Snowman On Fire

Technically the season is more than half over, but calling the All-Star Game a mid-term break is fair enough.   With 48 games in the can, the Devils are atop the Atlantic Division.  A nice change from last year at this time.   The run rate of 1.31 points per game translates to about 107 points for the season, which would be close to an all-time Devils record.<p>Let’s break it down:</p><p><b>Defense: B-</b>.   I remember my father in law screaming “Jaworski” at the television set, turning off Eagles games in a rage because they weren’t worth the dollar or two in kilowatts to bring that misery into his living room.   My kids will remember me yelling at Lukowich and Rafalski, and even some mistakes from Paul Martin.   But lately they’ve been much better.   Look at the test grades on this one and you’ll see early season ugliness with recent upward trends.   Would be nice to get Oduya back, because he’s fast and smart.  I miss Hale, and I’m not sure what he did to end up in the doghouse.    Overall, Brodeur’s play has made the defense look better than it is at times.</p><p><b>Goaltending: A</b>.   Marty is just <i>on</i>.  Like really on.    Goals have been scored, rather than “given up”, mostly due to screens, deflections or simply too many loose bodies near the blue paint.   </p><p><b>EGG Line: A- but homework still missing</b>.    Elias came out of his slump and briefly took over the goal scoring lead, and still has the team points lead.   Gionta looks Rochester Retro rather than Sophomore Scoring Slumped, and Gomez is showing flashes of playing pivot rather than playing for pivotal contract moments.   Still, they aren’t striking when needed, and (aside from Gio) their shootout utility deserves an “incomplete”.</p><p><b>Jay-Z Line: A, with a gold star from Dallas</b>.   Parise earned a new nickname in our house: Freakin’.   Right up there with Brylin.   6 points, Young Stars MVP, very nice.   Zajac is having a great rookie year (for a normal rookie, discounting Ovie and Evgeni), and Langenbrunner continues to deliver.   Down the stretch, these guys will give the EGG-heads a run for team scoring leads.</p><p><b>Checking Line: A with an extension for scoring</b>.   Yes, they’re put up against  opponent’s top lines, and when you see Jay Pandolfo piss off Bobby Holik you want to give him a lamp-lighting hall pass for weeks, but some more output would be nice.  Still, Brylin moving to wing is great, and one of the reasons the goals-against average is hovering near a deuce is that the Devils aren’t getting killed on the power play, rather, they’re doing the killing. </p><p><b>Big Body Line: B</b> The fourth line is doing an above average (by NHL grading standards) job of creating some punch (literally in the case of Janssen and Rupp).  They’re all big bodies that don’t create gravitational attraction for penalties.</p><p><b>Fans: Absent when picture was taken</b>.   </p><p><b>Athletic Trainer: Repeating phys ed</b>.   Is it me, or has the NHL become a groin pull ward?   Fortunately, the Devils only lost White and Gomez for short stretches, but heaven help us if He Who Was Named To The All Star Game should find a twitch near the cup holder.  </p><p><b>Alex Brooks: Revising his essay on the number 8</b>.   The snowman seems to be getting the bad luck the last few seasons.   Brooks has a broken foot.   Klee didn’t get signed and bolted to the mountains.  Larionov was pretty much useless as a Devil.  And I may be the only person (aside from the equipment manager who packed his locker) who remembers the Sheriff himself, Vadim Sharifijanov, a first-round draft pick who ended up as trade bait for Mogilny back in 2000.</p><p>Can’t wait for real hockey to spin up again in 24 hours, with the Devils in Tampa Bay to remind Lecavalier that he was about minus-a kajillion in the All Star Game.<p><!–adsense–>

It was a very busy celebratory weekend here in young Devils land.  Our Squirt B Select team went to Lake Placid and came home with bronze medals, despite a tough tournament bracket and an Adirondack ice storm.     Since we share a coach with that team, I called to check in on their tournament, and got the full report Saturday afternoon — walking down Main Street in Lake Placid, our coach’s daughter (an up and coming player herself) said, “Dad, this is the best weekend ever.”   That was before the medal game, before hearing her name ring out in the Olympic complex, and before cradling a chunk of metal on the six-hour ride home.     Jim Craig says that if you listen carefully on a cold night, you can still hear “USA! USA!” on Main Street, but if you listen more carefully, you hear the true essence of youth sports on any given day.<p>We went to the Bar Mitzvah of a good friend’s son, a great friend to our son and a baseball player I’ve coached in previous seasons.   There’s something wonderful about seeing young athletes mature into young men, and apply their passion for sports to more mature endeavors.   In our friend’s case, he raised over $15,000 for the Valerie Fund by holding a raffle for autographed sports memorabilia donated by local teams.    The good deed was returned, as an eventual surprise on the bar mitzvah boy himself, when Johnny Damon made a cameo appearance in his video montage to wish him good luck and congratulations.   There you have it:  good sportsmanship, so easy even a  caveman could do it.    Those fifteen seconds of fame-brought-home went to the top of my “best words” list, with a bullet, ahead of the stroll down 1980 memory lane in Lake Placid, but only for twenty-four hours.</p><p>Sunday night found our Pee Wee B team in Toms River for a non-league game, minus an entire line and both coaches.  Our part-time parent coach and I filled in on the bench.    It was a very hard-fought game, with more than the usual volume of hitting, passing, and shooting.   We broke a 1-1 tie with my son’s first goal of the season, and Toms River tied it again on a simply monstrous slapshot from one of the biggest defenseman I’ve ever seen in a Pee Wee game.    That’s how it ended, and my co-substitute coach noted “Our head coach would have won this game.”   The simplest recognition of how much he can get out of our own players, and completely true.   Not an admission of regret, but a statement of respect. As I waddled off the ice, I was greeted with “Good game, coach” by the parents.   But not just from our team; from our opponents’ parents as well. </p><p>Apologies to the news channel that snuck in Johnny Damon, and those who channel Herb Brooks through all manners of Miracles on Ice, but those were the best three words of the weekend.<p><!–adsense–></p>

Tonight was not the first night I’ve run around screaming “Freakin’ Brylin!”   2000 Stanley Cup Playoffs, I was in a hotel room in Boston, and received a call from the hotel manager asking me to talk to “Freakin’ Brylin” a little more quietly.   Tonight, though, Sarge gets all the loud <i>mamalushen</i> he can handle direct from our living room.<p>Hard work backchecking, picking up a puck behind the Atlanta net, with enough speed that Exelby trips him to start the Devils power play.   Then Brylin finishes off the second half of the stacked power plays with the game-winning goal.    Best moment of the evening was watching Bobby Holik come out of the penalty box swearing at the top of his lungs.   Sorry, even I could lip-read that one, proving that “Holik” and <a href=”http://www.slovnik.cz”>”hulakat”</a> (bawl, shout, holler) are sin bin neighbors in the Czech dictionary.</p><p>Devils beat Atlanta for the first time in 33 months. and move into 2nd place in the conference.  The last time the Devils lost to a cellar-dweller, then came back to beat a team ahead of them in the standings, it was a turning point in the season, when they went on a tear to finish the second half and play deep into June.    Take the other hot shot Russian shooters to Dallas for the All-Star game, we’ll keep Brylin here in NJ, <i>spaseeba</i><p><!–adsense–></p>

ESPN’s e-ticket follows Kathryn Bertine’s quest to represent the United States at the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Doing just about anything, it seems. The series is Bertine’s quirky, self-effacing and sport-defacing travelogue of her attempts to qualify in the women’s pentathalon, checking out team handball to a tortuous, tortured, and not at all circuitous route to the 7-11 Velodrome for Team USA Cycling.

Tonight’s blog takes the form of a Jeopardy front-and-back answer: Steve Martin and Martin Brodeur, brought to you by the semi-annual confluence of the Devils and Montreal. Comedian Steve Martin once said, you can say anything in French and it sounds great. “J’ai faisait du but”, pardoning my conjugation, means “I scored a goal.” However, “Quelle dommage, c’est grand frommage,” sounds wonderful with cadence and rhyme, except it means “It’s a shame, it’s a big cheese”.

Nobody on the Canadiens could quip either tonight, even with approval of the Academie Francaise, as the Devils cruised 3-0 to win their second in a row. No, Canada, indeed. With a shutout, and back-to-back victories, you’d think Marty Brodeur would be the first star of the game? If not the first, maybe at least in the top three? In Brodeur’s home city, les escrivers sportifs demonstrated Homer-ism in the finest form: Habs goalie Cristobal Huet made the star-spangled banner, Brodeur didn’t. As Steve Martin might say, “excuse me.”

I had the pleasure of seeing great displays of sportsmanship today from youth athletes, and it made me proud to be a hockey dad, a team manager for the NJ Devils Youth Club and of course my own son’s father.

We started in our own rink, watching the tail end of a Mite game that was tied 4-4. WIth 90 seconds left, there was a lot of action in our might-mite Devils end, but they cleared the puck and fired off a few shots of their own. With ten ticks left, the puck squirted out of the attack zone, was picked up by a speedy winger, and we all watched as he raced toward our end of the rink. He had to beat both the defense and the clock. Which he did, and although he pulled up just about even with the goal line, he popped a shot in off of our goalie’s skate, the puck nestling into the back of the coincidentally with the final horn. The defenseman walked over to his goalie as the teams lined up for handshakes, and tapped him on the helmet.

He also happens to be the younger brother of one of my son’s former teammates, so I recognized him at Dunkin’ Donuts twenty minutes later. I told him how proud I was of him, and his whole team, for keeping their heads up, shaking hands, and supporting their goalie. I hope he remembers his good acts of sportsmanship long after he’s forgotten the score of the game.

Sportsmanship Act II took place 60 miles further south, on Princeton’s Baker Rink, named after the man who defined sportsmanship in the early 20th century, and whose name graces the award given to the top collegiate men’s hockey player. Baker Rink holds a very special place in my own hockey heart, for it’s where I first played hockey and scored my first goal. Today’s sportsmanship was a reflection of something that didn’t happen but was realized as another first: Our goalie recorded his first shutout of the season. On the way home, my son related that as the third period was under way, the blueliners told each other “We’re not going to let our goalie down,” everyone taking the extra stride mentally and phyiscally to help him earn a USA Hockey Patch. It was his first career shutout.

Above the reserved seats, beneath the student seating gallery, there’s a banner strung across Baker Rink that reads “Make Hobey Proud.” That’s exactly what our youth Devils did today.

I love books. I buy many more than I read, and lately I’ve been buying out of print or gently used editions from amazon.com to add to my collection. Typically the used tomes fill in from days when spending $15 on a book would have put a serious dent in my spending money. Now that I can dabble in books and have somewhere to put them other than a cardboard mover’s box, I’m able to build up small libraries in obtuse topics such as Lake Placid, New York, hold’em poker, cryptography, and 70s art rock group Yes.

Without any further introduction, here’s my current top ten favorite hockey books:

What’s missing? A book about Jeff Halpern . Something focused on hockey diversity, featuring Scott Gomez and Jarome Iginla, perhaps. The hagiography of Saint Patrik (Elias), with a whole chapter on how he can consume dumplings and kolachi and still be pure muscle.

The annual “100 People of Power and Influence” fills the current double-wide issue of The Hockey News, as it does to start every new calendar season. Once again, it reads like an alumni listing of the Old Boys’ School; while last year the list was 99 men and one woman, this year THN added Hayley Wickenheiser at slot 95 to make it 98 Men Of Power and Influence and oh yeah, two women too. If this list is supposed to be about influence on hockey, in hockey, and through hockey, then it had better reflect the demographics of the sport and the fan base. Rows of GMs, mainstream media broadcasters, league executives and some NHL players is a microcosm of what is wrong with the NHL Nation today: it’s not expanding.

Women’s hockey remains missing in (fun) action. I had a lot more fun watching the USA women play in Torino than the men. Women’s hockey is alive and well around the world, but you’d never know it from the Hockey News list. It’s supposed to be about “hockey” not “men’s professional hockey”, right? Angela Ruggiero is a glaring omission. Olympic athlete, youth athletics advocate, community service leader for the NY Islanders, and autobiographical author. Influence grows communities. Second on the missing list is Laura Halldorson, women’s ice hockey coach at the University of Minnesota. Her bid for a hat trick of national championships was spoiled by Wisconson, coached by Miracle on Ice alum Mark Johnson. Halldorson was instrumental in the growth of ECAC women’s hockey and Laura’s work helped ensure that the efforts of the top college women’s player would be recognized in the Patty Kazmeier award, named after her late Tiger teammate.

College hockey is not represented. Not every NHL player gets drafted right out of high school or juniors. For many hockey players, NCAA-sanctioned hockey is the top of their career, and they’ll go on to play ECHL or European hockey for a year or two before putting the college degree to work. Those players remain fans of the game, and if THN’s list is supposed to be about power and influence in the game, it has to include the programs that can build life-long fans. Boston Bruins tickets pale in comparison to Bean Pot ducats in the city that knows more than beans about hockey.

Hockey may be for everyone, unless you’re on the list. Jarome Iginla is “the face of hockey in Canada”, and he’s the sole minority on the list. The NHL has a variety of diversity programs, again intended to expand the reach, scope and fan base for the game, but none of that work shows up in this list. How about Ice Hockey in Harlem, or the Newark Devils Renaissance effort underway to make hockey accessible in and around the Devils’ new building? Broadcasters on the west coast are making a big deal of Georges Laraque’s transformation from enforcer to play-maker — isn’t that what the new rules were supposed to highlight? This year’s list isn’t only a huge majority of white men, it’s North American white men. Europeans? Russians and Baltic states? Diversity comes in many flavors, and it generally drives expansion of your talent arena, fan base, and power pool.

Where are the fans?. Maybe I’m just having trouble with the preponderance of mainstream media on the 2007 list. But with the number of message boards and blogs that focus on hockey, sometimes exclusively on hockey, why not at least acknowledge the fans and their direct participation in the marketing of the sport? The NHL’s “invitation only” blog effort is a start, but it’s league-centric; check out Hockey’s Future boards for a taste of unedited hockey wisdom or Off Wing Opinion and its daily dose of random non-press clippings from the mouths of the lowly fan (that would be us bloggers). Please, acknowledge that the game needs fans, and in particular fans in seats, for the “new economic certainties” to be long-term positive for the players, the league and ultimately, those same fans.

It wouldn’t be a new year if I didn’t make some predictions for next year’s list, so here goes:

Mark Cuban. I’d love to see him get involved with the Penguins. And he’d help fix a lot of the fan outreach issues.

Patrik Elias. I was happy to see Marty Brodeur on this year’s list, but he’s rostered because of his work on the competition committee and his Olympic efforts. His book was a good read, and Marty truly understands using the players to market the game. Elias demonstrated many of the things that the league wanted out of the new labor agreement: he took a hometown discount in his unrestricted free agency year, he signed a deal with a no-trade clause, he’s wearing the captain’s “C” on his sweater a year after nearly dying from a hepatitis infection, and he remains a genuinely good guy playing good hockey and leading the first-place NJ Devils into the second half of the season. If the Devils have a good second half and second season, then Elias deserves some props.

Linda Cohn. Am I the only one who read’s Linda’s missives on the ESPN NHL pages?. She’s a dyed-in-the-blue hockey fan, former hockey player, great commentator, fan agitator, and story aggregator. At the risk of sounding like the bridge of Genesis’ “Dodo”, she definitely has power and influence. Or does The Hockey News ignore all other media (see point about blogs above)?