NHL – Page 2 – Keefe To The City

Mar 2, 2018

Am I a Bruins Fan Now?

Two of my personal favorites are on the Bruins in Rick Nash and Brian Gionta and I’m stuck deciding if my liking of them outweighs my personal dislike for Boston sports.

Ray Bourque was my favorite player growing up. My grandmother won a raffle put on by my youth hockey program and her prize was a Ray Bourque stick signed by the 1992-93 Bruins and she gave it to me. Well, she gave to my older brother and I, but I took it and had my dad hang it up on my wall in my bedroom. Every image or video or hockey card of Bourque’s I would check to see if he was still using the same Sher-Wood Feather-Glas P.M.P. 7030 stick, and he always did right until his retirement.

In the summer of 1997, my family was in Boston because my sister had a dance competition, and rather than watch competitive tap, ballet and jazz dancing for three straight days at the back of the ballroom/auditorium/theater and serve as a sarcastic judge with my dad and brother, the three of us and took the T to North Station for a tour of the new FleetCenter. Joe Thornton had just been drafted first overall by the Bruins and Joe Thornton apparel with his No. 6 jersey (thankfully, he switched to 19) was everywhere, so it only made sense that as a 10-year-old hockey-crazed kid, I would be intrigued by the league’s next supposed superstar.

Bourque, the Bruins’ captain, was traded during the 1999-00 season to the Avalanche to chase the Cup he had never won, and he did so in 2000-01, retiring after the Game 7 win over the Devils. Thornton, the Bruins’ captain, was dealt to the Sharks shortly after the 2004-05 lockout in one of the worst trades in professional sports history as he became the only league MVP to be traded in the middle of their MVP season.

Aside from those two players, I never really liked any other Bruin. Sure, Bobby Orr is arguably the greatest hockey player of all time, and everybody loves him, but he stopped playing 10 years before I was born. And yeah, I guess Cam Neely was cool and Andy Moog was likable (especially if you had Don Cherry’s Rock’em Sock’em Hockey Volume 2) and Gerry Cheevers had the awesome stitches mask and Jason Allison might be the most underrated player ever and Patrice Bergeron has been a great story since breaking camp with the team as an 18-year-old rookie in 2003. But for the few easy-to-root-for guys, there has been way more hard-to-root-for guys over the years and two of the hardest ones are still on the team in Zdeno Chara and Brad Marchand.

The problem is now two of my Top 10 personal favorites of all time are on the Bruins in Rick Nash and Brian Gionta, and the texts have been pouring in asking me if I’m rooting for the Bruins to win the Cup this spring. I’m stuck deciding if my personal liking of Nash and Gionta outweighs my personal dislike of Chara and Marchand and Boston sports and all of my friends from college who are Bruins fans, who I don’t want to see win the Cup for the second time in eight years and reach the Final for the third time in as many years.

Why did it have to be the Bruins for Rick Nash? I’m sure playing for a contender and being in close proximity to his wife and kids in New York was a strong reason for putting them on the top of his OK’d trade list. And I’m sure that played a much larger role in his putting together that list than my personal feelings or any Rangers fans’ feelings. But now I have to watch Nash wear that 61 in Black and Gold and do his best to help a Boston team win a championship, all while having those college friends tell me how good he is and ask why he was declining with the Rangers.

And why did it have to be the Bruins for Brian Gionta? My favorite college hockey player of all time already helped the Devils to a Stanley Cup in his second professional season, put together a 52-goal season for the Rangers’ cross-river rival and then went on to captain the Canadiens. I guess it only makes sense that the Rochester native would complete the trifecta and go to the Bruins following a personal resurgence on a bad Team USA squad at the Olympics. Maybe Gionta can go to the Islanders, Flyers, Penguins or Capitals next season for a career grand finale.

In an ideal world, the Bruins will get knocked out of the playoffs in the first round to increase the value of the first-round pick the Rangers received for Nash and then Nash re-signs with the Rangers on July 1, which seems like a given anyway. That would mean no Cup for Nash, but it would mean no Cup for Boston, no highlights of Nash helping Boston win a championship and a better chance at a faster rebuild for the Rangers. As for Gionta? Well, he already has a Cup to his name even if it was 15 years ago when he won it.

I can’t root for Nash to win the Cup in Boston. I just can’t have that, the way I can’t have Ryan Callahan, Anton Stralman, Dan Girardi, Ryan McDonagh and J.T. Miller winning it in Tampa Bay. Aside from the simple fact that I can’t stomach another post-2004 Boston championship, Nash is most likely coming back to the Rangers (at least that is what I have convinced myself of) and I need him hungrier than ever to win it all. I can’t have him cashing in once last time and riding off into the sunset with a ring on his finger and Henrik Lundqvist becoming the Rangers’ Don Mattingly.

So no, I’m not a Bruins fan. I’m a Rick Nash and Brian Gionta fan. I understand that rooting for Nash and Gionta to do well essentially means rooting for the Bruins to do well, but I will refuse to think of it like that. Instead, I will root for them, but against Tuukka Rask.

NHL • Podcasts • Rangers

Feb 2, 2016

Podcast: Rear Admiral

The Barstool Sports Boston blogger joined me to talk about John Scott’s MVP performance at the All-Star Game.

John Scott saved the NHL All-Star Game from another ho-hum weekend and overall lackadaisical effort by creating a buzz the league has longed for with it’s midseason event. The problem is the league tried to avoid it at all costs and will now benefit the most from trying to keep one if its top vote receivers from playing. Thanks to John Scott, we were treated to a memorable night in Nashville that the league tried to steal from us like parts of the 1995-96 and 2012-13 seasons and all of of the 2004-05 season.

Rear Admiral of Barstool Sports Boston joined me to talk about John Scott’s MVP performance at the NHL All-Star Game, the slumping Boston-born players on the Rangers, the state of the Eastern Conference, old Boston and the Boston Garden and the best and worst bars in Boston.

Blogs • NHL

Feb 1, 2016

The Legend of John Scott

If it weren’t for Pacific captain John Scott, I would have watched no more than five minutes on Sunday night. After watching the efforts of the Metropolitan and Atlantic, I wasn’t sticking around if not for Scott.

I felt like I was watching a Rangers playoff game during the Pacific vs. Atlantic championship on Sunday night. If there was video of me watching Rangers-Lightning Game 7 in May and video of me watching then NHL All-Star Game championship, a split screen of the two would look like the split screens of Robinson Cano and Rod Carew. For a game with zero meaning other than for the players on the ice wanting their $90,909 winning share, I was pulling for the Pacific and once they took a 1-0 lead, I slowly watched the clock tick away. All of this unnecessary stress and uneasiness for no reason other than John Scott.

If it weren’t for Pacific captain John Scott, I would have watched no more than five minutes of Sunday night’s three games. After watching the Metropolitan and Atlantic put in the worst of efforts in the night’s opening game, there was no way I was sticking around to watch the Western Conference’s two teams “compete” if not for Scott. But the 33-year-old with five goals and six assists in 285 career games kept me around as if a trip to the Cup Final was on the line.

The NHL got its wish. They got their real fans and even casual fans to care about an exhibition game in 2016 that has no significance. But it wasn’t the way they wanted by implementing 3-on-3 play in a tournament format with $1,000,000 going to the winning team as a carrot at the end of the stick to get their multi-millionaire stars to care about competing. It was because they embarrassed themselves in a way only the NHL could thanks to the scum in the league office acting like the scum that they are.

The NHL’s attempt to keep John Scott out of the All-Star Game after he rightfully won a spot and captaincy through their own fan voting system was disgusting. Their plan to force a league-owned franchise in the Coyotes to trade Scott to Montreal and stick him in the AHL to make him ineligible for the game to try to keep an enforcer and non-traditional “All-Star” out of the game was disgusting. The idea that they didn’t that Scott would have to move his wife, who’s pregnant with twins, and two young daughters from Arizona to Newfoundland, or force him to be apart with his about-to-be larger family all to avoid him playing in the All-Star Game was disturbing.

Even though the entire story seems unimaginable and even though Scott’s account of it on The Players’ Tribune seems unfathomable, it shouldn’t be. This is the NHL we’re talking about. The same league that forced a partial-season lockout in 1994-95 and a full-season lockout in 2004-05 and another partial-season lockout in 2012-13. The league has never cared about doing what’s right or taking care of their fans or taking advantage of a great public relations opportunity. They have operated like the Mets at a league level and have remained tone deaf to the hockey world outside of their Avenue of the Americas office. Only the league could make me miss a former Ranger, who played six games for the team four years ago. And only the fans could make sure Scott attended the weekend and only the fans could make a write-in candidate the MVP.

It took pure scum to try to get Scott out of the weekend and to force a trade of him and to ask him to back out of the weekend and to ask him, “Do you think this is something your kids would be proud of?” and to leave him off the MVP ballot during the tournament. So it made sense that the king of all the scum, Gary Bettman, would stand there after championship amid a chorus of boos with that shit-eating grin on his face and shake Scott’s hand and pose with that dirty smile for a photo opportunity while telling Scott, “I’m proud of you.”

Before Bettman could smile about how his poorly-run league backed into a Disney-like story because of his own Joe Thornton-like leadership, John Scott had scored two goals. The first was the first for the Pacific in the tournament, tying the Central at 1 and the second came on a breakaway later in his team’s first game. He had scored twice and sat his former teammate Patrick Kane down before fake fighting the league’s leading scorer after the Blackhawk scored. He had played in front of a sold-out Bridgestone Arena chanting “M-V-P” at him and had the backing of the world’s best players at his side, giving the ultimate eff you to the league even if scumbag Bettman and his band of scum would be the ones who would ultimately benefit of the league’s short-lived publicity. And he had stood on the blue line, as an All-Star Game champion, $90,909 richer and in awe as his name was announced as the tournament MVP with a new pickup truck to go with his trophy.

The only two All-Star Games that have ever stood out to me were 1989-90 when Mario Lemieux scored four goals in Pittsburgh (which I was only three years old for, but relived hundreds of times thanks to the VHS Dynamite on Ice) and 1995-96 when Ray Bourque scored the game-winning goal with 38 seconds left in Boston. Now 2015-16 when John Scott took over the hockey world and then took over in Nashville joins them.

I wonder if his kids are proud of him.

Blogs • NHL

Jan 27, 2015

The 2014-15 NHL All-Animosity Team

This year’s team is a little different, but there are some familiar faces in the lineup, including a goalie on his way out of the league.

NHL All-Star Weekend has always held a special place in my heart. My feelings about a skills competition and an exhibition game in which there’s no physicality, defense or anything that resembles NHL hockey other than nasty dangles are probably unshared. But when you’re a kid growing up with stars like Wayne Gretzky, Mario Lemieux, Ray Bourque and Brian Leetch and watching them wear those black and orange gems each winter on a weekend afternoon, it’s something that stays with you.

Even though Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin weren’t in Columbus this weekend and Henrik Lundqvist was home in favor of goalies of much lesser abilities (Hi, Jaroslav Halak), I still watched and still paid attention to the 60th NHL All-Star Game, the first in three years. Well, I paid more attention to the skills competition than the game, but I still paid attention. And since I don’t always agree with the selections for the All-Star Game, a couple of years ago I decided to build my own version of an All-Star team. The one difference is that this team is built up of players I don’t like.

(Of course the first time since I started creating these teams that Brian Boyle is eligible to be on it, he isn’t.)

FORWARDS

Milan Lucic
Welcome back, once again! After leading the 2012-13 team and 2013-14 team, Lucic is back on the 2014-15 team.

It wasn’t long ago that Lucic was considered to be Cam Neely 2.0 in Boston following his 30-goal regular season in the Bruins’ Cup winning 2010-11 season. But after watching his goal totals decline over the last three years, Lucic has just nine goals in 47 games for the Bruins this year. Instead of hearing from Boston about Lucic’s all-around game, it’s more likely you’ll hear about Lucic connected to trade rumors. During the Bruins’ struggles around the holidays, the Boston sports media was hoping they could create some package involving Lucic to send him to Edmonton in exchange for Taylor Hall because every team is willing to give away their former No. 1 overall pick for a power forward in the middle of a three-plus year slide. (Actually, Edmonton would be the team willing to do that.)

The Bruins have cap issues and because of this, Lucic could be playing for another team in 2015-16, and judging by every team’s eagerness to give out bad contracts and throw money at any and every free agent, teams will be lining up to offer Lucic a big payday. If he plays himself out of Boston and off the Bruins, there might not be a place for him on the All-Animosity Team going next year, but his three-year run on the team will always be a memorable one.

Alexander Ovechkin
My animosity toward Ovechkin has declined since Sidney Crosby officially won the Crosby-Ovechkin Debate (which was never really much of a debate anyway) and I no longer have to spend time and energy defending and supporting the best player in the world against a pure goal scorer, who couldn’t care less about what happens in his own zone.

In the Road to the NHL Winter Classic on EPIX, Capitals owner Ted Leonsis referred to Ovechkin as the most pouplar athlete of the four majors sports in Washington D.C. and I questioned it at first, but when put against Bryce Harper, Robert Griffin III and John Wall, I agreed with Leonsis. After watching Ovechkin attend the Wizards game in the EPIX series and seeing him act like a normal person and not a four-time 50-plus goal scorer and one-time 65-goal scorer, I actually kind of liked him. And then watching him hope to be the last pick in the All-Star Game to win a free car, despite being possibly the best pure scorer in the world, I actually liked him a little more. I’m a Crosby guy and always will be, but maybe there’s room to be a fan of both? Maybe Ovechkin’s personality is playing him off this team?

I’m sure I will be back to being anti-Ovechkin in March when the Rangers and Capitals play again and he spends the entire night taking shots at every Ranger on the ice. Even though I will annoyed, it will put a smile on my face that my animosity toward Ovechkin is back.

Brad Marchand
I had to figure out a way to make room for Brad Marchand on the team and that meant either cutting Alexander Ovechkin or Chris Kunitz. I didn’t cut Ovechkin, even though I actually don’t have as much out-of-game animosity toward him as I do for Kunitz. By “out-of-game” animosity, I mean that I don’t mind Ovechkin when he’s not playing a game against the Rangers, or a playoff game, and putting fear into me every time he’s on the ice or every time the Capitals get a power play. Kunitz, on the other hand, makes me angry to just think about since his career has taken off with the Penguins thanks to playing with Sidney Crosby, yet people continue to consider among the league’s elite players, which was never more true when he was given a spot on Team Canada in the 2014 Olympics. I thought about putting Kunitz on D for this team and sort of making a power-play unit out of the team, but then I decided … actually, wait, that’s a great idea! Put Kunitz on defense and cut Dion Phaneuf, who couldn’t be any more irrelevant as the captain of the downfall of the Maple Leafs.

Marchand is the ultimate player who you hate to watch your team play against, but would love if he were on your team. He’s dirty and annoying, he’s a pest and nuisance, but he’s good. Or at least he can be good. There are stretches where you wonder why it looks like he doesn’t care and other stretches where he’s involved in every play and leading an unstoppable forecheck. His lapses in judgment and total disregard for player safety are what makes him hated and in the Rangers-Bruins game on Jan. 15, there he was earning a two-game suspension for slew-footing Derick Brassard (a technique that Marchand turns to frequently). The only thing worse than Marchand’s antics in that game were Jack Edwards and Andy Brickley calling the game for NESN and saying they didn’t see a slew-foot.

DEFENSEMEN

Zdeno Chara
I don’t know how Chara would feel knowing that on this team Milan Lucic wears the “C” instead of him, but if he were upset about it, I would have no problem throwing an “A” on his jersey for him.

It’s weird to think that the Bruins will retire Chara’s number one day considering the team they were when they signed him and the team they have become now seven years later. But Chara is as big of a reason as anyone in the Bruins’ turnaround from finishing the 2006-07 season with 76 points to eventually winning the Cup and being in another Cup Final. It felt like it would be at least another three decades until the Bruins won again when Chara arrived in Boston and he should be recognized for … wait a second … this is supposed to be about why I don’t like Chara. In that case, let me repurpose what I said about him last year:

Jack Edwards will likely tell you that Chara is the best defenseman in the league, but he’s the same guy who thinks fights are decided by whichever plays ends up on top of the other player on the ice. Is there anything worse than when broadcasters talk about Chara’s 108-mph slap shot in the Skills Competition in a real game? No, there’s not. Because there are a lot of times in real games when you get to sprint untouched from the blue into a still puck in the slot and rip a bomb into an open net. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg that is the lovefest for the 6-foot-9, one-time Norris Trophy winner.

Chris Kunitz
The Rangers’ 3-1 series comeback against the Penguins in the Eastern Conference semifinals last year was an amazing five days, in which any shot, bad bounce or deflection could have ended the Rangers’ season a month earlier than it lasted. And aside from the jubilation from watching the Rangers come back against a team that had its way with the Rangers in the postseason forever, came the jubilation of watching Chris Kunitz score once in the series.

I moved Kunitz back on D on this team just to keep him on and it was a move I had to make after originally thinking of leaving him off this year’s roster. But the more I thought about him and the more I thought about him putting up stats and getting paid as the product of playing on a line with the best player of this generation, I had to find a way to keep him on the team.

When I was in college in Boston, there was a place called New York Pizza next to the Boston Common on Boylston St. that I would always eat at 2 a.m. at the earliest when I wasn’t exactly sober. I swore to everyone that visited me that New York Pizza was the best pizza in Boston and every person I told this to agreed with me because I would take them there after a night of drinking. It wasn’t until one time when I went to New York Pizza in the middle of the day and had a slice and could barely get two bites down that I realized that the alcohol had masked the true taste of the pizza. Chris Kunitz’s career pre-Sidney Crosby was me eating New York Pizza sober in the middle of the day and Chris Kunitz’s career with Sidney Crosby has been me eating New York Pizza drunk.

Last year, I said, “I feel like you could stick pretty much anyone and I don’t mean just any NHL player, but rather any actual person on a line with Crosby and they would be good for 15-20 goals,” and I believe that to be 100 percent true. And because that’s true, let’s stop pretending that Chris Kunitz is the type of player that he isn’t.

GOALIE

Martin Brodeur
Like last year … was there any other choice? And unless you’re a Devils fan or have changed your stance on the Ten Commandments, then you will agree with Brodeur as the starting goalie once again.

Yes, I stole that line from myself from last year. And maybe there were other choices (cough, cough, Carey Price, cough, cough), but with Brodeur set to retire on Thursday after trying to play at the age of 42 for the St. Louis Blues, it made sense to bring him back one more time.

Rather than ride off into the sunset as a lifetime Devil, who could have enjoyed a final game in New Jersey last season, Brodeur had to come back this season. After 1,259 games with the Devils, his stats will always have those glaring seven games at the bottom of the list. Sure, he added three more wins to his all-time record of 691 wins, but it’s unlikely that number will ever get touched, so instead of leaving it at 688, it’s now at 691 with a little bit of stink on it.

There are some players that are just supposed to play for one franchise forever and Brodeur is one of those players, considering he has been on the Devils since I was in kindergarten. Yes, I said KINDERGARTEN! Very rarely does a Ray Bourque-like move work out and instead it just gets weird when someone like Brian Leetch, who was a Ranger for 17 years, ends up playing 15 games for the Maple Leafs and 61 games for the Bruins at the end of his career.

I also said that about Brodeur last year and now that he’s no longer a one-team career guy, it’s a shame that he put on another jersey in an attempt to try to hang on to the only thing he has known to do in the winter for his whole life. I thought Martin Brodeur would retire at the end of last year and he should have. But now that he will make it official on Thursday (barring another Roger Clemens-like midseason comeback) it’s time for me to say it again:

I will miss Martin Brodeur when he retires, but my animosity for him will stay the same.

NHL • Podcasts

Jan 9, 2015

Podcast: Ryan Brandell

The ‘Road to the NHL Winter Classic’ series is over for the year and it’s a shame because watching Joel Quenneville each week had become the best thing on TV.

The holiday season has come and gone and that means the Winter Classic has as well. And along with the end of the Winter Classic is the end of the Road to the NHL Winter Classic series on EPIX, which nicely filled the void left by HBO’s 24/7 version of the show for three seasons.

Ryan Brandell of Barstool Sports Chicago (known as “Chief” on that site), joined me to talk about the fourth episode of the series, Joel Quenneville becoming the most likable personality in the NHL, the Blackhawks’ disappointing loss in the Winter Classic and parity in the league this season.