2013-14 NHL Season: "We Are North American Scum"

[Sport]

I love hockey because it can make even the professionals look silly sometimes. It's a hard game.

I blame the shallower nets for the Bogosian turnover. He just had too much room back there to work with.

[fouhy12]

He turned it over because he took his eye off the puck. He assumed it was still on his stick, so he whiffed when it wasn't there anymore. Then, he fell over out of surprise.

[NEW.ERA]

Doesn't make him a horrible human being, he f'ed up. The Atlanta crowd will be all happy, but who cares.

[NJTank]

Holmgren is a rat.

He should be fired.

Yup

Craig Berube is the new coach. PC starts in a few minutes

Why was he even brought back to start the season if he had that short of rope, and personally I thought he would have gotten fired in April, but stilll.

[The_Admiral]

Come on, you should know by now that there is never any rhyme or reason to what the Flyers do. Holmgren probably meant to fire Purple Pete at the end of the year but got drunk and forgot to, and it was only during the rash of new coach hirings that he realized there was something he had meant to do but didn't.

EDIT: oh man, short of Bobby Clarke himself this dude is like the Flyersiest coach the Flyers could have:

He played 1054 NHL regular season games between 1986 and 2003. Berube was known as an enforcer and fighter in the NHL, and amassed 3149 penalty minutes in his career, good for seventh on the all-time list. Berube once punched official Kevin Collins while trying to fight Lindy Ruff.[1]

In November 1997, Berube called Florida's black player Peter Worrell "a monkey". Berube was suspended one game for his comment.

That last part is going to be great for coaching a guy who once had a banana thrown at him.

[NEW.ERA]

Joey MacDonald's save on Chris Higgins yesterday was pretty boss.

[BigEd76]

Flyers management thought missing the playoffs last year was a fluke and gave him another shot, but they were 1-5-1 in the preseason and scored only 1 goal in each of the first 3 games so far, and all 10 games were dreadful to watch and "nobody stood out or appeared to improve", so he and one of the assistants got the axe

[The_Admiral]

That was no fluke. If anything, they should have been a game or two worse. The goalie from last year is in the ECHL now.

[Sport]

Holmgren traded Richards and Carter, signed Bryzgalov to an 8 year deal, traded away Bobrovsky, released Bryzgalov less than 2 years after signing him.

Now that they're a division rival, I don't want Paul Holmgren to ever get fired.

[BBTV]

They still think it's 1975. They only let alumni from that era run things, and will never look outside the organeyezation for a GM or executive.

Ed Snider's heart is in the right place, he's just stubborn, and loyal to a fault. They want to be the Yankees, but they're the Cubs.

[BBTV]

Lol Ed Snider said in response to questions over only hiring from in house that that's their culture and there's no need for a fresh perspective.

He went from one of the best and most important owners in the league to an angry and borderline senile old man.

Still better than when his son was running things though.

[OMMF]

So Vancouver added lights to their stanchions:

OH FOR THE LOVE OF

Get outta here with that Vancouver. Man do I hate that.

Behind the scenes video on them:

[Kramerica Industries]

Joey MacDonald's save on Chris Higgins yesterday was pretty boss.

Gonna be hard to get used to those unnecessarily shallow goal cages.

[zpqmaowl]

Why not?

[BBTV]

Is that Terry "it's a choking situation" Murray?

[BBTV]

Pretty good write up of the current state of the Flyers and how their Flyersness is doing them in.

http://www.philly.com/philly/sports/flyers/20131008_Flyers__culture_needs_refreshening.html

[The_Admiral]

Sometimes, though, an identity can be a franchise's worst enemy. Consider the Chicago Blackhawks. They went through a dormant decade, missing the postseason nine times in 10 years and falling into irrelevancy.

But in an interview with me earlier this year, Blackhawks president John McDonough and general manager Stan Bowman acknowledged that the hidden benefit of all that losing was that it allowed the franchise to start with a clean slate. There was no tradition to uphold anymore. The Blackhawks weren't beholden to their own history. They could remake themselves however they chose, and all they've done since is win two of the last four Stanley Cups.

But the Blackhawks didn't have to abandon their history. They abandoned a dumbass policy of not airing home games (that's good!), and they don't play as much theater organ as they used to (that's bad), but McDonough sells the tradition hard. Every player of relative consequence has been melodramatically feted in the time he's been here: Chelios, Roenick, Larmer, even Bob Probert had a special night. He didn't show up to it on time, but they had one for him. You can't say there's a clean slate when the team logo is treated as the most sacred image in human history.

The key, which the Oilers would do just as well to heed as the Flyers, is to treasure all your beloved players and then consign them to meaningless sinecures so that the decision-making is left to the grown-ups. Denis Savard is one of the best players of the 1980s, but was a terrible coach (and he was an assistant through like every bad head coach before him!), and now he just hangs out at sports bars in the suburbs for road games. To hear it from him, he likes this job better anyway. Bobby Clarke has no business being involved with hockey operations in 2013. Just pay him to go out and be Bobby Clarke.

[BLUELANDbeliever]

Oh God.

[The_Admiral]

They say "Doty" and "Kopidor" on the back, then, right?

Always found it interesting that the L.A. Kings stole their color schemes from other teams with some commonality, whether teams also in Los Angeles or a team also named the Kings. Now here comes oddball to say something about how I'm an idiot and Jack Kent Cooke and doctors who save lives.

[CS85]

Sometimes, though, an identity can be a franchise's worst enemy. Consider the Chicago Blackhawks. They went through a dormant decade, missing the postseason nine times in 10 years and falling into irrelevancy.

But in an interview with me earlier this year, Blackhawks president John McDonough and general manager Stan Bowman acknowledged that the hidden benefit of all that losing was that it allowed the franchise to start with a clean slate. There was no tradition to uphold anymore. The Blackhawks weren't beholden to their own history. They could remake themselves however they chose, and all they've done since is win two of the last four Stanley Cups.

But the Blackhawks didn't have to abandon their history. They abandoned a dumbass policy of not airing home games (that's good!), and they don't play as much theater organ as they used to (that's bad), but McDonough sells the tradition hard. Every player of relative consequence has been melodramatically feted in the time he's been here: Chelios, Roenick, Larmer, even Bob Probert had a special night. He didn't show up to it on time, but they had one for him. You can't say there's a clean slate when the team logo is treated as the most sacred image in human history.

This right here. Here's a segment from a great Chicago Magazine article that details a bit more about the transformation of the Blackhawks post-Bill Wirtz by his son Rocky.

One of the first things he did after taking charge of the Blackhawks, for example, was to launch a goodwill tour among the three largest Chicago-area newspapers—the Tribune, the Sun-Times, and the Daily Herald—which had been the target of regular harangues by Bill over coverage he perceived as hostile. Such a conciliatory gesture would have been unthinkable under his father, he admits. "I figured, Let's take a little different approach," Rocky says. "I introduced myself, said, 'Hey, here's my card if you need me.' Just wanting to say, 'It's a new day; we're not carrying grudges; we're moving ahead.' "

The major thing the Blackhawks had to do after Wirtz died was reminding the city that there was a professional hockey franchise. They reached out to numerous former Hawks and re-hired Pat Foley almost immediately. It was an immense process of revitalizing an extremely viable product by giving it's marketing a power-washer-like cleaning. All the history was there, people just needed the proper exposure to it. It's pretty incredible to think that between 1997-2007 the team had lost almost $200 million dollars.

While I grant that the Blackhawks are not technically making a profit (thanks lockouts!) they're arguably the most famous and successful team in the NHL in years since.