"It's not a
perfect system," Calgary Flames president of hockey operations Brian
Burke wrote in 'USA Today' last Wednesday in defense of fighting in the
NHL. "Not every fight is a good fight."
As
if on cue, fighting proponents -- of which Burke, the lawyer and former
chief disciplinarian of the league, is the most eloquent -- had a
worst-case scenario on their hands to
defend.
On Friday in a 7-0 loss to the
Washington Capitals, the Philadelphia Flyers racked up 99 penalty
minutes, the ugliest of which was Flyers' goalie Ray Emery's
third-period pummeling of his opposite number, Capitals' goalie Braden
Holtby.
In the mythology of the NHL, the
idealized fight is that of one between equals. This was anything but.
Emery is a big boxing fan who relishes a scrap. Most goalies, with so
much equipment and no need to protect themselves the way skaters must
from time to time, mostly lack such experience. Seemingly an unwilling
combatant, Holtby lunged at Emery at the last second, as Emery skated
all the way down the ice towards the Capitals net. The Caps and the
anti-fighting crowd howled in protest at the unfairness of the
proceedings.
Yet what did the Flyers get
for their trouble? Well, if you can say they gleaned some positive
energy from their line brawl, they won the next night 1-0 over New
Jersey. But they did so without two forwards, who suffered injuries in
fights against Washington.
Newly acquired
forward Steve Downie reportedly was removed from the arena on a
stretcher and spent two nights in Pennsylvania Hospital for observation
after suffering a concussion in a second-period fight with Aaron
Volpatti and remains out indefinitely. Vincent Lecavalier suffered a
facial contusion from his bout with Steve Olesky. Originally expected to
miss several weeks, the Flyers hoped to have Lecavalier back on Tuesday
against Carolina.
But the Emery fight --
for which the goalie was not suspended -- provided more fodder in the
latest chapter in the debate over fighting. Burke summed up his argument
by saying that fighting serves as "peer accountability" on the ice and
that it helps to reduce the frequency of uglier
incidents.
"Hockey is a game played on the
edge," he wrote. "Large men with tempers explode around an enclosed
surface carrying carbon-fiber
instruments."
On the anti-side of the
debate responded Hall of Fame goalie Ken Dryden, currently a member of
Canada's parliament. Dryden pointed out that in the most recent 82-game
season in 2011-12, fights occurred at the rate of "less than one fight
per team every two games" and that in the playoffs, when the game is at
its best, fights are even less frequent, as coaches cannot afford to put
their enforcers – the players who account for the large majority of
fighting majors in the league -- on the ice, as they're
liabilities.
"Teams and coaches can't
afford anything stupid and unpredictable (in the playoffs)," Dryden
wrote in Toronto's 'Globe and Mail'
newspaper.
He also criticized what he
called the twisted logic of defending
fighting.
"To avoid having to expel a
fighter from a game, the league has decided the attempt to injure an
opponent with a check to the head is different from the attempt to
injure an opponent with a punch to the
head.
"Huh?"
Dryden
concluded that fighting in the NHL "will end because it is too
dangerous, or too laughable."
But not for
now.
Sergei Bobrovsky allowed 2.79 goals through his
first 11 games, going 4-7 in that stretch. (Russell
LaBounty-USA TODAY
Sports)
If you've
won the Vezina Trophy as the NHL's top goalie and you're still active,
this has not been your season. Maybe Miikka Kiprusoff got it right by
retiring. (The only other active one, Jose Theodore, 37, remains
unsigned.)
Consider the five goalies that
have won the award the last seven times have a combined record of
13-29-2. Some of it is age, some of it is playing on bad teams, some of
it is injury and some of it is just good, old-fashioned poor
play.
Here is a
look:
Columbus,
which finished off 2012-13 red-hot, figured to be a playoff contender
but has stumbled out of the gate with a 5-8 record in large part because
Bobrovsky (or "Bob," as he's known) has not played well. Bobrovsky is
4-7 with a 2.79 goals-against average and .910 save percentage and in
his last two starts; he has allowed seven goals on 45 shots (an .844
save percentage). He was pulled from his most recent start, after
allowing three goals on 10 shots in the game's first 23 minutes. Since
then, coach Todd Richards has gone with Curtis McElhinney (1-1, 1.55
GAA, .949 save percentage) in two straight starts, including Tuesday's
against Ottawa.
The New York
Rangers also are off to a rocky start at 6-8 and part of it has been
because Lundqvist (4-6, 2.56 GAA, .914 save percentage) has been injured
(Lundqvist would not identify what exactly the injury was to the
media). Like Bobrovsky, he has been outplayed by his back-up, rookie Cam
Talbot (2-1, 1.96 GAA, .929 save percentage) a 26-year-old rookie out
of that noted NCAA powerhouse,
Alabama-Huntsville.
After
taking the 2012-13 season off, the 39-year-old Thomas is finding that it
is not so easy to jump right back into the NHL and to stay healthy and
be successful -- especially when you're on one of the worst defensive
teams in the league (the Panthers are allowing 3.29 goals per game,
third-worst in the league). Thomas has suffered both groin and leg
injuries in this young season.
Of this
group, Miller has the ugliest record at 1-10 but has probably played the
best, as he has a .919 save percentage and 3.03 goals-against average.
It's not his fault he plays on what is probably the league's worst team.
By far.
It's sad that
perhaps the greatest goalie in league history might go out on a
humbling note. Brodeur is 2-3-2 with a 2.68 GAA and .888 save percentage
(55th among the 70 goalies to play so far this season). At 41, Brodeur
also has fallen victim to playing for one of the league's worst teams.
Only four teams had fewer points than the Devils entering
Tuesday.
Still with
one loss -- regulation or otherwise -- even goalie Semyon Varlamov's
alarming arrest could not derail the
Avalanche.
The Ducks,
who have the most points in the league, have played only five of 16
games at home.
The Sharks have
only one regulation loss and the league's top goal differential at
plus-26.
With a
seven-point lead over second-place Islanders, when will the Penguins
clinch?
The
Blackhawks are 6-1-3 in their last 10. Watch out, they're getting warmed
up.
Jaromir Jagr, who will turn 42 in February, is
leading the Devils with 10 points. (Anne-Marie Sorvin-USA TODAY
Sports)
The Devils'
leading scorer is 41-year-old Jaromir Jagr. Where is the
future?
Veteran Kris
Versteeg went minus-3 in only 10:48 in a 4-0 loss to St. Louis last
Friday. Seems like a brief
benching.
Trying to
fight their way out of poor play. Literally. They have won three of last
five.
Nail
Yakupov's defensive liabilities would be funny if they weren't so sad.
At minus-12, he's tied for worst rating in the
NHL.
The Sabres
trail next-to-last Philadelphia by three points and the Flyers hold
three games in hand.
In his NHL debut, the
goalie stopped 42 of 44 shots to defeat defending Stanley Cup champion
Chicago 3-2 in overtime at the United Center before 21,229. The 106th
overall pick in 2006 by St. Louis, Berra had played in his native
Switzerland for his entire career until this season. The 6-foot-4,
26-year-old came over from St. Louis in the Jay Bouwmeester deal last
season. Let us now be reminded that Flames coach Bob Hartley won a
championship in the Swiss League in 2012, coaching the Zurich Lions.
Alas, Hartley, who has a keen eye for players, likely pointed out Berra
to management when they were considering the trade. Before being
recalled, Berra was 4-3-1 with Abbotsford of the American Hockey League,
posting a 2.66 goals-against average and .908 save percentage. The
Flames had to put veteran Joey MacDonald on waivers to make room for
Berra.
In last Friday's
7-0 win over Philadelphia, Chimera earned four of his 11 points on the
season. He posted one goal, three assists and went plus-3 in 17:00 of
time on ice. He also was a perfect 100 percent in the faceoff circle,
winning both attempts.
In a
4-3 loss to Minnesota last Friday this line managed to go a collective
minus-9, giving up three goals in a combined total of 24 shifts and
16:42 in time on ice. Parros and Blunden, in particular, were such a
defensive liability that they played only seven shifts apiece, meaning
that each time coach Michel Therrien sent them out on the ice they had
almost a 1-in-2 chance they would surrender a goal. Compare that to
Minnesota defenseman Ryan Suter, who, in the same game, played 30 shifts
and was on ice for one goal.
This is
the teams' first matchup since the Rangers traded high-scoring wing
Marian Gaborik to the Blue Jackets prior to last season's trading
deadline. Gaborik is off to a strong start, leading the Blue Jackets in
points with five goals and five assists in 12 games. The only thing
missing from this game is the presence of former Rangers coach John
Tortorella, who never quite meshed with Gaborik, creating notable
tension that ultimately forced the trade. It's possible Tortorella's
failure to get the most out of players like Gaborik cost him his job
with the Rangers after the season. Plenty of players on both teams
formerly played for the other: Blue Jackets Brandon Dubinsky, Artem
Anisimov and Fedor Tyutin also played for the Rangers while Rangers
Derrick Brassard, Rick Nash, John Moore, and Derek Dorsett played for
Columbus, owing to the Gaborik trade, the previous Nash blockbuster and
even earlier moves. Now in the same division, it should breed
familiarity -- and contempt -- in the
rivalry.
Rick DiPietro is working on a comeback after he
had the Islanders bought out the last eight years of his contract in
July. (Anthony Gruppuso-USA TODAY
Sports)
Standing
under a nameplate that read "New Guy" and still with a New York
Islanders toiletries bag in his locker, Rick DiPietro began to undress
on Monday after a practice with his new team, the Charlotte Checkers of
the American Hockey League.
The first
overall pick in the 2000 NHL Draft, the man with the 15-year,
$67.5-million contract and innumerable hip and knee surgeries, DiPietro
is beginning his comeback to the NHL with the organization that is more
in need of goalies than any other in the NHL. With Carolina Hurricanes'
No. 1 goalie Cam Ward out several weeks with a lower-body injury and
back-up Anton Khudobin -- a player capable of winning the No. 1 job --
also out with a lower-body injury for the foreseeable future, Carolina
is hurting.
The Hurricanes have lost five
straight and, if they want to make the playoffs for the first time since
2009 in a suddenly weak Metropolitan Division, they need goaltending.
At present, Justin Peters, called up from Charlotte, is 0-5. Only three
goalies in the NHL have made more than one start this season and have
not registered a win. Of those, Peters has the most with
four.
On a tryout with Charlotte -- not
Carolina -- DiPietro's goal nonetheless is to get back to the NHL. But
he is mindful of doing it the right way after a history of rushing back
from injuries too often, something he said he
regrets.
"Definitely, the goal is to get
there but I want to get there and be helpful," he said. "I don't want to
go up there -- I mean I was telling the Islanders, too, at the end --
I'm not going to put anyone in the situation where I'm going to go up
there and not be good. I don't want to play if I'm brutal. It's
definitely something where I feel like I have a lot left in the tank and
I have a lot to prove because I have had a bunch of years where I
haven't played and my body actually does feel good again for the first
time in a long time so that's
exciting."
Following the 2007-08 season --
during which he started in the All-Star Game -- DiPietro has played only
50 games because of injury and poor play. In a wide-ranging interview,
DiPietro said that so many injuries and bad luck made him
dejected.
"Everything you could possibly
imagine bad was happening," he said. "It was like the more I rehabbed,
the more (stuff) went bad."
A low point
came last February when the Islanders put him on waivers and sent him to
their minor-league affiliate in Bridgeport. A reporter from a Long
Island television station came out to interview DiPietro, who made the
mistake of uttering a sarcastic comment -- one that DiPietro said he had
made many times before -- about "times where I thought about driving my
car into a tree, off the Throgs Neck
Bridge."
"There's been a lot of dark
times," he continued. "Lucky for me, I've had a good support system. I
got a great wife. She's been the drill sergeant through the whole thing
-- stay strong, keep your eyes on the goal, stay focused, work
hard."
On his drive home after the
interview, DiPietro said his attempt at gallows humor almost took an
ironic turn. So many people began texting him and calling him that as he
removed his cell phone from his "man satchel" that he almost got in an
accident.
He called reporters to clarify
his comments but it was too late to undo the harm of the comments. He
watched the news segment with his wife in his
home.
"We got through whole thing, she
looks at me and said, ‘That wasn't too bad,'" DiPietro said. "I was
like, ‘Yeah that could've been worse.'"
The
kicker, he said, came when the broadcast went back to its studio
following the segment and one of the anchors announced a poll on the
station's Web site, asking viewers to vote on whether they thought
DiPietro would actually kill himself.
"Are
you (expletive) kidding me?" DiPietro said. "Oh, my God. Any publicity's
good publicity, right?"
The best part
about going to Bridgeport, DiPietro said, was working with its goalie
coach, Steve Valiquette, his friend and former teammate with the
Islanders. He said hockey became fun
again.
"It rejuvenated me and got me back
to where I need to be," DiPietro said.
In
July, the Islanders bought out the final eight years of DiPietro’s
contract, meaning that they will have to pay him $1.5 million over the
next 16 years, ending in 2029.
He has continued to
work with Valiquette this season until a week before he signed with the
Checkers when he trained with Boston University, where he played one
season.
In his first two games with
Charlotte, he has lost both, stopping 25 of 29 shots in a 5-2 loss to
Grand Rapids last Wednesday and stopping 38 of 43 in on Saturday in a
5-3 loss at San Antonio. He started his first game after only one full
practice but Checkers coach Jeff Daniels, a former NHL player, said
DiPietro "wanted the net."
Daniels said he
thought DiPietro was sharper in the second game, which was the sixth
game in nine days his team had played on the road. The rest of the
Checkers, Daniels said, had hit a wall.
"He
came in right from Day 1 with a good attitude," said Daniels, who then
referred to former NHL forward Manny Malhotra who also came to the
Checkers on a tryout this season and earned a contract with the
Hurricanes. "They have something to prove. They're not down here to play
it out. They want to prove they're still capable of getting back to the
next level. He's here to prove a lot of people
wrong."
DiPietro hopes he is wiser now and
that his wisdom will pay off.
"When you're
younger, you think you're Superman," he said. "You go out and throw your
body around like nothing's ever going to happen. You don't have to ice,
you don't have to warm up ... As you get older, you get smarter about
taking care of yourself. The biggest thing I've learned is the fine line
between doing enough and too much."
"A lot
of times, you do too much and you get yourself in trouble."
