Three
teams entered Tuesday tied for the most points in the NHL and two of
them owed a good bit of that either to a current or a former
French-Canadian goalie.
Certainly, the surprise of
the season to this point is the Colorado Avalanche and head coach/vice
president of hockey operations Patrick Roy. After finishing with the
NHL's second-worst record last season, the Avs have won their first five
games by a combined 18-4 total.
In the East, the
Toronto Maple Leafs, while a playoff qualifier last season, have the
most points in the conference, thanks mostly to an offseason deal for
former Los Angeles Kings back-up goalie Jonathan Bernier. The Leafs sent
forward Matt Frattin, goaltender Ben Scrivens and a second-round draft
pick to the Kings, taking a bit of a risk, as it was hard to assess
Bernier as a No. 1 because of a fairly limited playing history. Playing
behind Jonathan Quick, who backstopped the Kings to the 2012 Stanley
Cup, Bernier played only 62 games in five seasons despite being the 11th
overall pick in the 2006 NHL Draft.
For now, the
move appears worth the risk, even if coach Randy Carlyle has refused to
name Bernier the No. 1 ahead of James Reimer, who, were it not for an
epic collapse at the end of Game 7 against Boston, would have shepherded
Toronto into the second round of the playoffs last
spring.
After shutting out Nashville 4-0 last
Thursday in a game in which the Leafs were getting badly outplayed and
outshot roughly halfway through the match, Bernier improved to 3-1-0
with 0.85 on the season and upping his save percentage to .974. A 6-5
win over high-scoring Edmonton on Friday caused his averages to rise to
1.75 and .946 but both remained top-10 in the
league.
Prior to the win over the Predators, the
Toronto media was ruminating over the Leafs' 66 turnovers "ominously
leading the league again" and its defense corps was being labeled "the
Deficient Seven." A goalie can paper over all of those weaknesses, which
Bernier did, much as a coach can make a team more than the sum of its
parts.
That is what Roy magically is doing in Denver.
The league had anxiously awaited his arrival as a coach for years after
a successful tenure as an owner, general manager and coach of the
Quebec Remparts in the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League. Roy had
romanced NHL teams in the past but never quite consummated the
marriages. With a young lineup, the Avs started their season 5-0 and had
the league's second-best goal differential at
plus-14.
First overall pick Nathan MacKinnon was
leading the Avs with six points despite averaging only 13:27 per game,
16th among 20 skaters on the team. Even old-timers like Alex Tanguay, a
one-time teammate of Roy's, were getting in on the act with two goals
and three assists.
Perhaps most significantly, maybe
some of Roy's hall of fame goaltending is rubbing off on the Avs
goaltenders, as Semyon Varlamov and Jean-Sébastien Giguere had yielded
but four goals combined, a league low. The hiring of famed goalie coach
Francois Allaire might have had something to do with that, too, a
decision Roy no doubt was involved in.
We'll see how
long Roy and Bernier can keep it up but hot starts are anything but
overrated, especially on teams with a poor recent history. If it takes
90-something points to make the playoffs, Roy's group already is more
than 10 percent of the way there after playing only 6 percent of the
games. The same is true of Bernier and the
Leafs.
There might
be three teams with fewer points but the Devils are one of only two
winless teams in the NHL. It's a sad state of affairs for one of the
best organizations in the league over the last few
decades.
How did they get here? Well, they weren't a
playoff team last season and while it's hard to blame it all on one
player, Ilya Kovalchuk's decision to retire from the league and to play
in the KHL in his native Russia removed a world-class player from the
Devils' roster -- a hole that is impossible to replace with the little
notice the Devils received.
In 2011-12 when the
Devils reached the Stanley Cup Final, Kovalchuk averaged better than a
point per game (37 goals, 46 assists in 77 games) and in 23 playoffs
games he posted eight goals and 11 assists, finishing just one point off
the best total in the postseason that year. He also killed penalties,
logged tons of ice time and did little things that made New Jersey
better all around. The loss of forward David Clarkson, last season's
leading goal-scorer, to Toronto via free agency this summer did not help
either.
Nonetheless, it's difficult not to view the
Devils as a collection of mercenaries -- Jaromir Jagr, Ryane Clowe and
Michael Ryder come to mind -- which is hardly the way that general
manager Lou Lamoriello has built his roster over the
years.
The talent on the Devils' squad says they are
better than this but, as they showed in their dreadful start to 2010-11
and Pete DeBoer is a good coach, as he proved in that '12 Cup run, but
bad starts can be tough to overcome.
The Sharks have outscored
opponents 24-7 and goalie Antti Niemi owns the league's best record at
5-0.
Coach Patrick Roy
managed to knock Peyton Manning off the top spot of the sports pages in
Denver in his debut. Can he keep it up?
The West is the best.
St. Louis hosts the Sharks in a key test on
Tuesday.
The surprise here?
Goalie Marc-Andre Fleury (.930 save percentage, 1.75 GAA) is back on top
of his game after a horrific playoff.
5.
Toronto
Joffrey Lupul and James van
Riemsdyk, with five goals apiece playing on different lines, are giving
the Leafs scoring depth.
No matter who the
coach is, the Oil still have trouble keeping the puck out of its net. 29
goals against is the NHL high.
We don't expect to see
them here for long but one win and a minus-16 goal differential? Oh,
my.
Was Peter
Laviolette the problem? No. Can Craig Berube get them in the playoffs?
It's a tall order.
They have two
shootout losses and an overtime loss but remain one of the league's two
winless teams.
Sabres are an
NHL-worst 0-for-7, although they do have an overtime loss. Scoring seven
goals in seven games won't get it done.
Jussie Jokinen burned his old team, the Hurricanes, for
a hat trick in their Oct. 8 meeting. (Charles LeClaire-USA
TODAY Sports)
In a 5-2 win on
Oct. 8 over Carolina -- his old team, which is paying $900,000 of his $3
million salary this season -- Jokinen netted a hat trick and finished
plus-1 in 16:24 of ice time with five shots. We at Penalty Minutes have
always been partial to Jokinen since he broke into the league with an
insanely cool shootout move in 2005-06. His penchant for scoring clutch
playoff goals (he recorded seven goals and four assists in 18 playoff
games), as the surprising Hurricanes advanced to the Eastern Finals
further solidified him in our estimation as one of the league's more
interesting players. Having fallen on hard times in Carolina and traded
to the Penguins for a conditional draft pick, Jokinen, 30, is showing it
can be easier to score when the players earning the assists on your
goals are named Crosby, Malkin and Kunitz, as was the case last
week.
In the Wild's 2-1
win over Winnipeg last Thursday, Suter, a finalist for the Norris Trophy
last season, played 30:39 with two penalty minutes, four hits, two
blocked shots, one takeaway, one giveaway and an even rating. It was the
second time this season Suter played more than half the game. It's
stats like that indicate why his game is so subtle and also why he is
perhaps the game's top defensive defenseman.
In a 4-2 loss
to Phoenix last Thursday, Weiss, who signed a five-year, $24.5-million
deal with Detroit this past summer, was on ice for all four goals his
team allowed and so, in the process, finished minus-4, won just 24
percent of his faceoffs (5 of 21) in 17:16. The only positive? Coach
Mike Babcock had him on the ice in the last minute to try and get the
tying goal but the Coyotes scored an empty-netter
first.
Patrick Roy's
participation in a once-great rivalry resumes, although with a
significant change. Whereas these two franchises once engaged in epic
battles in the not-so-distant past in the Western Conference Finals –
documented in a book by the Denver Post's Adrian Dater – now the Red
Wings have migrated to the Eastern Conference. Still, with both teams
off to strong starts, it should rekindle some memories and make for good
hockey to boot, even if Roy is one of the few names left from those
days.
Rookie Tomas Hertl has seven goals and an assist
through his first five games. (Ed Szczepanski-USA TODAY
Sports)
Bobby Holik was aghast
at the idea that six days after the fact, we were still talking about
19-year-old San Jose rookie Tomas Hertl, the left wing who, at the same
time, dazzled and enraged the hockey world last
week.
The play in question came at 12:05 of the third
period in the Sharks' 9-2 victory over the New York Rangers on Oct. 8
when Hertl had the gall to score the eighth goal of the game -- and his
fourth, personally -- by moving the puck between his skates, shooting
with his stick between his legs and flicking the puck behind his left
leg and past Rangers goalie Martin Biron on a breakaway. According to
the Sharks broadcast, Hertl became the youngest player to score four
goals in a game since Jimmy Carson did it on March 10, 1988. (Let's hope
for his sake that Hertl does not get traded for Wayne Gretzky, thereby
ruining his career, as happened to Carson.)
To the
casual fan, the quick hands and creativity Hertl demonstrated proved of
highlight-reel quality. To those from the old school, the play proved a
dangerous example of showboating and embarrassing an opponent -- the
kind that, we heard it suggested, could have ignited a bench-clearing
brawl in the days of Eddie Shore and Old Time Hockey, the Era
before which the NHL effectively outlawed such outbursts with severely
punitive measures. Washington Capitals coach Adam Oates, one of the most
prolific assist men in league history, went on record to say he was
"upset" by it.
Penalty Minutes sought out the opinion
of Holik because, for one, he was raised in Czech, like Hertl, but also
because of his no-nonsense way of playing the game that concentrated on
the fundamentals. Where exactly would the former Rangers center fall on
this debate, we wondered?
As usual, he did not
disappoint for a strong opinion. The two-time Stanley Cup winner said he
saw a bit of a cultural bias against Europeans, Eastern Europeans in
particular, implicit in the criticism of the 6-foot-2, 210-pound left
wing.
"I cannot believe we're still talking about
this," he said by phone from his home in Wyoming. "I thought times had
changed but some people don't. I moved on immediately. Great game, great
player, good things. Fun. I never gave it any second thoughts until
everybody else saw the highlights and it was time to spew out opinions.
What is there to talk about? Don't you see the game has changed? The
culture of the game has changed since the end of the '05 lockout. Nobody
ever talks about it…
"Talk about what a great talent
he is. Don't tell me how he celebrates goals. Because he's Czech. It's
not only a factor but a huge part of it. He's not from the 'Old Boys
Club' of Saskatchewan or Manitoba. They'd never do something like that.
I'm so tired of that. It's time to move on into new era of the game but
we have not."
Russian Ilya Kovalchuk encountered this
kind of criticism when he entered the NHL in 2001 for the exuberant way
he celebrated goals. (We loved how Kovalchuk, still learning English,
would say, "I am exciting," when he meant, "I am excited.") So did Alex
Ovechkin in 2005. Even Swede Linus Omark, with his fabulous shootout
spin-o-rama move against Tampa Bay in 2010, heard it in. Said Lightning
forward and former Hart Trophy winner Martin St. Louis at the time,
"It's kind of a slap in the face a little bit. Maybe it's a little too
much."
It's hard for us to get past the idea that an
inventive way to score on a goalie in the NHL, which is by no means an
easy feat, can somehow be construed as showboating. This isn't like
taking a home run trot timed by a sun dial. It's scoring. The goalie has
to stop it.
When Holik, who currently is mentoring
junior players and "learning by teaching," as he put it, debuted in the
NHL 23 years ago for the Hartford Whalers, European players represented a
tiny minority. Now, they constitute nearly 25 percent of the league.
The 6-foot-3, 225-pound Holik, an intimidating force on the ice, said
when he encountered such cultural bias during his career, he dealt with
it "directly."
We asked him what he thought was
running through the mind of Hertl, who, by the way, leads the NHL in
goals with seven, and was playing in his third in NHL game when he
posted his hat-trick-plus-one against the Rangers. (On a related note,
the goalie he notched the goal in question against, Biron, was placed on
waivers on Monday.)
"He's happy to be here," Holik
said of Hertl. "He's having a great time. One reason he did it was that
he doesn't know the 'ins and outs' of this business. For some people, it
comes earlier than others. I was 21. The moment you're traded, you
realize, 'They were right, it is a business.' You're just a piece of
meat -- a fully compensated piece of meat but at the time you don't
realize that...
"It's unfortunate that he's finding
out that there's a lot of haters out there -- as much as they say
they're not. Just talking about it's very negative. We will know we've
moved on when it will be shown on the highlight tapes and people will
say, 'What a great game, what a great goal.' I don't see that happening
for a long time."
It would be a shame to see a player
as exciting and marketable as Hertl have his enthusiasm beaten out of
him. The NHL thrives on skilled players. (Clearly, the league
understands this as Hertl was named its First Star of the Week on
Monday.) Year after year, Europeans have dominated the top 10 in the
points list. Presently, they are dominating the top 10 in the form of
Ovechkin, Hertl, Alexander Steen (Sweden), Nicklas Backstrom (Sweden),
Lars Eller (Denmark), Henrik Zetterberg (Sweden) and Michael Grabner
(Austria).
"It was the worst part for me in the NHL
but the best part because it made me stronger," Holik said of
confronting stereotypes. "I look back and certain players I played with,
what fools, thinking the way they were."
Hopefully,
Hertl also can learn to shake off the critics and keep up his enthusiasm
-- and his scoring.
