You want sports to be about winning. You want sports to be about being better than the other team, about exerting all your resources on Championship. You want sports to be about winning.
But as a Pittsburgher, and by extension a Pirates fan, I have learned that sports is not all about winning; it is a business not unlike any other, whose sole goal at the end of the day is to make money. Normally, this is most efficiently achieved through awards and trophies, but last month’s Forbes report reveals that the most profitable teams are far from the winningest.
We all know that Crosby and Ovechkin are their teams’ leaders, in action and in title. This might lead you to believe that the captains for all NHL squads are the leading points scorers. However, that isn’t always the case. In fact, it’s not typically the case. The remaining two teams in the playoffs are actually some of those who seem to value points first.
Mike Richards, with a seemingly average 62 points this season, led the Flyers in points. The Flyers are facing the Blackhawks in the Stanley Cup who are headed by Jonathan Toews, third on his team this year with 68 points. Respectable numbers, yes, but again compared to the likes of Crosby and Ovechkin it leaves you wondering whether their teams wish they had attached the “C” to someone else’s jersey. Read more
The Flyers surprised everyone last night when they came back from a 3-0 deficit to beat the Bruins and advance to the Eastern Conference finals. What made that win so sweet is that it capped off a four-game streak that brought the team back from the brink of exiting the playoffs, and propelled them to join history as one of the few teams to rally from down 3-0 in a post-season series. Moreover, the Flyers were the underdogs in the series and have now set up a conference final pinning the #7 seed against the #8 Canadiens.
What sort of drama they’ve wrought! Consider that in the West it’s the #1 Sharks and #2 Blackhawks facing off. While that’s bound to be a strongly fought and competitive series, all eyes are focused now on the East. Here’s what people are saying about the Flyers as they head into a series that’ll bring them one step closer to a Stanley Cup: Read more
With the way people are talking this morning about the Canucks-Blackhawks game one you’d think that Vancouver’s just locked up a spot in the finals. Sure, they trounced the ‘Hawks 5-1 in the series opener and set an unexpected tone for the series. But by no means does that mean more than just one win where it matters; Chicago could regroup and send the message right back in game two. Read more
There comes a time toward the end of every fantasy sports season when one play-off contending team manhandles a wannabe and propels itself into the post-season. These showings, while impressive, come at a cost – the cost of fair competition. It would be dishonest and downright delusional to believe that a team that’s been eliminated from the play-off run would still perform as well as they would have otherwise.
The larger difficulty with this dilemma is when we’re confronted with it in real sports terms. During a game last night, the play-off contending Boston Bruins shut down the Hurricanes 4-2. In that game, the Bruins scored a record three short-handed goals during one penalty kill (see video here). While the Bruins should be proud and overjoyed by this astounding feat, I can’t help but wonder if this occurred as an indirect result of the Hurricanes pretty much shutting down operations for the season. Just a few days earlier than they should have. Read more
There’s no denying that Alexander Ovechkin is at the top of the game. Just look at the goals and points leaders and you’ll see Ovechkin at or near the top. But the true measure of Alex’s greatness is not in his ability to score goals, it’s the way he’s led his team to the top of the Eastern Conference standings.
The Caps are the best team in all of the NHL right now, and it’s Ovechkin who’s propelled them there. Ovechkin leads the league in another area that sometimes gets overlooked: Plus-minus. If you want to figure out what a player is worth to his team, plus-minus is the stat to do it because it proves the actual difference that the athlete offers to his team. In fact, other sports have adopted this traditional hockey stat to help them evaluate their own players’ worth to their squads. Read more
Before I start the following argument, let me be clear about two things. A) I love the United States and was as excited when they scored the game-tying goal as I was when Pitt won the Big East Tournament in 2008. (In fact, the US Hockey team jumped over Pitt Football breaking into the top five sports loves of my life: 1) Steelers, 2) Pirates, 3) Penguins, 4) Pitt Basketball, 5) USA Hockey.) B) NHL players playing in the Olympics is wonderful for the sport , and it would be a horrible detriment if they are disallowed to play in four years. Those two key pieces of information being said, I wasn’t miserable when Crosby scored the game-winner in the Gold Medal game, and I hold a little grudge against the NHL for pushing me to root against my captain oh captain. Read more
As the hockey games get underway this week at the Vancouver Olympics, fearless prognosticators are taking their best stabs at predicting which teams will go home with medals. It’s hard to predict which team – with whatever talent they bring to the tournament – will mesh best and live up to their team’s potential. Lots of teams are stacked with talent from around the NHL, but it’s easier said than done to get a group of individual stars to play as a team. Moreover, there’s so little time to practice together that lack of preparation time could be the biggest factor that stands in the way of a standout squad.
Because hockey is such a team sport, we’ve come to accept (and witness) that the best teams are those that show the best chemistry. It’s a term that gets thrown around very easily to represent the cohesion that a hockey team must showcase in order to achieve greatness. Russia, for instance, has the most top-heavy talent on its roster at the Olympics, but it’ll take some carefully crafted lined and willing players to get the most out of the top-tier stars. If they don’t buy into the game plan or system for the tournament, these players could wind up leaving their teammates and supporters wondering what could have been. Read more
An announcement was made this week that barely made national news: The Pittsburgh Penguins’ owners, led by local-Superman Mario Lemieux, have made an unsolicited offer to buy the Pirates from current owner Bob Nutting. Read more
The Chicago Blackhawks have soared to the top of their division, surprising many NHL fans. The Hawks have had a short history of losing, to say the least, and casual hockey fans are probably surprised every day to find the team still atop the standings. But that doesn’t mean all the news for Chicago these days is good news. Patrick Kane – who’s developing a reputation for mischief – was caught, along with teammates John Madden and Kris Versteeg, without shirts on inside a limo in Vancouver last week. Read more
Vancouver Canucks’ forward Alexandre Burrows has earned his stay in the NHL for his work as an agitator. He’s getting attention today for agitating someone he didn’t try to set off: a referee.
At the top of last night’s game between the Canucks and the Nashville Predators, referee Stephane Auger supposedly warned Burrows that he’d be coming after him as revenge for Burrows tricking him into calling an undeserved penalty during a December match-up between the two teams. The ref must have felt embarrassed by the erred call – which led the NHL to overrule a game misconduct, in hindsight – so Auger informed Burrows he had a vendetta against him and would return the bad behavior during the game. Read more
Everywhere you look this week there are end-of-year and end-of-decade recaps summarizing who succeeded and made the biggest impression over the time period. Obviously, with sports it’s easier to measure success on a large scale – championships are won, awards doled out at the end of each season. But one thing that is often ignored is futility. While half the teams make the playoffs in the NHL each year, the other slate of teams is sent home without any sort of recognition or attention for their struggles.
That’s why I’m impressed that CNNSI has included a “Worst Franchise” of the decade along with the other awards the site dished out. For some reason, though, nobody talks about the Thrashers as the joke of the league. Sports has a contemporary set of teams who’ve become synonymous with being routinely awful – the Clippers, Raiders, Pirates, to name a few. However, none really stands out in hockey as the team everyone beats up on. Is it because those other teams have storied histories that they can fall back on? Could we be pitying the new guy, giving him some time to establish himself before we really let him have it? Read more
In front of 12,178 fans at the Prudential Center on Wednesday night, Martin Brodeur tied Patrick Roy’s NHL record for regular season appearances by a goalie. In 16 seasons – all with the Devils – Brodeur has played 1,030 games as of this writing. For the record, it took Roy 18 seasons to reach the mark. Brodeur was playing when I became interested in hockey back in the early 90s during the Lemieux/Jagr regime. Not only is he still playing, he’s dominating – just as he did back then, making him, possibly, the quietest-dominant player in the sport. Read more
Barring a catastrophic 2008-or-2009-Broncos-esque meltdown, the Cleveland Cavaliers will make the playoffs this year. And when they do, Shaq will make the post-season with his fifth team. Shaq. Who will retire with the fifth most points in NBA history. Five teams. With Iverson’s return to the 76ers this year, he too, has hit the historic landmark of changing teams at least four times. Two all-time great players are playing for their fifth teams in the NBA. Read more
There’s a moment during every championship run when you – the fan – start to believe. Sometimes it happens at the end of the regular season; more often it happens during the post season. It is at this moment when you get a pit in your stomach and think to yourself, “we’re going to actually do it this year. We’re actually going to win.” You start to believe. You start to understand that your team has the pieces in place to go out there and win the biggest games down the stretch. Your team is talented, on a hot streak, healthy, the ball is bouncing their way. You start to believe. Read more
