MONTREAL — So I look at Alex Ovechkin’s pedestrian numbers and forget the seven goals and 14 points in the first 17 games. The one that leaps off the page as most pertinent and most inexplicable is the 18:43 of ice time per game that as of Friday ranked — get this — 67th in the league among forwards who have played at least 10 games.
Then I hear Bruce Boudreau, the coach responsible for that astounding stat, talk about how using four lines makes the Capitals a better team and my thoughts turn to Al Arbour, who back in the day cut Mike Bossy’s minutes so he could get Hector Marini on the ice more often, but wait, no, that didn’t happen, and of course that didn’t happen, are you crazy?
Unless Ovechkin simply is not in good enough condition at the age of 26 to play approximately the 23:03 a match he averaged over the course of the 2007-08 and 2008-09 seasons during which he was the NHL’s most electrifying athlete, then limiting his ice time so people such as Cody Eakin or Joel Ward can get a few extra spins is strategy from another planet that is doomed to fail.
And this harping for the last couple of years about Ovechkin needing to be better without the puck … all I know is if I were aligned with any of the NHL’s other 29 teams, well, I absolutely would want Ovechkin to have the puck as little as possible, so I would be thanking the Caps very much for attempting to hammer the charismatic, multi-dimensional peg into a vanilla, one-size-fits-all hole.
Working diligently without the puck in a four-line rotation, yeah, that’s the ticket, and that’s of course the reason the blogger named Ted Leonsis is paying Ovechkin $124 million over 13 years, is it not?
* Over the last three or four seasons, the NHL essentially has ignored goaltender interference of the most blatant kind, allowing players to storm the crease and knock down or shove the netminder out of the way in conjunction with attempts to score.
The league, for instance, saw nothing wrong with the way the Blackhawks treated Roberto Luongo as essentially a tackling dummy in eliminating the Canucks in the 2010 Western semis, and saw nothing wrong with the way Henrik Lundqvist was repeatedly run in nets for years.
Now, though, the league — actually, more the league general managers than the league office — is in an uproar over the issue of goaltender interference because the Sabres’ Ryan Miller was run over by the Bruins’ Milan Lucic in the faceoff circle about 20 feet away from the net playing the puck.
What?
The GMs apparently believe the NHL’s duty to protect goaltenders is equivalent to the NFL’s approach to protecting quarterbacks, and that’s a worthy comparison.
Of course, the moment a quarterback leaves the pocket, he is considered a running back and therefore due no more or less protection under the law than any other ballcarrier.
Yes, I most certainly do believe the NHL should crack down on goaltender interference, but the focal point should on the physical contact in the crease, not the odd occurrence in the faceoff circle that prompted a combination of hysteria and much ado about next to nothing.
* Oh, and more to the point, what possible explanation is there for Miller’s failure to two-hand Lucic across the ankles when the Bruins’ winger set up in front of the Sabres’ crease not too many shifts after running over the goaltender in that match in Boston last Saturday night?
That’s just the way Hall of Fame, four-time Cup-winner Billy Smith would have handled it, all right — by doing nothing in the game when presented with the opportunity to get vengeance, whining in the room afterward, and then having his GM make his case at a meeting a few days later.
* My apologies to Tom Glavine, a full-time employee of the Braves, for incorrectly reporting last week he would be joining the NHLPA staff. My mistake.
I see where a fellow in Toronto with a pipeline to Toronto GM Brian Burke reported the Maple Leafs had rejected an offer of a second-round draft choice and a player in exchange for defenseman Cody Franson, scratched in 14 of the first 19 games, and I left am wondering who the player could have been, Scott Gomez?