Thanks to a schedule that has all teams playing their final regular season games against division rivals, NHL fans are in store for a wild ride.
The Ottawa Senators were in Buffalo Tuesday and the Sabres will be in Ottawa on Thursday to complete a home-and-home scenario that is one of the many reasons this season-ending run in the NHL has been so entertaining across the entire National Hockey League.
The best part: hockey fans in most every city across the league can enjoy something similar.
It’s all in the schedule, baby.
For starters, the Senators could end the Sabres' hopes of making the playoffs this season. Two wins by Ottawa could well be the tipping point in Buffalo’s quest to get to the eighth and final playoff spot. Should that happen, it certainly wouldn’t sit well in Buffalo given that the Sabres are the defending Presidents’ Trophy winners and falling that far, that fast would not only disappoint Buffalo’s truly loyal fans, but it might even cause a managerial head to roll given that the responsibility for the miss lies solely with the cost management decisions made by owner Tom Golisano, managing partner Larry Quinn and executed (some would argue not happily) by general manager Darcy Regier.
The Senators won the first game of the home and home with a 6-3 win Tuesday in Buffalo.
While that should be a cause of some joy for the Senators (assuming they find a goaltender for both contests) it’s a crisis for the Sabres. Among the young players who were not sacrificed on the altar of "cost certainty" and "business" decisions, there’s a certain amount of hatred for their Northern neighbours. Last season the Senators knocked the Sabres out of the playoffs in the Eastern Conference Final. Given that the Sabres had done that to the Senators the previous spring, the rivalry between these two teams remains huge, intense and enjoyably severe.
An anonymous Sabre recently was quoted in the Buffalo News using the "hate" word. In apprising trade-day arrival Steve Bernier of the depths of the Sens-Sabres rivalry, the player simply said "we hate those guys."
What else do you need to know? This is no fabricated rivalry, it’s the real thing. It has real passion, real emotion and, unlike so-called reality TV, real roots. Even if the Sabres survive the Ottawa test, they still will have to deal with two games against another long-time rival, the Boston Bruins, who are also playing for their playoff lives, two more against another longtime rival (and the team that has replaced them at the top of the Northeast Division and Eastern Conference standings) Montreal, plus one more against division rival Toronto.
And that’s the beauty of the way the NHL has constructed the closing weeks of the season. In structuring a concluding kick that has all teams playing their final games against division rivals, the NHL has gone back to its roots, it has emphasized one of the traits that makes the league great: traditional rivalries, but it has also done what so many other leagues can’t or won’t do, make the final games important for as many teams as possible.
Traditionally, the end of the NHL season has been a mish-mash of things. For some teams, it was a playoff-like test of their abilities to survive and get to the playoffs. For others, however, it was often a time to go on cruise control, rest players (while denying it) or tank games (while denying it) while awaiting the playoffs or the draft.
That’s still possible, but it’s certainly not easy. Look at the remaining schedule and tell me what games don’t really matter.
Sure the Sens are reasonably secure in making the postseason, but can they really afford to take a night off against a rival that has become, in essence, a blood rival? Is there a player on the Ottawa roster who calls himself a competitor who doesn’t want to have a hand in ousting the Sabres? Is there a Sabre who, even if he can stomach the idea of missing the playoffs, that doesn’t want to make certain their elimination doesn’t happen at the hands of the Senators?
And lest we forget, those four points could put the Sens back in the race for first place in the division and the conference.
Will it be any different Saturday night when the Toronto Maple Leafs play the Montreal Canadiens or when the Edmonton Oilers play the Calgary Flames? How about Wednesday night when the Canucks play the Colorado Avalanche?
Even among the nearly hopeless, there are blood-boiling games. Thursday night the also-ran Phoenix Coyotes play the also-ran Los Angeles Kings in a game that has Wayne Gretzky’s legacy all over it.
The doomed Tampa Bay Lightning have games against the hated Carolina Hurricanes and, later, the equally doomed Atlanta Thrashers, but do you think for a moment Lightning coach John Tortorella will send out a squad thinking that the games against Southeast division rivals don’t matter?
Even on the final night of the season, a night when maybe all playoff positions (or at least most of them) will have been decided, Chicago will play Detroit in the umpteenth revival of one of the longest rivalries in sport and perhaps with a playoff berth for Chicago still on the line. The Sharks will play Pacific Division thorn, Dallas Stars, while the New York Rangers will go across the Hudson to play the hated New Jersey Devils, the Pittsburgh Penguins will play hated in-state rival Philadelphia, the Minnesota Wild will play the Avalanche, the St. Louis Blues will play the Columbus Blue Jackets and the Coyotes will play the Ducks.
Fun? Wow!
You read a lot of criticism in this space regarding the National Hockey League and its sometimes byzantine structure and mind-numbing rulings, but the complaints don’t extend to the scheduling.
On this issue the league got it bang-on and if you’re a hockey fan, you can’t be anything but grateful for that.