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linskywords · 5 years

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Updated Hockey Writing Guide

Thanks to everyone who offered corrections on the original post! Most of this is unchanged, but there are a few tweaks and additions. There are probably still things I’ve gotten wrong, so feel free to let me know.

For context, this was originally a response to an ask from someone who was writing a hockey story on short notice and didn’t have time to watch or read widely. Watching games and reading about players (or just reading fic about them) are still the best ways to learn things, especially since this doesn’t touch on the details of particular teams. But hopefully it will be helpful to some of you!

The schedule:

The hockey season starts in early October. It goes until early April. Training camp is mid-September, and then there are a few weeks of preseason games before the season starts, where everyone doesn’t play every game; the teams are trying to get a look at prospects and see how players gel, and longtime vets may not play. Prospect camp or development camp is July-ish, but you don’t go to that if you’re a returning player.

Players don’t really get a break during the year except for the All-Star or Olympic breaks, if they happen. In the last year or two (I think?) each team has started getting one bye week of five days off per year. This year it looks like they’re all overlapping with the All-Star break, which sucks for the players chosen for that game. Other than that they might get a day off at a time but not usually much more than that – maybe a few days at Christmas, depending on the game schedule.

There’s a game roughly every other day, but it’s not quite as regular as that. I usually write with the Wikipedia or hockey-reference.com page open for that team’s season. I tend to assume the team has practice or some kind of skate pretty much every day, which may or may not be accurate for any given team. There’s also media stuff and team events, so true days off are rare.

Players take naps in the afternoon before a game. It’s an important sports performance thing.

Half the games will be at home and half will be on the road. Some teams tend to fly home late at night after their last game on a road trip, and others choose to fly back the next day.

Sometimes road trips are pretty long, like if they’re going to play a bunch of teams far away. Some teams have an annual long road trip when some other group is using their home arena (e.g. the Blackhawks used to have an annual circus trip in November). They fly on private flights and will take a bus to and from the hotel and the rink.

Playoffs start a few days after the regular season wraps up. 16 teams qualify, based on their number of wins (2 points per win, 1 point per overtime loss, 0 points per loss in regulation). Non-qualifying teams are usually mathematically eliminated in late March or early April, depending on how badly they’ve done that year. There are four rounds of playoffs: two rounds within their conference, then conference finals, then Stanley Cup finals. Each round is the best of seven games and stops after one team has won four.

Teams play other teams in their division most often, then teams within the other division in their conference, then teams in the other conference. Divisions and conferences are organized geographically, so this makes sense for ease of travel.

In the off-season, players rest up, train, see the people they don’t get to during the year, and play a lot of golf (they’re jocks, but they’re prohibited from playing dangerous sports by the terms of their contracts, so golf is one of their few refuges). Sometimes they’ll try to bulk up because it’s hard to keep weight on during the season. They usually take at least something of a break from training right when the season ends, and they won’t start skating again until partway through the summer. A lot of them go to special training camps or work with professional trainers.

Worlds happens during the Stanley Cup playoffs, so players who aren’t in the playoffs, or who get knocked out early, will go represent their countries. Junior Worlds is around Christmastime. There’s sometimes a World Cup of Hockey, which is in theory every four years but has been irregular. It happened in 2016, but the 2020 tournament was cancelled. When it does happen, it’s in September, just prior to the start of the season.

The game:

If a player earns a point, that means they’ve gotten a goal or an assist. An assist is when they passed to someone who scored (a primary assist) or passed to someone who passed to someone who scored (a secondary assist). Goals are better than assists but both are good, and both are worth a point in terms of player stats.

A point per game average is very good. If a player’s at a point per game, he’ll be very happy. Your top players probably do a little better than that. Of course, this is an average; it’s very rare to score in every game, and players have point streaks and also stretches where they’re held scoreless. There’s a LOT of randomness in hockey.

Shots on goal is another good stat: how many times did a player have a scoring opportunity where the goalie denied him?

You get three forwards, two D-men (defensemen), and one goalie on the ice at a given time. The forwards are organized into four lines of three: one winger on each side and a forward. The D-men are organized into three D-pairings. Defensemen will usually play for more minutes per game than forwards because of this. Your top line (of forwards) will play close to or just over 20 minutes per game. Your bottom line might play more like 10. The top D-pairing might be more like 25 minutes or even higher.

Play starts with a faceoff, where one forward, usually the center, faces off against a forward from the opposing team. The ref drops the puck, and the two players in the faceoff both try to knock it back toward their own players. The one who succeeds wins the faceoff. Sometimes a player will move toward the puck before it’s legal to do so, and the ref will throw them out of the playoff circle and one of the other forwards will have to take the faceoff.

There are a bunch of penalties you can get for stuff like illegal checks, high sticking, holding, tripping, hooking, delay of game (e.g. if the ref thinks you deliberately knocked the puck out of play). If you commit a penalty, you go into the penalty box and your team is on the penalty kill for two minutes, meaning they’re down a player. The other team is on the power play. If the team on the power play scores, the power play is over and the offending player is released from the penalty box early. If the team on the penalty kill scores, it’s called a shorthanded goal, and the power play continues. How often a team scores on the power play is a stat people talk about – sometimes teams have stretches where their power play is terrible, and they never manage to convert (score).

The two-minute penalties mentioned above are called minor penalties. You can get a five-minute major for fighting, or you can get thrown out of the game or suspended for multiple games for really bad stuff.

There are three main parts of a hockey rink (there are probably technically more, but eh): each team’s offensive zone, where the opposing goal is located, and the neutral zone between them. You can’t take the puck into the offensive zone if there’s another player from your team already there; if you do, it’s offsides, and there’s a stoppage of play and a faceoff in the neutral zone. That means you can’t pass to someone deep in the offensive zone. Because of that, sometimes when players enter they dump the puck, meaning they shoot it deep into the offensive zone even though there’s no one there to receive it. They might do this if they need to buy a little bit of time for a shift change.

They might also try to buy time for a shift change by shooting the puck deep into the offensive zone from behind the center line, but it will not work, because this is called icing, and results in a stoppage of play. The team responsible is NOT allowed to have a shift change, and there’s a faceoff in their own defensive zone. You can get some really long shifts from this. (The exception is when you’re on the penalty kill, when you are allowed to ice the puck.)

Shifts are usually about a minute long. When players aren’t playing, they’re on the bench. When it’s their turn to play, they go over the boards.

If a player gets the puck and has no members of the opposing team between him and the goal, it’s called a breakaway.

If two players have the puck and are facing one member of the opposition, it’s called a two-on-one.

There are three twenty-minute periods divided by two fifteen-minute intermissions. If at the end of the game, play is tied, they go directly to one five-minute overtime period, which for the past few years has been three-on-three (three players plus a goalie, usually two forwards and a D-man) and is very exciting. If no one scores in overtime they go to a shootout, where the players take turns shooting on the opposing goalies. Overtime rules are different in playoffs, where I believe they keep playing regular twenty-minute periods until someone scores.

If one team is down by a lot at the end of the third period, they’ll often pull the goalie so they can have another forward on the ice without going over their six-player limit. If the other team scores while there’s no goalie, it’s called an empty-netter.

Players wear a ton of pads but still get a lot of bruising. Which can be fun for writers. 😆

The team and the players:

There are up to twenty-three players on a team at a time. Twenty can dress for a given game, which includes the goalie and the backup goalie.

There’s usually a captain and two or three assistant captains (A’s). They have general leadership responsibilities among the players. The captain wears a C on his jersey and the A’s wear an A.

If a player gets injured, he might be put on IR and someone would get called up in his place from the minors (the AHL, or American Hockey League). There’s been a particular focus on concussions in recent years, since a lot of players have had major problems with them. There’s a concussion protocol players have to go through if one is suspected. Players still, unfortunately, lie about their symptoms to try to play through concussions sometimes.

The NHL has a CBA (collective bargaining agreement) with the NHLPA (the NHL Players Association) that determines a lot of player treatment, salary, etc. When a given CBA runs out and the NHL and players can’t agree on terms, you get a lockout, like the 2004-2005 lockout that lasted the whole season and the 2012-13 lockout that shortened it.

There’s a cap to how much salary a team can pay out to its players in a year. This can get very complicated so I’m not even going to try.

When players are first signed, they go on a three-year ELC (entry-level contract) which is capped at I want to say $895K per year, but I don’t think that includes bonuses. Again, this is complicated stuff and I’m not even going to attempt the details. Players on ELCs aren’t guaranteed their own hotel rooms, so you get road roommates. Good times for us fic writers! After their ELC runs out, they’ll negotiate a more lucrative contract with their team; there are also some limited ways in which they can choose to go to a different team. Later in their career they’ll become free agents and can choose which team to sign with.

Players get drafted at 18 or so, or older in rare circumstances. Draft picks are determined by a lottery that’s weighted by how badly your team did this year. Again, you can look up the math on this – it’s a limited number of teams that have a shot at a first overall pick. The draft happens in a bunch of rounds where each team gets a pick, but sometimes teams trade their picks in advance as part of complicated trade deals. The first round of the draft is televised and the players go up onstage and shake their new GM’s hand and get a jersey.

Players often come up through Major Juniors, which is the CHL (Canadian Hockey League, though a lot of the teams are in the U.S.). The CHL has different divisions: the OHL, the WHL, and the QMJHL. Players get paid and are considered professional, so they become ineligible for top-tier college hockey in the U.S. There are scholarships offered to CHL players at Canadian universities; I don’t know the details of that. While they’re playing Juniors they often live far away from their families with billet (host) families. Junior teams are limited in how many players they can have who are over 18.

Other places players might come from: American colleges; private prep schools or even public school systems; the U.S. NTDP (National Team Development Program); or many places overseas.

Most draftees don’t start playing for their NHL team right away, if they ever do. They might stay in Juniors for a year or two, or play for the A (the AHL) once they’re old enough, or go to college first.

NHL players in their rookie year often billet with an older player or sometimes even front office staff. Partly this is because they don’t want to invest in long-term housing until they get their housing letter, which is the team saying that they plan to keep them around. Partly it’s because they’re only technically not children anymore.

Players will each have an agent who negotiates contracts and does other stuff for them.

The teams each have a head coach and a bunch of other coaches, a lot of them specialized. I don’t have a lot of detail about this. There’s also a front-office staff, headed by a General Manager, who reports to the owner(s). The GM makes staffing decisions as well as draft and trade decisions.

Teams usually have an official arena where they play home games and their front office has their actual offices, and they’ll also have a practice facility which may be theirs or may be something local that they rent.

There are a bunch of awards players can get: the Art Ross for the most points in a season; the Hart for MVP; the Conn-Smythe for MVP of the playoffs; the Calder for best rookie. (There are a bunch more that you can look up.) These are given out at the NHL Awards in June. And of course what everyone wants to win is the Stanley Cup. If your team wins, you get a specially designed cup ring with your name and number on it (possibly everyone in the front office does, too??), and you get to spend a day with the Cup during that off-season. Players usually throw a big party for all their family and friends.

Players get nicknames and this is super fun! If you’re writing about existing players, they probably have nicknames already, but you can also make up hockey nicknames (like if you’re writing about obscure players, or making the players up) by taking the whole or partial last name and added -y (or -ie) or -er. Sometimes just -s. Sometimes it’s the first name. And sometimes they get more creative, like Soupy for someone with the last name Campbell. There is much potential here.

Other general stuff:

These boys are kind of dumb in general and specifically about emotions. It’s one of my favorite things about writing them, honestly. It also means you can go as bro-y as you want with the language.

The NHL is pretty deeply homophobic. Its official position is not homophobic, and there’s an organization called You Can Play that’s fighting to eradicate homophobia, but there are no out players, which speaks for itself. It’s pretty much like all major male American sports in that way. The homophobia is something I really enjoy exploring in some of my stories and in other stories just elide entirely if I feel like imagining a better world. You definitely have flexibility there.

Watching is definitely helpful but also I didn’t watch a hockey game until at least two stories in, soooo you can get away with a lot by just reading fic. :)

Reading fic is especially helpful because honestly the stuff I’ve laid out here doesn’t even touch on the details of a particular player’s life or a team’s traditions and history and dynamics. You can Google some of that, but the prior research done by other fans is going to be so helpful.

On the plus side, if you don’t know much about how something works, you don’t have to go into a lot of detail about it. I’ve written some stories where I’ve gone into a bunch of game details and others where you wouldn’t even know they played hockey if it weren’t for their spending a lot of time changing next to other men. Feel free to stick to the parts you know.

Another thing you’ll get from fic, which I’m not even going to go into here, is the plethora of tropes that are popular in hockey fandom. Or fandom in general, of course – you can always import new tropes, or make them up from whole cloth. AO3 is your oyster.

Again, please let me know if there’s anything I should correct, and feel free to make additions of your own. Happy hockeying, everyone!

#hockey #hockey rpf #hockey primer #p.s. you probably shouldn't use hockey as a verb #i am a bad example

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iamfitzwilliamdarcy · 5 years

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Title: Agony! That Can Cut Like a Knife Summary: Tim Drake loves Gotham Sports, but Gotham Sports do not love Tim back (AO3) A/N: I put too many italics in this for a tumblr post smh. Apologies in advance to citizens of Newark, my only encounters with New Jersey have been on the Turnpike and a view of the skyline across the river from a rooftop bar in Manhattan. Kinda want to apologize to Devils fans but maybe not enough to actually Do It.

For anyone who cares I set a Gotham Sports Team Roster because same names are used for different sports in different universes and this is what I decided to go with:

Football: Knights Hockey: Bats Baseball: Colonials Basketball: Buzzards

There was a low, pained groan from a couch in the main living room. Pained enough Bruce stopped to check it out. Jason was sitting in an armchair, eyeing the couch’s occupant with a particular kind of disbelieving, annoyed distaste.

Bruce couldn’t see who it was because they were slumped down, laying on the cushions. He peeked over to find Tim, hands peeking out of the too-long sleeves of his black Gotham Bats jersey. They covered his face, but he was looking through his fingers to watch the TV intensely.

Bruce followed Tim’s gaze to see the score and winced. “Still early in the season,” he said bracingly.

“Early?” Jason snorted. “It’s December.”

Tim did not respond, still watching intensely. He dropped his hands at a particularly bad turn-over to shout, “Oh come on!”

“Pace yourself,” Jason said, giving him that look again. “Or you won’t last to April. And we’ll need you in April.”

“Jason,” Tim said, sounding calm and intense, even as the game breaks away for a commercial. “I have never been chill about this team a day in my life.”

Jason muttered something that sounded like “Clearly.”

Bruce had been busy the past couple of months and hadn’t had much time to keep up with Gotham’s sports teams. Not that there had been much to keep up with. The Knights had ended their season quietly, as they had for the past decade--no playoff games, no Super Bowl hopes. There had been a brawl between teammates during a late season practice, but the team had kept that mostly hush-hush.

Hockey was only two months in but--well, he could see the score on the TV to see how that was going. The Buzzards, he’d read in the paper just that morning, weren’t doing much better.

He hadn’t had much time to hang out with his kids, either. He settled down next to Tim on the couch to watch, just in time for the game to return to commercials and a fight to break out over the face-off circle.

The second period closed with Gotham on a PowerPlay for another 1:30. Bruce got up to get snacks (“Popcorn,” Jason said, “With M&Ms!” Tim added.)

“Bruce,” Tim said balefully, staring up at him with wide eyes as Gotham gave up a shorthanded goal and their goalie broke his stick against the crossbar. “Will you buy the me Bats, please?”

“I had a chat with Joseph Higgens last week, actually,” Bruce said casually.

Tim twisted around so suddenly he almost startled even Bruce. “Higgens?” Tim repeated in an incredulous hiss. “Higgens? The Devils, Bruce, really, have you no loyalty? You’re a traitor, this is treason!”

Jason turned his laugh into a cough,, and Bruce opened his mouth in defense of his Gotham pride, but Tim was working himself into a state. “You don’t just give up on your team because they keep losing! That’s your team, you can’t just choose any old other team in your state. You don’t get to choose, Bruce! You can’t just turn your back on Gotham!

“And Newark! Nobody wants to live in Newark. I’d rather die than live in Newark, jot that down Jason, I want that in my Advance Directives.”

“Fair,” Jason said, nodding. He had died, and he had been to Newark. He understood.

Tim steamrolled on, not even acknowledging he’d been validated. “Wait, are you sending me to Newark, a city I hate, to own the Devils, the team I hate? Why,” and Tim, to Bruce’s horror, sounded tearful, “do you hate me, B?”

“Tim,” Bruce said, a little helplessly. “Tim, honey, I was joking.”

He leaned over and lays a hand across Tim’s forehead. He felt a shade too warm, but not feverish enough to cause such a response. It was probably the jersey anyway.

“I’m not sick, Bruce,” Tim said mulishly. Then, suspiciously, “Did you call me honey? You don’t do that. You are sending me to Newark.”

He flopped over on the couch and buried his head into his arms. This was probably a good thing as Gotham was scored against again.

“Just put us out of our misery,” Tim mumbled.

“What’s wrong with Drake?” Damian had come in, Dick not far behind, juggling the leftover popcorn Bruce had left on the counter, and he stood, arms folded, lip curling as he examined Tim. “He looks more pathetic than usual.”

“Ah Timmy,” Dick said sympathetically, glancing at the screen. “A little early for the annual Gotham Sports-Induced emotional breakdown, isn’t it?”

“Fuck you and your seocnd rate Bludhaven ECHL team, Dick,” Tim snarled, words, but not his ire, muffled by the couch pillow and his own arms.

Dick blinked, unsure how to respond, and silence rang through the room, though Jason’s silence sounded suspiciously like silent laughter.

Tim turned over. “I’m sorry,” he said, meeting Dick’s eyes. “That was ugly.”

Then, balefully, “Bruce is sending me to Newark to live amongst filth. Please say your goodbyes now as I am not much longer for this world.”

“I am not sending you to Newark, Tim, for God’s sake,” Bruce snapped.

“I’ll miss you, buddy,” Dick said solemnly, patting Tim’s back as he sat down on the kid’s legs. He offered Tim some of the popcorn.

“You didn’t put M&M’s in,” Tim accused, but ate a handful anyway.

“If you care,” Bruce said, coming back on the other side of the couch and throwing himself into his recliner. A cat streaked away from where he’d been about to sit and Damian threw him a filthy look, “I tried to buy the Bats for your birthday last month, but the bastard Eliot cousin won’t sell.”

“Honestly, Bruce,” Jason said, leaning back, “How are you the richest man in Gotham and you don’t own a single team?”

“No one will sell to me,” Bruce said glumly. “I tried to get the Knights a few years back, when they were about to go bankrupt, but Stan Diner wouldn’t let me.”

“He’s a Cobblepot cousin,” Jason said, casually, turning back to his book.. “The Penguin funds him. It’s shady.”

Bruce frowned at him. “How did I not know that?”

“Mm,” Jason said, not looking up. “I know something you don’t. I have connections you don’t. And you said the mob wouldn’t pay,” he lowers his voice in a stern imitation, “Mob boss isn’t a career path, Jason, you said, but look who’s got the insider knowledge.”

Bruce closed his eyes and breathed in deeply.

Midway through his calming breath, Damian said, haughtily, “This sport is respectable.”

He opened his eyes to see a Gotham player dropping his glove and raining, admittedly admirable, rights on an opposing player.

“Have you never seen a hockey game?” Dick asked, frowning.

“God, I wish that were me,” Tim said, when Damian shook his head.

“Bruce,” Dick said, in that disappointed parent tone that always upset Bruce’s sense of order “You haven’t taken him to a game?”

“We haven’t had much time,” Bruce replied. Then, defensively, “I’ve taken him to many museums!”

“That’s barely culture!” Dick said.

“You take Dick to games?” Tim asked.

“He has box seats,” Jason put in.

Bruce wasn’t sure how this had turned on him.

“WE has box seats,” Bruce snapped. “Not me.”

“Bruce,” Tim said, looking at him with wide eyes that made him look sad and young. “You had box seats to the Bats and you never told me, the CEO of Wayne Enterprises?”

“He used to take me all the time,” Jason, the son whom he loved, said, betraying him, while Dick shook his head sadly.

“Me too,” Dick added. “He’s got seats at the Knights, Buzzards, Colonials, Tim, he never told you?”

“No,” Tim said miserably, peeking at Bruce from his forlorn place on the couch. “Never.”

“They go to a WE family in a lottery system!” Bruce insisted.

“I am a WE family!” Tim said back. Then, abruptly, roared at the TV, “Fucking refs, I swear!”

“I guess it has been a while since we’ve all had a family outing to a sports endeavor,” Bruce admitted.

“Well don’t make it sound like textbook disease, B,” Dick said, rolling his eyes.

“The Bats play the Monarchs next week and I’m fully expecting to lose and also Tim Winston to fight at least three players,” Tim said.

“At the same time,” Jason added.

“I hope he gets his ass kicked,” Tim said.

“He won’t,” Jason said. “But he might get suspended again.”

“Boys,” Bruce said absently, thinking.

“You’ll take us, won’t you, B?” Tim said, suddenly pleading.

“I’ll call HR and make sure they haven’t gone for lottery yet,” Bruce agreed.

“A box seat,” Tim sighed wistfully, flopping back against the arm rest. “This whole time. To think I used to take Steph on dates to the nosebleeds.”

“Invite her,” Bruce said. “Barbara too,” he added at Dick.

“And Jonathan?” Damian asked, stiffly.

“If you want a Monarchs fan tagging along, sure,” Tim said, disgust evident.

“Tim,” Bruce scolded. Then, “Of course Jonathan can come. I’ll call Clark tomorrow.”

He looked around at his family, suddenly feeling warm. A day at the box seats at a Gotham Bats game would be good, fun bonding for them all.

“Fuck you, ref!” Tim yelled suddenly at the TV.

Jason shouted after, “And the horse you rode in on!”

Well, Bruce could hope.

#tim drake #jason todd #batfam #bruce wayne #dick grayson #damian wayne #gotham sports #fanfic tag #my fic #katie's adventures in writing

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your-dietician · 3 years

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What will ESPN’s coverage of the NHL look like next season?

New Post has been published on https://tattlepress.com/nhl/what-will-espns-coverage-of-the-nhl-look-like-next-season/

What will ESPN’s coverage of the NHL look like next season?

The network’s coverage starts with the July 21 Seattle expansion draft, hosted by Chris Fowler on ESPN2. John Buccigross will host the NHL Draft two days later. Those shows will be produced by NHL Network.

When Gross spoke over the phone this past week, ESPN (which reportedly paid $410 million a year for seven years of NHL rights) and Turner ($225 million a year over the same period) still hadn’t divvied the games. The NHL had yet to release its 2021-22 schedule. Its puck- and player-tracking data has not seen the light of day.

“One thing we’re trying to get our arms around is what analytics teams and coaches use to showcase in our game coverage, our studio coverage,” Gross said. “Camera positions is another thing we’re looking at, talking to the league to see how we can showcase and document the games.”

Strategy and speed are the buzzwords Gross hears in his daily conversations with NHL people. Capturing both, while serving hard-core fans, hooking viewers from the massive pool of casual sports viewers who don’t give hockey much thought, attracting diverse genders and backgrounds . . . all are among Gross’s concerns.

“There has to be a level of entertainment without it being forced,” he said. “There’s really nothing worse on TV than forced fun. We have to find our spots, when we get [Chris] Chelios and [Mark] Messier together, who have a relationship. We’ll mix and match with other folks.”

Chelios and Messier, along with Steve Levy, will likely work the major events. “We know how that works,” Gross said. Hearing the two Hall of Famers, owners of some sharp elbows, chime in on player safety decisions should be interesting.

While he may not be hockey’s answer to Charles Barkley, Chelios does seem like a straight shooter. In a phone call, he acknowledged he wasn’t looking for a gig when he reached out to ESPN after the announcement. He was calling as a dad, hoping that his daughter, Lightning TV reporter Caley Chelios, was on the network’s radar.

“I like to think I’ll call it like it is,” said Chelios, 59, “Even though it’s a little different than when I played, hockey’s hockey.”

Messier, Chelios, Hilary Knight, Ray Ferraro, Brian Boucher, and Cassie Campbell-Pascall were among the first names Gross mentioned when speaking about his roster, but a lineup has yet to be solidified. He noted that women will be featured prominently in on-air roles.

The list of local connections is long, from Boucher (Woonsocket, R.I.), A.J. Mleczko (Nantucket/Harvard), former Red Sox play-by-play man Sean McDonough (Boston), Buccigross (who has Boston roots), Rick DiPietro (Winthrop/Boston University), ex-Boston College Eagles Blake Bolden and Bob Wischusen, and Emily Kaplan, a former Globie.

Gross said another fan favorite from the past, play-by-play announcer Gary Thorne, remains an option. He spoke with the agent for Thorne, 73, this past week.

“We’re not done yet,” Gross said. “We want to see what the schedule looks like, and what other decisions we have to make. We still have time.”

What’s the game-changing idea that will separate ESPN? It won’t be glow pucks and robots (fun as they were for younger fans in the ’90s). What’s hockey’s version of the K-Zone?

“Some people thought the first-and-10 line would be too intrusive,” Gross mused. “Now you can’t really watch a game without it.”

AWARD SEASON

One voter’s ballot in depth

Connor McDavid became the first unanimous MVP since Wayne Gretzky in 1982, collecting all 100 first-place votes for the Hart Memorial Trophy.DARRYL DYCK/Associated Press

I consider it a privilege to vote on year-end NHL awards as part of my duties with the Professional Hockey Writers Association. I’m not alone. My peers and I want to get it right.

When it came to this season’s MVP, I believe we did.

Connor McDavid earned all 100 first-place votes for the Hart Trophy, becoming the second unanimous MVP ever (Wayne Gretzky, 1982). McDavid’s 105 points in 56 games goes down as one of the most dominant seasons in league history. He was playing at a different speed than everyone else.

In the voting bloc — trimmed from about 175 to 100 members, and dispersed regionally to address imbalances created by the divisional-only schedule — we saw some refreshingly progressive thinking, and as always, some strange calls. One Edmonton writer voted McDavid’s teammate, Leon Draisaitl, second for the Selke. Draisaitl made strides this season, but it would be generous to call him an above-average defensive forward, much less elite.

In this space last year, I delved into my methodology, which blends in-person viewings, video study, and number-crunching. Obviously this season, I relied more on the latter two. I was among the few beat writers who traveled all season, but I only watched the East Division up close.

My ballot, and some quick takes:

Hart Trophy — 1. McDavid; 2. Auston Matthews; 3. Nathan MacKinnon; 4. Aleksander Barkov; 5. Brad Marchand.

Relatively easy calls. McDavid was incredible, and the other four were the driving forces on good teams. Marchand was ranked as high as No. 2 on six ballots.

Norris Trophy — 1. Adam Fox; 2. Cale Makar; 3. Charlie McAvoy; 4. Dougie Hamilton; 5. MacKenzie Weegar.

A youth movement, and an ECAC/Hockey East top three. Makar (UMass) missed 12 games, or 21 percent of the season, leaving the door open for Fox (Harvard), who was the Rangers’ MVP in his second season. McAvoy (BU) might be the best five-on-five defender in the game. Weegar opened eyes after Aaron Ekblad’s injury. Eleven blue liners earned top-three votes. Victor Hedman was down-ballot for me, after an injury-plagued regular season. Don’t ask me why someone gave Kris Letang a first-place vote. Fun fact: Fox is the first player of Jewish descent to win a major NHL award.

Calder Trophy — 1. Kirill Kaprizov; 2. Jason Robertson; 3. Alex Nedeljkovic; 4. Josh Norris; 5. Igor Shesterkin.

Kaprizov (27 goals and 51 points in 55 games) was a slam dunk, though Robertson had a brief midseason run that made it interesting.

Lady Byng Trophy — 1. Jaccob Slavin; 2. Jared Spurgeon; 3. Barkov; 4. Roope Hintz; 5. Johnny Gaudreau.

I’ve said before that writers should not vote for this. Referees should. Slavin, an elite defender playing heavy minutes, committed one penalty all season (for shooting the puck over the glass). Good enough for me.

Selke Trophy — 1. Barkov; 2. Patrice Bergeron; 3. Joel Eriksson Ek; 4. Phillip Danault; 5. Joe Pavelski.

Barkov had a strong MVP case, but his 200-foot excellence was properly recognized here. Bergeron is still Bergeron. Could see Danault, after his lockdown playoffs, be front of mind for a lot of voters next season.

The PWHA does not vote on the Vezina Trophy (the general managers selected Marc-Andre Fleury), but we do pick the year-end All-Star teams. My goalies, in order, were Andrei Vasilevskiy, Fleury, and Juuse Saros. We also pick All-Rookie teams. I had Kaprizov, Robertson, and Norris as my forwards, Ty Smith and K’Andre Miller as my defensemen, and Nedeljkovic in goal.

ETC.

League will not rush to judgment

Commissioner Gary Bettman said the league is waiting for an independent review of the Blackhawks alleged cover-up of sexual abuse before proceeding.Karl B DeBlaker/Associated Press

The alleged cover-up of sexual assault by the Blackhawks was the leading topic in Gary Bettman’s annual pre-Stanley Cup Final news conference this past week. Rightfully so.

Bettman said the league learned of the allegations “relatively recently” and will wait for an independent review.

According to a lawsuit filed in May, a former Blackhawks player alleges he and another player were assaulted by then-video coach Brad Aldrich during the team’s 2010 championship run. The team’s leadership, which included current GM Stan Bowman, were allegedly informed of the incident by then-skills coach Paul Vincent, whom the players had told.

Aldrich later worked at a high school in Michigan, where he was convicted of sexual assault involving a student. He is now on Michigan’s sex offender registry.

Multiple ex-Blackhawks, including Nick Boynton, Daniel Carcillo (then with the Flyers), and Brent Sopel, spoke out this past week. One unnamed player told The Athletic that “every guy on the team knew.” Captain Jonathan Toews took issue with that, telling that outlet he didn’t hear about the allegations until the end of that summer. He said he couldn’t say for sure if the team “mishandled” the situation.

Bettman, a former lawyer, pumped the brakes. “Let us see what the investigation reveals, and then we can figure out what comes next,” he said. “I think everyone is jumping too far, too fast. This is going to be handled appropriately and professionally, and done right.”

Let’s hope so.

Beijing Olympics not a given

Commissioner Gary Bettman said the NHL has concerns over the feasibility of sending players to the Olympics next winter.Wilfredo Lee/Associated Press

Later in his Q&A, Bettman shared the league’s “real concerns” over whether it was “sensible” to have a two-week shutdown for the 2022 Beijing Olympics.

Wait, what?

After sitting out 2018 — and watching interest in Olympic hockey wane — the NHL and NHLPA last summer collectively bargained to participate in the 2022 and 2026 Winter Olympics, pending further agreement with both parties, the IIHF, and IOC. But there is no plan yet.

COVID-19 variants remain a worry, and NBC isn’t likely to lobby on the NHL’s inclusion following the expiration of the TV deal. The NHL hopes to release its 2021-22 schedule shortly after the Cup Final.

“Time is running very short,” Bettman said, which came as disappointing news to Tampa Bay’s Victor Hedman.

“The Olympics is one of the biggest dreams of mine and I haven’t been able to participate in one. This might be the last chance I get. That sucks to hear,” said Hedman, who was left off Team Sweden in 2014. “When you get an opportunity to represent your country on the biggest stage, it’s one of those things that you’ll probably never forget. For me, it’s obviously something I’ve been dreaming about my whole life and something I want to do before I hang up my skates.”

Pride working on title defense

The Boston Pride, two-time Isobel Cup winners, are preparing a title defense for 2021-22.Mary Schwalm/Associated Press

The NWHL’s Boston Pride are deep into an Isobel Cup summer, hauling the trophy from New England lake houses to the Grand Canyon.

As he preps for a title defense, coach Paul Mara is playing his cards close. After a few defections, he’s using his newfound salary-cap space — the league doubled the ceiling to $300,000 — to bring in some outside help.

“Working on a few things,” he said.

The NWHL is feeling momentum entering its seventh season. An influx of sponsorship dollars, visibility from its Isobel Cup playoffs broadcast on NBCSN, and a lot of player raises have elevated the mood.

Since last month, the four franchises under league control — the Buffalo Beauts, Connecticut Whale, Metropolitan Riveters, and Minnesota Whitecaps — were sold to private owners, making it a league of six independent clubs. Expansion is on the horizon, with Montreal a primary target.

Also notable: This past week’s draft, which was streamed on Twitch, included appearances from a range of pro sports personalities, including NHL league and team executives, and USA Hockey reps. The NWHL hasn’t always had such vocal support.

For all the growth, players aren’t yet earning a living wage. Contracts are yearly. Outside opportunities create a talent drain.

The Pride lost president Hayley Moore to the AHL (vice president of hockey operations), replacing her with 1998 US Olympian Colleen Coyne. They are searching for a GM, after Karilyn Pilch this past week signed on with the Chicago Blackhawks’ scouting and player development department.

They also need a few good forwards. Mary Parker, Carlee Turner, and Lexie Laing departed for job and school reasons. Czech standout Tereza Vanisova signed with Leksands IF in Sweden, which will better help her participate in a demanding Olympic training schedule.

League MVP Jillian Dempsey, recovered from shoulder surgery, returns with All-Star linemates McKenna Brand and Christina Putigna, the No. 1 defense pair of Kaleigh Fratkin (two-time NWHL Defender of the Year) and Mallory Souliotis, and netminders Lovisa Selander and Victoria Hanson. That crew, plus whomever Mara can lure to town, should keep the Pride near the top of the standings.

Unlike last season, when the Pride got a boost from No. 1 overall pick Sammy Davis (BU) and six drafted rookies, the draft won’t have a major impact. Because they lost their 2021 first- and second-round picks when they traded up to select Davis, and dealt their third-rounder to Buffalo for future considerations, the Pride picked in the fourth and fifth rounds (Weston’s Finley Frechette and Beverly’s Abby Nearis, both forwards).

The NWHL’s player pool was thinned after the NCAA granted players an extra year of eligibility, leading many of the top draft-eligible players to return to school. Because of that, Boston isn’t the only team that believes next year’s draft will be loaded.

Loose pucks

Bruce Cassidy (left) has been promoting from within, with assistant coach Jay Pandolfo (center) leaving for Boston University.Winslow Townson/Associated Press

The Bruins have promoted from within of late, calling up coaches from Providence and the player development ranks. It makes sense that fourth-year P-Bruins coach Jay Leach would replace Jay Pandolfo on Bruce Cassidy’s staff, but player development staffers Chris Kelly and Jamie Langenbrunner will also get a look. Like Pandolfo, they were two-way forwards with long NHL résumés . . . As for Pandolfo, the move to BU gives him a shorter path to a head coaching gig. Albie O’Connell, who is entering the final year of his deal, has had a spotty run . . . Bruins strength and conditioning assistant Kenny Whittier also made the move to BU . . . A few first-timers joined NHL benches this past week, including two ex-players, Alex Tanguay (Detroit assistant) and Tuomo Ruutu (Florida assistant), and André Tourigny (Arizona coach). The latter move was particularly interesting, for a league that often recycles head coaches . . . Toews, after a year out of the spotlight with a mysterious illness, is back on the ice. He posted a video message to fans after a practice, saying doctors told him he has “chronic immune response syndrome,” a catch-all term for constant, debilitating stress reactions. Still dealing with a few symptoms, the Blackhawks’ captain believes the condition was brought on by a nasty bout with COVID-19 in February 2020, before the pandemic hit in full; the toll of 13 NHL seasons; and the year-round hockey training schedule he’s followed since he was a young teenager. “I think there’s a lot of things that just piled up,” he said, “where my body just fell apart.” He hopes to return in October . . . Edmonton trimmed Ryan Nugent-Hopkins’s $6 million cap hit, but took a beating on term, when it locked up the No. 2 center to an eight-year, $41 million deal with a full no-move clause. He will be 36 when it expires. “No contract is perfect,” GM Ken Holland acknowledged . . . Hurricanes owner Tom Dundon’s take on game jersey ads, which are coming to the NHL sooner rather than later: “If we look like Formula One or NASCAR, that’d be fine with me.” . . . Glad to see college athletes everywhere get a chance to make some cash off their name and image, following the Supreme Court’s hammering of the paternalistic NCAA. A small step, long overdue.

Matt Porter can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter: @mattyports.

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yahoosports · 7 years

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Jaguars at Patriots: Jacksonville needs its best game of the season for its first Super Bowl berth

By Shalise Manza Young, Shutdown Corner

AFC championship game Jacksonville Jaguars at New England Patriots Sunday, 3:05 p.m. ET, CBS Livestreaming on Yahoo Sports app

JAGUARS AT A GLANCE

Key player: DT Malik Jackson. The personnel isn’t the same and the scheme isn’t the same as when he was with the New York Giants, but Jaguars’ vice president of football operations Tom Coughlin knows what it takes to beat the Patriots. A decade ago, in Super Bowl XLII, Coughlin’s Giants had great success affecting Tom Brady by pressuring him through the middle. That’s where Jackson comes in. The 28-year-old first-time Pro Bowler had eight sacks and 11 quarterback hits in the regular season, and if he’s active on Sunday, able to even disrupt Brady, it could go a long way toward the Jaguars’ defense slowing the Patriots’ offense.

Why they’ll win: Get an early lead – Blake Bortles plays better when he has a cushion – and dial up the defense. We saw it last week in the divisional round against Pittsburgh: Jacksonville went up 21-0 in the second quarter, and while the Steelers closed the gap, they were never able to fully dig out of that hole. Having a lead, or even a close score, means the Jaguars can continue getting Leonard Fournette lots of touches, which both runs time off the clock and keeps the ball out of Brady’s hands. And on defense, you have to mix it up and disrupt Brady without flat-out blitzing him and flood the passing lanes.

Why they’ll lose: We hate to put it on Blake Bortles, but if Bortles has one of those games – you know, an interception at the worst possible time, the back-breaking turnover that the Patriots quickly turn into seven points – it will be a long, cold afternoon in Massachusetts. In Jacksonville’s Week 16 loss to San Francisco, Bortles had three interceptions, one of which was returned; the 49ers turned the other two into touchdowns as well. The Jaguars lost, 44-33. Now in his fourth season, Bortles has come a long way, and he played relatively mistake-free in a close game last week in Pittsburgh.

Keep in mind: The Jaguars are 1-10 all-time against the Patriots. That ain’t good. The one win was in the playoffs, in the 1998 wild-card round, but that was a long time ago. So long ago even 40-year-old Brady wasn’t in the NFL yet. New England has won seven straight since that postseason win, including the 2007 divisional round, when Brady completed an incredible 26-of-28 passes. The last meeting between these clubs was early in the 2015 season, a 51-17 New England win.

Patriots tight end Rob Gronkowski is so tough to cover Jacksonville coach Doug Marrone said hoping Gronkowski drops passes might be the best defense. (AP)

PATRIOTS AT A GLANCE

Key player: TE Rob Gronkowski. Even Jaguars coach Doug Marrone concedes that there’s no good way to cover Gronkowski. Asked about the 6-foot-7 All-Pro, who missed the postseason last year because of injury, Marrone said, “Hope they do not throw him the football. Hope he drops it. There is no secret formula. I’d like to watch a game where someone has been able to do it. He is going to make his plays and you hope those plays don’t end up killing you.” Last week against the Titans, Gronkowski had six receptions for 81 yards and a touchdown.

Why they’ll win: The Patriots’ defense was the team’s Achilles heel early in the season, but since the fifth game of the season, it’s been one of the stringiest units in the league, at least in terms of points allowed – and that’s about the only statistic Bill Belichick cares about. Over the first four games, when New England went 2-2, the team allowed 32 points per game; over the final 12 games of the regular season, that number dropped to 14 PPG. Oh, and there’s that whole Tom-Brady-at-quarterback thing.

[Stream the NFL Playoffs live on the Yahoo Sports mobile app]

Why they’ll lose: Speaking of Brady, he didn’t practice on Wednesday or Thursday because of an injury to his throwing hand. It’s hard to imagine he won’t play on Sunday afternoon, but the rhythm and timing of the Patriots’ offense could be off. If timing is an issue, that could pave the way for the Jaguars’ defense to have success. Will it happen? Stranger things have.

Keep in mind: Experience could be huge in this game, as could emotion. This is New England’s seventh straight appearance in the AFC title game, and as we know, the Patriots are the defending Super Bowl champions. They’ve stumbled at home in the playoffs before, and this game won’t be easy, but Belichick prepares for any and every situation, and he also teaches them that no opponent is to be overlooked, especially this late in the season.

OUTLOOK

Teams tend to do dumb things when they play the Patriots. A bad decision on a punt return that could have been avoided, terrible clock management, a chip-shot field goal miss – it’s happened so many times. But there have been teams, particularly teams with strong defenses and especially those who don’t get sucked into the Brady/Belichick mystique and get too cute, that have been able to have success against New England, even in Foxborough. The Jaguars have done well this year to break years of franchise frustration, and they’ll have to play their best game to beat a New England team for which making the postseason and advancing is an annual occurrence.

#football #nfl #jaguars #afc #afcchampionshipgame #yahoosports #yahoosportsapp #patriots #nflplayoffs

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goswagcollectorfire · 4 years

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CARL’S BLOG: ARKANSAS HILLBILLY 2-8-21, Warren Public School System here we come! Before moving to Warren, Lena and I bought a large tri-level house on Central Street near the Bradley County Hospital, which was only a rock’s throw from our driveway. The move to Warren was hard on Jeff. It was a sad time for him. He was leaving behind some good friends he thought he would never see again. Regardless of what we said or did, the move to Warren was an emotional strain on him. I did not realize it would have such a traumatic impact on him. During our second day in Warren, things begin to look a lot better. Jeff and I were out in the front yard playing catch with his football. We noticed a church van, with “First Baptist Church�� written on the side, pass our house twice. The van was full of young people. After the van passed the second time, it went down to the next street, turned around, and came back. This time the van pulled into our driveway. As soon as it stopped, several kids got out and came up to Jeff and me. One of the young people was the youth director from First Baptist. He and some of his youth group members came to welcome us to Warren and to First Baptist Church. The youth director was a friendly person with a likeable personality. He introduced himself and members of his youth group. Jeff and I introduced ourselves to the group. It was not long before members of the group invited Jeff to go to the Sonic with them to get a coke. Jeff looked at me and asked, “May I, Dad?” The youth minister said, “Mr. Barger, I assure you, I’ll have Jeff back in about an hour.” I gave him permission to go with the group and the rest is history. The First Baptist Youth Group was the best thing that could have ever happened to Jeff. After they left, I said, “Thank you, God!” I was hoping that would be just the thing to get Jeff through his depressed mood. After that day, he never looked back. He easily made friends and became happy at Warren. Carla did not make the move to Warren. She had a summer job with Wal-Mart. She stayed behind with our good friends, Richard and Anne Wells, who had two girls, Joyce, and Marni, close in age to Carla. They were good friends, and we knew we could trust Richard and Anne to take good care of Carla. After Carla’s summer job at Wal-Mart ended, it was time for her to report to the University of Central Arkansas in Conway. Her close friend, Ginger Brown from Bentonville, was her roommate. When school started, Jeff started playing football. He was backup quarterback to Bubba Smith, a senior. Jeff later played basketball for the Warren Lumberjacks. During Jeff’s senior year, he achieved his goal of becoming quarterback of the Warren Lumberjacks, who finished the regular football season with a record of 8-3. Jeff went on to lead the Lumberjacks to the quarterfinals of the Class AAAA State Football playoffs. Jeff was an all-around student in school. He was popular and everyone liked him. He was self-motivated and showed an interest in acting. He landed the top role in both the junior and senior plays. Because of his leadership skills, he became president of our local Beta Club and later ran for state Beta Club president. He did not win, but he came in second. Curt, like Jeff, had an outgoing personality and made friends easily. He attended Brunson Elementary School on the west side of Warren. His close friends were Sam Wisener, Joseph Calloway, Chase Ellis, Patrick Ellis, Curt, and Bart Goodwin, and Chad Wharton. Bradley County was a paradise for hunters. People from surrounding states and all over Arkansas came to Bradley County for the annual deer and duck hunting seasons. Bradley County had one of the largest deer populations in Arkansas. Deer hunting was so popular that we built “Deer Day” into our school calendars. Deer Day is the first day of regular gun season each year. It didn’t take Jeff and Curt long to get exposed to deer hunting. Almost all of their friends went deer hunting and were members of their dads’ deer camps. Both Jeff and Curt turned out to be successful deer hunters. We always had deer meat in our freezer. They also loved fishing. The Saline River ran within two miles of Warren. Both Jeff and Curt spent lots of time fishing either in the Saline River or in big stock ponds belonging to some of their friends’ parents. It didn’t take Lena long to get adjusted to Warren. All she needed was a good church for our family to worship in. While we were in Warren; she took a teaching role in an elderly lady Sunday School Class. She loved those ladies and they loved her. She would visit them when they were sick and dedicated herself to ministering to their needs. She also loved her English teaching job at Monticello Junior High, seventeen miles from Warren. She did not mind the drive each day. If fact, she said, “The drive gives me time to relax and reflect upon my day.” After Carla’s freshman year at University of Central Arkansas in Conway, she moved in with us. She enrolled in the University of Arkansas at Monticello, majoring in Early Childhood Education. After graduation, she was employed by the Rogers Public School System as a kindergarten teacher. While working there, Carla dated Brent Phillips, the son of some of our dearest friends, Boyd, and Marty Shelton. After Brent graduated from Dartmouth University in New Hampshire, she and Brent were married on June 22, 1996. After their honeymoon in Hawaii, they moved to Boise, Idaho, where Brent was employed with Hewlett Packard, and Carla took a job with the Star Elementary School as a school safety aide. Jeff’s two years as a Warren Lumberjack were two of his best years. He did well in his academic studies and graduated in the top 10 percent of his class. When he graduated from Warren High School, I was proud to award him his high school diploma. As he walked across the stage, I was prepared to just shake his hand and say “Congratulations, Son,” but when he approached me, he reached out, shook my hand, hugged my neck, and said, “Dad, I love you!” I said, “I love you, too, Son!” Jeff finished his degree in biology at the University of Central Arkansas in Conway in December 1996. In the fall of that year, he went to Seattle, Washington, where he was employed with a government agency that places people on commercial fishing boats in Alaska. Jeff’s responsibility was to monitor the type of fish caught and regulate the number of fish caught in the Baring Sea. He loved it, but admitted it got really cold on the boat. After Jeff returned to Arkansas, he shared with Lena and me that if he had slipped and fallen into the ocean, he would have frozen to death within six minutes. Lena said, “Jeff, I’m so glad you waited until now to tell us that. I would have worried myself sick if I had known that.” Jeff took a job with the Arkansas Nature Conservancy in Little Rock in 1997. We were so relieved to have him back in Arkansas.

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rosstalksabouthockey · 6 years

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NHL PLAYOFF PRIMER 2018

It’s that time of year again when we take the last 6 months of hard-fought regular season and chuck it straight out the window - PLAYOFFS PLAYOFFS PLAYOFFS

This season in the NHL featured zero surprises and happened exactly as we all expected, with Vegas winning their division and Colorado and New Jersey making the playoffs. Nothing unusual there.

Likewise, the playoffs will be extremely easy to predict, so without further ado:

Eastern Conference

Atlantic Division

#1 Tampa Bay Lightning vs WC2 New Jersey Devils

The league’s top offense by a mile will face the league’s most criminally-underrated goaltender, Corey Schneider, who after years of toiling with a terrible Devils team, will finally get his chance to shine - wait, I’m being handed something here...yes, okay, scratch all that, as the Devils are reportedly starting Keith Kincaid between the pipes, who I’m pretty sure is actually Keanu Reeve’s character in Point Break. Nevertheless, with an unproven goaltender who may actually be a fictional character standing up to the onslaught of Steven Stamkos and Nikita Kucherov, it’s tough to pick New Jersey in this one - Lightning in five.

#2 Boston Bruins vs #3 Toronto Maple Leafs

The NHL’s weird playoff format results in the #4 team in the league playing the #7 team in the league in the first round. Toronto’s young talent have taken the next step this year, with Auston Matthews, Mitchell Marner, and William Nylander leading the charge and bringing the Leafs back to relevance. Boston, meanwhile, has ridden an aging core and new young talent of their own back to the playoffs. Tuukka Rask is playing lights-out in Boston’s net, but will 40-year-old Zdeno Chara be able to keep up with the speedy Leafs? An absolute must-watch series goes the distance and the young Leafs pull the upset (and get revenge for 2013) over a legit Cup contender in Boston - Leafs in 7. Metropolitan Division

#1 Washington Capitals vs WC1 Columbus Blue Jackets

Ah, our good friends the Washington Capitals advance to the playoffs once more. Alex Ovechkin put up 49 goals to win his 7th Rocket Richard Trophy, and the Capitals are icing a team deep at all positions, albeit arguably not as good as past years. They get a relative unknown in the Blue Jackets, who TOTALLY DIDN’T LOSE THEIR LAST GAME ON PURPOSE TO AVOID PITTSBURGH. THAT DIDN’T HAPPEN. DO NOT INSINUATE THAT NHL TEAMS LOSE GAMES ON PURPOSE. DON’T DO IT. Anyway, the Blue Jackets put the usual first-round scare into the Capitals by taking Game 1 in Washington, but the Caps figure it out and take this series in 6.

#2 Pittsburgh Penguins vs #3 Philadelphia Flyers

Again, the NHL playoff structure is fucking weird - though they’re the #2 & #3 seeds in their division, Pittsburgh and Philly finished with the 10th and 13th best records in the league, respectively. In fact, I wonder if Pittsburgh has set a record here for being the worst team to have home ice. That said, they still had 47 wins and 3 players finish in the top 10 in point scoring - plus, they’re the 2-time defending champions with the best player in the world on their roster, so yeah, Pittsburgh in 6. Philly will make it interesting and this is another must-watch series because it will be old-school bloody hockey, but the Flyers lack the depth to come out of this one.

Western Conference

Central Division

#1 Nashville Predators vs WC2 Colorado Avalanche

The President’s Trophy-winning Predators take on a team that posted 48 points last year. Pretty hard to pick the Avalanche in this one, Hart Trophy candidate Nathan MacKinnon’s game-breaking play notwithstanding. Colorado got in to the playoffs on their last game, beating St. Louis in a game that sent the winner to the playoffs, so they’ll be fired up and ready to go, while Nashville locked up their playoff spot weeks ago and stormed their way to the league’s best record. Last year’s runner up will likely go back to the Finals again, and given that Colorado is a weak team aside from MacKinnon, Nashville wins in 5.

#2 Winnipeg Jets vs #3 Minnesota Wild

Poor Minnesota - after years of being beat down by Chicago in the playoffs, the Wild finally go to the dance in a year that the Blackhawks are out, and Minny’s reward is that they play the second-best team in the league. Winnipeg’s scoring is positively terrifying, with Blake Wheeler, Mark Scheifle, and Patrik Laine tearing it up all year and center Paul Statsny joining the team at the deadline from St. Louis. Minnesota brings resurgent performances from Zach Parise and Erik Staal, but lost their #1 defenseman, Ryan Suter, to a freak ankle injury late in the season. Suter’s out for the playoffs, meaning Minnesota won’t be able to prevent Winnipeg from loading the net. Jets in 5.

Pacific Division

#1 Vegas Golden Knights vs WC1 Los Angeles Kings

Surpassing literally everyone’s expectations, the Vegas Golden Knights got out of the gate fast and barely slowed down all season, finishing with the NHL’s 5th-best record and winning the Pacific Division in their first year as a team. It’s absolutely unheard-of for an expansion team, and that’s what makes this series so hard to pick. Vegas goes into the playoffs as a complete unknown, and they face a Kings squad only 4 years removed from winning 2 Cups in 3 years. A lot has changed for the Kings in the interim, but Jonathan Quick, Anze Kopitar, and Drew Doughty still have championship talent and aspirations. This should be a fun one - Knights in 7.

#2 Anaheim Ducks vs #3 San Jose Sharks

Once more, all three California teams make the playoffs, which virtually guarantees a California matchup in the first round. The Sharks and Ducks form one of the most heated rivalries of the first round (Pittsburgh-Philly is maybe the only bloodier series) and both these teams know how to bring the pain. Expect a lot of close games and probably the most penalty minutes of any series. It’s also a match-up that could go either way, but I’ll pick San Jose in 7.

SECOND ROUND

Eastern Conference

#1 Tampa Bay Lightning vs #3 Toronto Maple Leafs

This year’s bluest matchup pits a battle-hardened, experienced Lightning squad against the upstart young-stars of the Maple Leafs. This will be one of the highest scoring series this year; both teams are better at putting the puck in the net than keeping it out. Goaltenders Andrei Vasilevskiy and Frederick Andersen will have their hands full. Tampa Bay’s offense and experience will win out after Toronto takes a 3-2 series lead. Lightning in 7.

#1 Washington Capitals vs #2 Pittsburgh Penguins

The now-annual event you’ve all been waiting for. Is this the year the Capitals finally exorcise their demons, get over the hump, and get past the hated Penguins and the hated second round? Short answer: no. Long answer: Pittsburgh is one of those teams that has an extra gear in the playoffs. Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin are capable of taking over series, Matt Murray is able to steal games in net when the offense isn’t there, and with Kris Letang healthy, Pittsburgh’s defense corps is elite. Washington is a good team and I would love to pick them, but it’s Pittsburgh in 7 (meaning once again Washington loses Game 7 at home).

Western Conference

#1 Nashville Predators vs #2 Winnipeg Jets

Two absolute powerhouse teams go at it with a trip to the conference finals on the line. This will be a hell of a series, with both squads capable of lighting the lamp in droves while delivering huge, game-changing hits (Dustin Byfuglien and Ryan Hartman in the same series? Yes please). The star power here will be lights out - PK Subban and Patrik Laine are two of the game’s brightest young studs. A back-and-forth series that sees multiple multi-overtime games will go the distance - Predators in a rocking Game 7 after coming back from down 3-2.

#1 Vegas Golden Knights vs #3 San Jose Sharks

San Jose is almost the Washington Capitals of the West - great regular-season team, underwhelming in the playoffs, with a long-time, charismatic-and-at-times-controversial star in Joe Thornton that’s never won a Cup. Thornton’s at least been to the Final, losing to the Penguins just a couple years ago, but if he never wins it, it would be fair to say he and Ovechkin would be two of the best players not to win. It would also be fair to say that if Vegas won a Cup before San Jose and Washington, expansion franchises themselves, that the collective saltiness of their fans would turn the Great Lakes into the Dead Sea. Knights in 6.

CONFERENCE FINALS

Eastern Conference

#1 Tampa Bay Lightning vs #2 Pittsburgh Penguins

A re-match of the 2016 Eastern Conference Final, this will be a series for the ages with the Lightning looking to avenge their loss two years ago and the Penguins looking for a chance at a three-peat. Tampa Bay will look to overwhelm with their speed and scoring, but Pittsburgh can match speed with guys like Carl Hagelin and Kris Letang and are no slouches at putting in pucks. A back-and-forth series will need all seven games, but this year the Lightning emerge victorious, ending Pittsburgh’s title defense and returning the Lightning to the Final after a 3-year absence.

Western Conference

#1 Nashville Predators vs #1 Vegas Golden Knights

Last year’s runner up versus this year’s Cinderella story. In a way, this series represents the future of the NHL - Nashville took some time but have evolved into a premier franchise and a for-real hockey market, while Vegas hit the ground running and have driven home the idea of hockey in non-traditional markets. The luck will run out for Vegas, though (how many of those puns are you going to hear in the playoffs? I’ll take the over); Nashville is a complete squad top-to-bottom, while Vegas is a team largely of unknowns and cast-offs. The Knights have had an admirable first season and a trip to the Conference Finals is a success beyond what any could have imagined, but the Predators’ championship window is wide open and they’re going to break through to a consecutive Finals appearance. Nashville in 6.

STANLEY CUP FINAL

#1 Nashville Predators vs #1 Tampa Bay Lightning

The final showdown pits two recent losers against each other - Nashville last year and Tampa Bay in 2015. Both teams have legitimate star power, depth at every position, and great storylines. PK Subban and Steven Stamkos chasing their first Cups, Nikita Kucherov and Filip Forsberg putting on dazzling moves, and Pekka Rinne and Andrei Vasilevskiy trading highlight reel saves - what more do you want? It’s really hard to predict this one, but I’m sticking to my guns and calling it for Nashville as the Predators win their first Stanley Cup in a thrilling 6-game series, eventually throwing the rowdiest Stanley Cup parade in league history. Pekka Rinne wins the Conn Smythe as MVP of the playoffs.

#NHL #NHL Playoffs #Stanley Cup Playoffs

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mitchbeck · 4 years

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CANTLON'S CORNER: HOCKEY NEWS AND NOTES VOLUME 8

BY: Gerry Cantlon, Howlings HARTFORD, CT - The suspension of hockey continues though the NHL may resume the regular season or go straight to a playoff format in an attempt to conclude the 2019-20 season. The AHL, meanwhile, is on the verge of announcing the cancelation of the rest of the regular season and Calder Cup playoffs. COLLEGE PLAYER SIGNINGS The New York Rangers' goaltending situation got a bit more interesting with the signing of their sixth-round (174th overall) pick in 2016, Tyler Wall. The former UMass-Lowell senior was signed to a two-year, entry-level deal ($925K-NHL/$70K-AHL). The organization now has six goaltenders under contract starting with Henrik Lundqvist, who is entering the final year of his contract that pays him $8.5 million. Alexander Georgiev will become a Restricted Free Agent (RFA) in 2020-21. He's proven he is more than NHL-ready. Igor Shesterkin enters the second year of his two year deal and would become an RFA in the 2021-22 season. Shesterkin spent half of this season in Hartford where he was superb in net and brought the Wolf Pack to first place for at least three months. The team then struggled mightily after his recall. The team dropped to a .500 record. Add to the list, second-year pro, and former UConn Husky, Adam Huska. He will enter the final year before he hits RFA status. Then there is J.F. Berube. He was acquired in a late-season trade for his fellow goalie, Thomas McCollum, with the Lehigh Valley Phantoms. He will be a UFA at the end of June. Nobody knows for certain how this entire thing will shake out in the end. The NHL salary cap for next year was originally pegged to land between $84-$88 million, however, with the COVID-19 pandemic and other external factors, that number is now in a complete state of flux with the entire worldwide economic landscape having been dramatically altered. The cap could potentially drop below $80 million. That would force all of the NHL's teams to do some serious refinancing of its payroll structure. On the goalie front, the Rangers would be faced with even tougher choices than they already were going to have. Wall, 22, from Leamington, Ontario, appeared in 32 games with the UMass-Lowell Riverhawks (HE) this season. He posted an 18-8-6 record, along with a 2.10 GAA, a .931 save percentage, and two shutouts. He was named to the Hockey East Third All-Star Team this season, which was the conference’s deepest position. Darien’s Spencer Knight (Boston College) and Hobey Baler finalist Jeremy Swayman (Maine) were the two in front of him. Wall appeared/started in 32 of UMass Lowell's 34 games this season. He earned all of his team's wins during the season and established a collegiate career-best in save percentage, Wall was tied for ninth in NCAA Division I in save percentage. In addition, Wall ranked eighth in the NCAA in saves at (924). His 336 saves in either the third period or overtime were the third-most in the country. This past season, Wall's stinginess saw him allow just two goals or fewer in 22 of his 32 appearances, including one goal or fewer in eight different appearances. He was named the Hockey East Defensive Player of the Week on six different occasions and served as an alternate captain, becoming the first Riverhawk goaltender to wear either a 'C' or an 'A' on his jersey since Dwayne Roloson did so in 1993-94. Wall stands 6'3" and weighs 214lbs. He covers the lower part of the net very well. Wall appeared in 103 career collegiate games over four seasons and amassed a college career record of 58-34-10, a 2.28 GAA, a .918 save percentage and nine shutouts. Wall's 58 career wins with UMass Lowell are the most by a goaltender since the school began playing in Division 1. He broke Roloson's record of 51 wins. He established a collegiate career-best in appearances (37), wins (26), and GAA (2.06) as a freshman in 2016-17, and he established a UMass-Lowell record for wins by a rookie goaltender, previously held by current Winnipeg Jet, Connor Hellebuyck. Wall also helped UMass-Lowell win the Hockey East Championship in 2016-17, and was named to the Hockey East All-Tournament Team. He posted a 2.10 GAA or better in three of his four collegiate seasons. IN OTHER SIGNINGS After four years at Penn State (Big 10), Peyton Jones signs a deal with the Colorado Eagles for 2020-21. Yanni Kaldis Cornell University (ECACHL) signs with Bakersfield (ECHL). Along with Wall, that makes 93 Division I players who have signed North American professional contracts. Including European deals, 150 collegiate players in total have turned professional. Hockey East saw 21 players turn pro in North America and the Big 10 has 20. They are followed by the NCHC with 17. The WCHA has 13, while the ECACHL has 12 and the AHA with nine. Penn State has the most signees with seven. They are followed by Western Michigan (NCHC) with six, Ferris State (WCHA) with five, and Hockey East's Boston University and Vermont with four each. Leading the 39 Division III signees is Northland College (NCHA) who've had four players put their names on contracts. Matt Tugnutt of Sacred Heart University becomes the 13th Division I grad transfer and the second one for Providence College Friars (HE) in goal. Jason Herter, Assistant Coach with the two-time defending NCAA champions, the University of Minnesota-Duluth, has stepped down to take another position in hockey but has not declared if it was in pro or college. Scott Morrow (Darien) just finished at Shattuck’s St. Mary in Minnesota, had his USHL rights traded from the Youngstown Phantoms to the Fargo (ND) Force for next season. In 2021-22, Morrow starts playing for North Dakota (NCHC). He was also drafted by the Val D’ Foreurs in the 2nd round 21st overall in the 2018 QMJHL Draft. NHL SEASON The NHL wants to minimize the loss of revenue to the escrow fund which they and the players share as a part of the CBA agreement. The NHL is trying to salvage the regular season and the Stanley Cup playoffs a massive revenue generator. Presently, they're trying to find COVID-19 light cities to re-start and complete the remaining 14-15 games left in the regular season. There is also talk that they could jump to just a 12-team per conference playoff format. It is unclear which way they are going to go. Also being discussed is the recall of AHL players from each team's affiliates as a taxi squad once the AHL season is officially canceled. However, there are some serious issues regarding contracts that need to be worked out. “It comes down that the NHL is trying to preserve the sponsorships and the TV ad revenue to minimize the losses. It's paramount to the league right now, however, we’re getting close to fish-or-cut-bait time for the NHL and AHL because the clock is ticking to a new fiscal year of business that starts by the end of June,” commented a long-time hockey source. The NHL isn’t alone in trying to complete their seasons. Both Ukraine and Spain have tentative plans to finish their playoffs in September. Ukraine still has the semifinals and finals while Spain has just its championship round. CONGRATULATIONS Former Hartford Whaler and Rangers' defenseman, James Patrick, will be inducted into the University of North Dakota's sports Hall-of-Fame. Patrick was a first-round pick (9th overall) by the Rangers in the 1981 Draft. While with UND, he led the Fighting Sioux, as they were known then, to an NCAA title in his freshmen year and he was an all-tournament selection in the Frozen Four. Patrick was on the WCHA Conference's second-team All-Star. He was the conference Rookie-of-the-Year and won a WJC gold medal with Canada. In his sophomore season, he was a first-team WCHA All-Star, was first-team NCAA All America, and was a Hobey Baker finalist. Patrick played in 1,280 NHL games with the Rangers, Whalers, the Calgary Flames, and Buffalo Sabres. Upon retiring, he spent seven years with Buffalo and then three years with the Dallas Stars as an assistant coach. Patrick is currently entering his fourth year as head coach with the Winnipeg Ice (WHL), a franchise moved from Cranbrook, BC (Kootenay) two years ago. His nephew Nolan is a member of the Philadelphia Flyers. IN OTHER COLLEGE NEWS Three weeks ago, The Vermont Catamounts saw long-time coach, Bob Gaudet, announce his retirement after 23 years. Todd Woodcroft becomes just their fifth coach in Vermont school history. This week the University sadly mourns the passing of their first Division I coach, Jim Cross (1965-1984), who shepherded them in from the Division II level. Cross, 87 passed away due to COVID-19 complications. Cross coached Vermont to three ECAC Division II championships including back-to-back titles in 1973-1974 with a conference record of 37-1. He was named National Division II Coach-of-the-Year in 1974. Cross help the Catamounts transition to Division I hockey in the ECAC in 1974 getting into third place in their first season. His 19-year coaching mark was 280-251-9. A BU grad, Cross was honored by the Terriers in 1975 with its Harry Cleverly award given to alumni who excel in coaching. Cross was inducted into the University of Vermont Athletic Sports Hall-of-Fame in 1996 and just last year, the Hobey Baker Memorial Foundation named him recipient of the “Legend of College Hockey” award. He will posthumously be inducted into the Vermont Sports Hall-of-Fame later this year. Among the players he coached in Division I included, former New Haven Nighthawk, John Glynne (Hamden) and Kirk McCaskill, who had a much better professional baseball career with the California Angels (nee Anaheim Angels) for eleven years as a pitcher, after one season with the Sherbrooke Jets (AHL). He was one of the few hockey players drafted in two sports hockey (Winnipeg) and baseball. USHL DRAFT On Monday and Tuesday, the USHL conducted Phase I and Phase II of its annual draft. In Phase I, in the 2nd round, (26th overall), Connor Welsh (Greenwich/Brunswick Prep) was selected by the Sioux City Musketeers. Andrew DellaDonna from the US Selects Academy at South Kent Prep U-15 team was taken by Cedar Rapids Roughriders in the 4th round (55th overall). He is an Ohio State (Big 10) commit for 2022-23. In the fourth round (57th overall), the Fargo (ND) Force took Cam Knuble, the son of former Ranger, Mike Knuble, who played with the Fox Motor Sports U-15 (T1EHL). His older brother, Cam Knuble, just finished his junior career with the Muskegon Lumberjacks. The elder Knuble was his head coach and an assistant coach with Grand Rapids this past season. In the fifth round (63rd overall) Cedar Rapids selected John Emmons Jr. from the Oakland (MI) Grizzlies U-15 (HPHL). He is the son of John Emmons Sr. (New Canaan/Yale University) who was an assistant coach of his team this season. Lucas DiChiara (Fairfield), of the nationally renowned Shattuck St. Mary’s program in Minnesota, was taken in the ninth round (131st overall) by Muskegon. He is not currently college committed. In Phase II on Tuesday, Tabor Heaslip of the Avon Old Farms Winged Beavers was taken in the fourth round (56th overall) by Sioux City. He is currently slated to play for the UCONN Huskies (HE) in the fall. Five spots later, Matt Crasa from the Selects Academy at South Kent Prep, went in the fourth round (61st overall) was taken by Fargo. He skated for the Cowichan Valley Capitals (BCHL) this year with 44 points in 51 games and is slated to skate with the Sacred Heart University Pioneers (AHA) in the fall. In the ninth round (125th overall), Zach Tonelli of Taft Prep (Watertown) was taken by Cedar Rapids. He is the youngest son of New York Islanders great, John Tonelli. He is Brown University (ECACHL) commit 2021-22 where his older brother Jordan, also a Taft grad, will start in the fall. Ten picks later, David Andreychuk of Gunnery Prep (Washington, CT) went to the Waterloo Black Hawks. He is a St. Lawrence University (ECACHL) 2021-22 commit. The sons ex-Hartford Wolf Pack and Bridgeport Sound Tiger, David Karpa, were selected one round apart. In the 15th round (223rd overall) Zakary Karpa was taken by the Waterloo Black Hawks. He played for the US National Development Team (USNDTP) in the USHL, the US National U-18 Team. He's committed to the Princeton Tigers (ECACHL) in the fall. Younger brother Jakob Karpa went in the 16th round (242nd overall) to the Omaha Lancers from the Victory Honda U-18 (T1EHL/Midget) team. He is slated to skate for the Grande Prairie Storm (AJHL) in the fall. Lastly, Ryan Vellluci, the son of ex-Whaler Mike, the current coach of the Wilkes Barre/Scranton Penguins, was taken in the 18th round (262nd overall) by Muskegon from the Detroit Little Caesars U-18 (T1EHL) squad. He was taken by Saginaw Spirit in the 2018 OHL Priority Draft in the 13th round 242th overall. The other US junior league, the Tier II NAHL, will have its Supplemental Draft on May 12th. 81 players will be drafted (three per team) and an extra tender contract can be offered to one player per team the next day. The NAHL has pushed its main draft to July 21st. The QMJHL Draft will be conducted remotely and is scheduled for early next month. The first round will be on Friday, June 5th, with rounds 2-14 the following day. The U.S. Draft will be Monday, June 8th. The QMJHL released its CSB’s final list of available players and there are quite a few Connecticut kids listed as possibilities. A slew from the Greenwich-based prep school, Brunswick School. John Burdett, leading scorer, Andon Cerbone (Stamford), and John Gammage are on that list. Jakub Teply (Stamford) is scheduled to play for the Powell River RiverKings (BCHL) in the fall, and Beanie Richter, the youngest son of former Ranger great, Mike Richter. From Greenwich HS's Charlie Zolin and William Richards (Westport) from Staples HS, Peter Ungar (Stamford) of the CT Whalers U-15 (AYHL), Arthur Smith (Farmington) from the US Selects Academy at South Kent Prep and Daniel Lurie (Westminster Prep (Simsbury). Nicholas LeClaire (Colchester), a grad of Xavier HS (Middletown), who is now at Northfield Prep (MAPREP) and Charlie Leddy (Fairfield) of Avon Old Farms, who is slated to be with the USNDTP U-17 team in the fall and a Boston College (HE) commit in 2022-23, Aidan Cobb (Ridgefield) from Kent Prep and a Cornell University (ECACHL) commit for 2020-21, Charles Andriole (Branford) of Loomis Chaffe (Windsor), and incoming Taft Prep (Watertown) player, Isaiah Green (Sandy Hook) are also expected to be selected. The CHL Import Draft usually held a week after the NHL Draft is in a state of suspension because of COVID-19. TRANSACTIONS Alexander D. Tertyshny (Choate Prep), after playing with three teams last season, Belye Medvedi Chelyabinsk (Russia-MHL), Corpus Christi (NAHL), and Northeast (NAHL), heads to AIC-American International College (AHA) in the fall. Tertyshny is the son of former NHL’er, Dmitri Tertyshny, who played just one season with Philadelphia but died in a tragic boating accident in the off-season in Kelowna, BC on July 23, 1999. Justin Danforth (Sacred Heart University/Sound Tigers), departs Lukko Rauma (Finland-FEL) to Vityaz Podolsk (Russia-KHL) for next season. Heading to Europe will be Swedish defenseman Pontus Ahberg from the Toronto Marlies to Traktor Chelyabinsk (Russia-KHL) after playing for six years in North America. Anton Wedin leaves Rockford/Chicago (NHL) for HV 71 (Sweden-SHL). According to European media reports, several players are in the last stages of contract negotiations and are waiting on the call of the AHL season to be officially be canceled before making the announcement. Mikhail Vorobyov of Lehigh Valley (Philadelphia Flyers) is said to be heading to Salavat Yalaev (Russia-KHL). Josh Persson Bakersfield Condors (Edmonton Oilers)/San Diego Gulls, and Gustav Forsling from the Charlotte Checkers are both to be going to EHC Biel/Bienne (Switzerland-LNA). Christian Folin Laval Rocket (Montreal Canadiens) to Frolunda HC (Sweden-SHL) and Henrik Borgstrom, Springfield Thunderbirds (Florida Panthers) to Jokerit Helsinki (Finland-KHL) are all still pending. That would make eleven players in total, with 10 of the 31 AHL teams to have at least one player sign overseas for 2020-21. Ex-Pack goalie, Miika Wiikman, who played last year with the Coventry Blaze (England-EIHL) and with HC Anglet (France-FREL) last year, announced his retirement due to injuries. Anton Sundin, the son of year one ex-Wolf Pack, Ronnie Sundin, after playing with three teams last year, signs with Halmstad HC (Sweden Division-1). Henrik Samuelsson, the son of ex-Whalers great, Rangers player, and an assistant coach with the Wolf Pack and Avon Old Farms, Ulf Samuelsson, leaves Manchester (England-EIHL) and signs a deal with Saryarka Karaganda (Russia-VHL). Ulf is still listed as the head coach for Leksands IF (Sweden-SHL) and a pro scout for Seattle (NHL). The youngest brother, Adam Samuelsson, is with Sudbury (OHL), and the eldest brother, Philip, is said to be close to signing with HK Riga (Latvia-KHL). Ex-New Haven Nighthawks and Ranger, Glen Hanlon, leaves DVTK (Hungary-EBEL) for Krefeld (Germany-DEL) as their new head coach. Former Beast of New Haven defenseman, Jaroslav Spacek, is an assistant coach of HC Plzen (Czech Republic-CEL) and an assistant with the Czech National Team program, saw his eldest son, David Spacek, who plays for HC Plzen U-16/U-18 squads and for the Czech Republic U-17 Team last season. Read the full article

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junker-town · 5 years

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Life and death: The true cost of inequality in high school football

The true cost of inequality in high school football

The last time she spoke to her son, Lashona Williams was sitting alone in the bleachers of Greenville High School’s football stadium, near midfield and a few rows up from the team bench. The school band, banging drums and cymbals and decked out in Hornet black and gold, had just marched from the parking lot. The scent of barbecue and tamales swirled from under the stands into the night air.

Usually a contingent of family — siblings, a godsister, godmothers — went to the games with Williams to watch Jeremiah. Not on Nov. 2, 2018. An afternoon cold front had plunged the temperature to 50 degrees at the time of the 7 p.m. kickoff, unseasonably cool for the Mississippi Delta. Greenville, which had lost every game since the season opener in August, was playing its last regular-season game against Madison Central, a perennial power from the Jackson suburbs headed for the state playoffs.

Despite the challenge, Jeremiah Williams was more optimistic about the outcome than his family and many of his peers. Between classes in the white-tiled hallways of Greenville High, he wore headphones over his ears, zoning out to music by NBA Young Boy. In the south end zone, just before gametime, he kept slapping his teammate Rufino Griffin’s hand, trying to hype him up. “That day he was so excited,” says Jokayah Sanders, his close friend. “He was like, ‘we finna win.’”

Jeremiah was known to friends and family as Dugg, a shortened version of his childhood nickname “Dugga Wugga.” “When you first meet Dugg you’d think he was mean or antisocial,” says Errick Simmons, Jr., a Greenville football player. “But once you really got to know him, with us, we really knew how he really acted. He was goofy, playful, really sneaky.”

When Sanders met Jeremiah in the second grade, she says she and Jeremiah made a pact to go steady. Not long after, he sat next to another girl on the school bus. Sanders said she would never speak to him again, a vow that lasted for only a few days. “We couldn’t stay mad at each other,” she says. When he wasn’t playing sports at the local YMCA or the Elwyn Ward Recreation Center, he was hanging out with Sanders. They liked watching old movies like Baby Boy and Love & Basketball, and she’d make them noodles with Ro-Tel cheese.

Jeremiah had beaming brown eyes and a buzzcut, and his face often expressed a warm, knowing smile. Despite standing no taller than 5’8 and weighing perhaps 165 pounds, he had blossomed into Greenville’s star player, a junior defensive back tasked with stopping the opposing team’s top receiver. His status on the team was evident from the gold numeral emblazoned on his jersey: No. 1.

But with Greenville fielding the opening kickoff, he began the game on the bench. Before the offense had run a play, Jeremiah turned around to the bleachers, facing his mother.

Mom, can you get me a Gatorade?

Yeah, son.

At the concession stand, nobody was in line. Williams bought Jeremiah his drink and, for herself, some nachos. She had no idea what was happening on the field.

“He just laid on the ground. No movement. No nothing. I called his name, shaking him. Nothing.” - Lashona Williams, mother of Jeremiah

Then-Greenville coach Sherrod Gideon remembers the play clearly. “It sticks with me every day,” he says. “I go back and watch the video and look at it (and wonder) what could’ve happened on that play to have a different outcome.” Greenville threw an interception on the first play of the game. Jeremiah entered the field from the sidelines. On what Gideon recalls as the next play, a Madison Central player broke loose on a run after Greenville’s defense overcommitted to the inside. Jeremiah freed himself from blockers as the ball carrier was about to score. At the same time that Jeremiah went in for the hit, the player, who was taller, lowered his shoulder, and the top of Jeremiah’s head collided with the player’s body.

When Lashona Williams returned from the concession stand, the stadium had fallen quiet. “I could see a player down on the field,” she says. “I knew that it couldn’t be him because he was just on the sideline. And I come up and the cheerleaders turn around. They looking. Now my heart is beating. I’m looking for a ‘1.’ It’s like everybody’s looking at me now.

“He just laid on the ground. No movement. No nothing. I called his name, shaking him. Nothing.”

Jeremiah Williams was airlifted from the stadium to a hospital in Jackson, suffering from fractured vertebrae. A ventilator kept him alive for seven days. He never regained consciousness, and his brain never showed any signs of activity. He was the third player to die during a high school football game in Mississippi in the fall of 2018.

On Sept. 10, 2018, Houston High School’s William Anderson, a 15-year-old offensive lineman, removed himself from a JV game and collapsed on the sideline. He died three hours later from an embolism. Doctors at the hospital in Tupelo, a 45-minute drive from Houston, had to wait for Anderson to stabilize before transferring him to a trauma center in Memphis. Two weeks earlier, he and his mother had been discussing the death of another player. Dennis Mitchell, a 16-year-old defensive lineman for Byhalia High School collapsed and died on Aug. 24 while playing at Coahoma County High School, in the Delta. Byhalia did not have an athletic trainer on hand.

According to the National Center for Catastrophic Sport Injury Research, 218 middle school and high school boys died from football between 2000 and 2018, an average of 11 deaths per year. One-hundred-fifty boys suffered indirect deaths, from cardiac arrest, blood clots, heat stroke or similar causes. Sixty-eight of the deaths were direct. Like Williams, most of these 68 boys died after sustaining blows to the head and neck.

Football deaths are occurring in an era in which improved tackling techniques, athletic trainers, AEDs and helmets have supposedly made football safer than ever. At the college and professional level, death is much rarer. But the high school level is plagued by inequality, crippling budget cuts and de facto school segregation, factors that prevent underserved schools from affording athletic trainers, new helmets and lessons in the latest tackling advancements. Since 2009, the districts encompassing Houston, Greenville and Byhalia have faced annual state funding shortfalls that cumulatively total $55 million. Bereft of resources, underserved urban and rural high schools often fail to provide basic equipment and safety measures, or are located far from trauma centers. These shortcomings, a disturbing wedge between the haves and have-nots, add greater risk to a game that leads to catastrophic injury and death every fall.

Although nobody has completed an academic study examining the characteristics of high school football deaths, a pattern has emerged over the last several years: Most of the boys who have died are young men of color from distressed communities, like Williams, Mitchell and Anderson.

In the January/February 2019 issue of the journal Sports Health, University of Washington sports medicine professor Jon Drezner published a study on sudden cardiac arrest, one of the leading causes of indirect deaths in high school football. Drezner examined athletes in all sports between the ages of 11 and 27. It found that though almost half of athletes who suffered sudden cardiac arrest (SCA) survived, black athletes were twice as likely to die from SCA as white athletes. The study spurred Drezner to explore connections between race and socioeconomics in SCA. The socioeconomic data did not return a statistically significant correlation with death over the four-year period. “However,” Drezner says, “they all trended in that direction, suggesting that maybe there’s a relationship.”

And in the first two years of the data, socioeconomic factors did correlate with death. “If you had SCA you were more likely to die of SCA if you were in a school with a higher percentage of students on free and reduced lunch,” he says.

In 2019, at least six high school boys were reported to have died from football, in Florida, West Virginia, Oklahoma, Minnesota, Missouri and Louisiana. Lashona Williams has heard about many on the news. When a player named Jacquez Welch died during a football game in September in Florida, the news was a particularly hard reminder of Jeremiah. “Son o son how I miss you so very much,” she posted on Facebook. “My heart is so heavy. Momma is trying her hardest to keep it together but Lord knows it’s hard and it seems like ever since you left me all I see is young men passing away in the same sport.”

Shortly before he died, William Anderson discussed quitting football with his parents. He preferred basketball, ATV rides on his family’s wooded property and perfecting his hair: William’s goal was to one day be an entrepreneur in the hair industry. But going to college was going to be an obstacle, given the middle-class salaries of his stepfather Jamarcus Smith, a truck driver, and his mother Vida Anderson-Smith, a bank teller. When William brought up the possibility of quitting football, Jamarcus Smith remembers telling his son, “‘If you don’t want to play football just think about that football can get you to a scholarship and you can try to start your own hair product.’” Although William was a freshman, Houston coach Ty Hardin says that William’s size and talent projected him to become a college player.

Jeremiah Williams, the sixth of Lashona Williams’s eight children, was on a similar trajectory. He was dribbling balls before he could walk, and would talk to his friends about playing Division I. In a September 2018 game, Jeremiah held the top wide receiver in the state to 37 yards, and Gideon realized Jeremiah was becoming a college prospect.

Even as the risks of football become better understood, black children, who often come from middle- and lower-income families, continue to play the sport, while white children, who are often from wealthier families, are giving it up. About 24 percent of white high school boys play football, according to estimates from a 2018 Monitoring the Future survey of 10th grade boys by University of Michigan professor Philip Veliz, a number that has fallen steadily from 30 percent since 2014. But 35 percent of black high school boys play football, almost the same as the 37 percent who played in 2014. White athletes still account for the majority of total high school football players, at 56 percent, according to Veliz, with black athletes representing 22 percent.

The lure of football is particularly strong in Mississippi, where nearly one-third of children grow up in poverty, and the sport has long been a way to earn college scholarships. It is one of only eight states where high school football participation has not declined since 2010. The end of every fall week is a three-day celebration: The state’s numerous junior colleges play on Thursdays, high schools on Fridays and Ole Miss, Mississippi State and Southern Miss on Saturdays, along with storied HBCU’s like Jackson State and Mississippi Valley State.

Seemingly every school district — from the Gulf Coast in the south, to the Piney Woods of the east, to the Delta of the west — boasts star alumni. A Mississippi statistician found that, as of 2016, 44 of the state’s 82 counties had sent at least one player to the NFL. In 2018, Mississippi ranked fourth in the country in current NFL players per capita, ahead of Florida, Texas and California.

Gideon, the former Greenville coach, is an example of a Mississippi local using football to change his life. He was a top recruit and honor student at Greenwood High School in the Delta, an All-American wide receiver at Southern Mississippi and an NFL Draft pick (he was selected one spot behind Tom Brady in 2000). In Greenville and other high poverty Delta communities, according to Gideon, “There’s really nothing to do if you’re not playing sports. You really can get into some type of trouble if that’s not what you doing.”

Outside of sports like lacrosse, baseball and ice hockey, which are often not offered at rural and urban schools and often require athletes to join expensive club teams, football gives high school athletes the highest percentage chance of making an NCAA team. Thousands more roster spots are also available at the NAIA and community college level. The current coach of Greenville High School, Quintarus McCray, estimates 10 of his senior players can advance to play in junior colleges. “I’m just trying to get them away from here,” he says, “even a couple hours away.”

But the resources available to Mississippi’s rural and urban public schools don’t match the importance that players and their families attach to the game. When Gideon arrived at Greenville High School in 2017, he says the high school didn’t have blocking sleds or tackling rings, which players use to improve tackling technique while avoiding physical contact at practice. The helmets, which must be replaced every 10 years per guidelines from the National Operating Committee on Standards for Athletic Equipment, were still usable but nearing their expiration date. On the lower end, helmets go for $150 to $200 each, and $500 for top of the line models. Outfitting a full team of 60 to 70 players would have cost the school approximately $14,000, the entirety of Greenville’s annual football budget, Gideon says.

Greenville High School, where almost every student is black and every student is eligible for free lunch, plays at the 6A level of athletics. Its district opponents in 2018 included suburban Northwest Rankin and Madison Central. Both schools have racially diverse student bodies but are majority white. For athletics, Greenville budgeted $78,000 in 2018-19, or about $64 per student. Northwest Rankin budgeted $215,000 ($127 per student) and Madison Central budgeted $339,000 ($261 per student). Northwest Rankin and Madison Central also typically receive mid-six figure contributions from booster clubs, according to Form-990 tax filings, and have modern weight rooms and training programs, sleek uniforms, doctors on the sidelines and video scoreboards.

“Look at they facilities and then come to Greenville,” Gideon says, “and you think there’s no way these two teams are playing against each other.”

Greenville also did not employ a staff athletic trainer or use one on a contract basis when Gideon started coaching, he says. He reached an agreement with an athletic trainer at Mississippi Valley State to attend games when she wasn’t on the road. Gideon says he paid the athletic trainer $200 for each game out of his pocket or with funds from the school’s modest booster club. “Especially competing against those types of teams you have to have [athletic trainers, quality helmets and tackling rings] in order for those kids to be safe,” he says.

“There’s really nothing to do if you’re not playing sports. You really can get into some type of trouble if that’s not what you doing.” - Sherrod Gideon, former Greenville High School football coach

Gideon left Greenville at the end of the 2018-19 school year for an assistant coaching position at Yazoo City High School, whose district was taken over by the state after receiving the Mississippi Department of Education’s lowest accountability rating. There, he again found a school lacking in proper safety measures, including an athletic trainer. The school, he says, now contracts an athletic trainer who works for the county. Yazoo City alumnus Fletcher Cox, who plays for the Philadelphia Eagles, donated money that will help the school purchase new helmets and refurbish the locker room.

I asked several of the people interviewed for this story what they hoped would happen after a year in which three Mississippi boys died playing football. Many offered immeasurable goals like community togetherness and school spirit. Others, like Gideon and Errick Simmons, the mayor of Greenville, were more pragmatic. Simmons says that in the aftermath of Jeremiah Williams’s death the whole community rallied (a GoFundMe raised $40,000 from black and white residents, including a prominent Republican business owner), but longer-term changes are needed. “The state needs to get involved to have consistency from school to school,” he says. “Between black schools and predominantly white schools, the state should be involved to ensure safety across the board for football players.”

The failure of Mississippi to adequately protect football players is tied to decades of abandonment and neglect that trace back to the end of segregation. After Brown v. Board in 1954, white Mississippi legislators, seeking to avoid desegregation, wanted an option to dissolve public education entirely. They rewrote the state constitution so the legislature was no longer required to provide public education funding. In Greenville, private segregation academies sprung up in churches and hotels. Although newspaper accounts at the time cited college prep as motivation, white parents freely expressed concern about their children attending school with black children at whites-only meetings. Local historian Benjy Nelken, who had recently returned from college, recalls attending one of these meetings and warning that abandoning the public schools would be bad for Greenville.

Nelken runs Greenville’s history museum, which is adorned with old maps, newspaper clippings and photos of Archie Manning and Louis Armstrong. When I visited with him on a September afternoon, he took a framed picture off the wall featuring the first graduating class of Greenville’s Washington School, a segregation academy that opened in 1970. Grayscale portraits of six white girls are arranged in a circle. “Those are the first ones that parents wanted to be removed,” he says, “because of fear of the black males.”

Today the vast majority of white children in Greenville (the city is about 20 percent white and 80 percent black) attend Washington School, St. Joseph’s Catholic School or Greenville Christian Academy. According to research by Jake McGraw, project coordinator at the William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation, roughly 40 percent of Mississippi schools feature student bodies that are at least 90 percent of one race. Last year, a Center for Public Integrity analysis found that no Mississippi public school district that was made up of 75 percent or more black students was rated “A” or “B” in the state’s accountability ratings. And no school district with a proportion of white students 75 percent or higher was rated “D” or “F.” Greenville High School received an “F” in accountability ratings for the 2018-19 school year. Majority-black Byhalia High School and Houston High School received a “D” and “C,” respectively.

“Race has always been the principal dividing line of who gets an education in Mississippi and who doesn’t,” McGraw says. “While the systems and laws have changed and progressed, in many ways we still in 2019 have a fundamentally segregated system.”

In the last decade, Mississippi lawmakers failed to reach the mandated funding level of the Mississippi Adequate Education Program (MAEP), which was passed in 1997 to ensure greater support at lower-income schools. Statewide since FY 2009, school districts have been shortchanged by an estimated $2.5 billion, according to The Parents’ Campaign Research & Education Fund. The pinch is particularly severe in urban and rural areas that can’t rely on wealthy local tax bases.

In 2015, the Greenville school district was one of nearly two dozen districts to legally challenge the state’s failure to fund schools through MAEP, but the Mississippi Supreme Court ruled the government did not have to fully fund the schools. McGraw says the majority of Republican state leaders “fought tooth and nail” against the lawsuit, and Lt. Gov. Tate Reeves, who is now governor, later tried, but failed, to eliminate MAEP.

“The state and the current leadership have not taken an active role, an aggressive role, and have not shown great concern in public education,” Simmons says. “The policies of the last eight years have been vouchers and taking money from the public schools and getting money for the academies or creating a charter school system. If we really invest taxpayers’ money in the public school system, you will see an improvement.”

Facing shortages, schools have been forced to make sacrifices. Byhalia High School did not provide an athletic trainer at the game when Dennis Mitchell died because it could not afford one. Principal James Kimbrough, who was at the game, says Byhalia still does not contract or employ an athletic trainer, and its rural location away from major hospitals and universities gives it scant options for finding volunteers. “If you look throughout Mississippi, most of the rural schools or less affluent schools, they’re not going to have that,” he says. Kimbrough described state government officials as being unaware of the needs of schools like Byhalia: “They don’t realize that kids with less need more. That’s the golden rule. And I don’t think a lot of them understand that rule.”

The nonprofit governing body of state athletics, the Mississippi High School Activities Association, does not require athletic trainers or even AEDs, although it encourages both. Don Hinton, the association’s executive director, says the limited budgets and rural locations of many schools would make mandates difficult. In 2015, a state legislature committee audited the MHSAA over concerns about athletic eligibility requirements and financial transparency, but not for safety.

As of late January, more than 17 months after Mitchell died, the state medical examiner’s office, beset by funding cuts, has not returned a cause of death. Scotty Meredith, the coroner in the county where Mitchell died, says cases can take up to three years to be resolved. He says Mitchell’s mother has called him two to three times a month seeking an update. “There’s nothing in the system for me to give her closure,” Meredith says. “It’s pitiful.”

In northeast Mississippi, William Anderson had to be taken to a hospital in Tupelo because the local emergency room of Houston’s Trace Regional Hospital closed in 2014 due to financial distress. William’s mother, Vida Anderson-Smith, says the Tupelo staff wanted to airlift him to a higher-level trauma hospital in Memphis. Before he was stable for the transfer, about three hours after leaving the football game, William lost consciousness when an undiagnosed blood clot traveled to his heart.

“Race has always been the principal dividing line of who gets an education in Mississippi and who doesn’t.” - Jake McGraw, William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation

Trace Regional was one of five rural hospitals to close in the state since 2010, and a February 2019 study placed nearly half of Mississippi’s remaining rural hospitals at high financial risk. Former Houston State Rep. Russell Jolly has attributed the closure of Trace to Mississippi’s failure to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. Ryan Kelly, executive director of the Mississippi Rural Health Association, says Medicaid expansion would shore up hospital finances and help patients, but numerous other problems, including the downcoding of emergency room visits by insurance companies and Mississippi’s lack of a universal credentialing system for doctors, have contributed to the crisis.

Hardin, the Houston coach, says a volunteer athletic trainer who attends most of the high school’s live sporting events, sprung into action when William collapsed. But Hardin still thinks about the ways William’s life could have been saved, and fears for future emergencies involving Houston athletes. “What if something else happens?” he says. “What could’ve been different that day if we could have taken him to the emergency room a mile, five miles down the road?”

As schools, hospitals, and other institutions reel from a lack of public investment, legislators and former Gov. Phil Bryant have filled the state’s rainy day fund to its highest level ever. In 2016, they passed the largest tax break in Mississippi history.

Football has been used as a public relations tool for the state. Gov. Bryant’s attachment to the sport is so well known that he has appeared as a guest analyst on the SEC Network. He routinely attends college football games. When Jeremiah Williams was in the hospital after suffering his neck injury, Bryant implored his Twitter followers to pray for the student-athlete. Months later, Bryant signed an education budget that was $200 million lower than the state is obligated to provide under the Mississippi Adequate Education Program. The Greenville district’s shortfall for the year was $2 million below the mandated funding level and its budget was $1.8 million below what it received the previous fiscal year.

Anderson-Smith doesn’t blame football for her son’s death. She wanted to talk to SB Nation in part to raise awareness about the danger of missed diagnoses of blood clots among children.

William is buried in a cemetery located on 500-plus acres of family land on Houston’s outskirts. Before William died, he roamed the countryside, criss-crossing trails on a blue Polaris ATV that his mother and stepfather had recently bought him. On Sundays at Missionary Baptist Church, William was an usher and sang in the top row of the choir, fourth spot from the left. He was fearless: The family heard stories of how he stood up for kids who were bullied.

In the last 17 months, life without William hasn’t gotten easier for William’s mother and stepfather. Smith thinks about his son when he’s behind the wheel of his truck, driving alone. Weeks before William died, they went to Abilene, Texas, on their first trip together. Anderson-Smith thinks about William all the time — when she’s cooking, when she’s buying home freshener products because he always wanted the house to smell good. He was the baby of the family for about 10 years, until his younger sister, Madison, came along. “My oldest daughter would always say, ‘he’s so spoiled,’” Anderson-Smith says. “I’d say, ‘but you know he’s the baby.’ And you look at it now I got to spoil him because he didn’t get to stay here as long.”

A few months ago, Anderson-Smith spotted “Share a Coke” bottles featuring the University of Alabama logo, her son’s favorite college team, and with the names William and Anderson. She bought the bottles with both names and set them up in his room near his PlayStation 4 and Houston High School uniform.

In the weeks after Jeremiah’s death, Lashona Williams replayed a gut-wrenching conversation they had earlier in the season when she questioned whether he was tackling too much with his head. “He was like, ‘Momma, I’m tackling right. I know what I’m doing. I know what I’m doing,’” Williams says.

According to Hinton, the MHSAA has encouraged football coaches to take courses on tackling techniques but does not require certification as other states do, like Texas. The coaching staff at the private Washington School in Greenville recently attended a rugby-style tackling clinic in Alabama that featured lessons from Seattle Seahawks staff. The coaches at the grade school level at Washington Day are closely supervised by the high school staff and teach the same techniques. Those kinds of tackling lessons — that emphasize keeping the head up and out of the way during tackles — are missing for many young children in the Delta, Gideon says. When they get to high school, they often face a curve in learning how to properly tackle. Gideon says Jeremiah “had more knowledge than anyone on the team.”

When Jeremiah’s teammates and their parents expressed the possibility of leaving the game after her son’s death, Williams says she told them to keep playing. Almost all the players in Jeremiah’s class returned for a 2019 season that featured the highest attendance and community support in years, as well as new helmets and uniforms purchased by the school.

Greenville had bigger concerns than safety on its football field. Three weeks before Jeremiah’s death, another child, a 15-year-old Greenville High School student, had been gunned down while riding a bike. And two weeks after his death, a 17-year-old was found fatally shot in a home on a Saturday morning. Between random violence, drug-related violence and accidents, so many Greenville High School students died during Jeremiah’s time as a student that administrators can’t give an exact count off the top of their heads. They say it was between 10 and 12.

“It hurt to the core to lose my child,” Williams says. “But it’s a different hurt than his life being taken by a gun.”

In Byhalia, at a memorial assembly for Dennis Mitchell reported on by the Memphis Commercial Appeal, his sister Kiara Mitchell said the fact he died playing the game he loved hurt less than another frightening possibility: “I’ve told his football team that. I wanted that to get to them because that’s how this is helping me get through this situation. There wasn’t no other way. It wasn’t violent, it wasn’t in the streets. That’s why it sits well for me.”

On a Friday night in late September, Williams is back at Greenville’s stadium for the team’s game against Murrah High School. Her seat is behind the home bench, surrounded by family and friends, but she stands on her feet for much of the game. She stomps in disapproval at penalties against Greenville High. When a player tweaks an ankle, she draws closer to the bench to ask how he is doing.

Greenville rushes out to an early lead, but Murrah storms back in the fourth quarter. Trailing, 14-9, Murrah has the ball in the red zone and appears poised to score. But Greenville’s defense stuffs the running back behind the line of scrimmage. The next play is a sack. Then, with about 10 seconds left, Murrah’s quarterback apparently means to spike the football but instead kneels. The clock runs out.

Williams hustles down the bleachers and onto the patchy green field for the celebration. The players rush toward her, and she hugs as many as four at a time. Many of the boys spent 2018 Thanksgiving and 2019 Mother’s Day with her. At the season opener, they pronounced her captain, and she led them onto the field while wearing a No. 1 jersey. Getting back to the games required prayer and counseling from her pastor, but Williams decided she wanted to provide support, too. “I feel like it’s my duty as Jeremiah’s mom to walk the walk with them,” she says. “They were there. They’re damaged as well. It wasn’t just me and my kids or sisters, aunts, brothers. Those kids were there. They witnessed all that.

“I pray daily for them and not just them but for football players all over the world to just be safe.”

Twenty minutes later, after the fans have returned to their cars and the players to the locker room, Williams is one of the last to leave. She walks with her sister through a chain-link gate that is adjacent to several homemade signs decorated by students. Most are the usual sort seen at football games nationwide: “Push ‘Em, Sack ‘Em, Attack ‘Em” and “It’s Tackle Time.”

One sign is a reminder of the tragic losses Williams and other mothers endure every year from football. It says, “Ashes to Ashes. Dust to Dust.”

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andrewuttaro · 5 years

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New Look Sabres: 2018-2019 Season Retrospective

We have a lot to talk about, don’t we? Everything and nothing I guess. For some reason the word “Sparks” is sticking with me. No, not the crap backup goaltender for Toronto. Jason Botterill used that word to describe what he saw out of the Buffalo Sabres in the first half of this season. The word will/is/was probably used several times at Locker Room Cleanout. If you’ve read this blog over the second 41 games of the season you probably read along as I struggled with how to say this the right way. On one hand, the second half of the season was so bad it pretty much erases all the good of the first half. On the other hand, every member of the quote unquote core of this team had a career season on their respective lines of the stat sheet. That’s not worth nothing. Of course, the big news we’ve yet to discuss here on the blog is the firing of Phil Housley. It happened. Let’s get the obvious out of the way. Point One: That felt inevitable and anyone who thinks that was the wrong move is quite simply not tuned into the Buffalo Sabres. Point Two: His firing should not be something we mourn because of the number of coaches that have gone through since Lindy Ruff’s firing. That’s a loser’s attitude in the NHL. Point Three: There is no clear timetable on a replacement, but I like Chris Taylor and its an open question what Botterill is thinking. No one is inside his head. Those are the easy points to make and I streamline them there not just for the sake of discussion in the comments but because this is going to be the longest post in New Look Sabres history, and this matter has too many question marks to make a definitive statement. I think the only bottom line we’re going to put in the Housley Era for now is that he didn’t do the right things to get the sparks of this team to catch fire; at least not consistently. We can talk development, deployment and defense all day; but those three D’s and all the other complaints about this team right now are tiny against the big question mark of who will be the next Head Coach of the Buffalo Sabres. The bottom six and defense needs a fair bit of work by Botts in the offseason but the most important job for the next bench boss in Buffalo will be how can you turn the sparks of greatness on this team into a fire? We saw those sparks in dangerously flammable quantities in the first half of the season and sparingly in the back 41 games. This blog’s question to the coaching candidates are simple: Can you start the fire in Buffalo?

I scared my wife. We were still sitting in a Tim Hortons in Detroit when I broke out with a ghoulish cackle at seeing the news Housley was fired. It may be the most welcome news in Sabres Hockey fandom since the win streak, but we shouldn’t celebrate anyone losing their job. Right…. I’m gentleman, I’ll stop with it now. It’s also bittersweet because the season is over. Here we are, it’s over, all 82 games. After having one of the wilder off seasons in recent memory, the Buffalo Sabres entered with minimum expectations of better hockey than the prior season, one of the worst in the history of the organization. The new season got off to an encouraging start getting to above .500 for the first time in a long time before going on a record-tying run of ten straight wins! After that we pretended things were okay in December, or at least I did, and it wasn’t too long into the New Year it became clear things were not exactly going the way that first half had made us hope. After artificially inflating playoff expectations, Buffalo went on an America’s Funniest Home Videos tumble montage that had only been achieved one time before in NHL history. The team that won ten straight missed the playoffs by a sizable margin and was, after all, out of it by the end of February. Eight Straight seasons without a post-season berth and this one stings a bit worse than we’ve seen in recent years. That’s the story of this season. Here we are today to close the chapter on our Buffalo Sabres’ 49th season and we might wonder how to sum it up. In midseason thoughts I summed it up as the Reclamation Season. At that point I was in denial of the historic collapse that was taking place, but I have since woken up. And I’m still calling this season the Reclamation Season. Perhaps the new runner-up title is the Season of Missed Opportunities, but the header remains the same for me: Reclamation. The collapse was embarrassing, particularly for those of us who have non-hockey-watching friends and family who got turned onto the Sabres in the win streak and now ask us what happened. That collapse however doesn’t take away what the win streak meant outside the standings. I don’t say this to be a sappy cop-out: this season has meant more than a collapse and another missed postseason. This season was a reclamation. It was a reclamation of the Buffalo Sabres name. After a half a decade lingering in the basement to the point of perpetuity the proud name of an organization was brought to the top again, for however brief a time, and excited a new generation that scarcely understands the history. We’ve all gotten a taste of grandeur now, some of us for the first time, and there is no going back. Stop rattling off stats about losses in March and shit Rob Ray said before Hurricane Katrina: TAKE PRIDE IN THE GOOD STUFF FOR ONE DAMN MINUTE!

The immediate road ahead is riddled with question marks: the biggest has the first name Jeff. But the future is now. Easter Sunday 2011 was the last time Buffalo saw playoffs at the building now known as Key Bank Center, but November 2018 was the last time Buffalo wore the Sabres close to their hearts. When we say “remember when” with these guys now, there’s a decent chance we’re talking about last year not last decade. It’s progress, even if it was followed by historic failure. Don’t be sad it’s over, be happy it happened. The name of the Sabres has been reclaimed and I think we’re only going up from here and if we aren’t than that is too great a problem to make myself miserable over. Let’s have some joy for a brief, fleeting moment in our harrowing Sabres lives! It’s time for the First Annual New Look Sabres Awards! We saw the team itself give some of these awards away and we’ll see the league pass some of these out in June. Here I am going to attempt to pass out some fan-first awards if you will. What are some awards that Sabres Fans yearn to give to their team? Category One: The Crow-Server. The Crow-Server goes to the player who made certain fans eat crow. They made some of our takes colder than Hamburg on the water. This player was maligned by fans and proved them all wrong. The 2018-2019 New Look Sabres Crow-Server Award goes to… Tage Thompson! You may have thought Alex Nylander’s late season arrival was the biggest bust-turned-darling story of the season but think back to October where we were bemoaning Thompson’s presence on the NHL roster. Shocker, he was pretty decent actually. He’s not all there yet but he is a find that will probably play out this same story again next season! Category Two: The Robin Lehner. The Robin Lehner Award goes to the player who was scape-goated for all the team’s problems fairly or not. This player was in a tight race with another player for this award. The 2018-2019 New Look Sabres Robin Lehner Award goes to… Marco Scandella! Vladimir Sobotka almost took this one and indeed voting was really close but Scandezzy came out on top! Finally, Category Three: The Fan MVP. The Fan MVP Award goes to the player who was not only most valuable to the team but made fans pompous online. This player was a big get and won over the hearts of Sabres fans with his skating style and goal scoring. The 2018-2019 New Look Sabres Fan MVP is… Jeff Skinner! No surprise there, he was a fantastic pick up in every way… PLEASE resign him… like yesterday. OH, PLEASE JEFF, DEAR GOD WHAT DO I NEED TO DO! I CAN’T HANDLE THIS TEAM WITHOUT YOU, DON’T GO! IT’S JUST SNOW! YOU’RE FROM FICKING MARKHAM, ONTARIO YOU BEAUTIFUL ICE MAN!

Let’s talk offseason. To have this talk we have to spend a little more time on the season we just endured. The second half collapse, specifically the way it progressed from February 15th onward is straight up unacceptable. It was that game followed by a four-game losing streak that saw the Sabres crash out of playoff contention. The team, as in the players on the ice, gave up at that point and the last six to seven weeks that followed were the most unwatchable games of the season. It was painfully obvious. It’s kind of a chicken-before-the-egg kind of thing: did the players give up on the coach or did they realize their playoff hopes had died? This connects to the offseason because the collapse can really be split into two parts that each have something to say about how we should approach the summer. Collapse Part One was more on GM Jason Botterill for not tweeking the roster through trades or waiver claims much at all in the months between the end of the win streak and the trade deadline. The Montour trade is the only thin layer of protection from criticism he gets with Skinner still unsigned. There is a solid argument to be made he let the ship sink and did nothing. Collapse Part Two was entirely on Coach Phil Housley and assistant Davis Payne’s non-existent powerplay. While they couldn’t get the team to play .500 after the win streak, they allowed a total unmitigated tank following February 15th. Housley is gone now, like ASAP the day immediately after Game 82. Kudos to Botterill for getting that done quick. We already went over Housley’s exit so let’s talk that Collapse Part One and Jason Botterill’s future, the offseason is all in hands and now he’s got a mandate to give the next guy some better supporting pieces past that top line. This next coaching hire needs to start fires and blast the doors off of Botterill’s office because the clock is ticking, Jason. This season was a failure and the offseason needs to see some stuff fixed. This season was a failure that tasted good at first bite and was nearly poisonous by the end. That will not fly next season. When I said next season needs to see a Playoff berth I’m not saying that as an aspirational statement: if they miss the playoffs next season then clear house. If the Botterill Presser announcing Housley’s firing taught us anything it’s that Botterill isn’t stupid and he’s done feeling anything but winning. That’s technically two things but what I’m saying is he knows what the problems are: they’re the same ones we’ve been complaining about. The defense is an incomplete whole and there is maybe one and a half lines of NHL players in the forward group. Forward depth and defense are the problems. Also goals: less against and more for, please. This club wasn’t as good as ten straight wins, but they aren’t bad enough to not consistently be in the mix by now. Don’t lower the expectations because of the impending coaching change: This team should be in the 90-point range at the end of the season from now on until Jack Eichel and Rasmus Dahlin retires. There are enough good pieces for that and the supporting cast is coming; and we really ought not to settle for less.

That was a long meandering road to talk offseason. Let’s talk offseason. For one, signing Skinner is the number one priority. It looks likely he’ll test free agency now even though Botterill insists they’ve never stopped hammering out a deal. If Skinner walks then Jason Botterill has just about nothing going for him. Whether or not Skinner signs, Botts needs to get busier than a Mighty Taco on 4/20. Trading away Rasmus Ristolainen is probably a 50/50 chance at this point, and we can talk about how the defense needs more help not less right now but Risto isn’t getting any better. I tend to agree you have to sell an asset high while you can still sell high. Trade out our tough boy for a second line center and hopefully some other pieces that help now. And if you get spare parts you better be certain they aren’t Patrik Berglund reruns (God speed to Berglund for a healthy future). Second line center is a smart move not just to give Casey Mittelstadt some more time to grow but also to solidify center depth given a couple decent fourth line options coming down the pipeline. If you can ship out any three of Johan Larsson, Zemgus Girgensons, Vladimir Sabotka, and Marco Scandella it would be a massive victory. There is enough talent to fill those roles, especially if you get a second line center via trade or free agency. Assuming Skinner signs and Alex Nylander has actually finally arrived I think you need to have a rock-solid top six by the start of Training Camp. Defenseman, oh yeah and some down-pairing defenseman would be great. Next season simply cannot be another development year if that’s even what you want to call this year given Phil Housley’s awful deployment choices and a simply atrocious goal differential. Did I mention the Fail Army style second half tumble down the standings? Oh yeah, I got that.

Draft strategy this year is interesting: two first round picks this year and one is likely to be top five or damn close. We learned in the 2016 Draft that you always have to take the best available unless you are really dying for something. It’s funny that I just praised Alex Nylander only to say that but look at those other picks. HOT DAMN. Anyway, there maybe only three or four players this Draft who jump right into the NHL. If you get into the top five, assuming Jack Hughes and Kaapo Kakko are off the board, you can’t go wrong with one of the centers (Dylan Cozens and Trevor Zegras) or right wing Vasily Podkolzin. Immediate help isn’t coming from any of those guys, but beggars can’t be choosers. The highest projected defenseman, Bowen Byram of WHL Vancouver, may end up being the highest ranked guy available if the Sabres pick fifth like they’re set up to right now. Byram would be a fantastic pickup (assuming Botterill can get over his distrust of WHL prospects) but he’s not the partner for Rasmus Dahlin we’re looking for. Sidebar: let’s not depend on a lottery ball bouncing the right way for any hope going into next season. This is a sports team not a casino. The other Sabres first round pick is truly a wildcard as there is a weird drop off in this Draft. However, if Cam York or Cole Caufield drop to that pick you better take one of them. Those guys are my 2019 Draft crushes. Free Agency on the other hand is a dangerous game the Sabres have been burned on a couple times in recent memory. Kevin Hayes in Winnipeg jumps out as that second line center we need; while I dream of Mats Zuccarello and Ryan Dzingel for other roles, but those options seem far-fetched. There are more than a couple guys worth pursuing who currently wear Lightning jerseys but barring sending Ristolainen to Tampa I don’t see those moves happening without an offer sheet and that’s a discussion I don’t want to have until the cat is out of the bag. You may have heard there is a scenario where Jonathan Huberdeau comes to Buffalo, maybe in a Ristolainen trade. That goes a long way in solidifying the top six like I mentioned earlier. While we’re talking kind of distant possibilities, if Ryan Nugent-Hopkins is a piece coming to Buffalo that also solidifies a top six that makes the playoffs in 2020. It feels weird expecting a crazy trade out of Edmonton now that Peter Chiarelli isn’t there anymore, but I don’t know if much in that Front Office is very different in my most honest opinion. It’s hard to imagine a big offseason compared to 2018 but we may need one to finally go to the postseason in 2020.

I said this would be the end-of-season bonanza and with the way this season ended it feels difficult to wrap up. For one last time this season I will say like, comment and share this with your friends. You guys are what makes this blog feel worth it. If you were with me from the start you’ve watched this thing change and grow since June of last year when I started a blog with a funny name and a faint hope the Sabres wouldn’t be total trash. My hope was satisfied for a little while. Unless some real profound garbage unfolds in the offseason or God forbid my life circumstances change unexpectedly I will be back at it again next season, starting later this week with 2019 Playoffs according to the Sabres. Yeah, it sounds weird to have Sabres and playoffs in the same sentence but bear with me and it will be fun. That’s probably up Wednesday, we’ll see. That post will officially kick off the 2019-2020 New Look Sabres season and feature a slightly new look. That is what I want to show you next. Below this paragraph, assuming this post went up properly, you will see the New Look Sabres 2019-2020 thumbnail image. It’s a little sleeker and more fun because when you get right down to it this past season’s logo was really just a color swapped normal logo. This one obviously takes the name of the blog a little more literally. I hope you enjoy it. I always end these posts with thanks for reading. I will do that again but let me just add some more thanks: thank you for reading. Thank you for reading along on this journey through better or worst with the Buffalo Sabres and Rochester Americans. Thank you for reading through all the typos and weird metaphors. Thank you for bearing with me on the most intensive blog I’ve ever written. 82 games are a lot but when you think about back-to-back nights and road trips you can imagine how chaotic writing these could get. I’ve written up some of these games at my in-laws, while in hotels, in the wee hours of the morning and so on. It’s been fun. I don’t regret a minute of it and in spite of how tough the team has been to us; I still can’t wait for a New Look Squad next season. In case you missed it, I am a relentless optimist. No matter what happens if you got anything that made your Sabres fandom more enjoyable in this blog than it’s all the victory I need as a blogger. I hope we can keep sharing this crazy life of being Sabres fans for seasons to come. In the meantime, Let’s Go Buffalo! Let’s Go Rochester! Especially Rochester, they got a Cup to win!

Thanks for reading.

P.S. I know it’s weird that I’m ending the season only to put up another post in a few days and then take a couple months off. Blame the Sabres: if they make the playoffs I don’t write “Playoffs according to the Sabres”. But here we are again; hopefully that helps a little bit… well that and the Rochester Americans hopping on the postseason warpath!

#buffalo sabres #hockey #blog #nhl

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the-record-columns · 6 years

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Jan. 16, 2019: Columns

A sports column about Tom Graves ??

Tom Graves

By KEN WELBORN

Record Editor

Between now and March the college basketball season really heats up with conference play and other big games one after another.

With the finite amount of time I am willing to sit in front of a television set (what with my day job and all) this past weekend I had to decide what was most important for me to watch. Skipping the pro football playoffs was an easy decision. Many of them do not want to stand for the Star Spangles Banner, so many of us have decided not to make any priority of sitting down and watching them. I know that has nothing to do with basketball, but I have been wanting to put that in print for some time. Hope you understand and agree with me or will forgive me--whichever applies.

But back to basketball--admittedly my favorite sport to watch.

This past weekend one of the games I didn't want to miss was No.1 Duke playing at Florida State. I had read that the last three times Duke played Florida State as No.1, the Seminoles had knocked them off. That storyline didn't really motivate me too much as I knew the Blue Devils would blow them out of the gym, what with the memory of being booted out of No.1 three times by Florida State, and Duke having yet another powerhouse team led by a phenomenal kid named Zion Williamson.

Well, time passing as time does, and me not the best at remembering things or scheduling, I again got myself in a bind for time and it appeared as though I would miss the Duke game. Then, my vaunted memory kicked in. I remembered hearing Tom Graves of North Wilkesboro and Wilkesboro holding court at one of the gatherings he and his wonderful wife, Ann, have at their “Town House,” the old Johnson-Hubbard place on Main Street in Historic Downtown Wilkesboro.

To paraphrase Tom, he basically said that basketball games were easy. They last about two hours, but if you can tune in with about two or two and a half minutes to go, you'll see, for all practical purposes, all of the game that matters.

At the time I figured he just wasn't much of a basketball fan, but it seemed to come in handy on Saturday. I tuned in the game to find Duke behind, playing without their phenom Williamson, who had an eye injury in the first half, and the announcers, Dick Vitale and Company, talking incessantly about this being the fourth time that Duke had risked losing their No.1 front of Florida States rabid Seminoles.

Simply put it was a helluva finish. Florida State was up by two, Duke got the ball, shot and missed and the ball was awarded to Florida State. Upon review, it was clearly out on Florida State, Duke inbounded to one of their other phenoms, Cam Reddish, and he coolly fired a three-pointer at the buzzer and Duke won by one.

Whew.

But I had to confess, I had seen "the game" for sure. Tom Graves, once again, was right--in his own dry as a dead bug in a drought way. So, before I went back downstairs to work, I scanned the channels and, lo and behold, there was the game between the Providence Friars and the Georgetown Hoyas, also a close score and near the end.

Could it happen twice in one afternoon?

Again, I like basketball, including a good game between two teams I really don't know a lot about. I knew that former pro Patrick Ewing was the coach of the Hoyas--and what is a Hoya anyway--so I decided to watch the finish. And, what a finish--a double overtime win by Georgetown.

So, Tom, I've got to say I would prefer to see the whole game, but you certainly have something with your end of game theory.

To finish, Tom Graves, in addition to being a sports guru, is one of the most decent folks I know-- with a heart of pure gold. When I visit with Tom and Ann Graves in their home, I feel as "at home" there as I do in The Mayflower, my apartment above The Record. He is at ease everywhere he goes, will give a stranger’s kid a ride in his old T-Model Fire Chief's car, and, at a gathering of friends on New Years Eve, Tom is the one who spoke up just before midnight and asked us all to pause, and take time to honor the memory of our dear, dear friend Eric Payne.

He is just that kind of a man.

Kind.

Land of the Long Leaf Pine

By HEATHER DEAN

Record Reporter

From the beginning of my scholastic endeavors, I was taught about North Carolina State history.

The state flag, state bird, state flower, state motto, and the regions of the state, all came before fourth grade. In eighth grade we learned more about the “Tar Heels,” and the origins of the name dating back to the Civil War, and how we were a formidable force, even though N.C. voted against joining in the hostilities.

We learned our state song in music class, and memorized our state toast. Entitled “Land of the Long Leaf Pine,” it was written in 1904 by Leonora Monteiro Martin and set to music by Mary Burke Kerr. The N.C. General Assembly recognized it as the official state toast on May 21, 1957, and we remain the only state to have one.

The toast is delivered twice annually at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's oldest student organization — The Dialectic and Philanthropic Societies. There’s even an Order of the Long Leaf Pine and once inducted, they become cultural ambassadors of the state.

Here's to the land of the long leaf pine, The summer land where the sun doth shine, Where the weak grow strong and the strong grow great, Here's to "Down Home," the Old North State! Here's to the land of the cotton bloom white, Where the scuppernong perfumes the breeze at night, Where the soft southern moss and jessamine mate, 'Neath the murmuring pines of the Old North State! Here's to the land where the galax grows, Where the rhododendron's rosette glows, Where soars Mount Mitchell's summit great, In the "Land of the Sky," in the Old North State! Here's to the land where maidens are fair, Where friends are true and cold hearts rare, The near land, the dear land, whatever fate, The blessed land, the best land, the Old North State!

But why is our state toast about a pine tree?

According to the N.C. Forestry Service, the longleaf pine forest is a fundamental component of the cultural and natural history of North Carolina. They were once one of the most extensive ecosystems in North America. The historic range of the species stretched from Texas to Virginia, covering approximately 90-million acres.

In North Carolina, longleaf pine forests covered nearly all of the upper coastal plain and lower piedmont. So likely that’s what the first European settlers forged their way through, and some in N.C. have been dated to be almost 500 years old. Some fences, and even tombstones, made of heartwood pine are still standing after a hundred years. Pretty tough stuff these pine trees. Until there’s a good old fashioned N.C. winter storm.

Large branches, pieces of branches, and entire trees have been downed in these past few months, and I’ve been stuck behind work trucks more often than not cleaning up the debris. Even on my side road, down in the hollow, way out in the middle of nowhere, on the Boomer side of life of Wilkes-By-God-County.

I say all this to reckon if we shouldn’t have a new toast recommended to the General Assembly. Hardly seems fitting that as the only state to have a toast, it is to such a fickle and easily uprooted tree. Perhaps we could write one to “The Stalwart Poplar,” or “The Indomitable Oak.” Heck, even to the “Dainty Maple” would be fine by me.

Education vs. Indoctrination

By EARL COX

Record Publisher

The world is hoping for a peace plan that will stick between Israel and the Palestinians and most are anticipating some sort of a two-state solution. Even U.S. President Donald Trump is envisioning this possibility with his yet-to-be-announced, “deal of the century.” But promises, agreements, treaties, plans and “deals” will not work as all seem to be approaching the problem with a top-down solution rather than a foundational approach which is essential to achieving real and lasting peace. What I am referring to is the Palestinian education system starting at the earliest level.

As things stand right now, Palestinian children are not being educated; they are being indoctrinated. The civilized world is generally appalled whenever children are used (abused) by adults in the commission of illegal or immoral acts yet there is no outcry against the Palestinians even though this is exactly what they are doing – using their children to continue and intensify their hatred for Israel.

In 2017 there was a study conducted of the Palestinian elementary school curriculum. It was discovered that for grades 1 through 4 the teachings in the newest textbooks were more radical than in previous editions. Palestinian children are taught to be martyrs and to demonize Israel and the Jews brainwashing them into believing that Israel has no right to exist and that all of the land belongs to the Palestinians exclusively. Shockingly, Palestinian youth are taught to be expendable. Within the pages of Palestinian textbooks for elementary school children are messages such as, “the volcano of my revenge”; “the longing of my blood for my land” and “I shall sacrifice my blood to saturate the land.” Basic arithmetic is taught by using dead martyrs and murdered Jews.

Students in upper grades are taught the strategy of violence and pressure in place of negotiations in order to achieve Palestinian goals. To struggle against Israel and bring about its destruction is the main theme of all Palestinian education. Empathy for Israel and the Jews is not even a consideration. Furthermore, every textbook is laced with negative messages regarding non-Muslims. In fact, a message often repeated is that those with opposing views are not merely the opposition but rather are to be considered as enemies to be eliminated.

If ever there is going to be a lasting peace involving the Palestinians, there must first be a change starting with the very youngest and as soon as they take their first breath. As it stands right now, from cradle to grave Palestinians are fed a steady diet of hate. Peace will only be possible when the roots of Palestinian morality are changed to reflect respect and tolerance for others and when they acknowledge the right of all people, including Israel and the Jews, to live free from aggression and terror.

A rainy day at the Barber Shop and Peggy the witch

By CARL WHITE

Life in the Carolinas

I enjoy my visits to the barber shop for a variety of reasons. The more practical reason is to get a good haircut, but if you limit your experience to the utilitarian purpose of walking away with shorter hair one will surely miss out on a treasure trove of cultural edification awaiting. In other words, hold on to your hat, things may just get a little hairy.

It was on the raining morning that I returned to the Second Street Barber shop in North Wilkesboro, NC a two-seat shop where Gary and his son Josh Beshears spend their days keeping many of the citizens of their community neat and tight.

News coverage of the rage of hurricane IRMA was on the TV and both barber seats were busy when I arrived. The barber shop is the perfect place for a story teller to hang out and for those who prefer to listen it’s hard to find a better show. Barbershop storytelling is judged more so on delivery rather than verifiable facts. While a good tall tale is welcome and celebrated the more weighted issues of life are also part of conversation.

One customer was sharing the story of a recent heart problem that has changed his life. We all celebrated with him in that his only real vice to battle is a half-gallon of ice-cream every night. This real-life issue was talked about, but before long things shifted to the story of barber Josh as a young boy in school, when he wrote a story about Peggy the witch that lived in a shack on the side the mountain

As the story goes Gary takes young Josh on an adventure to the Big Ivy area which is near the Wilkes and Ashe County line to learn about the legend of Peggy the witch who apparently once lived in the region in the late 1800’s and possessed the ability to do many things including shape shifting in the form of various animals.

At a certain point in the trip Gary stops his pickup near Phillip’s Gap and yells out the window “Peggy,” and as if on cue a deer walks out of the woods and stands in the road in front of them and stairs at Gary and Josh, but did not come close to them and then walked away. Gary drives on, however Josh wants to see if it will happen again.

At first Gary did not want to call out again, Josh was persistent so Gary stopped again and yelled out Peggy. Once again, as if on cue, a Groundhog appeared in the road in front of them, stared at them and then walked away. This happened again with a rabbit. It was at this time, they decided not to call for Peggy again.

Josh and Gary both told me that this was a true story regarding the animals. Josh wrote the story down with more history about Peggy. The story of the animals and other stories of fear and dread that Peggy stirred in other locals was published in the book, Hometown Memories, Blue Ridge Tales, published 1996 page 64-65.

The good thing about waiting for the barber’s chair is that you get to hear all the great stories and you know it will soon be your turn for an old fashion hair cut including warm shaving cream on your neck with a straight razor perfect line. You also have a chance to share your tale of the day and if you need it, you’ve got a few pals who will listen when you need it most.

When done, my seat was filled by a NC Army Guardsman, he required a simple shave, but at the Second Street Barber Shop a quick visit is not really an option. The stories take too long and who would want to rush something so important.

When folk artist Charlie Frye heard this story, he was inspired to create a painting to accompany this column. Thanks Charlie!

Carl White is the executive producer and host of the award-winning syndicated TV show Carl White’s Life In the Carolinas. The weekly show is now in its eighth year of syndication and can be seen in the Charlotte viewing market on WJZY Fox 46 Saturday’s at 12:00 noon. For more on the show, visit www.lifeinthecarolinas.com, You can email Carl White at [email protected].

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junker-town · 5 years

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The Saints’ playoff issues are more than just bad luck

Drew Brees and Sean Payton haven’t done their best work in January.

The Saints have bad luck in the playoffs, but they haven’t done themselves any favors either.

The New Orleans Saints have won 37 games in the last three regular seasons, more than any other NFL team. They haven’t made a single Super Bowl appearance over that span, though.

The “Minneapolis Miracle” ended their season in January 2018, and a blown pass interference call cost them last year. (And that’s just recently — the string of Saints postseason heartbreak stretches over a decade.)

This time, New Orleans didn’t even make it through Wild Card Weekend. Despite being an eight-point favorite at home, the Saints trailed almost all game against the Vikings. They forced overtime with a 49-yard field goal, but never touched the ball again.

Minnesota won the overtime coin toss and drove the entire length of the field. Tight end Kyle Rudolph ended the game by hauling in a 4-yard touchdown for the 26-20 win. He also appeared to get away with a push that probably should’ve been called offensive pass interference.

Was this pass interference?pic.twitter.com/NjQIctDtdN

— Dov Kleiman (@NFL_DovKleiman) January 5, 2020

That touchdown ended yet another season for the Saints that seemed destined for much more. If it felt a bit like déjà vu, that’s because it is. It was just as painfully close as all their recent postseason losses.

Saints are now the first team in NFL history to have six straight playoff eliminations by one score and the second team since the Packers from 2013-15 to be eliminated in three straight postseasons on the final play of the game.

— Adam Schefter (@AdamSchefter) January 5, 2020

Bad luck is frustrating, but New Orleans isn’t doing itself favors when it transforms into a mess every January. It doesn’t have to be like this. Just a few small tweaks could keep the Saints from repeating the same annual mistakes.

Drew Brees: Stop becoming turnover prone in the playoffs

The Saints finished the regular season on a tear. Brees totaled 16 touchdowns with no interceptions in his last five games, and had an absurd 137.0 passer rating in December.

Brees threw 191 consecutive passes without an interception before he casually lobbed a ball into double coverage just before halftime Sunday. It wound up being an easy pick for Anthony Harris, who set up the Vikings in good field position with about two minutes left in the half.

Throw it near @HOOSDatDude and he's getting it.#GoGetIt pic.twitter.com/Er5B4ETHE6

— Minnesota Vikings (@Vikings) January 5, 2020

The Vikings drove 45 yards and scored a touchdown to take a 13-10 lead into the locker room.

Brees cost the Saints again in the fourth quarter when he carelessly fumbled deep in Minnesota territory.

DPOY pic.twitter.com/NLo3JQVbP7

— Minnesota Vikings (@Vikings) January 5, 2020

That mishap happened immediately after Taysom Hill broke free on a 28-yard run that put the Saints in the red zone. New Orleans finally had some offensive momentum and looked poised to take the lead. Brees’ fumble — the biggest mistake on Wild Card Weekend — spoiled that.

Minnesota didn’t do much on the following possession, but it did halt a potential scoring drive for the Saints. The Vikings also managed to waste more than two minutes of clock and punt the ball back into New Orleans territory.

It wasn’t exactly a terrible showing for Brees, who still had 208 passing yards and one touchdown. Still, the loss to the Vikings is the fifth consecutive playoff game in which Brees has finished with an interception. It was also the fourth time he’s fumbled over that five-game postseason stretch.

That sloppy play was the Saints’ demise last season too. Even after the pass interference drama, New Orleans got the ball first in overtime and had a chance to win. But Brees threw an interception near midfield, and the Rams only needed a little bit of offense to set up a game-winning 57-yard field goal.

Brees’ propensity for playoff mistakes is an odd quirk for a quarterback who has been one of the NFL’s most efficient quarterbacks for years. He had just four interceptions during the 2019 season and didn’t fumble once. The Saints even broke a record in 2019 for the fewest turnovers in a season.

Alas, this may be a problem he doesn’t get a chance to correct. Brees turns 41 this month and there are tough decisions about the future to be made by both the Saints and their veteran quarterback. He’s not the only one in New Orleans with postseason struggles to fix, though.

Saints’ offense and defense: Keep playing like it’s the regular season

The entire New Orleans’ offense seems to save its worst days for the playoffs.

Last year, the 290 yards it gained against the Rams in the NFC Championship were well below its season average of 379.2 yards per game. That was against a Los Angeles defense that finished the 2018 season ranked 19th in the NFL in yards allowed, too.

The Vikings’ 2019 defense is a little more stout than that. It gave up the fifth-fewest points, although it was 14th in yards allowed. Still, the Saints had no trouble scoring against other top defenses in the NFL. It put up 46 points against the 49ers and 36 against the Bears. In the last four weeks, the Saints averaged 40 points per game. Against the Vikings, they managed just half that.

Minnesota didn’t have much of a special formula to shut down the Saints’ offense. It just won in the trenches in a way few teams have against New Orleans.

Right tackle Ryan Ramczyk didn’t allow a single sack during the regular season, but gave up two against the Vikings. One came on a third-and-goal that forced the Saints to settle for a 29-yard field goal.

Down he goes!#Vikings come up with a big 3rd-down sack. pic.twitter.com/2Oke0nQJAX

— Minnesota Vikings (@Vikings) January 5, 2020

That spoiled a golden opportunity to capitalize on an early Vikings fumble that set up the Saints in Minnesota territory. It was also one of several unsuccessful third downs. New Orleans converted just four in the game, largely due to consistent pressure from the Vikings’ Danielle Hunter and Everson Griffen.

Brees — who was sacked 12 times in 11 regular season games — was pressured 12 times by the Vikings and sacked three times.

The Saints’ defense had a subpar day, too. Minnesota tallied 362 yards of total offense, its highest total since Week 10 of the regular season. Dalvin Cook’s 94 rushing yards were the most any player has had against New Orleans since 2017.

In the regular season, the Saints’ defense only allowed 35 percent of third downs to be converted. The Vikings were successful on 56 percent of their third downs Sunday — including twice on its game-winning drive in overtime.

Sean Payton: Start managing the clock better

Even the Saints’ coaching seems more prone to brain farts in the playoffs. At the end of the fourth quarter, head coach Sean Payton chose not to use his final timeout at all — even though there were a couple of times that could’ve helped set up a game-winning touchdown.

Payton should’ve used his timeout after the Saints’ defense sacked Kirk Cousins with about 2:48 left, but instead he allowed Minnesota to take the clock all the way to 2:10 left. The ensuing punt and punt return took the game to the two-minute warning, wasting another chance to stop the clock.

He also should’ve used his timeout when a false start penalty with 21 seconds left forced a 10-second runoff. Payton kept the timeout in the reserves the whole time, and the Saints settled for a 49-yard field goal to tie on a second down.

Payton struggled to handle the clock last year too. The now-infamous pass to Tommylee Lewis that didn’t draw pass interference shouldn’t have been a pass play at all.

The Saints had the ball in the red zone at the two-minute warning with the game tied. Even if three run plays were all unsuccessful, it could’ve flushed away the Rams’ final timeout and wound the clock to about 30 seconds left before a chip-shot field goal to take the lead. Incomplete passes on first and third down gave Los Angeles had 1:41 to drive into field goal range.

Yes, there’s bad luck too.

Saints safety Vonn Bell appeared to score a go-ahead touchdown off a fumble late in the game, but replay determined that Dalvin Cook’s knee was down. Cornerback Marshon Lattimore suffered an injury in overtime and Kirk Cousins threw a 43-yard completion to Adam Thielen, who was covered by backup cornerback Patrick Robinson, on the very next play. It was the Vikings’ only pass play of more than 20 yards all game.

A team can’t exactly fix its luck. If that were possible, the Chargers wouldn’t be the Chargers.

But the Saints’ loss to Minnesota shouldn’t have come down to whether or not Kyle Rudolph’s end zone push constituted offensive pass interference. Simply put, New Orleans wouldn’t have to worry so much about playoff misfortune if it played like the same team in the postseason that it is in the regular season.

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