The conference finals are winding down, but you know what’s just winding up? The NHL Mailbag! NHL coaches are replacing goaltenders like crazy but we would never replace you, the reader! Well, maybe. Is there are a more-established reader behind you? Because if you’re a new reader, we may not trust you. This is just a lead-in joke about the goaltender stuff. We love you! Mailbag!
1. With playoff officiating being what it is, wouldn’t it be easy to fix a game? How would anyone tell the difference between a fixed game and just a regular game?
Marcia
Imagine it’s the NFC Championship. Great American and champion of men Eli Manning drops back to pass. He spots Odell Beckham streaking down the sideline late in the fourth quarter. Just as Eli releases one of his patented, clutch spirals, the defensive back dives and tackles Beckham by his ankles. The ball bounces harmlessly to the ground.
The official nearest the play looks at Beckham and turns his palms up.
You’d automatically assume that official owes a Russian bookie named Boris like 10 grand, right? You wouldn’t even think twice about it because unlike hockey, football officials call obvious penalties as penalties the same way in the playoffs as they do in the regular season.
@kfraserthecall how can an NHL referee make that call on Hornqvist? That was a typical play. This is when you wonder if the game is fixed
— Darryl Pedersen (@pedersen_darryl) May 19, 2016
In hockey, how could you prove it? If two referees dropped 50 grand at a casino in Montreal, they could break even with just one horribly officiated game that is just accepted in the NHL today. “Jacques? It’s Francois. Guess who isn’t going to have a good view of any high-sticking infractions and won’t raise his arm once in the final 10 minutes tonight even if a murder occurs?”
There was a 30-second stretch during Game 5 between the Lightning and Penguins in which Nikita Kucherov took a high stick at center ice, someone on the Penguins got mugged carrying the puck the other way, then a Lightning player was blatantly tripped skating the puck out from behind his net. No calls on anything. Why? Because the game was tied in the final 10 minutes, when referees may as well just leave the ice because all they are doing is getting in the way.
Hockey has so much luck involved that it would be a little harder to rig games, but since the NHL has no interest in telling its officials to call penalties whenever a penalty occurs, you can understand why fans think games are fixed to help this team or that team. If you choose to ignore two obvious penalties and call two iffy ones against the other team, that’s eight minutes of game time you are shifting in favor of one team. That’s no small thing. If some crime boss got his hooks into me and I was a referee and I’d be like, “Hey, if Kris Letang tries to behead anyone tonight, I’ll make sure to not call it. Don’t worry. No one will suspect a thing.”
I mean, if like five years from now we learn referees were fixing games, would you be at all surprised?
2. Florida Man
if you were Scott Luce, would you rub all the names off the whiteboard in the Panthers draft war room before you left?
— iNHL Online League (@iNHL_info) May 23, 2016
Yeah, what the hell is happening in Florida? Dale Tallon spent like six years slowly building a garbage fire of a team into a playoff squad with great young players, and ownership is just gutting and reorganizing everything that got them there? The state of Florida seems like it is inhabited by beings from a parallel universe and doing this to your successful front office now only confirms this.
The latest thing is firing Scott Luce, who has been running drafts since 2002. Yeah, that means he hasn’t exactly overseen a dynasty during the past decade-plus, but look at the roster now. There’s a cavalcade of young talent he’s responsible for drafting. If they fired him five years ago, you get it. But it makes very little sense now unless he has been sleeping with the cleaning people and crapping in the sink because “The pipes all go to the same place.”
These moves seem to be owner- and analytics-driven. And maybe they all work, because who knows with this sport. Two of Jim Nill’s biggest moves this season were signing Antti Niemi and trading for Kris Russell and the Dallas Stars finished with the most points in the Western Conference. The Panthers are a good team no matter what happens right now, so whatever.
You probably haven’t heard about this because this story involves analytics and the Panthers and there’s like 80 people who care about both of those things. Still, the timing of all this is amazing. Not like, someone bringing free pizza to the office amazing, but like, some loser dude broke up with his too-good-for-him girlfriend amazing. You care for a minute and you’ll passively check in to see how it works out for the dude.
3. Let’s get it on
https://twitter.com/RyanMUFC93/status/734769553281064961
Look, you have to see this from Brienne’s perspective. Not sure if you’ve noticed, but shit ain’t easy for a woman in the Seven Kingdoms. Men are using you as sexual trade bait in order to gain power or you have to sell your body or you’re just a flat-out slave if you’re not high-born. Brienne is still looking for respectability as a warrior after getting it together on the protecting the Stark children front this season.
So the last thing Brienne wants to do is engage in a romance with another great warrior. She probably cares more about earning his respect and won’t be willing to give into any lusting until she sees him killing dudes on a battlefield or if he saves her life. Then she will let her guard down a bit and then they will get to the business of making giant warrior babies that will rule Westeros and ride dragons for fun.
Brienne and Tormund is going to be the Steven Stamkos free agency courting period after the season. Think of Stamkos as Brienne and a bunch of potential superstar partners as Tormund. PK Subban, Auston Matthews and John Tavares are all eyeballing Stamkos, who looks away in disgust as he wonders how he allowed himself to be banished from a team just entering a championship window in sunny Tampa.
4. Hockey plays
The worst is Mystery, Alaska. I don’t know what the hell is happening in most of the game against the Rangers. There are players clearly letting guys go where they want and it’s bad. There’s also the part where you can tell the director told the goaltenders to be as overdramatic as possible on all shots to the glove side. It’s a good movie, but the hockey is bad.
https://youtu.be/NfOZaquIhG8
I really liked the hockey in Goon. Yeah, the fight where Doug’s ankle is giving out and him eating like 10 shots in the face is dumb, but it’s a comedy. All the skating and passing looks pretty good. I believe everyone in Goon is a hockey player.
As for Miracle, is it possible for the sports scenes to be too choreographed? Yeah, you’re trying to capture what happened in real life so you have something to work off, but some of it is too artsy. It’s like the uncanny valley of sports movies.
A reminder that A League Of Their Own is the best sports movie ever made because it’s funny, quotable, you care about the outcome of the season and the baseball is 100 percent believable.
5. Power to the people
thoughts on measuring PP success as time / goal rather than opportunities / goal? I think it’s dumb that a 5 minute major .. (1/2)
— Snepsts's Mustache (@snepstssstache) May 23, 2016
Oh, hell yeah. I’m on board with this. What sort of sense does it make to give a team an 0-fer when the other team commits a penalty nine seconds into a power play, leaving you with a nine-second power play of your own that you will almost definitely not convert? Why would we treat that the same way as failing on a two-minute power play?
I don’t know how to make this happen so if we need to picket outside the NHL offices, let me know. I’ve got time.
6. What sports memory has given you the most pain?
Tom
It certainly wasn’t the time the Giants beat the Patriots in the Super Bowl. Not that time, the other time. The Giants defeated the Patriots in two Super Bowls and you were thinking of the other one. It can be confusing.
Without a doubt, it was when my Rotisserie baseball team finished in second place last season. Six months of work all came down to how many hits and stolen bases my team got on the final Sunday of the season and it came up about five short. We’re talking a full eight hours of refreshing live standings, only to lose.
If you think that’s sad, well, yeah, it is. I don’t have a pithy way to end this.
On second thought…
7. For the dogs
Can a dog really feel better about himself with synthetic nuts?
— Sayerszy (@sayersc1972) May 23, 2016
…this is a better way to end this.