The big, injurious hit will forever divide hockey fans. So we’re going to weigh in on a couple that have been delivered of late knowing that roughly half of the readers will see this opinion as sound, reasoned prose, while the other half will take to Twitter with that old standard, “How do you get paid to write hockey?!?”
Did Brooks Orpik leave his feet when he clobbered Jonathan Toews? Yes, if not as contact was being made, then a split second afterwards. But was it a suspendable hit? Not a chance.
Now we hear that Toews will not play again this season, but coach Joel Quenneville promises he’ll be “100 percent for the playoffs.” That’s one of those “Cheque’s in the mail” kind of promises. Toews will be 100 percent for the playoffs, unless the playoffs start and he’s not, you know, even at 50 percent. Then he’ll be day to day—possibly until round three.
Then there was Alex Burrows’s double-team hit on Ryan McDonagh Tuesday night in Vancouver, which came with 44 seconds left in an irretrievable game for the Canucks. Was it necessary? No. Was it dirty? Barely.
Look, hockey hurts sometimes. And there are some realities in the game: Like, when you are the best player, you are a bigger target for injurious body checks than the No. 6 defenceman. And when you’re beating a Canucks team that is failing tragically, and it’s late in the game, they’re going to take out some frustrations on you.
As Bryan Marchment used to say, if you don’t like it, “go play tennis.”
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It’s one thing for Nail Yakupov, a 20-year-old Russian skill player with 111 pro games with an awful team under his belt, to be minus-33. But how does Alex Ovechkin, who leads the league with 48 goals, come in at a league-worst minus-36?
His work on the 4-0 goal was the efforts of a captain who had quit on the game. It is that kind of leadership that has taken the Capitals to where they’re at—a decent team that struggles to make the playoffs, and accomplishes nothing once they are there. “Ovie quit on the play coming back,” Caps coach Adam Oates said on Wednesday. “Just goes to show you you’ve got to hustle the entire time. The whole entire time.”
Here’s what Oates was talking about:
Nine NHL seasons into his career, Ovechkin is still trying to figure that out? No wonder the Crosby-Ovechkin rivalry is dead. They invoked the Mercy Rule.
We write about great offensive players “buying in” on a team that wins a Stanley Cup. Brett Hull in Dallas, Patrick Kane in Chicago, or the consummate two-way player, Patrice Bergeron in Boston. Well, Ovechkin is a one-way player, the likes of which you simply will not win with in today’s game. He is 28 now. He’s played 683 NHL games. And he is, by all accounts, Yakupov’s hero.
Edmonton: “Gulp…”
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Here’s a fun little wager to have with the boys in the West Coast office. Who gets fired first, John Tortorella or Randy Carlyle? Maybe a flat of Granville Island Pale Ale, against a couple dozen Sleeman’s?
Carlyle could have survived a playoff miss this season, in our opinion. But not a miss like this one. He is a veteran coach who failed to pull his team out of the fatal nosedive. As much respect as we have for Carlyle, that constitutes sleeping through the weightiest test of the school year. The quizzes don’t matter when you blow the final.
In Vancouver, Tortorella was simply a mistake hire. He didn’t fit the roster and couldn’t get the job done. And it won’t get better next year, the way his team has responded down the stretch. In Tuesday’s loss to the Rangers, the Canucks looked nothing like a team trying to win a statement game for their coach, against Alain Vigneault’s Rangers. “We lost. We’re losing.” Tortorella said post game. “We’ve just got to try and get better. I’m not making excuses, but we do need a number of chances to score.”
Did you catch that? “We do need a number of chances to score.” That’s coach speak for: “If my scorers would bury the damned puck more often, we wouldn’t be in this mess.”
Torts goes first, and his players will happily part with the beer.