Trending Topics is a column that covers hockey week, sometimes according to Twitter. If you just want to comment about how stupid Twitter is, why not cry about the slow, sad death of your beloved Internet instead?
The NHL’s marketing campaign to remind fans that hockey is back is aptly titled, “Hockey is Back.”
And that’s true in the most technical sense possible.
Sticklers will say it never went away, and that’s certainly true because I probably went to two or three dozen college games during the lockout. You could also have attended junior games, AHL games, ECHL games, World Junior games or even foreign league games. But for most NHL fans, “hockey” begins and ends with the NHL, and therefore “hockey is back.”
But the fact is, no matter the excuses the league has made over the past few weeks, nor the discounts and merchandise to get fans back into the buildings, will make up for the loss of those first three and a half months of the season. and probably no one felt it more than the vast majority of NHL players.
Case in point: The Boston Bruins faced their Providence counterparts in a game for which the team gave away free tickets to all 17,565 seats at TD Garden and probably drew about 13,000 people. It was a fun night, mainly because Providence won 7-5.
Aside from the goalscoring bonanza, just by watching the game for five minutes or so you could definitely tell which team was in mid-season form and which was made up largely of guys who hadn’t played competitive match with real controls since last spring. .
Boston certainly didn’t have its legs underneath it, to say the least, but let’s just say you could pretty well tell which players on its roster took advantage of their overseas opportunities, and which ones didn’t. ‘certainly didn’t. Tyler Seguin, for example, was obviously the best player on the ice and looked like a kid who is poised to get better after his sophomore season. This is thanks, it is assumed, to his domination of the Swiss championship in recent months. Patrice Bergeron also looked good. Dennis Seidenberg too, whose goal in the match was simply magnificent. Ditto for Rich Peverley. Ditto for Zdeno Chara. Ditto for Andrew Ference.
Not so much for Tuukka Rask, but he didn’t have any assists in front of him either, even though he allowed six goals on 24 shots or something like that. Or Milan Lucic, who skated like he was dragging a truck behind him.
The Providence Bruins, led by well-known hockey greats like Max Sauvé and Jamie Tardif, regularly split the Boston Bruins defense. Hell, the second best player on the ice was also a Providence Bruin until a day or two before the scrimmage. Chris Bourque appears to have made the big club and has looked excellent alongside Peverley and Chris Kelly (who himself played overseas), registering a goal and two assists. But I guess the question now is can you expect that kind of production from a career minor league player early in the season?
I guess at least for the first two, three or four weeks of the season it’s “Yes.”
It was brutal hockey to watch from the best professional players in the world, and they were getting torched in transition by the AHL guys.
The Providence Bruins, while very good hockey players in their own right and playing in what must have been a somewhat motivating situation, are also a decidedly mediocre club. Seventh in the AHL Eastern Conference with 40 points in 35 games, they should have been beaten by the second or third best team on paper in the NHL. And make no mistake, these guys weren’t looking for a job to start the season, as the big club’s roster is pretty much set.
What all this tells me is that when the puck drops tomorrow night, when the Bruins take on the New York Rangers of all the super-elite teams on the planet, the hockey will not be aesthetically pleasing at all, and You can also project this league-wide.
What was the final figure? Something like 30 percent of the league played overseas during the lockout? A few others went down to the AHL or ECHL, probably? That’s a pretty big part of the league that hasn’t played anyone in a real contact game or tried that hard in eight months and if the Bruins’ sloppy performance against their farm team is any indication, the rust is not going to do it. broke away between Tuesday and Saturday.
It’s also worth noting that these guys are still world-class players. Boston only scored two goals in the first two periods of the game, but then scored three in the span of about four minutes on a series of very good plays. The shots in particular were of extremely high quality, with Seidenberg’s aforementioned wrist shot and Brad Marchand’s second-half shot being particularly notable. But even still, more passes went wide, ended up in guys’ feet, or hit opposing sticks than anyone would have liked. The goalkeepers left goals that they would have liked to recover. The defense kept losing guys in coverage.
This all works out over the course of a two-week training camp with a few full-contact exhibitions thrown in for good measure, but when you’ve been in camp since Sunday after more than six months off, you can’t be should be completely ready for an NHL season. It’s not fair, but it’s the way things have to be for the league to save face.
I guess maybe we can extrapolate from this too, that teams whose players have spent significant time in competitive leagues overseas or here in North America might be in a better position to win games During the first few weeks of the season that there was a group of guys staying at home. This will definitely wreak havoc on the rankings early on, although the rankings will need a lot of help to be crazy this season anyway.
And none of this is to say anything about the fitness levels of these guys, which should be okay considering they’re professional athletes and all, but everyone in the hockey world has already checked his watch to see when the next guy will go down with a groin. injury (should happen any minute) in the first few weeks of the season. There will be a lot of it, and it won’t help the product at all.
Hockey is back, that’s for sure, but it’ll probably be a lot uglier than you’ve remembered in a while.
Business pearls
We all know there is no better Twitter account there than that of Paul Bissonnette. So why not check out his best advice on love, life and lappers from last week?
BizNasty on telephone tag: “Leaving a voicemail message for more than a minute should be punishable by death.”
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