Chris Letang controversy overshadows Sidney Crosby; goodbye to Bruce Boudreau; and goals of the week
NHL video highlights
Is Jaromir Jagr's comeback bigger than Sidney Crosby's? Crosby's comeback mired in controversy over Chris Letang's injury and then goal. And goodbye to Bruce Boudreau. Plus goals of the week, all feature in our weekly NHL round-up.
Crosby and Penguins back in the thick of it
One might be forgiven for assuming that, given the year the team has had with regards to head injuries, the Penguins might have taken the first week after Sidney Crosby's return to finally make news because of their play. Aside from Crosby's return, it didn't really work out that way. Not that it was entirely their fault.
We might as well start with Crosby, given his profile and the fact that him elbowing someone in the face presents too easy a segue from last week's recap not to. See, after Crosby was finished eating everyone's lunch in his first game back, he started getting his elbows up ? into people's faces. Here's what happened:
To recap, Crosby was upset with Nick Foligno who fell over Pens' goalie Marc-Andre Fleury, and decided to give him a quick shot to the head. The hit landed about as hard as the irony as far as Foligno was concerned, so he dully pointed out to the press that someone like Crosby probably shouldn't be handing out head injuries after, well, everything.
"It's not a big deal, but it is something that he preached all summer about that we should limit that and then he goes and does it," Foligno told the press, adding ? to his credit ? "But, you know, that's a small part of the game and it's over now."
Crosby replied that he doled out the elbow in the midst of a scrum ? something that ought to be somewhat expected, given the circumstances. Instead, he was more concerned about a different hit entirely, a night later in Montreal. Here it is:
That's Montreal's Max Pacioretty lowering the boom on the Penguin's Chris Letang mid-ice, hitting him pretty squarely in the head. Yes, that Max Pacioretty ? the same man whose face was rudely introduced to a stanchion not so long ago. Letang goes down hard, bleeding. A now-classic hit to the head, unquestionably the exact thing the league claims it wants to eliminate, and the exact thing that landed its number one player in a whole-body gyroscope monitored by a bank of computers. Yet, there was no call on the play.
On Monday, Patches got a three game suspension after a phone call with Brendan Shanahan.
As for Letang, he came back into the game and score the winner. Not only that, he managed to create even more controversy in the process. Here's his goal:
Carey Price is livid, and understandably. Letang's last-second puck pluck gave him the chance to reel it back and score. Should that goal have counted? Doubtful. There should have been a whistle once Price had some control over the puck below his pads, and normally one would have expected it. So as much time as the league spent reviewing the physical play, it doesn't seem like it spent any explaining the one thing that really, in the end, mattered most: the score. Not the greatest ending to an otherwise pretty decent game. Shame, that.
Speaking of hits
Fyodor Dovstoyeski is said to have once opined that "deprived of meaningful work, men and women lose their reason for existence; they go stark, raving mad." I'm wondering what he might have to say about his professional national hockey league, the KHL.
For the second time in a matter of weeks, Vityaz Chekov is back on YouTube with another bout of craziness, this time in the form of a bizarre game against Traktor Chelyabinsk.
This time, rather than the coach attempting to strike fans with a spare stick, the team decided to hound their opponents on the ice, instigating a handful of fights and, in the process, starting at least two brawls. Below, the video evidence for discussion.
Here's one clip, showing a fight between the two goalies ? both Canadian, for the record.
In this one, Vityaz's Nick Tamasky just decides to tail a few of the Traktor players until he finds an unsuspecting victim to toss around. Pretty awful, overall.
But the KHL isn't alone (obviously) in the Euro-hockey brawling department. If there isn't enough fighting in Russia, there's always Finland.
Here's the Lahti Pelicans squaring off against Idrottsf�reningen Kamraterna i Helsingfors (HIFK for short, thankfully, for the jersey manufacturer). It begins in the corner, and then, as the clip shows, the ballyhoo spreads immediately after the puck drop. Again, pretty ridiculous. And yet, despite all the fighting, the most egregious thing I can see in that footage is actually the design of the referee jerseys.
Bye, bye Boudreau and other coaching moves
We kind of saw this coming, didn't we? As it turns out, you don't solve a problem like Ovechkin until you solve a problem like Boudreau. So this week, the Capitals announced Boudreau had been fired and replaced by former Caps captain Dale Hunter, pictured here in glorious retrovision.
Hunter has most recently been coaching in the OHL for the London Knights and has never coached in the NHL before. However, his track record in London is seriously impressive. Together with his brother Mark, he revamped the Knights, turning them into a powerhouse for much of the last decade, capped by an amazing 31 game winning streak in 2004-05, the same year they beat Sidney Crosby's Rimouski Oceanic side to win the Memorial Cup. (That's the same season, it ought to be remembered, that Crosby racked up 168 points in the QMJHL. Seriously.) The Knights have also been the breeding ground recently for the likes of Corey Perry, Patrick Kane, and John Tavares.
So, Hunter knows a thing or two about building winning teams. It's a dramatic move for Washington in some ways, but may be exactly what's necessary.
Grantland's Katie Baker tweeted her reaction to the news: "I can't stop thinking about how sad Bruce Boudreau's Christmas shopping is going to be :(". Too right. So let's remember the good times:
Elsewhere in the Southeast division, another coach bid farewell to a team he'd steered from the bottom of the pile to the top and then back to the bottom again. Paul Maurice was let go from the Carolina Hurricanes and much to the chagrin of probably more than a few Montreal Canadiens fans who likely wanted him for themselves, Kirk Muller was hired to replace Maurice. That, as TSN points out, "means every team in the division except Tampa Bay ? which hired Guy Boucher in 2010 ? has changed coaches since last spring."
Like Hunter, Muller is an ex-NHLer, and a first time NHL head coach. He was behind the bench assisting in Montreal until recently, when he moved to Milwaukee to coach the Admirals, the Nashville Predator's AHL affiliate squad. Muller is popular and joins a bench already full of recently retired players, including Rod Brind'Amour and Tom Barrasso.
As we did with Boudreau, let's remember Muller's good old days, and his "raw athletic ability":
Greatest comeback?
Over at the Hockey News, Tom Thompson points out that anyone drawing a comparison between Sidney Crosby's comeback and the one made by former Penguins captain (and Sid's mentor), Mario Lemieux ought to think twice. Lemieux's return to the game after a 44-month absence was, he writes, "the most remarkable feat of its kind in my lifetime. All others must play second fiddle."
As Thompson goes on to explain, the odds were certainly stacked against Lemieux. Injury and illness took him to the brink, but he fought them off and came back. So, yes, the fact that he returned was certainly notable, and possibly more so when one considers he then racked up two 50-plus point seasons.
As it happens, though, another former Penguin is making a comeback these days ? just a slightly quieter one. Lemieux's old linemate, Jaromir Jagr joined the Flyers this summer and by most appraisals of late (including his own), he's playing better than he did for years before he decided to exile himself to Russia.
He told Sportsnet magazine this month (sadly not available online) the spurt of points since he came back is due to a changed attitude. As anyone who watched Jagr poison both the Capitals and Rangers during the last few seasons in the NHL, that shift might have been well overdue. So, despite a recurring groin injury, Jagr is back on form.
"When it's fun, you're young again," Jagr, who is 39 and now into the Chelios-Lindstrom-Howe age stratosphere told Sportsnet mag. He also noted that his advice to the younger players is some he could have used a few years ago: "I tell them that you can care too much about what other people say about you."
Here's a look at his first goal back. What's interesting about Jagr is he has returned to a league that is a lot different than the one in which he excelled for so many years. It's faster, guys are bigger, the rules have changed a lot. And yet, he's just unbelievably talented, so he thrives.
And apparently, he's planning on sticking with it.
From NBC's ProHockeyTalk: "CSNPhilly.com's Tim Panaccio gets the word from Jagr that while he's not talking about a contract extension with the Flyers as of yet, things are going well enough in his return to action that he's not even contemplating being done with hockey after this season."
Now, if we can just get him to quit doing that stupid salute.
Goals of the week
For some reason, the NHL decided to duplicate some of last week's top goals in this week's list. So, you might notice some repetition near the top, though most of the others are different. And how about these:
Grabner embarrasses the Jersey D and beats Brodeur:
TJ Oshie no-look to David Backes:
Corey Perry comes off the boards and scores a goal nobody really should:
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Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/blog/2011/nov/30/chris-letang-sidney-crosby-bruce-boudreau
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