One of Us is All of Us, or They’re All MY Guy

  The emotional argument for banning all headshots from NHL hockey

When Hockey Consultant was a fifteen-year-old avid hockey fan (emphasize on FAN) back in the late nineties, her team was the Pittsburgh Penguins.   Those Penguins were led by Hockey Consultant’s all-time favorite player, a right winger named Jaromir Jagr.     At the time, Jagr’s chief rival for the title of “best hockey player in the world” was a center from the Philadelphia Flyers named Eric Lindros.   As a fan, Hockey Consultant hated everything about the Philadelphia Flyers.  And, of course, Hockey Consultant insisted her guy, Jagr, was far better than the Flyers’ guy, Lindros.

A decade and a half later, Hockey Consultant will shake her head in shame as she regurgitates exactly what she thought about Eric Lindros at about the time Scott Stevens was making it a point to bash Lindros’s head very hard.    Lindros, you see, wasn’t as good as Jagr.   Lindros wasn’t as good as people cracked him up to be.  A specific flashback to the thoughts of a 15-year-ols fan yields something like the italicized paragraph below:

 

Eric Lindros is a whiny crybaby who needs to learn how to keep his head up.  If Lindros had the sense and wits to keep his up and not do that stupid stuff, he’d never get concussions and he’d be perfectly fine.  If Lindros were truly as good as people say he is, if he were really as good as he was heralded to be, none of this stuff would have happened to him.    Clearly, Jaromir Jagr has superior hockey sense.   Clearly, if Jagr can play and not get concussed, then Lindros isn’t as good as Jagr.   While Bobby Clarke is an imbecile for insisting Lindros should play through serious injuries, fact of the matter is, if Lindros just had a bit more of that heralded hockey sense and used his brain a little better, maybe he would not have a brain injury in the first place.  If Lindros is really that good, why can’t he just keep his head UP? 

Hockey Consultant winces and is ashamed of her age-15 thinking.    Because, as you’d probably guess, Hockey Consultant doesn’t think the same way she did at fifteen anymore.   As an adult she’s read about the post-playing lives of players like Eric Lindros and Keith Primeau, and she can now see them first as humans, not as she used to see them (when they were Flyers and that’s all they were because, yes, hockey fans are that insane).    Even this season, she’s read about the agony endured by another Flyer, Chris Pronger, and she admits all her italicized thoughts, circa age fifteen, were, are, and will always be completely wrong. 

Yet, in February 2012, Hockey Consultant observes an NHL that still adapts, far too easily, to her fifteen-year-old mindset.    In the 2011-12 season, the NHL still has a Rule 48 that puts the emphasis on a player in a vulnerable position to avoid the hit rather than making the elimination of head shots as black-and-white clear as are the league’s high-sticking penalties.   Hence, head hits that concuss athletes and have the potential to end seasons and careers aren’t always penalized due to the gray area of league rules.   And the men who run the NHL don’t seem to have an interest in changing those rules.   “It’s a hockey play.  He has to accept risk.  He has to keep his head up.”  The most recent such incident happened in a game between the Pittsburgh Penguins and Dallas Stars, but the ongoing dialogue has happened throughout the year, and all often, we still hear, “It’s just part of hockey.” 

There are legitimate business reasons to eliminate all headshots from NHL hockey (including the need to insure contracts; avoid legal trouble, both with being sued and have the government intervene and shape the game for you due to serious injuries; and the obvious one of needing to sell and market the players who can do what few others on the planet can do).  Likewise, there are legitimate medical reasons to eliminate any gray area when it comes to “legal” hits to the head in NHL hockey (concussions are a brain injury, not like playing on a broken foot) .   Yet none of these reasons seem to make a dent in in the ingrained mindset of those who are accustomed to viewing incidental head contact, and well, everything awful that’s associated with it, as unfortunate but a “part of hockey and we can’t do anything about it.”

Except they can do something to minimize it, by eliminating the gray area.   And the only thing, it seems, which gets a mindset to change, is when it’s YOUR guy who’s the one who could be the next Eric Lindros.

Let Hockey Consultant admit what she’s felt as a fan.    Twice this season, she’s watched her current favorite player drop to the ice after being struck in the head.   (Yes, Eric Nystrom may not have targeted Kris Letang’s head, but Nystrom still hit Letang in the chin, which, last time Hockey Consultant checked, was part of the head.)   She’s winced each time it happened and wondered if a 24-year-old who’s been projected to win a “Norris trophy or two” by the time his career is over is actually going to get that chance.   

And she understood something, as a fan, which she didn’t understand at fifteen.    Speaking from the mindset of a fan of the Pittsburgh Penguins:   Crosby and Letang are her guys.   They’re HERS. 

Do they lack hockey sense?   (Despite what some amusing folks posting on online forums complain about when they’re nitpicking about Letang, hardly.)   Are they soft?   (No.  Ask the Ottawa Senators of 2010, who remember Kris Letang as a player who regularly took hits to make plays.)   Are they players who lack toughness or heart or hockey sense, who somehow “deserve” the concussions they got?  When Letang’s head is slightly down because in both cases, he was actually trying to make a hockey play, that’s supposed to mean it’s OK to hit him in the head?  (Needless to say, Hockey Consultant no longer thinks what she used to think of Eric Lindros, either.)

Now, from the broader perspective.    Take a look at the list of players who have been out with concussions this season.   The Blackwks, Flyers, and Penguins—three contenders for the Stanley Cup, especially if the teams were 100% healthy—are all without their captains and faces of the franchise due to concussions.    The Capitals are without their number one center.    Three of these teams are still in playoff position.  But their fans, and potential fans, don’t get to see these teams at their best. 

And the crazy thing?   A simple change to the rules could fix part of this.   Not fix all of it.  Not eliminate all concussions.   But simply do what’s done for high-sticking, where accidental or not, the penalty is the same.   Eliminate head-shots.   One-time headhunter Matt Cooke has stopped hitting people in the head, and if Matt Cooke can stop hitting opponents in the head, other players can learn to do the same.

Because, when it comes to NHL hockey, they are all “our” guys.   Claude Giroux and Chris Pronger from the Flyers; Jonathan Toews from the Blackhawks; Nicklas Backstrom of the Capitals—these are “my” guys as much as Sidney Crosby and Kris Letang of the Pittsburgh Penguins.   They’re the men who should be the headline stories in the playoffs.     The Pittsburgh Penguins and Philadelphia Flyers could easily meet in the first round of the 2012 playoffs.   Both teams could easily be without their franchise players—and not due to “hockey plays” like shot blocks that break bones or inadvertent, accidental, awkward collisions that result in torn knee ligaments. 

But, if you’re a fan, or you’re in the game, you know the agony you feel when it’s “your” guy who goes down?  When it’s Letang who’s sprawled on the ice again, a player who’s beloved both by at-opposite-ends-of-the-spectrum Hockey-Hall-of-Famers Scott Bowman and Paul Coffey, and you’re angry and sad and worried all at once about the player and the game and the league? 

And there’s a simple way to look at reducing the agony that simply says, “Be accountable and don’t hit someone in the head.”

You don’t want it happening to your guy.   Then, remember something else, Eric Lindros is your guy.  So is Keith Primeau.  So are Sidney Crosby, Chris Pronger, Kris Letang, Claude Giroux, Nicklas Backstrom, and Jonathan Toews.

Let the playoffs be a fair fight between the franchise centers and franchise defensemen of the Flyers and the Penguins.    And you do that, simply, by saying that a hit to the head—accidental or inadvertent or not—is not a hockey play, and that it has no place in the NHL game.

Because all those guys.   They’re all your guys, and they deserve to be treated the way you want your guys to be treated.  And if there is any possible way to prevent your guy from being sprawled on the ice in agony, or out for months, or out for the year, or done with his career far too soon, if that injury to your guy could have been prevented--be honest.

You want to do what it takes to protect your guy.   If the injury could have been prevented by a simple change to the rules, you want the rule change.  Because you want your guy on the ice, doing his thing and helping your team.  So, the emotional argument to ban all headshots--accidental or otherwise--is simple.

You don't want it for your guy, and, though your fifteen-year-old self may not realize it, truthfully, they're all your guys.

The Brief Summary Post—Or, How You Can Know You’ve Arrived as an NHL Star

• Your name is on the All-Star ballot.
• No one complains when you're named to the All-Star team.
• The national broadcasters–and other people in the game–regularly discuss you as a candidate for one of the major awards the NHL hands out in June.
•  Opposing General Managers mention your name when talking about how one of his elite players stacked up against you. 
• Opposing teams make it a point to figure out how to get you off your game and take away your time and space. 
• Your teammates expect you to play key minutes on the special teams units.
• Nobody really talks about any of the many things you do right or well.   A lot of people talk about every little thing you do wrong or could do better.
• When your teammates get hurt, you’re the player who’s expected to take on a bigger role and play more minutes at the same high level. 
• If you’re still young, everyone ticks off a list of all the things you’re not good enough at yet and even when they know you’re working on those things every day practice they still scream because they just know you should already be good enough to do those things.
• If you’ve previously, oh, dominated the NHL playoffs and led the league in scoring, fans wonder if you’re done and if you’ll ever get back to that level and they’re not satisfied until you’re back to or exceeding that level because you showed you could do it before and things like recovering from surgery or playing through the flu or playing with nagging injury soul have no impact because you are a star player and should be able to be a star no matter what. 
• Twitter explodes every time you make a mistake with proclamations about how overrated and overpaid you are and if you will ever realize your considerable potential and all the reasons you won’t realize your considerable potential.   Usually this involves talking about your lack of “hockey IQ” or “scoring sense” or some other quality you clearly just don’t have, in spite of the above noted achievements by people actually paid to work in NHL hockey.
• Your coach expects you to be one of his best players, game in and game out, and when you're not, he's going to let you know in no uncertain terms that you have to be better--even as he still throws you on the ice to protect a 1-goal lead or mount a comeback from a 1-goal deficit in the waning moments of the third period of a 3-2 game.
• You’re expected to be a plus player every night, not allow any shorthanded goals to be scored, always make tape-to-tape passes, always get each of your shots on the net, and if you’re a goalie, you better never misplay a puck behind your net or go for the pokecheck at the wrong time. 
• When you go a game without a point or allow more than 2 goals in a game, it's considered a slump.  If you dare to go 2 games sans a point or allow more than 2 goals in 2 consecutive games, people wonder if you're secretly injured/what in the world is wrong.  If such a circumstance would happen for 3 games in a row, it's believed you're on the verge of "major meltdown." 
• You’re considered a core member of a perennial Stanley Cup contender.

The Brief Letter to the (Right Now  Healthy Enough to Play) Star Penguins:

Dear Marc-Andre Fleury, Evgeni Malkin, Kris Letang, Jordan Staal and probably soon enough James Neal:

I’m sure you’ve noticed the price you’ve paid for your play.    You’re STARS in the NHL now!  And you’re expected to be PERFECT!

I am certain you’re happy to be NHL stars, and I’m also sure you actually aspire to perfection (it’s a key reason why you got where you are, no doubt).

So just wanted to send a note of encouragement to remind you that the price you have to pay (perfection is now the standard expectation) is worth it.

But you already know that.    How’s the view up there?

Oh, right.   You’re not worried about the view up there.   You’re back at practice trying to help your team get the only view that matters—the Stanley Cup held aloft their heads— in June.

Anyhow, congratulations on your arrival as NHL stars.   

P.S.  And remember the secret code for NHL stars:  to play as perfectly as you possibly can on the way to the postseason and you play that way even more in the playoffs.

P.P.S.  There’s actually another secret code.   You shouldn’t stop at stardom.  You should be superstars, and do the impossible of improving upon perfection.  

P.P.P.S.    Ah, shucks—you’re already trying to do that, even though you’re not yet perfect because you’re star athletes who are human, too, so I should probably let you do what you’re already doing and enjoy my view that lets me see you guys be stars in the NHL.

The brief address to the screaming masses (sometimes known as pundits, sometimes known as fans, sometimes known, sadly (albeit not in high-performing organizations) as the ones in the game who don’t get it):

They’re star players.   And they’re human beings.    Please let them get better at the things they still have to get better at and be happy that they’re working to get better at those things while still doing lots of other things that make them the core of a perennially contending team.

Signed: 

 A terribly annoying Hockey Consultant who is very easily annoyed when star players are expected to be perfect deities, rather than elite, high-performing athletes who perennially help their teams contend for championships

The Smaller but Still Squiggly Line of Stardom (Stars Remain Human)

If most folks associated with hockey are in a realistic frame of mind (note, of course that there are no guarantees about this one), they expect the performance of young and developing players to mirror that of a quite squiggly line.   Within the same game, an inexperienced young talent can make a horrific, rookie mistake that shows how much he still has to learn while also showcasing precocious skill that shows just how much natural talent he has.     This pattern (precocious brilliance coupled with many “so much still to learn” moments) leads most great organization to set the goal for young players to be an “upward” curve, with the understanding that there are going to be many jagged edges along that road.   Such a chart might look like this:

DEVELOPMENTAL PLAYER CHART NHL GAMES 1-240

(For those who aren’t fans of charts, check out two video clips of a 21-year-old Kris Letang in his first two NHL seasons and note the precocious brilliance and the “WHAT WERE YOU doing, child?” moment at the 35 second mark.) 

Yet at some point in the careers of star players, (often around the fourth or fifth season), a few special players make the leap from “promising” young and developing talents to bona-fide NHL stars.    Their newfound status as star players brings with it a new expectation, one that was best described recently by the NHL’s ninth all-time leading scorer, Jaromir Jagr.

After Jagr, a once-promising teenage prospect, became the best player in the world, he described the years when he was amassing scoring titles as pressure-filled years.  He encapsulated the feelings of a star player well and thusly, “….When I was in position as ‘the guy’ ... if you feel good, everything is fine because you know you can make the difference. But there are times you don’t feel good and you still have to do it. That’s pressure. That’s when you struggle because you know you’re the guy and you know you don’t feel good but you still have to do it.” 

Like it was for Jagr, the newfound expectation for star players is that their games, if charted, should no longer reflect any squiggles.   That they have to be good all the time. 

Where once the squiggles were expected and normal, as in the first chart above, now the expectation becomes this straight line where the vertical axis is Points Per Game and the horizontal axis is a group of games in a season.   Note the expectation that the star player, in each series of games, will average around 1.25 points per game in all games:

STAR PLAYER EXPECTED PPG STRAIGHT LINE CHART

But it’s impossible to score 1.25 points per game.   It is impossible to average +1.3 on the night.   In an actual game, a player could score 1 or 2  or 3 points and be a +2 or a +1 or a -1, but he’ll never a -.5 anything.  Nor will he ever score half a point.

Star players have a higher average line than anyone else, and past precedent suggests that it’s right to hold the expectations for their line of play quite high.

But this is a better picture for the star player:

STAR PLAYER ACTUAL PPG AVERAGE SQUIGGLY CHART

And notice this truth about those PPG averages:

Note if this player ends up playing 82 games, he will score 102 points.  But he has a rough time period in games 51-60 and a really great month of November.   What you don’t see charted, but what could be seen in a scatterplot of game after game and season after season of actual Hall of Fame players, is that even future Hall-of-Famers have nights where they get held scoreless.    That even defensemen widely accepted as the best in the game have a few games a season where they’re on the ice when the opposing team scores a couple of goals.  

The price of stardom?    Whenever your straight line squiggles—not when it squiggles higher than your average of a point per game because, well, you’re good enough to have nights where you produce more than a mere point a game—but whenever that line dips, if there’s a play misread or just a night where a star player is fighting the puck and nothing is going his way—

A chorus of criticism is coming for that star player.   And Jagr’s quote lingers as true for any star player striving to maintain or increase his level of play.   Because of what he’s already shown he can do, there is screaming any time the star’s performance line is not straight as an arrow.

Hockey Consultant would like to offer a truth.  Even that “straight” line of performance for stars has some squiggles in it.   If the squiggles dip too low or become a pattern that results in a much lower line, that’s when a real problem has occurred.

But an otherwise stalwart player having a couple of bad games while fighting a cold or playing with a minor injury (not that anyone outside the team knows) or even a star player having a rough dozen games to start a season—

It’s not wise to press panic buttons or complete reset buttons.

Even for star players—albeit much to their chagrin given their usual tendencies toward harsh self-criticism and internally high expectations for their own play—that line, oh so high, is never going to be a pure straight line.   If it’s not a straight line for players who end up in the Hall of Fame (who usually still manage to put up at least a point in games when they’re otherwise terrible), it’s not going to be straight for mere star players, either.

Now look at the straight line.   If the average is here, that’s why the impatient organization or the average fan will start screaming when the squiggly dip to anything below that 1.25 PPG average occurs.

But look at the squiggly lines again and note what rationality has to say about how star players get to be as good as they are.   (It’s consistently high performance, but there are squiggly outliers here and there because they’re human.) 

A player at this level should expect to be challenged and critiqued every time his performance dips below that line.    That’s the price of being a star.

Guess what?

All fans and all organizations should wish to have such occasional “below-the-star-level” line performances to critique.  Championships are not won without players whose performance when chartered shows a consistently higher, less squiggly line than the performance lines of most other players. 

That high but not quite straight performance line of star players has smaller, fewer squiggles than the performance lines of most other players.    And the average line height is consistently higher than the line of most other players.

But there are still squiggles.   And as much as Jaromir Jagr hated that fact back in the days when he was averaging more than a point per game but not quite two points per game, and as much as every star player hates it when he believes he should be playing at his highest level every night, reality says players at this level—exasperating squiggles and all when you’ve seen them score at the 2 PPG clip for 10 games—are absolutely necessary pieces to the puzzle if your team is serious about winning a championship.

Some Teams Have Real Problems

     (Seriously: The largest identified issues are superstars occasionally not playing like perfect superstars and a theoretical concern about the sixth, seventh, and eighth defensive slots?)

Hockey Consultant got concerned when she saw the box score of the Minnesota Wild game the other night. Minor league call-up Brian Strait got injured. Brooks Orpik was still out with an injury, and Kris Letang was serving the first game of a two-game suspension. Zbynek Michalek and Paul Martin both had to play—literally—half the game. And Hockey Consultant got concerned that the Penguins were going to have a really tired out top-4 defense by the time the playoffs rolled around. And she was really worried about the coaching staff not having a 6^th defenseman they could trust to play solid minutes.

So Hockey Consultant proceeded to compose (an unpublished) blog post comparing Pittsburgh's current top 4 defense to the defense that was 8-deep that won the Cup. Long ago, in a former life on a different blog, Hockey Consultant wrote about the "Trade-Offs of a Salary Cap Era". And she's beginning to think that Matt Niskanen is looking, now, the way Kris Letang looked back in 2008-09 (talented and ready to play a role on a Cup contender, but not yet as an over 20-minute-a night-player). So she's really wondering about what happens if one of the top four defensemen goes down and what if two of the top four go down in the playoffs. Back in 2009, the Penguins were eight deep and a young Alex Goligoski and an old Philippe Boucher could step in and play limited minutes as needed, and the 2011-12 Penguins don't yet run eight deep on defense like that.

Seriously. This is Hockey Consultant's concern about her favorite team.

Hockey Consultant can only imagine how many other fanbases would love to have these problems:

• We are waiting on two former NHL scoring champions to return to our division-leading team.
  
• We are waiting for a 24-year-old defenseman who's scoring at nearly a point per game and generally playing very well to eliminate the occasional but really irritating brain-cramp mistakes from his game so he's brilliant ALL the time, not just MOST of the time.
  
• We are waiting for two "slow starting" veteran defensemen to get over their seemingly slow starts (which is already happening, but we get impatient very easily).
  
• And, of course, some of us (or just Hockey Consultant) are very, very concerned about the sixth defenseman and very concerned about being eight deep on defense in the playoffs and if number 7 and number 8 could actually play solid minutes if something happened (like it did in 2009 when Alex Ovechkin ran into Sergei Gonchar's knee).
  

So, Hockey Consultant knows that the Penguins could go and "upgrade" their number 6 defensive spot at the deadline, especially with the salary cap space they should have given the (unfortunate) injury of Crosby now. She knows the salary cap era means that there may be trade-offs and the Penguins may have to take the chance that none of their top-4 defensive guys goes down with an injury.

But as she looks at her "concerns" a few weeks into the season, she has to laugh. While she still thinks the pyramid is the best overall framework to figure out a franchise, when it comes to the regular season (which is going to stretch on for several more months), if the biggest thing you have to worry about is the sixth defenseman, well, umm….

There's a framework for that. For a fan, it's called gratitude and thanksgiving and enjoy it. Even beyond the obvious of "Former NHL scoring champions Evgeni Malkin and Sidney Crosby being healthy", there are teams that would love to have "24-year-old Kris Letang being consistently brilliant all the time" and "Former Conn Smythe winner Evgeni Malkin not trying to do too much when healthy" and "We really need to solidify our 6 through 8^th defensive depth for the postseason" on their list of "problems".

So, remember that phrase your parents and teachers loved to throw to you about "Real problems"? The 2011-12 Penguins may yet (and, in fact, most teams will at some point) experience "real" problems that they will need to overcome to win the franchise's 4^th Stanley Cup.

For now, though, in October 2011, let Hockey Consultant be clear in speaking to fans of her favorite team when she echoes the words of teachers and parents by posing the rhetorical question: "You realize some teams have real problems?"

Enjoy It, Edmonton (Letting Childhood + Youth Be Exactly That)

The Pittsburgh Penguins are Hockey Consultant's favorite—and hometown—franchise. Aside from the seasons that ended with Cup victories, a few other seasons stand out to Hockey Consultant as "very special" seasons. And when Hockey Consultant gets a glimpse of the Edmonton Oilers of 2011-12, particularly their young forwards, she's reminded of one of her favorite seasons in Pittsburgh hockey history, 2006-07.

Back in 2006-07, the Penguins were still a line-up of children. Literally. Evgeni Malkin was a 20-year-old rookie center; Jordan Staal was an 18-year-old rookie center. Sidney Crosby was a 19-year-old sophomore player. Marc-Andre Fleury was in his first year of "consistent" starting for the NHL team. Kris Letang was a 19-year-old defenseman who briefly made the team out of training camp. Tyler Kennedy was a 20-year-old prospect playing his first full season of professional hockey in Wilkes-Barre. On that Penguins team, former first-round picks Brooks Orpik and Ryan Whitney were still early in their then-nascent NHL careers and were rightfully viewed as talented and inexperienced kids.

Flash forward one spring, and all those kids had the experience of winning three playoff series and playing in the Stanley Cup Finals.

Flash forward two springs. Going only by birthdate standards, the triumvirate of centers remained kids. Going only by birthdays, important but complementary 22-year-old players on that Cup run, Kennedy and Letang, were still just kids. The goalie wasn't yet 25.    

But as hockey people—and fans—understand well, something happens as soon as you win the Cup. You're never a kid again. You've proven you can win it once. So the old long-awaited goal and dream is now the every-day-of-every-year expectation.

You won it once?

When are you winning it again?

It can be easy for Hockey Consultant to forget how young the players on her favorite team remain. Jordan Staal—the third-line center of the Penguins when Crosby and Malkin are healthy—has already scored 100 goals in the NHL. Kris Letang and Tyler Kennedy have already played hundreds of NHL games. Evgeni Malkin is a former playoff MVP; Crosby is a former league MVP. All of these achievements—including scoring titles Crosby and Malkin both won—happened before any of these players turned 25.

But there's no way anyone in hockey, or any fan, will ever view any of those Pittsburgh young players as a kid.

Watching Edmonton play, though, Hockey Consultant sees a team rife with talented kids. While she doesn't see a Sidney Crosby, she can't avoid noticing how many talented kids populate the roster. Talented kids you can—as Hockey Consultant did with her Penguins back in 2006-07—look at and imagine what one day, will be.

So, even though the Oilers are not likely to make the playoffs this postseason, Hockey Consultant would advise fans across the league to pause and enjoy watching the Edmonton Oilers play hockey. Because it is fun to watch kids, as kids, play the sport. It is fun to imagine what some day, will be, without stressing out because right now, they're not producing as much as they can and will later and that's actually OK because that's kids being kids and they're developing and that's what they're supposed to do.

One of Hockey Consultant's favorite games can be seen on the web. The game is from October 2006. The Penguins have three teenagers score in this one game. Crosby would win the league scoring title that year. Staal would be a nominee for Rookie-of-the-Year. Letang would be returned to his junior team and captain Canada's entry at that year's World Junior Championships to a gold medal.

Two years later, all those players would forever be known as Stanley Cup champions.

With their names etched on the Cup, they'd never again considered kids whose development was expected to have a few curves here and there where productivity in games might be less than ideal as they figured out a few things. Having shown they could meet the standard of the apex of the sport, that standard and that level of play, across-the-board, became the everyday expectation.

Goodbye to commentators talking about the "kids" and "youth" and "potential" of the Pittsburgh Penguins. Hello, commentators talking about the "battle-tested" and "playoff experienced" of the young twentysomethings on the Pittsburgh roster. Hello to the reality of what the analysts said about how they'd need to be even better than they were before because every team now specifically game-plans to stop Pittsburgh's "battle-tested and experienced" youthful talent.

For Hockey Consultant, there's just something about that October game against the Rangers and the talent those teenagers showed when they scored the goals they scored. There's something about that special 2006-07 season that announced the Penguins were back as a force to be reckoned with. Something that said these kids were going to be scary. Along with just getting to go along for the fun ride of watching those kids learn how to win.

Edmonton is likely more than two years away from a Cup championship (the Pittsburgh group was accelerated by outside trades) and perhaps even from a season like the 2006-07 season was for the Penguins, but the journey of watching talented kids learn to be stars should be similar. And fun.

And, perhaps for Hockey Consultant, there's a reminder that though the experienced and accomplished and still young players that headline her favorite team's roster are never going to be kids again by NHL standards, there's still an echo and linger of youth in their games, too. Crosby has regularly picked one thing to improve at every offseason. Other players have followed the example of their captain and are continuing to find areas where they can improve, too. It's just that the improvement is expected and demanded, NOW, and a lot sooner than it ever used to be in terms of "perform in games, perfectly, now!" Gone, to some degree, is the sheer fun of enjoying as you watch kids figure out how to get as good as they are going to be.

But as a legitimate Cup contender with a finite amount of time to contend, well, the Penguins and everyone else simply understand that improvement has to happen. Because it's critical that Jordan Staal steps up offensively if Crosby and Malkin can't play. Tyler Kennedy has to score more goals, and really, really, really, Kris Letang seriously has to learn how to quarterback an elite power play. And ideally, of course, for Pittsburgh, all those things would have happened in games well before yesterday's games.

But when she watches the Oilers play, Hockey Consultant remembers there's magic in what you can enjoy when you just go along for the ride. And, as a fan before she was anything else, Hockey Consultant would tell any team with kids of any age or experience level : Go for the ride, and no matter how bumpy it is, enjoy it. Because youth and childhood last only for a season (in Pittsburgh's case) or a few seasons. So let the kids be kids—and enjoying watching the kids when the commercials call them, as they did for Pittsburgh back in 2007, "Boys against men".

Because, pretty soon, even if their birthdates say they're still kids, the playoff ads and announcers are going to be talking about how they once scored game-winning playoff OT goals or shorthanded goals in the Stanley Cup Finals or hat tricks in the conference finals and demanding and expecting that you reach that level again, and then, someday farther down the line, they're going to ask if your hands and feet will still allow you to do those things—

But for now, the Oilers are talented kids, and that's magic to watch.

So watch the magic. Enjoy the show. Let the kids be the kids they are for the season(s) when it lasts. And if you need a reminder, watch this magic show from 2006.

And remember how fun the journey was to see those same kids eventually do this.

Kris Letang’s Correct Comparable (Aspirationally)=Chris Pronger

When the NHL suspended Kris Letang for 2 games for a hit from behind on Winnipeg Jet Alex Burmistrov, Hockey Consultant couldn't get a phrase out of her mind. Actually, when it comes to Letang—a player Hockey Consultant followed closely for years before he became an NHL mainstay—the suspension brought to mind a long-held belief about the defenseman who Hockey Consultant has long believed is the closest comparable—aspirationally— for Letang.

Chris Pronger.

Pronger's suspension history is here.

But you'll also want to take a look at Pronger's career playoff statistics. If the average TOI numbers don't say this clearly enough, and if the amount of time spent on the power play, killing penalties, and generally being on the ice more than any other player don't say this either, let Hockey Consultant spell it out, quickly: The eighth-seeded 2005-06 Edmonton Oilers don't advance to the Cup Finals without Chris Pronger on the roster. The 2009-10 Philadelphia Flyers don't get to the Finals sans Pronger, either, and that annoying one game suspension in the 2007 playoffs aside, the Ducks don't win the Cup in 2007 without Pronger.

An in-his-prime Chris Pronger is a dominant franchise defenseman, one who can dictate the pace of a hockey game with controlled, aggressive, physical play (including, of course, shooting, skating, stickhandling, and yes, hitting) in all three zones of the ice.

Throughout his career, Kris Letang has—quite hyperbolically, in Hockey Consultant's view, and she admits to believing the kid was going to be a star before he'd even cemented a permanent place on the NHL roster (and would defend herself by noting NHL luminaries such as Paul Coffey and Scott Bowman did the same at a later point)—been compared to players like Paul Coffey and Nicklas Lidstrom. Given some of Letang's easy-on-the-eyes skills in terms of skating and silky soft shootout hands, it's easy to see how those comparisons might happen, but the comparisons to those players are fundamentally wrong.

Paul Coffey played in the late eighties. He always had the puck on his stick, and no one could catch him. Teams didn't use video and shot blocking as systems the way they do now. While Coffey once broke his jaw blocking a shot with his face in the playoffs, Coffey did not play an era where he was required to do what the modern, tight-checking, systematized NHL requires defensemen to do. (Simply put, there is too much strength and too many systems for the wide-open style played in the eighties and early nineties when Coffey was dominating.) Nor is Nick Lidstrom a good comparison for Letang. Lidstrom, fundamentally, is ridiculously poised and positionally sound. And while Letang does have offensive skills and has learned a lot about defensive positioning, he's not an offense-only guy in today's NHL, or purely a "mobile and minute-munching" defenseman.

Like Chris Pronger, Kris Letang is a physical hockey player who plays aggressively. Like Pronger in his prime, when Letang is "on", he's playing with incredibly controlled aggression, perhaps best called "aggressive poise". When Letang is "off"—and he's off too much for the liking of Pittsburgh fans who have seen him dominate games and expect and believe he can and should do that night after night—he is either far too tentative (seen in early years), or, more recently, his aggression is less controlled, and that unharnessed aggression can result in awful-looking mistakes (things like a giveaway, or a physical defensive error, or well, not letting up on a check when—as another Brendan Shanahan video shows—he clearly knows how to do the right thing.)

Fundamentally, Chris Pronger is the correct aspirational comparable for Kris Letang.

A smaller version of Pronger, yes. A faster version of Pronger, hopefully.

But a physical defenseman who can make the great offensive plays and also make great positional defensive choices, when on, but, whose entire game, when on, is undergirded with an aggressive edge that enables him to dictate the flow of the game on the ice.

Hockey Consultant believes that Letang's learned a lot, and she hopes he'll "take his medicine" from the VP of Player Safety and not stop hitting but take the suspension as a lesson in controlling his emotions and harnessing his aggression appropriately.

But here's the thing about aggressive hockey players, or, more specifically, aggressive hockey players with the physical skills to be franchise defensemen.

You need to control the game 200 feet to 200 feet while playing half the game, and more than half the game if you are in a playoff overtime game? You need to play how Letang played against the Edmonton Oilers the opening road trip of the 2011-12 season, making a marvelous defensive play and quickly converting it to offense, and you need to do that shift after shift after shit? You need to set a tone for a period or a game for your team with a check or a hit? You need to control the entire flow of a game, end-to-end, like a general commands his troops?

If you're a physical player—not a smooth-skating guy who doesn't spend any time in his zone and you play your best defense when you get to pick in the moment if you'll use only your stick, or just sound position, or a legal hit, or some combination thereof, to make the right situational play—you have to play with aggression.

And your aggression—because of how your skill set wires you to play hockey—brings with it way more good than bad.

So Letang's best upside—and please note, we're talking upside here, Hockey Consultant IS ABSOLUTELY NOT saying Letang is anywhere near the level Pronger has reached in his career—is, stylistically, to be a smaller, hopefully faster version of Chris Pronger in his prime.

And do you know the one word that best described Chris Pronger?

"Nasty."

Nasty good. Nasty to play against. And, occasionally, even when he was doing far more good than harm in a playoff run to a championship, nasty in terms of being physically tough on the opposition to the point of being disciplined by an NHL that often failed to suspend star players.

Call Hockey Consultant crazy, but a part of her is relieved to see Kris Letang get suspended. Because it confirms something she's always suspected. That he's not going to be some very lite version of a smooth skating Paul Coffey or a positionally perfect Nicklas Lidstrom. But that he could be different than those players. He could use his own skill set, not exactly the same as theirs, and harness his aggression to play well against the strong, fast, and young players populating the NHL today.

Letang wouldn't be Chris Pronger lite, either. But Letang could be—and Hockey Consultant would argue—he is also wired to be— like Chris Pronger.

Go ahead and ask any NHL GM or Coach who wanted to win a championship: If having Pronger commandeer the ice during playoff game meant they occasionally had to live through a few too many minor penalties, coach him to learn to control his aggression, and well, remind him to play with a CONTROLLED, aggressive edge—they would moan and mutter and complain as they'd accompany him to a discipline hearing or two and remind him to control his snarl in highly critical moments, but they'd do it, honestly, if secretly, with a smirk that they were glad Pronger was on their side and not another team's.

Letang, a one-time All-Star who played important but protected minutes on a Cup champion team at age 22, still has a long way to go to have a career that is anything close to Pronger's. But, in Hockey Consultant's view, his play shows a couple of things: Like Pronger, the league tells him to stop it. Because, well, All-Stars and franchise defenseman don't need to make borderline/illegal hits to play hockey. And it's true—they don't.

But that fine line?

That nasty edge?

Defenseman in the mold of Pronger and Letang play the game best with a controlled snarl. So if a suspension teaches Letang (who has seemed, in other areas, to be receptive to instruction, albeit it may not happen as quickly as most fans would prefer) that his snarl is fine and quite necessary, but to control his snarl appropriately, well….

Look out, NHL, and not for more "fine lines" (though Hockey Consultant knows too well they happen with aggressive players and it's constantly checking in to keep human beings, all of whom have emotions, appropriately in line). Look out for the kind of nasty, franchise defenseman, 28 playoff games out of 28 playoff games, you dread playing against while secretly wishing that aforementioned nasty player were on your side.

And look out for someone other than Hockey Consultant to realize that, perhaps, it's not hyperbole to describe the style of game Kris Letang plays at his best as eerily similar—stylistically, anyway—to the way hockey has been played, excellently, for years, by that so nasty good defenseman, Chris Pronger.


 

 

Consulting Advice for the Reigning Jack Adams Winner: Get Elite Consistency from Elite Talent

As HBO’s 24/7 told us, Dan Bylsma’s reign as Head Coach of the Pittsburgh Penguins has pretty much been a “Steel City” dream.    Bylsma’s success story is clear:  He took over as Head Coach, and a few months later, he could add to his resume “Head Coach of a Stanley Cup champion”.   It was under Bylsma’s direction that the Penguins had the best penalty kill in the NHL in 2010-11 and still finished with 106 points in spite of the absence of former NHL scoring champions Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin for half a season.    Bylsma got All-Star level results from four talented players and still had a structure in place for the rest of the team—half of which, at one point, was composed of AHL players—to win tight games against other NHL teams.

In his coaching tenure, seemingly the only thing Bylsma has failed to do, quite honestly, is to have a power play that consistently produces to the level of the talent on the ice.    When the team was still healthy last year, there was actually a darkly comical moment when Bylsma was wearing a microphone during the team’s “Inside Penguins Hockey” weekly show.   Bylsma’s power play, featuring three All-Star players, was practicing a 5-on-3, and Bylsma actually stopped and asked Sidney Crosby, Evgeni Malkin, and Kris Letang:  “Which one of you is putting the puck in the net?”   The players, not wearing microphones, had some sort of discussion among themselves, but Hockey Consultant was darkly amused that the Head Coach actually had to stop and ask which of his All-Star players would deign to achieve the objective of the practice exercise and shoot the puck to score a goal on the power play. 

Yet, for Hockey Consultant, that scene stirs the one piece of feedback she’d have for Dan Bylsma that’s not about the power play.   It’s about managing superstar players who have more skills than anybody else and, at times, go off the deep end and try to do too much themselves.  Before Malkin’s 2010-11 season ended with a knee surgery, he regularly tried to do “too much” and didn’t have success at the MVP level he’d proven capable of in prior seasons.  The tale of Kris Letang’s two seasons—looking like the best defenseman in hockey before the All-Star break and not close to that same level after the All-Star break—is, incorrectly, blamed on Sidney Crosby’s absence.  Hockey Consultant observed that the issue was not Crosby’s absence, in and of itself, but that Letang changed his game when Crosby and Malkin went down and started trying to run the entire show himself (failing miserably, because an elite defenseman can’t defend well if his main focus is on attempting to supply the missing offense of two centers who are former NHL scoring champions).

Hockey Consultant is aware that the issues of Malkin and Letang trying to do too much could be due to their ages:  They are experienced, but still young (and they weren’t born with the same preternatural maturity of a Sidney Crosby).  You could say it’s on the players to learn the game and make the simple play and play within themselves.    You could say that—and Hockey Consultant would agree, wholeheartedly—it is something the players have to learn, and that it’s going to be learned, at times, like it or not, through painful experience of what doesn’t work when they run around trying to control a game in and of themselves.

But Hockey Consultant has an additional take, and her additional take is this.   Pittsburgh’s Head Coach, who has proven capable of letting superstars do their thing, putting role players in positions to succeed, and having AHL players come into his lineup and play within his system without missing a beat, still has plenty of room for growth when it comes to getting elite consistency from elite talents.   He knows how to provide the atmosphere for the elite talent to grow, but he still has to work to do in learning how to manage the players to get them to, well—

Stop doing too much.

Make the simple play.

Your talents are awesome.  Take that risk.  Don’t take that one.

And when they start doing that—to stop it and correct it, immediately.  The way Bylsma stops and corrects and seemingly fixes everything else.    He’s got to learn how to do it with players who have elite talent but who, too often, because they try to do too much, fail to have elite consistency.

Perhaps it’s trust.   Letang doesn’t try to do too much when Orpik is his defense partner.    When Malkin trusts his linemates—even Max Talbot in the 2009 playoffs—he doesn’t try too hard to do everything.  But when Malkin and Letang don’t have that trust, they run around, trying to do everything, and in so doing, failing to consistently perform as elite talents. 

It’s on the players, of course.   Ultimately, it’s on the players to perform.   

But the Coach is paid for a reason.   Teams have coaches for a reason.  Hockey Consultant dares to suggest that if Head Coach Dan Bylsma can figure out the right conditions—and maintain them—and manage them—that he’ll soon have more people jealous of the team he gets to coach than he already does.  Because he’ll have two more consistently elite talents.  

And when those talents translate to the power play, well—there really will be nothing for Dan Bylsma to fix—except, of course, that is, climbing the mountain to achieve higher, year after year after year.

But for now:  Figure out when and why 71 and 58 start running around.   Stop and prevent those conditions if you can.  If you can’t stop all of those conditions (injuries will happen), do as much as you possibly can to manage those conditions.    But as soon as those elite talents start trying to do everything themselves, know this:  It’s their job to play within themselves, but it’s your job to make sure they know when they're not doing that and to help to provide the conditions where they know they must play within themselves. 

Coaching is always, on some level, a Catch-22.   But fix that—and really, the power play, too, but that’s a whole other topic for a different day and it was 2-for-its-first-2 so Hockey Consultant will lay off for a week—and Dan Bylsma, truly, is the coach that can get results from any level of player, no matter what.

On Inconsistent Brilliance—or Why It’s Still Better to Have Superstar Talent than No Talent at All

Hockey Consultant didn’t actually get to see the opening games of the NHL season.  (Sadly, Hockey Consultant recently moved and is annoyed with her limited options for Internet and cable service and still does not have the ability to view games online or on TV, though hopefully that situation will be rectified soon.)  In lieu of actually watching the games, Hockey Consultant utilized her smart phone to listen to an opening game and follow evening long chatter on various online forums and, of course, Twitter.

Hockey Consultant found herself very annoyed as she wondered about how two former All-Stars had actually played.   Some people complained that former Conn Smythe winner Evgeni Malkin and finished-sixth-in-Norris-Trophy-votes-in-his-age -23-&-4^th-NHL-season Kris Letang played horribly.   Both, it was clear, had shifts that resulted in taking penalties that should not have been taken.      Yet, there was another side to how these two players had played, as seen in other chatter:  Fans of the opposing team marveled at the talent of both players.  In between moments of “What-the-heck-was-that?!”, said negatively of chances that weren’t finished and giveaways, there were other moments of “What-the-heck-was-that?!” said in regard to brilliant plays that less talented players just can’t make.

Hockey Consultant did see one thing, though, which is why she prefers to view herself as a consultant (one who, on rare occasions, notices things that could be useful).    When the game was on the line—admittedly in the regular season way of a shootout—the Penguins had two All-Star talents capable of closing out a win.

That’s the thing about players with superstar talent, the kind that the two players apparently having very “mixed” games had.   Even when they have “off” nights and do terrible things that they don’t do on nights when everything is “on”, any competent GM or coach (note:  not a journalist, not a blogger, and not a fan) still wants those players on his team.   Because those players—even on an off-night—gave the Penguins something they would not have had if they didn’t have players with those talent.

Those kinds of players—even on their “off” nights where mistakes happen—still do more to help a team win than lose.   And when evaluating their games, as 24-7 showed us that GM Ray Shero and Head Coach Dan Bylsma regularly do, you might give them a middling grade of 3.  But you might bump those grades to 3.5 given how they came through in the shootout.   And you might also note that even on nights where their games were around a 3 level—they ultimately had key contributions in a victory on the road against one of last year’s elite teams. 

And you might be best off remembering that, for the most part (there will be occasional horrific games for even the best of players), what Hockey Consultant would encourage any frustrated GM or coaching staff to remember if they ever sought her advice for dealing with the reality that even superstars don’t always play at “level 5” (A+) level every night.   That superstar talent is what every team in the league covets because, well, that kind of talent can still end a game with one save, or one shot, no matter what happened the rest of the game.

So, consider this Hockey Consultant’s friendly reminder:  If your team has superstar talent, it means you’ve got a better shot at winning the game with one or two plays.   You’re never out of it.   You can always come back.

And those players you’re mad at for being inconsistent?

They’re superstar talents because they can play better—and there’s every chance they will.

So look forward to them playing better.  And, by the way, enjoy the win you got when your two superstar talents had “less than perfect” and even “inconsistent” games and still delivered a win for your team.