Battle Of Hudson

If it wasn’t time to sound the alarm before today’s 4-3 shootout loss in Buffalo, against a last-place Sabres team missing its best player in Thomas Vanek, then it surely is now.  Or move the DEFCON level, the way they did in Wargames when Armageddon appeared at hand.  Just when you think things can’t get much worse after losing to Team IR (Ottawa) at home on President’s Day, or getting whipped by the Isles and the Caps, or losing two straight to the Jets – all non-playoff teams mind you, until Winnipeg’s recent spurt put them on top of the Southleast division – comes today’s latest wonderful performance against Buffalo.  Yes, they finally scored three goals and yes they ‘only’ lost in a shootout but enough is enough already.  This was another point thrown away in a season where you can’t throw away points.

I’m tired of hearing all these teams aren’t as bad as their record either.  At some point you have to start beating the teams below you in the standings, especially when they’re last-place teams missing their best player!  You’re not always going to beat the good teams, but good teams take care of the cellar-dwellers.  We haven’t been doing that lately.  Even finally having a (mostly) healthy lineup didn’t help, although Martin Brodeur‘s loss is being felt even more than expected with the subpar play of Johan Hedberg.  Whether it’s playing the puck or standing like a statue in the shootout as two wristers go through him, Moose has been a dissapointment when the team needed him to carry the ball with Marty on the shelf with back issues.

Maybe Marty’s back was tired by helping make this team look like it was elite when it really wasn’t early in the season.  Moose had a couple of good starts in that run too, but really Marty’s puckhandling helps the offense out, and Moose has gotten himself into trouble multiple times during this streak trying to overcompensate and use puckhandling skills he doesn’t have.  Not that Marty would have been able to do much with the utter brain cramp during another powerless play at 7:17 of the second period when useless Bobby Boucher Butler drifted away from the slot, and Ilya Kovalchuk and Andy Greene both went toward Cody Hodgson but didn’t take away the passing lane, leaving Jason Pominville wide open in the slot (on a power play, remember!) for as easy a one-timer shorthanded goal as you’re ever going to have.

Ironically it was Pominville’s weak backcheck on Adam Henrique that let him have enough time to score an uncontested shorthanded goal of his own early in the third period to give the Devils the lead, after Steve Bernier had tied the game in the second period with a ‘right place, right time’ goal off his foot.  Did Henrique exchange words with Ryan Miller after scoring his goal?  That is the only thing I can think of that might explain Miller’s bizarre reaction after stoning Henrique to end the shootout a half hour later, when for reasons known only to him the goaltender of a last-place team decided to trash-talk after actually winning a home game for the first time since the Bush administration.

Of course, Buffalo was chippy the whole game from Patrick Kaleta and Steve Ott continually trying to get at Ilya Kovalchuk and David Clarkson.  This is where I don’t understand Pete DeBoer‘s decision to scratch Barch, and for the likes of Butler no less.  You play Krys Barch in like fifteen games where he’s next to useless and don’t play him against a team with big, physical, cheap players that are looking to out-muscle you since they don’t have the personnel to outtalent many teams without Vanek?  Not having Barch around came back to bite us in the first period when Clarkson had to drop the gloves with Ott, then Kovy took a needless penalty against Kaleta (though Kaleta should have gotten one too).

It wasn’t just their big guys either, the smallest Sabre on the ice in Tyler Ennis took a cheapshot at Henrique towards the end of overtime when of course no penalty called would make a difference heading into the shootout.  That kind of penalty should warrant automatic suspension, otherwise you just give every team a license to cheapshot before the skills competition.  To add insult to near-injury, Ennis scored in the shootout.

Honestly, the last time I was annoyed at any other team this much was the Sean Avery Rangers, and I normally root for the Sabres as an unofficial second team, especially feeling for fans like Clown who’ve never seen a major sports championship.  I lost a lot of respect for that organization after today though.  Maybe Ron Rolston wants to bring an edge to get his team out of their season and a half long malaise.  I can understand it from that perspective, but there’s being physical and just being cheap and the Sabres crossed that line a number of times for no good reason.

Being mad at the Sabres isn’t going to help the Devils resolve their own issues though.  Although we outshot them 26-14 in the first two periods, it was the most misleading shot total ever.  Most of the quality chances were by guys in Sabre jerseys and Pominville (one of their few offensive threats) was getting open all night.  Our eight-defenseman merry-go-round continues to accomplish zip, zilch and nothing with the latest scratch being Anton Volchenkov who’s been benched for the last two games.

Not that I have any love for Volchenkov, who’s been a dissapointment in a Devil uniform, but it’s ridiculous to have starting NHL defensemen as healthy scratches while you continually try to plug Stefan Matteau and other assorted role players into the role of first-line winger.  Ironically, Henrik Tallinder‘s been one of the better Devils the last two games since returning to the lineup – some other guys have to step up, starting with Marek Zidlicky who can be counted on for at least a couple of boneheaded plays/penalties a game.  Adam Larsson‘s game has regressed a little and Andy Greene is pulling his usual ‘hot for a few weeks, cold for another few’ that’s marked his career.

And yes our offense managed three goals today – with of course Andrei Loktionov scoring the tying goal in the third period for seemingly his nine hundredth straight game with a point.  What does it say when four castoffs (Loktionov and the entire CBGB line, reunited with the return of Ryan Carter from a concussion) are your entire scoring right now?  If it wasn’t for the Kings’ ridiculous center depth and perhaps buddy Dean Lombardi doing Lou Lamoriello a little bit of a favor by letting us have Lokti for a mere fifth-rounder, we’d literally have been shut out a handful of times already.

Lou’s going to have to pull a couple more guys like Lokti out of his hat for this team to get anywhere.  Even having Danius Zubrus get healthy doesn’t give this team a real first-line winger although Zubrus can fill that role better than the guys that have been doing it.  Zubrus slots in best as a second-third liner.  This team needs a goalscorer from somewhere, anywhere.  David Clarkson‘s dissapeared since he started getting banged up in Washington, Kovalchuk has been on and off, in part due to having the rotating mystery winger of the day on his other side that doesn’t belong on a first line, and Patrik Elias has also gone cold lately.  Nevermind the lack of production from centers Henrique (despite his goal today) and Travis Zajac, who looks utterly lost without Zach Parise, the way he did two years ago when he struggled to a 44-point season when Parise was out most of the season with injury.

Even though the season’s nearly half over (!) I wouldn’t say time is running out yet for Lou and Pete to figure out how to fix this team’s issues.  Certainly however, these losses to subpar teams have run out the cushion they built with their 8-1-3 start.

I was gonna sit here and not focus on the negative tonight.  I’ve been focusing on the negative for two weeks while the Devils’ slump has been ongoing, since that home-and-home sweep of Pittsburgh.  It should be said we’re still in a good position with a 10-5-4 record and with a five-six point cushion over the playoff bubble for the moment.  I’m sure Derek would trade positions with me in a second considering the state of his Rangers, both record-wise and injury-wise…or Brian for that matter with his Sabres not exactly getting the ‘new coach’ bounce after Lindy Ruff‘s dismissal.  With our playoff cushion, there’s still time to resolve our issues before we go to DEFCON 1.

That said, as the losses to bad-mediocre teams are piling up it’s getting harder to ignore the negative returns during this Devils’ 2-4-1 stretch against not exactly the beasts of the East.  Specifically our horrendous ‘special’ teams, which continue to cost this team games.  Granted, today’s game wasn’t exactly a power play orgy with only four minor penalties in the contest.  However, the Devils’ two power plays were predictably infuriating with too much cycling over to players’ non-shooting sides.  I really don’t get the concept of Brad Shaw’s power play, or how it ever worked in San Jose.  Obviously they had better power play personnel, but from what I’ve seen of our man advantage, we put our players in positions to fail.  Ilya Kovalchuk in particular spends too much time off the right wing, cycling back toward the left or passing instead of ripping a one-timer from the left side or the center point, or being able to get off a clean shot.  They have been effective five-on-three (five for eight), propping up their overall percentage from what would be a bottom third to12th in the league, but you can’t count on 5-on-3’s in the playoffs.

And the penalty kill?  The less said, the better.  Our overall numbers in our last nine games (13 PP goals allowed in 32 chances) say it all.  No matter what the Devils do, they haven’t been able to kill a penalty seemingly since last March.  It would be easy to pin our hideous PK this year on the loss of Zach Parise to free agency and Danius Zubrus to injury, as they were two of our six key forwards last year on Dave Barr‘s record-breaking regular season penalty kill.  However, even with Parise and Zubrus around they were undressed repeatedly in last year’s postseason and it hasn’t been quite the same since.  I don’t know if I can pin this on system, as much as personnel and mental mistakes – such as Jacob Josefson drifting over to the right side when Stephen Gionta was already there on our ill-fated first PK today.  Gionta’s failed clear led to Grant Clitsome getting a wide open shot on Johan Hedberg and firing a wrister that somehow muscled out of Hedberg’s glove and in for the tying goal in the second period.

Why Hedberg was even in was a cause for concern, as Martin Brodeur was supposed to start but his back tightened up in warmups and Hedberg had to play a back-to-back.  After Moose’s first three starts were outstanding, his last three have been anything but, particularly playing the puck.  For a guy that doesn’t play the puck very well Moose still tries to emulate Marty too much at times and gets in trouble, the way he did with Eric Fehr‘s shorthanded goal yesterday.  Moose’s overagressiveness to make stick plays hurt him again late in the second period when a weak Adam Larsson shot was blocked, and suddenly Evander Kane was streaking down the middle past Larsson and Andy Greene, as if he hit the turbo button in NHL13.  Larsson and Greene were both a step behind him and could have possibly disrupted Kane’s shot but instead, Moose made a desperate attempt at a poke check and Kane sidestepped him and put it in the vacated net to give the Jets a 3-2 lead they wouldn’t relinquish.

Perhaps the Devils still hadn’t recovered from giving up yet another PP goal earlier in the period.  There was a certain amount of drop in their play from the first half of the game before Clitsome’s goal to the latter half.  At 2-2 that goal shouldn’t have been a killer but maybe this team’s had enough of hearing and reading about their lousy penalty kill and it affected the rest of their game.  Then again, the Devils made their share of mental mistakes even before that point, specifically the Jets’ first goal 2:30 into the game, indirectly caused by a fight between Krys Barch and Anthony Peluso.  With Barch serving his five minutes, Kovy had to get out on the ice for a second consecutive shift when the fourth line was out there.  Kovy and Gionta both got tied up in the attacking corner, and Kovy coasted back as Zach Bogosian beat both fowards into the zone by a mile and fired a one-timer home from the point to get Winnipeg on the board first.

There were positives to be sure, starting with the play of Andrei Loikotonov.  For the third straight game, the former Kings washout has continued to gain notice with his offensive creativity, nearly scoring in the first period on a breakaway when he deked out Ondrej Pavelec, but didn’t quite have enough of an angle to put it in the open net.  Our pocket Russian dynamo did get on the board for the third straight game later on, when his shot rebounded to Steve Bernier for a goal at 17:10 of the first period, giving the Devils a 2-1 lead.  Perhaps more crucially Travis Zajac finally got on the board before that, when Patrik Elias‘s pretty backhand feed on a two-on-one gave Zajac enough time and space to beat Pavelec with a wrister at 9:52.  Even Steve Cangelosi would say later on this game had the look of a great night for the Devils after the first period.

Of course, it was not to be.  Perhaps the only good news besides the fact Brodeur’s injury is supposedly not serious – if you believe him and coach Pete DeBoer – is that the team has nearly four full days off before the return match of our home-and-home in Winnipeg.  Conversely, the Jets have to play their fifth game on the East coast Tuesday against the Rangers.  You could say the Devils need to take advantage of a Jets team that might be flat, as teams usually are in the first home game back after a long road trip, but also the break itself is important to iron out issues that have cropped up.  Many of the Devils’ problems are correctable.  Perhaps an acquisition would help, specifically a third-line grinder who can win faceoffs and kill penalties…things neither Gionta or Josefson have done very well this season.  Another scoring/creative forward might help too, although reinforcements are eventually going to be available with Zubrus and Ryan Carter coming off the injury list before the end of the regular season.

In a couple of hours, Canadien forward Max Pacioretty will have a hearing to discuss this hit on Ranger defenseman Ryan McDonagh. It was a retaliatory boarding penalty for an earlier hit McDonagh delivered.

McDonagh let up on his check with Pacioretty facing the Montreal bench. Here, Pacioretty doesn’t, carrying momentum into McDonagh, who didn’t return last night. He could have a concussion. Hopefully for the bruised and battered Blueshirts, that’s not the case.

The question is was Pacioretty’s hit enough to warrant a suspension. Before he plays the puck, McDonagh sees Pacioretty coming. He put himself in a prone position. However, it’s a dangerous hit that crushed McDonagh, who was cut. Patches doesn’t let up and nails McD in the back. Making matters worse, Ryan’s head was exposed.

I’m not sure if Brendan Shanahan will suspend Pacioretty. McDonagh turned into it. Even though the commentary from the Hockey Night In Canada feed is obligatory. Whoever the color commentator is was out to lunch. You can’t compare the two hits. One player shows restraint while the other didn’t. As he was headed to the box, Pacioretty was seen visibly smirking. Even more pathetic, he wasn’t made available to the media. I wonder why.