2021-22 NHL Regular Season

[DTConcepts]

Man. After two consecutive trips to the ECF, a brand new world-class stadium, a hall-of-fame caliber coach and GM tandem, and owners who genuinely care about the team and its fans, I really thought the Islanders were finally done being an embarrassment.

 

But leave it to the Isles to leave me disappointed.

[Ridleylash]

 

[tp49]

46 minutes ago, DTConcepts said:

Man. After two consecutive trips to the ECF, a brand new world-class stadium, a hall-of-fame caliber coach and GM tandem, and owners who genuinely care about the team and its fans, I really thought the Islanders were finally done being an embarrassment.

 

But leave it to the Isles to leave me disappointed.

Half the team's out with COVID including one half of the top defensive pair.  The other half of that pair is out for another 4-6 weeks with a lower body injury.  The team's got issues, namely the pylon known as Zdeno Chara, their usual inability to score goals on the power play, and age.  However, with Bridgeport standing in I'm willing to give this stretch of games a pass.

 

Probably no playoffs this season but you play the hand you're dealt.  We've seen worse and we've dealt with worse.

[DoctorWhom]

11 minutes ago, Ridleylash said:

 

I'm so glad a team with major questions at Goalie ended up trading away Dan Vladar just to blow money on some scrub goalie from Buffalo. 

[Kevin W.]

So was Colliton the problem with this Hawks team? I know that six games is actually waaaaaay too small of a sample size, but they are 5-1 since King took over as interim coach.

 

I have no illusions about this team being a playoff contender. It's just been nice to have a stretch of games where they stopped being a complete dumpster fire.

[Ridleylash]

Sounds like a nice healthy work environment over in Vancouver. /s

[The_Admiral]

21 hours ago, Kevin W. said:

So was Colliton the problem with this Hawks team? I know that six games is actually waaaaaay too small of a sample size, but they are 5-1 since King took over as interim coach.

 

Yes he was. In going from Joel Quenneville to Jeremy Colliton, the Hawks went from one of the greatest coaches of all time to a pissant who got drafted after Duncan Keith and kinda did okay coaching in Sweden. The players had just-short-of-open contempt for him and correctly clocked him as a pet project of bumbling upper management (just so everyone knows, there was no "chain of command" w/r/t Blackhawks coaches; every assistant Quenneville didn't pick off a Whalers roster was a management spy). He insisted upon a man-on-man defense that did not and would not work with the personnel he had, further alienating his players. Derek King, by all accounts, has pretty much just told his players "do what feels right" and otherwise treated them as adults, and in doing this absolute bare minimum of supervision has distinguished himself as a far superior coach. Colliton will never be a head coach in this league again. I don't think he'll even be a head coach in the American league again. As the special boy of blacklisted GM Stan Bowman, he will have zero credibility forever.

[Ridleylash]

Hoooh boy, the Canucks look teeeeerible.

 

EDIT: Meanwhile, down in Sunrise...

 

[DG_ThenNowForever]

Went to Climate Pledge tonight. It's really quite something. And the Kraken won!

[Ridleylash]

The Canucks are a circus and Aquilini is the ringmaster.

[Chromatic]

10 hours ago, Ridleylash said:

The Canucks are a circus and Aquilini is the ringmaster.

"We don't know what we're doing!" is the motto of this regime.

[spartacat_12]

On 11/20/2021 at 5:52 PM, LMU said:

Pretty much.

 

Considering what a s#$% show the Barclays seating layout was for hockey, I'm sure Islanders fans will absolutely take generic. And as other people have said, I'm not sure what you can do to give it more character.

 

On 11/21/2021 at 10:33 PM, DoctorWhom said:

I'm so glad a team with major questions at Goalie ended up trading away Dan Vladar just to blow money on some scrub goalie from Buffalo. 

 

With Rask gone, I can understand the Bruins not feeling comfortable going into the season using a tandem with a combined 15 games of NHL experience. And Ullmark was one of the few bright spots in Buffalo over the past few years. He somehow managed a winning record in his time there, and had a save % over .900 every season.

 

Besides, who knows what they actually have in Vladar. Daryll Sutter's system managed to make Martin Jones & Jonathan Bernier look like Vezina caliber guys.

[The_Admiral]

"Run a dump-and-chase with everyone being big and fast" was a pretty solid system, yeah. I wonder if Darryl knew he was running it.

[DG_ThenNowForever]

Here's a photo I took inside of the Pledge:

 

 

I haven't looked at any direct comparisons, but the inside feels about 1.5 times the size of Key Arena, it not larger. It's really amazing that they built a larger arena inside of an old arena and it all makes sense.

 

One other thing -- and it's not surprising -- is that at least two thirds of then people in the stands were wearing a Kraken jersey. And, not surprising, people around me were very confused why the Hurricane were pulling their goalie when a penalty was called against them. We all made fun of Carolina explaining hockey to the fans in-arena when they first started, but it seems kind of necessary to do so.

 

That said, my first Kraken experience was an A-. The arena and on-ice product were great, but tickets were $150 to sit in the upper level and :censored: that.

[SFGiants58]

On 11/20/2021 at 2:52 PM, LMU said:

Pretty much.

 

I think we’re burying the lede here:

 

Somebody let Olbermann out of the mental hospital?

[JerseyJimmy]

it is so goddamn weird to think of Florida of all teams tying a record associated with winning at home.

[Brass]

On 11/21/2021 at 10:33 PM, DoctorWhom said:

I'm so glad a team with major questions at Goalie ended up trading away Dan Vladar just to blow money on some scrub goalie from Buffalo. 

 

Let's not act like Swayman and Ullmark are doing terrible; the weakness is the defense.

 

The Bruins defensive corps was absolutely exposed in the playoffs last year, and the Bruins decided to try to fix it by signing Derek Forbert. They've been playing terrible in their own zone, headlined by Jakub Zboril who, despite being a first round pick that the Bruins saw more potential in than Thomas Chabot, might be one of the worst players in recent Bruins history.

[habsfan1]

Marc Bergevin's job is 100% safe no matter what because he's the only french candidate currently available.

 

But here's an obstacle that the team now has to face: Marc Bergevin is leaving on his own terms because he himself wants out. They can't tie him down to his office chair.

 

---

 

For the first time since Cunneyworth, the Habs have been given permission to talk to Jeff Gorton, who doesn't speak a word of french. Apparently, it's being pitched to re-name all of the management positions because, quite frankly, they're totally  out of luck and they're attempting to appease the media people, many of whom have started panicking.

 

I say it's about time they make steps foward, to try to better the team.

[The_Admiral]

The New York Times wrote about the Quebec problem the other day, and they're pretty much saying what I've been trying to say: that "growing the game" has been a zero-sum game, and that because of the league's derelict stewardship, it's dying in a place where it needs to be. 

 

Quote

MONTREAL — Of all the shortages that have emerged across the globe this year and attracted high-level political attention, the most astonishing may be this: the scarcity of Quebecers in professional hockey.

Forget worries about pasta shortages (the Canadian harvest of durum wheat is down by almost a third) and the soaring prices of poultry (the staple of Montreal’s famous rotisserie chicken outlets) and beef (the star of the popular steak frites joints that dot the city). The problem raised last week by François Legault, the premier of Quebec, is the lack of successors to Marcel Dionne, Mario Lemieux, Luc Robitaille, Mike Bossy and Guy Lafleur — the five leading goal scorers from Quebec in N.H.L. history.

There now are 51 Quebec-born players in the N.H.L. — about 7 percent of the league’s roughly 721 players, according to statistics parsed by the website QuantHockey. Ontario, with 171 players, far outpaces Quebec and now accounts for the most professionals from one province in the league. The difference is not merely explained by Ontario’s larger population.

Canada leads the N.H.L. with 43 percent of players compared with 26.4 percent of players born in the United States. But within Canada, the province of Quebec is singing a sad song. Where have you gone Denis Savard? A nation — and Quebec considers itself a nation, with a provincial legislature called the Assemblée nationale — turns its lonely eyes to you.

Indeed, today, there are more players on N.H.L. rosters from Sweden (86) than from Quebec.

 

Quebec and, for that matter, Canada, are facing weightier issues. Covid-19 has not disappeared, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau made faint progress in eroding President Biden’s Buy-American impulses last week, the energy sector is in distress and the Western province of British Columbia is in its second major climate-related disaster in six months. Then there is the hardy perennial, the constant fighting in Quebec about how much English should be permitted on signs and preventing non-English speakers and newcomers from outside Canada from sending their children to English-language schools.

But a week ago, Legault caused a contretemps — fortunately the same word in both tongues — when he uttered an incontrovertible and uncontroversial truth at a news conference at the Bell Centre, where the Montreal Canadiens play. “Hockey is more than a sport in Quebec,” he said, expressing distress at the decline of hockey-playing youth in the province and announcing the creation of a 14-member committee led by a former N.H.L. goalie, Marc Denis, to study the problem, which includes a lack of coaches and the high cost of equipment and ice time. The committee is expected to report back on April 1.

No one took issue with his assertion that hockey in Quebec is “our national sport, part of our identity,” nor did anyone quibble last year when he expressed grief that for the first time the Canadiens played a game with not one Quebecer on the roster. No snickering: Has the home team ever taken the field at Penn State’s Beaver Stadium without a single resident of Pennsylvania on the squad?

...
 

Hockey has long been a vital element in Quebec culture. Maurice Richard, who played for the Canadiens for 18 years, is a Quebec nationalist hero. He scored 50 goals in 50 games in the 1944-45 season, the first player to do so; anchored the Habs’ hockey dynasty by winning eight Stanley Cup championships; and, most significant, was a symbol of francophone achievement at a time when Montreal was dominated by an entrenched anglophone establishment.

In 1955, when Richard got involved in a physical altercation with a linesman in a game against the Boston Bruins and then was suspended for the remainder of the season and the playoffs, Montreal was inflamed with anger. One fan assaulted the N.H.L.’s commissioner, Clarence Campbell — a hard-faced symbol of English power — and another set off a smoke bomb in the Montreal Forum, and soon the brawling was so wild that the fire marshal ordered the crowd to retreat to the streets, where a full-scale riot broke out. Through it all, Richard emerged as the personification of both francophone oppression and pride.

Hockey is so much a part of Quebec life that one of the most beloved children’s books, “Le Chandail de Hockey,” or “The Hockey Sweater,” explores the mortification that a child experiences when his French-speaking mother orders a “bleu, blanc et rouge” Canadiens jersey only to have the department store send him one bearing the despised Blue and White of the Maple Leafs, the Habs’ dreaded rivals, instead.

Though the Canadiens signed three Quebec-born players — David Savard, Cedric Paquette and Jean-Sébastien Dea — on a single day in July, the relationship between the province and the princes of local hockey is not what it used to be.

The N.H.L. is an intercontinental league — the Columbus Blue Jackets opened the season with players from the United States, Canada, Switzerland, Finland, Russia, the Czech Republic, Denmark, France and Latvia on the roster — but the Canadiens historically were the preferred destination for Quebec-born players and built what the Montreal-born hockey writer Mike Moore called “an unequaled and powerful empire of feeder teams across North America.” But, he wrote, “the Montreal Canadiens stood to lose the most” when a new amateur draft system was adopted by the N.H.L. in 1963.

...

Quebec City, which lost the Nordiques to Colorado in 1995, has had an N.H.L.-ready arena since 2015, and applied for an expansion team that year, as did Las Vegas, which was awarded the Golden Knights franchise in 2016.

The day that Legault announced the committee to study hockey in Quebec, he told the French-language sports broadcaster RDS that he had spoken with Gary Bettman, the N.H.L.’s commissioner, “to find out what we need to bring back the Nordiques.”

However, on Wednesday an N.H.L. spokeswoman wrote in an email quoting the league’s deputy commissioner, Bill Daly, as saying: “We are always happy to meet. We are not currently considering further expansion.”

Does it really matter that Quebec has a single N.H.L. team, or that Saskatchewan produces more N.H.L. players per capita than any other province, or that Ontario produces the most, period? Hockey, like home, is where the heart is.

“Hockey is a part of life all across the country, but is special in Quebec,” said Daniel Béland, a political scientist who moved to McGill University in Montreal as director of its Institute for the Study of Canada after a decade at the University of Saskatchewan. “Quebec feels it cannot be perceived as a declining source of supply for hockey players. It’s that important to Quebec culture.”

 

Hockey is special in Quebec and should be treated as such. I don't think it's quite as special to the three-car-garage exurbs of Dallas and Raleigh.

[Kramerica Industries]

 

"Ce qui est clair: c'est que le prochain DG du #CH parlera français"

 

Gee whiz, c'est une surprise.