Two early trends were in the spotlight in the fourth week of the 2016/17 NHL season, and there was a goalie fight, too! The National's ice hockey writer Rob McKenzie provides a recap.
Plan B
So far there are two storylines in this young season: the resurgence of the Canadian teams and the emergence of a corps of young stars. Those themes overlapped on Tuesday when Connor McDavid and the Edmonton Oilers visited Auston Matthews and the Toronto Maple Leafs. The matchup of the top choices from the past two drafts was much hyped. And while the game was fast and would go all the way to overtime, the star was a relative oldster: Toronto’s Nazem Kadri, who knocked McDavid to the ice on the first shift of the game, scored a goal before the game was 90 seconds old and potted the winner 12 seconds into OT. McDavid and Matthews were held pointless.
The new Ranger
The best rookie on an American team so far this season is Jimmy Vesey of the New York Rangers. Vesey's six goals place him near the league leaders. His power-play score in a 5-0 shellacking of St Louis on Tuesday was typical Rangers: team play rather than individual dominance. After the Blues' Jay Bouwmeester tried to fire the puck out of the defensive zone, New York's Ryan McDonagh stopped it near the blue-line boards. He passed the puck up to Vesey in the high slot, who, with his back to the net, whipped it across to the rookie Brady Skjei at the far point. Skjei, again without hesitation, snapped it diagonally up to Derek Stepan just off the side of the net. Stepan eased in, waited for Bouwmeester to dive in front of him to block any shot attempt, then passed to Vesey who was skating towards the net at the centre of a triangle of Blues. Vesey snapped it high and the rout was on.
Through Sunday the Rangers were averaging a league-leading 4.2 goals per game.
Big zeroes
While the Rangers were firing away, three Western teams were finding goals hard to come by. The Los Angeles Kings went 205 minutes and 25 seconds without scoring a goal. They finally got back on the board when Trevor Lewis lit the lamp in Thursday’s 3-2 overtime win over Pittsburgh. Colorado went 164:48 without scoring. The Vancouver Canucks were even worse, being shut out in four of five games through Thursday’s 1-0 loss in Ottawa. What is happening is that teams are tightening up their execution as the season moves beyond its early days. This means fewer scoring chances. The first eight nights of the season had no shutouts, but last week featured a whopping nine.
A night to forget
One of those shutouts came on Friday night in Columbus. The Montreal Canadiens entered the game 9-0-1 while the revived Columbus Blue Jackets were 4-3-1. Final score: Columbus 10, Montreal 0. What a shellacking! The Montreal backup Al Montoya, who had hitherto been stellar this season, surrendered all 10 scores. Little-known Swedish centreman Alexander Wennberg’s four assists for the match lifted him into a tie with Philly’s Claude Giroux for the league lead at 11. “Une soirée à oublier pour le tricolore,” lamented the French-language TV announcer — a night to forget for the blue, white and red.
Odd stat: Shea Weber led Montreal in ice time yet had a plus-minus for the night of zero, somehow going even-steven amid the lopsidedness. His fellow blue liners Andrei Markov and Jeff Petry, in contrast, were minus-four.
Overtime notes
While National Football League games become harder and harder to watch — too many ads, so many injuries that Red Zone becomes Red Cross Zone — the NHL game has got better. Last year's move to make overtime a three-on-three affair (versus five on five in regulation) is a winner, and so is the shoot-out in cases where the five minutes of OT prove inconclusive (unlike the NFL, there's never a tie). Three extra-time plays stood out last week. One was smart: Carolina bought time for a line change with a long pass back to goalie Cam Ward, who then zipped the puck back out to one of his team's fresh skaters just outside the blueline. Two other plays seemed less smart: the Islanders never used their star John Tavares in Saturday's shoot-out loss to Edmonton; and in Washington on Thursday, the Winnipeg Jets left Alexander Ovechkin uncovered from his favourite launching pad, the right face-off circle. A pass came his way, he one-timed it home, game over. Totally predictable.
Viking pride
Darryl Sutter reached 600 career coaching wins with Thursday’s defeat of Pittsburgh. The dyslectic and phlegmatic bench boss, who alternates long stretches of bovine passivity with occasional bursts of finger-pointing urgency, has taken the Kings to two Stanley Cup victories. Sutter played during seven seasons as a tough-as-nails winger on the Chicago Blackhawks. Five of his six brothers also made the NHL. The other Sutter, Gary, was said by the brothers to be the best player of them all, but he preferred to stay down on the farm in Viking, Alberta.
This season Sutter’s Kings are at 6-6-0, with two straight wins following their scoreless skein. Saturday’s 5-0 gutting of Calgary was, surprisingly, their first win in regulation time. Goal scoring is going to be a problem for LA all season long; they lack depth. Team defence on the other hand has not been a problem. They employ the league’s best defenceman in Drew Doughty, and Peter Budaj, with a 2.31 goals against average, is filling in decently for the injured Jonathan Quick.
The long view
The Florida Panthers are a team to watch out for. They have started a middling 5-6-1 with young star Jonathan Huberdeau injured, but his absence has created a chance for other players to emerge. Jonathan Marchessault is getting 18 minutes of ice time a night while playing on the top line with Aleksander Barkov and Jaromir Jagr. And the Panthers have a rookie surprise in Denis Malgin, a 19-year-old from Switzerland who had two goals and an assist in three games last week. Margin was teammates last year with Matthews on the ZSC Lions in the Swiss league.
When Huberdeau returns, maybe in January, Malgin and Marchessault will surely be squeezed out of some of their ice time. There will be an adjustment period. But the Panthers should be stronger for the playoffs, because their depth players will have grown their games.
In summation:
(All stats through Sunday)
Standings: Montreal lead the league with 21 points. The other division leaders are the Rangers, Chicago (winners of six in a row; it's a pretty good time for Chicago sports) and Edmonton. The team with the fewest points are Arizona with eight.
Standouts: Chicago's Artem Anisimov is the league's scoring leader with 17 points, one ahead of his linemate Patrick Kane. Anisimov is tied for most goals at eight with the Winnipeg rookie Patrick Laine and Pittsburgh's Sidney Crosby (who has played only six games so far this season). Weber is still leading the plus-minus parade at plus-15. The best goals-against average (minimum three games played) remains Detroit's Jimmy Howard, at 1.12.
Stand and deliver: After Kadri delivered a super-cheap headshot on Vancouver's Daniel Sedin on Saturday, a brawl naturally erupted. The Vancouver goalie Ryan Miller dropped his gloves and pounced on the nearest Leaf. The Toronto keeper Frederik Andersen joined the fray, skating all the way down the ice to take a few jabs at Miller. Andersen then took shots at a Canuck or two alongside the boards. Then, as the brawl quieted down, the two goalies stood side by side, chatting like buddies on a work break. How's things, eh? Pretty good fight, eh?
Standing small: On Saturday the San Jose Sharks fell 5-0 at home to Pittsburgh in a lame rematch of the Stanley Cup final. On Sunday night Calgary lost in Anaheim for the 24th consecutive time (before the game a police dog, Corporal Nero, dropped the puck for the ceremonial face off). And after opening the season with four wins, the Canucks have dropped eight in a row.
Standard-bearers: In Monday's loss to the Rangers, the Blues' Jay Bouwmeester became the 307th NHL player to appear in 1,000 regular-season games. Back on November 26, 1961, in a game at Chicago Stadium, who was the first?
That would be ...
The late, great Gordie Howe.
rmckenzie@thenational.ae
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