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2016-17 NHL Season: Happy 100th Birthday, National Hockey League


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4 hours ago, the admiral said:

The team that does everything wrong, the second-place Blue Jackets, beat the team that does everything right, the tenth-place Hurricanes. Good. I'm starting to think that when people talk about the Hurricanes and possession, it's not about them having the puck, it's about holding them down and kissing them so hard you'll take their breath away.

 

The second time in 4 days I should add. What goofus in the NHL office scheduled the Hurricanes in Columbus twice in 4 days? What is this, college hockey?

 

To be fair the Jackets went almost 20 minutes without a shot in the second period, which will get you an L on most nights, but the game before against Ottawa was a classic case of a game you win most nights so everything evened itself out. 

 

The Hurricanes have some good dmen, Teuvo Teravainen is gonna be something, Jeff Skinner would be huge if he played in Toronto, and their penalty kill is #1, so they should have a better record than they do, but also their goaltending is Cam Ward playing above his head so maybe they're right where they should be. I'm starting to become a big believer in you're as good as your record say you are. Especially at this point in the season. 

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I wrote this last night...I'll add some thoughts as well.

 

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Frankly, the warning signs were there last year. The Lightning lost 11 points from 2014-'15 (108 points) to last year (97), and they only made the playoffs by about six points, if I properly recall. They also had the benefit of the weaker division in the weaker conference. They also started very slow last year and, overall, were one of the biggest underachievers in the league.

This has just been a continuation of that, except the rest of the conference has gotten better overall, so now that slow start has led to them being completely buried, even in a still-bad Atlantic division.

I had hoped that last year was just a one-off thing, random, and not anything reasonably expected to repeat itself this year. I was wrong, but I wasn't wrong. It hasn't "repeated" itself this year; it's been considerably worse. That 11 point drop last season? Lightning will be lucky not to drop 11 more at this point. Right now, they're on pace to finish 15 points worse than last year.

 

Basically, I think there's a very bad blend of injuries, regressed performance, and bad coaching. The Lightning's possession metrics are down 3% from where they were two years ago, there's no puck movers on the blueline besides Stralman and Hedman (who generally play on the same unit, thus, the other two pairings are weak), Vasilevskiy has looked like, well, a 22 year old when he got a chance to start while Bishop was injured...nonetheless, like I mentioned above, there were already indications of there being problems last season, too. I could buy the argument of "can't get up to play the regular season" if any of the other usual top teams had these kinds of issues. They don't. The Caps, Pens, 'Hawks, you name them, are all going to easily sail past 100 points and have a home ice playoff seeding (I assume) come April. The Lightning sandbagged the first half of last season, until they hit rock bottom in Calgary at some point in January and realized what kind of mess they were truly in.

 

They looked more like themselves from there on out, but that still side-steps the major issue, and that's Jon Cooper's lineup decisions. Last year, and going back into the '15 postseason really, his refusal to give Jonathan Drouin regular ice time was infuriating. It might've cost them a chance against Chicago in the Final when Johnson's wrist was broken and all form of scoring dried up, and it ingratiated Drouin to the point of demanding a trade last year. Drouin finally got regular ice time again when there was truly no other choice, basically. Frankly, I'm amazed that he's actually working out as well as he is now; that kind of :censored: can ruin a player's development. And now, this year, swap out Drouin for Slater Koekkoek and you have basically the same thing, just on the blueline. Koekkoek has been in the AHL since 2014-'15; he's gotten two full years of seasoning already. Giving him for AHL ice time is a waste on his ELC. He's also a capable puck mover, something the team so clearly lacks having depth in. Is he going to make mistakes? Yes, and he's already made some, too, but you know who else is going to make mistakes? Luke Witkowski. And he's the kind of plug that exists in every team's organization, so what's the point there, exactly? Nikita Nesterov is a capable puck-mover but absolutely sucks at playing his own zone and shows brutal instincts for it, but he keeps getting regular opportunities as well. The double standards are bizarre as hell. 

 

I've been a critic of Cooper for a long time (check the time stamp). It's easy for me to rag on him. It only feels like it's gotten worse as the time has gone on. Even if it's not his fault, though, frankly, does it matter? The end result is still a massively underachieving team. They were a pre-season Cup contender by consensus; they aren't even gonna make the playoffs. Usually that's a recipe for firing the head coach. That they fell to the bottom of the conference by getting routed by, arguably, the worst team in the NHL last night? Insult to injury. 

 

--

 

It would be hard to answer the "who would replace him" question right now; the easy answer would be Todd Richards, who is an assistant who has helped turn the power play around from being brutal to being one of the league's best, but his track record in Minnesota and Columbus is, well, decent but nothing great. Beyond that? I'd need more time to think about it.

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13 minutes ago, McCarthy said:

Teuvo Teravainen is gonna be something

 

It would have been nice if the Blackhawks' doctors could have diagnosed Bryan Bickell with multiple sclerosis before Carolina's did, because then we could have LTIRed him for life and kept Teravainen, but on the other hand, it started to feel like he was never going to thrive on the Hawks. I don't know why he's putting it together now, but he was just so tentative and easily bullied here. I think Panarin's breakout sort of doomed him, practically and psychologically.

♫ oh yeah, board goes on, long after the thrill of postin' is gone ♫

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1 hour ago, Kramerica Industries said:

Lightning are now in last place in the Eastern Conference in terms of points percentage.

 

Can we finally fire Jon Cooper already? Simply unbelievable things have sunk this far.

What if Steve Yzerman doesn't mind the team being bad this year?  It will possibly keep the price down on some of the RFAs this summer, they'll get a reasonably high draft pick, and then the team takes a crack at it again next year with a new coach and Steven Stamkos back?  Obviously the talent is there to be better than this.

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16 hours ago, the admiral said:

Genius GM Steve Yzerman is changing the way we think about contending for the Stanley Cup: you don't have to qualify for it every year!

I'm not calling it a Sabres-level tank; that would be hard to do.  If the team played through Stamkos's absence like they did last year, I think he'd have been thrilled.  I just think that instead of blowing up a talent-laden roster or firing a coach that was very successful until five months ago, he might just be letting things play out in order to better assess where he's at.  A trade also might have been very difficult to do, since they're close to the cap.  It also has the benefits of getting a high draft pick that might be able to play on the team for a low cap hit in a year or two and weakening the resumes of impending RFAs; that's a big deal for a team with little cap room.

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No, I think you're right, too. It probably is an unexplored (at least intentionally) market inefficiency to guarantee a 0% chance at the championship with a good team in exchange for, like, let's say a 15% chance with that good team + more assets in the following year. I'm just poking fun at the consensus that anything the Lightning do is brilliant. 

 

That being said, aren't the Lightning really up against it for next year or the year after? They might be running out of time with this core.

♫ oh yeah, board goes on, long after the thrill of postin' is gone ♫

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4 hours ago, TheGrimReaper said:

 

I agree with you, but to an extent. The loser point can skew the standings a little bit.

 

Absolutely and the league likes it that way. I think they also like the wide gap in games played that this bye week has created, which had the Devils a couple points out of a playoff spot until you figured out they had 5 more games played than Toronto who has 3 more points. The league is counting on fans not noticing that. It's the same reason things are priced at $5.99 instead of $6.00. 

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The Blue Jackets and Senators played a 2-0 snoozer on Thursday and then a 7-6 overtime barn burner on Sunday. Hockey is goofy. Of course, didn't have to look hard to find gomers online expressing their moral superiority for preferring the 2-0 game. 

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11 hours ago, McCarthy said:

The Blue Jackets and Senators played a 2-0 snoozer on Thursday and then a 7-6 overtime barn burner on Sunday. Hockey is goofy. Of course, didn't have to look hard to find gomers online expressing their moral superiority for preferring the 2-0 game. 

 

WHAT A COMEBACK!

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