a little to the left, a little to the right, trying to get the angle just right so that when a pass comes his way he can one-time it into the net.
He does this all the time. He has a lot of good days at the office.
2. Ovechkin scores ...
Here he is a few centiseconds later. He wasn’t happy with the angle the first time Matt Niskanen got it to him during the 5-on-4, so he sent it back Niskanen’s way and started the game anew.
Niskanen sent it right back to Ovechkin, who this time liked what he saw and whipped a shot low between the legs of the Boston defenceman Adam McQuaid and past Tuukka Rask, who might not even have seen it. The goal gave Washington a 3-2 lead over Boston Wednesday en route to a 5-3 win.
3. ... and scores
It was Ovechkin’s 550th career goal. Two-hundred and five of them came on the power play. The franchise he has the most scores against is Atlanta/Winnipeg with 43 in 59 games. In March 2013, when the Jets were making a playoff run during their second season in Winnipeg, he demolished them with five points in back-to-back games.
So at age 31, Ovechkin has a ton of goals. But he doesn’t really care about goals anymore — or rather, he cares about a goal beyond goals. And that goal is to win the Stanley Cup.
4. You have to shake your head
Poor Henrik Zetterberg. He’s going to be the first captain of a Detroit Red Wings team to miss the playoffs in 26 years. The veteran leads Detroit in points and plus-minus but he can’t do it all by himself.
Zetterberg needs help but on Tuesday he wasn’t getting it from his coach, Jeff Blashill.
The situation: it’s late in the third and New Jersey lead Detroit 4-3. With 2:16 to go the Devils’ Kyle Palmieri takes a penalty. The face off is in the Jersey end and it’s so obvious that what Detroit should do is pull the goalie right away and turn their five-on-four advantage into six-on-four. Pulling the goalie increases volatility; when you’re losing and time is running out, on your game and on your season, volatility is your ally.
Instead Blashill did the bog-standard thing. He left Jared Comeau in net for about a minute, during which time the power play did not get a shot on net. By the time the Wings put a sixth man on, it was too late. And now Detroit had lost five in a row.
The Wings need every point they can possibly muster. Playing it safe is a slow death.
5. ‘They have to win’
A few nights later and the Wings are hosting the Islanders. In the pregame show Blashill says some pretty obvious stuff: we need to get the puck out of our zone better, and we need to keep it in the other team’s zone longer.
Mickey Redmond, the local TV analyst and long-time player, follows this up on the broadcast with a shot of actual emotion: “Desperation. Passion. Urgency. This is what this team needs. They need it now ... psychologically this is a must win for the Detroit Red Wings tonight ... they have to win and that’s all there is.”
They do, 5-4 thanks to a last-minute goal by Danny DeKeyser. But the Wings are still closer to the bottom of the conference standings than they are to a playoff spot, and they don’t seem able to pull together a winning streak.
6. Some guys never learn
Joe Colborne might not take a lot of penalties but he sure has a knack for taking them at the worst possible time.
Two years ago in the playoffs as a Calgary Flame he took a four-minute high-sticking penalty — as time expired in the second period, how useless! -- that led to Anaheim’s winning goal in Game 4, and in the next game he was again in the penalty box for an Anaheim goal, in a match that went to OT and ended the Flames’ season.
Now he’s toiling for Colorado. On Wednesday in LA the Avalanche were down 3-0 early in the third. If they score a goal, it’s a game again.
So what happens? Colborne is denied a scoring chance in the crease by Brayden McNabb and retaliates by jabbing his stick between McNabb’s legs. Ouch. A mindless penalty in the offensive zone is about one of the dumbest penalties you can take. One second after the penalty expired Dustin Brown scored to make it 4-0 Kings. Final score, 5-zip.
7. Bad planning
Game broadcasts on nhl.com run a lot of ads for #nhlgreen, the league’s ecological initiative. But if the league were serious about saving energy, it would ease teams’ travel schedules by having them play back-to-back road games in the same city instead of travelling so much with endless one-stop scheduling. Example: the Edmonton Oilers were in Nashville this past Thursday. They’ll be back in Nashville on Feb 26, as part of an insane Chicago-Tampa-Miami-Washington-Nashville-St Louis road trip. That is the worst travel planning ever. Why not double up every now and then? Why not let Edmonton play two in a row in Nashville? It would save jet fuel, it would save wear and tear on the players, it would give teams more chances to practise.
Baseball has lots of matchups where the visitors play four games in a row in the same city. On baseball’s 162-game schedule, that is almost exactly proportionate to what a two-game set would be in the 82-game hockey schedule.
8. Toronto reborn
The Toronto Maple Leafs won a game over Boston on Saturday that they had plenty of chances to lose — a game that in the past they surely would have lost. But the young Leafs, under Mike Babcock, are erasing the franchise’s half-century legacy of disappointment.
Toronto led the game 4-1 before Boston came all the way back to tie it. Toronto then went up 5-4, Boston tied again. And then with a minute and a half left, in place of the usual collapse, James van Riemsdyk scored to give Toronto the win.
Frankly Toronto deserved the win. They were the better team, and going forward, they have the young talent to start pulling ahead of mid-pack teams like the Bruins.
9. It’s an outdoor game
One of the benefits of a road trip to New York is that, with three teams in the metropolis, visitors get to hang around for a while. It’s not yet another case of airplane, rink, airplane.
So it was for the Calgary Flames at the weekend. After a game against New Jersey, they had a free day before Sunday’s matchup with the New York Rangers. So they went to Central Park on Saturday for an outdoor practice. The players said the ice was crispy and way better than in indoor arenas. At the very least it was a change of pace.
Alas the Flames’ three-game win streak ended the next night, with the Blueshirts besting them 4-3.
10. More bad planning
At the start of this season the St Louis Blues implemented a weird coaching structure. Ken Hitchcock would be the coach this season but his assistant Mike Yeo would take over next season.
In his 20th season as a head coach, Hitchcock, who led Dallas to the 1999 Cup, was going to be a lame duck. I suppose this could have worked — succession planning is not a sin — but if things turned south, it was a formula for having players tune out Hitchcock.
And things did go badly. The team’s young goalie, Jake Allen, started playing horribly. His .841 save rate in January was abominable, and he was pulled from three straight games.
So the Blues canned Hitchcock on Wednesday and put Yeo in charge early.
And then, Allen won a game for the first time in a month, 5-1 over the visiting Toronto Maple Leafs on Thursday.
11. In summation
■ If the play-offs started today ... the matchups in the east would be Washington-Philadelphia, Columbus-Pittsburgh, Montreal-NY Rangers and Ottawa-Boston. Note that Toronto is two points back of Philly with three games in hand, The west would have Minnesota-Calgary, Chicago-Nashville, San Jose-LA and Anaheim-Edmonton.
■ Standouts: The stats leaders are: Connor McDavid, 60 points; Sidney Crosby, 30 goals; Minnesota's Jason Zucker, +33; Dustin Byfuglien, 27:20 average ice time; Antoine Roussel, 109 penalty minutes; Detroit's Jimmy Howard, 1.96 goals-against average; Braden LA's Peter Budaj, seven shutouts.
■ Standard-bearer: San Jose's Patrick Marleau scored his 500th career goal. It came on the power play in a 4-1 win over Vancouver on Thursday.
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