Grab Bag: Have fans been 'Brucing' Bettman all this time?
-- Welcome to a weekly grab bag of thoughts and observations from the past few days and/or decades of NHL hockey.
This week's three stars of comedy
Recognizing the three NHL personalities from around the league who produced the most comedic fodder for fans.
The third star: Henrik Lundqvist has learned from his mistakes -- After nearly getting a Ranger fan choked out two weeks ago, Lundqvist has seen the error of his ways.
That's what's known in the comedy game as a callback. Maybe this guy has a career in standup, if the whole superstar hockey player/rock star/model/restauranteur/humanitarian thing doesn't pan out.
The second star: The case of the disappearing puck -- Where did it go? Don't worry, Detective Orlov has a lead.
I'd love to know Calvin Pickard's internal monologue here. "Hey, nice save by me. Huh. Something's missing here. I can't quite put my finger on it, but [goal horn] oh, right."
The first star: Ryan Kesler goes undercover -- In fairness, the fans assumed he couldn't be an Anaheim Ducks forward after he told them he planned to score a goal this season.
Hey look, he even got Corey Perry to fall for the same "wear a disguise and ask for an autograph" trick that he used to get Bob Murray to sign that contract extension.
Obscure former player of the week
NHL history is filled with legendary players whose stories are passed down from generation to generation. This is not one of them.
Last week's obscure player was Ralph Backstrom, a longtime Montreal Canadiens forward who spent almost 15 years in Montreal before being traded to the Los Angeles Kings. But as a few readers pointed out, I left out arguably the most important detail of that trade. So I'm going to fix that now, with the help of this week's obscure player: Gord Labossiere.
Labossiere was a center who played for the Kings, Minnesota North Stars and New York Rangers during a six-year NHL career in the 1960s and '70s. He'd been a minor league star, but was mostly a depth guy at the pro level. And he was also the main piece going to Montreal in the Backstrom trade, back in 1971.
And that's where it gets interesting, because the Habs clearly didn't get much in that deal; they didn't even keep Labossiere, flipping him to Minnesota the same day for prospect Rey Comeau, who would play just four games with Montreal. Even given that Backstrom had asked for a trade, surely GM Sam Pollock could have done better for a multi-time All-Star, right? Wasn't he supposed to be some sort of genius?
Instead, Pollock practically gave Backstrom away, then saw the veteran go to L.A. and rack up 27 points in 33 games. The Kings were a bad team, one that was battling with the Oakland Seals to stay out of last place overall, but adding Backstrom served as the turning point of their season, and they finished well clear of the basement. So Pollock traded a useful player for essentially nothing at all, then watched that player lift his new team in the standings. The Seals wound up with the top pick in that year's draft. Except for one thing: They didn't own their pick that year. They had traded it during the previous offseason to ... Sam Pollock and the Montreal Canadiens. Yep. The Backstrom trade was just Pollock's way of giving the Kings a little boost, an effort to ensure the Canadiens kept the top pick.
Montreal used that first overall pick to select a flashy winger named Guy Lafleur, who would score 518 goals and win five Stanley Cups as a Hab. And the rest of the hockey world learned, once again, a valuable lesson: Sam Pollock is smarter than you.
Be It Resolved
"Be it resolved" is a feature in which we will propose new rules and customs, which the rest of the hockey world will be expected to immediately embrace as official policy.
Be it resolved that we just start treating the NHL All-Star Game like the TV show "Survivor."
Stay with me here, because the two have a lot in common. Both are competitions. Both highlight athleticism. Both have no actual competitive integrity. And both have been around for so long that when you turn on your TV and see them, you think, "I can't believe they're still doing this."
Sure, there are differences. For example, the people competing on "Survivor" are actually trying. But they're close enough that the NHL can learn something here.
And what they can learn is this: When your product is tired and played out, the only way to maintain interest is to change the format every single season. The NHL has already taken the first step, switching this year's game to a 3-on-3 format. That might work. But even if it does, the league can't get complacent. They need to just go ahead and start using a new format each and every year.
One year, it's a family theme with Staals, Sedins, Sutters and Schenns. The next year, it's returning players against first-timers. The next year, there are three teams, somehow. The next year, the players are decided by a fan vote. Wait, scrap that last one, it would probably go terribly.
But yeah, the All-Star Game needs to follow the "Survivor" blueprint. Get creative. Mix it up every year. Never get attached to any one format. And make sure that each and every year, you come up with a fresh approach that will get your fans excited.
(And then, three minutes into every game, Gary Bettman comes out, says "drop your buffs," and everything goes back to the exact same way it's always been.)
Trivial NHL-related annoyance of the week
In which I will complain about things that probably matter only to me.
Earlier this week, we looked at the NHL's decades-long failure to boost scoring. For 21 years and counting, the league has been tweaking, tinkering and generally mucking around with everything from the rulebook to equipment to the playing surface, all in an attempt to bring offense back to life. And it never works.
Or does it? This year's fix was a change to the faceoff rules. In previous seasons, the home-team player always got the advantage of putting his stick down after the visitor; this season, for all faceoffs in the offensive zone, the attacking team's player gets that right. Give the offensive team a better chance at winning the faceoff, the thinking went, and it will lead to more goals.
So has it worked? Yes, according to this study. The change has boosted offensive-zone win rates for the attacking team by a small but statistically significant margin, and based on historical scoring rates off faceoff wins, we can estimate how many new goals have been created.
The result: three.
Three goals, as of two weeks ago. So that's probably up to four by now, maybe even five if we're lucky. At this rate, the study concludes, we're looking at 20 goals over the course of a full season, or a boost in the overall scoring rate of roughly .016 per game.
I mean ... it's just ... guys, what are we even doing here?
If we want to get scoring levels back to where they were in 1995-96 -- not the high-flying '80s, mind you, or the rocking '70s, but just to the season after the trap became widespread -- we need to add about 1,000 goals, maybe a bit more. That's a lot. And we're not going to get there 20 at a time.
If you believe that modern scoring rates are a problem -- and the NHL seems to, based on years of public statements -- then you're not going to solve it by making minor changes. And yet the NHL took the time to consider, debate, vote on and eventually implement this new faceoff rule. They promoted it. They patted themselves on the back for doing something. And all for three measly goals.
This has to stop. Changing faceoffs, or moving the blueline a few feet, or allowing hand passes in the offensive zone, or loosening the rules around kicked-in goals -- none of this is going to move the needle in any noticeable way. Either get serious and start making major changes, or throw up your hands and admit you can't fix this, at which point we all just accept that we're a few years away from crossing the 5.0 goals/game mark and we just have to live with it.
Either of those options would be better than what the NHL is doing today: watching its house slowly burn to the ground while debating where to pour this year's thimbleful of water.
Awesome and/or horrific old YouTube clip of the week
In addition to being a great source of adorable pets and functionally illiterate commenters, YouTube is a goldmine for old hockey clips. In this section we find one and break it down in way too much detail.
So what's behind the league's long-term scoring woes? That's a complicated question, but many fans blame the onset of the Dead Puck Era on two key factors: the New Jersey Devils using the neutral-zone trap to win the Stanley Cup in 1995, and Gary Bettman. So today, let's combine those two factors, and look back on one of the most bizarre interviews in hockey history.
Have a question for Sean? Want to suggest an obscure player or a classic YouTube clip? Send all your grab bag-related emails to nhlgrabbag@gmail.com.