PHILADELPHIA — A year ago, the Rangers were eliminated from the playoffs by losing a shootout here on the final day of the season.
Now, if the Rangers don’t make the tournament, it might be because they have won too many shootouts this year.
Not all losses are considered equal in the gimmicked-up league, and neither are all wins. Before their loss to the Islanders on Thursday, the Rangers were 41-31-5, which in the real world translates to 41-36. The Sabres were 39-29-9, or a bottom line 39-38. Yet Buffalo held the lead in the standings because starting this season, the first tiebreak is no longer total victories, but non-shootout victories.
The league is prepared to have a tournament berth decided by a single shootout, but not by the cumulative effect of a season of shootouts.
Victories always had been the first tiebreak, even after the league adopted the shootout as an entertainment vehicle coming out of the lockout. But when the number of shootouts increased to 184 last season, up from an average of 156 the first four years of the skills competition, Detroit GM Ken Holland led the charge to change the rules.
The fact that the Red Wings were 6-9 last season and an all-time 23-29 probably had nothing to do with it. Detroit always is about the good of the league, never its self-interest, going back to the time when the club chose to move to the West in order the ensure less challenging competition for a playoff berth. It’s interesting that when Johan Franzen was injured a few years ago in the playoffs and Holland thought his player was then targeted by the opposition, the NHL summarily changed its rule about injury disclosure.
It’s interesting that when Detroit drove through the Holland Tunnel signing players to front-loaded, long-term contracts, the NHL never blinked, but when . . . well, we digress.
If the NHL had wanted to make a point (rather than giving away points to losers), the league would have either adopted a simple win-loss, baseball-type approach to the standings, or, it could have moved to a system in which regulation victories would have been worth three points.
Of course, those changes would have rewarded excellence and undermined the lowest-common-denominator approach that allows the most mediocre of teams to sell the illusion to their fans of being a contender, even if sharp customers like the ones in Atlanta aren’t fooled by the charade.
The Rangers are used here as the example, but the issue is not about the Rangers, it’s about the absurdity of some losses being artificially enhanced and some victories being artificially devalued. It’s about a shootout success determining a playoff berth, but a season’s worth of shootout successes being discounted.
Everywhere else, including at the bargaining table, you win or you lose. But in the NHL standings, you not only can win by losing, you can lose by winning.
The NHL’s celebration of Dale Hunter as part of its playoff “History Will Be Made” promotion is nothing less than sickening.
Hunter is the perp who committed one of the most dastardly acts in NHL playoff history when he mugged and maimed Pierre Turgeon during a goal celebration after No. 77 clinched the Islanders’ six-game, first-round series against the Caps in 1993 by taking the puck from Hunter and scoring.
Though Gary Bettman, new on the job, gave Hunter a 21-game suspension to start the 1993-94 season, the play merely changed the course of Islanders’ history.
Turgeon — a great player on a dynamic, entertaining team that featured Steve Thomas, Benoit Hogue, Derek King, Pat Flatley, Vladimir Malakhov, Darius Kasparaitis and Glenn Healy — was a shell of himself the rest of the playoffs and never the same the remainder of his career.
The Islanders, who had as good a chance as anybody still standing after taking out the two-time defending champion Penguins in seven — David Volek! — in Round 2, couldn’t get by the Canadiens in the semis, going out in five to a somewhat ordinary Montreal team carried by Patrick Roy.
Imagine what a Final matchup against Wayne Gretzky and the Kings would have meant to the franchise, win or lose. Understand that a healthy, undamaged Turgeon never in a million years would have been traded to the Canadiens for Kirk Muller less than two years later in the deal that debilitated the organization.
But history was made. It was made by Hunter, somehow celebrated by the NHL for scoring an overtime goal in the playoffs in 1988.
Ignominy was made, too.
The only reason the Islanders haven’t yet announced that Jack Capuano will return behind the bench next year is GM Garth Snow‘s desire to remain consistent with his statement upon bringing Capuano in from Bridgeport on Nov. 15 that the situation would be addressed following the season.
If Snow had been this consistent in nets, the Flyers might have beaten the Red Wings in the 1997 Cup Final.
Finally, took a gander at the “History Will Be Made” parody featuring the incorrect no-goal call against Laurie Boschman in the third period of Game 6 of the Devils-Penguins 1991 first round.
The goal would have tied the game. Had the Devils won the game, they would have won the series. Instead, the Penguins won Game 6 then Game 7 at home on their way to their first Cup.
The referee who ruled that the puck was kicked in, though replays clearly show the puck being tapped in by Boschman’s stick after it hit his skates, was Bill McCreary, who retired last night.
Talk about consistency.