The third week of the NHL season featured the return of the game's best player, stellar play from a world-class blueliner, a problem solved in Chicago and two grandmas. The National's ice hockey writer Rob McKenzie provides a recap.
‘Welcome back, Sid!’
Those were the words from the Pittsburgh announcer Paul Steigerwald when Sidney Crosby scored during his return to action on Tuesday. Crosby had missed six games because of a pre-season concussion. In his first three games back, the team went 3-0 and the captain chipped in two goals and an assist. His goal to give the Penguins a 3-2 lead over the Islanders on Thursday was vintage Crosby, combining power and touch. First he checks Johnny Boychuk (best name in hockey) into the endboards. Boychuk goes flying and loses his stick. Crosby skates behind the net, then slides out in front of the goalie while Boychuk is looking for his stick. Crosby stops a hard pass from the point on his backhand, quickly brings it to his forehand and snaps it along the ice just outside Jaroslav Halak’s right pad. Easy-peasy for the world’s best hockey player.
But next time Crosby adds to his list of concussions, maybe he can stay away from work for more than two and a half weeks. Concussions are scary.
Tampa defanged
Some hockey injuries are less serious and even provide comic relief. Like on Tuesday, when the Tampa goalie Ben Bishop took a puck to the face against Toronto, haha. It hit his mask so hard that it knocked out two of his teeth. Bishop grinned like a kid as he searched for his absent incisors and as the trainer checked him out. Naturally he stayed in the game.
“It wasn’t really super painful or anything like that,” the hockey player opined after the game. “These guys in front of me lose teeth all the time, so I guess I just wanted to be like them.”
The view of his coach, Jon Cooper: “Our trainer came to the bench and he opened his hand and I couldn’t believe how big Ben’s teeth actually are ... Apparently they were fake anyway.”
Jon Cooper — not exactly the king of bedside manner.
Pacific tides
The defending Cup champs in Pittsburgh are doing fine — but the team they beat in the final, the San Jose Sharks, are in the middle of a volatile Pacific division. The hot Edmonton Oilers, who were last in the division in 2015/16, are on top. The Sharks started slow but have now won three in a row. The division’s two perennial powers, Los Angeles and Anaheim, are below .500. And Vancouver, after four wins to start the season, are on a five-game losing streak.
Je me souviens
Tell Habs fans that their heroes are off to a good start, and they cringe. They know how this movie goes: strong start, lame ending. Through the past three seasons no team is better than Montreal in October: the team's 26-4-2 record across that span equates to an .843 win rate, eons ahead of next-best Minnesota's .722. But the fans remember that last season Les Habitants raced to a stupendous 10-0-0 start before Carey Price got injured and the team suffered a long, slow, sad collapse. Now Montreal have won seven straight games, including a back-and-forth 3-2 win over the Islanders on Wednesday, a 3-1 win over Tampa on Thursday and a 2-1 defeat of the Leafs on Saturday.
The question is, can they keep it up?
Yes they can
For one thing, Price is healthy and displaying his usual excellence in net. For another, the big off-season trade that brought Shea Weber to town and sent PK Subban to Nashville is looking smart. At the time of the deal, the consensus was that Nashville had pulled off a fast one. Jeff Marek and Greg Wyshynski, who have a really entertaining hockey podcast at sportsnet.ca, were talking like it was the steal of the century. But Weber is a Team Canada-class defenceman and has stabilised the Montreal blue line. He leads all NHL players in plus-minus with a plus-12, leads the Habs in ice time at 25:59 a night and is even chipping in on offence: he scored Wednesday’s winner against the Islanders and, at left, Saturday’s winner versus Toronto.
Nashville are unsettled
So how is the big trade playing in Nashville? Not so well. Things have gone sideways since a stellar opener in which Subban scored as the Predators beat Chicago. Their record through the weekend is 2-5-1 after consecutive losses to the three California teams. Subban is erratic — he is tied for the team's worst plus-minus at minus-7 and looked like a goof on Anaheim's second goal on Wednesday. The Preds were on a power play and Subban was at the point. Anaheim won possession and Subban's version of defence was to back up, take a sad jab at the puck from pretty far away, then try to take out his man and instead get knocked on his butt. A night later in Los Angeles, in the third period of a tie game, he created a scoring chance with a perfect pass to Jeff Carter, who alas was playing for the other team.
On the bright side, Subban has 407 times as many Twitter followers as Weber (905,000 versus 2,220).
Chicago adjust
At even strength, as in the picture at left, the Chicago Blackhawks have been fine. But put one of them in the penalty box, and through their first seven games they turned ghastly. The Hawks had given up 14 power-play goals in that span, including two against Calgary on Monday night. But in their last two games — both wins — they seem to have cleaned up this mess.
The problem was that the Hawks were too disciplined when playing a man down. Their four guys form a rectangle to keep opponents away from the middle area. That’s standard practice, but Chicago were not at all aggressive in going after the puck handler and the Hawks players were disinclined to block shots. This was giving shooters a clear lane to the net.
On Friday at New Jersey the Hawks adjusted. They were peskier while short-handed and even blocked a shot. They still gave up one power play goal on four Jersey opportunities, but at least they weren’t brutal.
And in Sunday’s shutout of Los Angeles, they killed off two penalties by stepping up the same formula — go after the puck handler, get in front of shots.
Grandmas are great
When Zane Gothberg was a kid, his grandma Susie McIntyre got him interested in hockey and would drive him around to tournaments. He was so close to her, he had his last name legally changed to McIntyre. This week he played his first NHL game, occupying the net for the Boston Bruins because Tuukka Rask is injured. The mask that the newcomer wore bore an image of his grandma in feisty mode on the back, above the words “Love You Grandma Susie.”
When Dylan Larkin was a kid, his grandma Alice Larkin would give him $5 (Dh18.37) every time he scored a goal. And on days when he had lunch with her, he almost always scored a goal. Now Larkin is a young star on the Detroit Red Wings. He had lunch with grandma on Tuesday, and that evening he scored his first two goals of the season. Alas grandma is no soft touch: she had asked him to score three.
In summation:
*All stats through Sunday
Standings: Montreal lead the league with 17 points. The other division leaders are Pittsburgh, Minnesota (thanks to Devan Dubnyk's three straight shutouts) and Edmonton. The team with the fewest points are Arizona with four.
Standouts: Philly's Claude Giroux and Edmonton's Connor McDavid are tied for the points lead at 12. The best goals-against average (minimum 120 minutes played) belongs to Detroit's Jimmy Howard at 0.86. The top team in takeaways — a measure of defensive hustle — are the New York Rangers with 92.
Standard-bearers: Steve Ott of Detroit played his 700th NHL game. Ott is no star but has endured through hard work, toughness and finding any little edge he can — like learning curse words in foreign languages so he can irritate players from faraway lands.
Stand and deliver: The leader in penalty minutes remains Detroit's Jonathan Ericsson at 28 minutes, thanks in large part to his two fighting majors.
Standing tall: Ottawa's Craig Anderson got a 2-0 shutout in Edmonton on Sunday. It was his first game back since taking a leave of absence upon learning that his wife, Nicholle, 35, has cancer. The Ottawa captain Erik Karlsson said after the game: "He held a strong face, but you could still see the pain in his eyes. And he came in here and led by example. He didn't say much, had the same routine, and showed what a true leader he is."
rmckenzie@thenational.ae