Black Aces

Black Aces All-Star Game Vintage

2012-01-25T23:00:00.003-05:00

When I was a kid, I absolutely loved the All-Star Game - up to a point.

I'd get all cranked up on soda and stand glued to the spot during the player introductions, always the most glamourous part of the game. In the 80's the "glamour" consisted of bare lights, a rousing 80's keyboard anthem and miles of bad hockey hair. By the end of the first period I'd be in the basement pretending I was Wayne Gretzky and winging tennis balls off the washing machine, the game itself forgotten.

As a time capsule, here's the 1980 All-Star Game player introductions at the brand spanking new Joe Louis Arena in Motor City. Of note, this is Gretzky's first All-Star Game and Gordie Howe's last.

The Skills Competition was like every kid's dream to watch and remains better than the game itself. Here's the breakaway competition from 2002.

Let's go with the shooting accuracy comp in a random year - 1996 - which has all the big names you can think of, plus Brendan Shanahan as a Hartford Whaler being blown away by Mark Messier going 4 for 4.

The 1991 All-Star game may be the most memorable in the past 25 years. Held in Chicago Stadium during the start of the Gulf War, the anthem before the game was a complete madhouse and the roof almost came off the old building.

The following video showing highlights of that 1991 weekend is typical of the production values that the NHL employed at the time - full-on cornball. But there's still good stuff in here, particularly Phil Esposito letting off some kind of flash-bomb taped to the end of his stick during the old-timers game. And you thought Ovechkin's hat and glasses trick was flashy?

Of course, we have to end it with Owen Nolan's called shot against Dominik Hasekin 1997 (with glowing puck). This video shows his last two goals of the hat-trick with the big moment coming about 50 seconds in. Still one of the best things I've seen in a hockey game.

Hope everyone enjoys the All-Star weekend here in Ottawa for the first time.

Hard Night In Hollywood.... O'Rourke's Revenge .... Tim Thomas Fiasco... and Coffee Stained Game Notes

2012-01-24T01:49:00.002-05:00

Los Angeles 4 Ottawa 1

Some might be tempted to call this game "Dan O'Rourke's revenge", in response to Paul MacLean's loose lips in Anaheim on the weekend (see below). Others might wonder if the Senators are showing signs of falling back to earth after a meteoric January by losing their past two games.

Meanwhile, many others didn't even watch this one because they were sleeping like most working people in the Eastern time zone. I persevered through a somewhat dull tilt (it had its moments) by plowing through a few cups of instant coffee and reading endless tweets about the Tim Thomas gongshow (again, see below).

To me, this Senators team looks like a group of guys who are in need of a vacation. That was their 12th game of the month, the first game of what will be their 3rd back-to-back in January, and their 8th on the road in 18 days.

To say the Senators are due for a few losses is an understatement. The fact that it took until the end of this brutal stretch is the only real surprise here. They have one more on Tuesday night in Phoenix, where Kyle Turris will be putting some good money on the board to try and get the win, and then it's the much needed All-Star break where the majority of Sens will get a chance to recuperate (ie. party) before they embark on the stretch run to the playoffs.

The fact that Jason Spezza took a puck off his helmetless forehead during the warmups and had to get stitched up before he even broke a sweat should have tipped off the wise that the breaks would be hard to come by in L.A.

Nothing to see here. Keep moving.

We'll take a pass on the Senators 3 Stars for tonight because there isn't enough to fill it out. But if we had to pick one, let's take Colin Greening who led the team in hits with eight and tied for the lead in shots with four.

NOTES

With coach Paul MacLean putting the flamethrower to referee Dan O'Rourke for calling Erik Karlsson a diver, there was a bit of a free pass waiting there for Karlsson if he wanted to bury O'Rourke even further to the press. The fact that Karlsson chose not to and even had some sympathy towards the tough job referee's have just shows the kind of class #65 has. It's something you could imagine Nicklas Lidstrom or Ray Bourque saying..... With that being said, O'Rourke has been brutal. First the diving comment, and then he watches as the Kings captain Dustin Brown tries to break Karlsson's arm with a slash and keeps his whistle at his hip. My guess is O'Rourke wasn't too happy about MacLean's comments. Kind of brings you back to Cory Clouston's public plea that the refs were jobbing the Senators. Maybe Clouston was right..... Kerry Fraser seems to think that O'Rourke would probably apologize to Karlsson in person if in fact he did call him a "diver", something Fraser sheds doubt on in his TSN column..... Darryl Sutter is proof enough that redemption is always just around the corner in the NHL. This guy was called "done" more times than dinner around the league and now he's behind the reins of a Kings team that has more talent than the Flames squad he led to the Cup final in 2004..... Denis Potvin had a nice moment when he said Jonathan Quick's catching glove was like "a frying pan". In fact, I think some goalie's are using woks out there...... The collision between Colin Greening and Drew Doughty might be the most epic hit you'll see all year (with apologies to Brayden Schenn who I'll talk about later). Doughty basically exploded in mid-air and he was the aggressor in the play. Unbelievable..... Clearly, Doughty was just fine after that hit because he set up Jack Johnson's power-play goal which put the Senators to bed for the night.

....Tim Thomas is an incredible goaltender with a great story, but refusing to attend the White House event because of "political and ideological differences" seems petty and arrogant. Thomas is a hardcore Tea Party advocate, and in keeping with that party's ideological extremism, has found a way to turn what is always a mild, non-partisan event into a political cluster-f**k. Standing up for what you believe in is no offense, but if you can't even celebrate with your teammates because your adopted ideology won't allow you to shake the hand of the President of the United States, then something is truly off. A lot of people are drinking that sugary brand of Kool-Aid in America and it's not surprising to see it start to leak into areas where politics usually isn't welcome. Try not to get your feet wet..... What the hell is going in Winnipeg with Evander Kane and the fans? Sounds like Kane is getting the Ray Emery treatment - ie. rumour mongering and a local press that despises him. How does this not end with Kane asking for a trade at some point down the line here?..... One of the more bizarre calls the Senators have faced all season is Chris Phillips giving the Kings a penalty shot for allegedly covering the puck in his crease with a glove, even though the replays clearly showed he batted it towards Craig Anderson's pads, a perfectly legal and commonplace play. Of course - of course - the Kings scored on the penalty shot. Then Chris Neil takes a crosscheck in the grill from Kyle Clifford (accidental, but still a high-stick), goes down in a heap and the Sens still don't get a mercy call. Combine that with the slash on Karlsson, the non-call when Phillips had his stick axed in half right in view of the ref and various other borderline whistles that didn't go the Senators way, and you could almost imagine MacLean waving the white flag like Roger Neilson once famously did in Vancouver. But if the refs think you're a team full of divers, those whistles tend to stay pretty dry.

.....Two of the best things on Twitter: The Iron Shiek @the_ironsheik, and Don Cherry Parody @DonCherryParody. I'm pretty sure the Iron Shiek account is real (as he's as crazy as his tweets whenever he makes a public appearance) and the Cherry Parody is so spot on it hurts. Don Cherry himself would appreciate it if he even knew or cared what Twitter was, much like he appreciated the piano bit that hit You Tube not too long ago...... Lots of people had some harsh reactions to Tim Thomas on Twitter today, but as usual, one person went way too far and that person was TSN's Dave Hodge, who has a history of getting himself in hot water for various things (the flipping of the pencil being my favourite). Bringing up someone else's kids is never going to work, even if it was intended as a joke. I like Hodge a lot but I don't know how he's going to get out of this one.....It's always worth watching CBC's Ron MacLean and Don Cherry's routine on Saturday nights, even if you can't stand Cherry. You can't accuse it of being boring, but it used to be even less PC in the old days, if you can believe it and somehow louder. But the give and go has been the same and it's interesting to go back and watch a few from over the years. Here's Cherry in his prime when he had the much hated Ulf Samuelsson as a foil back in 1991 (it's funny how Cherry was calling out guys for dirty hits long before the shrill fourth estate of today). And here's Cherry coming two letters from swearing on national TV back in October 1993 and while MacLean sheepishly looks on in a cold sweat.....But that's nothing. How can anything compare to Don Cherry laying down a rap track on Rock 'Em Sock 'Em 5? This may blow your mind ("Listen, listen, never turtle, you do that they'll call you Mirtle. Let's Go!").....

.....What in incredible open-ice hit by the Flyers Brayden Schenn on the Bruins Steve Kampfer. I know that people don't like to see fights occur after clean hits like the one Schenn delivered, but the fact that Chris Kelly immediately went after Schenn and dropped the gloves shows the leadership Kelly is providing and why he's already an assistant captain for the B's after being there less than a year. While the fans and media don't like these post-clean hit fights, it's now de rigueur amongst the players and a failure to react after a teammate gets crushed is viewed as being soft. Right or wrong, that's where the game has evolved to. Kelly did the right thing in that situation. As for Kampfer, man, how do you not know to keep your head up when coming from behind your own net? Even in today's NHL?

Ducks’ Hagman Might Be Option For Ottawa

2012-01-20T10:40:00.000-05:00

Ottawa Senators GM Bryan Murray has never been one to hide his intentions from the press, unlike some of his colleagues who apply to the old Cosa Nostra theory that “three people can keep a secret if two of them are dead”.

Murray telegraphed his wish to pick up another forward who can put the puck in the net and even owner Eugene Melnyk said he’d support Murray’s efforts at the deadline. With the Senators continuing to roll after a somewhat surprising 4-1 win over the Sharks, coming on the heels of a long flight into the Bay Area 3 time zones away, Murray is clearly in a position where he has to start thinking about the playoffs.

There’s some disagreement amongst fans whether or not Murray should be risking the chemistry of the team for a better shot in the post-season, and probably a near unanimous sentiment that he shouldn’t deal any top prospects, but some kind of move is inevitable. Especially when Murray has a history of adding at the deadline, even if a lot of those moves didn’t pan out as expected.

Those were different teams under different circumstances. This year’s edition of the Senators is the first team under Murray’s GM tenure that seems to have fresh momentum heading into the stretch, as opposed to the post-Cup final squads that were hanging on to past glories.

A smart deadline deal for a team on the upswing can really push them to the next level, while that same deal might just burden a club already fading under expectations.

Yet if you look at the situation closely, it seems like Murray has already pulled the trigger on the biggest move he’ll make this season when he dealt future offensive stud David Rundblad for Kyle Turris, a player who is making Murray look like a genius after bloggers like myself called him crazy. But that’s the hockey business. One day you’re on the ropes, the next you’re landing uppercuts.

Barring a stunning deal that brings in a well-known player with term and money on his contract, the Senators are likely looking for a veteran forward who is about to become a UFA, has a scoring touch and can fit into coach Paul MacLean’s system by being able to skate. Even if the Senators defense isn’t very fast as a group, it seems like MacLean insists on his forwards being able to play with speed.

Keeping that in mind, who would be a likely target for Bryan Murray when talks heat up after the All-Star break?

A guy that seems to fit is Ducks veteran winger Niklas Hagman, now a bit of a journeyman after stops in Florida, Dallas, Toronto, Calgary and now Anaheim. He’s had a few rough stretches in his career but he’s put up over 20 goals three times, has 30 games of playoff experience (all with Dallas), and would immediately become one of Ottawa’s best skaters. He also has experience playing either wing and would be an easy plug-in on any line. Other than inconsistency, Hagman’s biggest drawback is that he’s not physical but the Senators aren’t exactly lacking in that department.

If Hagman’s not to the Senators taste, there’s a buffet of players heading into UFA status on bad teams that would be available to Murray. Tuomo Ruutu will be a guy that everyone will be chasing but Carolina GM Jim Rutherford will probably want to hit a home run with the gritty winger which means Tuomo will likely miss being the third Ruutu brother to be brought into the Senators organization (after Jarkko and Mikko).

Ales Hemsky and Ryan Smyth of the Oilers are probably out of Murray’s range for similar reasons. But Sammy Pahlsson and Vaclav Prospal of the woeful Blue Jackets might be options for Murray. Pahlsson doesn’t have the offense Murray might want but he’s known as a greasy playoff guy and won a Cup against Ottawa while with the Ducks. MacLean knows Pahlsson well from the Western Conference and there might be some interest there. Prospal is ancient but has a history with the Senators and can play both wing and centre. He may still have a few goals left in him but he’s probably a long shot to join Ottawa.

But who knows? For all this talk, Murray might just decide to fold his arms and watch other teams fall all over themselves for past-their-prime players while his Senators plug the holes with prospects from Bingo.

Maybe Andre Petersson steps in and scores a hat trick in his first game. I’m pretty much through with predicting how this season will go for the Senators. There seems to be a surprise around every corner and I expect the trade deadline to be much the same.

Circus Around Battle Of Ontario Crazy As Ever

2012-01-18T11:33:00.005-05:00

The beat goes on for the Ottawa Senators after another comeback win, this time on the road against God’s Team, the Toronto Maple Leafs.

It was a game everyone wanted to see, and the hype was surprisingly strong for a mid-January tilt between clubs that play each other six times a season. Even if the game is ho-hum (this one wasn’t), the circus surrounding it is always worth a laugh simply because everyone takes it so seriously. Television’s talking heads lose their objectivity and seem to think they’re on the ice with the players (see Nick Kypreos). Or in the case of Damien Cox, use it as a platform to tell everyone what’s so awful about the NHL (ad-nauseum). Tweeters see every nuance of the game and tweet about it as if it was some vital piece of information, or proof that their viewpoint on the current state of hockey is being proven right beyond any argument.

Take the Nick Foligno – Dion Phaneuf incident. You all saw it. The hipcheck (or the “clipping”). Phaneuf going ass over chin and landing on his face. Phaneuf starting to get up and then faking an injury (allegedly). Then the big fight a little bit later.

As far as the two players are concerned, the fight was a natural reaction to the hit and the matter was settled. It’s not a complicated process for the players to understand.

Yet the reaction amongst the cognoscenti was far from simple and each side had to adjust the reality of it to fit their agendas.

The exchange between Nick Kypreos and Damien Cox on Sportsnet right after the game is a good representation of this.

Kypreos said that Phaneuf had to fight Foligno to send a message that it wasn’t okay to run him and think you can get away with it. Again, this is simple logic for most hockey players. It’s like an inherent truth, an archetype, a natural reaction.

Then you had Damien Cox with that sour look on his face exclaiming “But they lost the game!” His point was that Toronto was leading 2-1 at that point and that Phaneuf should have just accepted the fact that Foligno got a penalty and turned the other cheek.

This made Kypreos start flinging his arms around saying that you can’t let “guys like Foligno” take runs at you and not do anything about it. Kypreos was on the verge of hysterics while Cox smugly looked on like a kid who had just poked a hornet’s nest for the fun of it.

Cox’s theory is representative of a growing consensus in the game that players should leave all the policing up to the league instead of taking matters into their own hands.

If you read my blog at all, you probably already know my take. I think that’s complete bullshit. I’m on the pro-fighting side of the current debate and that’s that. I like the traditional way of players settling issues with each other on the ice, instead of expecting the league to take care of every issue.

Clearly I have my own agenda and I know that. Don’t bother calling me on it. I have a lot of respect for people on the other side of the debate like Roy MacGregor amongst others. There are lots of valid points in either argument.

Yet, I’ll go back to something I said about Don Cherry not too long ago. I’ll always respect the opinion of someone who genuinely seems to love the game, even if they tend to go off track once in a while either in the name of entertainment or bullheadedness. When I see Cherry or Mike Milbury get spitting mad about changes in the game, I see guys who are passionate and protective of a sport they based their entire life around.

I saw that same emotion in Kypreos last night. Cox won the argument simply by being cool and smug, and knowing that Kypreos could never articulate his points the same way a polished writer and communicator like Cox can.

But it doesn’t make Cox right.

To me, I will always err on the side of player’s opinion. They’re the ones who play the game and put their health on the line every night while guys like me sit and judge them for every move they make on the ice.

In short, I’ll take guys like Milbury, Cherry and Kypreos just as seriously, if not more than I would Cox, MacGregor or Adam Proteau. And that also means that players such as Stu Grimson and Chris Nilan have just as valid points to make. Maybe that’s a flawed approach, but it’s the one I believe in.

A major weakness I see in Cox’s argument, and the variations on it that you read in the blogs and on Twitter is that fighting largely has no effect on the game. People like to point out when a fight either hurts a team (like Toronto last night) or when nobody seems to gain momentum from it. But to acknowledge that it can have a negative effect also means you have to acknowledge it can have a positive effect on a team. That’s just logic, not some theory I invented in my spare time. You can’t separate the two in order to prove a point. If the fight was bad for one team, then it was clearly good for the other team.

But that’s the kind of world the NHL is in right now. It’s become so politicized that it’s a bit of a bummer at times. You can sit and watch your Twitter feed during a game and be amazed that so many people get sucked into the shallowness of it all, the pettiness and the egotistical crusades that make it like a deranged schoolyard atmosphere where grown adults embrace their worst impulses and try to peddle it as insight. The amount of straight-up bullies on Twitter is amazing to behold. It’s like stumbling onto the island in Lord Of The Flies and seeing people in rags trying to maim each other. It’s somewhat surreal.

But who am I to spoil everyone’s fun. It is what it is. I’ve waded into those waters myself from time to time.

As Bob Dylan once said in Talkin’ World War III Blues, “Half of the people can be part right all of the time, Some of the people can be all right part of the time, But all of the people can’t be all right all of the time.”

Sens Have A Night To Forget.... Diva Goalies.... The Boss.... Chomsky-esque Game Notes

2012-01-16T22:45:00.004-05:00

Winnipeg 2 Ottawa 0

Sometimes teams get sick of winning.

Okay, that's completely untrue, but for fans it sometimes looks that way. Against the Winnipeg Jets on Monday night, the Senators barely had anything in the tank coming home from a mini-road trip and with a much bigger one probably looming on their minds.

They'll never use it as an excuse, but the Senators may have been looking ahead to Toronto on Tuesday and the scheduled full week away from home. And if they were going to offer up a clunker, Monday night was about the safest time they could do it.

Even after the loss, the Senators sit safely in 5th place in the East and the loss to the conference rival Jets doesn't immediately seem to pose a danger. There is still a 9 point gap there and the Jets were due for a win against Ottawa after dropping the first two of the season to the Senators.

All those games Ottawa won recently gave them a cushion exactly for nights like this in the dog-days of January when the bounces don't go their way, the legs seem like they're full of gravy and hands are dipped in cement.

It happens.

The only real emotion the Senators showed was when Erik Karlsson was elbowed by Evander Kane and Chris Neil had to jump in a few plays later to address the situation. Neil levelled Kane with a Flesherton handshake and all hell broke loose for a few minutes with Karlsson and all his teammates on the bench appreciating Neil's efforts. It was the absolute right thing to do for Neil - it was the only thing to do. If he doesn't let Kane know that elbowing Ottawa's best player is a punishable offense, then Neil isn't doing his job. Matt Carkner also got into the act by backing up Neil when the Jets fought back and the Senators gladly killed off the extra two-minutes. Those are the kinds of penalties any team will gladly take.

Yet the emotion from that scene didn't give either team momentum one way or the other. It was one of those nights where Bruce Springsteen and the whole E-Street Band could have personally ripped into Born To Run in the dressing room and the Sens would have been just as flat.

But the Leafs might have an angry Sens team on their hands on Tuesday night. Word is Eugene is personally flying in Bruce from Jersey for this one.

Black Aces Senators 3 Stars

Not much to pick from here but let's give it a shot....

1. Chris Neil (Stuck up for Karlsson, led team in hits with 5)
2. Sergei Gonchar (Led team in shots and blocked shots)
3. Craig Anderson (Solid outing with no goal support)

Goalies Still Have It Good....Too Good

It's a topic you don't hear much about anymore with the concussion issue taking precedence over everything. Yet, goalie equipment is still huge, scoring is trending downwards and nobody seems to know what to do about it, at least no one with any say on the matter. The guy responsible for enforcing the standards on goalie equipment size, Kay Whitmore, recently told the Hockey News that "Nothing is imminent...It’s always been a goal to find a way to get rid of the big catch glove without having sprained thumbs, torn ligaments and wrist injuries." Please. The only thing those mitts protect is the net and everybody knows it.This doesn't inspire much confidence that change is on the way. The same article points out that "the league reduced goalie pads from 12 to 11 inches '05-06" but that goalie save percentages have risen during that time. Again, larger nets are being brought up as a possible solution. Pass the Gravol. Maybe the league should stop treating goalies like divas and just get the equipment shrunk drastically once and for all, just like they did so well with obstruction. We're talking about 60 guys in the NHLPA that will be upset and the rest will be high-fiving each other because more goals equals bigger contracts. The NHL has to make it so players can come over the blue line, take an unscreened shot and score a goal more than once a year. Half the goals in the NHL today are what we used to consider garbage goals, all within five feet of the net and off rebounds. Yes, the goalies are bigger, but the equipment is beyond being a joke. It was a joke in the 90's. Now everyone is just tired of talking about it and have accepted the one-inch change in '06 as the final say in the matter. Too bad. When it finally gets done, people will be wondering why it took them so long, just like obstruction.

NOTES

Now that we've already broached my least favourite subject - goalies - the Senators would have been smart to look at the Ducks Dan Ellis before he tore up his groin and went on the IR as an option to shore up their back-up slot. The guy is a UFA next season and actually has a pretty good save percentage on a brutal team. Clearly, Alex Auld is not getting the job done and that's not giving the Senators many options if they want to rest Craig Anderson. Now that Ellis is likely off the table, there's no real obvious candidate for Ottawa to trade for. Maybe if the Jets plummet in the standings the Sens could try to get Chris Mason in a bargain. He's also UFA but the Jets may have ideas of re-signing him or extracting a good pick in return for his services....The Winnipeg Jets must have felt right at home going to the rink for today's game-day skate. It sure felt like Winnipeg out there after a fairly mild winter so far in Bytown.....I'm a long-john's kind of guy but I recently had a pal tell me I was crazy and that no one wears long-johns anymore. What? Is this true? I wouldn't be able to survive an Ottawa winter without those red-striped woolen socks and the johns. Or maybe he's the freak. That would explain a few things....It seems like every team in the East plays 90 percent of the game in the neutral zone this year with variations on the classic trap. And Ottawa has just played three of them in a row. The Sens might be happy for a trip to Toronto and out West if only for a chance to be able to skate again. Maybe the NHL should just put the nets at the bluelines and put expensive seats in the old offensive zones. That's a million dollar idea right there......I think Dave "The Voice" Schreiber is the only person left on earth who likes to exclaim "Kowabunga" after big goals, like he did on Alfredsson's shootout winning goal against Montreal on Saturday. The reason is that he's the only guy who still sounds good doing it. Seriously, Schreiber is the best in the business and it's a shame more people don't know about him......

.....Brendan Shanahan made the right call on the Vincent Lecavalier punch to Evgeni Malkin's grill. It was dirty, sure, but basically harmless. The guy most in trouble should be the linesman who supposedly had Lecavalier tied up. One of the linesman's main responsibilities in fights or major scrums is to make sure that no one gets in a free shot while the other guy is immobilized by the other linesman. That didn't happen here and Geno had to take one on the chin. I liked Malkin's response though. He took it, shrugged it off and left the game with 5 points, including a hat-trick. He's got no place fighting anyways, unlike Lecavalier who's been known to throw them once in a while. That's for Arron "The Sandman" Asham to take care of the next game.....Not many inspiring shifts by an Senators line but the fourth unit of Chris Neil, Zenon Konopka and Bobby Butler hit the post twice with about three minutes to go. Interesting that Paul MacLean would put those guys out at that time but he seems to have a good feel for the bench. It almost worked....

....A strange trend I've noticed across the league in the past couple of seasons is guys showing their frustration by raising their sticks in a chopping motion (usually with one hand) and starting to bring it down on the ice or the boards before pulling up and skating off the ice. Of course, that's always been around but I've really noticed it this year as a sort of standard show of emotion by younger players. I think it's a bit like the chewing of mouthguards or the hockey pant strings dangling you see a lot of. Weird, meaningless trends that catch on amongst young players and proliferate. It's nothing to get up in arms about, but it's a bad habit. You know the old maxim: "Never let them see you sweat." In the old days, the only time you'd see a player raise his stick in a chopping motion was when he was really going to bring it down on someones head or ankle. I guess this is better when you think of it in that way.....Ryan Miller is officially killing me in my hockey pool. This is a guy playing like he wants to be in Anaheim. Maybe he'll get his wish very soon.....

.....Hitting the mid-point of the season, every self-respecting blog has to hand out their own set of team awards, so in order to do the minimum expected of me, here's two random ones:

Most improved player: Obviously a lot of candidates for this one but I've got my eye on Nick Foligno. Sure, Filip Kuba and Sergei Gonchar have bounced back from tough years, but we all knew the level they could play at when at their best. Foligno is starting to show that he can make plays, score goals as well as be a bit of a shift disturber out there, as Sidney Crosby can now attest. In years past, Foligno looked like he was missing a cylinder. He could make the nice plays in his head, as shown by his numerous failed attempts to stickhandle into the offensive zone, but this year he's getting past the blueline with the puck still on his stick and he's starting to show some hands nobody knew were there. I wrote a piece on Foligno early in the year saying he had to accept his fate as a grinder and just go to the net instead of trying to stickhandle like Spezza. Looks like I was wrong. He's like a hybrid now. One minute he'll have three guys trying to punch him in the head for going hard to the net and the next he's deking those same players out of their jockstraps.

Best goal celebration: This is a tough one. It's hard not to like Jason Spezza's understated fist pump or Erik Karlsson's near Ovechkin-like joy when a teammate scores (ie. Alfie's 400th goal when Karlsson was jumping up and down like my sister at the New Kids On The Block concert in 1990). But I have to give the best goal celebration to Daniel Alfredsson who lately has taken to simply putting both hands straight in the air after a near two-second pause and staring down his teammates as if to say "Yup. That's how it's done, boys". This will surely go down as the classic Alfie pose, as he most famously did it in the 2007 Eastern final against the Sabres to send the Senators to the Stanley Cup final for the first time. It also helps that every time he seems to do it is because he just won the Senators the game. As the players pile on around him in celebration, the only thing you can see of Alfie is those two arms still in the air.

Sens Keep Rolling Through East.... Cammalleri Fallout .... Cool Hand Luke... More Game Notes

2012-01-12T23:02:00.007-05:00

Ottawa 3 NY Rangers 0

As Senators head coach Paul MacLean said after the game, this Ottawa team knew exactly who they were playing on Thursday night - the best team in the National Hockey League, at least at the halfway point of the season.

And the Senators played a game that was remarkably similar to what the Rangers have been exhibiting all year, which features, above all, China Wall goaltending, a commitment to defense and the patience of Job waiting for a scoring chance off a mistake by the opposition.

Hey, don't get too used to it.

While the Rangers may be winning, they aren't exactly a masterpiece to watch if you like to stay awake past 7:45. Out of necessity and inexperience, the Senators have taken a different approach through the first half, letting in a ton of goals but climbing back by scoring just a few more, many of them coming in nerve shattering comebacks that have left local fans in some kind of shock for hours after it's all over.

But maybe, with all these wins starting to pile up, the Senators are slowly beginning to take shape as a team that can at least have a chance of shutting down the opposition, especially in big games that actually mean something in the standings.

Craig Anderson had his first shutout of the season, Jason Spezza continues to play the best hockey of his entire career with two goals Thursday and MacLean, now solidly in Jack Adams Trophy talk, has the rest of the team galloping through a tough part of the schedule with everyone playing a role, from Erik Karlsson right down to Kaspars Daugavins.

You can see the kind of unity this team has and the momentum that's giving them.

A quick look at the standings tells just how crazy this is getting. The Senators are 4 points out of 1st place overall in the National Hockey League.

Just let that sink in for a moment.

Now that you've done that, brace for the bad news.

The Senators have one hell of a West Coast road trip coming up in a really short time span and that's going to cause problems and slow the train down a little. But the points they are getting right now, many of them against top Eastern Conference teams, is giving them a cushion they can use for the inevitable downturn that comes in every season.

That's how you make the playoffs. Attrition. Get the points in the right parts of the schedule which lets you survive the tough stretches where winning is like climbing a mountain sometimes.

Right now, that's exactly what Ottawa is doing and it's even brought talk of adding salary at the trade deadline to really make a playoff push.

Some will have strong opinions about that, positive or negative, but the point is that people are even talking about it as a possibility.

That's a conversation that was almost unfathomable back on October 18th when this team was a dismal 1-5, quickly on the way to proving their critics right.

Yet, April still seems like a long ways away, doesn't it?

Black Aces Senators 3 Stars

1. Craig Anderson
2. Jason Spezza
3. Milan Michalek

Honourable Mentions: Jared Cowen, Kyle Turris, Chris Phillips, Sergei Gonchar, Filip Kuba and Colin Greening.

NOTES

They spent all that time and money refurbishing Madison Square Garden this summer and it still looks dark and dingy on television, especially around the nets in both ends and in the corners where it's almost cave-like. I'm no engineer but it seems to me they're missing about four good television lights on that ceiling and have been ever since I can remember watching hockey. Yet, it does give the famous rink a distinctive look, like it never evolved past 1972. No wonder nobody can score in that rink..... Denis Potvin had a pretty good line near the start of the game when, describing a solid positional save by Craig Anderson, said "the puck just melted into his equipment". Wish I'd thought of that one.....Then Dean Brown got into the act at the start of the third period when he said that “Bobby Butler just chunked it into the corner”. Again, another description that just sounds exactly the way it looks. It was like these guys were doing a chocolate bar commercial. But maybe they just had a bag of peanut butter cups on the desk which they were plowing into during commercial breaks and started saying these phrases unconsciously. It would be hard to blame them. Those things are pretty good…..

….It’s been fascinating to watch the Montreal Canadiens completely implode this season, disaster after disaster. It’s no fun for fans to watch their own team become a laughingstock but for everybody else it’s almost cathartic in a way. Every season at least one or two teams become a complete side-show and it’s just part of the overall entertainment package the NHL provides. This year it’s been Montreal and Columbus. But Ottawa fans remember what it feels like because they’ve been through it a couple of times since the run to the Stanley Cup final in 2007. It’s not a good place to be. But then again, you wonder if karma is coming around for Habs fans. When you call the cops because Zdeno Chara hit one of your players and make a tradition of singing that silly victory song “Ole” before the first period is even over, you kind of have this coming, don’t you?.....Then to compact their problems, they trade one of their most talented and clutch players, Michael Cammalleri, to the Flames just because he has the audacity to speak the plain truth at a time when that's exactly what's needed in that crazy organization. But we in Ottawa all know how Pierre "The Ghost" Gauthier feels about the truth. 1998: Sure you're not going to Anaheim, Pierre....

….Denis Potvin was really feeling it tonight. After Milan Michalek’s goal he pulled out a Paul Newman quote from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid: “Who are these guys?” When you’re doing a hockey game and you’re quoting Newman, it’s pretty hard not to go right to Slapshot and Reggie Dunlop. Not bad Denis. But I’d have been more impressed if he went to The Hustler or The Sting. Or if he vowed live on-air to eat 50 hard boiled eggs like Newman does in Cool Hand Luke......No reason to get too upset about the Ruslan Fedotenko knee-on-knee hit on Spezza. Completely unintentional and Spezza was fine once he got the blood flowing again. Collisions happen. Not all of them are a conspiracy theory. Besides, Fedotenko is about as clean a player as you can find…..

.......Is there a more innocent looking face in the NHL than Chris Neil's after he does an "uh-oh"? When he hit Michael Del Zotto on an icing play at the end of the second period, Neil looked genuinely hurt that he was being called for it. Those refs just have no heart. It's like throwing Tiny Tim out into the cold at Christmas....Speaking of Del Zotto, here’s a pretty amazing stat for you - going into tonight’s game, Del Zotto was +25 to lead the team. The next highest rating on the Rangers going into the game was Derek Stepan’s +13. You might remember that Del Zotto suffered through a brutal sophomore season last year which actually saw him get sent back down to the minors after playing 80 games as a rookie defenseman in the NHL. With 23 points in just 40 games, he’s clearly one of the comeback players of the year…..

....Think you're good with your NHL history? Get a few buddies, a case of beer and play this game for half an hour before you're too bombed: Someone picks a random NHL team. The guy beside him picks another one. Now you've got two teams - say the Oilers and the Rangers. On a piece of paper, everyone individually writes down as many players as they can think of that played at least one game for both teams. After a few minutes, the silent buzzer goes and everyone presents their lists. Have the Official NHL Guide on hand or an internet connection to Hockey DB to check any disputes. You get one point for a correct answer but you also get a point taken off for a wrong player, so you actually have to put some thought into it instead of just scribbling down names you think might have played for both teams. Most points wins the game. Then another two random teams are picked and the next game starts. First person to win four games wins the series. And if you want to turn it into a drinking game, the losers of each game have to guzzle. Yes, I invented this time waster many years ago but I have since gotten what some people like to call "a life". But go ahead and try it sometime. It's way harder than you think and it will either humble you or make you look like an NHL Cliff Clavin amongst your drunk and somewhat dimwitted pals......

.....Get ready for the onslaught of the “The All-Star Game Is Terrible And Needs To Change” articles that you see every year at this time. But one thing to keep in mind about these predictably grouchy editorials – they’re all wrong…… How is it that Ottawa’s been rebuilding for less than a year and they already seem miles ahead of where Edmonton is, despite the Oilers having 3 of the best prospects in the game in Taylor Hall, Jordan Eberle and Ryan Nugent-Hopkins all progressing as expected? Probably because Bryan Murray realized he didn’t have to burn the thing to the ground and instead kept a few proven veterans like Daniel Alfredsson, Chris Phillips and Chris Neil, all with a history of winning in this league, to keep playing key roles they had when the team was a powerhouse. Only Erik Karlsson is in a premier role while the rest of the youngsters are learning the ropes as support players. It also helps that their number one centre, Jason Spezza, is fully in his prime and still developing as a leader. On the other hand, the Oilers have thrust their top prospects into the most pressure filled spots while their vets, like Shawn Horcoff and Ales Hemsky, now seem more like “support players”, and very expensive ones at that (the exception is Ryan Smyth who is having a great year). It’s starting to look like the Oilers are going to miss the playoffs yet again while Ottawa is actually fighting for home-ice advantage in April. This doesn’t mean that the Oilers won’t turn into a powerhouse a couple of years down the road, but their kids are playing under a lot of pressure and losing hockey games while Ottawa’s youngsters are more protected from expectations and learning to win along the way. Which approach is better? If these same Oilers go on to win a Stanley Cup, we’ll know our answer then. But for now we’ll take the Senators model....

Have a great weekend folks.

Sens Show No Mercy In Steeltown .... Keep Kuba Revisited .... And A Set Of Cut-Rate Game Notes

2012-01-10T22:20:00.004-05:00

Ottawa 5 Pittsburgh 1

You had to feel for the Pittsburgh Penguins going into this one. Minus Sidney Crosby, Jordan Staal, Kris Letang and Paul Martin, they didn't seem to have much of a chance, even with Sens whiz kid Erik Karlsson being a late scratch with an "upper body" injury.

The whole scenario reminded me of this dramatic scene from Norm Macdonald's 1998 masterpiece of cinema, "Dirty Work".

There's not much to learn from this game other than Ottawa went into another rink and got the two points from a team they couldn't afford to give mercy to. The Senators now (shockingly) sit 6 points up on the Pens in the East.

They just got 5 of a possible 6 points against the Flyers and Pens in the past four days and now they are closing the gap on the Bruins for first in the Northeast.

And it's not even cold this winter in Ottawa.

What the in the good name of hell is going on?

Black Aces Senators 3 Stars

1. Nick Foligno
2. Milan Michalek
3. Craig Anderson

Honourable Mentions: Jason Spezza, Colin Greening, Kyle Turris, Chris Neil and Filip Kuba.

Here's where everybody sits in the year long 3 Star contest:

Black Aces 3 Star Season Scorecard

1. Karlsson – 33
2. Anderson – 31
3. Spezza – 29
4. Alfredsson – 27
5. Michalek – 25
6. Neil – 16
7. Foligno – 15
8. Cowen – 13
9. Smith – 10
10. Greening – 7
11. Gonchar – 5
12. Kuba - 5
13. Da Costa – 4
14. Butler – 2
15. Phillips – 1
16. Winchester – 1
17. Condra – 1
18. Carkner – 1
19. Turris - 1

***

Keep Kuba Take Two

We’ve been over this terrain so many times now that we’ll have to re-pave it soon, but as long as the Senators remain in the playoff picture (and right now there’s no reason to think they won’t be unless the rest of January turns into the road trip from Hell), I don’t see any reason why they would trade Filip Kuba (a pending UFA), let alone Sergei Gonchar (as I already wrote about here). What they would get in return for Kuba is not even close to what they can gain by making the playoffs and possibly even winning a surprise round. Every playoff game is a cool million dollar profit for Eugene Melnyk and just dumping a defenseman like Kuba, who has taken on an important role alongside wonder kid Erik Karlsson, for a measly second rounder (but more likely a third) would be pointless. Both Ian Mendes and Graeme Nichols recently covered this story and it’s not going to go away until the trade deadline comes and goes. Like I said before, this isn’t the same situation as Ottawa letting Zdeno Chara and Anton Volchenkov walk for nothing. Those were two players in their prime getting their first crack at free agency who were foundation players on the Senators. Kuba is an older defenseman who is more of a component than a key cog, but a component who is working wonders for the team right now. Why mess with that? If he walks in the summer for nothing, the Senators save cap money, clear a roster space for Mark Borowiecki and possibly have a tidy little profit from a playoff run in their pocket. Not to mention the experience and intangible benefits that come from being a playoff team. The CBA rules flood the market with mid-tier UFA players even if the elite get locked up in multi-year contracts and never make it to July as free men. The Senators will have plenty of options in the summer. To me, it’s a no-brainer. Keep rolling. Keep Kuba.

NOTES

It’s not just Erik Karlsson chasing down Norm Maciver for a Senators milestone. Filip Kuba is only one point behind both MacIver and the late Karel Rachunek for 28th in all-time Senators scoring with 96 points. When Kuba breaks the 100 point mark this season, he’ll be the 7th defenseman to do so in a Senators uniform, on the list behind Wade Redden, Chris Phillips, Zdeno Chara, Jason York, Erik Karlsson and Andrej Meszaros….. Okay, time to re-do the math on Chris Phillips’ possible 1000th game. He was originally going to hit the magic number at home against the Leafs on Feb. 7 but since he missed a few with a concussion, that game is now scheduled for Feb. 9 at home against Nashville as long as he can stay healthy. Maybe they’ll have an appropriately themed Country Music night at the rink for the big Alberta boy. Maybe Big Rig will do the warm-ups wearing a Stetson. People would freak if he did that. Freak. Get your tickets folks….Good to see that Matt Carkner didn't let Matt Cooke out of the game without at least one punch in the face after the big hit on Sergei Gonchar. Carkner got his shot in as the whistle blew. Just doing his job, as was Cooke.....I bet Gonchar is okay with getting booed heartily in Steeltown as long as he's not getting booed in Kanata anymore.....A lot of Pens fans on Twitter getting upset that Gonchar was being booed in the building, including @Evil_Jagr who tweets "Please stop booing Gonchar. Breaking my heart. Genos not hurt and I'm sure he's still buddies with him. Why can't our fans leave him be"......

….After all these years it’s still mind-blowing to me that if you took away all of Wayne Gretzky’s 894 goals, he’d still be the NHL’s all-time points leader with just his assists. He has 1,963 helpers to Mark Messier’s 1,887 total points. And yet Gretzky is the NHL’s invisible man right now, nowhere to be seen except when his daughter is in the news. The first thing Gary Bettman needs to do when the Coyotes get sold is give Gretzky his damn money, re-name the Lady Byng trophy after him and put 99 on television with an NHL logo behind him whenever possible. There’s so much negativity around the league in the past couple of years and Gretzky is one of the only personalities who can make people forget about that for a few minutes when he’s talking. But right now, the silence is deafening…..Hey, it’s sort of the same deal with Chris Neil. Take away 1,000 of his PIM’s and he’d still be the all-time PIM guy on the Senators. Neiler has 1,763 going into tonight while the next guy on the list is Chris Phillips with 667. Come on Phillips, let’s get the misconducts going here…..Alfredsson‘s 459 career PIM’s are only 3 back of Andre Roy’s 462 for 8th on the Sens all-time list. Only on Black Aces will this impending milestone be celebrated…….

.... Hey, it's old-school hockey card time, featuring the Pittsburgh Penguins: Current CBC hockey personality Craig Simpson broke into the NHL with the Penguins before being packaged off to Edmonton (where he won two Stanley Cups) for Paul Coffey (who won his fourth Cup in Pittsburgh in 91 before rejoining Wayne Gretzky in L.A.). Recently fired Anaheim coach Randy Carlyle had a good run with the Penguins in the early 80's before becoming a fixture in Winnipeg (where he may one day return as coach). Senators fans might remember Phil Bourque who was a character guy in red and black for a couple of seasons in the mid-90's. But before that, he was rocking a classic Kentucky Waterfall in Pittsburgh while winning two Stanley Cups. Bob Errey shared those same two Stanley Cups and is now doing good work on Penguins television broadcasts. Some other old names from Penguins past: Jean Pronovost, Zarley Zalapski, Pierre Larouche, German Titov, Syl Apps, Ulf Samuelsson, and Les Binkley. (Most of these images courtesy of Penguins-hockey-cards.com.).....

…. I just can’t seem to get too upset that the NHLPA grew a set of balls for the first time in years and rejected the NHL’s re-alignment plans that would see four uneven conferences and hopelessly skewed playoff races. The setup didn’t look right, like it was drawn up on a napkin after a couple of quarts down at the Dominion Tavern in the Market. For starters, it seems plain weird that Eastern teams in the other conference like Philly, NYR, Pitts etc will only play in Ottawa once a year under the new scenario. Sure, you get to see every team from the rest of the league at least once in your own building but for Ottawa to lose dates with Crosby, Ovechkin doesn’t seem worth a guaranteed Blue Jacket and Wild game in the middle of the winter. It’s the same for every team, East or West. For every star player guaranteed to come into your building, you lose a date with another. I agree with the players in that it’s unfair and harder to make the playoffs in the West than it is in the East. And let’s not forget that one of the reasons it changed to the current format is that fans were sick to death of seeing the same teams play against each other in the playoffs every single season in the 80’s. And the proposed set-up would also mean the end of the 8th place team upsetting the top seed, not to mention the wide open race to make the top eight that is one of the most exciting part of any NHL season. The first April after this goes into effect, fans will be the first to complain that a team made it to the playoffs in one conference with fewer points than their own team in another. And if you ask me, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with the playoffs as they are right now. The first round is the best in all of sports. You’ve seen it since the lockout. Tell me when it’s ever been better? A couple of teams complaining about travel shouldn’t be enough to scrap a playoff format that’s working so well ......

……It's kind of uncomfortable for me but I completely agree with Brian Burke. He's right. This is the age of the rat in the NHL. There’s no fear anymore when you run another team’s star players. Nobody can touch you and neither can the league as long as you don’t hit them in the head. The only “tough guys” left are the players who don’t fake being hurt anytime they get hit along the boards. But it seems that’s what the fans want. So you’re going to get a steady diet of it until the pendulum swings back to where it should be. But hey, that’s just Old Man Milks yapping again. Take no heed….In case you missed it, Chris Stevenson reported on Saturday that hitting is significantly down in the NHL this season. Take from that what you will....

Okay, one last clip. I didn't want to, but you forced me.

Sens Fans Live The Near Perfect Day .... And Other Strange Rumblings From Capital City

2012-01-05T23:09:00.005-05:00

Ottawa 4 Tampa Bay 1

Just as I was going to write something about the Senators win over the Bolts tonight, I catch sight of Sens prospect Mika Zibanejad scoring the overtime goal for Sweden to win the World Juniors and doing an incredible "Foligno leap" as his teenage teammates swarm him in a shambolic blur of yellow jerseys.

It was an unbelievable goal by a can't-miss kid who has power forward written all over him.

Could Ottawa Senators fans possibly have a better day in January?

Their top prospect stars in the World Juniors and scores the clutch overtime goal to become a hero in his homeland.

Four Ottawa Senators - Daniel Alfredsson, Erik Karlsson, Jason Spezza and Milan Michalek - get voted into the starting lineup of the All-Star game right here in Kanata while the Leaf's golden boy Phil Kessel gets buried before the finish line as Sens fans stack the ballots at the last minute (Oh the indignity! Kessel gets picked last in the "fun" draft last year and now the millions of Leaf fans hang him out to dry).

And just to make sure everybody gets a gift bag, the Senators roll over the Lightning for their 4th straight win that temporarily puts them ahead of Pittsburgh for 5th in the East.

Not sure I should write much more because most Ottawa fans are probably in some kind of happiness coma or else blind drunk in an effort to deal with the mind shattering events of today.

Allright, one more for the deranged.

Alfie had a 3-point night.

Grown men are weeping across the city.

Black Aces Senators 3 Stars

1. Craig Anderson
2. Daniel Alfredsson
3. Kyle Turris

Honorable Mentions: Zack Smith, Colin Greening, Jason Spezza and Erik Condra.

***

Expansion Twins Starting To Grow Up

The Tampa Bay Lightning and the Ottawa Senators both entered the league in 1992 when the rather dapper NHL President John Ziegler was the king of Palm Springs and nobody but basketball fans had heard of Gary Bettman (nor had they heard of an NHL "Commissioner"). Here’s a few random comparisons between the two relatively young franchises:

1. After their first two NHL seasons, the Bolts had 53 wins while the Sens had 24.

2. To date, the Senators have had 9 head coaches (including Roger Neilson for two games) while the Lightning have had 8. Basically a wash.

3. The Lightning have had 8 different captains. The Senators 7.

4. The highest sweater number worn by a Senator was 94 by Stan Neckar. For the Bolts it’s 97 worn this season by Matt Gilroy.

5. A few notable players that fans may or may not remember that have played for both Ottawa and Tampa are Alexandre Daigle, Filip Kuba, Vaclav Prospal, Bruce Gardiner, Andrej Meszaros, Mike Sillinger, Zenon Konopka, Cory Stillman, Janne Laukkanen, Andreas Johannson, Brandon Bochenski, Grant Ledyard, Ryan Shannon, Stan Neckar, Luke Richardson, Colin Forbes, Jody Hull, Andre Roy, David Hale, Darren Rumble and Juha Ylonen.

6. The Lightning have had the first overall pick in the Entry Draft 3 times, taking Roman Hamrlik, Vincent Lecavalier and Steven Stamkos. The Senators also picked first 3 times taking Alexandre Daigle, Bryan Berard and Chris Phillips.

7. The Bolts best late round pick has to be Pavel Kubina, taken 179th overall in the 7th round in 1996. Obviously Ottawa’s is Daniel Alfredsson taken 133rd overall in 1994’s 6th round. Maybe Ryan Dzingel will change all that in a few years.

8. Ottawa has used 27 goalies in its existence. Tampa has used 37. Remember Dieter Kochan? Who’s calling who a goalie graveyard now?

9. The Bolts have made the playoffs 6 times in their 18 completed seasons, with the most in a row being 4 from 2003 to 2007. The Sens made it 12 times in the same span, doing it 11 years in a row between 1997 and 2008.

10. The one comparison that really matters? The Bolts have a Stanley Cup.

NOTES

Some more good news for Senators fans: the players voted into the All-Star game will be spending the month of January trying to prove to everybody they truly deserve to be there. Daniel Alfredsson already mentioned something like that around Christmas, saying he wished it was his play qualifying him for the game and not just his popularity (to paraphrase). Is it a coincidence he’s been on fire lately? The player this should give the biggest boost to is Milan Michalek who’s been pretty cold since he returned from a concussion. I don’t think it matters to Erik Karlsson. He’s too green and otherworldly to even know what pressure is. He’d still have 20 assists if he was playing with a broomball stick and wearing a pair of old Kodiak’s.....It's always funny when you hear a player very forcefully yell "f**k off!" during the play on live TV and guys like Dean Brown and Denis Potvin have to pretend we all didn't hear it......Played Pro-Line again on Wednesday night for the first time in a while and picked Winnipeg to beat Montreal and took the Under. Habs win 7-3. I took Boston and New Jersey to tie. Bruins win 6-1. And yet I seemed so sure of my own genius when I forked over the two dollars to the strangely smirking clerk who said "Good luck" like he knew something I didn't.....

.....Kyle Turris. Pretty good hockey player. Not the greatest interview. I felt for Ian Mendes as he tried to get a few moderately entertaining answers out of the young man after his first goal as a Sen. Mendes would have had better luck mining for diamonds in Major's Hill Park.....You might be surprised but a lot of NHL coaches don't go around patting backs on the bench. Hell, some coaches barely even talk to their players outside of the dressing room. But there was Paul MacLean going right up to Kyle Turris to congratulate him on his first goal as a Senator. And we've seen that type of thing all season from MacLean. It's somewhat normal for assistant coaches to do the rah-rah thing but the stereotype of the head coach is a guy who eats ice chips and sneers like Mike Keenan (who really did eat ice chips from a Gatorade cup every single game). It's no surprise the players love playing for a guy like MacLean. If he can get them into the playoffs, they'll go through the wall for him......Kerry Fraser recently penned a really good column over at TSN about some of the more vicious and controversial trash talking that goes on in the NHL between players. As Kerry points out, it can often go over the line into territory that gets everybody in trouble. But for every taunt that goes over the line, there's probably 50 that are pretty funny. I've been reading Fraser's new book about his career called "The Final Call" (which I will probably do a review of in the near future here on the blog) and in it he recalls a time when New York Islander (and now TSN personality) Ray Ferraro made then-New York Ranger Tie Domi go completely berserk with rage. Seeing that it was right around Halloween, Ferraro waited until the linesmen had Domi tied up in an after-whistle scrum and then yelled at the young tough guy "Domi, with a fuckin' head like that, you should be sitting on someone's porch!" As Fraser tried not to laugh, Domi had to be held back from "ripping Ferraro's head off to hang on the rear-view mirror of his car." Halloween-themed trash talking clearly has potential for greatness.....

.....Now that Stevie Yzerman's running the Bolts, can we start calling Steven Stamkos "Stevie" too? I think the only one who still calls Yzerman "Stevie" is Don Cherry, but that's a tradition that should be carried on. It's not too hard to remember Stevie Y as the kid who Detroit pinned all their hopes on to drag them out of their ghetto early 80's era.......One last thing about the Lightning - their new uniforms this year are a huge improvement (remember these old 3rd's?). Simple, clean but still bright and those lightning bolts on the pants are a nod to their early years. Yzerman said the organization wanted a classic look and in a way the Tampa uni's are close to a blue version of the Wings look. Pretty sharp....

......John Vogl of the Buffalo News gives us a great quote from Ville Leino on the quiet and lifeless atmosphere in Buffalo’s home rink this year: “Married couples fighting upstairs, you can hear that on the ice."…..Geez, I’m guessing the Sabres would love to get their hands on Ryan Getzlaf if all the scuttlebutt about him being available in a possible yard sale in Anaheim. Getzlaf is exactly the kind of big, proven, playmaking centre they’ve needed for a long time. Could even be worth sacrificing Ryan Miller for….

Sens Pull Another Late Comeback .... Plus Why Ottawa Shouldn't Trade Kuba and Gonchar .... And Endless Game Notes

2012-01-02T22:54:00.001-05:00

Ottawa 3 New Jersey 2 (OT)

Is anyone really surprised anymore?

Yet another scrappy third period comeback.

A clutch Daniel Alfredsson overtime goal, this one nearly identical to the one he scored against the Calgary Flames just after Christmas for his 400th career goal.

The entertainment value of the Ottawa Senators hasn't been this high since the mid-2000's but for much different reasons than anyone would give those old teams credit for.

The old Senators teams won on a vast array of overwhelming skill while these ham-and-eggers win games on what often feels like character alone. I've lost track of how many third period comebacks we've all sat through and watching this game go into overtime, I'm sure many Senators fans just knew this team was going to find a way to get the extra point. The fact that it was another Erik Karlsson to Alfredsson play just adds to the awe factor that is quickly creeping into this storybook season.

Further below you can read my take on why the Senators should be in no rush to trade their veteran d-men and tonight's win just further cements my theory. Something is happening with this team and where it will end, nobody seems to know right now.

They can play the game any way you like it. With speed, with skill, with fists or with a huge dose of plain old luck. And it all seems to come at just the right time.

For the first two periods against the New Jersey Devils, it clearly looked like the Senators were the inferior team. The Devils just looked bigger and faster while they played a textbook road game, backed by the ubiquitous Martin Brodeur who looks pretty much the same now as he did in 1995 behind that tiny gear.

Then the third period switch was flicked somewhere in that Senators dressing room and Ottawa created an unstoppable flow of momentum that now seems so strangely familiar.

How do you explain it?

Maybe it's time to drop the pretense and just admit that this is a good hockey team, much better than we all thought.

But then again, nobody wants to lose the underdog label. Sens fans might want to curb the effusive praise and just see where this "underdog" role carries the team.

Black Aces Senators 3 Stars

1. Erik Condra
2. Daniel Alfredsson
3. Craig Anderson

Honourable Mentions: Jason Spezza, Chris Neil, Filip Kuba and Erik Karlsson.

***

Sens Might Want To Hold On To Their Older Defensemen Past The Deadline

No one can be sure in the first week of January, but this Ottawa Senators team doesn’t look like a club who’ll be desperate to shed two of their top defenseman, even if one of them is a UFA next season (Filip Kuba). It’s rare for a team in 8th place in January to fall out of playoff contention completely, so if Ottawa is still within striking distance of the postseason at the trade deadline (very likely), I can’t see either Kuba or Sergei Gonchar getting dealt like many believe.

Sure, that seemed a likely scenario at the start of the season when it was expected that Ottawa would be a lottery pick team, but circumstances have changed and the Senators would be doing a disservice to themselves and the fans if they moved important players for draft picks. Both Kuba and Gonchar, targets of cave dwelling boo birds to start the season, have rebounded quite nicely from disastrous years and both would play big minutes in any playoff series the Senators find themselves in. If a team dangled a first-rounder, then maybe you reconsider, but what are the chances of that happening? Nil to zero?

It doesn’t mean that Bryan Murray has to actually add more salary at the deadline to help in a playoff push, but he would likely be loathe to subtract. You have to take into account Murray’s position here. Ever since he took over as GM following the Senators run to the Cup final under John Muckler, he hasn’t won a playoff series. Don’t think for a second he isn’t dying to get in there and see what this overachieving team can do to restore some of his reputation. I highly doubt he’d sacrifice any of his own draft picks to do so, but Murray wants to win now just as much as he wants to win in the future. See the Kyle Turris trade. Turris helps the team right now and in the future. David Rundblad was more of a future prospect, even if he is somewhat more highly touted than Turris at this point.

As for losing Kuba (and possibly Gonchar in a year from now) come July 1st, that’s just reality in today’s NHL. While it’s great to get a pick to show for a pending UFA, it’s not the end of the world anymore if you don’t, especially for a mid-level player who can be replaced by prospects already in the system. What you lose in a UFA you gain in cap space and the opportunity to do something different with that money. You’d never want to see a star like Jason Spezza walk away for nothing, but a playoff spot is far more valuable than what you can get on the market for players like Kuba and Gonchar. Enough said.

NOTES

Robin Lehner getting in trouble again for going absolutely nutzoid during an AHL game may signal that the competitive young man gets frustrated from time to time playing in a league that he clearly feels he’s too good for. Or it might suggest that it’s actually the NHL that he’s not ready for. Take your pick. He’s not having the best year he could have, but I’m betting Lehner will be a better NHL’er than he ever will be an AHL’er because he has the type of personality that thrives on competition. If, in his mind, he feels he’s not competing against the best, maybe he doesn’t bring his best. Or maybe that’s all a load of s**t. Again, take your pick….I'm guessing Toronto Sun columnist Steve Simmons is going to get some heat from Ottawa fans after he tweeted this at around 5:00 today, "I used to think the dumbest hockey fans in Canada were in Ottawa but not anymore. PS - I voted for a Sedin for MVP in each of the last 2 yrs". This was in response to some heat he was getting from Vancouver fans. It's pretty impressive when you can inflame two fanbases in one tweet. Yet, any good sportswriter worth his salt should piss a whole swathe of people off once in a while, just to make sure he/she still has it. Clearly Simmons does.....

......How does Erik Condra, a right-handed shot, not fire a laser when Daniel Alfredsson sets him up with a perfect pass on the left side of the ice during a 2-on-1 with Martin Brodeur in motion across the crease? Could he have been intimidated by the legendary Brodeur? If he was, you can't really blame him, can you? I wonder if Alfie told him to smarten up when they were back on the bench. Whatever it was, Condra got over it pretty quickly as he started firing shots from all angles, including the beauty that resulted in his game-tying shortie in the third.....

....That was one of the meanest, hard-nosed scraps of the year when Chris Neil and former Atlanta Thrasher Eric Boulton went at it late in the second period. Neil was landing heavy bombs early on but Boulton evened it out with a strong finish. All of it was nasty..... Speaking of tough guys, does anyone else find it strange that Matt Carkner was pegged to be a healthy scratch until Sergei Gonchar pulled the chute after warm-ups? Especially after one of Carkner's best games of the season? For cherub Brian Lee of all players? Either Paul MacLean was trying to keep big #39 humble or he was still hungover from New Year's Eve when he made that decision......Someday, an NHL player will separate his shoulder after jumping into the glass to celebrate a goal. And that someone will probably be Peter Regin.....

.....Finally got a chance to see the new scoreboard in person after taking in the Calgary game last week. That thing is a beast. It almost seems too big actually, though I'm hardly complaining. From where I was sitting in the lower bowl, it blocked out most of the other half of the arena. I kind of like the bare bones look of it with just the huge screens. Makes the rink look like a massive living room with 20,000 people spilling soda all over your couch and carpet.When they finally add the fancy casing to it, the rink will look more like Pizza Planet from the Toy Story movies.....I have yet to be in the rink to hear a louder roar than when Daniel Alfredsson uncorked his 400th career goal in overtime against the Flames that night. Pure bedlam in the stands. I think the girl next to me peed her pants for real. So did my brother on the other side of me, but he does that whenever he hears loud noises. Erik Karlsson looked like a kid running down the stairs Christmas morning and the guy on the goal horn was putting some major stank on it for close to 30 seconds. And Alfie evidently still had the adrenalin going when he was announced as first star of the game. He launched the traditional giveaway stick into the stands like it was a javelin. The folks rushing for the parking lot missed the sight of two middle-aged men fighting tooth and nail over that very same stick to the point where I thought punches were going to be thrown. Alas, cooler heads prevailed and we all walked out into the freezing rain having just seen a hell of a show......Unfortunately for Spartacat, he was shooting blanks at the Calgary game when his t-shirt gun went on the fritz. Those shirts were popping about three feet into the air and dropping to his feet rather sadly. So he got the natural guns out and started heaving them into the upper decks on his own. That's what you look for in a mascot - the ability to improvise.....

.....I have a friend who went out and bought a ticket to the last home game of the season, April 5 against the Bruins because he thinks it might be Alfie's last game. After watching the way Alfie's been skating the past month, I think I'll tell him he's going to need another ticket for April 2013....Wonder what it was that Martin Brodeur said that Milan Michalek found so funny after a scramble at the Devils net in the third period......With the way Henrik Lundqvist played in the clutch during the Winter Classic today (and through the whole season), it makes you think the Rangers aren't really that far away from winning a Stanley Cup. They don't seem to have much firepower outside of their two big forwards stars but they could win it all with goaltending and coaching. If Marc Staal can stay healthy, the Rangers will give the Bruins all they can handle in the East.......Both the Flyers and the Rangers did a great job with their retro sweaters for the game (as seen below). The bright orange looked incredible in HD (although white shoulders would have been better than black) as did the "vintage white" of the Rangers with the simple blue and red stripes. I was skeptical before but now I'm completely sold on vintage white as a good choice for a permanent road colour for the Senators, maybe as a mirror to their current black retro's.

Happy New Years

2011-12-31T14:39:00.000-05:00

Seeing as I'm just slowly starting to come out of my holiday induced coma, Black Aces will start up again Monday night with a big post after the Sens-Devils tilt. Lots to catch up on.

Big happy new year to all my readers. See you in a few days.

Sens Break For Christmas As A Team To Watch

2011-12-23T22:49:00.005-05:00

Carolina 2 Ottawa 1 (OT)

Not bad for a back-to-back going into the Christmas holidays.

The Senators lost another low scoring game in Raleigh, a town which they always seem to sleepwalk through a couple times a year but getting that point keeps them in the top eight (pending the outcome of the Winnipeg game) going into the Christmas break.

Outside of the Panthers, the Wild and the NHL Guardians Project, the Ottawa Senators have to be considered one of the league's biggest success stories as we near the halfway mark. Right now they sit above teams like the Montreal Canadiens, the Buffalo Sabres, the Washington Capitals and the Tampa Bay Lightning, all of whom were expected to be much better than they actually are.

This team has the feel of those 97 and 98 squads who had a few really good offensive talents backed by a gritty character group of support players, but instead of older guys like Tom Chorske, Bruce Gardiner and Shaun Van Allen, these Senators have young kids in many of those support roles and they just keep getting better as the games pile up.

Clearly, this is not an elite contending team yet but if you go back to those late 90's editions you'll remember how they kept surprising everybody by winning games and a playoff series no one thought they could. It's the same scenario repeating itself over a decade later.

Back then, the Senators made some key but risky trades to accelerate the youth movement, such as swapping one young, highly-touted prospect for another in the Bryan Berard - Wade Redden trade and then picking up veterans such as Steve Duchesne to help the young guys learn how to pick the best wines at restaurants.

GM Bryan Murray recently made another risky prospect-for-prospect move by shipping off David Rundblad for centre Kyle Turris and three games in Murray looks like a smart man, despite many (including myself) reaching for the Wild Turkey and guzzling a quart straight off just to try and get their heads around it. Murray also picked up some good vets like Craig Anderson and Sergei Gonchar, both of whom are starting to pay off in a possible playoff chase (remember when fans booed Gonchar and Filip Kuba at the first home game? I still don't get it.)

If the Ottawa Senators are a contending club two or three years from now, we'll all look back on this season like we once looked back at that 1997 team where a raw group of talented kids started to lay the foundation for better things to come.

Daniel Alfredsson was at the start of that road way back then in a terrible JOFA helmet and now he's looped back around to see it happening once again, only this time he has a glorious Lanny McDonald above his soup coolers.

If his memory serves him well, he might want to stick around at least another season to see where it all leads.

Black Aces Senators 3 Stars

1. Craig Anderson (36 saves)
2. Filip Kuba (22 minutes, 1 goal, 3 blocked shots)
3. Erik Karlsson (for being Erik Karlsson)

Here's how the season scorecard looks going into the Christmas break:

Black Aces 3 Stars Season Scorecard

(3 points for 1st star, 1 for 3rd star etc.)

1. Spezza – 28
2. Karlsson – 25
3. Anderson – 25
4. Michalek – 22
5. Alfredsson – 20
6. Foligno – 12
7. Neil – 11
8. Smith – 10
9. Cowen – 10
10. Greening – 7
11. Da Costa – 4
12. Gonchar – 4
13. Butler – 2
14. Kuba - 2
15. Phillips – 1
16. Winchester – 1
17. Condra - 1

NOTES

Erik Karlsson has now had 7 multi-point games this season, which is pretty remarkable for a defenseman by Christmas. 16 Senators have had multi-point games so far. Here's a list of them and how many:

Spezza - 11
Alfredsson - 7
Karlsson - 7
Michalek - 6
Foligno - 4
Condra - 3
Gonchar - 3
Neil - 3
Smith - 3
Butler - 1
Cowen - 1
Da Costa - 1
Greening - 1
Kuba - 1
Phillips - 1
Regin - 1

....Strange fact: Nick Foligno played 35 games going into tonight and never surpassed 2 minutes in penalties in any game except twice - he got 17 minutes against Vancouver and 15 minutes against Florida this month. In the four games between the matches with Vancouver and Florida he had 0 penalty minutes. The guy knows how to pick his spots......Somehow I doubt we'll see Kyle Turris replacing David Rundblad in this sort of important situation.....

.....I've always liked that thing they do in the Carolina rink where someone goes to town on that crank noisemaker to get the crowd going. Tonight it was Santa Claus just givin 'er a rip. Maybe in Ottawa they could steal that classic moment from Fubar where Tron puts an axe into a tree stump to signal that the party has started, as seen below. You could have Sparty do it at centre ice right after the anthems. Or even better, the drunkest fan they can find....

.....I've always wondered if it was coincidence that my 2 year old son decides to take a massive dump in his diaper which requires an immediate changing as soon as the puck drops for the start of the game. He did it again tonight, about the tenth time this season. I'm beginning to suspect my wife has something to do with this. Her cackling laughter gives it away.......Tough story last night about a man having a heart attack right at the main entrance to Scotiabank Place. Luckily he was attended to quickly by two bystanders with CPR training.....

So I'd like to wish everyone a Merry Christmas. Black Aces will take a little break for a few days while I get drunk and eat and sleep like an animal. Let's end it with maybe my favourite clip from Christmas Vacation, a movie everyone should take the time to watch over the holidays, even if you've already seen it 32 times.

Turris Has Solid Debut In Red....While Anderson Quietly Gets Back On Track

2011-12-20T22:52:00.003-05:00

Ottawa 4 Buffalo 1

Kyle Turris didn't exactly get feted at the airport by a raucous crowd of supporters thrilled he was the newest Senator after a surprising and somewhat controversial trade with Phoenix, but he likely soothed a few concerns with a solid effort in his first game in front of the home fans.

It was a predictably slow start for the young Turris in the first two periods as he was probably just trying not to throw up, but he made his mark in the third by initiating the play that delivered Erik Condra's game winning goal over a struggling Sabres team missing seven regulars. After the goal, the crowd was losing it, Turris almost picked Condra up and hoisted him over his head like the Stanley Cup, and fans watching at home inundated Twitter with endless exclamation points!!!!

Hey, it was only an assist but there's something to be said about the buzz a big trade creates and the energy it gives to the players and fans, especially when you can see some results right away. I bet there's been a few orders for a #7 Turris jersey just on that assist alone.

Playing on a line with Condra and Nick Foligno, Turris finally showed some spark when he aggressively stole the puck on the back-check and snapped off one of those rumoured trademark shots that handcuffed Ryan Miller and allowed the rebound to go to Condra who knocked it in.

That shot was what everyone in Ottawa was waiting to see. The hyperbole was cranked a little high on TSN with Chris Cuthbert comparing Turris' shot to Joe Sakic's in the sense that he can get it off his stick a split-second before anyone expects it. That was the only time that Turris found the net in his first game but it was enough for everyone breath a little easier and Turris seemed more involved in the play after that goal.

It was a big win for Ottawa as they jumped back into a playoff spot, but more importantly, Craig Anderson had a quiet game behind all the Turris hype and that's exactly what he and the team needed at this point. The month of December has been pretty rough all around and Anderson badly needed to get settled down and stop the whispers for at least a few days.

Anderson did that, even when all eyes were following the new guy.

Black Aces Senators 3 Stars

1. Jason Spezza
2. Craig Anderson
3. Erik Condra

Honourable Mentions: Kyle Turris, Daniel Alfredsson, Erik Karlsson, Chris Neil (10 hits!) and Zack Smith.

NOTES

No pressure kid. TSN's Brent Wallace interviewed Turris before the game and I think Wallace used the word "pressure" 30 times in three questions. Nothing wrong with the questions, as they were all valid, but I'm guessing Turris didn't get those kinds of prompts out in Phoenix too often....Not bad for a trio of tough guys. First goal of the game scored by Zack Smith, assisted by Chris Neil and Matt Carkner.....It would be amazing if Daniel Alfredsson decided to play another season AND kept the moustache for the duration. He's starting to get a "Lanny McDonald in 1989 looking for his first Stanley Cup" vibe happening..... It seemed strange that nobody on the Senators did anything about Paul Gaustad ramming Jesse Winchester into the boards from behind and putting him out for the game. The refs blindly didn't deem it a penalty which made you think Matt Carkner or Chris Neil would have something to say very soon after. It's tough to do that in a close hockey game because of the instigator so it's understandable that the Sens kept their cool. Neil finally challenged Gaustad late in the third period after the Sabres were whistled on a penalty but Neil was smart enough not to drop his gloves first and Gaustad took a pass on the scrap. Then Ottawa went out and scored on the power-play with Neil standing in front of the net causing havoc. .....Carkner was there doing his job well when he viciously cleared the net area of Jason Pominville's pesky presence midway through the third period. Ottawa missed that part of his game while he rehabbed his knee early in the season. Carkner has been his usual steady self since returning..... Nice to see the Senators highest scoring defenseman in franchise history, Wade Redden, watching the game from the Foligno family box. He's also the team's all time leader in plus/minus with an impressive +159. The guy still looks 25 years old.....

.....It was rather amusing to see all those knives in David Rundblad’s back as he exited for the sunnier climes of Phoenix. There were a lot of fans bemoaning the loss of such a talented defenseman but there were also quite a few fans explaining to everyone just how terrible Rundblad really was, as if his current defensive short-comings represented the peak of his development. It reminded me a little of the guy whose girlfriend moves away and he bravely tells his buddies that she wasn’t that great anyways. The reality is that the Senators traded one talented prospect for another, and you don’t have to pretend Rundblad is a bum to justify the trade in your head. The trade was a gamble for Bryan Murray (despite his denials that it’s a gamble at all) and that’s okay. It’s a GM’s job to gamble once in a while. For GM Don Maloney in Phoenix, it was a steal because Kyle Turris desperately wanted out of there and the whole league knew it. Yet Maloney still got an elite prospect and a second rounder to boot. In short, it’s okay for fans recognize that the Senators traded away a good, soon to be great hockey player. They may have gotten one back at the same time or they may have gotten damaged goods. There will be a lot of people proclaiming who won or lost the deal, probably as early as tonight, but no one will really have a handle on it until both Turris and Rundblad begin to hit their prime years. That’s still three or four seasons away. Time to put the pitchforks back in the hay for a while.

Kyle Turris Flashback

2011-12-18T17:50:00.001-05:00

Kyle Turris will get to experience this all over again on Monday. My guess is he won't be as awestruck. Or be wearing a backwards baseball cap.

Sens Saturday Shocker - Rundblad Traded For Turris

2011-12-17T15:40:00.001-05:00

I thought Saturday would be a fine day to relax and get away from the game for a day. WRONG.

Ottawa traded young defenseman David Rundblad and a 2012 second-rounder to Phoenix for 22 year old center and recent contract holdout Kyle Turris.

Oh boy.

As I now battle to keep the Saturday morning pancakes down, let's take a minute and try to understand the reasoning behind GM Bryan Murray giving up on an elite prospect like Rundblad for a former elite prospect in Kyle Turris.

First, as befits the weekend, let's look at the positives with Turris coming in. He's only 22 years old and is signed for the next two seasons at an annual cap hit of $1.4 million. He's a former third overall pick in 2007 who went just behind numbers one and two Patrick Kane and James Van Riemsdyk, both of whom are living up to their once lofty elite prospect status.

Which brings us to the bad news part about Turris. Clearly, he hasn't achieved the same level of success in the NHL as the two stars picked ahead of him (although Van Riemsdyk took longer than Kane to break through), or even a few picked after him like Logan Couture, Sam Gagner or David Perron. Turris' stats read 137 GP, 19 G, 27 A and a -22 through what amounts to two seasons as a semi-regular with the Coyotes.

Yet Turris has shown some skill in the pros. In 2009-2010 with San Antonio in the AHL, where he spent the entire season after he had already played his rookie year in the NHL, Turris put up 63 points in 76 games. And lets not forget last year's shortened playoff performance with 3 points in 4 games. Reasons for optimism.

Turris has decent size, being 6'1 and 185 pounds and will almost assuredly get a shot to be the Senators second line centre after rookies Mika Zibanejad and Stephane Da Costa weren't ready for that role. What is a little confusing is that Nick Foligno has stepped into that spot nicely after being a winger for most of his NHL career (no word on Foligno's injury against the Penguins on Friday) and Peter Regin has shown glimpses of being able to fill that slot as well. Conceivably, the Senators, who are having a better than expected year, could have slugged it out with Foligno or Regin the rest of the season knowing they have Zibanejad in the pipeline and just kept Rundblad, whose status as a prospective top-end offensive defenseman is a scarce commodity in the league.

So where did it all go wrong with the Senators and Rundblad? Surely we can't base it all on his rookie performance which isn't even 3 months old? Rundblad was likely headed to the AHL this season for some more seasoning but Rundblad was always a player expected to pay off two or three years down the road. In fact, you'd be had pressed to find a pundit who didn't see him becoming a big star in this league. The outlook on Turris is decidedly more sketchy (although Darren Pang vouches for him).

Clearly, Murray saw an opportunity to strengthen a weakness down the middle and felt he could subtract from his strength on the blueline, knowing he has two blue-chip players in Erik Karlsson and Jared Cowen (who had four points Friday night - surely that wasn't the deciding factor?). Murray may also have been looking down the road and seeing himself having to pay three elite defenseman those very expensive elite contracts and decided he'd rather spread that future money around. Murray might also be thinking about the playoffs this year (and rightly so), realizing that Rundblad wasn't going to contribute while Turris already has NHL experience and might contribute right away. Murray likely feels he is accelerating the rebuild while still remaining young and cheap.

With all that said, it still doesn't feel exactly right.

Guys like Rundblad are so rare while offensive forwards like Turris are somewhat easier to draft, trade for or sign in free agency. You can also usually find guys with less baggage than Turris who is now coming to a city which has seen more than it's fair share of contract disputes, trade requests and general disgruntlement. Informally, fans know that this kind of trouble tends to follow players around for their careers. But in a way, that's being unfair to Turris. He deserves a clean slate in Ottawa and will get one, although the same happened with Nikita Filatov and he wasn't able to break free of his reputation in his ridiculously short time here this season (but wait - word is Filatov wasn't able to secure a KHL contract and has come crawling back to Binghamton which will likely be confirmed in the next few hours EDIT: Filatov was assigned to Bingo on paper only. Expected to stay in Russia.).

In short, this trade was a genuine shocker for many, and not just to over reactive bloggers and tweeters like myself. Rundblad, of course, is not a sure bet to be a superstar, but he's a better bet than Turris at this point and you'd probably get 9 out of 10 dentists to agree. Yet Murray feels Turris is a better fit in the long run and he may end up being right.

That's the real crux here, like all player-for-player trades. We won't know who wins and loses for at least three or four years, even if the early results favour one team over the other. Defenseman like Rundblad can take years to blossom and if the Phoenix Coyotes end up moving to Quebec City, Senators fans might be able to watch that take place six times a year for the foreseeable future.

Oh yah. The Senators got a new scoreboard. And Jacques Martin was fired in Montreal.

A Saturday afternoon pint is in order.

Goaltending Quickly Becoming An Issue In Ottawa.... What Else Is New?

2011-12-14T22:58:00.002-05:00

Boston 5 Ottawa 2

The shots on goal total say it all here. Ottawa 49 - Boston 29.

This game came down to goaltending and as usual, Tim Thomas of the Bruins, who "likes the lighting" in the Kanata rink, dominated the Senators with 47 saves and a .959 save percentage.

On the other hand, Craig Anderson was dismal on Wednesday night and couldn't stop Patrice Bergeron on a breakaway when the Senators needed him to step up and bail them out on a tough play.

You could point to the fact that Ottawa was missing three of its better and more experienced players in Milan Michalek, Sergei Gonchar and Filip Kuba, but how much of a difference could they have made when Anderson was beat cleanly on multiple shots with no deflections?

Anderson has played in 28 games so far this season and he's had a sub .900 save percentage in 14 of those games. That's exactly half for those who didn't pass Grade 10.

But it's tough to bury Anderson when his defense is giving away pucks all night as they have throughout the season but he also hasn't made a habit of stealing games and unfortunately that's the type of goaltender Ottawa needs this year to make the playoffs.

Things won't get any easier with Pittsburgh rolling into Kanata on Friday. Last time Anderson faced the Penguins he gave up four goals on eight shots in just under ten minutes.

Black Aces Senators 3 Stars

1. Jared Cowen (team high 27 minutes of solid play)
2. Daniel Alfredsson (responded to being put back on first line)
3. Jason Spezza (dangerous late in the game and 2 points)

NOTES

Only a veteran media guy like Darren Pang could actually appear nervous when getting introduced from between the benches at the start of the game. As he kept talking throughout the first period, my wife, who doesn't pay any attention to hockey whatsoever, gave me a strange look and asked if that was some teenage kid talking. Instead of trying to explain, I just said yes. That's no knock against Panger. Not many love the game more than that guy, plus he's a good Ottawa boy (as Don Cherry would say if he was fond of talking about good ol' Ottawa boys).....One of the reasons they put media guys between the benches is so we can hear things like Pang relating how the whole Ottawa bench visibly sagged and lowered their heads when Craig Anderson let in a softie to Rich Peverly in the first period. It would be interesting if the cameras panned to the benches after goals instead of going to the "goat cam" which focuses on the guy who made the mistake (although they tend to get it wrong almost 50% of the time).......How long until the Senators make a white counterpart to their new heritage uni's and those become the home and away set with the current red the "new" third jersey? I'd give it two more years....What's the deal with this logo anyways? They've used it on some merchandise but not on an actual jersey. And we can all be thankful for that. It's pretty terrible compared to the logo they were obviously trying to "modernize"....What is it about Twitter that brings out the Dwight Schrute in everyone?.....

.......It's amazing that people still seem so surprised and outraged that NHL players actually get concussions. The fact that two recent high profile players were injured by accidental collisions with teammates has just added to the confusion. If we could all pull our heads out of our asses for one minute and use some common sense, we'd quickly realize that hockey is a physical, athletic sport which requires the participants to hit each other in various ways to retrieve the puck. This will always lead to injuries, some of them serious. You can tweak the rules and the equipment but concussions are here to stay. At some point we should probably get over it and accept it as a normal outcome of sports. As Cam Cole noted in a widely read column today: "It may turn out that the NHL, in all its misguided, deceitful stubbornness, was accidentally right all along. Maybe concussions really are just the cost of doing business, and we — and they — had better get used to losing the best players, who have the puck the most and therefore are the most vulnerable. What can you do? It’s a kind of natural selection. Charles Darwin wrote about it." And we're just realizing this now? People need to get over their bogus "spectator guilt" and accept the game for what it is at the root level. The players accept it readily. So should the fans and the media......

.....With the Big Bad Bruins in town, that gives us a flimsy excuse to look at old Bruins hockey cards. This 54-55 Topps Milt Schmidt would make a pretty nice print to hang on your wall, don't you think?

Here's a few more: 57-58 Topps Johnny Bucyk, 33-34 O Pee-Chee Eddie Shore, 71-72 O Pee-Chee Phil Esposito, 73-74 O Pee-Chee Derek Sanderson, 79-80 O Pee-Chee Peter McNab , 33-34 O Pee-Chee Tiny Thompson, 81-82 O Pee-Chee Mike Milbury, 54-55 O Pee-Chee Fern Flaman, 71-72 O Pee-Chee Bobby Orr.....

.....Scary bout between Matt Carkner and Milan Lucic in the first period. Every time I see Lucic start throwing the hammers, I expect to see his opponent lying on the ice, even when it's a heavyweight like Carkner. I'll give the scrap to Lucic on punches landed but Carkner got the last laugh - literally. I wonder what he said to crack the linesman up as he was getting escorted away.....Ex-Senators goalie Brian Elliott is having a hell of a comeback season in St. Louis. Yet, like all goalies, Elliott will hit a tough patch and it will be interesting to see how he responds. He didn't handle those down times very well in Ottawa but when things were going well, he could look unbeatable. In a way, Elliott reminds me of a guy like Brian Boucher (now in the Carolina Hurricanes organization). When Boucher got hot, it was unbelievable what he could do in a limited stretch of games. Then he'd go into the tank in a spectacular way and have to build himself back up. Maybe Elliott's career will go in a different direction and this is just the start of a natural maturation process. Think of how amazing a story it would be if he won the Vezina trophy this June. Don't laugh, it could happen.

Sens Rack Another Comeback .... Plus Pulitzer Worthy Game Notes

2011-12-13T22:15:00.003-05:00

Ottawa 3 Buffalo 2 (OT)

Talk about a bizarre sequence of events.

The Senators battle back in the third period to tie the Sabres on a shot from forward Peter Regin who is hanging back at the point to cover for one of his defenseman. Then in overtime, Jason Spezza gets tossed from a faceoff and Regin steps in before being waved off from his own bench (likely because of his surgically repaired shoulder). So defenseman Erik Karlsson, of all people, steps into the circle and takes the draw. On the same shift, Karlsson collects the puck deep in the Sabres end and throws it to the front of the net where another defenseman, rookie Jared Cowen, slams it past Ryan Miller for the win.

It was a bit like a twist ending from a decent Twilight Zone episode, possibly spurred on by the strangeness of seeing Sabres defenseman Christian Ehrhoff instigate a fight with hulking Colin Greening after Ryan Miller got a softie bump behind the net in the final seconds of the third. It was the right thing for Ehroff to do, given the history in Buffalo with the Milan Lucic nightmare, but Greening cut him open pretty good with a shot straight to the visor before they both went down in a heap.

Not a bad way to end a divisional hockey game - a good scrap, a goalie dive, and a couple of defenseman hooking up for a down-low overtime winning goal.

Oh, and judging by that crazed pileup after the OT goal, Cowen seems to be a much loved player in that dressing room. The only guy who didn't deliver a facewash to Cowen was Paul MacLean but maybe he got Cowen with a shaving cream pie in the hallway afterwards. Or just turned the fire extinguisher on him.

With that clutch win for Ottawa in the books, they temporarily booted Washington out of 8th place (pending games yet to finish on Tuesday night) and now sit just one point behind the Sabres for 7th in the East.

A few downer moments for Ottawa were the giveaways that led directly to the two Sabres goals and if you've been watching closely, you can tell that David Rundblad is pretty close to a date in Binghamton, maybe as early as one of Sergei Gonchar or Filip Kuba getting healthy. Rundblad's stick seems like it's made of meatloaf when he's trying to get out of his own zone and he's not exactly creating many chances anymore like he was earlier in the year.

Never thought I'd say this, but right now Rundblad is making Brian Lee look like Doug Harvey back there.

Milan Michalek also left the game after colliding with Karlsson at the blueline. Maybe a shoulder?

Black Aces Senators 3 Stars

1. Erik Karlsson (team high 27 minutes)
2. Jared Cowen (26 minutes, overtime winner)
3. Jason Spezza (slick 2 assists)

Honourable Mentions: Colin Greening, Craig Anderson, Peter Regin, Chris Phillips.

NOTES

Good to see two players doing what they do best in the first three minutes. Jason Spezza making a shifty pass behind his back to a winger and Zenon Konopka winning a vicious scrap he probably had no business winning from a purely physical standpoint. Konopka took some heavy shots from Cody McCormick but somehow was the one left standing at the end of it. But from the look of Konopka in the box afterwards, he wasn't any prettier because of it (but he still looked better than assistant coach Mark Reeds who took a puck in the face during a recent practice and had the full racoon mask on behind the bench)...Did you ever want to know exactly how they make NHL ice? Wonder no more. I didn't realize the white and the lines were painted on different layers....Funny moment in the third when Daniel Alfredsson was ready to go off the ice so he slowly flipped the puck into the Sabres corner for Kaspars Daugavins to go chase down. It was just like a guy playing fetch with his dog in the park. Sure enough, Daugavins put his head down and went after it with his tongue hanging out (well....)......Hard to believe just how far Daugavins has come since last season. Somehow he played his way up the depth chart, pushing guys like Bobby Butler and Nikita Filatov down along the way. I mean, Butler was a lock going into this season. Not any more. Daugavins hadn't been as good lately but he was more like himself tonight. And by more like himself, I mean "sticky". The guy is always stuck to something. The boards, the puck, the other team's defenseman, his own teammates. He always seems to be in a crowd shuffling his feet but pucks seem to hit him, deaden, and fall to the ice in front of his stick. If some guys are slick and freewheeling, Daugavins is a bit like a piece of gum stuck under someone's shoe. And that's what makes him so effective. If he ever develops a mean streak, he could really be something....

......Both Zenon Konopka and Paul Gaustad are known as two great faceoff guys. Wouldn't that be a strange trend if tough guys across the league all of a sudden got great at draws as a way to get more ice time or even stay in the league? It's hard to imagine a guy like Bob Probert ever taking important faceoffs near the end of games..... Mika Zibanejad and Nikita Filatov both played 9 games, but Zibanejad had twice as many shots on net. Both had one point but Filatov was +1 while Zibanejad was -3. What does this say? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Or maybe just that neither was ready to play in the NHL full-time....Prior to tonight's game, Erik Karlsson was just one point behind both Norm MacIver and Karel Rachunek on the Senators all-time scoring list with 96 points (Edit: He got that point tonight). But I'm guessing Karlsson would rather break MacIver's single-season Senators record of 63 points in a season. He's still 38 37 points back....

.....Per Puck Daddy, when Nikita Filatov was asked by Sovetsky Sport about his relationship with GM Bryan Murray and coach Paul MacLean, he replied "No, there was a good relationship with both the coach and the general manager. I can't complain. I can only blame myself." It may be easy to jump to conclusions about Filatov's attitude if you go on hearsay and past problems in Columbus, but all he's done this year is say the right things and he certainly didn't burn any bridges on his way out of Ottawa. My humble opinion is that we've seen the last of Filatov, at least in Ottawa, but it's not like he won't be welcome if he wants to come back and try again.....Not so interestingly, Filatov is tied with another once highly touted Russian hockey player on the Sens all-time scoring list with one point. And that player is Alexei Kaigorodov who pulled off the single point in only six games as opposed to Filatov's nine. That must burn.....This is not a shot at Winnipeg, but Antti Miettinen thinking he was going to Tampa Bay but ending up in Winnipeg is going to really mess with what he and his family were planning to pack....Chris Phillips is on the home stretch to his 1000th game by playing in his 976th tonight in Buffalo. If all goes well and he stays healthy, he'll play the big game on Hockey Night In Canada at home against Toronto on Febuary 4th. No bigger stage than that for the "Big Rig".

Filatov Gets The Boot In Ottawa

2011-12-12T13:40:00.000-05:00

Let’s just say there was plenty of warning signals for those who could get past the initial excitement of the Senators adding a former highly touted first round pick for a mere third rounder.

Back in the summer, word leaked out that Nikita Filatov was claiming he was promised top-six minutes by GM Bryan Murray. Uh oh.

Not only did that “promise” go unfulfilled, but Nikita Filatov was back on a plane today to Russia to finish the year in the KHL and it’s not even Christmas yet.

So where did it all go wrong?

Some would say it went wrong all the way back in Columbus where Filatov cemented his reputation (fair or not) as a petulant, offense-only winger who wouldn’t take coaching instructions. Optimists said it sounded like a hundred other prospects who eventually turned their games and attitudes around to have long careers. Pessimists rejoiced in the leaked “Filly don’t do rebounds” story that surfaced not long ago and it seemed the entire fanbase was at odds with one another over whether Filatov wasn’t being given a chance to succeed under Paul MacLean and those who felt he had to earn his chance by playing in the AHL or with spot duty on the bottom two lines.

Today we know which side will be thumping their chests.

But even with Filatov gone, many questions remain. He may not be done in Ottawa just yet. The Senators “assigned” him to the KHL which indicates they retain his rights. All the Senators have to do is submit a qualifying offer in the summer and we could potentially see the circus return next September (as long as a new CBA is hammered out in the meantime).

Fans are also left wondering what would have happened had MacLean given Filatov just a few more games in the lineup to so he could get that one goal that might spark a return of confidence. With Filatov’s stay cut so abruptly, it may feel to some like an experiment that never had a chance to play out properly.

Filatov played a total of 9 games spread out over a couple of months: 3 games in October but the first two were on back to back nights to open the season and the last was at the end of the month. He played 5 games in November, again with the first 3 at the beginning of the month and 2 at the end. His final game was against Dallas on December 1 where he had his only minus game of the 9 total. His highest ice-time total in those 9 games was 15:07 on November 27 against Carolina (where he was +1) and his lowest TOI was only two nights later against Winnipeg at 3:30 which was artificially low because he took a skate boot to the face and had to leave the game. But Filatov also posted individual game ice-times 5:16, 6:34, 7:18 and 8:51 in four consecutive games from October 30-November 5 that weren’t affected by injury.

Looking at those ice-times, you can see why many people feel he didn’t get a proper look. But some will point to the fact that in 9 games, Filatov ended up with a single assist and that came in his first game. And this is on a team where many third and fourth liners are contributing on the scoresheet as well as playing a complete defensive game in limited ice-time, neither of which Filatov can claim to have done.

In the end, it looks like this saga came down to one thing: Paul MacLean felt Ottawa had a better chance to win with Filatov out of the lineup instead of in it. That’s pretty much all there is to say. Perhaps there were issues with his work habits in practice or maybe some other intangible thing that fans don’t see in games. So much goes on behind closed doors that fans are left to speculate on scraps of information that may be misinterpreted without the whole context behind them.

Quite likely, and this is just an educated guess, Paul MacLean has no time for incomplete players. Look at the system in Detroit that he came from. All of their offensive guys played the game both ways. Then look at Ottawa and notice that David Rundblad has been scratched from time to time because of his weak defensive play, despite the fact that he can create offense. Filatov, despite skating well on the backcheck in the games he did play, didn’t seem to be contributing in either area.

While we may not have heard the last of Filatov in Ottawa (although I suspect we have), it will be a debate that goes on for some time, but in the end it’s just that – debate.

Paul MacLean and Bryan Murray have the final word in all these things and they spoke rather clearly today with the departure of Filatov.

Feisty And Entertaining Senators Starting To Freefall

2011-12-10T23:13:00.002-05:00

Vancouver 4 Ottawa 1

This is what Alanis Morissette meant by "irony".

On a night when Matt Carkner returned to the ice for the first time this season, the Senators and Canucks went at each other in a Bronx rules street brawl but Carkner himself didn't collect a single penalty minute.

I think that's irony. Perhaps it's a paradox or a coincidence or an anomaly. Whatever it was, the game was entertaining to say the least. If you wanted to say the most, it made grown men want to drive down to Kanata and rock the Canucks team bus posse style like they do in Philly and New York, even when the home team wins.

Sure, the Senators are in a bit of a freefall lately and can't seem to stay healthy, but Kanata fans definitely got a good Saturday night tilt to remember. The Canucks rolled into town as the biggest villains in the NHL thanks to their players making up for a distinct lack of toughness by becoming the most skilled divers and whiners in the league.

The Senators already had a problem with the Canucks because the last time they met on November 20, Jesse Winchester ended up on his back in the Vancouver bench thanks to an "aw shucks" Alex Burrows slyly opening the door at the right moment.

Chris Neil certainly had that on his mind as he proceeded to unleash hell on the Canucks in the first period, hitting everybody in white and green, getting his black and blue mug into Roberto Luongo's personal space (not much room there with all the illegal equipment) and making the CBC cameras follow him around like he was Sidney Crosby for a night.

Then Nick Foligno channeled a bit of his father's game and absolutely buried the bad luck plagued Cody Hodgson who was caught dipping his head down as Foligno came in for the hit. When Hodgson tried to get up, CBC commentator Gary Galley said he had "Bambi legs". It looked like a clean hit by Foligno because it was Hodgson who changed his position at the last second. But you didn't come here to have every hit analyzed to death. What matters is that Foligno delivered the hit, faced the consequences by fighting Dale Weise (and winning), and then didn't let that stop him from being physical the rest of the game. He got jobbed by the refs after hitting Ryan Kesler along the boards, getting a 2 and a 10 minute misconduct because Kesler sold the play like a good Canuck always does.

Foligno, along with Zack Smith, has been one of the biggest revelations of the Senators season thus far. Just like Smith, he's providing clutch scoring and showed tonight he can play it physical if he needs to. He's no longer the over-stickhandling giveaway machine he was last season. Sure, Foligno still sometimes plays the yo-yo out there but he's certainly not alone on the Senators in that regard.

Foligno has always had a character presence on this team but he seemed completely expendable because he just couldn't crack the top six. That era seems to be over. Even with natural centre Peter Regin coming back from injury and joining his line, Foligno stayed in the middle and took seven draws. He's having success at centre and it will be interesting to see if coach Paul MacLean keeps him there long-term.

Yet for all the fireworks, the reality is that the Senators aren't the same team with Sergei Gonchar and Filip Kuba out of the lineup. Even with them healthy, they can't seem to beat good teams but make hay against similar or weaker clubs. That's kept them afloat in the playoff race but leading up to Christmas they face the Boston Bruins, the Pittsburgh Penguins and the surprising Florida Panthers. They also face the Buffalo Sabres three times before New Years.

If Ottawa can't get their game together, they will be out of the playoff race a lot quicker than it seemed possible just last week when they were the toast of the town.

Black Aces Senators 3 Stars

1. Chris Neil
2. Nick Foligno
3. Daniel Alfredsson

Sens Let Caps Back Into Playoff Spot....Plus The Hard Truth About Filatov...And More Notes

2011-12-07T22:17:00.007-05:00

Washington 5 Ottawa 3

Tough night for Ottawa. Hell, it was a tough night for Washington.

For a moment it looked like the Senators were about to pull the comeback routine on the Caps late in the third when Alex Semin took a lazy penalty and Milan Michalek popped one in to make it 4-3 and get himself tied for the NHL goal scoring lead.

Daniel Alfredsson was inches away from tying it up but Tomas Vokoun made a desperation save and that was all she wrote for the late dramatics. The Senators didn't look too into the game until Chris Neil did what he does best and bulldozed Alex Ovechkin. Ovie got up, muttered "fat f**k" and then speared Neil in the gut which somehow prompted the refs to call Neil for diving. The anger from that call gave Ottawa some legs and they began to play with some emotion and took a hard fought 2-1 lead into the third.

Then all hell broke loose. Three goals went past Craig Anderson in a five minute span and Ottawa only got one of them back.

Now the Sens have put themselves in a tough spot having to fly into New Jersey tonight to get some sleep ahead of the back-to-back. If they can't beat Jersey then they come home to the Vancouver Canucks on Saturday and they're starting to look dangerous again.

In short, that was one Ottawa let slip away and it cost them their sole spot in eighth place that they now share with the Caps. You can imagine the turmoil it would have caused back in D.C. if the Caps had lost this one in the dying stages. Ottawa would have been three points clear of them and Ovie and company would be hitting peak levels of angst and frustration. Now they're just a little looser, Ovie scored a trademark snipe and suddenly things look a lot brighter for the Caps.

The Caps were a giant the Senators would rather have left sleeping as they continue their season-long crusade to stick it to the pre-season critics and actually make the playoffs in April.

Black Aces Senators 3 Stars

1. Milan Michalek
2. Nick Foligno
3. Daniel Alfredsson

NOTES

Nikita Filatov was made a healthy scratch again. At this point I think it’s rather clear that coach Paul MacLean just doesn’t like The Filatov. He’s not a MacLean type player and that seems to be the start and the end of it. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that either. If MacLean thinks he has a better chance to win without Filatov on the ice, then just get the kid out of here and move on with the season. It's even worse when you realize that the player he's competing with - Bobby Butler - isn't producing but still gets the nod ahead of him. Some people will say it’s not fair, but whoever said the NHL was fair in the first place? Think of how many guys never got a chance to even play in a single game in the league, let alone a guy like Filatov who’s now on his second team and still can’t convince anybody he’s worth playing full-time. It’s a cutthroat business and Filatov just hasn’t made his mark. ….I actually think it would be a good idea to name the four new conferences the Howe (Detroit’s grouping), the Gretzky (West coast), the Orr (Northeast) and the Lemieux (Pittsburgh’s grouping). The cynics will find something not to like about it as they always do, but there’s nothing wrong with going the sentimental route…. Latest Twitter nonsense: Sportsnet's Mike Brophy immediately chimed in that Brendan Shanahan should be reviewing Sens goalie Craig Anderson tripping the Caps Jason Chimera into the end boards in the first period. Pffft. Please. Andy was going for the puck on a play by his net. Chimera got a stinger. It's hilarious how so many people watch hockey simply so they can jump up and feign outrage on Twitter every time someone gets a bruise. Maybe hilarious is not the right word. Pathetic is more like it..... Imagine they had Twitter back in the 50's? Gordie Howe would be public enemy number one and U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy and his legion of blacklist elves would be tweeting that Ted Lindsay was a commie. The big debate on Twitter would be about making helmets mandatory.....

..... Hard to believe that two teams as talented as Ottawa and Washington could produce nearly unwatchable hockey for the first ten minutes of the first period. It took a 5 on 3 power play for the Caps to open up the game, but the rest of the period was only marginally more exciting than the first half......Interesting to see Paul MacLean pulling aside his entire defense corps during a TV timeout to give them an animated talk about moving the puck. Usually you'll see an assistant coach do that in-game. But MacLean is as hands-on as they come, compared to stoics like Scotty Bowman and Jacques Martin. The "pep-talk" came immediately after David Rundblad looked like he was taking a stroll along the Champs-Élysées with the puck when a Cap back-checker lifted Rundblad's baguette and almost got away with it. That's been Rundblad's weakness his whole rookie season so far - thinking he has way more time than he actually does. Maybe MacLean needs to put him on the old stopwatch routine. Two steamboats and then the puck has to go......

......Heard someone talking about hockey cards today and it brought back a painful memory. I lived in Montreal for about three years going to university in the early 2000’s and became a bit of a card collecting nutcase for a while, amassing a huge collection of cardboard. When I left to move back to Ottawa in 2002, I was forced to leave behind the cards to save space in the car (yes, I moved my entire life in the backseat of my buddy’s car), with the intention of going back for them later that month. Months turned to years and I forgot all about those cards and they’re either sitting at the bottom of a landfill right now or my old roomie who I lost touch with cashed them in for beer and steaks. Leaving those cards was either the worst or best decision of my life. My wife thinks it was the best by far. Marrying her came a close second…..Among those cards? A huge Alexei Yashin collection, probably the finest in the East. Go ahead and laugh….. As a kid I had the O Pee Chee Steve Yzerman, Mario Lemieux and Patrick Roy rookies. My mom tossed those like they were regular garbage. Go ahead and cry…..

Senators Welcome Tampa To New Conference With Comeback Win... Plus Notes on the New-Look NHL

2011-12-05T23:32:00.004-05:00

Ottawa 4 Tampa Bay 2

After spending a majority of November on the road, the Ottawa Senators finally came home for the first of 9 games at Scotiabank Place in December and put up two much needed points onto the board right away against a Tampa team that looks like they're trying to win the 1996 Stanley Cup at the height of the Dead Puck-era (more on that in the Notes).

At one point in the third period, Ottawa was down 2-1 and a lot of people were singing "Good Night Irene", seeing that Tampa (per the encyclopedic Dean Brown) leads the NHL in one-goal wins. But then Daniel Alfredsson stepped into a muffin-soft Jason Spezza pass just across the Tampa blueline and decided to hammer home the tying goal past a helpless Dwayne Roloson. The puck actually had a comet-tail on it like those 96-era Fox glowing pucks. Or maybe I was just stoned (Note to cops, friends, family members, wife, suspicious neighbours - I haven't smoked weed since my 20's. I just pretend to in blog posts to deliver lame punchlines. I meant it more in the Van Morrison tradition).

But the real news of the night took place across the continent in Pebble Beach, California where a complete league re-alignment was tentatively approved, pending co-operation with the NHLPA and a few hundred reams of papers still to be signed.

The four new conferences are the same as Elliotte Friedman happened to scoop on Hockey Night In Canada's Hot Stove segment, meaning Winnipeg moves West... and no one moves East. Strangely, the West will have two eight team conferences and the East will have two seven team sets which may change with either Phoenix moving east next season or the future announcement of two expansion teams to bring the league up to 32 teams and balance the numbers.

For an Ottawa perspective, consider this. The initial plan, as TSN reports, is to have teams in the East play their conference opponents six times - three home, three away, and then a home and home against the rest of the league.

Let that sink in for a moment. For Ottawa fans, that means you only get to see Sidney Crosby and Alex Ovechkin once a year as opposed to twice. If you look at it from the perspective of the current configuration, the Philadelphia Flyers, the New York Rangers and the Pittsburgh Penguins are going to be treated like Western Conference teams are now.

I find this to be quite a surprising change. Note that the four "divisions" are being referred to as "conferences", and that's a huge, huge difference as far as the schedule goes. The positive is that Ottawa fans will see every team in the NHL at least once, but that's also a negative when you apply that to popular eastern draws like the Penguins, Flyers and Rangers to name a few. Ottawa's "conference" will keep all the teams from their current division but will see both Tampa and Florida added while Carolina and Washington join the New York area teams to fill out the East.

The playoff format will also be divisional so expect more post-season matchups with Toronto and Buffalo and hopefully for the first time with Boston and Montreal. No one seems to know exactly how it will fly after the first two rounds. Some suggestions making the rounds will see the final four re-seeded regardless of East/West which means you could potentially see two eastern teams playing in the final and vice versa.

Black Aces Senators 3 Stars

1. Zack Smith
2. Daniel Alfredsson
3. Craig Anderson

Honourable Mentions: Chris Phillips, Jason Spezza, Jesse Winchester and Nick Foligno.

Okay, it's been a while so here's where the season 3 stars scorecard stands (even if there isn't a post after every game, we still keep track of the stars, except when no stars are warranted)

Black Aces 3 Star Season Scorecard

1. Spezza – 20
2. Anderson – 20
3. Michalek – 19
4. Karlsson – 19
5. Smith – 10
6. Alfredsson – 9
7. Neil – 7
8. Greening – 7
9. Foligno – 6
10. Da Costa – 4
11. Gonchar – 4
12. Cowen – 3
13. Butler - 2
14. Phillips – 1

NOTES

Again, David Rundblad provides little glimpses of the star defenseman he's about to become. In the first period, Rundblad knocked a knuckleball puck flat onto the ice at the Tampa blueline while a forechecker closed within a foot of him and then threw a shoulder-head deke and easily took the puck around him to create another play. There is just no panic to #7's game. Ottawa is going to have the best blueline in the league in two to three years. Hell, maybe sooner if Jared Cowen can show that his 28-plus minutes against the Caps on Saturday is just the first sign of being a 30-plus minute player....Brett Connolly decided to take a healthy run at Chris Neil along the boards in the first period. Not the smartest idea the 19 year old has ever had. But to be young is to be foolish....I guess we shouldn't be so surprised at just how passive the Tampa penalty-kill is. There's something to be said for consistency in approach......But how soon do we start hearing about Guy Boucher being on the firing line. Right now, the Bolts look like they're not having any fun. And they're not any fun to watch either. Considering they have players like Steve Stamkos and Martin St. Louis, there's something wrong with that. GM Steve Yzerman is a man of incredible patience (look how long it took him to win a Stanley Cup), but he also seems to be a guy not afraid to make a move. He's facing a big problem down there right now....

....Doesn't it seem fitting that both the head coach and the captain of the Ottawa Senators are both still furry well past Movember? We all know Paul MacLean is a lifer, but Alfredsson has a good thing going there now and let's hope he goes into the playoffs with it. Yes, I said playoffs.....Thought we'd see Zack Smith out there in the final minute with the Tampa net empty trying to get his first NHL hat trick.....In case you were wondering, there have been 61 players with the last name Smith to play a game in the NHL. Zack is the only Smith to start with a Z. Other Smiths? Hooley, Wyatt, Alf, Clint, Dallas, Floyd, Wayne, Nakina, Sid, Stu and Vern...... And there was one Milks to play in the NHL. Good ol' Hib Milks who played from 1925 to 1933 with the Pittsburgh Pirates, the Philadelphia Quakers, the New York Rangers and the Ottawa Senators. He also played amateur with the (get these names) Ottawa Gunners, the Ottawa Landsdownes and the Ottawa New Edinburghs. To be honest, I have no idea if I'm related, but let's just pretend I am. I need the cred.....

......Woah! Steve Simmons of the Toronto Sun pulls out his flamethrower and calls Toronto GM Brian Burke a liar, a bully and a "local embarrassment". Life has always been contentious between Toronto scribes and the team they devoutly cover but this brings the animosity to heights not seen since the days of owner Harold Ballard and GM Gerry McNamara. Ballard enjoyed calling reporters a "bunch of c**ksuckers" and once told female journalist Barbara Frum that women were only good for "lying on their backs", but Simmons implies that Burke wants to actually "run the newspapers". Surprisingly, Simmons gives coach Ron Wilson a pass, even though it was the glib Wilson's fib about starting goaltenders that caused the uproar in the first place. At least the Leafs are never boring.... A couple posts ago we talked about a guy having a hard time getting the customized heritage jersey and all the extras he paid for from the Sens Store. Got word that the Senators made amends and compensated the guy a little extra for his troubles. All's well that ends well....

......I’m sure it’s frustrating and annoying for many Rogers basic cable subscribers in Ottawa who get Sportsnet as part of their package but not the secondary Sportsnet Sens channel. I thought this Sens Sportsnet was there so Ottawa fans weren’t inconvenienced when NFL or MLB coincided with Senators games? From what I hear, there are still a lot of Ottawa fans who are forced to watch Senators games illegally streamed over the internet because their $75 packages (including HD box) still doesn’t get them all the Ottawa games broadcast into the area. It’s also a big middle finger to consumers that you can get Sportsnet in HD but have to pay a premium to get TSN in HD. Rogers, who owns Sportsnet, reap the benefits by forcing a large portion of their customers who want to watch highlights in High Definition turn to Sportsnet instead of the far superior, but standard definition, TSN. Sure you can get anything you want by paying for it, but a lot of people don’t have the budget to spend into the three zeroes just to watch a few Sens games when all they have to do is go to some shady website and watch a choppy stream for free.

Zack Smith Archaeology

2011-12-01T23:48:00.003-05:00

Dallas 3 Senators 2

Oh Nellie.

Out of sheer compassion for my readers, I won't bother to recap the Sens-Stars tilt tonight. Chances are you watched it. It was bad enough that the first two periods were unwatchable, even for Roger Neilson and Bobby Fischer acolytes, but when the third opened up, the Senators blew a late lead and left Dallas with zero points. Let's call it a filler game. You're gonna get a handful of these just to pad out the schedule, just like AC/DC would pad out albums with songs like "Mistress For Christmas" or "Got You By The Balls".

So instead....

Zack Smith has got me intrigued. Even being a fan of tough hockey players, I was somewhat sceptical about Smith until this season started but let's just say I've recently been converted. And in converted, I mean Bob Dylan in 1979 deciding that Like A Rolling Stone was meaningless and he was only going to write songs about Jesus. That kind of converted.

And it made me want to dig back a little and try to see what I missed when Smith was slugging it out in Swift Current and Binghamton.

And then I stumbled upon this video of a fight from Febuary 14, 2010 between Smith and Kenndal McArdle, then of the Rochester Americans and now a fellow NHL'er with the Winnipeg Jets. I don't think I could find a more perfect capture of what Zack Smith is all about. And I'm not trying to just glamorize a fight here. This goes beyond the actual fight.

Watch Smith get absolutely rocked by McArdle, collapse to the ice like anyone would, but then get right back up and just power a beating on McArdle to totally turn the tables and win the fight. No way he should have gotten up after that punch, but he did. That has nothing to do with how strong he is. That's pure character, competitiveness, "balls", whatever you want to call it. That was plain will.

I remember guys like Tim Murray just raving about this Zack Smith kid and looking at this video, I can understand why.

Zack Smith Gaining Cred... And Sens Second Line Emerges In Tough Win Over Jets

2011-11-29T23:57:00.002-05:00

Ottawa 6 Winnipeg 4

Senators fans who tuned in to the Jets game Tuesday night were witness to one of the more exciting games of the season, and that's saying something because Ottawa has been in a handful of barnburners in the first quarter.

Going into Winnipeg for the first time since the 95-96 season, the Senators were challenged physically by the Jets all night long, in particular Erik Karlsson who was obviously targeted in the game plan by coach Claude Noel. Karlsson took a lot of tough, borderline hits including a hard fall against the boards that must have had the Senators coaching staff on tenterhooks while #65 crawled to his feet, thankfully just winded. Despite getting the rough treatment, Karlsson was again the Sens best defenseman, but he wasn't alone in having a standout game.

Sportsnet colour commentator Denis Potvin was right on the money when he spontaneously exclaimed that Zack Smith was "coming out of his shell" before our very eyes right after Smith scored his second goal of the night, which turned out to be the game winner.

Smith has been getting better all season long but in the last stretch of games dating back to that long Western road trip, you can just see him quickly growing into a fierce power forward with the kind of clutch ability that you can't teach. It just seems to be part of a player's personality or it isn't. Smith is starting to look like that big game guy that Ottawa management projected very early on when he wasn't even on the radar of most fans.

Take that move Smith made against Tanner Glass, coming from behind and lifting his stick, stealing the puck and drawing a penalty. Or the scrum around the Jets net when it was clear to everyone that Ondrej Pavelec had the puck covered and the whistle should have been blown, but Smith and Erik Condra simply outbattled the Jets down low and Smith was able to toss it into the net to tie the game. Again, clutch.

It looks like Smith can play the game any way he wants to. He can drop the gloves, he goes to the net without any fear at all, he's already one of the team's best penalty killers and he's got a set of hands.

Smith wasn't the only revelation for the Senators tonight in an important road win. So was the second line now being centred by Nick Foligno. Whether it's the added responsibility of being the man down low and the main puck carrier on the attack, or whether it's just freshness of the new role, Foligno looks like a perfect fit right now on that once stagnant second line with a rejuvenated looking Daniel Alfredsson and the consistent Milan Michalek.

The one worry about the new lines may have been separating Michalek from Jason Spezza but both players haven't missed a beat being apart and now there seems to be a balance up front that wasn't there when Stephane Da Costa was regressing and Alfredsson looked like a man on an island. The captain noticeably has more jump and is getting the puck on his stick so he can make plays.

Meanwhile, the top line were still creating chances even though Spezza keeps losing wingers. Tonight it was Nikita Filatov (who just can't catch a break) getting a skate boot in the face and breaking his nose, forcing him to leave the game early (he only played 5 shifts in total). That opened the door for Bobby Butler to once again skate with Spezza, the centre that he had so much success with last season.

It will be interesting to see if Butler gets another shot with Spezza against Dallas on Thursday. Right now we don't know if Filatov is able to go (a broken nose shouldn't keep any hockey player from playing unless there's deeper damage) but if he isn't, there's a good chance Butler stays for another game. Like we've said many times on this blog, Butler is still a great prospect and he has that much in-demand value of being a natural goal scorer. Sure, he's struggling more than anyone could have imagined, but if he gets a little confidence going and Spezza keeps putting the puck on his stick like last year, Butler has the ability to bury it. He should have had at least one tonight but he whiffed on a puck going across the crease during a scrambly play.

Right now, Ottawa has three lines that can change the momentum of a game and a fourth line with Zenon Konopka in the middle that can surprise other teams once in a while.

If Foligno can keep playing this way, the only pressing question is that Filatov/Butler slot, or whomever Paul MacLean picks to win the lottery.

Black Aces Senators 3 Stars

1. Zack Smith
2. Erik Karlsson
3. Milan Michalek

Honourable Mentions: Chris Phillips, Jason Spezza, Nick Foligno, Erik Condra, Daniel Alfredsson and Colin Greening.

NOTES

Strange. Bobby Butler gently puts his stick on a Jet and gets called for a weak hooking penalty. The moment he gets out of the box after the Sens kill it off, he quickly does the exact same thing but doesn't get called for it. I don't know who's dumber - Butler or the refs......It's the curse of Andreas Dackell. Winger Chris Neil, with 179 career points, was just one behind Dackell on the Senators all-time points list when he was hobbled with a bum ankle. Or is it just unlucky #13? That's the rank of Dackell and once Neil takes it over, he might be stuck on the jinxed number for a while as #12 on the list, Magnus Arvedsson, is 30 points ahead with 210 in his Senators career.... Speaking of unlucky, when I think of Dackell and Arvedsson, I can't help but think of two brutal injuries they sustained as Senators. Dackell got absolutely crushed by the Flyers Eric Lindros against the boards in October 1998, making a gruesome mockery of what was once a "human" face. Go to this old Black Aces article for a picture of the aftermath. As you might recall, Arvedsson had his abdomen punctured when he went into an open bench door, also against the Flyers. He spent the night in the hospital and doctors thought there were no internal injuries until further testing revealed he had torn open his intestine, requiring major surgery. Geez Louise.....Great pre-game segment by Sportsnet's Ian Mendes about Paul MacLean's 82-83 O Pee Chee rookie card having a picture of teammate Larry Hopkins instead of MacLean. Mendes took a pic of the error card to current Sens players to see if they could spot the mistake but it seems only Matt Carkner picked it out, saying the "rookie" looked about 45 years old.....

......Strange rumblings out of Anaheim that Bobby Ryan might be on the market. Seeing that this was reported by a mainstream source (Nick Kypreos), there may be something to it, but I can’t see any realistic scenario where Anaheim benefits by doing that. I still can’t understand why they traded Chris Pronger, let alone them contemplating moving another one of their foundation pieces. If your club is having an off year, it doesn’t mean you make panic moves and deal one of the best young players in the NHL. Maybe it’s a bunk rumour anyways….TSN analyst Aaron Ward absolutely tore into Anaheim bench boss Randy Carlyle on That's Hockey on Tuesday night. He said his time with the Ducks under Carlyle was the worst month and a half of his career, said that Carlyle "sucked the life out of the game", and finished by openly calling for his firing both on TSN and on Twitter. It's a bit of a flamethrower job, but that's why they have Ward on TSN. It makes for boring television when people sit on the fence and try not to piss anybody off. Thankfully, Ward doesn't have that problem.... And neither does Mike Milbury who is really coming into his own as a television personality. There's nothing more entertaining than when Milbury's face creases with disdain and rage at someone whining over a hard hit or babbling on too long. Anytime he says boo, people flame him on Twitter but to me that's a sign he's doing his job. He's got strong opinions on the game he grew up playing and he's not afraid to lift the middle finger to the new school mentality of fans and journalists who think hockey should be no more offensive than your average public service commercial telling you to "play safe".....The Lightning Strikes blog points out that Tampa coach Guy Boucher is now the longest tenured bench boss in the Southeast Division with the firings of Bruce Boudreau in Washington and Paul Maurice in Carolina. He is also the only coach in the Southeast who has yet to be photographed smiling…..How long before we see both Boudreau and Maurice on TSN or Sportsnet? And how long before Boudreau drops an F-bomb on live television? The guy is what us old timers from Almonte used to call “a classic”…. Woah. One of those speedbag scraps tonight between the Sabres Zach Kassian and the Islanders Matt Martin.

“The Senators Heritage Jersey Fiasco”

The Ottawa Senators ran a very popular jersey promotion at the start of the year where you could buy the new Heritage sweater and get two tickets to the Colorado game on October 13 as well as a barberpole toque and scarf thrown in for only $130 bucks. Pretty good deal and fans snapped it up. Except there were a few snafus when people wanted customized jerseys with players names on them. There was a thread on the HF Boards a while back with fans frustrated at not getting their jerseys in a timely manner. Then there is this guy, Andrew, a friend of Black Aces who wrote me a note about his experience trying to get what he paid for. It’s kind of unbelievable the runaround he’s been getting and I’ll let him share it with you in his own words:

“Sept 27: Pre-ordered a custom heritage jersey - Zibanejad 93. Comes with 2 tickets to Colorado game, heritage toque and heritage scarf. I am told that because it's a custom job, will not be ready on Oct 1st, but will be ready in 10-14 days. I'm given a voucher for the tickets for the Oct 13th game unveiling the new jerseys, but no toque or scarf... I assume they'll come with the jersey itself. And am under the impression I should have the jersey well in-time for the game.

Oct 13, 16 days after ordering, I call to see if it's in so I can wear it to the game - no. They say they'll call me when it's in.

After 3 weeks and no call, I call to see if it's ready - no. They say they'll call me when it's in.

After 4 weeks I call again - not ready.

After 5 weeks I call again - not ready. The guy tells me that because they accidentally shipped a box to Buffalo in the famous incident, Reebok have been working around the clock to keep the shelves stocked. So what that tells me is that since they already had my money, there was no rush at all to get me my jersey, but instead they needed to provide jerseys to the stores so that they were available for game-day sales, etc.

Finally on Nov 5th, almost 6 weeks after I ordered it, I get the call. When I go in to pick it up, the clerk is unaware that I am expecting a toque and scarf with it. He then tells me they're out of them, and that they'll phone me when they get more in and gives me a rain check.

Nov 26th, I get a call that my toque and scarf are in. I go to pick it up on Nov 28th, and when I present the clerk with the rain check, she tells me they ran out again. However, sitting on the counter in between she and I are the exact toque and scarf I am waiting for. So I ask her "isn't this the package we're talking about?". She says "yes, but we're out. I can take your name and number and call you when we get more in if you want?" I left, completely dumbfounded.”

Did anyone else have similar troubles to Andrew or is this just an isolated incident?

Filatov Gets His Last Shot To Stick In Ottawa

2011-11-27T20:32:00.001-05:00

Ottawa 4 Carolina 3

When the Ottawa Senators went into Pittsburgh on Friday night and got humbled by a much better team, you could sense that some kind of change was about to take place.

To start with , they made a minor move that paid off well when they put rookie David Rundblad back into the lineup and he ended up scoring his first NHL goal tonight against Carolina. But the one that will make all the headlines is the fact they called up the now controversial winger Nikita Filatov from Binghamton, presumably to give him one last chance to stick with the big club before they inevitably bow to his demands to take his career to Russia.

That meant another struggling rookie, Stephane Da Costa, traded cities with Filatov and suddenly a Sunday afternoon game against the vanilla Carolina Hurricanes had a little unexpected hype.

You couldn't label it a must-win game for Ottawa but if they had dropped this one, they would have found themselves on a three game losing streak as they head back out on the road for the next week with no easy games on the schedule.

So they went out and took care of business against Carolina with a new look on their top two lines, as coach Paul MacLean went out of his way to give Filatov a chance to succeed by playing him with Jason Spezza and Colin Greening. That meant the team's best goal scorer, Milan Michalek, was put on a line with Daniel Alfredsson and newbie centre Nick Foligno.

It worked. Sort of. Spezza had a great game with two goals but Filatov was a minor presence (he's played a lot of hockey on consecutive nights in the past week). The Michalek line didn't make much of a ripple either so in order for the new set-up to have a chance of continuing, both Michalek and Filatov have to prove they can put up some points with their new centres. No doubt that the club wants Filatov to suceed, but if Michalek gets quiet playing with Foligno and Filatov isn't producing with Spezza, there will be too much at stake not to reunite the top line that has been working so well all year.

It sounds like Filatov is already penciled in for the three game road trip starting on Tuesday, so expect MacLean to give these new combinations some time to breathe and grow together.

Filatov had a couple of chances against Carolina, in particular a two-on-one where he showed good speed but seemed to hesitate when it came time to shoot or pass. There's a lot of pressure on the kid to do well and no doubt he's feeling it right now. With a week on the road, you never know what that can do for his game.

Basically, it's now or never for the slick Russian winger. If he can't create offense with Spezza as his centre, you can start saying your goodbyes.

Black Aces Senators 3 Stars

1. Jason Spezza
2. Zack Smith
3. Sergei Gonchar

Honourable Mentions: Craig Anderson, Erik Karlsson, Colin Greening, Zenon Konopka and David Rundblad.

NOTES

I wonder what it is that GM Bryan Murray is writing down on that pad of his every time the TV camera's focus on him up in the box. Maybe it's a crossword puzzle......Have to agree with Sidney Crosby on this one. Nick Foligno made a bit of a fuss that he got hit in the face by Crosby during a scrum in front of Marc-Andre Fleury on Friday night. Foligno basically called Crosby a hypocrite for advocating tougher rules on headshots but turning around planting an elbow into Foligno's face. But come on, Nick. It was a hockey scrum. You had just bowled over his goalie. He gave you a little shot in the face, not a blindside hit that put you on a stretcher. No need to go crying to the press......That being said, I actually like the fact that Bryan Murray sounded off a little bit about the whole thing. He sounded pretty angry about it and mentioned that he'd have a much tougher lineup the next time they face the Penguins. That's the way to do it. Foligno should let Murray handle the off-ice ranting and instead, take a number for the next time they play Crosby. When a player whines to the press, it makes him sound like he wants somebody else to fight his battles for him. And it also makes them sound like Ryan Miller, and nobody likes listening to Miller drop f-bombs and pout every time a microphone comes near his face...except the press (actually, it's pretty entertaining for everybody, but that's besides the point). As for Murray, he's let some opportunities to defend his players in the past go by without saying a thing. This year has been different. He's been on Brendan Shanahan for the Wolski/Alfredsson incident and now the Crosby/Foligno mess. You can guarantee the players love it when the GM goes to wall for them, even if it's much ado about nothing, which is exactly what this whole thing is about. It was a glorified face-wash......

......That's how you break a scoring slump that had gone into double-digits. Jason Spezza's goal 55 seconds into the game was a thing of beauty. He decided the streak was long enough, grabbed the puck, blew through the Canes and almost casually slipped it by Cam Ward's left pad. Done......It was pretty funny hearing Sportsnet colour commentator Denis Potvin let out a big sigh of disgust when the refs called Jared Cowen for a hooking penalty in the first....... Poor Jesse Winchester. He was initially pegged to be Daniel Alfredsson's centre before news broke that Stephane Da Costa was demoted to the B-Sens and Filatov was promoted, causing coach Paul MacLean to scramble his lines. Winchester got pushed back down the depth chart in a hurry.......You've already seen it, but if, miraculously, you haven't, make sure to watch two 70 year old CFL legends swinging at each other at a press conference which was put on to promote awareness about post-concussion syndrome in athletes. At first, a lot of people thought the fight between old rivals Joe Kapp and (ex-Ottawa Rough Rider) Angelo Mosca was staged but that wasn't the case. These two lads went at each other and Kapp planted one right on Mosca's chin. Kapp then kicked Mosca on the ground, walked back to the stage, threw up his arms and inexplicably yelled "SPORTSMANSHIP!". This CBC article reveals that before the press conference, Mosca had extended a hand to Kapp but was refused. When Kapp started waving flowers in Mosca's face, something snapped for Mosca and he swung his cane (!) at Kapp, and then came the punch which wobbled Mosca (who has trouble standing up at the best of times, let alone taking one on the button). Unbelievable. In hockey terms, this would be like Ted Lindsay and Bobby Hull swinging on each other at an NHLPA function in Toronto......

....Tough to see ex-Senator and current Red Wing Patrick Eaves block a shot with the side of his face and break his jaw. He's gone for two months with jaw surgery. It wasn't that long ago but it's almost hard to remember Eaves as a Senator at all. Yet he did score 20 goals in only 58 games during his rookie season in Ottawa. He's currently playing with Mike Commodore on the Red Wings, one of the players he was traded for when he was sent to Carolina in 2008 along with Joe Corvo. Cory Stillman was the other player going Ottawa's way. Almost four years later, you might say that the Hurricanes won that trade but it's important to remember that Corvo had requested a trade. Stillman was the best player in that deal, with apologies to the hard-shooting, very tattooed Joe Corvo. Eaves has never come close to replicating that 20 goal season, either with Carolina or Detroit.....Also of note against Carolina, Tim Gleason played his 500th career game tonight against the team that drafted him 23rd overall in 2001. He didn't play a single one of those 500 games in a Senators uniform because they dealt him to L.A. for Bryan Smolinski, who was a pretty good second or third line centre for a while here in Ottawa.

A Healthy Carkner Could Make Lee A Healthy Scratch

2011-11-24T14:34:00.001-05:00

It would have been interesting to see the kind of start Matt Carkner might have had this season if he hadn’t wrecked his knee in a training accident. By all accounts, the big man was going hard this summer – obviously too hard – and might have had some extra jump much like Chris Neil, who looked extra-lean and hungry in the early going before hurting his ankle.

A large part of Neil’s early success comes from having a coach behind the bench who not only treats him like an important player on this team, but who generally likes the “type” of player Neil is. One gets the feeling that Paul MacLean is going to appreciate having Carkner around to clear the crease for Craig Anderson and to act as that nuclear threat in case someone like Milan Lucic or Wojtek Wolski decides to take liberties with Ottawa’s best players.

In short, when Carkner is ready, if that’s a week or two from now or even tomorrow, he’s going in and somebody is coming out.

You could try to start some kind of debate about who’s going to get the short straw, but you’d just be fooling yourself. If everyone’s healthy (and that’s a big qualifier), Brian Lee must be the guy MacLean has pegged to take a seat.

For one, Lee plays on Carkner’s side. Two, there’s no reason to sit Jared Cowen. Ottawa desperately needs more muscle on their blueline and substituting Carkner for Cowen is one step forward, one step back. Plus, Cowen has been as steady as they come nearly every time he steps on the ice.

Lee has been serviceable, with not too many lows or highs. If you read Lee’s generous press clippings, his “wonderful attitude” makes Mahatma Gandhi look like Al Capone (and which leaves you the impression that Lee is the only healthy scratch in the NHL who “works hard” and “doesn’t complain” – something that has inexplicably given Lee a cult-like following amongst some Ottawa fans).

Lee is a nice fill-in player who never seems to find that extra gear to do anything more than just be average on the ice. He’s still young, but as Bob Dylan said, “It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there.”

On the other side, Carkner and Cowen both have a defining characteristic – toughness – which makes them more valuable, even if they may lag behind Lee in the skating department (an element that the Ottawa defense is not lacking in).

A Carkner-Cowen pairing has the potential to be a nasty duo as long as Carkner can get his feel for the game back in a hurry. Guys coming off knee surgery can be tentative in the early going and that’s a real disadvantage for a guy like Carkner who can’t hesitate to be physical if he’s going to be a help to the team. Some are saying Carkner will get a conditioning assignment in Bingo once he’s ready to play. If that holds true, he might burn off a few expected bad games where it won’t hurt the big club while Lee and rookie David Rundblad continue to swap in and out.

Rundblad is an interesting case because it was clear MacLean preferred the dynamic young Swede over Lee but was forced to sit him after a few tough errors that cost the Senators some goals. Rundblad seems so close to being a regular because of the things he can do with the puck but it’s going to be even harder for him to get in the lineup with Carkner providing the Senators a much needed bulldozer on the back end.

It’s tempting to say the Senators would be better off if they had Rundblad as the only spare, playing when he can and continuing to learn in NHL practices instead of languishing behind Lee on the depth chart. Rundblad may end up going down to Bingo for a while and that may even be the best thing for him in the end, although he’d benefit Ottawa more by running the second power-play unit. But he has to get in the lineup to do that first.

There are a lot of questions and only Paul MacLean has the answers. We just have to eat our popcorn and watch the show.

Senators Winning But Da Costa Hurting Second Line

2011-11-21T09:58:00.001-05:00

Coming home for a week off after racking up 7 out of a possible 8 points in their last 4 games on the road, the Ottawa Senators are starting to look like a team that have a strong playoff push in them after all.

They’ve held down that last playoff spot in the East, one point up on a trio of familiar teams - the free-falling Capitals, the Devils and Canadiens. The Leafs are just two points up on Ottawa, and the Senators are just three points back of the Flyers for the top spot in the East.

Not bad for a bunch of rookies, some aging vets and a first-year head coach condemned to spend almost all of November on the road going from East to West and back East with a healthy Sidney Crosby waiting for them at the end of the line.

With that being said, the next mind-numbing losing streak could be just around the corner. Even a minor slip could bring this team back down to earth. That’s not just an Ottawa problem. That’s the NHL. Even the best teams won’t have any breathing room until late January or early February.

For all of their recent success, the Senators have a growing problem right now and that’s with their second line of Stephane Da Costa, Nick Foligno and Daniel Alfredsson. Let’s not beat around the bush here. We’re talking about Da Costa.

The kid is clearly regressing and was pretty much invisible on the Western road swing, forcing coach Paul MacLean to finally sit him for an extended period last night against Vancouver because his line was clearly the most ineffective of the four. Da Costa was the only Senator other than the lightly used Zenon Konopka to play under 10 minutes. If that’s your second line centre, there’s big reason to worry. Luckily for Ottawa, their third and fourth lines are playing above their punching weight right now and the Spezza trio is still producing.

You may have noticed that Alfredsson had a lousy road trip, over handling the puck at times and not getting as many shots as he normally does. Last night in Vancouver, he put one shot on the net in just over 17 minutes of ice-time. Foligno has fared better but when he’s on his game, which is being physical and going to the net, it doesn’t really matter who his centre is. But for Alfredsson who likes to play give and go or get into open ice for one-timers, he needs a centre who is able to give him the puck and Da Costa just isn’t doing that right now.

When he’s not sitting on the bench looking gap-mouthed and stunned by the game going on around him, he’s skating around the perimeter of the action looking uncomfortable and uninvolved. That’s a far cry from the Da Costa who earlier in the season was willing to take hits to make plays and carry the puck over the blueline to set up in the zone. For the first time, Da Costa looks overmatched physically and struggling to make quick decisions.

People have been on him for losing so many faceoffs but that seems to be a hallmark of rookie centres. What’s more troubling is his lack of involvement in the other team’s zone, even when he’s making an honest effort defensively as he has all year.

Perhaps it’s time to give Da Costa a chance to get that confidence back in the minors. With Peter Regin still on the mend, the Senators need to change that second line up before it gets even staler.

You get the feeling they could use some size and maybe Zack Smith gets a chance to move up to play with Foligno and Alfie (I wonder if the Senators regret sending big Mika Zibanejad back to Sweden, where he has struggled). Or they could simply shift Foligno over to centre and promote a winger up to that line like Bobby Butler or Erik Condra. They could even split up that top line and try to get Milan Michalek or Colin Greening away from the other team’s top defenseman, but there’s probably not much impetus to break up a line that’s working so well together.

OR….

They could make that call to Bingo and retrieve the misanthropic Nikita Filatov and give him one last chance to show he can stick, even if his appearance will set off a bit of a controversy in town after he let it be known he’s ready to take his show to Russia.

I’m guessing GM Bryan Murray would much rather not make a trade at this point. The team is doing fine and the cure for that second line clearly resides with Peter Regin if he can get healthy and stay that way. They have some people on two-ways that can move up or down leagues and Murray has some option on forward and defense as well.

What’s important right now is they get someone to play with Alfie and get him going again. Otherwise they’re going to have a tough time winning when the top line goes through a cold stretch as they inevitably will.
Clearly, Da Costa is not getting the job done right now. It will be interesting to see what Murray and MacLean decide to do about it.

Senators Sweep Alberta... Plus Notes On Filatov, Whiny Goalies and Long Island Misery

2011-11-18T00:26:00.002-05:00

Ottawa 5 Edmonton 2

These big Western road trips are tough on the players, but they're tough on the fans back East too. A lot of late nights, a lot of groggy mornings where you walk out the door with shaving cream still on your face.

But for the Ottawa fans who held on past midnight, they're at least getting to see their team rack up some unexpected wins.

Not that Calgary and Edmonton are superior teams (although nearly every pundit predicted they would be), but it's tough to win two games in a row when your body clock is shot and you don't have access to Kettleman's bagels.

Yet the Ottawa Senators just pulled it off (they also beat Toronto before the Alberta trip which makes that 3 straight road wins) and now they can relax for a couple of days before they have to face the Canucks on Sunday.

It was a little tough to see the young Oilers get schooled like that at home, but the Senators certainly know how that feels. They were bulldozed a few times early in the year but all of a sudden that feels like a very long time ago.

If you think these guys are coming together as a team through their Alberta sweep (the first time since 2003), how much closer will they be after a couple nights off with nothing to do in downtown Vancouver? Seems like a good time to throw that annual rookie dinner.

Black Aces Senators 3 Stars

1. Milan Michalek (His goal turned out the lights on the Oilers)
2. Jason Spezza (All around great game)
3. Colin Greening (Best showing in a while, was a beast physically as well)

Honourable Mentions: Filip Kuba, Kaspars Daugavins, Craig Anderson, Jesse Winchester and Erik Karlsson.

NOTES

As for Nikita Filatov wanting out of Binghamton and possibly going back to Russia, I’m not going to waste your time by cranking up the vitriol. You can read others who do that better than I can. But I will say that Ottawa has seen much better and higher profile players pull the chute on the organization. Filatov barely warrants a ripple in the history of this team. If he wants out, who really cares? You can’t have him in that Bingo dressing room much longer and you certainly can’t have him up with the big club after this. He won’t be respected by the players or the fans. The team took a calculated chance on him and it didn’t work out. No big deal. They only gave up a third rounder in a draft where they already had multiple picks which they used very wisely. The NHL club has too many forwards as it is right now and they don’t have room for some kind of petulant kid who thinks the world owes him something. This would be a bigger story if Filatov was a superstar, or at least a useful player. Right now, he’s neither. He’s just a headache….

.....What was Jesse Winchester looking around for as he crossed the blueline on his breakaway goal in the second period? Did he think there was a penalty, or that he was offside or was he thinking "Geez, this has never happened before. What the hell do I do now?" I bet he thought about dumping the puck into the corner for just a split-second. If there's one thing Winchester seems to love doing it's protecting a puck along the boards........How about Colin Greening just punishing Oilers defenseman Corey Potter behind the net when he knew Potter was already hurting from a previous play. Potter was likely gutting it out because defenseman Andy Sutton had already left the game with a groin injury. But that hit put him out of the game for good. Greening can be a cruel, heartless machine out there when he wants to. And that's a good thing..... I truly feel sorry for Islanders fans. They've been brutalized for close to two decades with everything from bad ownership, terrible hockey teams spawned by horrible general managers making embarrassing trades, a dilapidated arena, legendarily ugly uniform experiments and of course, Alexei Yashin. Now they have to endure another jersey that is already the laughingstock of the league. You wonder why the organization feels the need to do this when their standard "dynasty era" uni's are among the most classic in the league. Judge for yourself. Maybe you'll rush right out and buy one of these bad boys.....

......Is there anything more annoying than a goalie whining (ie. Ryan Miller)? Goalies have had it so good for so long that it's hard to find sympathy when they get a little knock once in a blue moon. How do any of them get hurt with all that bulky equipment on anyways? They've been cheating with impunity since the 1990's. They should keep a low profile and hope they continue to be allowed to do so.......I’m telling you, the reason the Carolina Hurricanes are floundering this year is because they failed to sign Jarkko Ruutu this summer to play with his brother Tuomo. OK, maybe that’s not even close to the reason, but that team is lacking some snarl and personality. Jarkko could have helped in that department…. Everybody in the building knew Kaspars Daugavins was going to shoot that puck, including Nikolai Khabibulin. There was no "looking off" the goalie, no head deke, no fake pass. Daugavins stared Khabby down and just blew the puck by him. It's easy to say Khabby should have had it but I'm not so sure. That was a perfect shot.......If Daugavins is going to stick around, he should ask for a better jersey number. #23 is too blah for a strange character like Daugavins. Maybe Peter Regin is more than ready to give up #13....London, Ontario is having a bad year. First they had a fan throw a banana at a black hockey player that made headlines around North America and now they have a baseball team, the London Rippers, named after a serial killer. What's next? Giving Nickelback the Keys To The City?.....

.....When the Edmonton Oilers finally shut down Northlands Coliseum to move into a new rink sometime in the near future, the final night is going to have a pre-game ceremony for the ages. You can just see the greats walking to centre ice. Gretzky, Messier, Kurri, Coffey, Fuhr et al. in Oiler blue. But it will be hard (nee impossible) to top the night they shut down the Montreal Forum in 1996. The ovation they gave Maurice "Rocket" Richard has to rank as one of the greatest moments in all of sports.....

Senators Forgotten Man Finds His Hands

2011-11-16T00:13:00.003-05:00

Ottawa 3 Calgary 1

Bobby Butler came into this season on a high, playing a vital role in the Binghamton Senators Calder Cup win after riding shotgun with Jason Spezza on Ottawa's top line for over 30 games. GM Bryan Murray inked the college boy to a one-way contract with visions of Butler greatly improving on his 10 goals as a rookie and almost everybody had him pencilled in next to Spezza going into camp, even though he had a new coach who wasn't going to be faithful to Cory Clouston's setup.

Then the sophomore jinx came and kicked his ass for a while.

He started camp slow, got injured, sat out a stretch of games and couldn't buy a goal when he was in the lineup. Going into tonight's match in Calgary, Butler was wearing cement shoes on a line with Zenon Konopka and Jesse Winchester. Meanwhile, fellow college kid Colin Greening was holding his spot quite nicely alongside Spezza up in first class.

60 minutes and two goals later (including the winner), Butler might just have remembered what made him successful in the first place - his shot.

That's his best asset, his one true weapon. It's not a hammer like Dany Heatley's, but it's sneaky. When Butler was scoring goals alongside Spezza, he was finding that vacated space around the circles and simply getting shots off quickly before goalies had time to react. Same thing tonight against the Flames. The first goal he does a basic deke and snaps the puck about one beat earlier than a lot of players would, and it looks clean, like Patrick Kane looks when he shoots. It's on and off the stick right away and the wrists barely move.

The second goal was much the same minus the deke. It wasn't ripped, but it was quick and a little early. It seems more like a product of hockey sense than it does plain physical skill, but it's obviously a nice combination of both.

If these two goals take off a lot of the dead weight that's been sitting on his shoulders in the early going, then the Senators may not need to go out and trade for another top six forward before Christmas.

All season the Senators have seemed to be one skilled forward short (actually a center), and that's mostly because Peter Regin shredded his shoulder again, Nikita Filatov didn't seem to be right and Bobby Butler most definitely wasn't right.

If he can snap out of it, and tonight was a hell of a start, the Senators might be able to go cheap on the pro scouting for a little while.

Black Aces Senators 3 Stars

1. Craig Anderson: Dominated before and after puck handling gaffe that led to tying goal.
2. Bobby Butler: Two goals in under ten minutes of play.
3. Jason Spezza: Had his wheels going and dominated the face-off circle.

Honourable Mentions: Daniel Alfredsson, Chris Phillips, Filip Kuba, Sergei Gonchar and Jesse Winchester

NOTES

Lamest moment of the night: When Zenon Konopka and Tom Kostopoulos were engaged in a pretty good scrap early in the second period, the music guy at the Saddledome felt he had to play some loud MMA style metal in the background. Since when do fights get music in NHL rinks? I may be wrong but I'm pretty sure that's never happened in Ottawa so far. It reminded me of being at a Toronto Rock lacrosse game where music was blaring while the play was going on. .....Not sure what Zack Smith did to deserve a boarding penalty late in the first period. I suppose the hit made a loud noise, so maybe if your hits are too loud that's now considered a dangerous play. As Norm Macdonald said in Dirty Work, "ridiculous"..... The parents of those kids sitting directly behind the penalty box may want to stop their tykes from banging on the glass right after a Flame like Chris Butler takes a bad penalty in the 3rd period. Just saying....

....That was one of the more emotional Hall of Fame ceremonies in recent memory. They’re always great each year but Mark Howe’s induction speech was unbelievable. There were so many intense moments – like when he pointed out the late Brad McCrimmon’s wife who came specifically for Mark’s induction. Or when he threw on the #9 Red Wings jersey in honour of his father Gordie Howe, who watched the whole thing with tears in his eyes. It was almost too much to take. When Doug Gilmour closed his speech by saying that the late Pat Burns would someday join him in the Hall, I started waving the white flag at the TV. That’s why hockey is the best sport in the world – it has the greatest guys playing it…..

.....Why does it still bother me that there are actually two Stanley Cups? The real one, which the players hoist at the end of the season and cart around to barbeques all summer, and the “fake” one (created in 1993) which fills in for the “Presentation Cup” at the Hall Of Fame when the real one is on tour. I’ve been to the Hall Of Fame many, many times but there’s always the letdown knowing that the Cup you’re looking at is not the real one (they do have the original bowl on display that was retired in 1970 for being too old and brittle – this was the one that was dropkicked into the Rideau Canal in 1905 by Harvey Pulford after Ottawa beat the Dawson City Nuggets. The Cup went into the canal near Laurier and Elgin and stayed there all night long while the Ottawa players slept off a nasty hangover). The HOF is very open about it and don’t try to pretend the replica is the real Cup, but the purist in me thinks people would be okay with just having an empty stand where the one true Cup is supposed to sit if it’s not there at the moment. That would make seeing it in person even more special. What should they do with the replica then? Maybe donate it to the Leafs so they can string it from the rafters of the ACC like a dangling carrot to their players. Plus, guys can try to hit it with pucks during practice….

......Tough times in Tampa Bay right now. They’ve lost both games since Flyers coach Peter Laviolette decided to make a mockery of Guy Boucher’s 1-3-1 defensive system by instructing his defenseman to stand still if they weren’t challenged. And they weren’t. The Lightning won that game but they haven’t looked right since. Boucher called the loss against St. Louis on Saturday “shameful” and basically bag skated his charges the morning of their game against the Jets. The Lightning responded by getting whacked 5-2 in Winnipeg and now you have to wonder if some of the vets on the Lightning were somewhat demoralized by that incident against Philly. You think a proud guy like Martin St. Louis enjoyed standing at the blueline for minutes at a time and getting laughed at by the Flyers bench? It probably embarrassed him and a few of his teammates. Ask any player and they’ll tell you they want to skate and chase the puck, the way hockey should be played. Ask a coach like Boucher or Ken Hitchcock and they’ll tell you they want to win above all else, no matter what it looks like. I’m sure Tampa will snap out of it once they get some of their top defenseman back but maybe Boucher needs to drop the intensity once in a while. He got in front of a microphone before the Jets game and talked about “going to war” etc. The guy is about a 9 on the tension scale all the time. That can get old rather quick with some players….

.....The Flames may not be very good, but their Heritage Uni's are as good as they come. Seeing them play the Oilers in these flaming orange sweaters is every 80's hockey fans dream come true.

.... And finally, congratulations to my brother Ben and his wife Michelle on the birth of their second baby boy today. I'm guessing Ben still found time to watch the game tonight. Ridiculous.....

Sabres Learn An Old Lesson

2011-11-14T13:58:00.002-05:00

So the Buffalo Sabres are getting it from all corners of the hockey world for failing to act on Milan Lucic’s hit that knocked out their franchise player and number one goalie Ryan Miller on Saturday. Pundits are calling the Sabres “soft”, “gutless” and a few other things that aren’t printable in your average family newspaper.

Sound familiar Sens fans?

It should, because Ottawa had a reputation for a long time of being a team that failed to protect its star players from predatory hits and cheapshots (and oh there were many over the years). That changed a little when Zdeno Chara and Brian McGrattan provided some muscle in the mid-2000’s but after a few incidents with Daniel Alfredsson in recent years (such as the Mark Bell hit and the Wojtek Wolski elbow) that were not fully addressed on the ice, either at the time or in subsequent matches, the Senators are not exactly a shining example of frontier justice anymore either. But more on that in a moment.

Miller, who is now out with a concussion, fired the first “gutless” shot at Milan Lucic himself, saying “He has 50 pounds on me and he runs me like that?... That was gutless.” Lucic, who was given a few love-taps by the Sabres on the ice immediately after the hit, fired back with “We wouldn’t accept anything like that. We would have [taken] care of business. But we’re a different team than they are.”

The reason Lucic can say that with complete confidence? He knows the Sabres won’t do anything about it. Who says intimidation doesn’t work in hockey? Boston won the game 6-2.

Perhaps the Sabres were counting on the referees to take care of them but Lucic only got a two-minute penalty for charging and the Sabres didn’t do anything with the power-play, as can often happen when a team is demoralized like that.

You can perhaps forgive the Sabres for thinking the refs would come to their rescue, just like some teams who don’t employ tough guys believe that the league will dole out the proper punishment to players taking cheap shots at their stars. But even in this era of heightened sensitivity and super-suspensions, the league is still powerless to act if they deem the hit to be a legal one.

That’s exactly what happened to the Ottawa Senators when Brendan Shanahan decided that the New York Rangers Wojtek Wolski was “bracing himself” instead of intentionally elbowing Ottawa’s own franchise player in the chops and concussing him for five games (of which they lost 4 in a row).
So right there you can quickly see a grey area where old school “vigilante justice” may still have a role in the NHL. If your star player is lying on the ice and the league sees nothing wrong with it, what are you supposed to do? Just sit back and take it?

Of course not. That’s a loser mentality. Even if your star player gets hit cleanly, it’s important for his teammates to let the other team know that’s still unacceptable. That doesn’t make sense to a lot of fans who see everybody as fair game as long as it’s within the rules but hockey players certainly don’t think like that. The proof is out there on the ice. A lot of people complain about the fights that happen after clean hits, and in a way it has gotten a little ridiculous. In the 80’s for instance, fights always happened if a star player got hit cleanly but was usually let go when a third or fourth line player got lit up at centre ice (give or take a few bench clearing brawls between the Canadiens and the Nordiques of course).

Now even those hits are ending up in fights a lot of times, but behind it all is a reasonable motivation. If teams let every clean hit go without fighting back, the league would be littered with star players (and third liners) on the sidelines. Those fights, or the threat of them, make some players think twice before really laying the body on someone (although some players just aren’t wired that way, like Patrick Kaleta). It acts as a deterrent and keeps the game from turning into a roller derby every night.

And that’s just the clean hits. If you let the dirty ones go unpunished, what does that say for your team? To count on the league to play enforcer is plain folly. Even if the guy who hit your star gets suspended, it seems like little solace in the end. Players don’t want the league to do their dirty work. They’d much rather take care of it themselves in the traditional way that hockey has always allowed, even after the instigator penalty was instituted (although to a lesser degree).

So why didn’t the Sabres respond to Ryan Miller getting knocked out of the game? Beats me. They’ll get a chance to do that later in the season but it seems like it’s already too late. They’ve been labeled and teams won’t have much fear going into that rink and maybe giving Thomas Vanek that extra shot that they know will go unpunished. On the other hand, maybe this incident serves to wake up the Sabres and they come together as a team. It can work both ways.

And why did the Senators seem to shy away from getting tough on the Rangers just weeks after Alfredsson was knocked out of commission? Maybe it had something to do with Wolski being out of the lineup for surgery but that shouldn’t have had any bearing on the situation. Brad Richards had a fairly comfortable game, as did Marian Gaborik. Zenon Konopka and Jared Cowen stepped up and took on the Rangers but it still felt like a missed opportunity to make a stand as a team. The Senators fell apart shortly after that and erased their great October with a brutal start to November with Alfie on the shelf.

In essence, it’s not the fighting that’s important, it’s the idea of coming together and making a statement to the league. They could have done that without any fights at all. All they had to do was make life miserable for the Rangers on the boards and within the rules. Winning that game on their own turf would have been enough. That didn’t happen either.

To be fair to the Senators, they have a lot of young guys trying to stay in the league. Nobody wants to be the guy who takes a stupid penalty and puts his team down a man. Nobody wants to get hammered by Shanahan. The league seems to be in a flux right now and a lot of players don’t know how to act.

But at some point for both the Sabres and the Senators, you have to come together as a team and let it be known that if you mess with one, you have to face the rest. That’s a cliché as old as hockey itself, but it’s one lesson that seems to get taught year after year after year.

Laviolette Follows Killer’s Example

2011-11-10T09:03:00.000-05:00

I’m sure most of you have seen the debacle by now. In last night’s Tampa/Philly game, Lightning coach Guy Boucher employed the much-hated neutral zone trap and didn’t allow his forwards to even remotely forecheck the Flyers defenseman coming out of their zone, which prompted Philly coach Peter Laviolette to tell his d-men to stand there with the puck – as long as it took.

It was quite the spectacle. The Lightning forwards seemed embarrassed by the whole thing, in particular Martin St. Louis, who was heard asking Boucher incredulously what they were supposed to do. The Flyers were on their feet just giving it to Tampa, loving every minute of it. Laviolette was clearly trying to prove a point, going to ridiculous extremes to showcase how boring the 1-3-1 system can be to everyone – the players, the fans and I guess some of the coaches. I thought it was a great move by Laviolette and maybe it will spark some kind of change down the road here, either through rule changes, like a ban on zone defences (don’t ask me how the hell they could enforce such a thing) or just in the general culture of the game. Let’s call it a public shaming.

But Laviolette is not the first hockey coach to take a stand against this kind of crap. Ottawa 67’s legend Brian Kilrea pulled a similar stunt in the late 70’s. Here’s a quote from one of Kilrea’s players at that time, Jim Fox, from James Duthie’s great book on Kilrea, “They Call Me Killer”:

“Killer loved offensive hockey. He had no time for boring, sit-back-and-defend hockey. So, we’re playing in Peterborough one night and they play the exact opposite system. They play very defensively. From the first shift, they decided to shadow Smitty’s (Bobby Smith) line. As soon as Killer realizes this, he calls time-out and calls us to the bench. He tells all three guys on that line to stand at the Pete’s blue line and not move.

So they do, and the three Peterborough guys stand right next to them. So the two teams basically played 2-on-2 hockey! There was the odd whistle, but this kept going all period…Killer was fighting for his brand of hockey…It was something to see. I think we lost the game, but he made his point.”

Coach MacLean Is The Right Guy At The Right Time

2011-11-08T13:19:00.001-05:00

They say, “If you’re worried about being popular, don’t become a referee, a goalie or a coach.”

There’s little glory to be had in all three jobs but that just makes the people who succeed in them all the more interesting (ie. crazy).

So let’s talk about coaches for a minute, and in particular the sometimes jovial, but always authoritative Paul MacLean, whose work so far this season has been better than anyone except maybe Mrs. MacLean expected.

The personality and style of an NHL head coach is sometimes the only show in town, mostly because they have a free pass to let loose a string of expletives into a microphone and not have anyone call them a prima donna because of it.

Certainly the players aren’t encouraged to let it all hang out in public even though there are a handful of interesting guys playing in the league today, such as Sean Avery, Paul Bissonnette and George Parros among others. Mostly we know they’re interesting from social media like Twitter, or in the case of Parros because he has a famous moustache, went to Princeton, majored in Economics but chose to make his living by punching other people in the face with his bare fists.

That’s like a character out of Hemingway or Bukowski right there.

Otherwise, most players take the pre-season media training to heart and mete out safe sound bites for reporters which end up filling newspaper columns like so much landfill. You can pick through it and once in a while to find something noteworthy, but most of the time it’s like taking a handful of Sominex.

But coaches can always give you something. A lot of these guys are grizzled hockey vets who have been through the trenches, both as players and coaches, experienced both success and failure, seen a lot of punk kids they either turned around or booted in the ass, and somehow broke through every barrier the game has placed in their way.

In short, a lot of these guys are grumpy old men and there’s nothing more entertaining than grumpy old men when things aren’t going their way. If the coach isn’t old, then he’s certainly grumpy, because in order to pull together 23 millionaires and get them to sacrifice their personal wills to the larger good of the group, you have to be able to look someone in the face and tell them they’re not good enough. It’s harder than you think. Just try it sometime on your husband or wife and see how it flies.

But this isn’t about what a coach says after the game to someone like Larry Brooks (ie. f#!* off). It’s about how he handles his players.

Paul MacLean strikes me as a coach who has no problems establishing his authority. Yet he has the reputation of being a “communicator”, a balance that seems to be essential to successful coaching in today’s NHL.

In the old days, a “communicator” was someone who grabbed a shovel from his office, locked the door of the dressing room behind him after a big loss, and the only thing the assembled beat reporters could hear from behind the door were players screaming “No coach, noooo……” and then the sound of metal tables hitting the wall and garbage pails rattling across the ceiling. Message sent. Message received.

Maybe Bruce “F’ing” Boudreau is headed that way but not many coaches go for intense intimidation anymore. Mike Keenan used to single out players individually and shame them in front of the rest of the players all season long, trying to embarrass them. The whole team would hate him and end up playing angry – and often winning just to spite Iron Mike. Scotty Bowman didn’t bother to talk to his players at all, making decisions in a vacuum and instilling a deep loathing mingled with respect. Obviously it worked, but back then there was always the threat of losing your job at any moment’s notice and that’s why guys played hurt, hid injuries (including concussions) and choked back their grievances over a few beers with the boys (read James Duthie’s book on Brian Kilrea to learn about beers after games - it’ll make you awful thirsty). Now if a player hates his coach, he just requests a trade or simply waits for them to be fired – either way often works.

There are some big personalities in the NHL today like Boudreau, John Tortorella, Tom Renney, Mike Babcock and Ron Wilson, a few notable for their lack of personality, like good ol’ stubborn Jacques Martin, and then there are that group of coaches somewhere in the middle who are able to find that common ground with the players, and get good results from teams that maybe don’t look so good on paper.

Those coaches I’m talking about are guys like Barry Trotz in Nashville, Lindy Ruff in Buffalo, Guy Boucher in Tampa, Dave Tippett in Phoenix and, yes, Paul MacLean right here in Ottawa.

You get little hints of it when you hear a player like Chris Neil say he loves to play under MacLean. Same as with Kaspars Daugavins and Sergei Gonchar. MacLean is an ex-player and he seemingly knows which buttons to push and when to push them. He also knows when to bring down the hammer by skating guys hard in practice or benching players like Bobby Butler and Nikita Filatov to try and motivate them.

There doesn’t seem to be any gimmick here with MacLean. He isn’t in Ottawa because the team was in emergency mode, which is how Cory Clouston was hired. He isn’t here to rectify a perceived discipline problem like Clouston and Craig Hartsburg before him. He isn’t here to be a caretaker of an already established team like John Paddock was.

MacLean was brought in to help build this team from the ground up, not to patch holes or maintain the work of a previous bench boss. For the first time since the equally charismatic Bryan Murray took over after the lockout, the Senators have a coach who truly seems in charge and who has the opportunity to mould this team in his image right at the foundation level, something that Paddock, Hartsburg and Clouston didn’t have the opportunity to do (in their defense). Murray was handed a great team to coach but he also completely rebuilt the mindset that was instilled by Martin before him, so in essence he was starting over as well.

As for rebuilding this current Senators team, there doesn’t seem to be a more suitable guy to do it than Paul MacLean. Something about MacLean’s personality speaks of a father-figure type, and it’s not just because of the famous moustache above the soup coolers.

He’s a little rough around the edges – you get the feeling that he could let slip an F-bomb if he wasn’t careful – much like a lot of old hockey players who bear the faint scars of rougher days. He has that glint of strange mischief in his eyes once in a while but the booming voice of a taskmaster when he’s running a practice. He commands instant respect, not just from his coaching background in the Red Wings organization or as a star player in the league, but from the force of his personality.

In coaching, you need to have the X’s and O’s covered, but you also need that intangible factor, that charisma that separates the leaders from the followers. Setting up plays on a chalkboard is one skill, but giving orders and having your players go through a wall for you night after night is a whole other level of coaching that you can’t learn by reading Lloyd Percival’s Hockey Handbook.

There are going to be some tough nights ahead for MacLean and the Senators, and he won’t always be as popular as he is right now, but as long as he doesn’t physically choke out a reporter or one of his players, you get the feeling he’ll be around for a long time to come in the Nation’s Capital.

Senators Need To Show Up Angry Against Rangers

2011-11-07T11:38:00.002-05:00

When New York Ranger winger Wojtek Wolski planted an elbow into Daniel Alfredsson’s grill on October 29th, putting the Ottawa captain out of action for the next four games (and counting), speculation immediately began that the Senators would get their revenge on Wolski when the two teams faced off nearly two weeks later.

That game is just about upon us but the gods have spared Wolski even more graciously than Brendan Shanahan spared him an obvious suspension.

Wolski has a wonky groin (you can make a joke about his stones… but I’ll refrain for now, as tempting as that is) and he’ll be watching his teammates have to answer for him on TV from the comfy confines of the Injured Reserve list.

So does that mean the rumble is off?

Hopefully not. There is no way the Senators can let 60 minutes go by without inflicting some kind of physical toll on the New York Rangers. That’s just the nature of the game.

They watched as their franchise player and locker room leader lay face down on the ice before being helped off by a trainer and Wolski paid for it by sitting a lousy two minutes in the penalty box drinking Gatoraid. That’s not nearly enough.

If Wolski isn’t there to face the music, then his teammates will have to do it, as they should. And before anybody starts wringing their hands, we’re not talking about Todd Bertuzzi going ultra-vigilante on Colorado’s Steve Moore in response to a hit on his captain Markus Naslund. That is and will always be the NHL’s worst nightmare in this kind of payback scenario (which they ultimately fostered by not suspending or even fining Wolski).

Instead, we’re talking about Ottawa finishing every single hit on Brad Richards and Marian Gaborik. Going out of their way to get a glove in their face after a whistle. Challenging their tougher players to scraps. Getting into Henrik Lundqvist's personal space on every single play near the net.

Basically, the Senators need to become hell on skates for 60 minutes and let the Rangers star players know they’re a valid target after what happened to Alfredsson.

If the Rangers take exception to this and some kind of brawl breaks out, then so be it. I’m sure fans will be quite forgiving of guys like Chris Neil and Zenon Konopka if they end up taking a few penalties in this one. It’s one thing to go into the box for a lazy hook or an errant high stick. Those kinds of penalties hurt your team. But if you do it to prove a point, to show that there are real consequences for the opposition if they go after your star players, then that’s a penalty the team will gladly kill off anytime.

This is the type of game that isn’t just about the scoreboard or the standings. It’s about morale and team bonding. Not much brings a team together faster than turning the rink into a modern day Alamo. You can call it a “dinosaur mentality” and say the best revenge is simply getting the two points. But we all know that’s a bunch of bull.

The best revenge would be to see the Rangers pay a very steep physical price for taking out the Senators captain. If this is done cleanly or in some kind of throwback brawl, it doesn’t really matter. The fans will love it. The players will love it. The media and the bloggers will hate it, but they hate everything anyways.

So will we see a game like this? In the modern NHL, these expected clashes usually provide very little bang for your buck. Guys are afraid of taking suspensions and the media blow it out of proportion (exactly as I’m trying to do with this piece). But once in a while, we’ll get a game for the ages.

Maybe Wednesdays tilt against the Rangers in Ottawa will give us another one of those classics, like the famous Ottawa/Philly brawl or Ray Emery fighting the Sabres Martin Biron and Andrew Peters within seconds of each other and doing so with a huge grin on his face.

Don’t bet the house on it, but with spirited and emotional guys like Neil and Konopka on the ice (certainly MacLean will want to play Konopka), it’s not as farfetched as you think.

Alfredsson An Ottawa Institution

2011-11-03T17:50:00.001-04:00

In glitzy Ottawa, a town so full of excitement it makes Paris, France look like Cornwall, Ontario, it’s easy to take Daniel Alfredsson for granted. Captain of the Senators since 1999, Alfie is a bit like the Parliament Buildings – always there through rain and snow – but sometimes falling apart on us.

Well, that’s a bit of a stretch. When the Parliament Buildings start to crumble, they throw up scaffolding and go to work for years. Alfie goes under the knife, tapes an aspirin to the bruise, and is usually good to go in the morning, or in about half the time it takes other athletes to recover. That’s the way he’s been throughout his career but he has fans worried with some of his recent injuries. He got over the bad back but now he’s out with a concussion and many fans are starting to prepare themselves for life without the captain in the future. With any luck, that might be a few seasons away, but we can all see the slow train coming up around the bend.

Alfredsson has 1030 points in 1066 games as a Senator.

Just how lucky are Ottawa fans to have had a player of this caliber donning the red and black since 1995?

Consider this: There are 7 NHL organizations, all of which started operations either before or during the Senators inaugural season of 1992-93, that have not had a player score 1000 points in their uniform. You may be surprised to see which high profile teams are on this list.

New Jersey Devils
Formed: 1974 (as Kansas City Scouts)
Points Leader: Patrick Elias – 825 points

Phoenix Coyotes
Formed: 1979 (as Winnipeg Jets)
Points Leader: Dale Hawerchuk – 929 points

San Jose Sharks
Formed: 1991
Points Leader: Patrick Marleau – 774 points

Tampa Bay Lightning
Formed: 1992
Points Leader: Vincent Lecavalier – 802 points

Toronto Maple Leafs
Formed: 1917 (as Toronto Arenas)
Points Leader: Mats Sundin – 987 points

Vancouver Canucks
Formed: 1970
Points Leader: Markus Naslund – 756 points

Washington Capitals
Formed: 1974
Points Leader: Peter Bondra – 825 points

In addition to the 1000 point threshold, the Ottawa Senators will welcome another lifelong player to the 1000 games played list this season as long as Chris Phillips stays healthy. Using the same 1992-93 cut off, four teams who started before the Senators don’t have a single player in franchise history to hit four digits in games.

Pittsburgh Penguins
Formed: 1967
Games Played Leader: Mario Lemieux – 915 games

St. Louis Blues
Formed: 1967
Games Played Leader: Bernie Federko – 927 games

Tampa Bay Lightning
Formed: 1992
Games Played Leader: Vincent Lecavalier – 946 games

Washington Capitals
Formed: 1974
Games Played Leader: Calle Johansson – 983 games

Numbers are numbers. You can attach any kind of significance to them you want. So what if Lemieux didn’t play 1000 games for the Penguins. That team wouldn’t be worth a capful of racoon shit if he hadn’t single-handedly filled the seats at Mellon Arena year after year.

What really matters is that a fan base has someone to identify with. They want a guy they can point to and say “that’s what Senators hockey is all about”, or Red Wings hockey or Flyers hockey. Mats Sundin may lead the Toronto Maple Leafs in a lot of statistical categories but most fans still hold guys like Wendel Clark and Doug Gilmour in higher esteem, if not in their heads, then certainly in their hearts.

And that’s what it’s all about anyways. Numbers are a fun distraction, but they’ll never be able to tell you about character and personality.

Luckily for Ottawa, Alfie’s got that in spades and the numbers to boot.

Sens Go Down Scrapping As Streak Dies

2011-11-01T22:11:00.000-04:00

Boston 5 Ottawa 3

For a while it looked like Ottawa was going to extend their six game winning streak against an obviously frustrated and struggling Bruins team, but once Boston started hitting in the second period, the Senators were just trying to hang on.

Simply put, the Senators just didn't have an answer for the size of the Bruins down low. The Senators defence were fine when they had the puck but for the first time in a while it looked like they were physically overmatched. It was a tough game for the Jason Spezza line as well, as Spezza was rocked pretty good by Zdeno Chara and didn't seem to have much steam left after that.

One player who was worth watching against the Bruins was big Jared Cowen. He is one of the only Sens defenders who can play that style all-night long and he did pretty well for himself in his own end. A game against a team like the Bruins is where you will see Cowen's true worth, and that also bodes well for any future playoffs where this type of game is more the norm. He also got his first goal of the season on a bouncer from the point that eluded Tim Thomas. Not a bad goalie to score your first one on.

The Senators were due for a loss and at least they went down fighting with Zack Smith and Zenon Konopka throwing their fists around.

Black Aces Senators 3 Stars

1. Nick Foligno

2. Stephane Da Costa

3. Chris Neil

Honourable Mentions: Craig Anderson, Jared Cowen, Zack Smith and Filip Kuba

NOTES

Heartily agree with Shaun Van Allen who had the guts to say he actually "likes" the shootout on the Team 1200 pre-game show (Bruce Garrioch had his back as well). In fact, Van Allen thinks it should go to five shooters from three, something else Black Aces completely supports. With three shooters, you don't have enough of a chance to come back if you get down early….. I didn't see anything wrong with the Francois Beauchemin hit on Mike Fisher. Shoulder to shoulder and Fisher had the puck. Why would that be a suspendable offence? Not even close to what Wojtek Wolski did to Daniel Alfredsson. That's not me being a homer, because I'm not a homer. I sleep just fine when the Senators lose games. But to me, it's apples and oranges, even if both players were hurt.....That was one of Zenon Konopka's better fights of the season when he obliged Shawn Thornton. But as sometimes happens, the Bruins got some momentum out of it.....Which Nick Foligno promptly erased with a sickening pass between his legs to Stephane Da Costa for the Senators second goal. Foligno seemingly feels he has to put on a stickhandling exhibition every time he has the puck, to his detriment, but it sure as hell worked that time. Unbelievable pass.....What the hell is wrong with the Detroit Red Wings? A lot of people have been waiting for them to finally break down one of these years and get forced into a rebuild. Those people may feel that year is upon us, but something tells me they’ll find a way out of the wilderness yet again. Has anyone said they miss Paul MacLean yet? No? OK, let me be the first….

..... Finally getting around to reading James Duthie’s book on Brian Kilrea, “They Call Me Killer”. And it’s a hell of a read. For instance, one of Kilrea’s teammates on the Eddie Shore owned Springfield Indians, Denny Olson, relates this little piece of information: “Eddie (Shore) would say ‘I want you to skate like a Boy Scout taking a shit in the woods. You gotta position your back so you don’t shit on your heels!’” Kilrea himself talks about Shore trying to teach him this unique skating style by tying Kilrea’s elbows together behind his back with a string, taping his gloves to his stick, tying his legs together to prevent long strides and then putting a stick under his jersey and up his back to keep him straight. Sounds a little like Robin Lehner’s old man….The new alignment plans being floated out there by Elliotte Friedman (who reports it as Gary Bettman’s preferred scenario) basically makes everyone out of your division similar to how it works now between the East and West conferences – two games a year, a home and home. So that would mean Ottawa fans would only get one chance to see Alex Ovechkin, Claude Giroux, Steven Stamkos etc. Right off the bat, that doesn’t make any sense. They have a good balance going right now. Why throw it out the window just accommodate teams like the Jets, Stars and the Blue Jackets? Just switch the Jets out with one of Detroit, Nashville or Columbus and away we go (please make it Detroit)….

..... Paul Bissonnette is great for the NHL but posting a picture of a teammate in blackface is a pretty serious lack of judgment, even for professional athletes who lead a somewhat sheltered life and may not be fully aware of just how historically touchy that type of thing is. The NHL is still an old-school place where owners and executives are largely uncomfortable with players (i.e. peons) making waves outside of the rink. Just ask Ray Emery and Sean Avery. Anything that has a racist overtone, no matter how unintentional, is about the worst PR you can get. It’s also notable that Bissonnette plays for a team being run by the NHL itself. I’m not saying they would be looking to trade him, but since he’s not a superstar on the ice, his activities off of it will be tolerated that much less. He’s not Patrick Kane punching a cab driver in the face. He’s a fourth liner who inadvertently unleashed a PR nightmare for both the Coyotes and the NHL. Biz Nasty will live on, but will it be with the Coyotes for the long-term?.... How do I feel about the whole thing? It was an innocent mistake. Time to move on….Don’t you hate it when people ask themselves questions like I just did? What an asshole.

"Bad" Sens Team Wins Their 6th In A Row.... Greening A Calder Contender...Game Notes

2011-10-30T22:53:00.004-04:00

Ottawa 3 Toronto 2

Coach Paul MacLean has been praising his veterans for leading the once beleaguered Ottawa Senators back to respectability, but they largely won their sixth game in a row tonight on the backs of the kids.

There was no Daniel Alfredsson, sitting out the game with a possible concussion sustained in a cheap shot by the Rangers Wojtek Wolski (which strangely went unpunished, but more on that later). Jason Spezza seemed a little off the mark for once and had his 6 game point streak snapped. Milan Michalek didn't have a point.

That's not a criticism, because you'll never have your top guys going every single night in an 82 game schedule. But that's when you need other players to step up, and in Ottawa's case, those other players are kids by necessity.

It's hard to imagine Colin Greening playing any better than he did tonight but, as most agree, he has only shown us a glimpse of what he's capable of. That's a frightening proposition. Think Milan Lucic with goal scorer's hands. Greening was all over the Leafs tonight, throwing his body, stealing pucks, grinding the boards into a fine white dust and scoring a game tying goal in the first period off a highlight feed from David Rundblad. If he hasn't been talked up as a rookie of the year candidate already, now is a good time to start. I wish I had the stones to predict that at the start of the season, but what the hell, I'll say it now. He might get a challenge from the guy who fed him that pass, because it looks like Rundblad is going to have a chance to put up some impressive numbers thanks to a league best power-play.

Rundblad just keeps impressing, running the play when he has the puck and even adding a few blocked shots to his arsenal. Robin Lehner made all the stops he should have for his first win of the season in an emergency call-up role for the injured Alex Auld.

Jared Cowen quietly had another great game, and he showed he has the timing to make a solo run into the offensive zone when the play requires it. That's one of the toughest things to learn as a young defenseman - when to go and when to stay. Guys like Karlsson and Rundblad have the switch permanently set to "Go" but that's because they have the wheels and skills to do it. Cowen, like Chris Phillips, has to pick his spots more carefully because he's playing a different role. You could see it when he ended up making a big hit behind the Leafs net and then getting back quickly when the play went the other way. You could see it when he stole a puck in the neutral zone and just plain outbattled a Leaf player at the red line and then carried it himself into the Leafs end.

And then you have Erik Karlsson, who is quickly becoming the best player on the hockey team if he isn't already. When he's on the ice, the play runs through him and he's the linchpin of their entire attack when they are at even strength. He's just as good on the power-play and now he's making defensive plays he seemingly wasn't capable of in his first few years in the league. His defensive game is so subtle that you don't notice it right away but lately he always has his body in the right position and he's stealing pucks in the corners with his smarts instead of his modest size.

Of course, vets like Sergei Gonchar, Chris Phillips, Filip Kuba and Chris Neil continued to be strong as they have all the way through the current winning streak.

Right now, no one knows how good this team can be, but it's clear they are better than what anybody gave them credit for in the summer.

Bad teams don't win 6 games in a row.

Like I said on my twitter feed, no need to plan a parade just yet, but it might be okay for this team to reassess their goals for the season. I'm sure the playoffs were the target from the beginning for everybody in the organization, but now that doesn't seem as laughable as that notion once was just a few short weeks ago.

Call us back in February.

Black Aces Senators 3 Stars

1. Erik Karlsson
2. Colin Greening
3. Chris Neil

Honourable Mentions: Robin Lehner, Sergei Gonchar, Jared Cowen, David Rundblad, Kaspars Daugavins and Zack Smith.

Black Aces Senators 3 Stars Season Scorecard

Here's a first look at the results of all the Black Aces 3 Stars for the year so far. 3 points for 1st Star, 2 for 2nd. 1 for 3rd Star. You get the picture.

1. Spezza – 12
2. Michalek – 10
3. Karlsson – 9
4. Alfredsson – 7
5. Neil – 6
6. Greening - 5
7. Gonchar – 3
8. Anderson - 3
9. Da Costa - 2
10. Foligno – 2

NOTES

Of course, the highlight reel plays David Rundblad is capable of, such as the pass from his own net to the other blueline that sent Colin Greening in alone to score, are the ones we'll all be talking about the next day, but it's the little plays that give you a hint of his all-around game. One thing Rundblad does so well is step up on the puck carrier at the blueline like he's about to go in for the big hit. He doesn't do it on every play but when he does, everything about his body language says he's about to throw his body instead of just trying to angle the puck carrier off to the boards. It's funny to see just how quickly the puck carrier bails on his play and gets forced into turning the puck over just to avoid the steamroller. I've seen him do it a bunch of times already and only once or twice has he actually delivered the hit. It's an effective tactic for sure, and when he does catch someone on that play, they're going to be hurting. We've all seen those highlight videos from Sweden of Rundblad exploding guys. Won't be long until we see a huge one in the NHL by #7.....Do you think Kaspars Daugavins is popular with his teammates? I haven't seen so many people as happy as when Daugavins snuck a rope shot through Jonas Gustavsson for his first career goal. I thought Erik Karlsson was going to kiss him for a moment there....Huge goalies are a problem for the NHL, but it's nice if you have one yourself. Robin Lehner is a mountain....Nice to hear Sergei Gonchar getting praised around the league instead of the usual chatter about him being a bust. But really, it makes sense that the possible Hall Of Famer is bouncing back after a tough year. Guys like that don't suddenly forget to play the game. Now Ottawa fans are getting a taste of how good he can really be. Should be a fun year on the power play Gonchar and the Swedes playing catch....

.....The Sens Heritage jersey still looks great but they have to do something about that "bib" at the back. Every team has one now but maybe because the last stripe is white, it looks pretty long on these sweaters. Maybe one day we'll see the old straight cut back....Wow. They played Fastway's song "Trick Or Treat" at the rink tonight, a completely obscure track from the equally obscure but wonderfully cornball 80's horror movie "Trick Or Treat" starring that guy who played Skippy on Family Ties. Do yourself a favour and track down this movie.......Have to say it's refreshing to listen to Zenon Konopka do an interview, especially when he comes right out and says he "hates" the Leafs. Seriously, that's fantastic. Despite all the bad blood between the two teams over the years, nobody has ever come out so directly like that. It's probably just a little show biz on Konopka's part but fans eat that kind of thing up. Makes the atmosphere around the games fun and gives us hacks something to write about....But then Konopka gets scratched for the game. Hey, we can't all be Mark Messier.....Again, we don't want to run this subject into the ground, but the only thing worse than the garbage call on Konopka during the Rangers game is the fact that some highlight shows are stating Konopka hit Artem Anisimov "from behind" or "on the numbers". Clearly, they don't know how to sit and watch a replay and make a basic observation on what happened. To a lot of people, a guy lying on the ice means that the hit was a suspendable hit, no matter what the facts are or what the video shows....Ryan Getzlaf of the Ducks has seen his fill of diving and he really lets it loose while talking to the media after the Ducks game on Saturday.....

....I'm just as surprised as everybody else that there were no consequences for Wojtek Wolski over his elbow to Alfredsson's head on Saturday afternoon. Seemed cut and dried to me, and I'm not usually the type to be screaming about suspensions for every dangerous hit. Looks like he turned into Alfredsson on purpose and plowed his head with an elbow. Anyways, you can assume that next time the Rangers and Senators meet, Wolski will be a paid a visit by one of Chris Neil, Zenon Konopka, Matt Carkner, Zack Smith, or just about anybody you can name. Accountability on the ice is at an all-time low in the age of diving, but it still exists and there are a few guys on the Sens who are good at bringing down the judge's gavel.....Watching Rob Blake narrate the video for the Daniel Carcillo suspension left this viewer with one real conclusion: Let Brendan Shanahan do the videos. Blake can do the camera.....

....With news that Sean Avery has been put on re-entry waivers, it begs the question: Wouldn't it be ironic if Avery ends up saving John Tortorella's job? If Torts can swallow his obvious dislike of the nutjob winger, he's got a real important weapon he can throw onto the ice whenever his team needs a shot of adrenaline or old fashioned batshit craziness. You'd be surprised how often you need a little batshit craziness in professional hockey.....

.....The 2nd ever issue of "The Best Of Everything In Hockey", published by The Hockey News, just hit the shelves recently. Apparently, the Ottawa Senators are "The Worst At Everything".Even a quick look tells you just how far opinion of the Senators franchise has plunged over the past few years. There is barely a mention of the team or any of its players and they barely get any votes for any category you can dream of, including Best Public Relations, Best Arena Food, Best Celebration Zone, Best Broadcasting Tandem, Best Business Savvy, Best Jersey, Best Mascot, Best Intermission, Best Development Organization and many more. Zenon Konopka got some votes for Best Interview (from his time in Long Island and Tampa presumably), Sergei Gonchar tied for 6th Best Power Play Point Man and Matt Carkner and Konopka each got votes in the Best Fighter category (both tied for 4th). Chris Neil was voted the 9th best hitter and Gonchar was tied with 13 other players for 9th best skater. No votes for Daniel Alfredsson in the best leader category or for Eugene Melnyk in the best owner list. But the organization does get credit for helping to popularize Stompin' Tom Connors iconic "Hockey Song" in an article by Bruce Garrioch. I didn't realize the Senators were the first NHL team to play this regularly at games. The Leafs followed the Senators example shortly after and now it's probably played in every arena in every league known to man. So there's that..... In the same magazine, it sort of seems crazy at first that Ray Bourque didn't make the Boston Bruins All-Time First Team but when you have legends like Bobby Orr and Eddie Shore in the same group, what are they supposed to do? Dit Clapper is with Bourque on the second team, but if they do this magazine in another ten years, you might see Zdeno Chara on that second team with Bourque.....

....Have to love Robin Lehner's goalie pads. He has two solid red bars on the outer edges of each pad, which obviously are meant to look like goal posts. I guess the idea is to trick the eye of a shooter in that split second before he unleashes his shot. A shooter will always try to put one just inside the post, no? Pretty clever.

Sens Punish Rangers, Defy Refs With Huge Win

2011-10-29T18:56:00.006-04:00

Senators 5 Rangers 4 (SO)

Writers are beginning to run out of superlatives for the Ottawa Senators this season. They're the perfect underdog story but it's starting to get absolutely ridiculous how these guys are pulling wins out of the fire. It's bordering on being a Twilight Zone episode. And here we go again.

Another come from behind win that just leaves you shaking your head. Somehow, coach Paul MacLean has got these guys believing in themselves again after almost getting run out of the league in the early going by a few blowouts that had all the pre-season pundits nodding their heads in smug satisfaction.

So how do they explain this team knocking off 5 wins in a row, rallying from multi-goal deficits and sitting at 2nd in the league in power play percentage?

They don't. Everyone seems mystified. Ron Maclean, host of Hockey Night In Canada, said at the start of the year that the Senators were "his team" and called for them to make the playoffs, but that was a lonely prediction. P.J. Stock was literally at a loss for words during the first intermission on Saturday to explain why the Senators were so loose and having success. The chasm between the expectations and the reality is causing some to just throw their hands up. Up until early this week, some writers were still making fun of the team because they were, to quote, "the Ottawa Senators", as if they were a synonym for ineptness.

Fair enough. This team was pretty much a joke under Cory Clouston last year and the gruelling blowout losses early this month had everyone talking about Nail Yakubov in both ironic and non-ironic terms (I might have just pulled an Alanis there, but we'll leave it). Now we should be asking if it's okay to just go ahead and pencil Erik Karlsson and Jason Spezza into the All-Star game.

The real letdown now may be the health of Daniel Alfredsson after he took a blatant cheapshot from the Rangers Wojtek Wolski, leaving the captain prone on the ice with a possible (likely) concussion. He never returned to the game and as of this writing, his status is unknown.

It was a clear injustice that Zenon Konopka got 5 and a game misconduct for hitting Artem Anisimov FROM THE SIDE (emphasis intentional) and Wolski only got 2 minutes for taking Alfredsson's head off with what was an intentional elbow.

Anisimov lay on the ice like his season was over but was magically well enough to play on the ensuing 5 minute power play which saw the Rangers score twice to seemingly put the game away.

Frankly, the refs should be embarrassed over the discrepancy between the calls. Some say there is no accountability for the refs but that's not true. There is internal monitoring that goes on but it's just not done in the public eye. And really, you wouldn't want to see that anyways. People already go after refs enough. No need to have a public hanging. The payoff for good refs is getting to work playoff games.

Black Aces Senators 3 Stars

1. Jason Spezza
2. Erik Karlsson
3. Milan Michalek

Honourable Mentions: David Rundlbad, Filip Kuba, Sergei Gonchar, Chris Phillips, Jared Cowen. Yes, the entire defense crew.

Back at it tomorrow night against the Leafs. Don't tune out early.

Bring The Crazy Guy Back

2011-10-28T20:04:00.001-04:00

The Ottawa Senators will be going into Madison Square Garden, "The World's Most Famous Arena" on Saturday afternoon for a tilt with the Rangers, but something important seems to be missing.

And that something is Sean Avery. Banished to Wade Redden's lonely corner of the hockey world in AHL Connecticut (although Keith Richards makes his home in the state - no sightings of him at any Whale games yet, probably because they don't allow smoking).

Everyone has an opinion on Sean Avery. A lot of those opinions are unprintable in your average family newspaper. Yet, the guy is as entertaining as they come, especially if you like mobster movies where Joe Pesci randomly shoots people.

There are a lot of smug smiles around the NHL because John Tortorella won the attention war in Manhattan, but here's a little reminder of what was, what could be, whatever this is.

Book Review: Eddie Shore and That Old Time Hockey

2011-10-26T17:35:00.000-04:00

"Nearly all of Shore’s gleaming white teeth were store-bought, the originals having been ejected from his mouth, and his nose, despite having been broken countless times, was straight. Shore had light hazel eyes that crinkled when he laughed, and when he spoke, his voice was disarmingly soft, lowering almost to a whisper. “Oh,” he once confided quietly of how he had kept his nose in line, “if you grab it quick just after it is busted and fit the edges together, it will grow as good as new. I always set my own nose. I twist it around until I feel the edges grit and then put a plaster across it to hold it flush.”
Anyone queasy yet?

No? Good.

Because if you want to read about the original era of NHL hockey and its heroes like Eddie Shore, then you will need a high tolerance for brutality, at least half as high as the players tolerance for the pain and suffering they endured during the barnstorming days of the best hockey league in the world.

Eddie Shore was undoubtedly the biggest name to emerge from that time, and his name is still used as a synonym for “tough hockey”. They called Shore the “Edmonton Express” from his days with the Edmonton Eskimos in the Western Canadian Hockey League, but he made his fame in the NHL with the Boston Bruins between the years of 1926 and 1940, winning two Stanley Cups and four Hart Trophies as league MVP. The NHL did not create an award for best defenceman until the 1950’s, but it’s safe to say Shore would have won his share as well.

C. Michael Hiam’s 2010 book “Eddie Shore and That Old Time Hockey” is as good a portrait of that era as you can get your hands on, simply because Hiam doesn’t just track the great defenceman Shore’s life as most traditional biographies do, but rather spends a considerable amount of time on the other great personalities of that age, like rivals Frank “King” Clancy of Ottawa, Howie Morenz of Montreal (whom Shore himself thought was the best hockey player in the world) and of course the ill-fated Ace Bailey of Toronto, whom Shore would catastrophically injure in one of the most notorious episodes of on-ice violence in NHL history.

We meet Bruins teammates like the vicious Sprague Cleghorn, whom Hiam calls “the master of the clenched fist coming out of nowhere…the skate to the groin, the elbow to the head, the stick across the face…over the head…the butt end in the ribs.”

We meet mercurial owners and managers like Maple Leafs legend Conn Smythe who was inspired by a nameless sergeant in the First World War who was brave enough to put a fellow wounded soldier out of his misery with a bullet to the head on the battlefield. “I always admired that sergeant…for doing what had to be done.” Smythe would take that mentality and apply it to his career in the NHL, although he always had a soft spot for the rival Bruins’ Shore, even when Shore nearly killed one of his best players, Ace Bailey.

Of course, the Bailey incident is a major section in this book because it comes to define not only the violent nature of the sport at that time, but also the conflicted character of Shore, who at heart was a loner and whose hobby was playing the saxophone rather badly in his time off from scoring goals and terrorizing opponents.

In a game in Boston between the Bruins and the Leafs on December 12, 1933, Shore was hit by the Leafs Red Horner and slid into the boards in a daze. When he collected himself, the first Leaf player he saw was Bailey and Shore hit him hard, sending Bailey to the ice where his helmet-less head bounced sickeningly off the ice. Bailey went into convulsions and nearly died on several different occasions in the hospital before making a miraculous recovery that shocked even his doctors (although he would never play hockey again). Shore, who also got sucker punched by Horner after the hit and knocked unconscious, had to take his family into hiding while Bailey clung to life in the coming weeks. Shore expressed deep remorse for what happened while the media and fans decried the incident as just the latest in a league that fostered senseless violence (sound familiar NHL fans?). Shore quickly became a pariah.

Yet the league, and Shore, survived the crisis and there is a famous picture of Bailey and Shore shaking hands together prior to a benefit game for Bailey in Toronto, which would come to be known as the first All-Star game, a tradition that continues to this day.

Hiam covers this incident in great detail and it becomes the highlight of the book as he shares both the agony of the Bailey family and the sorrow that Shore felt for years afterward. It is the counterpunch to the somewhat lighthearted shenanigans that Hiam covers in the first part of the book. The sticks over the heads and the knockout fights seem brutal enough, but they also have a comic book quality to them because all those players, most notably Shore, would keep playing through incredible injuries that are hard to believe. The Bailey incident quickly puts that into perspective and a serious tone begins to emerge that wasn’t there before.

If there is one criticism I have with Hiam’s meticulously researched book, it is that he tends to spend too much time on the minutia of individual games. Some Stanley Cup matches seem to be described in almost a play-by-play manner and it slows the book down sometimes, when I suspect most readers are more interested in the off-ice moments that Hiam relays so well.

But that is a minor quibble. The stories and anecdotes you will remember from this book are worth a few small patches of dry reading.

The last quarter of the book deals with Shore’s post-playing career as the skinflint owner of the minor league Springfield Indians, where he did everything from park cars, paint the walls, trade players and suit up for the team himself. This is the Eddie Shore that people like Don Cherry and Brian Kilrea talk about all the time, having served under his iron rule for years while they chased the NHL dream in the minors.

Shore was a tyrant and specialized in treating his own player’s serious injuries with a form of Marquis de Sade inspired chiropractic techniques that often left the player in worse shape than when he went on to the cold metal table in the training room.

This part of the book is so funny and cruel that you end up wishing Hiam had written another 25 pages on it.

Overall, a fascinating read. Give it to your friend who is constantly going on about how violent the NHL is today. I suspect they will change their tune rather quickly once Hiam is done dispensing anecdotes like this quote from hockey legend Frank Patrick at the time of the Bailey injury:
“Cecil Blanchard of the Wanderers was the first to be cut down. I remember the blood just spouted out of his head when he was crashed deliberately by a stick. It was not a tap. The stick was brought down like a butcher swinging a cleaver. Then Alf Smith skated the width of the ice and cold-bloodedly carved down Hod Stuart. This wasn’t an accident. It was done deliberately. Stuart was knocked senseless on the ice. He was bleeding unconscious. If such a thing happened in hockey today the offender would be at once ruled out for life – and still critics talk of murderous hockey and all such rot. They haven’t seen anything.”
***

You can get this book at all the usual places. If local to Ottawa, try supporting a smaller independent book store that could really use your business. Here's a few from Ottawa Start.

MacLean's System Paying Off ... Zbad Decision Looms... And Other Notes

2011-10-25T22:38:00.002-04:00

Ottawa 3 Carolina 2 (SO)

If that's the kind of puck-possession, hard forechecking game that represents coach Paul MacLean's system executed at a high-level, then Senators fans are in for some wildly entertaining hockey this year, much like they watched tonight from their couches.

It wasn't easy, and they almost gave it away after a fluke goal off a weird bounce in front of the net and a weak penalty call against David Rundblad that gave the Canes some life. But MacLean was working this game like his career depended on it.

TSN started going to the bench more and more as the the third period went on because MacLean was pacing back and forth, barking instructions, and leaning to give one-on-one talks to stars like Jason Spezza and rookies barely hanging on to a roster spot like Mika Zibanejad. And he was playing them all in crucial parts of the game.

Notice how David Rundblad was sent right back out on the ice shortly after the Canes tied it up on the power-play off a holding penalty the young defenseman took (although he didn't realize it and sat on the bench for at least a full 60 seconds). Sure, it was a "soft" call, as TSN colour guy Mike Johnson termed it, but the coach had a lot of excuses not to play the rookie if he wanted them.

Yet Rundblad ended up playing a strong 17 minutes and Zibanejad clocked in at just under 15 with a couple of blocked shots to his credit and a safe 22 shifts.

Everyone was watching Zibanejad tonight and they pretty much saw what they've seen the past 8 games - a kid trying not to make a mistake, even if it's stopping him from creating offense. At least against Carolina he had a few plays where his feet were really moving through the zones and he was involved in a couple of good chances. He even won half of his faceoffs.

It's clear, to this writer at least, that Zibanejad should stay with Ottawa this season. Once he's here, watch him settle in and start playing a little looser. He's not going to get worn down. He's a kid and he's freaking huge. As long as the coaching staff protects him a little when needed, he'll have a good learning year in the NHL. Contracts are meant to be played, so worrying about burning a year off his entry deal shouldn't make or break his short-term future. They won't let a player like Zbad go anywhere when he's 25 or 26 anyways. Let him play. But ultimately GM Bryan Murray will make the right move. If he goes back to Sweden, he'll be playing in a good league. If he stays in Ottawa, he'll be that much better next season when they will really start to need his scoring and physical play. They can afford to carry a "student intern" for this season.

What else can you say about Jason Spezza? The guy is playing the best hockey of his life right now and he's doing it in the defensive zone as well. The line of Spezza, Milan Michalek and Colin Greening are proving to be too much to handle for the past few teams they've went up against and it should stay that way. Greening is like a bull out there and you can tell Michalek is gunning for 40 goals this year.

When a team has their best line going strong, all they need is the role players to do their thing, and guys like Chris Neil, Erik Condra and Zenon Konopka are all doing their specific jobs well right now.

After they both got booed during the home opener, Sergei Gonchar and Filip Kuba have shrugged it off while playing the way they're supposed to. Gonchar in particular is making the Senators power-play lethal, which is why he was brought to Ottawa in the first place.

You can tell this team is buying in when you see a little guy like Stephane Da Costa hustling on the fourth line and taking a big hit behind his own net to make a play in the third period. Nobody is backing off.

It must be good to see for Ottawa fans. Next up, Florida.

Black Aces Senators 3 Stars

1. Jason Spezza
2. Sergei Gonchar
3. Colin Greening

Honourable Mentions: Erik Karlsson, Craig Anderson, Chris Phillips, Erik Condra and Zenon Konopka (for the huge snipe)

Notes

TSN was raving over Jeff Skinner getting a scoring chance in the first period on a scrambly play, but they missed that Colin Greening was the real star of the clip, outmuscling Skinner and throwing him aside like a bag of garbage (which is sort of what those black Canes uni's look like, complete with the red pull ties).... It would have been interesting if the Canes had signed Jarkko Ruutu this summer to play with his brother Tuomo.....The linesmen in the NHL this year are getting out of control with how many guys they throw out of faceoffs. One of them threw Mika Zibanejad out in the second period and then got lippy with the rookie while pointing and waving his arms. Ridiculous. Just go back to doing what you do best, breaking up fights, getting in the way of pucks trying to clear the zone and blowing offside calls (I kid, I kid)..…You know, if you follow the right people on Twitter, you don't even have to watch the games anymore. Second by second play-by-play. "Spezza takes a shot. Misses net.", "Foligno moves his left leg, then his right."....

.....Geez, Zack Smith might as well just have the equipment guys cut the arms off his jersey so he doesn't waste so much time rolling them up to his elbows....Terry Murray, what are you thinking? How can you not let Jonathan Quick start and try to get his fourth shutout in a row, especially since the Kings have had a couple days rest in between games? Even if they win, it's still lame.....Now people are screaming about visors. I get it. Fine. But all these players have a choice to wear one or not. There is no more of that old "macho culture" that says they can't. If the NHLPA isn't concerned, then I'm not too worried about it either. I think all players should wear one, but I'm not out there on the ice playing for millions of dollars. They can do what they want. I'd sure as hell wear one. In fact, I'd probably opt for the cage and safety goggles (ala Al Arbour). To me, oversized goalie equipment is still a more important issue. Nobody wants to talk about that anymore, yet it adversely affects every single game that's played in the league. But you don't need me telling you what's wrong with the game. There are thousands out there who can do it more angrily than I can....

.... You know how you can tell TSN's Mike Johnson still has that hockey player mentality? After he interviewed both Brandon Sutter and Nick Foligno during breaks in play, he gave each of them a big pat on the arm when it was over. You don't see reporters doing that, but you sure as hell see players doing it every game. Johnson had a pretty good career, but he could have used a few more scars on the face. He's a little too pretty compared to guys like Ray Ferraro and Mike Peca, his ex-player peers currently getting paycheques from Bell media....Interesting to hear Coach MacLean say that Erik Condra has a chance to be "an elite penalty-killer" in the NHL. No kidding. Great hockey sense, great hustle, good wheels and a beauty number. As in #22, worn by a previous elite penalty-killer in Chris Kelly, now a Stanley Cup champ with the Bruins. Shaun Van Allen wasn't too bad either when he was sporting #22 in Ottawa....

.... Do you ever get the feeling that the “hockey blogosphere”, the message boards, the legions of angry people who comment on articles, or basically the entire internet is just a bunch of people working out their insecurities by trying to sound smarter than everyone else? There’s so much sniping, so much pouncing on other people’s opinions, so much downright nastiness that it makes you feel ashamed to even be a part of it sometimes. Why does everyone act like such assholes? When I read an article by someone like Don Brennan, or Bruce Garrioch or Ken Warren, I think “That was a decent read, there were a few good bits there” and then I look at the comments and people say the craziest, meanest, vilest things you could ever imagine. And you’re sitting there thinking “What are they talking about? How did they get this angry after reading the exact same words that I just read?” It wouldn’t matter what some writers say in any given article because there will always be ten people leaving comments like “You’re a fucking idiot, you suck, you don’t know shit, get a life etc.” I don’t get it. I go to the HF Boards once in a blue moon to get a feel for what people are talking about and I feel like I need to take a shower afterwards. People are just straight up mean when they are anonymous, and when they’re not anonymous, they’re usually just sarcastic and dismissive of everyone and everything. Don’t get me wrong, there are great bloggers, writers, tweeters, commenters (like some who say intelligent things on this site) out there. But they are greatly outnumbered by uninspired hacks just looking to make a name for themselves by flaming other people. It’s brutal out there. Watch yourself….

.....Have to admit it was great to see Jaromir Jagr break out his trademark salute after scoring his first goal of the season against the Leafs. The guy was considered a hot dog back in the day for doing it (and he had the opportunity to do it quite a bit), but it seems rather innocuous now, with Alex Ovechkin doing the “hot stick” routine and Arron Asham doing the “go to sleep” bit after a scrap. It’s so good for hockey that he’s back in the league….But no one will ever top Teemu Selanne’s “rifle blast” towards his airborne glove after passing Mike Bossy for the goal scoring rookie record back in 1992-93 when he potted his 54th of the season (he ended up with 76 - insane). Almost as good, but a lot less celebrated, was Nick Foligno’s reaction after his first career goal when he did the “Foligno leap” in tribute to his father Mike. The Dave “Tiger” Williams “riding the stick” is another classic. As is Bobby Orr’s famously modest reaction after he once skated through the entire Atlanta Flames team to score an easy wraparound goal. As Don Cherry loves to point out, Orr actually put his head down and didn’t celebrate because he didn’t want to embarrass the other team. Who doesn’t love that kind of stuff?

Five Worst Current NHL Uni's

2011-10-24T22:38:00.000-04:00

Actually, things aren't that bad.

NHL fans had to live through some truly ugly uniforms throughout the 90's and 00's but with the Heritage craze thankfully taking over, we are seeing less black, less navy blue and more of the bright primary colours that were popular before Gretzky went to LA and wore the new black and silver Kings theme that went on to sell a million jerseys and taking hockey fashion to boring depths never breached before.

That era is coming to an end but there are still some sweaters that would best go the way of the the Islanders Captain Highlander experiment.

I'm sure people will vehemently disagree with some of my choices, so let me have it if you feel that way.

Okay, here we go. Five worst uniforms in the NHL today:

1. Anaheim Ducks 3rd jersey

The Ducks regular uni's are merely boring, drab and uninspired. These are straight up brutal. Where do we start? First off, I like orange on uniforms if done the right way (Philly obviously). Bright colours look good on TV and nothing pops better in HD than orange. But this uni is a bit of a Frankenstein. Look at the socks. Looks like a failed home economics project where the clearly failing student randomly sewed together two different socks from two different teams. Why not just go with an orange stripe instead of going half and half?

Then there's the already dated vertical slashes under the arms, the horrid piping along the shoulders and the meaningless, utterly forgettable logo on the front. Why not just go back to the duck mask? At least that had character.

2. Dallas Stars home and away

What's the point here? They're barely even trying. There was a spate of uni's after the lockout that were so plain they looked like pajamas (the worst being the Oilers white sweaters which they have mercifully discontinued). These plain Stars uni's are almost impossible to discern on TV. The Stars have a decent logo but it's hanging out on the shoulder where no one can see it and their best colour - green - is now pretty much a complimentary shade.

You can't even make out any green on these black home duds. It's bad enough there's no stripe along the waist, but plain black pants? Who designed this crap? The Undertaker?

3. Colorado Avalanche home and away

The Avalanche actually have a good color scheme, which is distinctive in a league full of black, red, blue and more black. But you couldn't really come up with a worse design than this. I look at the shoulders and it reminds me of a bad spacesuit. How many sections is this jersey made of? The piping down the front makes this look like a barbecue apron. It's got that ugly neckline that makes the players look like they're wearing a pendant around their necks. There's not an inch of tradition here and that makes these look cheap and dated.

The home darks are only marginally better. That being said, their 3rd jerseys are among the best in the league. How do they not go with these full-time?

4. Edmonton Oilers 3rd jersey (former home jersey)

Again with the pajamas. Or practice jerseys. Whatever you want to call them. One of the best logos in the league on the one of the worst uniforms of the past decade. Half-stripes on the underside of the elbow, the dreaded apron piping, no stripes on the waist, zero colour. A sad time for the Oilers. Thankfully they have reverted back to their Gretzky-era uni's but for some reason they've kept this disaster as a 3rd. Their now extinct white counterparts were even more boring. Against the ice, it was like watching invisible men.

5. Los Angeles Kings 3rd jersey

The Kings uniforms have been a mess since 98-99 when they dropped their Gretzky-era black and silver (which I was never a huge fan of either) and adopted various versions of black and purple with the city's name spelled out on the waist. This dud has survived the war of attrition and will be worn a few times this year. The Kings have never been able to get their look dialed down and watching the Kings for the past decade has been depressing if you're a jersey hound. Looks like that is going to continue in a rather dumbed down black and silver uniform that still doesn't seem quite right to me (but at least they look kinda mean now).

To end on a bright note, the Kings do have one of the nicest heritage jerseys in the NHL with this beauty. Too bad we only get to see it a handful of times. When I see these, I think LA hockey - Marcel Dionne, Charlie Simmer, Bernie Nicholls.

Sens Not Alone In Arena Fails

2011-10-23T12:12:00.001-04:00

Yes, the antiquated and barely functioning scoreboard clock at Scotiabank Place is a local eyesore, but remember, it could always be worse. It could look like this:

This is what the scoreboard inside the Marine Midland Arena (now the First Niagara Centre, home of the Buffalo Sabres) looked like on November 16, 1996 after it fell from the rafters not long after the Sabres had finished practice for the day. Luckily no one was killed.

Cries for a new scoreboard have reached fever pitch in Ottawa, especially with the All-Star game in the building this year and early problems with the clock which has crapped out in at least two home games so far. It was basically inoperable for much of the third period in last night's game against Columbus and rink announcer Stuntman Stu had to keep announcing how much time was left. Yet the Senators organization refuse to say if and when a new one will be purchased and installed, leaving them open to all the wisecracks they deserve.

If they have concrete plans to replace it, why not just tell the fans that? They'll be much more patient and understanding if they know a new one is on the way. Right now, it's a closely guarded secret and I can't fathom why.

Meanwhile, fans grasp at made-up rumours and columnists take pot shots at the organization. It's a relatively small issue that is getting blown out of proportion and the team let it get that way by being more secretive than the people in charge of the Winnipeg Jets, who operate that club more like a cult than a pro sports franchise.

But at least the Senators eschew gimmicks like oil derrick's, which got stuck dangling over the Edmonton Oilers bench during a game last week and hung there during game action.

Oilers defenseman Ryan Whitney talked to Postmedia reporter Joanne Ireland and said "That was like a scene out of a movie. Like Final Destination."

Luckily for the Senators, they have also never had a mascot set himself on fire in front of thousands of horrified children. So they have that going for them.

Also, this has never happened:

Can anyone remember other arena/stadium mishaps? Let us know.

Andrew Ladd's Postcard Home

2011-10-20T23:17:00.002-04:00

Ottawa 4 Winnipeg 1

OK, everyone. Back on the bandwagon. There's lots of room and we have eggrolls.

As Denis Potvin said at the end of the game, during the players-only meeting immediately after the Flyers debacle on Tuesday, the most vocal guys in the room were Daniel Alfredsson, Chris Phillips and Jason Spezza, and then they went out and clearly led this team to a rare victory in the early going here.

It may not be Mark Messier in 1994 (here goes Milks with his Messier crap again), or even Mark Messier back in the 80's when he grabbed Reijo Ruotsalainen in the dressing room and threatened to send him back to Finland in a pine box if he didn't start working harder.

But it was good enough for October in Ottawa when the Sens badly needed a win to get the entire city off their backs for at least 24 hours of rare peace.

Craig Anderson looked like the confident goalie who pulled this team out of the basement last season when he came over from Colorado. He made 35 saves and was only beaten from the point on a double deflection that was shot by Dustin Byfuglien.

To say the Senators needed this win was a bit of an understatement. They were getting absolutely buried for two days on all the usual media outlets, being accused of blaming each other instead of taking responsibility and other such nonsense. Sounds like the entire team took responsibility in that meeting and it showed against the Jets.

Coach Paul MacLean had the whole team going and the ice times reflect that. Only Jesse Winchester, Stephane Da Costa and Peter Regin played less than 10 minutes and that's because Regin hurt his shoulder (yes, the bad one) and Winchester was playing his first game of the year after only a handful of practices taking body contact (thought he looked good as well).

Da Costa, despite getting some time on the first power-play unit, suddenly seems like he may be the odd man out if the Senators decide to keep Mika Zibanejad after the 9 game threshold. Da Costa can dangle as good as anyone on this team but he's been shrinking a little the past few games and you can almost smell a demotion coming. Regin's injury, if it's serious, may give him a reprieve but there are still too many bodies kicking around the roster and Nikita Filatov is going to have to get a chance to come up soon as well.

But if you don't like the weather... wait 5 minutes. We could be singing a different tune come Saturday. The stock of guys like Da Costa, Zibanejad and David Rundblad seem to fluctuate shift by shift because there have been so few games to really evaluate them. The most important thing to watch for is seeing if they are improving every game.

Zibanejad and Rundblad have both been getting better (especially Rundblad), but Da Costa might be regressing.

Now watch Da Costa rack a hat-trick against Columbus.

Black Aces Senators 3 Stars

1. Craig Anderson
2. Milan Michalek
3. Jason Spezza

Honourable Mentions: Chris Phillips, Erik Karlsson, Colin Greening and Daniel Alfredsson.

NOTES

Anne Murray was in the Kanata rink tonight, wearing the Senators heritage jersey. It's not exactly on par with the great Neil Young wearing the Jets jersey as he was pictured recently, but what is? ....Colin Greening is going to be scary good in a year or two when he really gets a proper feel for the league. It's actually strange to see a power forward on the Senators. This guy should have been a Bruin. Luckily for Ottawa fans, he's going to find a home here in town for a long time.... What will the Senators do in 5 years for their 25th anniversary? Will we get another retro jersey, maybe with the original 2-D logo? Have you ever seen a grown man beg?.... I thought it would bother me, but I don't mind the player numbers on the front of the helmet..... Don't look now, but Chris Phillips is playing pretty damn good. Played 22 minutes in a shutdown role and got more physical as the game ramped up. The old cliche - when you don't hear his name a lot, he's playing solid..... Haven't seen much of the Jets this season other than their first game, but Alexander Burmistrov is a lot of fun to watch. Sometimes there's nothing better in hockey than to watch a player who can really skate like that. Still, he's no Sergei Fedorov....They should make Canadian postcards with that image of Andrew Ladd sitting on the bench late in the 3rd with a bloody, swollen, broken nose and a tube stuck up one nostril. That's just as great to watch as a perfect skating stride. Anyone remember Oilers captain Jason Smith getting stitched up while standing in the hallway just behind the bench in the playoffs? Hockey is the only sport in the world where you'll see that kind of dedication (Some still think Curt Schilling put that blood on his sock himself. Not me, Sox fans, not me.).

….It’s time to pull out that old chestnut, “The 2006-2007 Senators started real slowly and look how good they did by the end of the year”. Same thing could happen right? Guys? Anybody?.... At this time last season, the Sens had a terrible record of 1-4-1 but then went on to win 8 of their next 11 games, including a 4 game winning streak in early November. The year they went to the final they were 2-4-0 by October 20 and went on a 5 game losing streak from Oct. 28 to Nov. 8, the last loss being against the Atlanta Thrashers, now your Winnipeg Jets….

… Is Zdeno Chara’s old number 3 retired in Ottawa? The only player to wear it after the Big Z departed in 2006 is the long forgotten Lawrence Nycholat for 3 games back in 2008. If Mark Borowiecki makes the team next season, he should snag it. Or else maybe big Eric Gryba will…. Who will be the first player to claim #12 after Mike Fisher’s departure? It’s a damn good number. Here’s a trivia question: Which player has worn the highest jersey number in team history? Answer will be buried somewhere below.….Olli Jokinen of the Flames says he now has a personal “mental coach” who he calls before every game to help him prepare, as reported by Steve MacFarlane of the Calgary Sun. I’m not making fun of it, because I’m sure in 10 years every team will have a full-time “mental coach” (as opposed to mental coaches like Mike Keenan and John Tortorella), but can’t you just picture poor old Olli on the phone to a guy sitting at a desk reading a newspaper who is distractedly muttering “Yes, Olli, you can do it. Just go to a happy place, Olli. Just tap it in. Just..tap…it …in.”….

…Is this the year the Blue Jackets finally give up on Steve Mason? Maybe they need to get him Olli’s mental coach. Or maybe they should just fit the management team out for straight jackets. At some point the team will have to trade Rick Nash just out of common human decency. Or maybe they should just move across state to become the second incarnation of the Cleveland Barons. Every pro league needs a Cleveland….Trivia Answer: Stan Neckar, who wore #94 for a couple years in the mid-90’s. The next two highest numbers are Mika Zibanejad, currently wearing #93 and Alexandre Daigle who wore #91 (Daigle switched to #9 in 1998 when GM Pierre Gauthier decided that high numbers were no longer allowed in Ottawa because it set individuals off from the team. Mike Comrie was the first player to have a number over 70 after Daigle and that wasn’t until 2007. Nicky Foligno and Jarkko Ruutu soon followed suit with #71 and #73 respectively)...

…Just when I write something that says the Hockey News needs to diversify their editorial outlook - i.e. a writer who actually likes the more physical aspect of hockey - the latest issue features an article by Ryan Kennedy who goes on unashamedly about his love of fighting in the NHL. So I was proven wrong right away on that one. Figures. I happen to agree with Kennedy, and believe that fans shouldn’t be ashamed to let people know they like fighting in the NHL. That’s the game we grew up with, and it’s still a part of the game today. You may not be with the majority on the issue anymore (and you will get castigated for it in the NHL’s modern McCarthy era), but it doesn’t mean you’re wrong. Enjoy it while it lasts…..

....Shane Hnidy, who is now doing radio work for the Jets after winning a Stanley Cup with Boston last year, is just the latest ex-Senator to find a job with the media upon retiring. He joins Jason York, Shaun Van Allen, Shean Donovan and Todd White, all of whom cover the Senators in various capacities. Ron Tugnutt also did a little work with Hockey Night In Canada a few years ago. One ex-Senator who we will likely never see doing media work? I'll put my money on ex-coach Jacques Martin. Wouldn't be surprised if way, way down the road we see Nick Foligno stepping behind a microphone.....Can't deny it. The Jets uniforms are incredible. I didn't like the logo when it was first revealed but it's grown on me, and to see it on the uniforms gives it a whole new dimension. I wouldn't say they're top 5 in the league, but they might be in the top 10. Just imagine how wild it will be in a few years when the Jets inevitably cash in on the old Jets look and reveal some kind of new heritage jersey like the Senators did this year. Fans will lose their freaking minds and empty their bank accounts. The Jets are just sitting on a goldmine and they know it. No need to mine it so quickly. When regular jersey sales lag, drop the heritage sweater and count the dollars.

Jets Fly Into Town For First Time Since 1995

2011-10-19T21:51:00.002-04:00

The last time the Ottawa Senators faced a team from Winnipeg at home was when they played the original Jets (now the Phoenix Coyotes) on Wednesday November 22 1995 at the old Ottawa Civic Centre at Lansdowne Park, almost two months to the day before the Senators moved permanently to the Palladium in Kanata.

And thanks to You Tube, there's a whole package of in-depth highlights from this 3-1 Jets victory in pretty good quality.

For the Senators, we get views of the doomed Dave "Sparky" Allison behind the bench along with his assistant coach Pierre McGuire (who is just as bald as he is today). We see signs that say "Dump Sexton Now", referring of course to Randy Sexton, the beleaguered GM at the time who would get replaced by Pierre "The Ghost" Gauthier not long after this game. You get to see Daniel Alfredsson in his rookie year when he was wearing that brutal helmet. You get Radek Bonk, you get Alexandre Daigle (who Greg Millen says was "sulking" under recently departed coach Rick Bowness), and you get Don Beaupre in nets. For the Jets you get Nikolai Khabibulin, Alexei Zhamnov, Dave Manson, Shane Doan and of course Teemu Selanne.

Now, here's a question. Which is the better team? The Senators from November 1995 who would go on to finish last in the NHL with 18 wins, 59 losses and 5 ties for 41 points, or this year's Senators?

Tough question.

Senators Running Out Of Answers Already

2011-10-19T12:15:00.001-04:00

Already?

I’m already writing a post about this?

There’s not even snow on the ground yet and the Ottawa Senators have the stink of a team headed for local infamy.

A rebuilding team playing poorly is one thing, but to get blown out on home ice twice in a row by scores of 7-1 and 7-2 must be excruciating for both the fans and the organization.

After all, this is not just a team full of kids learning the pro game. There is a solid core of veterans on this club who know how to win. To be this bad, this early, defies even the longest of odds.

Yet the fans in this city said they were on board for the rebuild. They’ll be expected to hold up their end of the bargain and keep filling the rink every night and buying that merchandise and booing their own players. So far, so good on all those fronts.

But how did the Senators get to this point this fast? It’s like watching Clark Griswold on the saucer sled in Christmas Vacation. Or maybe more like Cousin Eddie emptying his portable toilet into the sewer while drinking a beer. “The shitter was full.” This has nothing to do with the story at hand, but what the hell. Nonsensical Christmas Vacation quotes are fine paragraph filler for highly paid pros like myself.

It’s easy to point to the goaltending… so let’s go ahead and do that.

Craig Anderson and Alex Auld have been brutal, and there’s no way to sugar coat that. When either of them lets in a softie, the whole team deflates and you can quickly bet that three or four more goals will follow in short order.

The one major hope going into this season was that the goaltending would keep them in games while the kids learned on the fly. That could still happen, but how often does a goalie just flip a switch and play lights out? Not very often. It looks like Anderson and Auld are going to have to build their confidence up slowly and that could mean some more long nights in the short term.

Meanwhile, Robin Lehner and Nikita Filatov lurk in the minors, waiting for their phone call.

Too soon to mention Lehner?

Probably, but losing this badly can really force a GM’s hand. The one thing Lehner doesn’t lack is confidence. All he’s said this year is that he’s ready to play in the NHL, even when nobody believes him. There’s no way he will supplant Anderson permanently this year, but does he get a call to play a few games if both NHL goalies keep rolling downhill?

I think it’s possible because the Senators have a lot of cap room to play with and can afford to sit someone they’re not too happy with.

To be fair to Anderson and Auld, we are not at that point yet, but it’s not as far off as we might assume.

Out West, Cory Clouston may be allowing himself a secret little smile.

Yet, Sens fans can be thankful they will be watching Erik Karlsson, David Rundblad, Mika Zibanejad and Jared Cowen grow up in this town for the next ten years. All of them will likely be stars, if Karlsson isn’t one already.

And you can insert your Nail Yakupov jokes here as well.

Positive Signs From Rundblad in Loss To Caps... Plus Weekend Notes

2011-10-15T22:28:00.002-04:00

Washington 2 Ottawa 1

Another tough loss for the already desperate Ottawa Senators, but if you want you can count that one as a "moral victory" because they played a near perfect road game but got beaten by a better goalie in Tomas Vokoun.

True, they came out sluggish again in the first frame and still looked somewhat shell-shocked from the Colorado disaster on Thursday night, but you could see some structure starting to come into their game. The fact they took the play to the Capitals in the last two periods by outskating and outshooting them seems to bode well. Even if the Senators are going to lose games, they should be fairly entertaining to watch if they skate like that the majority of the time.

Some positives for Ottawa? Right away the name David Rundblad comes to mind.

Thankfully Paul MacLean discarded the seven defenseman rotation he experimented with against Colorado (ironically that would have helped them tonight because Sergei Gonchar left after the 1st after getting hit with a hard shot). On Thursday, it seemed that Rundblad and Brian Lee took turns taking shifts with Chris Phillips and you have to wonder how a defenseman can get a rhythm going in that kind of scenario. Tonight, MacLean scratched Lee in favour of Rundblad and it paid off.

With the exception of one tough shift where he gave the puck away to Alex Ovechkin's line which hemmed the Senators into their zone, Rundblad played his best game with the Senators so far and sometimes made it look easy out there. There were two or three hard passes right onto the sticks of breaking out forwards through the neutral zone that just left me shaking my head. His panic level is basically a flatline and he can glide with the puck almost as fast as some can skate with their heads down.

So far it's just the little things you notice from Rundblad and he has yet to make that sort of defining play that lets you know he's ready to roll here for the rest of the season. But if MacLean keeps playing #7 regularly in the next few weeks, I have a feeling we'll see that sort of moment from the young defenseman.

As for the rest of the Senators, they can at least take the fact they should have won this game if not for great goaltending from Tomas Vokoun. That's not very inspiring for fans, but after the Colorado shellacking, it's a small step forward for this team.

Their veterans on defense played a lot better tonight, in particular Chris Phillips who has been the best of the veteran lot anyways. Erik Karlsson was the best player on the ice tonight for Ottawa with MacLean playing him a whopping 27-plus minutes, about 3 more than Phillips. Rundblad played just over 17 minutes picking up an assist and going +1 on the night.

Next up for Ottawa is Philly at home on Tuesday. Philly looks loaded and ready to go this season. Jaromir Jagr still has that sneaky fast shot and great hands, Claude Giroux is sickening to watch and even Sean Couturier fits in well (from just the two games I've seen, mind you). They are going to be scary good if Ilya Bryzgalov lives up to the hype. The hope for Ottawa in this one might be just to survive and keep playing that fast puck chasing game, even if the results don't show up right away.

Black Aces Senators 3 Stars

1. Erik Karlsson
2. Daniel Alfredsson
3. Milan Michalek

Honourable Mentions: David Rundblad, Chris Phillips, Jason Spezza and Chris Neil.

WEEKEND NOTES

....CBC Colour commentator Greg Millen brought up a frightening alternate reality. If the 2004-2005 lockout hadn't taken place, there would have been a good chance that the rebuilding Capitals would have ended up with the first overall pick, something I had never thought about before until he mentioned it. Which also means Sidney Crosby would have been centering Alex Ovechkin for the past six years. But if you want to play that game, you can go all the way back to Wayne Gretzky, who was put on a plane by Indianapolis Racer's owner Nelson Skalbania in 1978 and didn't know if he was going to land in Edmonton or Winnipeg because negotiations for his trade were ongoing while he was in the air. The plane touched down in Edmonton and the rest is history.....

....Tough thing for a guy like Don Cherry to swallow some pride and apologize on Coach's Corner tonight. After he did so, he went right to the video of Arron Asham's apology for the unfortunate hot-dogging against the Capitals. Wonder if Asham's sincere apology inspired Grapes to do the same thing? Or it may be the fact that everyone in the hockey world with an axe to grind against Grapes took their opportunity the past two weeks, some of them just as viciously as Cherry went after Stu Grimson et al. Hopefully that puts an end to that particular sideshow. Either way you take it, hockey is pretty much a huge bummer right now with everyone sniping at each other and at the game itself. Everybody wants to prove themselves right which means proving someone else wrong. And that kind of game usually gets ugly. Like I said in a tweet earlier today, "How did hockey become so much like politics in the past few years? Anger, cynicism, pushing agendas, slagging our great game. What a drag." I truly believe the NHL game is fantastic just as it is, despite the fact that nobody seems to be happy with it anymore. Over-the-line violent incidents are still very rare, as they always have been since at least the 70's. They will always happen in such a fast, physical game with everyone running on adrenalin. But now every incident seems to start a flame war and it's very easy to get sucked into it all and forget just how great this game is in the first place. There's no doubt in my mind that someone like Don Cherry goes overboard once in a while simply because his passion for the game is unsurpassed. A guy like that sees the game he's dedicated his entire life to, being picked apart on every newscast, on every radio show and in every newspaper. He came back swinging because that's what Don Cherry does. That's why people watch him. But that invited others to swing back and out came the pathetic "old man" insults and the usual "caveman" jibes. But I'm telling you, sometimes I'd rather stand by someone who's in the wrong occasionally but who clearly cares for the game rather than side with the smug and cynical folks whose only passion is to tell you how awful the NHL is. Because I know they're wrong every single time.....

...Good on Todd White, working the pre-game show on the Team 1200, for not taking the bait and burying Sean Avery, whom he was a teammate with for a short time in Manhattan. White said Avery was a friend to him and couldn't say a bad thing about the controversial winger, even after he was asked by Bruce Garrioch more than once. White also threw doubt on Garrioch's info that Avery operated on an island in that dressing room. It's always good to hear from real players who are in those dressing rooms instead of listening to speculation from people removed from the situation... Speaking of listening to the players, Brooks Laich of the Washington Capitals let his thoughts be known on the current concussion protocol in the NHL, and although the media and the bloggers have already criticised and disregarded his "outburst", it's always worth listening to the players who actually put their necks on the line out there. Not sure if this is the view of more players than just Laich (we know that Sidney Crosby certainly doesn't feel this way, and for good reason), but this is what he said if you missed it: "I really don't care about that awareness crap. To be honest, I'm sick of hearing all this talk about concussions and about the quiet room. This is what we love to do. Guys love to play, they love to compete, they want to be on the ice. How do you take that away from someone? We accept that there's going to be dangers when we play this game. We know that every time we get dressed. I don't know, sometimes it just feels like we're being babysat a little too much. We're grown men and we should have a say in what we want to do." There are certain segments of the media who are very patronizing towards players, thinking they know more about the game than the people who actually play it. It's always refreshing to hear a player speak his mind, even if you don't agree with what he's saying...

....A lot of people seem to be upset with Nicky Filatov's demotion to Bingo. I was somewhat surprised as well, thinking he didn't get much of a chance. But maybe it's exactly what Filatov needs in order to get his confidence back, as backwards as that may seem at first. If he has some strong games down there (and he's off to a fast start with a multi-goal game on Friday), he'll get called up very quickly and by the end of the year this may all seem like a minor speed wobble on the way to a redemptive season. A few games in Bingo didn't hurt Erik Karlsson any either. It can only help Filatov and the kid seems to have accepted the decision in a mature way. The one thing going against Filatov in this town is that some of the media and a lot of the fanbase simply don't have much patience for skilled players, especially of the Russian variety. Don't shoot the messenger folks, because you know it's true. Ultimately, that says more about those people than it does about the player in question, but Filatov, rightly or wrongly, is going to have to work harder than anyone else to erase that stigma. He has a tough road ahead, but not an impossible one by any means.....

... Just wondering – is there a hockey fan who doesn’t read the Puck Daddy blog every single day? It’s become more than just essential reading to keep up with day-to-day hockey news. It has clearly replaced The Hockey News, once known as the Bible Of Hockey, as the premier source for info on the game. I still pick up a copy of The Hockey News every week from the newsstand and read it cover to cover, but their website seems stuck somewhere in 2004. Don’t get me wrong, the Hockey News employs some good writers, but I find they all have nearly identical views on the game with nary a dissenting voice in sight. The Hockey News has always been known as an entity strongly against fighting and other hockey violence well before the rancorous debate flared up this past summer and they have pushed that agenda with intelligent writing over the years by a lot of different people (Adam Proteau has a new book coming out on that very subject). I’m not saying they need to hire a ballbreaker like Don Cherry to start pouring gasoline on the fire but some more editorial balance might work for them. That is one thing Puck Daddy does well. They have hawks, doves, and every animal in between. There’s a lighter tone on Puck Daddy that feels natural, but it doesn’t stop them from covering the more serious issues with integrity. The Hockey News does the serious stuff better than most, but when they try to do “quirky” bits, it feels somewhat forced, like your grandfather showing you the Three Stooges and saying “this is what real comedy is all about”. I get the feeling a lot of people don’t even read the print version of The Hockey News anymore and that’s a shame because it’s still a top notch magazine. But it is clear Puck Daddy is running away with the ball game right now….

....Count me in as someone who strongly favours a Detroit move into the Eastern Conference. In fact, they should go directly into the Northeast, pushing Buffalo where they belong, into the Atlantic with the rest of their New York State cousins (or you could push the Bruins into the Atlantic and try to catch some of that Boston/New York buzz that works so well in baseball).That would then push the Penguins into the Southeast where they can battle the Caps six times a year instead of four. The one rivalry that would be diminished would be the Pens/Flyers Pennsylvania feud, but is that really as good as the Pens- Caps rivalry that has been going on since the 90’s? Now that Alex Ovechkin and Sid Crosby are locked into their respective franchises for years and years to come, that rivalry can only get better. Time for the West to stand on their own without the Red Wings as an anchor tenant. There are also teams in the East who could use the extra gate revenue when the Wings come to town, Ottawa being one of them. The Wings have certainly paid their dues longer than the Predators or the Blue Jackets. Plus, who wouldn’t like to see more Original Six games, such as the old Wings/Leafs rivalry? Boston vs. Detroit six times a year? Amazing. The latest rumblings are that the Wings are willing to stay in the West if their travel is strictly curtailed, but that seems like a mediocre solution at best. They’ll still get dinged with travel in the playoffs. Hopefully the NHL makes the sexier move and puts the Wings back where they belong – in their own time zone….

Enjoy the rest of your weekend.

Thursday Night Gong Show

2011-10-13T22:55:00.003-04:00

Colorado 7 Ottawa 1

No need to pile on any further.

Any number of outlets can tell you just how brutal and embarrassing tonight's bulldozer job was. I was at the rink for the first time this season and I can't remember a more subdued crowd since The Eagles put everyone in the building to sleep back in October of 2003.

Can't take any positives out of tonight except for some handsome jerseys and some vastly improved eats at the busy concession stands (I think everyone in my section ate a smoked meat sandwich in the first period, which unfortunately made the place reek like a dutch oven).

The Senators just need to go out and drown a few cold ones tonight and forget all about it.

Just one question still nags at the back of your head: Why did Paul MacLean change a winning line-up, especially after the team seemed to come together in an emotional win against the Wild?

It's seems convenient to ask that question amidst the ashes of Thursday night, but weren't many asking themselves that question well before puck-drop?

Perhaps Friday will bring us some answers. Or just more indigestion.

Kuba - Meszaros Trade 3 Years Later

2011-10-12T22:53:00.001-04:00

Back in August 2008, the Sens swapped young defenseman Andrej Meszaros to Tampa Bay for Filip Kuba, Alexandre Picard and a first round pick . Some thought dealing a young d-man like Meszaros was a mistake (like myself) and others felt Bryan Murray robbed Tampa Bay blind. Meszaros did struggle with the Lightning, some of it due to injuries, but he's found a new lease on life in Philly while Kuba has regressed in the Ottawa organization after a strong start, also a result of injuries.

Just for comparisons sake, here's how the two have stacked up statistically since the deal (as of Oct. 12, including Mesz's game Wed. night where he got the game winning goal against Vancouver):

GP
Kuba: 191
Mesz: 217

G
Kuba: 9
Mesz: 17

A
Kuba: 76
Mesz: 51

PTS
Kuba: 85
Mesz: 68

PPG
Kuba: 5
Mesz: 6

Plus/Minus
Kuba: -26
Mesz: +15

Who got the better of the deal if we take Picard and the draft pick (which the Senators sent to the Islanders along with Dean McAmmond for Chris Campoli and Mike Comrie) out of the equation?

Kuba has significantly more points but is trending downwards while Meszaros is trending up. Kuba's cap hit is 3.7 million in the last year of his deal while Meszaros carries a 4 million tag for a couple more seasons. Money is basically even and so are the stats when it all shakes out in the end. The plus/minus category is more an indication of weak Senators teams and one year in Philly on a great team for Mesz. Plus/Minus is the most overrated statistic for defenseman anyways. Good defenseman on bad teams will get buried in that category. Even good d-men on good teams can get burned by it. Nicklas Lidstrom was -2 last year and won the Norris.

But I guess it comes down to who you would rather have on your blueline right now. I'm guessing 29 out of 30 GM's would pick Meszaros because at 25 years old he's just beginning to enter his prime years. Okay, more like 30 out of 30 but we shouldn't expect Bryan Murray to throw himself under the bus.

You could say Ottawa won this deal in the short term because Kuba excelled while Meszaros struggled. But now let's take into account the other components of the deal. Picard was a bust on the blueline (he was a throw-in anyways) and the first rounder was essentially wasted because Comrie struggled in his second stint in Ottawa and Campoli can only be described as a disappointment before he was shuttled off to Chicago for depth player Ryan Potulny and a second rounder.

Yet Murray used that second rounder in a package to get Detroit's first in 2011 with which they chose winger Matt Puempel, someone who the organization is very high on.

Exhausted yet?

I still think it was a mistake to trade a young player like Meszaros instead of paying him, but Ottawa was under a different kind of salary-cap pressure than they are facing now. Hockeywise, the deal doesn't look great (but it's not a landslide either), yet whoever said modern trades were about hockey? It's all salary-cap, probably for the rest of our hockey watching days. If it wasn't Meszaros gone, somebody else would have been dealt.

But if Kuba has a good year and the Sens make the playoffs, or if he can get some more value for this team on the trade market....and... if Puempel turns out to be the goal-scorer this team thinks he will be down the line.... well, this saga will be far from over.

This deal will end up being so convoluted and open to interpretation, it will make the movie Inception look like Ernest Goes To Camp.

Chris Neil And That Old Time Hockey, Eh

2011-10-11T23:33:00.004-04:00

Ottawa 4 Minnesota 3 (SO)

Hell of a game. Hell of a night.

The Senators again displayed a gutsy come from behind effort that now seems to be some kind of DNA trait that wasn't there last season. Maybe coach Paul MacLean stamped it onto them by some of the hardest practices these players have ever seen, or maybe it's the young legs, but whatever it is, the Senators are suddenly more tenacious than Rudy Ruettiger.

But it wasn't easy yet again. This time the Senators were fighting a home rink that was in a peculiarly nasty mood, booing their own players, booing Dany Heatley, even booing the mayor (although that might have just been the OC Transpo riders - don't blame them). They dominated the Wild but the breaks were going against them and the mood got even blacker as Sergei Gonchar got singled out by the crowd on the power-play, making things worse for the team than they already were (more about the ugly reception the fans gave Gonchar and Filip Kuba later).

But the comeback was started by Chris Neil who looked like he was born just to play in this one game. It was incredible. Neil began by yapping with Heatley off a faceoff in the Wild zone near the start of the second period. Then he delivered a punishing hit to Clayton Stoner that would have topped Dion Phaneuf's stapling of Stephane Da Costa if it was only in the middle of the ice instead of behind the net. One of Neil's best hits in a long time:

He kept after Heatley all game, backchecking on a Wild rush so he could be shoulder to shoulder with Heatley and sent him to the ice amidst the roar of the entire rink. He took a handful of other runs at #15, cut the Minnesota lead to 3-2 with a huge goal that gave the Senators life, and finished +2 with 2 points and easily led the team with 8 recorded hits (they must have missed about five).

Something truly feels different about this spirited team, if only because they actually won a game in a shootout and didn't choke when faced with adversity. As TSN panned both benches before Milan Michalek took the first shot, the Wild looked nervous but the Senators were loose. Like some kind of miracle that these eyes have yet to see, all three Senators shooters scored, with Daniel Alfredsson capping it off and raising his arms in triumph as he glided along the boards.

Like I said, unbelievable game. If you saw it, you know exactly what I mean. It's way, way too early to call it a turning point, but that was a huge game for the Senators to win.

Black Aces Senators 3 Stars

1. Chris Neil
2. Colin Greening
3. Nick Foligno

Honourable Mentions: Jason Spezza, Peter Regin, Filip Kuba, Chris Phillips and Stephane Da Costa.

NOTES

...David Rundblad looked solid in his first NHL game, playing a surprising 20:59. He'll likely get a chance to stay in the lineup ahead of Brian Lee because he did some good things offensively. Erik Karlsson played over 28 minutes and just kept getting stronger after a weak opening. Peter Regin played a strong game, skating well and going 10-7 in the faceoff dot. No chance he comes out of the lineup for either Bobby Butler or Nikita Filatov. His line with Nick Foligno and Chris Neil looks like a keeper....

...One thing we don't miss about Dany Heatley - the constant hoarking on the bench, especially those deep ones where it looks like he's about to hurl....Can't get over the fact Ottawa fans would take the time to lustily boo two of their own players - Sergei Gonchar and Filip Kuba - during player introductions. Real classy guys. You got 'em good. Yup. Embarrassed them to the max. Their families were likely watching. Hope you feel better about yourselves.....Good to hear Dean Brown ask coach Paul MacLean if any player "filled his role better than Chris Neil in the first two games". MacLean was quick with the praise, as expected. Neil doesn't get much credit for the role he plays but when he's doing his job well, and that's pretty much every game, he's one of the most effective in the league. He can fight. He can play. He's a leader. He sticks up for his teammates. He's entertaining. Can't ask for much more than that....

....Tons of awkwardness all around. Home team players getting booed mercilessly, Mayor Jim Watson gets booed, Heatley takes a spill during warmups and gets a big reaction from the fans, and then TSN shows a clip from practice of coach Paul MacLean going down hard to the ice on his back. Probably didn't help his mood much.....You have to wonder if Nikita Filatov's play in the first two games really warranted his scratching, or was it something else? Practice habits? I don't pretend to know but he seemed to be giving an honest effort in the games, even if he wasn't creating a lot of chances. We've all heard about MacLean screaming at Filatov and fellow healthy scratch Bobby Butler in practice the other day. Maybe there's something to that, maybe not. But I thought he played okay overall. Maybe that's the difference with MacLean. Okay isn't good enough anymore....

....As if the Sens don't get teased enough about their antiquated scoreboard, it begins to repeatedly malfunction at the start of the second period and TSN's Gord Miller has a laugh and says "Shades of the old Civic Centre". Isn't that just fitting with a dozen or so original Senators on hand....Some good news. No Nickelback goal song this year at the rink. The bad news: Nickelback is still writing songs. No one is safe yet....

...Great interview with former Sens GM and club founder Randy Sexton on the Team 1200 pre-game show where Sexton retold the old story about how Bruce Firestone, Cyril Leeder and himself were having a cold one in the locker room in 1988 after a beer league game when Firestone said they should try to bring an NHL team to Ottawa in any future expansion. Sexton said he and Leeder spit their beer out on the floor at the idea, which was somewhat similar to my reaction when I heard they had suceeded. I was too young to spit out any beer, but my jaw hit the floor and so did my father's. Haven't been able to shut it since.....It would be sort of interesting if Sexton some day made his way back into the Senators organization in a role similar to what he has in Pittsburgh right now as Assistant Director of Amateur Scouting. Stranger things have happened. Certainly, Sexton is a much more rounded hockey man than he was when given the thankless task of building the Senators post-Mel Bridgman..... Speaking of scouting, I've been reading Shane Malloy’s 2011 book “The Art Of Scouting”, and in it he says the consensus among most NHL general managers and directors of amateur scouting is you have to get two NHL players from every entry draft. Just two from seven rounds in total. Doesn’t seem like a lot but some teams have a hell of a time doing it. Malloy quotes Mike Futa, an L.A. Kings scout, as saying “It’s the only job where you can be right 15 percent of the time and be ruled a Hall of Famer (..) and if you hit on 2.5 home runs every draft, you are par with some of the best scouts ever.” If we quickly apply that gold standard to the Senators, we can see that they already have one player from the 2011 draft in the NHL – Mika Zibanejad, and some very likely prospects to do so as well such as Matt Puempel, Shane Prince and Stefan Noesen. Their 2010 draft, where they only chose four players is not looking as good but Mark Stone will probably play in the next two to four years. They also dealt their first-rounder to the Blues to grab David Rundblad who made his NHL debut tonight and looks to have a good career ahead of him. The 2009 draft has already seen Jared Cowen and Robin Lehner play some games. They’ve used three players from 2008, two of them regulars in Erik Karlsson and Zack Smith (Patrick Wiercioch being the other prospect on the bubble). In 2007, the last year of John Muckler’s reign as GM, the Senators again only had four picks and the only one to get any games is Jim O’Brien but he may not end up being an NHL regular at any point. Before 2007, every Senators draft produced at least two players who took part in at least one NHL game, either with Ottawa or with another team. Not all of them became regulars, but they made the show. That’s an impressive record….

…. I don’t know what it is about Brian Lee, but the fans in this city have fallen head over heels with the young defenseman and have nearly elevated him to martyr status. When fans first heard rumours that Lee would be a healthy scratch for the match against the Wild, the boards and the blogs lit up with indignation, as if they themselves were somehow the victims of a terrible injustice. Lee is a solid 6th or 7th defenseman on the periphery of being a regular. He may play better than Sergei Gonchar or Chris Phillips during any given game, but overall he can’t provide what those two can when at their best. It won’t be permanent. He’ll play plenty of games for the Senators this season and contribute where he can. If he keeps playing solid when he gets the chance, he'll force the coaching staff's hand. To get so upset about it strikes me as completely bizarre and unwarranted. Same thing happened with Martin Gerber and Jonathan Cheechoo. This town seems to love the underdog, which is admirable, but we’re beginning to lose perspective here….

….Wouldn’t it be something if Semyon Varlamov proved to be a better number one goalie this season than Tomas Vokoun? It’s entirely possible considering Vokoun is 35 and Varlamov is just 23. You can also imagine Varlamov giving Colorado that same surprise goaltending Craig Anderson did a few years ago and sneaking into the playoffs. Washington was so lauded for their off-season moves that you know at least one of them is not going to pan out as well as the pundits predicted. Not saying it’s going to be the Vokoun deal, but you never know. The hockey world has a weird way of evening things out after all the hype has died down….Speaking of the Avalanche (still a terrible name, though not as bad as the “Wild”), if Milan Hejduk had played his career in the East with those same numbers, he’d be a household name in hockey. Instead, he keeps on scoring goals year after year in near anonymity (11 seasons with 20 or more)….. Columbus just can’t afford to miss the playoffs again, not after being so aggressive in the summer. This team desperately needs something positive to happen to them. But they’re 0-3 to start the year. Uh oh…..

Sens Get Cleaned Out, Pick Themselves Back Up

2011-10-08T23:09:00.005-04:00

Two games into the season, the Senators are both terrible and wildly entertaining as they staged big comebacks in both matches and almost caught the panicking Leafs on Saturday night. Ultimately they came up short again and are sitting at 0-2 going into their home opener.

Okay, cancel the parade but don't cancel your cable package. It looks like every night has the potential to be either a massive train derailment or a fight filled, goal scoring frenzy. Or both. Quite likely both.

Even when the Senators were getting absolutely hammered by the Leafs in the first two periods, guys like Chris Neil and Zenon Konopka basically went to war in order to salvage some pride for their team. Konopka came as advertised in his first Senators game - yapping, fighting, selling penalties, winning faceoffs and ....yapping a little more.

Neil unfairly got an instigator and a misconduct penalty when he schooled Luke Schenn near the benches in the second period. Neil was going for a change when Schenn stepped into his path on purpose but clearly got more than he could handle. Refs must have felt sorry for Schenn and tossed Neil, leading to the Leafs scoring on the ensuing power-play. Things were hitting rock bottom rather quickly for the Senators, just like it did against the Wings on Friday.

Dion Phaneuf delivered what will probably be the biggest hit of the year on waterbug Stephane Da Costa. The rookie could have lain there like a shattered human being, wishing he was back in Paris strolling along the Seine, but to his credit he got right back up, took a bit of ribbing and probably some short advice from Daniel Alfredsson on the bench. The cameras clearly caught him mouthing the words "my fault" and letting slip a smile.

If the NHL can keep those kinds of hits in the game and eliminate the "Cooke on Savard" type disasters that repulsed so many, both players and fans will certainly be satisfied on both sides of the violence debate.

More encouraging news was relayed by CBC reporter Elliotte Friedman on the pre-game show when he said both Brendan Shanahan and his assistant Rob Blake went back and viewed the Scott Stevens clips that Don Cherry showed on Thursday's now legendary Coach's Corner segment and said that all but one of those brutal hits would be completely legal under the current rules. Only the Paul Kariya hit in the 2003 Stanley Cup Finals would have been deemed illegal. Perhaps now some critics can also stop piling on Hall Of Famer Scott Stevens with comments like "those are the type of hits we need out of the game." In fact, we need more of them, and Phaneuf delivered a memorable one tonight.

And a little like Kariya years before him, Da Costa rose like Lazarus and ended up scoring a clutch goal (his first in the NHL) near the end of the third to put the Sens back within one in a see-saw battle right to the final faceoff in the Leafs zone with less than ten seconds remaining.

A few thoughts the Sens coaching staff can take with them after the short but brutal road trip are probably these:

1. Da Costa is an NHL player and a top-six forward who's going to put up points. Despite getting cleaned by Phaneuf, this guy rarely gets taken off the puck when he's on the rush. I've said it in about 5 or 6 posts dating back to the rookie tournament, but the one word that best describes Da Costa is "sneaky".

2. Erik Karlsson woke up tonight and is back on track to put up some huge totals.

3. Daniel Alfredsson needs to be on the first power-play unit, not Nikita Filatov. What were they thinking? Also, Alfie is back to his old self. Took this team on his back in the third. What else is new?

4. Sergei Gonchar needs to get better very quickly if they have any chance of turning this around. We all saw his mistakes on the goals, but he wasn't very good on the power-play either. Zero shots recorded and I don't remember any being blocked.

5. It really is a problem that Matt Carkner is out with an injury. The Sens just can't put muscle on guys in their own zone and it's costing them big time. Turnovers are killer, but so is the fact that nobody on the Leafs or Wings were even remotely worried about going to the net or into the corners with the likes of Karlsson, Filip Kuba, Brian Lee or Gonchar. Carkner isn't exactly fleet of foot, but sometimes you don't need to be when you're laying the lumber on guys trying to get close to Craig Anderson. Jared Cowen is doing a good job on his own but he needs some help.

Black Aces Senators 3 Stars

1. Daniel Alfredsson
2. Jason Spezza
3. Erik Karlsson

All right, short post tonight. Happy Thanksgiving. See you Tuesday, a little older, a little wiser, a little fatter.