Game 11: 9/10ths

I’m not sure I believe in ‘puck possession’.

No, I’m not advocating some transcendentalist hockey philosophy that suggests that no one can truly every possess the puck, the puck being a free object controlled but none by the hockey gods themselves. That, probably, would be silly. I believe that there is such a thing as a puck that may be possessed by a particular player at any given moment. What I’m uncertain about is the existence of ‘puck possession’ as a distinct hockey strategy; i.e. a style that a coach chooses to impart to players over other, competing styles. What people mean when they say that the Red Wings are a ‘puck possession’ team, or that Martin wants to train the Canadiens to play a ‘puck possession’ system, that concept of puck possession. I think…maybe… perhaps… possibly… it’s bullshit.

My doubts arise from the suspicion that ‘playing a puck possession style’ is just a code for ‘being a very good hockey team’. There is clearly no such thing as a puck dispossession style. There is no such thing as a keep-that-motherfucking-puck-as-far-away-from-us-as-possible style (except insofar as that is the preferred style of goalies everywhere). Most hockey teams, most of the time, want to have the puck. Trying to get the puck and keep it is fundamental to the game.

There is, I concede, a kind of possession-indifferent style. The storied neutral zone trap strategy places more importance on controlling the lines and protecting the defensive zone than it does on getting the puck. A trap team may go for long stretches of the game without actively pursuing possession, content to dispossess the opponents again and again until the perfect opportunity arises for an offensive push. But this is comparatively rare, since there aren’t so very many pure trap teams left in the world.

Even if there were, though, I’m not sure that contrasting puck possession to the trap proves anything. The trap has long been considered an equalizing strategy, the final recourse of the offensively-deficient. The trap is what you play when you think you’re going to get your ass kicked on open ice. So if the defining characteristic of puck-possession hockey is that it isn’t trap hockey, it comes back to my initial hypothesis: puck possession strategy = being good at hockey.

A new angle. Forget intentions, consider actions. What are the definable actions that distinguish a puck possession style from other possible styles? This is hockey, not international espionage- any strategy at work should be clearly visible on the ice surface. A color commentator of reasonable intelligence, observing a trap team in play, would be able to select certain plays, repeat them in slow motion, and outline with circles and arrows in bright neon yellow exactly when a given player takes an action redolent of trappishness. You can see the trap in play. What would be the distinct actions that are redolent of puck possessiveness?

Under what circumstances in a hockey game do teams voluntarily, deliberately, surrender possession? Involuntary losses of the puck don’t count- one player’s ability to hold the puck in a situation where another might make a giveaway is an example of skill, not strategy. No, the important question is: In what situation does a puck possession team keep the puck when another equally skilled, equally rational team might choose to forsake it?

The shot. I haven’t done the research to back it up, but I’d guess that a preponderance of shots result in a loss of possession for the shooting team, as the puck generally ends up in the netting, in the goalie, or bouncing back towards the neutral zone. Theoretically, a strategy based on puck possession might emphasize taking fewer shots of more precise calibration, resulting in a lower shot count and a higher shooting percentage than other teams. We may, however, reject this proposition on two grounds: firstly, the entire aim of possession is to get shots on net, it would be ridiculously self-defeating to forego shots in favor of aimless puck-wandering (although such a choice is not unimaginable for those of us familiar with Alexei Kovalev); secondly, there is the empirical evidence of identified puck possession teams, who seem to have normal-to-high shot counts.

The dump-in. Opposing a puck possession style to a dump-and-chase style might be on the same level as opposing it to the trap; that is, what you’re really doing is opposing skill to not-skill. After all, dump and chase is most commonly found in hockey as the preserve of bottom-six forwards who can’t be trusted to do anything fancier. It’s the default, basic, not-exactly-smart-but-at-least-it’s-not-stupid play- just get it in deep- but it’s also usually seen as something to be superseded if one has the talent to do so. However, there have on occasion been teams, even teams with skilled offensive forwards, who chose to make dump-and-chase their preferred mode of attack. I’m still inclined to think such teams are a minority, however, like pure trap teams.

The clear. There are a variety of ways for a defending team to get the puck out of their zone, but several of the more popular ones involve a probable loss of possession. Under pressure, most players will happily take a nice toss up the boards to no one in particular. Even more pressure, and they’ll take any available tap or whack over an open stretch of blue line, anything for a little room, an extra breath, a change. Given space, and time, and vision, most teams will happily take a moment to set up an attack in their territory, but keep a team in their own hole for a minute or a half and most will take any opportunity to get the puck free. It takes courage, or hubris, or an absolute faith in some kind of system to ignore those options and try to make a cute pass or deke a defenseman when you’re still escaping more than attacking.

Which is where we come, at the end, to the Canadiens. When Martin came in and started talking about a puck possession system, it seemed like little more than talk- a story for the press, the obligatory rationale for the fans. Every new coach has to say he’s got something new to offer, and puck possession is a popular buzzword of late. But something’s been bugging me about the Canadiens play style thus far in the season, and I think it might be exactly that last point: they (or at least their top two forward lines and the occasional defenseman) are passing up the easy, pragmatic defensive plays in favor of the high-risk, high-reward options. Because we know enough now to know that if Gionta or Gomez can get out into open ice with puck on stick, they can pick up speed through the neutral zone and make landfall at the opponents’ crease before half the other players on the ice have hit the red line. We know that, they know that, and the results are dazzling when it works… but the first step, that first fucking step beyond the blue line with clear possession… it’s hard, man, and the risks are huge. Turn that thing over while most of your forwards are looking outbound and picking up speed and there’s very little left behind to protect the poor lemur in the net, other than Hal Gill’s blessedly immobile bulk.

I think, God help us, they really are trying to be a puck possession team. I just don’t know if they’re good enough to make it work.

Game 10: Mixed Blessings

Against the New York Rangers, the Canadiens played a terribly symmetrical game. The equivalency wasn’t just an eerie evenness between the teams- although it was that, as NYR seemed to have the same problems as the Canadiens, if not the same assets. It was also a harmony between the Habs’ own strengths and weaknesses- a creepy kind of yin/yang balance between exciting offence and excruciating defense, play as creative on the rush as it was stagnant on the backend.

Part of that is the injuries to the D. Bergeron can compensate somewhat for Markov’s absence on the PP (he doesn’t ‘replace’ Markov, since his contribution is rather different), but he’s not remotely a comparable player in his own zone. Every defenseman the Canadiens have has been pushed up the depth chart, which means some of them are playing above their optimal ceiling, in terms of the number of minutes or their difficulty or both. It’s expected that the D will play slightly sub-par. They are slightly sub-par.

But the forwards aren’t doing their share. Yeah, I know, everyone’s forgetting the first period because the result was so good, but for all their offensive force and neutral-zone heroics, that top line can be pretty ineffectual at getting the puck out of their own end, and the still-hypothetical 2nd line is even worse. Based on this game, the Chupacabra/Latendresse/D’Agostini trio is our best defensive option, and they’ve been uneven on the season so far. NYR picked their goals off the Habs’ ugly giveaways and failed clearing attempts, but they didn’t capitalize nearly as often as they might have. When you give the opposition that many quality opportunities, you damn well better have some hat tricks up your sleeve.

Gomez? He cool. Cammelleri? He awesome. Gionta? He awesomer. These guys, played as a set, are so much better than anything the Canadiens have had in recent memory that it’s like moving up to the next generation of hockey offense- Bob Gainey finally bought us a Playstation 3. But if Mike Cammelleri doesn’t have a stellar night, including a few stunning individual efforts, the Habs lose that game 4-2. And Mike Cammelleri, as brilliant and glorious and electrifying and sensational and handsome and dashing and charismatic and intrepid and witty and debonair and strawberry-flavored as he is, will not have a stellar night every night. ‘Fast’ doesn’t mean uncatchable or unstoppable. If the Canadiens’ offense remains this unidimensional, it’s going to get shut down come January, and we’ll be in a place not so far from the one we were in a year ago.

This isn’t pointless negativity, and this isn’t nostalgia for the past. I’d be the first to agree that this is an exciting team with oodles of potential. But too much of that excitement is coming from a) one line and b) nearly getting our asses kicked and then pulling out a dramatic finish. Which is fucking great entertainment, it’s just not one of the Six Proofs of the Existence of Good Hockey.

The first hurdle was scoring. The next hurdle is depth.

[Please note: games 6, 7, 8, and 9 will be filled in behind this one, further down the page, because I don’t have hardly any time to write these days. Feel free to acknowledge them, and I’ll respond to comments, even though they’re not the latest thing. The posts aren’t time-specific anyway.]

Game 6: Memento Mori

…everyone you know someday will die.

You would definitely have noticed them.

The camera noticed them. They must have been among the more heavily-adorned fans that night, in their jerseys and face paint, but they couldn’t possibly have blended in. Nor would they have wanted to, for what else could be the point of dusting off the old Nordiques gear for the Canadiens’ season opener?

The cameras found them after one of the Avalanche goals, raising their glasses and proudly shaking their clothes, as if one might miss the turquoise and the mutated elephant amidst the row upon row of bleu-blanc-rouge. I assume they wanted to remind all of the assembled Habs fans and those of us watching on her ships at sea of the glories of the Nordiques, who were no negligible team in their day and gave us some of the most intense rivaling we’ve ever been rivaled. But for me, having no personal memory of the Nords, the effect was rather different. They didn’t make me think of glory. They made me think of death.

These zombie fans, with their Quebec fleur-de-lies or their Hartford evergreen, are acolytes of the dead teams. There are too many. Since the inception of the NHL, 48 teams have played under its auspices. Eighteen have perished, enough to form an entire conference of ghosts and then some- a murky netherworld where the Cleveland Barons play no-forward-pass rules against the Montreal Wanderers.

There isn’t a lot of mystery about the causes of death. People can die of any number of things, but hockey teams almost exclusively die of poverty. The game might be their soul, but finance is their blood, and for all the talk of winning being hockey’s ultimate goal, no team has ever died of losing. At best, winning (particularly the winning of a Stanley Cup) is a kind of prophylactic, it reduces the chance of contracting a fatal financial disaster. Nevertheless, successful on-ice teams have failed while their underperforming cousins struggle on.

What can we learn about the mortality of hockey teams from these poor corpses? Expansion is risky, for one thing. The NHL’s most expansive periods have also proven its most punishing- virtually all dead teams date from the wild pre-WWII era or the kudzu growth of the 1970s- and, of course, the damaged foster children rescued from the wreckage of the WHA. Obviously more expansion teams have survived than not, but it seems that an ambitious generation will eventually see some attrition.

Most teams that die, die young. The notable exception is the Minnesota North Stars, who played 26 seasons before they went south, and the WHA imports made an impressive go of it. But most of those who die make it less than a decade, and many of them only a year or two. As with infants in peasant villages, the first years of life are the hardest on a hockey team. The corollary is that persistence is a kind of protection- every further year a team plays, the more likely it will get another.

Teams that fail once tend to fail again. After the long, stolid Original Six period, teams don’t die outright so much as move. Beyond the first couple of seasons it amounts to the same thing, since a team with a different name in a different city with a different owner and a different roster is pretty much the definition of a different team. But looked at from a certain perspective, as many as three of the failed teams might be considered the same, very unlucky franchise. The Golden Seals became the Barons became the North Stars became the Stars before finally settling on a stable identity, and the Scouts became the Rockies became the Devils, and it seems likely that the Jets who became the Coyotes will become something else again. So if your team is inherited from someone else and not very old…

The positive flip side of this is that former NHL cities are prone to reincarnation- having had a dead team seems to be a virtual guarantee of getting another. Ottawa got its Sens back, after a generation, and New York regained its 2nd team. Pittsburgh and Philly, St. Louis and Atlanta, Northern California, Ohio, Minnesota, even non-Montreal Quebec got two chances. Considering that Hamilton and Kansas City are up for resurrection in the imaginable future, the rate might climb to nearly 100% for cities the NHL chose itself. WHA cities, and 2nd teams from Montreal, are exceptions.

We know, also, that the moral qualities of neither fan base nor ownership matter particularly. Well-intentioned owners in hockey-mad cities have seen their teams killed off by economic fluctuations, whereas foul owners in hockey-indifferent cities continue to make money. The life cycles of hockey teams have painfully little to do with hockey- they’re all about currency conversions, and interest rates, and corporate investment, and other such dull banalities.

Some dead teams are more fondly remembered than others, some are more widely lamented, although the difference might be time more than passion. Most of the remaining zombie-fans are attached to teams that caved in the mid-nineties- you can still see Nordiques fans roaming free in their natural habitat, and it’s not uncommon to find a stray Jets fan nesting under your porch in the winter months. You’d have to look a lot longer and deeper to find the few remaining devotees of the Scouts or the Golden Seals. The Maroons and Americans are so long gone they’ve become public domain, part of the collective past of Hockey.

However good or mediocre the franchise was in its time, dead-team fanaticism is almost impossible to pass on. I get why so many Nordiques fans chose to try to move their allegiance to Denver. It makes a ton of sense, in 1995, to just become an Avs fan- after all, they’ve got all ‘your’ players, they’re pretty good, and transferring to the Canadiens must have seemed unthinkable. But now, a decade and change later, it’s ridiculous- the Avalanche are an American team in another conference, covered almost entirely in another language, games generally shown at times you can’t watch on channels you don’t get, retaining not one living connection to the Nordiques you knew. It’s a thin fanaticism to hold, one held more out of hatred for the Canadiens than anything else, and it can’t be passed down without simply segueing into an awkwardly displaced varietal of ordinary Avalanche fanaticism.

Every team will die eventually. It is inconceivable that something so fraught and capitalistic should endure forever. Some of the teams, we can imagine their deaths- think of the Lightning, the Panthers, the Thrashers, the Predators, certainly the Coyotes, possibly the Oilers, and you can see how they might be carried off by the ups and downs of yearly economic cycles or needy, scavenging billionaires. Others are probably bound to the success of the NHL as a league. The California teams, the Northeast American franchises are likely to flourish as long as the League flourishes; come the rise of the KHL and the internationalization of the game, or the abject failure of hockey as a spectator sport, there might be some attrition. Others, though, it’s harder. The Leafs are so resolute a brand that they’ll likely survive, indifferent to winning and losing, unto the complete economic failure of Canada, and my own Canadiens are so valuable an icon that I think they’re likely to survive in some form or another so long as ice and French persist in the world. I can imagine a team of Francophone mutant cockroaches playing in the ruins of Le Centre Belle through a century of nuclear winter, in expansive four-armed jerseys bearing the CH across the thorax.

Yeah, that’s ridiculous. But hidden even in that facetious fantasy is my true answer to the question, which is that the Canadiens will survive as long as Quebec survives, as long as the French-Canadian microculture in North America remains viable. Yes, they may have the reputation of being the Anglo team from Montreal, but they've grown inextricably bound to French-ness, to Francophone media, to French-Canadian ethno-linguistic pride, to the multilingual, multicultural past of their city. As long as that culture and its memory endure, they’ll find ways to keep their Club Du Hockey, in some shape, in some league. Which is why, in a way, I thank God for every fractious Francophone reporter and snarky RDS talking head and every Quebecois parliamentarian who rants periodically in paranoid style about the encroaching danger of Anglo hegemony: because they’re shoring up that delicate ecosystem that my Habs need to perpetuate their species, the culture that supports the economy that supports my team and no other. Certainly not the Avalanche.

Game 5: The Boy

[Please note that the following is highly personal and subjective in nature. It contains almost no general-interest discussion of the Canadiens, nor any particular hockey analysis.]

beebeebeebeeep…

beebeebeebeeep…

beebeebeebeep…

BEEBEEBEEMOTHERFUCKINGBEEP

Somewhere, just over my head and to the left, the cell phone becomes insistent. I can’t tell if the boy is awake or not. He’s not, of course, really a boy, being 28 and not wholly lacking a certain maturity one associates with adult males. But I’ll call him that in this essay, both as a gesture of affection and because other substitute names seemed even more ridiculous. Anyway, call him what you will, he is sprawled insensibly across the bed, unable or unwilling to respond to the staccato alarm or my impatient prodding.

It’s 9:45 am, and in Canada, it’s hockey night. In Taipei, it’s Sunday morning- a grey, moody, distinctly un-tropical Sunday morning. Out my window, fine drops of rain are tittering on tin roofs, and even the 101 looks forlorn, like a stack of empty boxes soaked through by the drizzle. Another game, another day, and I would happily stay in bed until noon, since that is the best feature of Sundays the world over. The boy is thinking the same thing, dragging himself from under the covers reluctantly, almost hoping there aren’t any good live feeds. Fortunately, unfortunately, there are two, so I grab a blanket and we perch ourselves on the couch for the awkward, mandatory ritual.

My Habs, his Oilers. Our apartment is littered with their symbols and their artifacts: bright flags and sweaty jerseys, pristine commemorative pucks, faded T-shirts, stickers, scarves, and utterly useless tuques- a museum of the many and varied marketing salvos of the two franchises. The hockey-filled apartment is one of the incidental pleasures of a cohabiting with another fan. There are others. The ordinary satisfaction of trading snarky jokes about Brian Burke. The melting thrill when he came back from Canada and gave me a Saku Koivu rookie card in a yellowed plastic shell. The enveloping contentment of being around someone who Gets It.

So long as I share my life with the boy, I will also share my life with the Oilers- their ups and downs, all their little dramas. It means, as a matter of course, that I have to recognize Shawn Horcoff as a legitimate first-line center, retain a soft spot for Fernando Pisani, and put up with rather more references to the swollen horror that is Mark Messier than I would like. Also, as the boy reads a lot of blogs, I have to have an opinion on the value of zone-starts as a player-quality measure. These are not great sacrifices.


For the most part, our two fanaticisms can coexist peacefully, he to his conference and me to mine. Thank the 30-team NHL, where the competition is so dilute that very few other teams have any meaningful individual impact on the success of my Habs. Like the Sharks, the Wild, the Preds, the goodness or badness of the Oilers is a matter of indifference to me, or at best casual curiosity. It is only in the unbelievably unlikely event of an Edmonton-Montreal Stanley Cup Final that it would matter deeply.

And on days like this one, when the Canadiens go to Rexall Place.

Early in the game, if you can believe it, I’m happy. It’s looking close, as I knew it would be, but the Habs are getting their shots and their chances at what seems to be a slightly faster rate than the Oilers, and I’m thinking it’s only a matter of time before a goal comes. I’m not sure how much faith I have in Carey Price, but I sure as hell don’t have any faith in Nikolai Khabibulin. The boy doesn’t either, which helps.

But just as the first period is melting off indecisively, there’s a goal and a roar and the boy says, Oh, Mike Comrie, all is forgiven, and I try to smother the creeping premonition that the luck is not on my side this game. He is grinning. I am discreetly digging my elbow into his ribs. It’s only 1-0, though, so the intermission can be spent companionably. Kevin Weekes is doing color commentary for the game, and using the position to blithely shout out ever more perplexing inanities, so we sleepily ponder the CBC’s hiring standards and wonder how many times he might use the phrase ‘Bulin Wall’ before the morning is out.

The second period doesn’t go so well. J-F Jaques gets his first NHL goal and the boy convulses with joy and yells, Don’t you write a book about this, Kevin Weekes, and I growl. At this instant, I hate the Oilers, even more so because I know it’s a cute moment and a guy who really deserves it and blah-di-blah-blah, but I wish nothing more than for Jaques to get reamed up the ass with a sledgehammer. By the time O’Sullivan gets the third goal a few minutes later (does every Oilers scorer in this game have to have some cute and/or poignant backstory?), when the boy tries to hug me, I shove him away.

Hockey is, in a causal sense, the reason we’re both here, but it’s hardly the cement of the arrangement. Sometimes we commiserate, but more often we bicker, tease, nag, bet, and otherwise irritate each other. People bitch about their non-sports-addicted family members (they just don’t Get It!) but trust me, there are times when I vainly wish he was just some simple, complacent, totally non-kinetic music nerd, or gearhead, or even a soccer fan.

Ragging on each others’ teams is the least of it. There’s the arguments- the long, drawn out, hour upon hour arguments where we start debating draft strategies and end up pacing the floors at 4 am, shouting over each other, bleary-eyed and incoherent, and go to bed back to sullen back in icy silence. There are hockey topics we’ve had to agree to never mention again just to preserve the peace in the house. And if it’s gotten easier with time, it’s only because our discussions have become increasingly general and cautious, lacking most of the analytical depth we’d expected in the beginning. Our hockey conversations began in metaphysics and have ended in trivia. In some ways, life with another hockey obsessive is considerably harder on one’s relationship with the game than life with an indulgent, disinterested partner.

I know my Habs will not come back from this, and for a moment, I am seething with the most irrational, incredible, desperate, pointless rage at the boy and his oo-la-la Western Conference and his advanced stats and his sainted prodigies. The Oilers now are lucky. They’re lucky and they’re winning and I know with the highest reasoning I’ve ever reasoned they’re not a great team but they’re shooting like they’ve got God’s own sniper rifle and they’re surging and kicking ass and I don’t think when they fall they’re going to fall so hard as to negate this fantastical run they’re starting on and oh Sheldon Souray, can’t you rip a tendon or something the way you used to in the halcyon days of your youth? [Now, of course, I feel bad about having written this.]

My Habs, they’ve got nothing, no spark no luck no fight no will no system no discipline no special teams, nothing but the shot counts and tenacity on their side and I know back in Montreal it must be like an unplumbed level of hell these days and they’re due for a fucking break sooner or later, right? But whether they’ll get it, whether the pendulum will swing back, whether they’ll get a few bounces before the hole is too deep… I have doubts. I have fears.

The boy knows enough to let me be for a while.

His species of fanaticism is at least as serious as mine and probably more so, but mellower. This season, neither of us have much hope. The difference is in the tone. The boy has passed the point of hurting, passed the point of anxiety, passed nearly the point of taking it personally. He still cares, of course, he still follows assiduously every doing and saying in the Oilers universe, but he’s given up expectation, and with that some sense of pride. He’s seen his team go from good to bad and bad to worse, and over the last three seasons he’s used up most of his shock, horror, and outrage. His obsession has grown gentle; bemused affection rather than raging passion. Me, I still do the shrieks, the shrill rants, the pouting, the profanity. I want my Habs epic, one way or another, and so my mind makes them. I immerse, I avoid , I adore, I ignore, I am inconstant. He, to his team, is faithful.

Now that I am spending the second period assiduously avoiding looking at either the television or the boy, my eyes drift over the rest of the apartment. It’s not all franchise stuff, thank God. There’s the Canadian flag over the TV, the somewhat-unearned-but-charmingly-bloodstained Taipei Typhoon jersey on the adjacent wall, a precarious assortment of sticks leaning behind us, the lumpen, battered equipment bag in the corner.

I am sometimes ambivalent about sharing life with another hockey fan, but I am never ambivalent about sharing life with a hockey player. That’s the beautiful thing about the boy, he plays. Not very well, mind you, and not with the requisite jock-swagger one generally associates with hockey players, but nevertheless, winter upon winter lo these many seasons, he plays. He plays with an unquestioning, self-punishing certainty, even here, where the game is strange and expensive and nothing like the carefully-calibrated system Canadian boys are accustomed to. He plays, though he has the wrong body for it- tall, yes, but all thin tangled limbs, the coltish silhouette of teenager still waiting to fill out, impervious to exercise or diet. He plays, though countless awkward falls, overzealous turns, and unanticipated collisions have woven an ever-shifting web of aches and twinges across his back, though he’s sprained ankles and split lips and blackened eyes.

And still, the boy loves hockey more than anything. More than money, more than sex, more than a hot shower on a cold morning, more than a cold beer and an Arrested Development marathon. More than truth, justice, and virtue. More, probably, than me. Maybe more than his mom. (To his mom, if she’s reading this: that’s probably not true, but don’t press him on the point.)

Playing hockey is the bridge too far for me. I can skate, sure, but my hands are leaden and my eyes wandering. Someday, yes, maybe, I will get back to Canada and find myself a friendly, decorous women’s beginner league, where I can slide around precariously with other giggling, self-conscious females who missed out on hockey until it was too late. Maybe on occasion I’ll goaltend, badly, for shinny or practice. But I’ll never really play, never skate in a game that means anything to anyone, never have to sacrifice or even give all that much to sport. Real hockey is something I will never experience. Bad luck, yeah; bad choices too.

Still, I love being around it. Not just the watching of it, not the fan bullshit, but the details of it. I trail the boy around and soak up the antiseptic chill of freshly-Zambonied ice and the sour reek of old equipment and the resonant smack of pucks off Plexiglas. I carry stickbags and wash jerseys and go to the emergency room and fill out scoresheets and other such nauseating feminine tasks. I watch, all that gliding and sweating and swearing, I reenact in my brain stem all those rushes and retreats. The boy plays, and I dream on his playing.

Sometimes I wonder how many of the fanatical hockey moms of the world, the supportive wives, the ravenous puckbunnies, are borrowing, second-hand, a life they missed the first time around. When I was a little girl, I wonder, would I have played hockey, if I’d been aware that I could play hockey? Probably not, probably I was so timid and bookish that I’d have shirked sports as resolutely in Badger Pond, Alberta as I did in Chicago. And anyway, the contours of women’s hockey aren’t especially appealing. Aside from the truly elite level, it’s a fuzzy, shrunken version of the men’s game, lacking nearly all of the cultural resonance, social rituals, and ragged, ugly edges that make hockey itself. It’s a consolation prize, for those of us who lost the genital lottery. I’m never really going to play hockey, but if I could, I’d like to think I’d play like the boy- not talented, not flashy, not theatrical, but wholly and passionately nevertheless.

The two seasons I lived in Montreal, when my Habs were eliminated from the playoffs it felt like death, like the end of hockey, a bottomless loss. Hockey was Manichean than, because there was only one virtuous team and only one true victory. Now, though, in this life, as far as possible from the NHL, it feels more cyclical- so many different varietals of the game, so many endless kinds of wining and losing, infinite permutations of play. There are gloves drying on the windowsill and sticks propped in the corner, and Roman Hamrlik scoring one last unnecessary soul-soothing goal on the TV, and I know that tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, in Montreal or in Edmonton, in Turku or in Turin, and even in Taipei, there will always be another game. I should have known that all along, but really, I learned it from the boy.

Buzzer.

He smiles, stretching out the shiny pink high-stick scar on his upper lip, with far too much sincere pleasure. “So what did I win?”

“A day with an irritable girlfriend who resents you.” I don’t mean it the way I might have in the middle of the 2nd period.

“That’s not what I was hoping for.”

“Then you should remember to make your bets before the game.”

And we go back to bed.

Game 4: Growing Pains

In Vancouver, the Canadiens finally found the kind of defeat they’d been searching for since game 1. It was a drastic, merciless, unambiguous pummeling by a Canucks team determined to win as decisively as possible. They used their speed to find gaps and press advantages in every direction, and the Canadiens- this time- were unable to rise to the challenge. They folded, despondently, and ended up lamely waiting out the third, just waiting until they could go back to the hotel, drink heavily, and drift off to their own respective ‘happy places’ (Carey Price: stripper rodeo!).

The good thing about this kind of loss is that it gives one occasion to contemplate the causes of pathetic hockey. A win, or a close loss, no matter how bad the game, encourages a deep-denial emphasis on good things, little flashes of inspiration you can blow all out of scale and imagine as the subterranean causes of an apparently unearned outcome. But with a game like this, you can’t do the whole ‘let’s focus on the positives!’ routine. Let’s focus on the negatives. Let’s speculate, just for the misery-wallowing satisfaction of it, about what might be wrong with these Habs.

Could be nothing, of course. Could be bad luck. Could be a gypsy curse, or a Western Canada curse, or a Sedin double-evil eye. Could be the injuries- certainly they’d be better than this with Markov on the ice twenty-odd minutes again, probably they’d even be better with Metropolit and O’Byrne as options. Could be the long early-season road trip, or the difficulty of coordinating a dozen new players on one team. Or it could be that they’re just not good enough and never will be.

Could be the kids.

The Canadiens have a lot of new faces. These can be divided into two basic categories: free agent signings and rookies who’ve visited the team before but have yet to prove themselves as NHL regulars. The first group is performing fairly well. Gionta and Cammelleri are appropriately shiny (although Cammelleri appears to be a bit unlucky as yet), Gomez is looking like the palid-but-not-entirely-unwelcome center-playing ghost of Kovalev, Moen is a heartfelt whacker and banger, Mara has been better than advertised, Spacek is manfully toiling through difficult, unforgiving minutes, and Gill- probably the most dubious of the new guys- has been generally competent, in a panda kind of way.

But the kids, the homegrown talent, are getting killed. Pacioretty shows flashes of greatness, but he’s going through a lot of his ice time in an unseemly daze; D’Agostini, even more so. Stewart has been invisible at best- I’m thrilled not to notice him, because when I do, I feel queasy and forlorn. Chipchura has the worst effort-to-results ratio of any Hab in the past three years, and is going to surpass Higgins’ previous records for earnest, ineffectual self-punishment before December at this rate. Weber has an excuse- he’s the true injury call-up, he was never intended to be here this season- but the young forwards are here because they’re due. And they don’t look ready.

Because they aren’t. NHL readiness isn’t one of those things that just happens naturally, a stage of growth, like hitting puberty. It isn’t a line to be crossed. Players are not hanging around the AHL, waiting for that magical day when Bob Gainey will come and whisk them away to a smoky hut in the woods, where he’ll get them drunk on Molson Export and take them on a psychedelic vision quest to commune with the wise, restless ghost of Howie Morenz, after which they will be presented with a commemorative tuque and know that now, finally, they have become an NHL player.

Nope, sadly, there’s no hut, all the drunkenness is recreational, Howie Morenz’s ghost presently refuses to talk to anyone but Youppi!, and getting to the NHL and staying there is a messy process. Some guys do it fast, some do it slow, some bounce back and forth for years. We only start paying attention to an NHLer after he’s been in the show, regular-like, for a couple of seasons, but there are dozens of guys right now on various teams, playing in the NHL because of the immediate needs of the franchise. Unless they’re on our team, we don’t even bother learning their names, because we know a fair number of them won’t stick. But which ones will and which ones won’t is a mystery. And a lot of what decides it isn’t really skill.

There are two things aside from talent (probably more, but I’ve only bothered to think about these two at the present moment) that heavily influence a maybe-NHLer’s chance of becoming an actual NHLer: luck and need. If he hits a lucky streak during some part of his initial look-see, pots a goal or two, makes some sexy plays, it can buy a lot of patience with subsequent growing pains. Better yet, if he comes on the scene during an injury crisis, when the team has few other options, it guarantees a certain amount of time to show well and a certain amount of indulgence.

Talent probably isn’t as big a factor as it seems- it’s only the most gifted of the gifted who have enough talent to play credibly on the big team no matter what the circumstances of their arrival. For most players, there’s a necessary adjustment period, spent trying to get (literally) up to speed. During this period, more or less all players suck- almost any older, steady NHLer could outplay them for their spot. The only advantage they have is the higher-ups vague desire that they should be given ‘a chance’- and that isn’t going to carry a lot of weight if the team is in trouble.

The Habs’ youth-heavy bottom lines are getting punished by opposing teams, and while that’s certainly not the only flaw one could find, it’s significant. Moreover, since the past off-season was a frugal one, there are still proven 3rd and 4th line NHL players out there without contracts. It would likely be possible to pick up a someone or two who could step into those roles and do a steadier job that D’Artagnan or Chupacabra. Keeping them around right now is an act of faith and an act of will, hoping that they’ll get through the growing pains and come out capable on the other side. Maybe they will, and the team will be rewarded for its patience with sturdy, inexpensive role-players. Maybe they won’t, and we’ll wonder why we sacrificed X early-season games on AHL dudes.

The critical thing to remember, though, is that this variety of suckage is perennial and, in the existential sense, unavoidable. If you have any hope, ever, that the team will develop in-house talent rather than buying everything in the summer, then there will be these periods when a bunch of new kids arrive and hang around being bad for a while. Eventually, we will learn which ones will always be bad and which ones can be good, but that learning takes time, and while it’s going on, there will be struggles- for the kids individually, for the team as a whole. It’s part of the process that is the Montreal Canadiens, ugly but necessary, and it’s definitely better to be doing it now than in March. Don’t think of it as a disastrous loss. Think of it as a practicum in player development.

Game 3: Elevation

The worst thing about hockey, the most frustrating, hair-tearing, sleep-depriving, enthusiasm-crushing, despair-inducing facet of the game, is not Gary Bettman. It also isn’t the CBA, southern expansion franchises, the instigator penalty, or Sean Avery. It’s not fighting, or dudes who don’t backcheck, or local television color commentators. It’s the luck.

Over the long term, maybe, there is a correlation between winning and playing well. But in any particular game, there may be no relationship whatsoever between the look of the game played and the outcome on the scoresheet. The soul of hockey is chaos, and there’s more than enough random in it to win without playing well. Through the first two games of the season, these Canadiens were winning, but they weren’t playing particularly well. They played the games in Buffalo and Toronto like their net was a black hole, exerting a horrific gravitational pull that drew them- and the opponents- and the puck- inexorably towards its bottomless depths. Every now and then some tiny particle of Hab would manage the tremendous effort necessary to rip himself free of that force, go careening up ice drawing a few compatriots along, but gravity inevitably reasserted, as gravity is wont to do, and pulled all things back towards their own crease. Either Price had a quantum singularity in his ass, or that team was playing shit hockey.

Whatever the scoreboard says, whatever the stats say, whatever that warm, contented victory-intoxication in my belly wants to believe, these Habs have been playing an ugly game. There are good miscellanea, there have been good performances from some and a good shift or two from almost all. There’s certainly no reason to write off the team’s potential-new faces, chemistry experiment, time to gel, blah blah blah. But those glimmers of hope cannot and should not be confused with playing good hockey. We had a lucky couple of games, so offer praise to the hockey gods and store up a little goodwill for the goalie, but I was preparing for a huge letdown in Calgary. Sure, I had some small hope that Martin had a plan and a cattle prod with which to enforce it, but it’s not likely that a team struggling to hold back the Leafs would be dangerous against the Flames.

And yet in Calgary they put in by far their best game of the neonatal season. Not perfect, not consistent (the second period, in particular, was a bit crap), but tough and spiny with a kernel of skill at the center. They pushed and shoved when they had to, broke out clean when they could, passed neatly, shot frequently, skated hard, and finished it all up with a third-period onslaught of admirable scale. Their first line, once Moen was moved off it anyway, was a brilliant creature, but it goes to the entire team’s credit that they seldom looked entirely pinned down by Calgary’s expensive, celebrity defensive corps. It was a loss, anyway, but a loss to the luck as much as the Flames- karma coming back from the previous two games. More importantly, it was an honest effort, worth being proud of.

This is one of the stranger phenomena of the sport, this mysterious elevation. Teams, especially flawed teams, frequently play better against more difficult opposition. Not necessarily better enough to win, but it’s not uncommon to see a struggling club take loss upon loss to bottom feeders, only to launch a furious attack in an otherwise ordinary game against a League-leader. Teams on the bubble can be schizoid like that, counter-intuitively playing well against teams that ought to murder them, than sucking whorishly against those that should be easy prey. It’s exactly the opposite of the logical assumption.

This occasional pattern, ‘playing to the level of the opponent’, might just be a name we put on randomness. If we assumed that every team had a certain number of good games in it and a certain number of bad games, and we scattered those outcomes God-like across the schedule, it would probably come out that occasionally there’d be a run of bad games against bad teams and good games against good teams. The results might seem unlikely, but the entire point of random is that every now and then the unlikely is exactly what one should expect.

But watching the Canadiens pull out that extra effort against Calgary, I thought, that’s not random. It’s human.

People aren’t consistent. That’s one of the reasons we have such a strong desire to delegate tasks to machines, because we know we can’t put in the same level of focus and precision every single time we attempt something. We don’t get out of bed every day with the same amount of energy. We don’t go to work every day with the same level of interest. Yes, hockey players are professionals, and it is part of their professional duty to be equally psyched up for every game. But it’s obvious that they aren’t, just like all of us- professionals in some profession or another- don’t care equally about every detail at every moment. We space out, we get lazy, we assume, we slack. Hockey players do too.

But there’s something about a challenge that kills those ugly impulses. If you love what you do at all, you love it most when you’re practicing it at the highest levels; when there is something new, something difficult, something original to be seen or done, and most of all, when there’s someone else- someone better- confronting you. You prepare more, you think more, you watch more carefully. Doesn’t matter if you’re a chess master or a dancer or a professor or a lawyer, you work harder when the challenge is greater.

Ken Dryden repeats himself a lot, and one of the things he’s repeated often enough that I remember it is that he’s grateful for the Bruins, because they were tough opponents. He’s absolutely right. Thank God for the excellent teams out there, whoever they might turn out to be this year, because they are the ones who are going to get the best games out of all our teams. Because they’re the adversaries who are going to spark the competitive impulse and the passionate effort, they’re the ones who are going to make everyone- even the piddly little rebuilding-phase franchises with their discount rosters and half-empty stadiums- skate faster, hit harder, shoot more, and maybe even win more. They’re the teams they all have to be good against, not the pedantic ‘have to’ of ‘have to eat your vegetables’ or ‘have to get pucks in deep’, but the ‘have to’ of necessity: have to be the best you can, just to stay in the game, just to keep up, not get run out of the building. Professional pride and the attendant fear of public embarrassment are powerful things.

So I’m going to take a cue from Dryden and give most heartfelt thanks to the Calgary Flames, in all their goofy, simian glory. I don’t know if they’ll actually turn out to be a great team this year, but they were good enough to bring out the better in my boys, and show me something of what a good 2009-2010 Canadiens might look like.

謝 謝!

Game 2: Uneven Strength

[N.B.: As I live on the opposite side of the planet from virtually all NHL games, my comments will routinely be lagged a day or two. In the future I hope to keep the intervals shorter. In the meantime… well, there are plenty of more current blogs out there.]

There are two kinds of hockey people: people who like even strength, and people who like power plays. Even strength people are the sensible ones, the ones who care about objective value and replicable results, the accountants and scientists, who love practical shoes, bulk groceries, and responsible two-way players on a value contracts. Power play people, on the other hand, go in for drama and artistry, myths and intangibles, and like their wine expensive, their cats Persian, and their players insouciant, one-dimensional divas.

Okay, that’s bullshit, just as every phrase that begins with ‘there are two kinds of people…’ is bullshit. But there is some faint truth in it. Imagine, for a moment, a known power play specialist. Pick anyone you like, forward or defenseman, old or young, friend or foe, so long as it’s someone who gets a high percentage of his points with a man or two advantage. Now, I don’t know you, but I can bet your feelings about this dude follow one of two trajectories: either you think he’s a virtuoso who can do amazing things with a little extra space, or you think he’s overrated and probably overpaid, and much less talented than he appears.

The core issue is that power play ice time is sweet, sweet ice time, and it’s built into the game. One of hockey’s special features is the idea that rule violations are routine and unremarkable. There aren’t any real ‘punishments’ in hockey, none of the standard penalties are considered especially bad in the moral sense, and there’s no burning desire to purge them from the game or humiliate the perpetrators. Rather, it’s a compensatory regime, wherein the perceived unfairness of a given action is atoned by revisiting a greater injustice on the offending team. Every team, every game, no matter how disciplined or tender-hearted, expects to take some penalties.

Power play time is therefore guaranteed. In fact, rather a lot of power play time is guaranteed. In the last season (i.e. 2008-2009, from which are drawn all subsequent numbers as well), total PP opportunities ranged from 307 (Devils) to 374 (Canadiens), meaning most teams average something like four power plays in a game. And there is not a team yet constructed that doesn’t benefit from this advantage. Every team, without exception, gets 2-3 goals per hour of ES play time (the range was 2.0 (Avs, Isles Kings) to 2.9 (Wings, Pens, Flames) last season). Even the worst power play (NYR, anyone?) is nearly twice as effective per minute. A really good PP, an excellent PP, can be more than four times as effective as the typical ES scoring rate (Capitals, 9.9 GF/60, 5 on 4).

Look at it another way: if the best PP% is 25.5%, and the most PP opportunities one might get is 374, that’s 95 goals. Worst case scenario, 12.7% of 307, 38 goals. The real numbers don’t fall too far from that: the most PP goals (all advantages) last season was 91, the fewest, 41. The difference between a holy PP and a hellish one is perhaps 50 goals, between the middling-sad and middling-happy varieties, 20-and-change. And unlike ES markers, there’s significantly less trade-off in power play offense- that is, an all-out pursuit of the goal doesn’t carry as much risk of allowing goals against.

For players, we’re talking about the glory minutes of a game, forgiving of mistakes, indulgent to the ego, and quite likely to pad the numbers. It’s certainly easier to be an offensive terror on the PP than at ES; on the other hand, the expectations are significantly higher. The question isn’t whether a PP specialist is as good a hockey player intrinsically as an ES star. If we could leave aside the quasi-ethical proposition that it is ‘better’ to be good at ES than good on the PP, we might come to face the more significant issue: what proportion of team success is won on the PP.

In most cases, the two facets of the game fall in the same range- that is, teams who are good at ES tend to have good-ish PP rates, teams that blow at ES have worse ones. But sometimes the PP makes a major difference. The Sharks last season, while admirably stingy in their defense, had a fairly depressing 131 ES goals, putting them in the same range of ES scoring prowess as the Lightning and the Coyotes (yeah, I’m only considering goals-for at the moment, and yeah, I do realize that the whole GA thing is important also. That’s another post for another time). However, 87 PP goals, 8.6 per 60, was enough to put them in the upper tier of the NHL and buzz them, for a time, as one of the best teams in the League. Conversely, the Blue Jackets were just about as effective at ES scoring as the Capitals, but their bottom-feeding PP ensured a significantly less impressive outcome.

All this is a fancy, numerically-sub-literate way of trying to persuade you, dear remaining reader, of one thing: the power play is important. It’s not extra-credit points, it’s not free goals, it’s not the marshmallow topping on the sweet potato casserole that is ES play. It’s the greatest opportunity hockey offers, where the difference between good and bad might be 25% of your overall goals. The difference between winning and losing. The difference between the postseason and golf.

In Buffalo, the Canadiens played a game with nineteen penalties, nearly half the thing uneven. They won, of course, but by a hair, in OT, after scrabbling out a grinding, miserable horror of a game. For a couple of seasons, there was in Montreal a superior power play, the sort of thing one might lust for and linger over, the kind that alchemically turned the careless hooks of rookies and the ill-considered cross-checks of goons into standings points. We weren’t enough at ES to support those results, but year after year we let our PP specialists go, figuring them overpriced and unnecessary. I wonder, now, if they really were. That power play, that excellent one, might only have been worth another 18 goals, maybe twenty, nothing more than the extra goal every four games suggested by the averages, but games like this it would steal easily. With Markov out for so long one might as well forget his existence (it’ll just seem that much more special when he magically appears in February!), the selection of especially useful PP players has dwindled beyond dwindling, and that is cause for concern. A good PP is not necessarily as difficult to find or as expensive to purchase as good ES. It’s less mysterious, less given to chance, and the agents of its success are more easily identified. It might be the simplest way to make a team better.

Game 1- Monster

It is a hockey custom, of a kind, that a player who has recently switched teams make some sort of performance of hatred towards his erstwhile teammates. It’s an empty gesture. This is not 1957, no one really believes that 21st century hockey players are such sentimental creatures as to play soft against dudes they like. Nevertheless, it is de rigueur to display added hostility; bare minimum, an extra-rough check on your former captain or maybe an unnecessary run at the goalie- just so the reporter has some excuse to comment during your intermission soundbite on how there’s no love lost between you and the [X]s, eh?, and you can say how much you loved playing for the [X]s, but life goes on and it’s a business and the [Y]s are your new team and you’re going to play as hard as you can for them. It’s one of the few ironic moments in life wherein one proves maturity and professionalism by behaving like a vengeful kindergartener.

Anyone, anywhere, could have told you that Mike Komisarek was going to make a statement of his season-opening game against the Canadiens. Firstly, because they being the team that birthed him and raised him up into the NHL, there might be a particularly strong faux-suspicion of lingering attachment. Secondly, because it is a rivalry, and folk on both sides would expect him to play up the treacherous villain thing, for narrative purposes. Thirdly, because he’s made his name on playing rough and would need to make a show of that for the ACC fans early in the season. And ultimately, because he plays now for Brian Burke, who seems to believe that thwacking and bashing are a moral imperative. Lord, if there’s any player anywhere ever who absolutely had- for his reputation, for his honor, for his paycheck- to go apeshit on an opposing team, that player was Komisarek on Thursday night.

And he did such a good job. The Canadiens lose players all the time, but few have ever made such a spectacular display of NOT BEING A HAB ANYMORE REALLY REALLY REALLY as our dear Komisaurus did. He yapped and growled and grimaced and threw his body around and whacked his stick at all available faces. It was impressive, the scale of it; I’m sure Gomez felt rather as though he was being set upon by a territorial albino gorilla. It even makes sense, strategically speaking, if you believe the pre-season opinion. The Canadiens are diminutive up front, as well as having a couple of players with reputations for effeminacy and fragility. Hypothetically, a couple of nasty hits and a non-Laraque fight or two, and they’d skitter away to the neutral zone like cockroaches under a refrigerator. Right?

But here’s the thing, the beautiful, serendipitous, deliciously poignant thing: Komisarek, with all his size and fury, almost singlehandedly lost the game for Toronto. Yes, there were other factors- Carey Price put in a spectacular opening performance, and by the third period Gionta and Cammelleri sparked a bit. Nevertheless, the Leafs were legitimately, solidly, decisively killing the Habs at even strength through two-plus periods of hockey. That kind of dominance, in the absence of ludicrous stupidity or misfortune, wins games. My boys, especially my first-and-second-line boys, they were out-shot, out-skated, and out-thought in every segment of the game. And yeah, probably out-hit, but therein lies the fatal flaw.

The Leafs, they could have beaten the Canadiens clean. They could have played God’s own kind, gentlemanly, pussified hockey and emerged with two comparatively easy points. But no, habibi Komisarek had to commit his random acts of violence, take a heap of penalties, and give the Canadiens exactly the amount of extra power play opportunities to keep the game even unto overtime. From the penalty box, he watched his old teammates get two of the three goals they managed the entire game, two of the goals necessary to tie the score with his own superior squad. In the 4th period, sudden-death, you’ve got a pretty good chance of winning, no matter who you are, no matter what happened previously- if you can only stay in the game long enough to get there. There were two people last night who made it possible for Montreal to stay in the game: Carey Price and Mike Komisarek. In all his zeal to prove his new allegiance, Komi gave us- gift-wrapped- the first unearned bonus point of the season. Maybe, deep down, he still loves us, eh?

So to the Toronto Maple Leafs, I give you the fullest of full credit: you were the better team, in the just universe to the left of this one, you won that game something like 4-1. If only you hadn’t signed Komisarek.