Avs Try Hard, Sorta
January 28th, 2009, 9:14 am
So the All Star break this year was bookended by boring games. It happens. For some more All-Star stuff and a discussion on the Avs game, check out our new podcast. The Sharks managed to coast to a 3-0 win in Denver with very few moments of drama. The Murray-Stewart tilt should have been a highlight, but even that was pretty lackluster. With many of the teams’ exciting players out of the lineup- Sakic, Stasny, Boyle- there wasn’t much to hang your hat on other than some spectacular saves by Nabby.
And I know were only two games into the Lemieux era, but isn’t the 4th line about twenty times better than it was? They had another great scoring chance last night, mostly due to Pepe. Here’s his line – 9:30 TOI, 2 shots, 3 hits. And he’s bringing his linemates along with him- Plihal had 9:58, and Shelley 6:36. It’s hard to really evaluate 4th lines, because you hear so little about them, but when JR comes back, isn’t JR-Pepe-Plihal one of the best 4th lines in the league? It’s certainly better than Ben Guite-Chris Steward-David Jones.
Actually, might be fun to compare some fourth lines (I’m using TOI to determine the 4th line, which may or may not be a good idea):
Detroit: Maltby-Kopecky-Mikael Samuelsson
Boston: Shawn Thornton-Petteri Nokelainen-Martin St. Pierre
Calgary: Eric Nystrom-Andre Roy-Dustin Boyd
I might give the nod to Detroit here on this list, but that’s only because we haven’t seen the full magic yet. It’s too bad we had to ditch Lemieux Watch on the podcast, it was a fun segment, but I’d rather have a producing fourth line than a good bit. I think.
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Claude has looked pretty good. I went to the Canuck game, and my buddies agreed that he was probably the shark with the best jump for 59 minutes of that game. I’m usually on the side of giving the youngsters a chance, but Claude has earned it.
If the Sharks take the cup with a 4th line of Plihal-JR-Claude, I hope Shelly knows he will have been just as valuable to the team even if he doesn’t play much in the playoffs. It’s too bad that he will probably sit, but he will have earned it just as much as everybody else.
Good point, Jody is as deserving as anyone else on the team. As long has he plays Thursday, he will have played in 41 games, thus qualifying him for his name on the Cup, should the Sharks win it.
I also wanted to respond to a comment of yours in the last post:
I agree with the second sentence, but not the first. Plenty of teams, including the Sharks, have held onto “faceoff specialists.” Remember Joel Otto? Yannick Perreault? Both of those guys were magicians in the circle, more or less worthless everywhere else.
True. The only things I worry about are 1) this isn’t baseball, where you can take your lefty specialist out when the big bad righthanded bopper comes up, and 2) I’m not really sure getting one extra faceoff win a game from him is really worth the lack of everything else he does in comparison to other options the sharks have (I don’t want to seem like I don’t think he is a good player, he is definitely a quality NHL player, but the Sharks have better).
One of the things that hit me when I REALLY got into baseball analysis was “just because teams have been doing it for a long time doesn’t mean it is the best way to do things.” Faceoff specialists are one of those things that are like speedy leadoff men. In baseball, I’d rather have a slow fat guy that gets on base all the time. For hockey, I’d rather have a guy that only wins 40% of faceoffs but who can actually put the biscuit in the basket. That being said, numbers have been crunched in baseball to bear that out. Hockey… ehh, not so much.