Plenty of blame with seventh games
Ryan Getzlaf should have considered the message as an early birthday present. Love and best wishes, from Randy Carlyle.
Getzlaf, the Anaheim Ducks captain and Team Canada regular, turns 32 Wednesday — the same day his team plays host to the upstart Edmonton Oilers in Game 7 of their second-round playoff series. And just so the hockey world is clear on whose competitive reputation is at stake in the match, Carlyle, the Anaheim coach, helpfully provided context in the wake of his team’s 7-1 loss in Edmonton in Game 6.
It has been widely pointed out that some of Anaheim’s best players have a reputation for being as invisible in big moments as an NHL concussion spotter in Pittsburgh. Each of the past four postseasons have seen the Ducks take a 3-2 lead in a playoff series, only to lose Games 6 and 7, the latter always on home ice. So if Sunday’s Game 6 setback triggered horrific flashbacks to the failures of the past, Carlyle, who is in the first year of his second go-round in Orange County, promptly detached himself from the lineage.
“I wasn’t here,” Carlyle said. “So don’t pin any of the Game 7s on me. Simple as that.”
Clearly there’s a reason they call this franchise the Ducks. Evading blame for the latest post-season failure has become an annual tradition. It was a couple springs ago that Getzlaf groused about then-coach Bruce Boudreau’s alleged botching of the matchups during in an in-game interview of a Game 7 dismantling at the hands of the Chicago Blackhawks. The year before ex-star Teemu Selanne fingered Boudreau as the root of the franchise’s failure to live up to its championship promise. And last year Boudreau was finally made the scapegoat after back-to-back seasonending losses to the Nashville Predators made Anaheim the first franchise to lose a Game 7 in four consecutive seasons.
Given that tradition, you’ll understand Carlyle’s don’t-blame-me sentiment. We’ve all heard of a coach throwing his players under the bus. Count Carlyle as the first to throw his players out ahead of the approaching vehicle in the days before a game, just in case.
Luckily for Carlyle, even an Anaheim loss on Wednesday might not make the Ducks the league’s highest profile example of perennial playoff ineptitude.
The Washington Capitals arrive at their Game 7 against the Pittsburgh Penguins on Wednesday with a track record as one of the greatest collections of squandered potential of this sporting century.
A Washington win would go a long way toward reworking that characterization. A Washington loss would mean that, for all the hype of the Alex Ovechkin era, the Great 8 will celebrate his 32nd birthday having never ventured past the post-season’s second round.
The Capitals, mind you, have been the better team for the bulk of the series. They’ve come back from a 3-1 deficit with two straight wins. And they’re armed with the theoretical advantages of both home ice, and of Mr. Game 7, Capitals forward Justin Williams, who owns a personal 7-0 record and an NHL record seven goals and 14 points in Game 7s.
Pittsburgh, mind you, is 5-0 as the road team in Game 7s, including a 2009 win in Washington en route to the first of two Stanley Cups in the Sidney Crosby era. And Crosby is a personal 3-2 in Game 7s.
If Crosby’s historic ability to lead teams in big victories is beyond doubt, his condition is a question mark. He hasn’t been his dominant self since being concussed in the early going of Game 3. And certainly it couldn’t have helped that after missing Game 4 to the brain injury — the estimated fourth of his career — he took a head-first tumble into the juncture of the boards and ice in Game 6, an impact that somehow didn’t draw the attention of the league’s on-site spotter.
The league claimed it didn’t meet the standard of the protocol as written, which suggests some rewriting is in order.
Anaheim is certainly game for revising its franchise narrative. Though the Ducks have been a near-perennial playoff force in the decade since they won the 2007 Stanley Cup with Getzlaf and Corey Perry providing offence for a team built around star defencemen Scott Niedermayer and Chris Pronger, the Ducks have often been damned by their residence in the NHL’s power conference. Maybe there’s collective shame in the pile-up of Game 7 losses. But seen in isolation, the loss to a Blackhawks team that won three Cups in six years, just like the loss to a Kings juggernaut that won two Cups in a three-year span, hardly count as disgraceful, even if they were resounding.
And Getzlaf, in the big picture, can make a claim as a proven playoff performer. He has 114 points in 114 playoff games. Of active players with at least 100 post-season appearances on their resume, he’s among three who’ve averaged a point a game. The other two are Crosby and Evgeni Malkin. Still, in the past four seasons, in the back-to-back losses that ended the Ducks’ playoff runs, he hasn’t been enough of a factor. In those eight games, plus the Game 6 loss on Sunday, he has compiled zero goals and three assists. Perry has racked up two goals and four assists. But both of Perry’s goals were relatively meaningless. One was scored after the Ducks fell down 4-0 in Game 7 of the Western final back in 2015. The other was scored after the Ducks dug themselves a 5-0 hole to the Kings in 2014.
That’s a lot of high-priced talent for such low-impact attendance when it counts. Perry and Getzlaf represent cap hits of $8.6 million and $8.3 million, respectively, the eighth- and 12th-most-expensive numbers in the league. Which only underlines Carlyle’s pre-emptive point. Don’t pin Game 7 on the coach.
The Ducks have already run one coach out of town for their perennial failures. Maybe, if Getzlaf’s blowing out of candles coincides with another blown chance, it’ll be time to pass the buck in another direction.