SORRY, BARKLEY: THIS HASN’T BEEN ONE FOR THE AGES
NHL’s playoffs have been better than NBA, but that’s a pretty darn low bar to reach
Charles Barkley said he wanted to see what all the fuss was about.
The NBA star turned analyst had been gushing about how much he loves hockey even though his knowledge was limited to the craziness of Ron Hextall — “I want to know if my guy really cares,” he said of the former Philadelphia Flyers goalie — young Blue Jackets blue-liner Seth Jones, “because his father played in the NBA,” and what his neighbour Jeremy Roenick has told him about the sport.
So when NHL commissioner Gary Bettman invited Barkley to come down and watch Game 4 of the Stanley Cup final in Nashville on Monday, he jumped at the chance.
After all, as Barkley joked, it couldn’t be much worse than watching the NBA final.
“You know, obviously I’m not breaking earth-shattering news — the NBA playoffs have not been very good,” Barkley said after crashing a news conference that featured Wayne Gretzky and Paul Coffey. “The best thing about my job is when I’m in work for two straight months, like the NHL playoffs, I’m in a room with 20 televisions.
“I watch pretty much every single hockey game. I think we showed the stat: We’ve only had four basketball games in the playoffs that were less than double digits. It’s not been a lot of fun broadcasting games this year.”
As Barkley spoke about how much better the NHL playoffs have been compared to the
NBA playoffs — “The playoffs in hockey have been amazing” — Bettman was off to the side of the stage smiling. He couldn’t have scripted a better scene, and relatively speaking, Barkley was telling the truth.
The NHL playoffs, including the Stanley Cup final, have so far been more exciting than what the NBA has had to offer — not that that’s saying much.
As non-competitive as the first two games between the Golden State Warriors and Cleveland Cavaliers have been, it’s not as though the Pittsburgh Penguins and Nashville Predators have been producing must-watch TV. Yes, the series is tied 2-2 and has a chance to go the distance for the first time in six years, and sure, there have been 24 goals scored in the four games. But has it been exciting? Three of the games were blowouts. The one that wasn’t a blowout featured five goals on 12 shots from the winning team.
So yeah, let’s hold off on patting the NHL on the back. Although Monday’s 4-1 Nashville win was the second-most-watched Game 4 ever on NBC, so far, this hasn’t been a Stanley Cup final you’d want to re-watch anytime soon.
Then again, it’s been a while since there was a truly memorable final. The last one might have been in 2011, when the Boston Bruins defeated the Vancouver Canucks in a seven-game bloodbath that featured four shutouts, several questionable hits, Alex Burrows biting Patrice Bergeron’s finger and a seriesending riot.
The nastiest thing about this final might be P.K. Subban’s breath. Even then, the whole thing seems contrived.
These two teams don’t really hate each other. If they did, they would be too tired to do anything about it — or too afraid it might cost them another body from the lineup.
Pittsburgh is already missing its No. 1 defenceman (Kris Letang) and Nashville has been without its No. 1 centre (Ryan Johansen). Nick Bonino and Kevin Fiala are both walking around on crutches. The players who are healthy are running on fumes, and it shows.
They’re still trying, still playing with heart and passion, but something is missing. After an 82-game season and two months of playoff hockey, the teams look like a pair of punch-drunk boxers in the final round of a fight that’s gone on far too long.
Maybe Nashville’s defence has been too good. Maybe Pittsburgh’s forward depth is too thin. Maybe this series should have happened a couple weeks ago, when the teams still had something left in the tank.
Instead, we had a game in which Pittsburgh went an entire period and more without recording a single shot on net and another where Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin were completely invisible. We’ve seen two games where Pekka Rinne looked like he was playing the position for the first time and two others where he looked like the second coming of Terry Sawchuk.
The rosters are a mishmash of minor-leaguers and bottom-rung players being forced to punch above their weight. Players you never heard of (Nashville’s Pontus Aberg, Pittsburgh’s Carter Rowney) are now playing prominent roles, while players you expected more out of have slipped into the shadows.
It hasn’t been all bad. Pittsburgh’s Jake Guentzel, one goal away from tying Dino Ciccarelli’s rookie goal-scoring record, has been a nice story. The same goes for Nashville’s Frederick Gaudreau, the minor-league call-up who has three goals in the final but is still waiting for his own dressing room stall.
Of course, it probably says something that the most exciting aspect of games 3 and 4 in Nashville happened to be the crowd inside and outside the arena. The games haven’t been anything to cheer about — at least not yet, anyway.
With the series tied 2-2 and now down to a best-of-three, let’s hope the players saved a little extra for these final three games. After all, Sir Charles is watching, and the last thing the NHL wants to do is lose a potential new fan. mtraikos@postmedia.com twitter.com/Michael_Traikos