Jaromir Jagr

Jaromir Jagr is, was, and remains Hockey Consultant’s all-time favorite hockey player.   Jaromir Jagr was the first hockey player she “called” correctly.  (Note: It wasn’t a difficult “call”.  By “call”, she believed he would one day be the best player in the world.   As an eight-year-old, she watched a rookie dominate.  As  a thirteen-year-old, she smiled that she had been right when she called Jagr being the best player in the world “right”.)   No matter what Jagr does—even if it’s kicking her beloved Penguins out of the playoffs in a coming spring—she’ll always love him.   (Hockey love, when it comes to Hockey Consultant and her all-time favorite player, is plainly irrational.)

Hockey Consultant believes she understands Jagr better than most.   Jagr has always been a highly emotional player.   Though Hockey Consultant was disappointed when Jagr chose not to come to Pittsburgh and rolled her eyes about the “left-handedness” of Crosby and Malkin, she ultimately felt she understand Jagr’s reasons—and emotions—for not returning to Pittsburgh.  (And they weren’t actually about “left-handedness”, either.)

  

Fundamentally, the Penguins belong to Crosby and Malkin.  If something had gone wrong—and Jagr’s been through this before, in Pittsburgh—it would have been on Jagr.  It would not have been on Crosby or Malkin.   Jagr didn’t want to deal with that, especially having already lived through it once (no matter how much of  it he brought upon himself back in 2001).

The heart of the matter, though—beyond the basic fundamentals—was simply this:  Jaromir Jagr did not want to come back to the NHL to be a complementary player on a contending team.   (Honestly, this is a fit Hockey Consultant thought would be perfect for a 39-year-old player.  Bookend your career with Stanley Cups as a complementary player.)   Jaromir Jagr wanted to come back to the NHL to be Jaromir Jagr.   To remind the league, one last time, that he’s one of the best players ever to play the game.  To be the face and heartbeat of a franchise.  To make an impact.

Hockey Consultant is aware of Jagr’s age.  She’s also aware of Jagr’s insane work-out regimen.   (To be honest, Hockey Consultant was saddened Jagr did not want to be part of the Penguins.  The workout regimes of players like Crosby, Letang, and Malkin, along with their desire to be the best in the world, remind her that those kids are exactly the same as the hardworking, want-to-be-the-best-in-the-world kid a teenage Jagr once was.)    She’s aware that if anyone can defy age and time and physics, it’s Jaromir Jagr (who’s been blessed to have a healthy career, save for a few annoying groin injuries).  

And, to be honest, in the only flashback to her junior high years Hockey Consultant would ever want to have, she’s actually looking forward to watching Chris Pronger and Jaromir Jagr play for the same team—old men though they may be in NHL years—and see if they can still dominate.    As a fan, she’s looking forward to watching the players who once were promising kids, became the best players in the world at their respective positions, and who will retire as Hall-of-Famers.   She wants to see them play, and play well, for as long as possible.

Hockey Consultant gets what Jagr wanted.    To say he’s, well, Jaromir Jagr.   To dominate.      She understands the choice.   She’s not sure how the choice will turn out—she still thinks Jagr would have been more likely to grab a Stanley Cup as a complementary player, not as one of “the” guys.  

Hockey Consultant tries not to let fandom make her irrational.  But her fandom states this (even if she should not let her fandom inform her consulting, but a secret about life is that being a fan informs most things, even when it's pretended fandom has no impact on any thoughts or calls or decisions).  Betting against Jaromir Jagr isn’t wise.   If the odds are against it—don’t bet against him.   (Though she notes the odds against him never before have been time and age and nature.) 

But, for this one, Hockey Consultant—if and when she gets her cable and Internet installed and up—will be watching with eager eyes to see what becomes of Jaromir Jagr in 2011-12.  But for now, Hockey Consultant would advise anyone—even disappointed Penguins fans who are mad at Jagr—to enjoy the fact that they can still watch, for now, one of the greatest players ever, yet again play in the NHL and who, for now and on the power play, still shows why he is the 9^th leading scorer in NHL history.

Hockey Consultant’s One Sentence on Jaromir Jagr:   Since even the best players ever can’t be the best forever, just enjoy watching every minute of Jagr’s NHL time while you can…and if you’re actually IN the game, then take the time to learn from playing against or playing with one of the greatest players of all time.

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.

October Hockey Is Not April Hockey

It’s a truism of the NHL season that the hockey gets better the longer the season goes.   In the fall, you’ll see egregious things like giveaways from players who ordinarily know better.  You’ll see goalies whose timing is off and who are letting up goals they won’t let up later in the year.  You’ll see the beginnings of systematized play, but you won’t see coherence as new linemates get used to each other’s tendencies.

As fall turns to winter, you’ll see better hockey, but it’s really when winter turns into spring and the snow disappears that the best hockey is played.   Oh, of course, that’s because only 16 teams make the playoffs.  But that’s also because the great irony of the NHL schedule is played out:  By spring—not naturally hockey season—the teams and players have been playing long enough that good hockey is played.

But October hockey?   For those like Hockey Consultant, who love the sport, October hockey is welcome.   But, as the shootout reminds, October hockey is early regular season hockey.   Even for teams that just competed for the Stanley Cup, they just took a few months away.    Fundamentally, the teams may have changed very little, yet, just as every Cup winner has to give the Cup back at the end of summer and earn it again, so, too, does every team have to rebuild, a little.  Rebuild the system.  Rebuild the trust.

So, remember.   What you’re seeing in October will not be what you see in April.   But the foundations laid in October are important for what you see in April.    

So October’s a time for learning how to win and figuring out how to improve.   But it’s a “process” time where performance counts (the points are the same in October as they are in March).

Hockey Consultant encourages you to remember this, though:   October is a “process” time for everyone.   So accept the process—and as the best teams do—and start the process in such a way that you’re building the foundation for the performance you want when April turns into May such that your results in May can turn into playing hockey in June.

But don’t forget:  It’s still a process.

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.