Hello, this is a feature that will run through the entire season and aims to recap the weekend's events and boils those events down to one admittedly superficial fact or stupid opinion about each team. Feel free to complain about it. There's been a lot of talk about what this season has meant for the Washington Capitals in the hours leading up to, and then immediately following, their final game of the remarkably eventful 2011-12 season. Wysh had a pretty good recap of the reasons the Capitals felt this little run to a pair of one-goal Game 7s against the Nos. 1 and 2 seeds in the Eastern Conference — both having been heavy favorites — vindicated the Dale Hunter system of everyone playing defense and collapsing to within three inches of the crease, and it's perfectly reasonable for people to feel that way. Certainly, no one expected these Capitals to do much damage in the postseason given that they frittered away a division they were picked to dominate. But the thing that everyone seems to forget is that, again, they were picked to dominate the Southeast, be a superpower in the East and the League at large. If the team tuned out Bruce Boudreau, and it appears they did, then wasn't his replacement, whoever it happened to be, more or less expected to get this far? Therefore, it becomes a question about what changed, and really, what didn't. Let's not forget, Boudreau came in originally and let guys like Alex Semin, Alex Ovechkin, Nicklas Backstrom and Mike Green have their run of the rink. Two-minute shifts? Sure! Goals aplenty? You bet. But in the end, what did it get them? Bounce-outs, and if you believe the talk, disappointing ones at that. So Boudreau changed the style, focusing more on defense, tethering Ovechkin and Co. to an extent, and … getting the same amount of success. Under each of the two clearly definable Boudreau regimes, the team lost in the conference quarter- and semi-finals. Which is of course notable because the latter is exactly how far Hunter got in his first chance at the tiller, despite doing everything in his power not to: like limiting Ovechkin to fewer than 20 minutes a night in every game in this series save for Saturday's Game 7 and the three-overtime Game 3, in which he played 35:14 — or, if you prefer 17:37 per three periods of play. This therefore vindicates Hunter only as far as it vindicated Boudreau; which, with a roster like this, and given the "choker" label being hung liberally on the former Caps coach this time last year. The philosophy changed radically under Hunter, and worked only as far as it did for Boudreau. Why? ( Coming Up: Team USA, international ass-kickers; getting stupid about Patrick Kane's drinking; Parise's future; Could Brad Stuart return to the Sharks?; Kevin Lowe says Ryan Murray is the top player in this year's draft class; Suter/Weber questions; Pancakes Penner's revenge; Bruins pumped for Dougie Hamilton; Alfredsson retirement watch; Leafs/Penguins trade?; Lundqvist is King; Alex Burrows runs and hugs a goalie; and Winnipeg Jets fans are burning Coyotes jerseys.)

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Hello, this is a feature that will run through the entire season and aims to recap the weekend's events and boils those events down to one admittedly superficial fact or stupid opinion about each team. Feel free to complain about … Continue reading ?

Posted under NHL

Hello, this is a feature that will run through the entire season and aims to recap the weekend's events and boils those events down to one admittedly superficial fact or stupid opinion about each team. Feel free to complain about … Continue reading ?

Posted under NHL

Hello, this is a feature that will run through the entire season and aims to recap the weekend's events and boils those events down to one admittedly superficial fact or stupid opinion about each team. Feel free to complain about it. And so it was that two long-standing Western Conference powers crashed out of the 2012 Stanley Cup Playoffs, bending the knee to upstart franchises in just five games each … You might not have liked the Sharks or Red Wings in their series against the Blues and Predators, but it was very difficult to see either one crashing out in five, wasn't it? Now both find themselves at a bit of a crossroads. Detroit, of course, has been hearing "they're too old to keep doing this much longer" forever. But were it not for what even the staunchest of statsphobic old-timers would call a lucky, impossible-to-replicate home winning streak, it's difficult to get excited about the team's prospects going forward. No one on the Wings broke 70 points, and that's the first time since 2003-04 that such a thing has happened. They only had 17 road wins this season, and didn't win once at Joe Louis Arena in the playoffs. Causes for concern, certainly, made no less worrisome by the prospect of Nicklas Lidstrom hanging them up. [ Related: After first-round elimination, Sharks face uncertain future ] Make no mistake, this is an old team. Second-oldest in the league behind New Jersey, in fact. The number of players in their top-10 for scoring under the age of 30 was just three, and they weren't exactly three guys you see a guy as apparently smart as Ken Holland building a team around: Valtteri Filppula and Jiri Hudler, who played most of the year with Henrik Zetterberg, and Ian White, who took the majority of his shifts with Lidstrom. That's not to say they're not good players in their own right (well, White isn't), but they are complementary players, and guys like Zetterberg would still succeed regardless of who played with them. They also have few particularly tantalizing prospects (the result of a decade or so of drafting pretty poorly) and Lidstrom, with his career very obviously on its last legs, simply cannot be the rough-and-ready warhorse at both ends of the ice he has been in the past, and the prospect of Niklas Kronwall playing any more minutes than he already does has to be concerning to anyone who watched this Nashville series. [ Related: Preds make Stanley Cup statement by eliminating Red Wings ] Now, none of this is to say that the Wings didn't carry long stretches of their playoff games, and outshoot Nashville significantly in three of the five. They did. But as the series wore on, they also often appeared baffled with how to handle the looks a line led by Martin Erat was giving them, and didn't do a very good job of silencing anyone over the course of five games. ( Coming Up : It's Claude Giroux's world, we just live in it; the end of the Pens; Marty Brodeur is old; Mike Cammalleri gets his sweater; hoping for a Nicklas Lidstrom retirement; the Islanders probably aren't Brooklyn bound; the Coyotes and Blackhawks play a lot of overtime games; Cam Ward is charitable; the Rangers can't score; Tyler Seguin is pretty good; Emerson Etem ignites; and a trade to get Roberto Luongo to Tampa Bay.)

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Hello, this is a feature that will run through the entire season and aims to recap the weekend's events and boils those events down to one admittedly superficial fact or stupid opinion about each team. Feel free to complain about it. It has never once been said that hockey pundits are ones to give up their long-held beliefs. Things like wins still matter a lot when it comes to Vezina voting, people still believe most careers were failures unless the player won a Stanley Cup, and the idea that a player can be "clutch" is still valued more than anything else once the postseason rolls around. Case in point: Marc-Andre Fleury. All we heard in the run-up to the playoffs was that the Flyers and Penguins were more or less each others' equals as far as the forwards and defense were concerned, and that the difference was in net. Ilya Bryzgalov: Fragile goalie. Marc-Andre Fleury: Big-game goalie. The Penguins, therefore, would win this series, even if it wouldn't be easy. And now we sit here, nine-plus periods of hockey having been played between these two bitter rivals, and Fleury has been nothing short of shambolic. The stats don't speak for themselves so much as they roar from the mountaintops that this is a goaltender who's in so far over his head that the Roberto Luongo who faced the Blackhawks those few times looks as mentally secure as Fort Knox by comparison. As netminders go, Fleury has been the worst in these playoffs by several country miles. He's the only one to start all three games and not earn a win (that's for all you old-schoolers out there). The worst save percentage of anyone. Worst goals-against average of anyone. ( Coming Up: Pekka Rinne is OK; James Neal is a punk; the Blues bench breaks; a way to get PK Subban to Edmonton; Bruins stars invisible vs. Capitals; Tortorella doesn't go crazy; huge off-season for Colorado; why Brent Sutter left; will Jackets go for Murray at No. 2?; Wild, Fletcher work on deal; Claude Noel's odd conversation with fan; Mike Green doesn't feel well; and why Canada's getting ready to cry.)

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Hello, this is a feature that will run through the entire season and aims to recap the weekend's events and boils those events down to one admittedly superficial fact or stupid opinion about each team. Feel free to complain about it. Another NHL season has come to an end and this might be the stupidest postseason yet in the Eastern Conference. This year, the Florida Panthers will be the third seed in the Eastern Conference despite being a thoroughly sub-mediocre hockey team. This is not in any way a revelatory statement. Anyone that watched this squad slump its way into the playoffs over the past few weeks will have seen just how easy it was to make it in the Southeast Division this year, with disappointing Washington making little effort to prevent the abominable teams usually littering its awful division from making it. If nothing else, you could always count on Alex Ovechkin and Co. to do that for you. What you may not know about the Florida Panthers, though, is that not only are they not a good team, they are quite literally the worst team since the lockout — i.e. when we got the shootout and all that bad stuff — to qualify for the Stanley Cup playoffs. How much worse are they? They finished the season with just 38 wins, for one thing. They lost more games than they won despite playing in probably the worst division in the league. No team has even made the playoffs winning that few games since the institution of the shootout, though Montreal and Boston had 39 each in 2010. And prior to this year, no team has locked up a top-three seed as a division winner with fewer than 43. Florida and Phoenix (42) both got in under that particularly low limbo bar this season. But perhaps wins aren't the greatest indicator of a team's success, and certainly, Florida would like to hope so, given that it only had 32 non-shootout wins this year — tied with titans like Buffalo, Carolina, and Colorado. So let's instead focus on its goal differential, which was appalling. Minus-24. Only nine other teams in the League were to that bad. It's the worst goal differential for a playoff team since the lockout, with the runner-up standing as Ottawa's minus-13 in 2010. They finished fifth that year, which you'll remember as the season in which Philadelphia and Montreal got into the playoffs with 88 points apiece. All of which is a long way of saying that the Panthers have perverted the playoff system once again — the other time being in 2002-03 when Mike Keenan's squad bored the pants off everyone en route to 26 overtime games, only four of which they won. You almost have to admire Kevin Dineen's squad for its commitment to mediocrity, and that comes from the top. I said when the Panthers made all those early-July signings that Dale Tallon had amassed an impressive collection of middling NHLers, probably enough to make a mediocre NHL team. They didn't get quite that far. Again, they had one more win than the 11th-place Jets, who we can all agree are terrible. Florida is now the ninth Eastern Conference team to make the playoffs with a negative goal differential since the lockout. By comparison, only one Western team (the 2009 Blue Jackets) has qualified with fewer goals for than against. There was a lot of talk about the need to change the system in 2010, when two 88-point teams made it in the East, but if this doesn't convince people that the system is broken, then nothing will. But how do you fix it? ( Coming Up: Future for Selanne, Iginla; Ovechkin back on track; Devils' 5-on-1; Dave Tippett is an OK coach; Stamkos hits 60; Montreal GM search goes to Chicago; thumbs down for Penguins critics; Hartnell promises blood; and the Canucks are the most hated team in the NHL.)

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Hello, this is a feature that will run through the entire season and aims to recap the weekend's events and boils those events down to one admittedly superficial fact or stupid opinion about each team. Feel free to complain about it. On Saturday night, the Sharks shut out the Dallas Stars and helped to solidify their chances of making the playoffs considerably. At the end of that game, their chances hovered just above 62 percent, up from a little less than 46 percent the night before, according to Sports Club Stats . Huge turnaround, especially because a loss there would have been disastrous in a Pacific Division in which two points separates first from fourth and, likely, a lack of a postseason berth. We can, I think, all agree that the Sharks missing the playoffs would be disastrous for the organization. This wouldn't be a case of the going from 101 points to 56 to 95 in three seasons, it would be an old team failing to capitalize on one of its few remaining years to reach a Stanley Cup Final before almost every one of their superstars gets too old to legitimately compete in the ultra-tough West. Of course, that also ignores the fact that the Sharks not missing the playoffs — sneaking into the eighth or, if they're lucky, seventh spot — is likely to be equally disastrous. The owners will make a few bucks, but they'll get flattened by Vancouver or St. Louis in a relatively short period of time and all that will have been accomplished is the extending of their season by about two weeks at best. History will show that the tragedy for these Sharks wasn't the binary option of making or not making the playoffs, but rather being in this position at all. It's a fairly curious case, after all. This was a team that smothered the Detroit Red Wings two playoffs in a row. This was a team that advanced to the Western Conference Finals in both those postseasons. This is a team that's eclipsed 100 points six of the last seven seasons, and won the Pacific four years running in relative walks. If anything, the team improved on paper over the summer. And yet here we are on April 2 with the Sharks' playoff lives very much in doubt. It's clear now that Antti Niemi probably wasn't what Doug Wilson thought he was when he got signed, at least, not if Thomas Greiss is able to put up comparable numbers. It's clear that Martin Havlat hasn't been what they wanted even when he was healthy. It's less clear, but getting clearer, that neither Joe Thornton nor Patrick Marleau are what they used to be, with the two combining for 134 points this season after putting together 143, which was itself disappointing, in 2010-11. Both retain fairly good underlying numbers relative to the quality of their competition, but two straight seasons of sub-average performances have to be worrying on some level, especially because Marleau gets incredibly favorable zone starts. [ NHL Playoff Death Watch: Pacific teams are in a war; Buffalo Sabres are in trouble ] It seems, from the outside at least, that the Sharks organization bought into the idea that it could remain as successful as they had been with the old guard — let's throw Dan Boyle in there with Thornton and Marleau for good measure — even as nearly everyone else in the division got into an arms race of young talent. Yes, Joe Pavelski (who at 27 isn't particularly "young" these days) and Logan Couture are great players, but they're also not on the level of a Loui Eriksson or Anze Kopitar or Keith Yandle. It, apparently, cannot. Teams are improving, the Sharks are coming back to earth in a very real way. ( Coming Up : The end of the line for George Parros in Anaheim?; Blue Jackets playing spoiler; Red Wings are getting healthy; Barry Trotz and the Predators get win No. 500; Ilya Kovalchuk is good; Peter Laviolette timeout works again; Mike Smith is awesome; Ken Hitchcock changes; Ray Whitney gets point No. 1,000; Jay Bouwmeester scores for the wrong team; and the No. 1 overall pick is on the move.)

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Hello, this is a feature that will run through the entire season and aims to recap the weekend's events and boils those events down to one admittedly superficial fact or stupid opinion about each team. Feel free to complain about … Continue reading ?

Posted under NHL

Dobber checks in every week to force-feed you the latest fantasy hockey trends. The founder of DobberHockey.com and a columnist for The Hockey News website, he long ago immersed himself into this rollercoaster world and is unable to escape. Two weeks of regular season hockey to go before we break out our draft lists and start putting together a formidable playoff team for the office pool. But before all that, let's take one last kick at the can here as we try to win/place/save face/not lose our 2011-12 fantasy league. Here is a snippet of Frozen Pool's Roto Rater report for the last two weeks — taking into account player position and the standard deviation of each stat to assign a rating. Studs... These fellas are wielding a hot stick. Take that into consideration when you go after them in trade talks... James Neal, Pittsburgh Penguins (8-5-9-14, plus-9, 8 PIM, 32 SOG) — Neal has the sweetest job in hockey — playing shotgun beside the league's leading scorer. He's also been piling up the PIM and the result of this has him second among all players in roto ranking for the entire season. Take a look: Drew Stafford, Buffalo Sabres (7-4-8-12, plus-10, 0 PIM, 26 SOG) — He was a minus player who was on pace for 40 points. Two weeks later, he has 45 points and is plus-7 on the campaign. He's clicking well with the surging Tyler Ennis and the surprising Marcus Foligno. For the first half of the season Stafford had a nagging problem that was holding his numbers back. It's called "Ville Leino is on my line". Brad Richards, New York Rangers (10-6-8-14, minus-2, 0 PIM, 34 SOG) — I didn't know this - Brad Richards has been a plus player just three seasons in his career, but a minus player six times. He sits at minus-1 this year and for his career he's a minus-73. Who does he think he is, Milan Jurcina? Matt Moulson, New York Islanders (15-9-5-14, minus-2, 0 PIM, 36 SOG) — The 28-year-old has 95 goals over three seasons and his just six shy of 40 for 2012-13. All this from a guy who, when he was 25, couldn't get a one-way NHL contract. His 34 goals would easily lead the Kings — the organization that let him walk. And his 64 points is one shy of LA's top scorer Anze Kopitar. Duds Somebody wake these guys up — their fantasy owners are counting on them... Jarome Iginla, Calgary Flames (6-0-2-2, minus-1, 4 PIM, 20 SOG) — It's not often that I take a 'Stud' from one week and slap him on here as a 'Dud' the following week, but here we are. Five games without a point after getting points in eight straight (14 in that span).  Shades of former Flames Rene Bourque or Kristian Huselius, where hot/cold streaks like this are second nature. Keith Yandle, Phoenix Coyotes (6-0-0-0, minus-3, 9 PIM, 13 SOG) — Yandle's following up a 59-point contract year with a 41-point rolling-around-naked-on-a-big-pile-of-money year. Zack Kassian, Vancouver Canucks (10-0-0-0, minus-1, 29 PIM, 6 SOG) — I can solve all of Zack's problems with this piece of advice — shoot the puck! Even Tomas Kaberle is laughing at you. Kris Versteeg, Florida Panthers (11-0-1-1, minus-1, 13 PIM, 20 SOG) — A career year that has gone so bad that it may not become a career year any more. At the 53-game mark, Versteeg had 48 points. Since then, he missed nine games due to injury and has one point in the 11 that he did play. That's right, 20 games have gone by and he's boosted his point total from 48 all the way up to 49. As a rookie he had 53 points. The Wire... Mostly short-term grabs here, but as always some potential steals... Benoit Pouliot, Boston Bruins (9-4-7-11, plus-9, 0 PIM, 13 SOG) — The good news for Habs fans is that Montreal is starting to look good in that trade that sent Guillaume Latendresse to the Wild for Pouliot. The bad news for Habs fans is that Montreal is starting to look bad for letting him walk last summer. He's averaging 12 minutes a game, yet should still manage to finish the year with 35 points and a plus-20 rating. Right now he'd be seventh in scoring on the Habs. Raffi Torres, Phoenix Coyotes (10-5-3-8, plus-7, 14 PIM, 18 SOG) — The Coyotes have been struggling of late and that's because they've been relying on Torres for their offense. Not really. But he's the only one providing any these days. Jamie McGinn, Colorado Avalanche (12-8-4-12, Even, 7 PIM, 48 SOG, 3 PPG, 2 GWG) —Hey, you know who could use a guy like McGinn? The San Jose Sharks. They're struggling so badly that even the Colorado Avalanche has caught them in the standings. Oh. Wait a minute… Cody Hodgson, Buffalo Sabres (4-3-3-6, plus-2, 0 PIM, 19 SOG) — Weird that Kassian makes a splash when he arrives in Vancouver while Hodgson can't buy a point in his first 10 games with Buffalo…but now their situations have reversed. But Hodgson's reason for the turnaround is the same as what was noted in the Stafford blurb above — he kicked that case of Leino's-on-my-line-itis. Matt Cooke, Pittsburgh Penguins (7-7-3-10, plus-7, 4 PIM, 13 SOG) — The last time a third-line plugger started scoring like crazy when he was put on a line with a superstar, Chris Clark was getting 30 goals. Brian Rolston, Boston Bruins (6-3-8-11 plus-8, 2 PIM, 13 SOG) — In two weeks, Rolston has gone from a frequent healthy scratch looking at a 10-point season with a minus-14 rating to finish his career… to a solid secondary scoring option who has a shot at 30 points and getting his plus/minus back to even. Gustav Nyquist, Detroit Red Wings (4-1-3-4, plus-2, 0 PIM, 6 SOG) — Nyquist is a very promising young prospect who has proven himself ready for NHL duty. He's a solid setup man who has not looked out of place at all. There is no guarantee he'll stay with Detroit through the duration of this season, but until he's sent down he'll keep tallying up the assists … although he'll have to do it from the fourth line. For more fantasy hockey tips, take a gander at DobberHockey . And while you're at it, follow Dobber's fantasy hockey musings on Twitter .

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Hello, this is a feature that will run through the entire season and aims to recap the weekend's events and boils those events down to one admittedly superficial fact or stupid opinion about each team. Feel free to complain about it. It should of course be noted that "blowing it up" isn't always the answer to a team's problems. For every Pittsburgh Penguins success story, there is also an Edmonton Oilers and Atlanta Thrashers/Winnipeg Jets tragedy. But what you don't hear very much is the story of teams that got mediocre and stayed that way for years at a time: Your Minnesota Wilds, your Florida Panthers, your Calgary Flames. The problem with being a team like that is management seems very eager indeed to enter every season looking to compete very legitimately for a playoff spot (as opposed to those like Edmonton and the Islanders who pay lip service to competing but actually have no shot of doing so). Most spend middling amounts of money and seem somehow shocked when they receive middling results. But at least they're not the Flames. Calgary, having missed the playoffs two years running after spending a few post-lockout seasons at the top of the Northwest Division, entered the season with one of the largest payrolls in the NHL and have never once looked especially like a team that had real playoff aspirations. The big-name, big-money players are there, of course. Jarome Iginla, Miikka Kiprusoff, and Jay Bouwmeester are all booking north of $5.8 million against the cap, and there was once again very little roster turnover under new GM Jay Feaster. That was interesting. You can see Darryl Sutter's point in not flipping a what portions of the roster he could in the wake of that first missed postseason, because it may have been an aberration. After two such seasons, there weren't really any signs that the organization saw reasons for concern: several players from that group, in fact, were given multi-year extensions (the most egregious and baffling of which was Anton Babchuk's, which pays him $2.5 million for each of the next two years and comes with a no-trade clause). After Feaster traded for Mike Cammalleri — a mildly prudent move, given how bad Rene Bourque has been in Montreal — he flatly told ESPN that the Flames were "going for it." And then came a flood of derision. At the time, Calgary was 12th in the West, and though Feaster wisely stood pat at the deadline, the team has done little to improve its position. Calgary currently sits 11th, three points back of that big jumble of teams jockeying for the final two playoff spots, despite earlier this month putting together a five-game winning streak and climbing as high as a tie for ninth two points back of the final playoff spot. But since then, they've been dragged mercilessly back into the muck and mire that better fits their actual quality as a team. ( Coming Up : Teemu teases another season; Nassau Coliseum might be dangerous to your lungs; Blues chase NHL defense record; Toews inching back; Radulov's Nashville return; sick feed from Kyle Brodziak; Travis Zajac is lucky; a winning team in Toronto; Matt Cooke's argument against the red line; the joys of NCAA hockey; Quebec City gets a minus; John Tavares to the Rangers [yup]; and Henrik Sedin offers a little hypocrisy on player safety.)

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