Game Day Thoughts

Let me ask you this. How sorry a state is the NHL in when not a single fucking bar in the Causeway Street area carries the Bruins opening night tilt against the Capitals and the best player in the league? Let's put it this way: there's a reason you're reading my blog right now. Ahem.

So there I am, last Thursday night, rushing to get downtown to meet my brother and a few friends at Greatest Bar for some boobs, beers and what turned out to be a hockey game I barely saw any of in the end. I get through traffic just in time to roll up to the bar at 7pm.

"Holy shit, this place is dead", i think as I order a pitcher for the table we've taken over right in front of the biggest tv on the first floor. Within a minute, our waitress comes over with the beer and my brother asks her if they plan to turn the channel to Versus.

"No", she replies in a coy manner.

I immediately berate my brother for not recognizing her sarcasm.

She repeats herself. I fall off my barstool at this point.

Are you fucking kidding? You're not? Why? Direct what? Direct TV doesn't carry Versus?

We proceed to leave a two dollar tip on a twenty five dollar tab, pound two coors lights each and storm down the street looking for a new bar. Ten bars, a ciggarette and a string of expletives unloaded on scalpers and hobos alike, and we're rounding the corner to Johnny' on the side mad as rattlesnakes.

Sure enough, no game. All we found at every bar in Causeway was a meaningless Red Sox game with Chris Woodward starting at Shortstop. Yea, Chris Woodward. That's who i want to see right now (jabs eyes out with parking cone). If i'd seen that Hummer, it would be a charred pile of metal right now.

Anyway, needless to say, my blogging this year started off the way my hockey viewing did. Slow and uncoordinated. But I'm back!

A few thoughts before getting to tonight's matchup (yes, the cavemen will be there).

First, John Buccigross can kiss the fatest part of my ass. I love the man. For my money, Bucci is not only the last bastion of hockey knowledge at ESPN, but he's a man cut from the same cloth as me (New England boy, builds a rink in his backyard, longs for the original 6 teams - a true aficionado of the game). However, in his season preview, he lambasted the Bruins Brass for the Kessel trade. Here's an excerpt.

"Instead of feeding off last season and building momentum, the Bruins hit a speed bump after strange negotiations with their best pure goal scorer, Phil Kessel. Kessel is a soon-to-be 22-year-old whose career arc looks to be peaking toward a 40- to 50-goal annual turnaround. How this didn't turn into an eight-year contract extension with about a $5.5 million cap number I will never understand."

Excuse me? 8 years? This isn't Rick Dipietro we're talking about (insert any Garth Snow jab here). What the hell is Buccigrass smoking? Can i have some?

Kessel has had one, count 'em, one good year. He has one, count 'em, one mother fucking move. By mid-December, every defenseman in the Eastern conference had figured out the "off wing, top of the circle toe-drag quick release" and was simply poke checking his shots high and wide. Let's see how he does in Toronto without a center the likes of Savard, or even Krejci, to feed his stick in the slot.

Oh wait, there's more.

"You just don't let players with this kind of skating and release go. And during his young career, he has shown he can take his game into the postseason."

Really? Like that time he was benched? BENCHED. Against the Canadiens? Look, i'm not living in a cave (sort of) and i understand that he got better after that experience, but you're not really bringing a huge body of work to the table here. Phil is not someone who makes others around him better. He's not someone who plays two way hockey. There's a reason that despite 36 goals and a spot on the top line, he only had a +23 last year. Compare that to Krejci's league leading +36? Now you tell me that Kessel's worth a full million a year and double the contract length more than Krejci? They're both under 24!!!

"These players sell tickets and jerseys. Oh, and win games. Red Wings fans have Datsyuk; Penguins fans have Malkin and Crosby; Caps fans have Ovechkin; the Hawks have Patrick Kane..."

That does it. Pull this truck over to the side of the pretentiousness turnpike. If your argument goes so far as to compare Kessel's meaning to the franchise and city to the likes of Ovechkin and Crosby, then you need to take a nap. Phil may have sold a few jerseys (more because he became a fan favorite by surviving cancer and winning some exciting shootouts - didn't he go 7 for his first 7 attempts at one point?), to me included, but he's not even the third best player on the Bruins.

Let's play a game. It's called: "List the best players on the Boston Bruins 09-10 roster"

1. Chara
2. Savard
3. Thomas
4. Krejci? Bergeron (if healthy)?

Did Kessel go here? Maybe. But does that warrant locking him up for 8 years with only one full season of history to go off of? Hell no. We don't know where the cap is headed and if Chiarelli's shown us anything, it's that he's loading up on two kinds of players:
- Guys that play two way hockey
- Guys that want to be here
Phil didn't fit either and what's worse, he had a skewed perception of his market value. Just because Toronto paid him something, doesn't mean he's worth that.

Am I dejected by this trade? Yes. Do i know it was the smart business move for the team long term? Yes. Can we make up for his "offense" and "lack of defense"? Abso-god-damn-lutely.

Now on to tonight. The Ducks are in town which means only one thing. Emilio Estevez photo moments! I think this is a tough matchup for the Ducks. They're no longer the defensive team they once were, especially without Pronger. For the record, I completely agree with Bucci in his assessment of the Ducks, ironically.

They rely on scoring now, and the Bruins have a perfectly structured defensive core to stop their not-so-small forwards. If the B's get out to an early start against whichever interchangeable keeper is in net tonight, The Ducks will be reeling. Plus, they're in the midst of one of those not so fun cross-country road trips; Meanwhile, the Bruins are at home and well rested.

Prediction: Bruins win, 4-2. Enjoy the game!

Bruins Add New Ticket Package - Boobs Now Free!

If it was any secret that girls at hockey games are cooler than girls at just about any other professional sporting event, Barstool Sports has busted the story wide open (relatively NSFW).

If you were puzzled by cheering from the hometown crowd during the Bruins stink-fest of a home opener, perhaps these two ladies were responsible. Come to think of it, this sort of activity actually makes sense, given that the food that comes with the 'Hungry for Hockey' tickets is on par with a strip club buffet.

Anyway, well done, ladies. I'll be in Section 304 on Thursday.

Breaking News: Lucic Extended

The Bruins announced today that Milan Lucic, F, has signed a 3 year extension through the end of the 2012-13 season. Read the official release here.

Obviously, we love every damn bit of this.

Heroes of Fort Wilderness - B's mess up Canes, 7-2

Remember that part of the Patriot when Mel Gibson and his two pre-adolescent sons save Heath Ledger from 20 redcoats and a hangman's noose? At the end of that scene, Gibson (Benjamin Martin) takes a Cherokee Tomahawk to a redcoat who he'd already wounded, and finishes him off to the tune of 17 or 18 hacks and more blood than a Mike Myers movie. Later in the story we come to discover that this was a resurgence of brutality from his youth whereby he led a platoon of men to take revenge on French/Indian troops at Fort Wilderness after they'd abused a group of English Settlers and left them for dead at another camp. Brutal, but loyal and protective to no end.

Last night, the Bruins began a road towards redemption. Brickley summed it up best in the third, after the 6th Bruin of the night (Matt Hunwick) had dropped a tally in the goal column, when he said "Balance and Depth". That Bruins team reminded us why we fell down a stairwell in love with them last year and introduced some new faces (Hello, Steve Begin: I'll come back to you later) in the process of doing so with a 7-2 scalping of the sorry Carolina Hurricanes; They're basically Tropical Depressions at this point.

My favorite moments weren't the goals, though man were they pretty at times (Savard's feed to Sturm was much more difficult than the casual observer will realize, as was Sturm finishing it off). No, my favorite and i believe the most telling sign that this team is going to be as good as we hope this year came in the second period when old "friend" Andrew "the ankle bender" Alberts took a bit of a high attempted check at Marco Sturm of a faceoff. This was just moments after Lucic had won a game of uncle against Jay Harrison (Harrison was literally begging for mercy at the end, watch below). After Sturm got ran, Marc Savard jumped on Alberts like Quagmire on a panty-less Asian flight attendant. Savard's defensive manuever led to a full on 5 v 5 scrum with the hated Tom Kostopoulos trying to take on Chara's shinpads for a time.



This kind of shellacking is exactly what makes the Bruins good. They're physical, they're smart and they are hard to play against. Most importantly, they don't back down. Savard saw a teammate recently recovered from a season lost to both a head and knee injury get pseudo run (i only denote this because Alberts basically missed, but the intent was there) by a former teammate he knew to be a goon - He didn't hesitate for a moment. Savvy was in on Alberts like he'd talked about his sister. That kind of camaraderie and fight is what makes them big and bad. It's what makes them the Bruins. By the time we were done in this one, it felt as though the Bruins were committing a massacre the likes of which we'd not seen since the days of Benjamin Martin. These guys had stolen our dream last year. They'd punctured our proverbial balloon and then they'd come into our building and tried to run us. Not a chance. Beat 'em on the scoreboard, beat 'em in the fight and beat 'em in their hearts.

The fact that seven different people scored in this one? Well, let's just say it won't be a one man massacre this year. All 23 of these guys want to be that hero of Fort Wilderness, together. Just for good measure, let's all enjoy Shawn Thornton reminding Mr. Alberts why you don't fuck with a man with a Positron Pack on his back.

My Fellow Nerds and I Will Retire to the Nerdery With Our Calculators

It was a rough morning around my house.

Last night started at the Sox game and ended at a law student kegger in Allston, MA. There were a lot of things that took place in between but lets just say drinking was a focal point.

For whatever reason, this hangover got me thinking about statistics. Maybe it was the Beer-aide served out of a plastic bag lined cardboard box, maybe it was how I angry I got about the guy with dual-popped polo collars (Duke colors, too - this was no accident), I don't know.

In any case I went over to Puck Prospectus and started checking out some of their predictions for the year. They just came out with the season previews for all 30 teams - including, of course, your Bruins.

Take a look at the defense:

          2009-2010 VUKOTA Projections

Name            Age  GP     G     A    Pts   GVT
Dennis Wideman  26  77.0  10.9  34.4  45.2  12.7
Zdeno Chara     32  73.8  12.2  33.8  46.1  12.6
Matt Hunwick    24  57.2   6.3  19.9  26.2   7.2
Derek Morris    31  64.7   4.5  15.5  20.0   4.8
Mark Stuart     25  66.6   3.4  10.6  14.0   3.9
Andrew Ference  30  51.4   2.5  12.9  15.5   3.2
Johnny Boychuk  25  27.9   1.6   5.3   6.9   1.4

I've altered the table slightly to fit in this space, but the last stat on the right is Goals Versus Threshold (explained here). It's similar to VORP in baseball and attempts to put a number on how much better any given player is than a replacement.

So Wide-Man projects to be just as valuable as Chara in 2009, at least according to this metric. We'll certainly see how the whole thing shakes out. He's got the talent and if he can stay consistent and healthy then I don't see why he can't build on last year's success.

Like all projections, it's just that, an educated guess. Perhaps the nerds won't win. Perhaps I won't drink Beer-aide out of a garbage bag lined box. It's really all up in the air at this point.

Check out the season preview and projection article on the Bruins, lot's of great stuff in there, as usual. In any case, we've got a big revenge game against the Canes tonight. Remember Scott Walker?

Game Notes Haiku: We'll Start on the Road Again Next Year , Thank You

Season starts tonight

Ovechkin got the memo

No one told the B's

Opening Night - Jitters, Thoughts, Kid's Names

I've decided to spare you all the 200 page novel of a season preview I've been dreaming about writing. Thank me later. This is my version of a cut to the chase, season opening post. Man, I'm more jittery and nervous than a paparazzi taking photo's of a Brady/Bundchen dinner party.

The Bruins kick off the 2009-10 season tonight against the hated, but very talented, Washington Capitals and the most entertaining player in hockey, Ovie. A few questions have been running through B's fans head's these last few weeks, so let me give you some answers while you stir about your office trying to look busy until pregame. Just try not to think about the fact that you named your newborn son Kessel.

How do we assess the team and its moves...?

1. Kessel Trade - look, this was inevitable. You need to look no further than the descrepancy between Krecji's contract and Kessel's deal in Toronto to understand the overwhelming fact in this case: Peter Chiarelli knows what he's doing. I'm starting to develop a Scott Pioli/Bill Belichek type trust for his business decision making (don't get me started on Derek Morris though, he's the Joey Galloway of the Bruins until proven otherwise). Straight up, i'm dissappointed that i'll have to re-thread my Kessel jersey, but the guy had to go and they got a very good return considering the economic condition of the league.

2. The Goal Scoring - the Bruins didn't do much to bolster their front line scoring potential. I know what you're thinking, "Bonesaw, come on, maybe Steve Begin will be this year's Michael Ryder". If that's your thought process, go ahead and take that last step off the Tobin and rid us all of your bullshit. Fact is, the Bruins didn't need to bolster this. There, i said it. Between the return of Sturm (the team's leading goal scorer in 07-08) and the eventual re-emergence of Bergeron we'll be well on the way to making up for that production lost in the Kessel trade. I haven't even mentioned the growth of guys like Wheeler (totally fell off in the second half after hitting the rookie wall around game 50 last year) and Krejci. Plus, we don't need to score as much. Why?

3. Defense/Goaltending - Funny you should ask. Few teams can win both the Jennings and Vezina trophies in a season and actually have BETTER goaltending the following season. But, the Bruins will have exactly that. Now, i'm not guaranteeing both trophies show up again, but Rask is the real deal. I watched him shutout the Rangers 1-0 last year while turning back 41 shots and he is hands down a better keeper than Fernandez. Consider that along with the fact that he's in a contract year and knows that the starting job for 2011 and beyond is his to lose (Timmy has one year left and will be 36 next season), Rask will prove himself and will make Timmy better at the same time.
As for defense, we lost a slow old man in Aaron Ward and replaced him with a slow middle aged guy, in Derek Morris. Otherwise, we get better with age because the combination of Wideman, Hunwick and Stuart all project to improve on solid seasons last year.

I think that's enough food for though for one day. We're all gonna have to wait and see how things like Sturm/Lucic/Savard and the D-pairings play out, but rest assured, this team is going to continue to step in the right direction. We don't need 116 point season to get better this year. We need to solidify the experience they've acquired in the last two post-seasons, win the Northeast handily and be healthy come playoff time. Game 1 of 82, at a minimum is tonight. Let's drop the fucking puck already.