Had I known that Cody Sylvester and Victor Rask were injured (along with Rob Trzynkowski and Calder Brooks, but they’re less important), I might have been less enthusiastic about the Hitmen’s chances in the first round. Sure, you hate to use injuries as an excuse, but at the same time, nearly any team in any league would be hard pressed to maintain their customary level with two top-six and four top-nine forwards out of action. The return of Sylvester tonight is cause for hope, to be sure, as it gives at least one or two guys a chance to step back into more comfortable roles. But the bottom line here is, the Hitmen need to get an early lead. They did it in Game 2, forced Brandon to get aggressive, and the longer the game went on, the more unhinged the Wheaties became. While I don’t expect a parade to the box necessarily, forcing Brandon to take more chances is naturally going to create more chances for Calgary: that’s Playing With The Lead 101. We’ve already seen what Brandon’s capable of with an early lead: they’ll let you back into the contest, and after you burn yourself out doing so, they’ll step on your throat in the back half of the game. Yes, they’ve gotten help from the officials in both victories, but even with that factor aside, Calgary’s just looked outmatched and outworked in the latter 30 minutes of both games they’ve lost, and it’s showed in the flurry of late goals (6 GA in the second halves of the two losses).

Break out your cliche-a-tron, because this is the biggest game of the season. A loss tonight, and I’ll be stunned if both teams return from Winnipeg this weekend.

Bold Prediction: A team will open the scoring in the first five minutes, then go on to win by at least three. Go Hitmen.

So first the “kinda” part. It continues to feel to me tremendously unfair that we dispatched the Wheaties rather handily in the playoffs, winning four straight after dropping the first game, then beat them again quite handily in the round robin (to the tune of 5-1, all goals in the first), and still had to beat them again in order to advance. I knew going into Friday’s game that it was going to be a squeaker, and I wasn’t going to be surprised at all if the Hitmen lost. Why? Because they’d just punted the Wheaties pretty hard, they were gonna come back pissed, and I wasn’t convinced the Hitmen were going to be able to get up for yet another battle against a repeatedly vanquished foe. Sure enough, three minutes and change into overtime, there they were, looking on in disbelief as the host team earned a free pass for the right to get skullfucked by the once and future kings (again). It was like a scene in a zombie movie, where one of the secondary heroes thinks he’s killed the zombie, but it pops back up again, so he puts a decisive round into its head, starts to walk away in that action-movie sort of way…then gets ripped to shreds by that same fucking zombie. Except not funny, because my team was the guy who got torn to hell.

I went over it in my head a hundred times. Why the hell should Brandon get a free pass? It’s not like they lost a hard-fought WHL Final or anything: they got schooled in the semis, for crying out loud! They’d lost to Calgary and Windsor, the consensus favourites by a mile, by a combined 14-4 in the round-robin. They had no business being there at all, and it showed in the final score of the final game (9-1 Windsor). Shouldn’t there be some way to remove the Wheaties from the process altogether? I dunno, make the Final a best-of-three between the top two teams. You still get your minimum-two-but-maybe-three games for gate receipts and TV ratings, and it seems like a much fairer gauge of who the best team in all the land truly is. Or maybe the hosts shouldn’t get a free pass if they don’t make their respective League Final. Something. Anything’s got to be better than this travesty of a result.

Then I stopped and reflected on the tournament as a whole, and came to a realization: the Hitmen simply didn’t play well enough. They got down 0-3 in each of their first two games, mounting a comeback against Moncton and losing 6-2 to Windsor. They became completely passive in their final round-robin game against Brandon after the first, then simply had no answer for Brandon’s tenacity in the semis. (These two things may or may not be related, depending on how you view momentum in a game.) I wasn’t scared of facing Windsor, as such: I maintain that we could’ve beat them, and if nothing else kept the score close. But I do wonder if we really deserved to win, regardless. Having two or three good periods in a tournament we should have dominated is no way to earn the right to play for the prize. Jones wasn’t good enough, the defence wasn’t good enough, the discipline wasn’t good enough, and outside the Jimmy Bubnick-Tyler Shattock-Kris Foucault line, the scorers weren’t good enough. Sure, we were missing Brandon Kozun, but that’s not an excuse: we were still three lines deep in offensive talent. They weren’t aggressively bad, or anything, they just weren’t at their best for most of the tournament, and it showed.

Still, even if we biffed our second consecutive chance to be crowned kings of junior hockey — and possibly the last for several years, given the amount of turnover likely to occur this summer — there’s a ton to be proud of. Two World Junior representatives, both of whom took home awards for their work at their respective positions: Kozun as the nation’s top scorer, Martin Jones as the West’s top goalie and MVP of the conference and league finals (Edit: and top goalie of the Memorial Cup). First overall in the League, for the second year in a row. The first 1-3 comeback in five years (since we ourselves were turfed by none other than those fucking Wheat Kings). Pasting the League’s best offensive team and the presumptive favourites by winning the goalie battle in spectacular fashion. Winning our first WHL title since the days of Moran, Brendl, and Fomitchev. The final result may not have been what was desired, but there’s a hell of a lot to be proud of here, and as the bitterness and pain fade, there are a lot of fond memories to look back on, and when we raise four more banners to the rafters of the Saddledome in late September, those will be the things that we as fans should focus on, not the resentment and disappointment of a single loss, off a single goal.

For the last time, congratulations to the 2009-10 Calgary Hitmen, and thanks for the memories.

The Oilers had a lot of things go wrong this year and as much as people like to bring up the cap I’m not convinced that it limited them this year and given that they’re planning to rebuild I’m not sure it limits them next year. However, at the beginning of the season a list was published of the best goalies of the last 3 seasons who were free agents, and what they were signed at. Let’s take a look again.

(Courtesy Copper ‘N Blue)

Notable exclusions from this list on the free agent market were Craig Anderson and… that’s about it.

So let’s cut out the goalies who didn’t play in the NHL this year and look at how many games the remainder played, won, and what was their SV%:

Now, it’s apparent that Deslauriers is off the mark, but not drastically.  Conklin’s number is likely inflated because he just barely crossed the 25GP mark, and as far as everyone else goes, 0.909-0.903 isn’t a huge difference.  It’s also interesting that Biron didn’t even make the list.  Only two other goalies on the list played the same amount as Deslauriers, and those are Roloson and Nittymaki, and they’re anywhere from 4 years to “old as the hills” older than him.

Now let’s take a look at those teams’ combined stats:

• St. Louis: 82GP, 40W, 0.912SV% – 2473SA – $4.3mil
• Tampa Bay: 82GP, 34W, 0.902SV% – 2575SA – $2.8mil
• New York Islanders: 82GP, 34W, 0.901SV% – 2619SA – $8.4mil
• Carolina: 82GP, 35W, 0.903SV% – 2574SA – $3.666mil
• Columbus: 82GP, 32W, 0.900SV% – 2514SA – $2.105mil

So judging by the win and SV% columns, St. Louis cleaned up, though they also had the least SA.

NOTE: There may be some issues with these numbers because of how NHL counts goals.  I’m unsure whether OT goals and SO goals are counted in this measure.

It also bears mentioning that the only teams who got a free-agent goaltender and are actually in the playoffs are Colorado and Philadelphia, and they both backed in. (Ignoring Raycroft, LaBarbera and Danis who each played less than 25 games)

What does all this mean?  If there was a goalie not named Anderson worth spending money on this past offseason, it was Conklin but god knows he’ll never play in Edmonton again.  And while Edmonton obviously did the worst, it did the worst with the only team in the league to play rookies for more than 60 games this season.  Add that to 525 man-games lost and 135 defenceman-games-lost (and 56 Hesky-games lost) and it’s tough to argue about the horribleness of the goaltending relative to what was available.  I think it’s a pretty safe assumption that with half of the injuries Edmonton certainly wouldn’t have gotten first overall pick.

In short, the complaints that people had about the Khabibulin signing and free-agency were blown out of proportion.  Yes, Anderson was a great buy.  Yes, Conklin is actually pretty good.  Yes, Khabibulin cost a decent amount of money.  But when it comes down to it having more cap space wouldn’t have fixed Edmonton’s problems this season, and there’s quite a bit of space free next season.  St. Louis got the best bargain, and they’re also the one of these teams who finished in 17th place overall.  The Islanders got the worst bargain, followed by Edmonton.

No, this isn’t an argument in favour of Khabibulin.  This isn’t even an argument in favour of good cap management.  It’s an argument purely saying that at the end of the day the stats are more or less the same so we just paid a bit more to get that #1 pick, not to mention driving down the prices on their RFA signings this offseason (Gagner, Cogliano, Potulny, Dubnyk, Deslauriers, Pouliot, Brule).  I mean, have you seen Calgary’s cap hit for next season?

Plus, 2 spots on the top 10 saves of the year isn’t bad for a rookie, no matter how dismally the rest of the year went. (Yes, I know they were in the same game. Sidenote: Detroit was on the wrong end of 4 of them? Crazy.)

It’s safe to say things haven’t exactly gone according to plan. We’ve complained about the officiating before, and that’s all well and good, but while I haven’t seen the other three games, I have seen the boxscores, and I’m unconvinced that the refs jobbed us in two of them. I’m looking at those Moose Jaw goal totals and wondering what’s happened to the D and/or goaltending. Both looked bad in Game 1, and clearly, we haven’t seen much improvement since: you almost wonder why Williamson hasn’t gone with Snider at some point here, and as for the D, well, let’s just say that the Tribe’s goalie got two assists in the first period of Game 4 and leave it at that. Of course, Jason Bast is having himself quite the series so far, with six goals (!!) in four games to this point, and outside of Game 3, Jeff Bosch has been lights-out. From the Hitmen perspective, though, my interpretation of the action and the comments to date is that the boys have got the opposite problem to last year. Whereas last post-season, they got too complacent after pummelling lesser teams, and basically let themselves be beat by the Kelowna Rockets in the final, this year, they seem to be clamming up and letting a lesser team beat them before they can get within a country mile of their peer group — the Blades, the Wheaties, the Americans, and the Silvertips. Instead of playing to win, they’re playing not to lose, and from the sounds of the public quotes to date, that directive isn’t coming from the coaching staff.

So, it’s win or go home for the next three games if Calgary wants to see the light of April. A comeback is far from implusible, of course: just last year, the Capitals came back from 1-3 down to win their series against the Rangers in seven. It’s not terribly common, either, mind you: just 12.1% of series in which the underdog has gone up 3-1 have seen such a comeback in the majors (not counting last year’s Caps win), and I can’t imagine junior would be horribly different — let’s be optimistic and call it one in five. If it’s going to happen, the coaches need to reign the boys in and get them playing confident and physical, more like Game 3 — or for that matter, the last 27 games of the season — and less like they have most of this series. They need to remember what got them here to begin with, and what got them within two wins of the Memorial Cup tournament last year. Play simple, play aggressive, and come at them in waves. They absolutely have to leave everything on the ice tonight if they want any hope of playing again on Saturday.

Prediction: Hitmen 4, Warriors 3. Kozun, Foucault, and Schultz in regulation; MacKenzie Royer scores on a fifth whack in double overtime to send us back to the Crushed Can. Bast with the hat trick for Moose Jaw, because why the hell not.

Turns out, it compares pretty favourably, in exactly the wrong way. More specifically, I’m pretty sure they currently hold the NHL record for most seasons played without a playoff series victory. These are the longest streaks I could find:

• Winnipeg Jets-Phoenix Coyotes: 1987-88 to 2003-04; 2005-06 to 2008-09 (21 seasons)
• Quebec Bulldogs-Hamilton Tigers-New York Americans: 1913-14 to 1916-17; 1919-20 to 1934-35 (20 seasons)
• New York Rangers: 1950-51 to 1969-70 (20 seasons)

Note that the Bulldogs-Tigers-Americans franchise streak includes their final four seasons in the NHL’s predecessor league, the National Hockey Association. Note also that all these years are inclusive, and that seasons in which a team did not play — 2004-05 for the Coyotes; 1917-18 and 1918-19 for the Bulldogs — are excluded for obvious reasons. This also means that while the Ottawa Senators did not win a playoff series between the old franchise’s last Stanley Cup in 1927 and the new franchise’s first series victory in 1998, only twelve seasons were completed during that stretch — six as the old Senators, one as the St. Louis Eagles, and five as the new Senators — which puts them down the list a bit.

This list should also give us Oilers fans a bit of perspective, for however bad things seem to be now, we’ve only missed the playoffs four seasons in a row: we have a long, long way to go before we’re as historically bad as these guys.

I’ll admit, even in the middle of January I was hoping for a repeat of Quinn’s undefeated streak (35 games) which could have propelled you into the playoff picture.  However, doing the math today shows that even if you win every game between now and the end of the season you’d be lucky to get 8th spot (with 96 points).  This is not the time to win.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying you should actively try to lose.  At this stage of the game if you break .500 for the rest of the season you’re still only likely to drop down to 3rd pick.  And while, yes, Toronto getting first pick would entertain me bitterly (I believe you’re aware that their pick goes to Boston this year) and I realize that there’s no real clearance between the first and second prospects this season it should be up to you to pick between Daigle and Pronger.  You don’t want to obsess over what might have been.

More should be coming from me in the future…

Matt

No clue what we’re going to do with the old posts, though, especially if simply migrating them over proves difficult or impossible.  I may just repost the handful of articles and posts that I’m particularly proud of and/or may need to reference in the future.  This site is very much under construction, so stay tuned.

For at least the next day or so, the normal site is down.  I’m switching over to WordPress for the basic posting stuff, so hopefully the comments should have an easier time there.  I’ll get the reviews and articles back up as soon as I can, but at this point that may take some doing.  We’ll see.

Either way, here’s to the start of something new.