Too soon for hockey fans to plan the parade — or the funeral.
The return of the NHL brings all sorts of things to our fair country. Not the least of which is wild overreactions
And now, a little math. Wait, don’t leap to your feet applauding and throwing bouquets of roses yet. There will be time for that later. This is an annual public service announcement, designed to discourage panic and/or irrational exuberance and/or despair. In hockey, because that’s where so many of us use those things.
The return of NHL hockey is a flood, and the waters are rushing in. In Washington, Alexander Ovechkin is as good as he has ever been. In Pittsburgh, Marc-André Fleury is airtight. In Edmonton, all is lost. In Calgary, all is not lost. In Vancouver, John Tortorella is crazy. In Colorado, coach Patrick Roy is on pace for US$820,000 in fines.
Can you spot the overreactions in that paragraph? Well, one of them is easy. Patrick Roy could easily blow past that number. He could get fined more than that after killing a peanut vendor by throwing the bench at him. But the point is, teams have played between 1.2% and 3.6% of their schedules, and you need to conserve your overreactions. Like in Toronto. In Toronto, it feels like people are on Ecstasy. Some people who should know better are declaring the dark days are over, the new age has begin, the Maple Leafs have figured this NHL thing out again. And, in fairness, in this regard, the Leafs are due.
But jeez, come on. The Devils started 3-0 last year. Toronto started 3-0 in 2011-12. Here are some teams that enjoyed at least a three-game winning streak last season: Edmonton, Columbus, Carolina, Winnipeg, Dallas, New Jersey, Tampa Bay, Philadelphia, Buffalo, Florida, Calgary, Phoenix, and Nashville. Hey, none of them made the playoffs. Only Colorado didn’t string at least three straight wins together among the non-qualifiers, and that took some doing.
And last season was a sprint, a breathless thing, 48 games and a cloud of ice shav- ings, and there was still time for teams to falter or surge or tiptoe along the edge. Three games don’t determine your season unless you are, say, the Pittsburgh Penguins and you just lost one of your stars to injury. We have six months for that to happen, sadly.
It’s not that what has happened is meaningless, no. Some guys really do look great — Kyle Turris in Ottawa, for instance — and some guys look terrible — Devan Dubnyk in Edmonton, for instance — and we have no idea how sustainable it really is.
Well, that’s only partly true. There are pockets of twitchyeyed panic in Edmonton over Dubnyk’s start, conveyed to me chiefly by Edmonton Journal and Bleacher Report writer Jonathan Willis. Dubnyk has an .831 save percentage and a 6.52 goals-against through two miserable games, and — this may be relevant, so let’s throw it out there — a 2.82 goals-against and .912 save percentage in 141 career NHL games. For the Oilers. Whose defensive zone coverage has occasionally strayed into the realm of teenagers standing around a junior high school dance, scared to talk to the girls on the other side of the gym. He’s had a bad start. It happens.
Well, in 2012-13 Henrik Lundqvist allowed 10 goals on 81 shots in his first three games, while Martin Brodeur started 3-0, allowing three goals on 71 shots. Not to spoil the ending in case you’re still catching up on the season, but those trends did not quite last. Maybe this is the year Dubnyk suddenly becomes the worst goalie in modern times, but it would come as a surprise.
It’s early. Repeat it, hold it like a totem, breathe it in, breathe it out. The results so far may either confirm or go against our pre-season biases, but they’re not proof of anything other than a good/bad/ indifferent start to what will be a very long season. This is not rocket science, or brain surgery, or trying to figure out why some fans in Glendale booed NHL commissioner Gary Bettman when he appeared on the big screen during the home opener. (Tourists? Taxpayers who wandered in, lost and disoriented? Canadians? Still, people.)
But i t ’s worth remembering, in this instant-reaction world we have built. Twitter, where this writer spends far too much time, is a declarative minefield, full of instantaneous judgement and insane confidence.
Some Leafs fans are swaggering around, drunk on Jonathan Bernier. He’s played in 64 NHL games. He might yet be great, but hey, whoa now.
Because in an 82-game season there will be streaks and outliers and unbelievable happenings, and so many of them will vanish in the whole. deadspin recently imagined how the standings would look in Major League Baseball or the NBA if they employed NFLstyle schedules, but they didn’t do it for hockey, for whatever reason. Well, the current arguments over so-called advanced hockey stats, which are largely based on how many shots you get versus give up, are predicated on appropriate sample sizes. One game isn’t predictive. 20? Quite possibly. 40? Usually. 60? Sure.
And you still have to account for those moments when your team is up 4-1 or 2-1 in a Game 7 or a Game 6 and you will probably win about 99 times out of 100, and that one time comes up on hockey’s slot machine. You can play that game atop a mountain of evidence, a season’s worth of proof, and you can’t predict that.
On Saturday night the Tampa Bay Lightning were being outshot 25-6 through two periods at the hands of the defending Stanley Cup champions, on the road. The Lightning wound up getting outshot 39-16, and won 3-2. Great comeback, amazing win, well done. And if you try that every night for 82 games you will get lit up like an amusement park.
Calm down. Breathe. Hold off on those parade plans and sudden tattoo ideas, and let this whole thing roll out, night after night, shift after shift. Hockey’s back. Let it unfold.