The Return of Hogging

Yes, hogging time is here again!  I never did finish <a href=https://crookedtimber.org/2007/04/25/hogging-ii-son-of-hogging/#more-5818>hockey blogging for the 2006-07 season</a>, and completely blew off blogging about the 2007-08 season, so let me start off in 2009 by predicting that the Anaheim <strike>Mighty</strike> Merely Ducks will overpower the Ottawa Senators in 2007 and that in 2008 the Detroit Red Wings and Pittsburgh Penguins will finally deliver us from the bizarre string of Stanley Cup finals involving Obscure Canadian Cities* v. Sweltering Towns in the Southern US That Weren’t Aware They Had Hockey Teams (Calgary v. Tampa Bay, Edmonton v. Carolina, Ottawa v. Anaheim).  For obvious reasons, those Finals were ratings dynamite — or would have been, if they had been televised.  No, wait, they <i>were</i> televised!  Apparently you can watch National Hockey League games in the US by tuning to a channel called <a href=”http://www.versus.com/”>“Against,”</a> which is available on cable channel 488356 (if you get the special ultra supreme X-treme package) and which features, along with hockey, an unbeatable combination of bull riding, cage fighting, <a href=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=50jVa25gmWs&feature=related”>riding-mower racing, and competitive flogging</a>.  So that’s positive.

Just as in 2007, veteran Calgary Flames fan Scott Lemieux will offer his take on the playoffs over at <a href=”http://lefarkins.blogspot.com/2009/04/post-youve-all-been-waiting-for.html”>Lawyers, Guns, and Money</a>, and I’ll do the honors here, where rumor has it that people have been clamoring for hockey blogging with a mighty clamor.  Though I’ll put most of this under the fold, so that the three or four clamorers and I won’t disturb all the rest of you.

This year, the consensus — and by “consensus” I mean “the opinion of the ten or eleven guys from the Nittany Hockey League with whom I had an end-of-season beer last week” — is that Detroit is the prohibitive favorite to repeat.  There’s a good reason for that, namely, that Detroit is very good.  Speed kills, and speed-plus-skills kills even deader.  Last year they outskated, outforechecked, outshot and utterly outclassed the Penguins, who managed to extend the series to six games by stubbornly refusing to realize just how out of their league they really were.  Indeed, since the Pens had gotten to the finals by crushing their three talented Eastern opponents, winning three series in only 14 games, it was kind of remarkable how out of their league they were when they ran up against Detroit; the lesson was not lost on winger Marian Hossa, who was picked up by Pittsburgh at the trading deadline last season but decided, after seeing Pavel Datsyuk, Johan Franzen, and Henrik Zetterberg blow the doors off the Penguins bus, that he’d rather switch than fight.  His reward for suiting up with the Red Wings this year?  A 40-goal season, good enough to lead the team in that department.

So it’s really unpossible for the defending-champ and second-seeded Red Wings to lose in the first round to the Columbus Blue Blazers, who have made the playoffs for the first time in franchise history (though you should be aware that the Blue Sport Coats didn’t exist a decade ago).  But then again, it was also unpossible for the top-seeded Red Wings to lose to the infant San Jose Sharks (playing in only their third year) in the first round in 1993-94; completely unthinkable for the second-seeded Red Wings (with 49 regular season victories) to lose to the lowly Los Angeles Kings in the first round in 2000-01; utterly unbelievable that the second-seeded Red Wings (48 wins) would be <i>swept by Anaheim in four</i> in the first round in 2002-03; and simply inconceivable that the top-seeded Red Wings, winners of a staggering 58 regular-season games, would lose to the Edmonton Oilers in the first round in 2005-06.

Or, as I said to my fellow NHLers last week, “I can’t imagine Detroit bowing out in the first round.  But I couldn’t imagine it the other four times it happened in the past 15 years, either.”

OK, well, the reason I’m opening by discussing the unlikeliest playoff possibility of them all is that yesterday, I logged onto espn.com and made my Official and Deeply Considered Predictions: in the east, Bruins over Canadiens in six; Capitals over Rangers in seven; Devils over Hurricanes in six; Penguins over Flyers in seven.  In the west, Sharks over Ducks in six; Red Wings over Blue Jackets (for that is indeed their real name) in five; Canucks over Blues in six; Black Hawks over Flames in six.  When I submitted my picks, I realized to my horror not only that I had picked eight favorites (as if this would not be foolhardy enough on its own), but that I had picked eight favorites in so drearily conventional a fashion that <a href=”http://proxy.espn.go.com/chat/sportsnation/polling?event_id=3809&action=1&question29090=116356&question29091=116365&question29092=116372&question29093=116385&question29094=116388&question29095=116395&question29096=116404&question29097=116412″>my selections aligned with the top one or two fan picks in seven of the eight series</a> (my only “outlier” was my hopeful suggestion that the Rangers will take the Caps to seven games).

That sucks.  And it tells me something about myself I’d rather not have learned.  So I’ve decided to complicate things.

Here’s the overall picture, for those of you who didn’t follow the season.  This slate of sixteen playoff teams breaks down as follows: some of these teams played very well all season long, but have Nagging Questions about their playoff durability.  And some of these teams were bafflingly mediocre in the first half of the season, but caught fire in the second half and are now riding a wave of adrenaline that might well carry them into the second or third round.  There really is no way to know which teams from group A will cough up a hairball or fail to answer their Nagging Questions, and which teams from group B will find that a wave of adrenaline is no match for, you know, individual talent and team discipline.

To wit: in group A, the Boston Bruins appear to be the real thing.  They got off to an eh start, but then scorched through November and December, going 23-2-1 and setting the pace for the East.  Speed and skill on offense, solid D led by the seemingly eight-foot-four Zdeno Chara, and terrific goaltending: clearly this was an unstoppable team, worthy of meeting Detroit in the finals.  Then things got weird: from Feb 7 to Mar 19 the Bruins went 6-9-4, and people began to remember that the team hasn’t gotten past the first round since 1999 (or past the second since 1992).  To make matters worse, they’re facing the Canadiens in round one, a team to which they have lost, I dunno, maybe 37 consecutive times, both as severe underdog (last year) and as overwhelming favorite (2002, 1971).

Likewise, the Devils, Capitals, and Flyers seem to be stocked and healthy, but New Jersey has looked abysmal at inopportune moments (even after Brodeur’s return), the Capitals are still not sure they’re not a one-man team, and the Flyers are wondering how the hell they lost home-ice advantage to the Penguins, who were an eleventh-place team only two months ago.  Indeed, on Feb 16 the Pens were an eleventh-place team at 27-25-6, having just lost in a shootout to the Islanders, which is a little like losing to the Gwinnett Gladiators of the East Coast Hockey League’s southern division.  Two days earlier, they’d fired coach Michel Therrien after an embarrassing 6-2 loss to twelfth- or thirteenth-place Toronto.  Since then, the Penguins are a terrifying 18-3-3, and riding a wave of adrenaline, etc.  Some say they were revived by the firing of Therrien, some say by the return of Sergei Gonchar, who runs their power play.  Either way, they’ll probably be too much for the Flyers.

As went the Pens, so went the Canes: 21-20-5 as of three months ago, 24-10-2 since.  Do the Rangers fall into this category?  Not really: they were always in playoff contention, and haven’t gotten as hot as Carolina or Pittsburgh in recent months.  All we know about the Rangers is that (a) their fortunes seem to depend, rather odiously, on the play of the psychotic yet strangely effective Sean Avery, since nobody else on the team is capable of motivating any of his mates to play like they mean it, and (b) they are capable of playing very well for entire games at a stretch, sometimes as often as twice in the same week.

As for the Canadiens, I’m not convinced they belong in the playoffs at all.  But then again, their powerful C-H insignia has a proven record of sapping the vitality from the Bruins’ large and small muscle groups, so here too, the unpossible may be possible.

In the West, group A consists of the Red Wings, whose Nagging Questions I have already addressed, and the Sharks, who seem to be solid this year but who have established a clear playoff pattern of collapsing completely and unfathomably right around game four of the second round.  The counterparts to the Bruins are the surprising Black Hawks: while it’s great to see professional hockey being played in Chicago again after fifteen years, no one knows if the spunky 20-year-olds who lead this team (Patrick Kane, Jonathan Toews — old guy Kris Versteeg is already 22, and grandpa Havlat is 27) are old enough to grow serious playoff beards.

Group B consists of Anaheim, St. Louis, and the Vancouver Canucks; the Canucks, most mysterious of these three, were stuck in a Penguins-like rut for quite some time.  How long?  Well, in January they played twelve games and won two.  Since then they’re a scary 23-7-2, and since they have the planet’s best goaltender in Roberto Luongo, they’ll probably manage to stanch the adrenaline of those St. Louis Blues, who actually weren’t even “bafflingly mediocre” in the first half.  They were abysmal, just as everyone expected them to be.  They were who we thought they were!  And they were dead last in the Western conference.  On Feb 12 they were 22-25-7 and nowhere near the playoffs; since then they’ve gone 19-6-3.  Alas, the Blues have been so good lately that they <i>just couldn’t stop winning</i> and found themselves with the sixth seed; if they’d had the sense to lose their final game to the sinking Avalanche they would have drawn the eighth seed, giving them a matchup against the Shaky Sharks and a chance for karmic payback for the 2000 season in which the eighth-seeded Sharks bounced them from the postseason in the first round.  As it is, they now have to play a team that’s just as hot as they are.

So, then.  Instead of going with the Safe Picks I enumerated above, in which I weigh teams’ strengths and weaknesses and try to come up with a rational sense of playoff likelihoods, I’m going to make a bunch of Crazy-Ass Picks by weighing a woman and a duck and admitting that I’m rooting for all four of my teams — the Rangers, of course, with whom I grew up, and also the Blues and Penguins, whom I’ve adopted, and the Canadiens, to whom I owe some kind of tribal loyalty.  Without further ado, Crazy-Ass Picks:

<b>East</b>:  Canadiens over Bruins in seven heartbreaking games.  Rangers over Capitals in six headscratching games because I want it that way, even though Washington needs some hockey love.  Hurricanes over Devils in six stormy games.  And the Penguins still beat the Flyers in seven. <b>West</b>: Sharks over Ducks in six, because the collapse isn’t scheduled until round two.  Morning Jackets over Red Wings in seven headexploding games because someone has to say so.  Blues over Canucks in six because I want it that way, even though Vancouver is a very nice city.  And the Black Hawks still beat the Flames in six because the Flames don’t have any defensemen, and they’ll need defensemen to stop those spunky twenty-year-olds.

OK, <i>now</i> this should be fun.

______

*  You understand that for most Americans, all Canadian cities are obscure.  Medicine Hat, Toronto, Rimouski — we have no idea where these places are.