Sens at Land’s End

And so begins the end of Christoph Schubert’s career in a Senators uniform? The Citizen reports:

Craig Hartsburg made his first unpopular decision as coach of the Ottawa Senators on Tuesday morning.

He told Christoph Schubert that his position this season would be as a forward on the fourth line, not as one of the team’s six defenceman.

The decision so upset Schubert that he slid out of the Scandanavium after the team’s practice without talking to the media.

Given that there is no room for Schubert in the forward ranks either (unless someone else is about to be traded), and that the team has gone to great lengths to create a more positive atmosphere in its locker room this season, this seems to make it even more likely that Schubert is on his way out. Hopefully Bryan Murray can find a good outcome for this situation via trade.

A few other bits and bytes:

No Thanks, Nikolai. Murray tells the media that the Sens have no interest in the newly-waived Nikolai Khabibulin and his massive contract. I feel shocked.

Scandinavian Getaway. The Sens are now in Sweden, no doubt spending their spare time eating lots of Mother Alfredsson’s home cooking and assembling stylish yet affordable furniture. The team’s official site has photo galleries and video from the trip. TSN also did a nice little story on the trip on SportsCentre yesterday, which included an interview with Alfie’s father Hasse, who really does look like an older, moustachioed version of his son. Looking at the photos and watching the interviews, I’m struck by how totally overjoyed Alfie seems to have this opportunity to bring his two hometowns together. He’s like a proud papa introducing his kids to his country, and his country to his kids. His 23 hulking kids.

Doomsday Scenario. Ross McKeon at Yahoo Sports offers this unhappy prediction for the Canucks this season:

Train wreck. They won’t score, they won’t be good defensively outside of an overworked Luongo, who better be prepared to face 35-40 shots a night. The coach will probably get fired, the fans might turn on them. It’s just not going to be pretty at all.

Yikes! But hey, this could be my chance to recruit a few disgruntled Canucks fans to the Sens Army.

This morning, I headed over to UBC’s hockey rink (scene of all my own greatest hockey triumphs and tragedies, if such terms can be applied to me scoring a few goals and then falling and cracking a bone in my finger during scrimmage in the UBC Ladies’ Beginner Hockey classes) to watch the Canucks’ rookies in action. Yes, the Canucks. Well, I live in Vancouver, and I have to work with what’s available.

But anyway: rookie camp! You know what this means. Hockey season is almost upon us! In fact, it is one week from today that the Senators will be taking the ice for their first pre-season game against Wade Redden and the New York Rangers.

Yesterday I did one of those fan surveys for NHL.com. It asked me a bunch of questions about how often I listened to games on the radio last season, which was pretty much all the time, due to my geographical situation. This season, I plan to avoid the radio by ordering Center Ice Online. Not only will I be able to watch the Sens to my heart’s content, I will also have the option of watching just about any other game I want to. It’s going to be like an all-you-can-eat hockey buffet!

I’m excited about it, because there’s a few teams other than the Sens I’d like to keep an eye on this year, for various reasons — because the Sens can’t play every day and I have to get my hockey fix somewhere, but also because some of these teams have players I like, some of them look like good young teams whose development will be interesting to watch, and one is a team I could not possibly avoid, even if I tried really, really hard.

Five Teams to Watch This Season on the Sens’ Days Off

Rick Nash and his wacky spaceman hockey suit want you to watch the Blue Jackets this season!

Columbus Blue Jackets: Oh, the Blue Jackets. One of those weird expansion teams no one really knows much about. They entered the league in 2000-2001, and have still never made the playoffs. I think that right there is actually a pretty good reason to watch them: they’ve got to make the playoffs someday (don’t they?) and maybe this year will be their year. It could be quite exciting to watch. The Jackets made some fairly big changes during the offseason. They also gave coach Ken Hitchcock a three-year contract extension, and seem to be building the team around his style of play. Will this plan work? Can goalie Pascal Leclaire, fresh off signing a three-year deal worth almost $12 million, match or better last season’s performance? Was the R.J. Umberger we saw with the Flyers during the playoffs last season the real R.J. Umberger? Will Mike Commodore do better in Columbus than he did in Ottawa? These are all things I’ll be watching for. But even without all that intrigue, I would still have one excellent reason to watch the Blue Jackets, and that reason can be summed up in two words: Rick Nash. My love for him is on its own enough to make the Blue Jackets my number one hockey destination when the Sens are off doing whatever they do when they’re not playing hockey.

Chicago Blackhawks: This one is a no-brainer — anyone who follows the NHL knows the Hawks are one of the most exciting-looking young teams out there right now. There’s an extremely strong chance they’ll make the playoffs this season, led by two fantastic young players: 2007-2008 Calder Trophy winner Patrick Kane (19) and his fellow Calder nominee Jonathan Toews (the Hawks’ newest captain at just 20 years old). Dustin Byfuglien (23) and my personal favourite Patrick Sharp (the old man of the group at 26) aren’t exactly chopped liver either. On defence, the Hawks were of course the winners in the Brian Campbell sweepstakes this summer: as an old 67’s season ticket holder, I’m a longtime Campbell fan and I’ll always keep an eye on him. Duncan Keith and Brent Seabrook are two other Chicago D-men of interest. Aside from all that, there’s also the annual Martin Havlat Injury Watch and the debut of The World’s Most Expensive Goaltending Tandem, with Nikolai Khabibulin ($6.75 million) and Cristobal Huet ($5.625 million) both still on the roster, to keep things interesting in Chicago.

Edmonton Oilers: With the Canucks and the Avalanche looking mighty bad and the Wild seeming to have taken a step backwards, I think the race for the Northwest this season will be between Calgary and Edmonton. It should make for some very entertaining Battle of Alberta games! I like both Alberta teams, and so the question arises: which do I root for in what will no doubt be an intense struggle for Northwest supremacy? My gut tells me I will be cheering on the boys from Edmonton. I was really rooting for the Oilers to squeak into the playoffs last season, and will be shocked if they don’t see some post-season action this year. They’re a fun team to watch, and a likeable one too. Beyond my somewhat random love of Shawn Horcoff, I admit that I have no reason for this preference of Oil over Flame. The Flames thus get an honourable mention on my list of teams to watch, too.

Phoenix Coyotes: The Coyotes haven’t made the playoffs since 2002, but I think they have a good chance of ending that streak this year. They’ve got a strong goalie in Ilya Bryzgalov, a great captain in Shane Doan (he is one of my favourites), and, in Todd Fedoruk, the always entertaining Daniel Carcillo, and our own Brian McGrattan, they’ve also got more enforcers than you can shake a stick at, though I don’t know that shaking a stick at an enforcer would ever be a good idea anyway unless you wanted your face broken. With that lineup, the Coyotes might just be trying to scare the rest of the Pacific Division into submission. But with young talent like Peter Mueller and Kyle Turris, who should be making his NHL debut this season, in the lineup along with new addition Olli Jokinen, they may not have to.

Vancouver Canucks: Vancouver Canucks? Shouldn’t it be Vancouver Ca-sucks? Zing! This team is going nowhere but down. With the departures of Markus Naslund, Trevor Linden, and Brendan Morrison this offseason, the Canucks lost three longtime players and important team leaders — Naslund had been the team captain since 2000 and Morrison was an alternate, while Linden, though he played only 59 games last season, was one of the greatest Canucks ever and no doubt took on a huge leadership role for the team. New GM Mike Gillis has replaced these guys with, er, Steve Bernier, Pavol Demitra, Kyle Wellwood, and Nolan Baumgartner. That doesn’t exactly seem like a step up, and with this loss of offense, Vancouver fans seem destined to have to watch an even more boring brand of Alain Vigneault defensive hockey than they saw last year. The Canucks’ one ace in the hole is Roberto Luongo, who can undoubtedly carry the team when he’s playing well. But Luongo did not seem happy last season, and I wonder how long he’s willing to stick around if this team doesn’t start winning. Which it won’t. So why am I going to be watching them, you ask? Simply put: they’re the only thing on TV. I get Sportsnet Pacific. Pacific! It’s not even Sportsnet West! It’s a channel with one audience: British Columbians. Their only job during hockey season is to cover the Canucks! It is wall-to-wall blue and green and orca logos out here, and because of the sad depth of my hockey obsession, I am incapable of looking away. It’s like a particularly nasty form of self-imposed torture.

As you can see, all the teams on my list are in the Western Conference. This is partly because most of the Eastern teams I don’t hate with a fiery passion are either really bad or incredibly boring, and partly because I am first and foremost a Senators fan, and I am really too invested in their fortunes to want any other team in the East to do well. However, if I were to pick a backup Eastern team, I would go with the Washington Capitals. I developed a soft spot for this bunch as I watched them systematically dismantle the Sens four times last season. Yes, it was truly horrifying and embarrassing, but at the same time I had to admit that, wow, those guys were good. Once the Sens had been eliminated from the playoffs, I was prepared to make the Caps my Eastern team in the second round … until they didn’t make it through. This season, they should only get better. There is, of course, the brilliant Alex Ovechkin to watch (bonus: the Ovechkin factor ensures that a lot of Caps games will be televised nationally), and add Alexander Semin, Nicklas Backstrom, and Mike Green to the list of great young players in DC. Though I can’t say I hope they win the conference, I will at least not actively be hoping for the Caps to fail.

If I do manage to follow through on my plan to watch as much hockey as is humanly possible this season, you may see posts about some of these teams in this space. But rest assured — I’ll be thinking of the Sens the whole time.

Pop quiz, hotshot. The NHL team you own has 47 forwards under contract and only three defencemen. The normal roster for an NHL team is 13 forwards, seven defencemen, and two goaltenders. You are obviously in desperate need of defencemen. What do you do? What. Do. You. Do?

If you are the Tampa Bay Lightning, you trade two of your defencemen (namely, Filip Kuba and Alexandre Picard) to the Senators to get one defenceman (Andrej Meszaros) back. That seems logical. If you failed grade 1 math.

The Lightning seem to be careening around with no particular destination or plan guiding them at the moment, just the whim of a madman telling them they’ve got to keep going or they’ll die. The result is that there is simply no place for logic in Tampa Bay right now. In this situation, logic is the lady who tried to get off the bus when they brought out the stretcher for the driver who’d been shot. You remember what happened to her.

But I am feeling pretty okay about the death of logic at the moment, since it seems to be benefiting the Sens. In this case, we are getting more bodies by spending less money and losing a player who was kinda starting to bring back some unpleasant Yashin-esque memories with this whole cash grab thing he had going on. Also coming to the Sens in the deal is a first round pick, formerly San Jose’s. I’m got a feeling the Sharks may not do very well this year, so who knows? That could turn out to be a reasonably high pick.

TSN is reporting that Meszaros will likely sign a six-year deal with the Lightning, worth $4 million per year.

This has been a pretty interesting story over the last couple of days. First, there was Bryan Murray’s press conference, at which he told reporters that the talks with Meszaros were still going nowhere. A few hours later came a Hockey News story that Meszaros had signed an offer sheet with an unnamed team, and then today we started to hear this talk about Tampa, and the offer sheet that couldn’t exist due to Tampa’s third round pick already having gone to Pittsburgh, and Ray Shero’s apparent unwillingness to be even remotely involved with an RFA offer sheet. Finally, we get this trade.

Personally, I’m very happy to see that something has finally happened with Meszaros. This whole stalemate situation was getting old, and I think it was preventing BM the GM from putting the finishing touches on the roster for this season. Now, with the additions of Kuba and Picard (a Gatineau native), the defence suddenly looks much deeper. The two of them combined make a little less than Meszaros is reportedly getting from the Lightning, which makes the cap situation look a whole lot brighter. I can’t say that I know a whole lot about either Kuba or Picard, but from the sounds of it Kuba has fairly decent offensive skills. He’s also really big. Picard, meanwhile, is only 23 years old (a few months older than Meszaros), has just over a season’s worth of NHL experience, and scored 38 points in 53 games with the Flyers’ AHL team last season. Whether he can produce in the NHL is definitely a question, but it’s also far from certain that Meszaros is ever going to live up to the promise he showed as a rookie and I would not have wanted to see the Sens pay him $4 million per year while they waited to find out.

The question that pops into my mind now that this is done is: are there any top six forwards left? Is there anyone alive out there? Hello? Maybe if Mats Sundin would just make up his flippin’ mind already, some of the other NHL pieces would fall into place.

Puck Lit reviews are probably going to slow down a bit now: I start back to school in just over a week, and won’t likely have as much time to read, which is sad but then again hockey season is starting up again soon anyway so I can go back to filling this space with posts about actual hockey. YAY!

Puck Lit Project Review #6: Cold-Cocked: On Hockey by Lorna Jackson

Plot Summary: This is another non-fiction book so there’s no plot per se, but basically it is the author’s chronicle of rediscovering hockey later in life and following the Vancouver Canucks through the 2002-2003 and 2003-2004 seasons. There’s also a little bit of her personal biography thrown in: stories about her attempts to learn more about her father’s service in World War II, her efforts at recovering from a long-term knee injury, and her sheep farm.

Genre: Non-Fiction, Reflections on Hockey

Hockey Content: Obviously, there is a lot in this one about the Canucks and the players who were with the team at the time the book was being written, with Markus Naslund, Ed Jovanovski, Trevor Linden, and Todd Bertuzzi (this was the season of the Steve Moore incident) as the main players. Mostly, we get Jackson’s observations on the Canucks’ games as well as their fans and players. For Sens fans, new Sens/former Canucks Jarkko Ruutu and Alex Auld figure in briefly. There are thoughts on Dany Heatley, and there’s a chapter in which Alfie gives birth to quadruplets!

Okay, it’s a sheep named Alfie. Had you wondering for a second though, didn’t I?

Choice Quotation: “Right before puck drop, Hockey Night in Canada’s Ron MacLean … goes wistful and chokes out Canadian hockey’s season-ending uber-cliché: We all dream about playing in the NHL, we all dream about playing in the Stanley Cup finals. We do not. Ron is over-acting about a certain brand of boy raised in cold places where ice happens every year, everywhere. Do we all dream Ron’s dream? Most little girls don’t (Shaunavon redheads notwithstanding) and really not girls raised more rain forest than ice-covered pond. The NHL engine — media pistons pumping and spewing — is fuelled ineptly by such mythomania. It distorts our national identification with the game and lies about those who love it. And it excludes a population of fans willing to commit, to stay loyal, to spend money.”

My Thoughts: I was very happy to read this book because out of all the Canadian books that reflect on the game and what it means — a pretty huge genre, really — this is, as far as I can tell, the only one written by a woman. As much as I do enjoy reading the meditations on the game written by the men who’ve played it, I must admit that I started to feel rather annoyed and excluded the last time I read one of those “we love the game because we grew up playing on frozen ponds” things. I never played on a frozen pond, but I still love hockey, and I certainly don’t think it’s right to state that only those kids (boys) whose parents (fathers) built them backyard rinks truly understand and love the game. Women not only get left out of the myth of hockey, but Jackson is also quite right: the NHL often does a pretty terrible job of marketing to female fans (see this post at My Three Favorite Things for more on that), and it’s not like there aren’t any of us out there.

So, I think it’s about time a woman sat down and wrote a book about why she loves hockey. Cold-Cocked fills a niche I’d been wanting to see filled, and it fills it well. It’s a very good read. Jackson’s thoughts on the game and how women view it are interesting. She writes that a hockey season is like a story, which is something that’s occurred to me often as I’ve been thinking back on 2007-2008 and wondering what went wrong. We can’t possibly know what an individual game or goal is going to mean until we’ve seen all the games and all the goals. Jackson argues that women in particular read the game that way, and that we like the stories involved. We like to know the background, the context for what is happening. While I’m not totally convinced that male sports fans don’t take an interest in that sort of thing, I’m certain she’s right that women do. She interviews Trevor Linden at one point, and asks him why he thinks female fans are so loyal to him. Linden says he thinks it’s because many of them have grown up watching him play, which I think gets at what Jackson is trying to say: women sometimes become personally involved in a way that men maybe just don’t.

Connected to this is another part of the reason I think women love Trevor Linden, which is that he comes across as upstanding, smart, and gentlemanly. He’s that guy who you just know would never do you wrong. He’s like hockey’s version of Lloyd Dobler (somewhere, my friend the Doc who loves both Linden and John Cusack is nodding). And with this, we get at the other thing women enjoy about hockey that men — at least straight men — probably do not. Jackson is totally frank about her schoolgirl crush on golden-haired Markus Naslund and recounts her fantasies about some of the players (totally G-rated, okay). Not that I personally indulge in that type of thought about hockey players … not that I would ever daydream about a fun-filled afternoon playing Rock Band with Rick Nash at his house, which I might imagine being something like Sugar Mountain, with a fridge full of ice cream and cake and a cotton candy machine, and also probably a trampoline — if I imagined Rick Nash’s house at all, that is. Which I do not, and I certainly would not have such a weird fantasy about him anyway. But that is beside the point: it seems inevitable that if you put a bunch of really fit men on ice and have them perform heroic feats of hockey greatness for us, women are going to find some of them hot. It’s just a fact of life, like how guys are always going to check out the ice girls. It doesn’t make us any less knowledgeable about hockey, and it definitely doesn’t make us puck bunnies. We just see things differently, and I don’t quite get why that’s a problem for so many men. I like the fact that Jackson deals with this aspect of female fandom in her book, instead of trying to cover it up to appeal to the more “serious” (those are sarcastic quotation marks, by the way) male audience.

Rating: 4 pucks out of 5. Jackson gives a great account of seeing the game through feminine eyes. I would recommend this book certainly to my fellow female hockey bloggers, who I’m sure would enjoy it, and to any male hockey fan who wants a different perspective.

I woke up just before 3:30 this morning and watched sexy kayak dude Adam van Koeverden race to silver in the K-1 500. Van Koeverden has become a great example for me of what Jackson writes about women liking a good story, not to mention a handsome face. Before he bombed the K-1 1000, van Koeverden was pretty much just a hot kayaking machine to me. I figured he was invincible. But seeing him absolutely lose the plot in his first final, and then seeing his complete and utter disbelief at how things had turned out made me much more invested in the outcome of his second race. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen someone look so genuinely lost on television before. Adam van Koeverden: awesome and unstoppable kayak juggernaut? Good story, sure. Adam van Koeverden: struggling after an unbelievably bad performance and unsure about his ability to bounce back? Now that’s compelling. In my barely-awake state, I cheered my head off for him. This is one of Olympic moments I’ll remember for a long time.

Big things are happening with Ontario’s two NHL teams these days. Cliff Fletcher is taking a machete to the Leafs’ roster, hacking off player after player. Kyle Wellwood and Darcy Tucker — gone. Mats Sundin would seem to be on his way out, Andrew Raycroft has now been put on waivers twice, and TSN reports that Bryan McCabe is also no longer welcome. I’m not too sure what Fletcher’s overall plan is — Is he really going to dump everyone and start fresh, or are they still trying to be competitive for 2008-2009? On the other hand, is dumping everyone and starting fresh the best way to be competitive in 2008-2009? — but it seems certain that the Leafs are going to be a very different looking team when the season starts. Maybe a more likeable team? … nah.

While the Leafs are having whole limbs chopped off, the Ontario team I actually care about is … er … attempting chemotherapy, to keep with the medical imagery, on that little locker room cancer problem they’ve been dealing with. Ray Emery is gone, and now Brian McGrattan, his best friend on the team, joins him on the road out of town, having been traded to Phoenix for a fifth round draft pick. Why the Coyotes want McGrattan when they’ve got Carcillo, who is a penalty minute machine, is a bit puzzling to me, but oh well. Gratts, have a good time with the Great One! Ooh — Gratts. Gretz. I hope people don’t start getting them mixed up!

Don Brennan had a pretty interesting article about this trade in the Sun on Thursday, with a revealing quotation from Bryan Murray:

In sweeping McGrattan out of town four days after buying out Ray Emery’s contract, Murray acknowledged he was doing some spring cleaning.

“From my point of view, I want our team to kind of knock the label of a dysfunctional room, if that’s the right word,” Murray said. “With Ray and Brian and people like that, all I ever heard were the stories of all these guys doing different things … I want a team of real character people, as best I can, and I want very definitely good people in our room.

“I think anything I read, and you guys wrote it, is that we had some issues in our room. I want to clean that perception up.”

“Character,” it seems, is a new key word for the team, along with Craig Hartsburg’s “accountability.” Other bloggers have pointed out the weirdness that seems to go along with this whole thing — the focus in Murray’s comments on the public perception of a problem rather than on the problem itself, which is never named by anyone — and I agree, but I am still feeling good about the changes being made. Am I a sucker for falling for the management line so easily? Maybe, but I’ve got to say that after this past season, what they’re selling sounds pretty darn appealing.

My ideal Sens player at this point is just about totally angelic (or at least a really nice guy) off the ice, but still fine with beating the living crap out of someone during a game. He is a guy you can not only bring home to mother, but also count on to defend your honour in a barfight. Basically, I want a team of Alfies, Mike Fishers, and Chris Phillipses. I’m assuming the team’s new focus on ”character” means I’ll hear no more shady rumours about this or that player getting up to mischief at some bar (it was Barrymore’s in the story I heard), while “accountability” means I’ll be able to count on seeing them put in a full one million percent effort on the ice at every game and every practice. I accept that not everyone can be a shining example of virtue or a pillar of the community like the three players I mentioned, but if they can at least show me a real commitment to the team while managing not to have road rage issues or be constantly dogged by nagging rumours of other mysterious and unmentionable “off-ice problems,” I’ll be quite happy.

At the moment, Cody Bass — a player I was very impressed with last season and hope to see more of in 08-09 — is being held up by management as an example of the type of player the team wants. From the Citizen:

Veteran Chris Neil and Cody Bass, who was one of the club’s few bright spots late in the season and in the playoffs, can hold their own against rivals. Just as importantly, new coach Craig Hartsburg can trust them to contribute while taking a regular shift.

“We want gritty, competitive people who the coach feels comfortable putting on the ice. Someone who can finish checks, kill a penalty or win a faceoff,” said Murray. “That tells the coach he’s a safe guy.

“That’s what (Bass) is. He’s a hard-working kid. He’s not afraid to run into people. I hope he will be a good penalty killer. He looks like a coachable guy.”

For his part, Bass, who is in town for the Sens’ Development Camp tells the Sun:

“I’m not a fighter, but at the same time if I have to I will,” Bass said at the Senators development camp yesterday. “I think every team will have the guys that if a game gets out of hand, guys will stick up for each other. I’m only a young guy, but I think that’s a huge thing.

“When you have a team that’s so close, it doesn’t matter who you are, you’re going to stick up for each other. I think that’s what they’re trying to look for this year. Hopefully, we’ll have a real close team.”

And this, I think, ties in pretty well with something Craig Hartsburg said at his first press conference:

“We want this group to take great pride and passion in being a team. To me, that is one of the utmost important things right from the start that we’ll stress.”

So for the Sens it’s out with infighting, and goodbye to the tiny personalized rainclouds that hovered over each of the players’ heads last season; in with sunshine and roses and a healthy desire to pummel your opponent instead of a soul-destroying urge to murder half your teammates. Can you feel the love? I can feel it. I hope this plan works.