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It's All the Same to Me

November 20, 2018, 9:12 AM ET [2 Comments]
Jay Greenberg
Blogger •NHL Hall of Fame writer • RSSArchiveCONTACT
Thanksgiving used to be a time when all other teams gave thanks to be competing against the Leafs. We always considered the holiday the end of the start of the season and, as long as some GMs spent as much time at the bar as they did on the phone, you could count on certain teams sifting to the bottom.

In different eras, it was different clubs, even the Canadiens taking their turn as a bottom feeder. But every time the NHL got too close to parity for comfort, you could always count on it creating new teams to beat up on, restoring the precious imbalance of power.

So, in the spirit of the season, I called up the standings on the excuse of doing a quarterly report, but really to find somebody worthy of ridicule. You can’t have good teams without having corresponding bad ones, correct? And by this time of year there always was one facing odds that were long, sometimes even coached by Barry Long.

But I searched longer and harder than even the Flyers have for a goalie and it proved hopeless trying to find a squad that was absolutely hopeless.

Yeah, the Kings are 7-12-1 and so beat up between the pipes that they are practically begging Wayne Rutledge to come out of retirement. But it’s hard to believe a team with Ilya Kovalchuk, Drew Doughty, and Jeff Carter will wind up to be a complete disaster. Mark these words: The Kings will get it going, just like everybody else to a certain point and then not be good enough to take it any farther.

There are 31 teams, unless they have added another one today that we haven’t heard about yet. All but ten of them at this writing are within four games of .500, and only the Kings are worse than that. You even have a sub .500 team, Vancouver, in an automatic playoff-qualifying spot in its division. There is less separation than even Jori Lehtera gets on a breakaway, more sameness than in a Sedin face.

You can’t pry these clubs apart with an acetylene torch or a John Tortorella stare when he doesn’t like the question. Even Marty McSorley’s stick blade won’t work.
We know you gotta be strong up the middle, but not in the middle, for goodness sake. The commissioner of this league should be Rick Middleton.

Nashville is really, really good. Tampa Bay, too. Monday night was quite the showdown between those two, played on Monday night of Thanksgiving week, Shhhhhhhh. Gotta believe that Winnipeg, when it finally plays some games, will be as it advertised in a conference final run last spring. The Leafs can bring it, and now someone just has to bring them a top defenseman, good luck to them on that.

And otherwise? The “contenders” are more bunched than a Senators’ diehard’s shorts, even though now even his team is somehow is in the mix. Oh, why the hell not? The more the merrier to this league, where average is congratulated and true excellence is a fond remembrance. Two consecutive Cups by Pittsburgh is very likely the best we ever are going to see again, so we would settle for some historically bad, like original Caps or Senators bad or 1980-81 Jets bad, just to help break the monotony.

Now that only one team in 31 can win, the goal created by a 31-team draft and the cap-imposed impossibility of keeping any depth has become to be just decent. We find this to be indecent. We are not here to campaign against hope, but the forces in place are like a magnet pulling teams with higher aspirations back harder than Michael Corleone every time he tried to get legit.

To reach a full realization of how average that average has become, you have to look a little deeper than wins, losses and the worst thing to ever happen to the standings–the reward for a loss. Once the standings were the purveyor of ultimate truths. But that all changed on the 2005 day that the NHL began giving a point for an overtime or shootout defeat.

One day, at a press conference where the discussion about his New York Giants was filled with wouldas and couldas, Bill Parcells bluntly said, “You are what your record says you are.” But when you take two players aside off the ice, then conduct a skill competition almost completely unrelated to the way the first 60 minutes were played, such an axiom does not apply as an accurate record of a team’s strength.

And anyway, in all leagues, your performance during the first quarter of the season only tells you what you might have a chance to become, not who you are. It also hides who you have played so far. But we will say this for the standings: You go a little farther to the right, past the wins and losses, there is another projection of a club’s net worth: The differential of goals for and against.

Let’s take the teams who, surprisingly in a few cases, so far are a little ahead of the pack. Buffalo, 13-6-2, has scored just five more goals than it has given up. Columbus, 12-7-2, is only plus four. Montreal, 11-6-4, is even. You look at the great mass of wild card contenders in the East and only the Islanders are a plus (eight).

Somebody will close with a rush because somebody always does. But round up the usual suspects–teams that are off to surprising starts. We’re as skeptical of all of them as we were that those were really Garth Snow’s shoulders under all those pads.

Minnesota? Based on the track record, get back to us in May on that. Ditto Columbus, where the world’s greatest goaltender has yet to win a playoff series in four tries. Montreal? Talk to us in February. Islanders? Hey, there were years Mariusz Czerkawski started fast, too. Buffalo? About time, but, uh, let’s give this some more time.

In the Atlantic and Central Divisions, men are men, producing some teams you can look up to. And then you have the Metro and the Pacific, where there is less identity than the coach of the defending champions, uh, we forget his name. Especially in the Metro, where five points separate seven teams and the bottom two even have games in hand, it looks like rush hour on a Metro, teams hanging onto the strap to keep from falling. You put three wins together and it’s like Wayne Gretzky’s 51-game scoring streak.

It’s parity. Also mediocrity, The Golden Knights astounding debut season was a tribute to GM George McPhee, Coach Gerard Gallant and how completely those players bought in. It was exciting, impressive, but also, in reflection of their 9-12-1 start to this season, now seems more magical than ever and a manifestation of a watered-down NHL.

The league congratulates itself for its taut races. More teams in contention, the more fun, the more the turnstiles turn. But, judging from attendance in Carolina, not so sure that those fans, their team on the bubble forever, are any longer buying in. Besides, when most teams struggle to put a productive third line together, balance is a contrivance more than it is the law of natural selection.

Blame the cap first, the number of teams second. The talent is spread more thin than an owner’s patience: Look at the standings, he says. How many teams are really better than us? A third coach already this season, Mike Yeo, got fired Monday in a likely-to-be-vain attempt to find out.
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