NHL 2012-2013: A hooligans game played by hooligans

If you think you're separating Detroit from Chicago and St. Louis and sticking them into a division with Buffalo and Ottawa....seriously, dude. That's not only not happening, that's aggressively not happening.

Another problem with that division layout is that Nashville and Columbus are still in the league.

KHL Prez Medvedev to SportsDaily.ru: New CBA may be basis for terminating existing contracts, some players will stay. -- via Slava Malamud, NHL.com contributor

Lack of free time was the least of the obstacles in the way of watching playoff games in Atlanta.

Hey, they made the playoffs once, didn't they?

In 2007.

I did fantasy hockey the first time last year but I managed it like I do baseball/football. Set up my team for the week and forget about it. It's a little bit more work since you have to go through each day but nothing terribly bad. I managed to lead the league last year throughout the regular season only to total collapse in the first round of the playoffs so I ended up fifth overall out of eight teams. At least I can take pleasure in the fact that Omni didn't best me either since he was the #2 seed and got booted in the first round too.

I kind of casually got into hockey while dating a girl from Denver, and consequently support the Avalanche in a plastic, "Oh, they won? Sweet" kind of way. I have never really followed it closely, though. Only recently with soccer have I really started to enjoy following the regular season of sports, and I've been experimenting to see what I might like to follow more closely. I enjoyed having games to watch regularly during the MLS season, and I miss it now; I tried to care about the NFL but I just couldn't do it. I'm going to give the NHL a proper shot, and I have a couple questions.

- I know the basics. I know the rules, I know what a power play is, all the stuff that goes into following the game at a basic level. Anything else I should keep in mind while watching? In soccer this would be stuff like formations and the like.

- I don't know any of the league rivalries and hatreds except that a lot of people seem to hate the Avs. Is there anyone I am contractually obligated to despise?

- A number of my friends have pretty sour views on the whole thing right now, ranging from disgust at the whole lockout fiasco to annoyance with the shortened season to concerns that players might be injured from the lack of preparation for the season. If I start watching with this season, am I likely to unduly sour myself on the whole sport?

The transition to professionally-provided live streaming is a godsend for me when doing something like this. I am obviously not in the local market for the team I want to follow, so the existence of Gamecenter or whatever they're calling their service is very convenient. I assume there are blackouts like other sports, but I do have cable and can watch that stuff when it's aired locally or nationally. I also don't have any interest at all in watching on my computer, but with the advent of set-top boxes like the Roku, I can watch in HD on my TV, which is very nice.


Fun fact: Yesterday, while reading an article about the league's woeful failure to prep a schedule in the aftermath of what is universally viewed as a shameful and pathetic display of greed, I saw an ad exhorting me to "Like the NHL on Facebook!"

There isn't really blacking out per se, it depends on whether NBC owns the local channel that carries the team. The Caps, for example, broadcast on CSN locally, so when there's a nationally carried game on NBC or NBCSN, they just don't broadcast. I dislike most of the national commentators so it kinda sucks, but at least all the games are carried in HD.

I personally don't know a ton about the Avs other than they have our old goalie, Varlamonster, but I would highly recommend the SB Nation blog for them, http://www.milehighhockey.com/ . If they're anything like the one for the Caps, they'll be highly informative.

Can the chirping start yet?

Proof that Bruins players are subhuman monsters!

A bit of smoke around Kovalchuk staying the KHL and not coming back, or at the very least staying for the KHL all star game on Sunday (which is due to be after ratification).

I am nonplussed by this news. If he stays, so be it, but I believe he's building a LOLHUGE house in Alpine so I don't see him leaving.

Burke just got fired by the Leafs!

It turns out SA has a hockey-for-newbies thread so I'm going through that and it is helpful. It mentions that offside and icing frequently confuse people but are actually simple, and explains them. I have a question about each of them, which I am asking here instead of there because reasons.

Offside (it is offside, not offsides, yes? I know how annoyed fans get about this kind of thing): They said up you can't "enter the zone" before the puck. Are the zones just your half/their half? Or is there a recognized neutral zone or something that matters?

Icing: This one the explanation seems clear to me but the rule also seems insane. If I understand this correctly, if I hit the puck from my half to your half, and it goes all the way behind your goal line, you aren't allowed to touch it? Is that right? Why?

Wow, that came out of left-field. If Toronto's ownership wasn't happy with Burke, you'd think the time to have fired him was months ago, not days before the start of the shortened season when GMs are frantically trying to get their teams in compliance with the new cap.

There have been all kinds of Luongo-to-Toronto rumours going around since Vancouver declared Schneider was their new starting goaltender last spring. I wonder if Burke was really high on acquiring Luongo but the owners didn't want him (or vice versa), leading to an ultimatum of some sorts?

Imagine the ice is divided into thirds -- the offensive zone, the neutral zone (which is divided by the center line), and the defensive zone. Each team's offensive/defensive zone is the other team's defensive/offensive zone. You can enter your defensive zone before the puck, but you cannot enter the offensive zone before the puck. If you or a teammate precede the puck into the offensive zone, it will be considered offside.

That said, there are nuances to the rule, such as delayed offsides, which give me enough of a headache trying to explain that I'm just going to link to the official rules.

Center ice used to matter more back when they had the two-line pass rule, but that's gone now, at least from the NHL game.

As far as icing goes, it prevents teams from constantly clearing the puck out of their defensive zone to relieve pressure. They're only allowed to do that if they're on a penalty kill. With icing in the game, they at least have to make an effort to clear the puck.

Offside: You can't cross the opposing team's blue line into their zone before the puck goes in, or unless you have control of the puck. The space between the two blue lines is called the neutral zone.

eta: Delayed offside is when you have broken this rule but you haven't touched the puck in their zone yet. If you get back out of the zone before touching the puck, nothing happens. Once you or a teammate touch the puck in the opponents' zone while any member if your team has committed an offside infraction leading to a delayed offside, play is blown dead and there is a faceoff at the dot outside the blue line.

Icing: Dumping the puck from your side of the red line down to the opposing team's goal line results in a race to the puck. If your team touches it first, you keep playing. If the opposing team touches it first, there is a faceoff in your end. This is to encourage forechecking and discourage the game from becoming a tennis match. Furthermore, if you ice it and lose the race, the players on the ice must stay on the ice, preventing it from being used as a convenient method of changing lines under pressure.

One more thing to keep in mind while watching is that home ice advantage isn't all just about the crowd. The home team gets to make the last line change at any pre-faceoff opportunity. This is a pretty big advantage as the coach gets to react to the lines put on the ice by the other coach, and gets the matchups he wants for the majority of the game.

Good write up, but now you'll need to explain forechecking to him.

I always thought it was weird separating Toronto and Detroit, but people seem to have gotten over that pretty quick.

You mention forechecking, but really, the one thing I hear the most from people who are new to hockey (besides confusion over what constitutes offsides) is confusion over the difference between backchecking and crosschecking.

There's a strategic layer to the game that isn't immediately obvious to new fans, and that's the composition of a team's lines (the group of forwards - two wings and a center - that make up the offense on the ice), how and when they change during the game, and how the coach matches his own lines against the opposing team's lines. Different lines have different purposes and a coach has a lot of freedom in assigning players to his lines to produce desireable results.

This is a not-bad general definition of lines in hockey: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_(ice_hockey)

It's worth noting that most shifts last a matter of 30-45 seconds of play, which tends to surprise new hockey fans. When a line gets stuck on the ice for more than a minute without a change, the players are visibly tiring with every passing second. You'll actually see them slow down and make more mistakes as a result.

Seriously. Burke and his boss have literally months of sitting around with nothing to do but make contingency plans for when the lockout ends, and in all that time whatever precipitated the firing didn't come up? Did they not talk about trading for Luongo until now? Did they just go on vacation and forget that they hate each other and can't be in the same room?

The Leafs have been dysfunctional for years, mostly because of the unrealistic expectations of their fanbase preventing a proper rebuilding process. Firing the GM right before the shortest free agent frenzy in years is but one more log on the pyre.

More Kovalchuk smoke!

If that's true you'd have to be an idiot to come back to the NHL. $30M a season? That's his 5 year value here in his prime. He could play there for 3 years and make as much as he'd make in a career in the NHL, and then come back to the NHL to just play for the fun/skill level afterwards.

I love Twitter wars:





However, @downgoesbrown gets the last laugh:

I get really annoyed about the tendency of the football community to disparage other sports, whether it's an actual team disparaging hockey and baseball like this, or fans who stop by soccer stories on newspaper websites to post witticisms like "soccer is gay." What is it with these fucking people? I don't like your sport, but fine, go, have fun. Leave mine the fuck alone.

FWIW, if you're gonna be a hockey fan, you'll just have to get used to hockey being the butt of the jokes as far as American professional athletics goes. As fans of the most underappreciated (and perhaps most dysfunctional) of the 'big four' leagues, many of us embrace the role of the pugnacious and scrappy underdog, and return the scorn with which the NFL regards hockey.

Oh, hello NHL. Have you met MLS? Oh, you haven't.

The what now?

Major League Soccer, the current primary American soccer league.

I know, that was a joke. :)

But yeah, if you're an MLS fan then you're going to fit right in.

Todd Cordell ‏@ToddCordell
SKA GM, and former Devil, Alexei Kasatonov says he will do everything possible to keep Ilya Kovalchuk from returning to New Jersey.

Dustin Leed ‏@D_LEED
Datsyuk, Malkin, Kovalchuk and Ovechkin were guaranteed $30 million each by Russian President Vladimir Putin to stay in KHL. Unreal.

Slava Malamud ‏@SlavaMalamud
"I want to stay in St. Petersburg but I have contractual obligations in the NHL, which will be hard to break" - Kovalchuk to Sport-Express

Meanwhile, Tank's agent tweets (12 hours ago):

@i_de_al: Vladimir Tarasenko takes off today from Moscow to STL! Good luck, strong health and winning! -- #stlblues

WHEW.

Was that really the worst burn? Because the Cowboys were really begging for it with that taunt given that the NFL is still playing but they aren't. It's not just Romo that sucks in Dallas.

It's not even a good analogy. (in the tweet, that is)

According to SKA coach, yesterday's game was most likely the last in the KHL for Kovalchuk, meaning he will leave for NJ as early as Monday.

— Dmitry Chesnokov (@dchesnokov) January 11, 2013

Sounds to me like the IIHF informed the Russians that if they'd like some of their stars to play in the 2014 Olympics--which will be held in Russia--they'd better honor the KHL/NHL contracts agreement. That was always the big stick behind the "speak softly" of the NHL teams saying they expected the Russian teams to honor their agreements.

When are we expecting a schedule? I thought it was coming yesterday.

St. Louis Blues ‏@StLouisBlues Vladimir Tarasenko has arrived and is expected to participate in today's informal skate at 10 a.m. at St. Louis Mills

I believe that it won't be released until the players ratify the agreement, so Saturday night/Sunday.

We didn't really talk about this here, but after Brian Burke was fired, his assistant GM, Dave Nonis, replaced him. This is the second time this has happened, the first time being in Vancouver. Even more bizarre will be if the Leafs trade for Luongo, because that happened in Vancouver too (although I don't think Nonis was the one to make that trade).

It's a bizarre repetition, sort of like how Joffrey Lupul has been traded for Chris Pronger twice. I wonder whether Burke will hire Nonis again, since it kind of decreases his job security when team's can fire him when they get tired of his bullshit without changing the direction of the club. Dave Nonis is the "Forget You" radio edit of Brian Burke.