A tip of my cap to Andrew Bucholtz for tipping me off to a brief footnote in a Globe and Mail column by Bruce Dowgibbin providing me with some more cannon fodder for our dear diminutive NHL figurehead.
Let's just cut to the quick:
Has Lance Armstrong become the Tiger Woods of cycling? The controversial American has been away from the Tour de France since 2005, but is making a comeback this year. For the first 10 stages of the 2009 Tour de France, ratings for Versus’ coverage are up 77 per cent through the comparable point last year. That includes an 85-per-cent rise among men 18 to 34 and 132 per cent for men 18 to 49. The 479,800 viewers for the Tour de France tops the 442,300 viewers Versus averaged for the first round of the ’09 Stanley Cup playoffs.
Yeah, I know the off-season is tough so we're reduced to cycling news and talking about Lance Armstrong and...
Wait a second, what was that?
The 479,800 viewers for the Tour de France tops the 442,300 viewers Versus averaged for the first round of the ’09 Stanley Cup playoffs.
Cycling is doing better than the NHL on television when the cycling takes place while most Americans are supposed to be at work and away from television sets.
Un. Freaking. Real.
Suck it Gary, this one's for you!
Remember, the NHL airs during prime time hours and they attempt to cater at will to anyone and everyone, meanwhile dudes in spandex riding a bike (RIDING A BIKE) do better TV business than the NHL on the SAME DAMN NETWORK?!
Wow. I can see the visionary changes with Versus and the NHL now.
Games played at 11 in the morning on a mountain in Europe and changes to the uniforms to make them even tighter than they are now and more expensive for fans to purchase just so the league can cash in on this cycling craze that has the ratings all abuzz.
Leadership: You're (Still) Doing It Wrong
Better yet, let's just get right down to what this means for the NHL.
Bicycle Ice Polo.
Get ready for it - it'll be the most difficult sport ever created and it'll come to Versus because some inept boob can't make his current sport more popular/noticeable/marketable/affordable.
How can this leadership failure be allowed to continue? It'll be fun when the salary cap falls by $5 million dollars after this upcoming season and teams start to really cry foul about money. Good thing the NHL extended that non-lucrative TV contract with NBC recently because, really, who needs TV money to survive anyway?
Future NHL Ticket Purchases: Doing It Really Old School
Not Herr Bettman and certainly not the NHL - they operate in a world without money. They operate in the South Pacific islands where bartering is legal tender. Make sure you brought enough chickens and volcanic stones to the ticket office so you can see a game this season.
How else can you explain that the lowest of the low amongst hockey bloggers gets the call to help out Versus, the American network of hockey?
That's right, Versus has hired the infamous Eklund (that link is a MUST read) to be their voice of the hockey blogosphere.
I provide you the link to the Versus site merely to prove that it's not some jerk-around that Versus did something this stupid and I do NOT encourage anyone to visit Dwayne Klessel's page either at Versus or his own kingdom of stupid.
I'm not going to pile on about Klessel because, let's face it, if you're familiar with him at all you know his site is a joke and that the man himself is a poser of the highest order and a phony. If you don't know him, don't bother getting to know him or his joke of a hockey blog full of terrible rumors.
What's got me amazed here is that there is information galore all over the Internet about what a fraud he is and Verus still found him to be their go-to-guy for web analysis of the Stanley Cup Playoffs.
Unreal.
This is an amazing level of carelessness on the part of a network that has not improved much since Day One of their contract with the NHL. I can't believe that it makes me this angry especially when there are at least three kings of the hockey blogosphere that could have been/may have been contacted about this instead.
Any one of Paul Kukla, Greg Wyshynski or James Mirtle would've lent a lot more credibility to Versus on this one, even adding any of the numerous folks who are acolytes at any of their respective big time sites would have done the trick as well.
Instead we get a heaping dose of continued failure from a network that insists on continuing to treat their core audience like children who have never been to a game.
Versus: The Official Network of the Failboat
I've heard back from all three blogging gurus about this and Mirtle reports that he was not approached at all. I have to wonder if that has more to do with James being from Toronto and Versus folks not really being aware of where or what Canada is.
Greg Wyshynski adds in a similar tale in that he was never approached about such a thing either. Wyshynski also has a distinct pedigree having come from both Fanhouse and being featured at Deadspin.
Paul Kukla, on the other hand, was approached by Versus at the beginning of the season and tells me that while he was flattered and intrigued by the offer he didn't want to lend his and his website's name to something that might be "tied in with other less-reputable bloggers." Versus said they could not guarantee this would be the case, a response that opens up another entirely insane can of worms regarding the network.
Interpret that how you wish, but apparently Kukla's response was taken seriously enough that he wasn't approached about doing the same for them for the playoffs and obviously Versus decided to go with, perhaps, the least reputable guy on the Internet.
Tomorrow is Labor Day (or Labour Day to those of you with Canadian/European tendencies).
It's not generally that big of a deal unless you manage a retail outfit and plan to SELL! SELL! SELL!
It's a big deal over here in hockey fandom, however.
Training camp awaits and with it, just merely another month behind it, a new season.
Being that this is the start of Season 2 under the watchful eye of Gross Misconduct (nèe Violating the Trapezoid) and being that I keep an extensive watchful eye on teams that are out to ruin hockey, it's about high time that I crank out a list of my Five Most Wanted for Offenses Against Offense.
I'm not going to rank them in order of sleep inducing to least likely to be boring, that's just foolish. If you're not actively trying to score at will in the game of hockey, you're spitting in my face while trying to hit on my mother all at once. It's straight up wrong and I want to punch you in the face for trying.
That said, let's warm up the boredom train and pull into the station to wait it out, these teams are going to suck the fun out of a theme park.
1.New Jersey Devils
Surprised? No, you shouldn't be and I just want to get them out of the way right now because Lord knows that they were going to pop up here now. Truth be told, every team not named "Pittsburgh" out of this division could go on this list but the Devils were the founders of hockey hell and they continue to hold the fort down. The way I see it, they're dragging the rest of the division down with them. But I digress.
Games between the Devils and just about any team end up being ones with a small handful of scoring opportunities, dump and chasing akin to what you'd see from a person with a nasty case of Montezuma's Revenge and lots of analysts talking about how they'd love to be Martin Brodeur's next mistress, Chico Resch excluded since that's a nightly event for him to wish that upon his star.
The Devils haven't changed their philosophy at all since Jacques Lemaire was manning the bench and now it's become clear that the mastermind behind hockey boredom was Lou Lamoriello. There are nice offensive pieces on this team (Elias, Gionta, Rolston, Parise) but everyone else is a defensive forward stiff out there to make sure no one takes any shots at all.
Some call this brilliant, I call it awful - and it's been awful for nearly 15 years now. Devils fans are tired of hearing about it and the ones that do exist on the Internet are more than happy to chime in and say, "AWFUL TO THE TOON OF 3 CUPZ!11! LOL!11!" Just because you were the best at playing the worst brand of hockey ever imagined doesn't give you something to hang your hat on.
Then again, folks in New Jersey have been proud of being mired in filth for a long time now. Par for the course I guess.
2. Vancouver Canucks You're going to notice similarities between the Devils and Canucks here. Both teams have all-universe goaltenders. Roberto Luongo can't do a whole lot more to help Vancouver than he has. Both have some nice offensive parts. The Sedin twins have become a pretty solid scoring duo the last couple of years. Both teams don't offer much of anything else once you get past those big scorers.
What aides in making Vancouver dreadfully boring is that they play in the Western Conference - the place where you'll find most of the harbingers of boredom in the NHL and Vancouver, if I were to actually slot out where they belong, would be a Top 5 offender.
This team plays everything close to the vest and their style of play has not deviated since the NHL came back after the lockout. Their series with the Dallas Stars in the playoffs two years ago was made of the stuff that cures Insomnia and the Canucks are happy playing it that way for a million reasons. Luongo can stand on his head to face 25 shots a night just fine. In fact their goal differential last year wasn't bad at all considering they finished last in their division (-2, 213 GF 215 GA). It's the point that they scored a mere 213 goals that's the problem.
Things will not get better in Vancouver unless they allow Mason Raymond to go hog wild and skate around everyone.
3. Dallas Stars This team was a dreadful bore already. They play in a building that doubles as a hothouse for two-thirds of the year so the ice stinks year round even when its not 90 degrees outside. Come playoff time, forget it - you're better off throwing a boat out on the rink and dragging guys around behind it on waterskis.
I mention this because it has everything to do with their style of play. They like to slow it down, they don't exactly have the high-skill type of skaters and they're really big on hitting guys in the mouth and thensome. This season, add in the Sean Avery factor they'll at least have a little bit more "excitement" to them, but this is a team that is an affront to how hockey ought to be played. Steve Ott, Sean Avery, Krys Barch... these are not actually talented hockey players. Avery I enjoy for his antics and in being everything that NHL players generally are not. He's not humble, he doesn't give the same post-game interview and he frankly has no respect for anyone else - I'm OK with that in small doses in the NHL.
Goofs like Ott and Barch, however, are not enjoyable unless they're on your team. Considering that Dallas will now have one of these clowns polluting three out of four lines, potentially, makes me fear the road the Western Conference is headed down. It was bad enough to have a team like Anaheim and their Circus of Unabashed Goonery polluting the hockey landscape but now it appears that Dallas wants to join them.
Stars captain Brendan Morrow was a guy whose play I enjoyed for a while, but now he's gone the Jarome Iginla route of being a crying little girl come playoff time all while digging in with a cheap shot now and again - something we saw a few times just last season.
Consider me not a fan of that.
They've got a highly talented scorer in Brad Richards now and guys who at one time were talented scorers are aging and oft-injured (Modano and Lehtinen please stand up with the help of an assistant) while other guys have the lovely background of being a diving Nancy (please, get up Mike Ribeiro).
This is a loathsome team and they're going to make sure to bother everyone and unfortunately, their style of play fits in ideally with what most of the rest of the Western Conference wants to do. They'll fly under the radar until they end up at or near the top of the Conference and then once the playoff coverage begins, people will say, "Jeez, these guys are real assholes!"
4. Boston Bruins It's all Claude Julien's fault here folks. The Boston Bruins in their eminent wisdom after years of either not making the playoffs or getting bounced out too early for their liking while trying to cut corners financially finally caught up to the mid-1990s and got on the Dump-And-Bore train started by Jacques Lemaire and Lou Lamoriello. These financial skinflints headed up by Jeremy Jacobs finally got the master plan to skimp out on spending stupidly and hire a coach who would slow things down to the point of frustration for everyone on and off the ice all while improving the standing of the team and try to capitalize on how every other Boston-area franchise was trying to win it all.
After all, winning it all means you can sell more merchandise, gain more fans and find new ways to steal money from a fanbase more than eager to throw away their money on everything with the word "BOSTON" written on it.
Of course, what helps to do this is a team with superstars who wins in an entertaining way. Jacobs will settle for games that continually end up 1-0, 2-1, 3-2 will somehow find a way to be exciting just by the game itself being close in score. Enter Claude Julien and his "Defense first, second and third priority" style of coaching. This is especially heartbreaking because there are really talented scorers on this team who have been already brutally mismanaged by Julien and his boring style.
Phil Kessel and Patrice Bergeron should be the one-two scoring punch answer in the Eastern Conference to guys like Crosby and Malkin - instead, Kessel gets continually chided by Julien for not doing things his way and Bergeron is finally going to be recovered from a massive concussion he suffered last season.
Kessel is an electric player who under Julien's watch won't be given free reign to do just that. Bergeron will be fascinating to watch to see what, if any, ill-effects he has from getting blasted in the head from behind against the Flyers.
Julien's answer, no doubt, will be to have him play better positional defense rather than try to track down a puck in the offensive zone - God forbid anyone bust their ass trying to retain possession and score goals.
At the very least, we're assured that the games between Boston and Philadelphia will have a little fire to them, but outside of that and games with Montreal... who would I look forward to seeing Boston play? No one. Julien's style doesn't allow for teams to take advantage of them nor does it allow for his team to have the freedom to attack at will. It's a counter-attack kind of team that relies on turnovers and power plays to do all the scoring. Five-on-five hockey is the time spent between opportunities to get a power play or to fight off on the kill. Julien's favorite game is one that ends 0-0.
The worst part of this is that Julien's style works. Somehow, horribly so, it works. Boston was the lowest scoring team in their division last year. They scored 19 fewer goals (212) than last place Toronto but allowed the same number of goals as first place Montreal (222). It's a goal differential of -10 yet up until the final few months of the season, they were one of the top three teams in the Eastern Conference. Gross.
Their 212 goals were the third fewest in the playoffs behind New Jersey and Anaheim and they were one goal worse than the New York Rangers who scored 213. Thoroughly abysmal offense and stifling, boring defense-only style of hockey makes me want to stab my eyes out with icepicks and right now, the Bruins are the team I look forward to watching the least. For as exciting as their playoff series was with the Canadiens last year, I found myself wishing for Montreal to score eight goals on Boston just to see what Boston would do when they were forced to open up their game even a little bit. I pray that an emerging Kessel and Bergeron returning to form will get Julien to open things up a little, but I don't see that happening as long as he's coach.
5. Anaheim Ducks
The Ducks are another long-time offender to hockey, and their fate was sealed in 2003 when they teamed up with the Devils to play The Worst Stanley Cup Final I've Ever Seen. Their 2003 team, like a lot of the teams who at some point adopted the Dump-And-Bore style was low on talent, had one line that could really actually score and three others that were great at grabbing attackers.
In 2007, the NHL saw fit to look the other way as the Ducks gooned and thugged their way to the Finals and won the Stanley Cup. After all, plenty of Cup winners have had teams that saw a guy get suspended multiple times during the same playoffs for cheap hits.
What hides the fact that they play a ridiculously boring style of hockey is their goonery. The fights, the cheap hits, the mouthy douchebag players all hide the fact that this team relies heavily on the power play to score at all. Jean-Sebastian Giguere has been their be-all, do-all goaltender since that 2003 Cup Finals season and the Ducks, out of all the teams on this list, have taken the lessons taught by the Devils of the mid-90s and extrapolated on them in a big way.
Giguere has proven he's more than capable of stopping the same crappy 25 shots per game while his team chips and pokes and gums up the ice in front of him. If the opponent gets a little too excited and zips in behind the defense? Grab them. Cross-check them. Punch them in the face. Whatever it takes, just do it. More often than not, it'll work and you'll get them to retaliate which then turns the game into exactly what the Ducks want: A parade to the penalty box that allows them to put out the Brad May's and George Parros' of the world more to actually mix things up. Throw in an actually talented scorer who does nothing but run his mouth like Corey Perry and you've got the West Coast version of the Philadelphia Flyers... except that the Ducks actually win big games now and again.
All this yammering on from me and I haven't even really gone into why Chris Pronger is, perhaps, the most loathsome puke in the NHL. The record speaks for itself in regards to him and enough people have wasted bandwidth on him and I'm not about to pile on. In short, screw Chris Pronger.
Some folks might argue that this teams penchant for fighting doesn't make them boring. Fights and cheap shots, however, are false excitement that has nothing to do with teams putting the puck in the net. Fights are another category unto themselves, which, if I was to rank out teams I most enjoy watching when I have an urge to punch someone in the face, Anaheim might be at the top of the list because I know they'll fulfill that urge.
Whether that's thanks to them playing an abhorrent style of hockey that makes me wish for death or because they're busy skating around the ice like the Hanson Brothers is irrelevant at that point.
Fact is, the Ducks scored the least number of goals of the playoff teams last year (205) and allowed the second fewest (191; Detroit was first with 184). They're a dreadfully boring team to watch five-on-five as long as they're not being goons. I'm glad this team plays on the West Coast so I'm not subjected to more of their garbage brand of hockey, unfortunately, as my hit list shows you and the Versus TV schedule backs up, we'll all get more than our fair share of teams looking to ruin your NHL fandom.
That's right, we're just whizzing away the rest of the summer here because, really - baseball has become uninteresting to us now, football season will be a huge letdown regardless (both in college and in the NFL) and September means... NHL Training Camp.
With that, we've learned what games the Versus Network will be covering this year and being that they're the exclusive home to NHL action on cable...we can't help but be severely let down. Clearly, they've again been struck with a case of the stupids.
I think we can all agree that the key to picking games to cover on TV when you've got a fairly limited window to choose from is to pick out the ones with the highest entertainment value, right?
I mean, that seems to be the thing that will rope in a big audience. By that measure, you'd have to expect that the national schedule would be heavy on Washington and Pittsburgh to showcase the big stars, Detroit to show off the Stanley Cup Champions who managed to get even better in the offseason, and to take care of your big markets which in this case includes: New York (just for the Rangers of course), Philadelphia, and Chicago with their renewed interest in professional hockey at the major league level (not to mention the young talent to boot.
Going by those squads you should be able to rack up a lot of fun, fast paced, even chippy games with all the violent side show possibilities one can ask for - the perfect recipe for marketing the NHL in all of its current glory. Let's face it, you get the best of the best this way.
Thank goodness the Versus Network is there to save us from ourselves. As Puck Daddy had already done for us and kept track of the numbers, Versus apparently didn't want to come off like they were playing favorites to anyone because the teams you'll get to watch the most this year are (drunken drumroll please):
Boston Bruins Buffalo Sabres Minnesota Wild New York Rangers Pittsburgh Penguins
You'll get eight games from these teams this year on Versus. It appears that the Versus folks wanted to meet me halfway - I guess that will work.
If I'm the executive at Versus and I get handed this rundown of games, I tell the folks responsible for picking out this docket to go back and try again and that failure to improve upon this will result in being launched into a great white shark tank.
I also question the selection of the Sabres for so many games, but I think I'll view that as Versus trying to guarantee viewership for eight games because Sabres fans are truly great fans and will tune in no matter what. It also helps that they'll dial up the ratings big-time in at least one city, so Versus has that going for them.
I can't help but be left scratching my head on the Wild and Bruins here though. Tthey could be doing the same thing here that they are with the Sabres and trying to lock up killer ratings within one market - Wild fans are also some of the best in the league when it comes to showing up and TV.
The Bruins don't really make a lot of sense unless the NHL and Versus are banking on the B's to pull a Celtics-style run out of obscurity and to fire up the bandwagon.... Uh, I mean wake up the long dormant die-hard Bruins fans that all helped celebrate Ray Bourque's Stanley Cup with the Colorado Avalanche. What's that? The second game of the opening night doubleheader on Versus is Boston at Colorado? Uhh...
Ahem.
The rest of the team breakdown for Versus makes mostly sense when you consider that Versus is meant to be the American answer to both TSN and CBC (since, you know, NBC doesn't recognize hockey as a sport until January). TSN and CBC will provide all the coverage of Canadian teams that could ask for since Versus is carrying all of nine games that involve teams north of the border. Three each with the Maple Leafs and Canadiens, two with Ottawa and one with Vancouver. Calgary and Edmonton? Too obscure to cover by Versus, but then again, so is Los Angeles as they too won't be making an appearance on Versus this season.
Nevermind how stupid it is that in a season as long as hockey season is and the fact that at least Calgary was a playoff team that you can't get every team on the air at least once in a season, but that's an argument for another time.
Did they do a good job of picking out matchups though? We'll see, obviously results during the season dictate how successful they did. If those five teams become the big guns this season, then it'll be an overwhelming success. I just ask that for the opening night game featuring Toronto at Detroit when the Red Wings raise the Stanley Cup banner that they not screw that up and treat it as a ho-hum normal broadcast.
Show the ceremony. Show the whole lead up to it. Show the national anthems. Heck, do that for ALL broadcasts, CBC does it and it's stirring to say the least, especially for games in Canada. A lot of the NHL fun is the lead up to the game, especially for big ceremonies. If you're covering a game with something big going on, how does it hurt to show it?
One more suggestion, if there's a way, maybe, that you could give Joe Beninati the wrong directions to any of the games you schedule for him, that would be GREATLY appreciated. The Beninati Experience must come to an end sooner than later.
So forget the stupid introductory first post we've all come to expect out of people starting a new blogging adventure. Funk that I say. Let's get right to it here:
To those of you who perhaps may be located here in the Northeast and watching the Buffalo Sabres run to the playoffs on MSG and have had the pleasure of getting to know Rick Jeanerette, and for me it's been a long process in getting used to hearing him call a game, we now find ourselves being held hostage by the ever hard to find Versus Network.
Given that Versus is in the position of having to pluck guys out of their regular play-by-play duties covering other teams and then propping them in front of the microphones to cover their "national" broadcasts you'd think they would have a treasure trove of great hockey voices to pick from.
Unfortunately for us here in the United States, Canada is holding many of those voices hostage on CBC and TSN including my guilty pleasure voice of the Vancouver Canucks Jim Hughson. That said, there are still some incredible people working in the NHL doing play-by-play duties for their teams. Let's just run down a few that aren't hired out by Versus, shall we? Warning: Some of these guys might be ruthless homers, so try to put that aside.
- J.P. Dellacamera - Don't know the name? That's too bad, because his voice is electric and you may likely know him better from his work with ESPN (and perhaps this is the hangup with him) when calling World Cup Soccer matches. He's energetic, emphatic and most importantly not a blowhard. Perhaps Versus also felt odd about asking for two analysts from the same team to do games as his color analyst for Thrashers games is Darren Eliot, and given who he's assigned to work with...well, let's just say he's got the whole show on his shoulders.
- Michael Haynes - While the folks in Denver, Colorado may have been spoiled mightily with their product on the ice, the fans who have gotten to follow along with the team from home via radio and now TV have gotten spoiled themselves. Michael Haynes may not be a name you're familiar with at all, or one you might get confused with a former Patriots and Raiders hall of fame defensive back, but Haynes has been a stand out performer first in radio for the Avalanche and now as their TV play-by-play man. Haynes too is also supported by an outstanding color man in Peter McNab. While all Haynes knows as a hockey broadcaster is the Avalanche, that makes him perfect for Denver and it remains to be seen (maybe?) what he could do with a national broadcast. At the very least, he can't be any worse than Jack Edwards who's made a habit of making an ass out of himself as a ruthless Bruins shill and bonehead with USA Soccer play-by-play duties in 2002.
- Jeff Rimer - Now here's a name I guarantee you don't recognize unless you're in Ohio or an old venerable hockey veteran. Rimer's background in hockey is extensive having jumped from expansion team to expansion team after getting his first NHL stint with the Washington Capitals. He then went on to working with the Florida Panthers during their...uh, glory years and now with the Blue Jackets in Columbus. A smart, passionate and knowledgeable guy he too is not a blowhard.
What's my point here? My point is that Versus has ostensibly blown it. While they've done well in hiring Mike Emrick to be their top play-by-play man and have a staff full of guys who have done well in some of their other, "lesser" broadcasts (John Ahlers from Anaheim, John Forslund from Carolina, Rick Peckham from Tampa Bay and most notably, their #3 guy Dave Strader formerly of ESPN and currently with the Florida Panthers) when it comes to this time of year, you only need your two best guys.
This is, after all, only the Conference Finals and your network has virtual exclusivity (since NBC is slated to only have a pair of Game 5 broadcasts which, I'd assume, Mike Emrick will get to do both should both series go five games - getting from Buffalo to Detroit isn't very hard).
Please tell me, why in God's name, do you allow a ruthless shill who broadcasts a game with a thesaurus of hockey clichés sitting open in front of him anywhere near the booth for the time of year when most people will be watching or attempting to watch your barely seen network? Why do you have Joe Beninati, a virtual lifer with the Washington Capitals (while I don't hate the Caps, they're not exactly one of the NHL's glory teams here) as your #2 play-by-play guy?
I'm not asking for them to dust off Fred Cusick and let him do it again, although that's not really a bad idea. But you have to do better than Joe Beninati that if you're going to be a big time player in sports broadcasting. You have to!
And you wonder why even the most ardent of hockey fans, NHL fans in particular, get so frustrated with Versus, the NHL and most pointedly Commissioner Gary Bettman. After all, this is his brainchild - the NHL as he envisions it (for the time being - at least until people get fed up again).
Speaking of that... that leads us to Point of Order #2:
Apparently the NHL got the memo that fans wanted the game to feel more like the way it did in the 1980s. Of course, it all depends on how you want to translate that. What the fans wanted was wide-open, high-flying, high scoring hockey.
What the league has decided to do is to treat the Western Conference and the Eastern Conference like the National League and American League of Major League Baseball in the 80s.
It's amazing to see the difference in rule interpretations so far throughout the playoffs and leads me to believe that referees are chameleons on ice and creatures of habit. In the East, the hooks and holds and interference calls have been getting made with semi-regularity. There are some glaringomissions from that, but I'll let that sit for another time. The Western Conference playoffs, however, have been an unmitigated nightmare to watch. While the style of play that is prevalent in the West is more about defending rather than going for the throat at all costs, that shouldn't mean that the officials let things go in favor of having the game move along at a more swift pace.
No, no, no, no...what do we call doing that kids? We call that the NHL Dark Ages (1995-2003). When you're calling a game as if you're Schultz from Hogan's Heroes and you don't see anything, that's just bogus. I could care less what Jacques Lemaire, Randy Carlyle, Dave Tippett and Alain Vigneault might think about this and how you can't punish everything that happens on the ice. I declare shenanigans.
How about this instead: Play offense, don't trap obnoxiously, and ask your GM to assemble some quality scoring forwards for you - more than one line's worth. I'm looking at you Anaheim - having a line and a half of scoring talent shouldn't allow you to make it this far in the playoffs in the "New NHL." You'll hear the same people making the same excuses and taking up the flag for these teams saying, "Well they just play great defense and if you don't like that, just score more!"
The people you'll hear making statements like this are the hometown broadcasters for those teams and people who cover things nationally that will always want to put the best face forward for the NHL. I call these fans and analysts the Know-Nothings since they're willing to look past glaring errors and bad play to either make sure they keep their job or its just what they've unfortunately been exposed to for so long that they don't know any better.
While that alone is sad, it's to be expected these days since hockey on TV on a national scale is hard to find and regional broadcasts tend to not want to upset the apple cart (eg: Chico Resch on FSNY for the Devils) it doesn't excuse why calling the rules as they were written is a bad thing. Remember, the way the rules were interpreted during the Dark Ages weren't written any different than they were before that or are now. All the NHL did was to "re-emphasize" the rule book and spice things up with a couple of glossy additions.
Let's see how things shake loose in Game 2 tonight with Detroit and Anaheim. My prediction: The rules continue to be shoddily interpreted and Western Conference hockey continues to be played as if they're batting with a lineup that has the pitcher holding down the ninth spot in the order.
A fan of old time hockey, at least if the kind they played in the 1980s counts at least. A guy who's fed up with watching the game he loves being handled and managed by folks with the intelligence equivalent to that of the common, everyday puckbunny.
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