With the NHL season having passed the quarter-pole, The National’s ice hockey writer, Rob McKenzie, reviews last week’s highs (Ovechkin) and lows (Vegas), and picks a bounce-back candidate among teams that have started slowly.
1. A bad sign
First things first: the league is adding a 31st franchise next season in that hockey hotbed of Las Vegas. On Tuesday the team revealed its name: Vegas Golden Knights.
Really? Are you kidding me? This is a silly name. Who in their right mind would want to dress like a knight, in a suit of armour, in the Mojave Desert? That’s a recipe for heat prostration. Did anybody think this through?
A better name would have been Coyotes, paying homage to one of the teams in the city’s storied (roller) hockey history. Such a masterstroke would have fomented a natural rivalry with the Arizona Coyotes, located just a stretch up US-93, which is a highway named after the number of hockey fans in Nevada and Arizona combined.
2. Clever Karlsson
Erik Karlsson made the play of the week. It came shortly after his dumb penalty for tripping led to a power play on which Montreal scored for a 3-2 lead in the third period Tuesday against Ottawa. Sitting in the penalty box, Karlsson could only shake his head in frustration as the Canadiens celebrated.
But on his next shift he came up the ice with the puck and did something quite surprising as he approached the Montreal blue line. Instead of dumping it into a corner or around the boards, he flipped it high in the air. This discombobulated the Montrealers. They turned and craned their necks to follow the puck’s flight, as did their goalie. Three Canadiens gave chase and ended up behind the red line – that’s too many guys so deep. Meanwhile Ottawa’s Derrick Brassard was chugging toward the puck – this must have been a set play – and got to it first. He poked it out to Mike Hoffman in front of the net, who slid it across to a wide-open Mark Stone for the score.
A few minutes later Karlsson had the puck along the offensive boards. He whirled and shot in the winning goal off a Montreal defender’s skate and past Carey Price.
That was a bit lucky; it was what came before that was brilliant.
3. Hats off
Alexander Ovechkin is heating up.
In Wednesday’s 4-3 win over St Louis he notched a hat trick to reach 12 goals on the season, with five of them having come in his past four games. His 16 career hat tricks are tops among active players. Second is Jaromir Jagr with 15. Third, surprisingly, is Eric Staal with 13. Yet the all-time leader has more than the lot of them combined: Wayne Gretzky, with an astounding 50.
When Ovechkin is in form, shooting the puck like a man snapping a whip, he is terrifying. Perhaps his greatest run was in the second half of the lockout-shortened, 48-game 2013 season, when he had nine goals at the season’s midpoint then went on a tear to finish with 32.
Ovechkin has achieved much, but he remains hungry for the Stanley Cup. And the scariest part of his success so far this season? It comes even as coach Barry Trotz is giving him less ice time, so that he will have plenty left in the tank for the play-offs.
4. Take that!
When you win the Stanley Cup, everybody starts gunning for you. The Pittsburgh Penguins are meeting the challenge, thanks largely to the work of their captain, Sidney Crosby, the world’s best hockey player.
So far this season the Pens are 4-2 against the teams with the most to avenge, the ones Pittsburgh eliminated in the play-offs. Last week the Pens twice faced the New York Rangers, the first team they culled in the spring. New York won the opener 5-2 on Monday in Pittsburgh, with the Rangers scoring the final five goals and Crosby going minus-four. So Wednesday’s game in New York was a chance for the Rangers to really assert themselves. But Crosby was having none of it.
In the first period he jostled with Rick Nash and later manhandled Ryan McDonagh after the latter slammed Conor Sheary into the boards. The fans chanted “Crosby sucks” but he had the last laugh, scoring two second-period goals as Pittsburgh stormed to a 6-1 win.
5. Send out the clowns
Entering Saturday’s game in Los Angeles, the Chicago Blackhawks were within reach of a winning record for a seventh straight year on their annual circus trip. With Ringling Bros taking over the United Center, the vagabond Hawks had gone 3-3 through the first six games of the trek, with blowout losses in Winnipeg and Edmonton, a tight loss in San Jose, and wins in Calgary, Vancouver and Anaheim.
The Hawks were missing their captain, Jonathan Toews, for the LA game after his injury in San Jose. The Kings had Marian Gaborik back in the lineup for the first time this season. It was a very good game, as befits teams that between them have won five of the past seven Stanley Cups.
Late in the first, LA was out-shooting Chicago 13-1, but the Chicago shot was the sole goal, a Patrick Kane tip-in. LA caught up early in the second when Alec Martinez wristed one home. The game stayed tied at 1 through three periods. In overtime, the Kings’ Jeff Carter banked the winner in off the post, seconds after a Chicago penalty expired, to give the Blackhawks a losing record on the road trip.
Incidentally, this was probably the Hawks’ last circus trip, as the company that owns the team and its arena is not expected to renew the clown show’s contract.
6. From bad to good
Last year at this point Pittsburgh and San Jose were playing poorly, yet they each turned their seasons around and won their respective conference crowns to meet in the Stanley Cup final.
So the question is, with the league’s schedule at the quarter-pole, is there a similar turnaround candidate this year?
Entering the week I thought there was, and they were playing in the southern US ...
7. The overview
My turnaround pick was the Nashville Predators. As the week began the Predators were 7-7-3 and in sixth place in the Central Division, outside the play-off picture. They had both scored and allowed 47 goals, which put them on pace to end the season at 227 of each.
Last season the Predators went 41-27-14 and finished fourth in the Central. They scored 228 goals and allowed 215. In the play-offs they upset Anaheim in seven exciting first-round games before falling to San Jose, also in seven.
In the offseason Nashville’s big move was trading Shea Weber to Montreal for P.K. Subban. They also lost three useful role players – Paul Gaustad, Barrett Jackman and Eric Nystrom – while adding Matt Irwin, Matt Carle (who has since retired) and Yannick Weber on the blueline.
Hockey people expected Nashville to be strong this season. Of 20 experts at nhl.com, six predicted the team would win the Central. Six likewise picked them to make the Stanley Cup final, though only one foresaw them winning the big prize.
This past week the Preds played four games: hosting Tampa on Monday and Dallas on Wednesday, then a home-and-away with Winnipeg on Friday and Sunday. A realistic objective was for them to get five points from these games. They got six ..
8. A new identity
The Preds started the week with a 3-1 win over Tampa that was noteworthy in two ways. First, it was a sign that Subban is playing better after an uneven start to the season. He scored twice against Tampa and played the fast, loose game that he can excel at like few others. The game also indicated that the Preds’ identity is changing. They used to be an ultra-disciplined checking team, brutes along the boards. Now they seem to be chippier, rougher, freer and more fun. This is very much how Subban plays and it suggests he and the team are melding.
After Nashville went up 3-0, Filip Forsberg gave Tampa’s goalie Ben Bishop a smack in the head for no good reason. A donnybrook erupted. Such exuberance has its cost, as became apparent when Tampa responded in kind. Jason Garrison applied an elbow to Viktor Arvidsson’s pate. JT Brown slammed Roman Josi against the boards. After, Nashville’s Ryan Ellis took a run at Brown to avenge the Josi slam. Both fell to the ice, and Brown flipped over and began whaling away on Ellis.
This is not the formula that carried Nashville to the Western Conference semi-finals last year.
Two nights later, against a sloppy Dallas team, the Preds won 5-2 as Forsberg, Ryan Johansen and James Neal each had a goal and an assist.
9. Comfort zones
Then came the two games against the Winnipeg Jets. The first was not much of a test. The Jets limped into Nashville with a long injury list at the tail end of a road trip. But what did stand out in Nashville’s 5-1 win was that their goalie, Pekka Rinne, is having a rebound year after being so-so last season. When the Winnipeg sharpshooter Patrik Laine got the puck on a turnover and came in alone, Rinne left him with nothing to shoot at and made the save seem easy.
Sunday’s rematch took place in Winnipeg. The Preds – entering the game with a road record of 2-6-2, with Ellis and Neal sidelined, and with the backup Juuse Saros in net – were outside their comfort zone, and it showed. They were often out-muscled along the boards. Winnipeg showed more desire, with 27 blocked shots versus 10 for Nashville. Drew Stafford scored the opener – and the winner – on a wraparound in which the defenceman Anthony Bitetto, freshly called up from the minors, gave Stafford too much space to play with. Final score: 3-0 Winnipeg, with the last two being empty-netters.
The verdict on Nashville: this is a team that is finding its strength, but is not yet strong enough to reliably overcome adversity, the way Chicago or Los Angeles does.
10. In summation:
(All stats through Sunday)
• Standings: Montreal (34 points) and Chicago (31) remain atop their conferences. The other division leaders are the New York Rangers (31) and, by a hair, the Edmonton Oilers (26). The league’s worst team is the New York Islanders (16).
• Standouts: Edmonton’s Connor McDavid has pulled into the points lead with 29. Crosby is the pace-setter in goals with 15, even though he missed the Penguins’ first six games because of a concussion. A week ago Crosby had been tied with Laine, but the Finn went quiet last week. The Rangers’ Michael Grabner is still setting the plus-minus pace, at plus-20.
• Stand and deliver: Antoine Roussel of Dallas got into a fight on Friday night, and padded his lead in penalty minutes. He now has 61.
• Standing small: Sorry to harp, but that Vegas merchandise has a distinct whiff of the bargain bin about it.
• Standard bearer: On Monday, David Backes scored the 20,000th goal in Boston Bruins’ franchise history. The Bruins are the second team to reach that mark – their nemeses in Montreal got there first, way back in December 2009.
rckenzie@thenational.ae
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