Conference Finals and the Caps Offseason

Chicago Blackhawks v. Anaheim Ducks

I had the Blackhawks losing last round, but they made me look totally foolish by sweeping the Wild.  The Ducks, meanwhile, might be the best team thus far in the playoffs, having lost only one game.  That said, they’ve had by far the easiest road to this point.

At this stage, series inevitably revolve around goaltending.  For the Hawks and Ducks, there are some wrinkles.  First, for Chicago, Corey Crawford had a rough first round but started all four games of the Wild series.  He’s also a Cup winner, but he needs to not revert to first-round form against the talented Ducks roster.  For Anaheim, Fredrik Andersen has been good enough, which is to say he has let his team flash its offensive prowess in front of him without being a sieve.  His stats look good, no doubt, but I remain a bit skeptical given his competition thus far and the gaudy 3.9 goals averaged by the Ducks this postseason.

Offense remains key for Anaheim.  Corey Perry has posted 15 points in the playoffs, along with goals at some very key moments.  For the Blackhawks, their superstar Patrick Kane has defied expectations in not only returning early from an injury but also producing at a high level.  Chicago has another worry on the back end, however, after Michal Roszival broke his ankle in the second round and is out.  They will now look to Kimmo Timonen and Davind Rundblad, both of whom played in Game 1 on Sunday.  I remain deeply skeptical Timonen has much left in the tank, so it will be interesting if coach Joel Quenneville breaks up the awesome Oduya-Hjalmarsson pairing to bring more balance across all three lines.

As a final note, two of the best two-way centers are playing in this series.  Jonathan Toews for Chicago, and Ryan Kesler from Anaheim.  Kesler will likely slot against the Kane line, which should be a fun matchup and will lead to plenty of shoving matches.  Toews is expected to match up with the Getzlaf-Perry line, which is bound to be entertaining.

Prediction: Ducks in seven.  They are better rested and bring more goal scoring depth to the picture.  Matt Belesky, Jacob Silfverberg, and Kyle Palmieri all can score goals, which in the end will overwhelm the Hawks.  But it will be tough, and I expect this series to go the distance.

Tampa Bay Lightning v. New York Rangers

In a matchup between one team no one cares about and one that everyone is tired of, this series hopefully will be more exciting than either of the second round tilts in the East.

One guy will determine this series: Henrik Lundqvist.  The Rangers goalie was nothing short of sensational last series, and his ability to nurse a one goal lead is, by now, well-known (feels like the Rangers haven’t had a two goal game since the Messier days).  This is particularly noteworthy when you consider how well Tampa has been this playoffs when scoring first (they’re undefeated).

For the Lightning, Steven Stamkos will continue to be the storyline.  He had three goals last round, but the sniper who decimated opponents the past few seasons just doesn’t seem to be there right now.  Tampa has relied on its famed Triplets line for top-end scoring thus far. 

This series will hopefully be characterized by speed.  Both teams bring very quick players, especially on their lower lines, that can change the course of a game just by a hard move into the offensive zone (kinda like Chris Kreider did against the Caps).  The last round didn’t feature much of this, but when it did both the Rangers and the Lightning cashed in. 

As was the case against Montreal, real emphasis will be placed on whether Ben Bishop can match Henrik Lundqvist.  Bishop has had a great postseason, but with some blemishes.  His glove hand in particular has failed him at some points, but through Game 1 he looks to have done a decent job.  It seems, however, that Lundqvist gets better and better as a series progresses, so the question remains whether it can all be sustained.

Prediction: Rangers in six.  I can see Tampa winning two here, but after their close calls in the first and second round (without a Tyler Johnson goal with under a second left they might not even be here) it’s tough to trust them at this point.  New York has, for lack of a better term, proven themselves qualified winners.  Their talent from top to bottom might not be as prolific, but with the Swede at their back I don’t see them losing to Tampa.

The Caps Offseason

Coming into the offseason, the Caps have some serious decisions to make.

First are the restricted free agents: Marcus Johansson, Evgeny Kuznetsov, and Braden Holtby.  It’s obvious they should do whatever they can to make Holtby happy, as he is the franchise goalie officially.  Kuznetsov, despite his disappointing season, looks to be the second line center for the Caps going forward.  I say sign him too.

The unrestricted free agents are a different batch: Mike Green, Joel Ward, Eric Fehr, Jay Beagle, Curtis Glencross, and Tim Gleason.  To dispense with the low-hanging fruit, Gleason and Glencross should not return.  Glencross started hot, but faded, and Gleason for all his physicality is keeping the spot warm for a youngster like Dimitry Orlov or maybe Nate Schmidt.

The key decision will be Mike Green.  In a more limited role this year, Green responded with 45 points, his most since the barnburning ’09-’10 season.  That’s great production, regardless, but it also means Green will be due a big pay day, especially at age 29.  I am in favor of letting Green go, mainly because he would demand a lot of money for a guy playing less than 20 minutes a game.  I also believe the younger guys can replicate his production in 5-on-5 when they come up (Orlov in particular), though it will be difficult to find his replacement for the power play unit.

Once those options are taken care of, we’re left with Ward, Fehr, Beagle, and Johansson.  Ward made $3 million last year, and might be looking for a raise after proving his worth in the postseason.  Eric Fehr had 33 points this year, and seems comfy in DC after his brief stint with Winnipeg a few seasons ago.  Jay Beagle, despite only 20 points, is a wonderful face-off man and a great penalty killer.  Marcus Johansson can play on the top line and, amazingly, is the 5^th most prolific scorer from his draft class, despite being picked at the bottom of the order.

If possible, you sign all four, but I don’t think that will happen.  The Caps have carved out a great use for Beagle, who I think deserves more than the 900K he made last season, and should stay.  The others are question marks.  Ward also has his specific role, and it seems he is a great presence in the locker room based on how he handles the media.  In the end, both he and Johansson have the ability to play on the top line, so if you can keep one, the other may have to go.  Fehr was a sparkplug this season, scoring big goals and plenty of them, and I liked his play before going down in the playoffs.  He provides true depth scoring and also is a decent two-way player that can contribute on the penalty kill, something Johansson does not do.

In the end, I’d let Johansson walk if I had to.  Regardless, it was a good season, though they choked at the end.

Unjustified Suspension

It might be time to assume the NFL has no real judgment on disciplinary actions.

Everyone remembers the nonsense that occurred last season, where Ray Rice received an initial two-game suspension before the league went into damage control mode.  That a videotape of a vicious act was needed to result in a firm and fair punishment continues to sicken me.  What’s even worse is that the public backlash was what spawned the change in Rice’s case.

Apparently nothing has changed.  Yesterday, the NFL suspended Tom Brady for four games as part of the Deflategate process and the Wells Report, which claimed that it was “more probable than not” that Brady was “at least generally aware” of the Patriots deflating footballs intentionally.

I certainly can’t argue with that finding.  The text messages between Bryan McNally and John Jastremski both signify that each had spoken with Brady about the issue.  Granted that is their own words, but it seems to me only an unabashed biased source could read them and make any other conclusion.

But we should key on the “more probably than not” in the quotation above.  I realize we aren’t dealing with a courtroom evidentiary standard here, but is it right to suspend someone for a quarter of the season based on a phrase that does not signify proof?  Clearly, the NFL is making the case and has come to the conclusion that Brady not only knew but was also actively involved.  It’s not that I think that conclusion isn’t justified, but Ted Wells still can’t come up with any proof.  There is no video tape or anything like that, which makes me think four games is too extreme.

In short, I can see how the NFL connects the dots, but without ironclad proof, Brady should not get the same punishment that performance-enhancers get in today’s NFL.  If it were me, I give him two games and that’s it. 

The bigger injustice is for the Pats organization.  Ted Wells says in his report that he does not believe Bill Belichick or any other Pats coach had any knowledge of wrongdoing. 

Tell them, Johnny, what’s their prize?

A $1 million fine and two lost draft picks, one of which is a first rounder in 2016.  Maybe this is a NCAA-esque attitude, where anything going on within the team is the fault of the organization’s leaders, regardless of their knowledge or not.  That is a reasonable approach without deep investigative reports, but when the NFL’s own report says something different, any penalty on the organization as a whole makes little sense.  As Greg Schwab said in his post about this, it seems the NFL would like to use parts of the Wells Report when it’s convenient, but clearly not the whole report. 

In the end, I cannot shake the feeling that this punishment, so devoid of full proof and clearly hypocritical, is all about the public perception.  There are concrete examples of very minor penalties being handed out to teams that were manipulating game balls (see Mike Reiss for more).  One of those resulted in a warning, nothing like a $1 million fine.  The league clearly hasn’t cared all that much until now, so I have to wonder why.  Granted, it happened in the playoffs where any breaking of rules is magnified, but going from a warning to a $1 million fine in one season is a massive shift that is not at all in keeping with the NFL’s prior work on the issue of ball manipulation.

Pats fans should feel fine about the short-term results.  Brady will likely appeal and get this whittled down (if the arbiter is truly independent), and the team will remain strong as it always has.  But longer-term, the questions about Brady will remain in the eyes of the average fan, most of whom don’t like New England.  They will hang the suspension for cheating on him forever, and while I can’t argue the presence of the suspension, the penalties in this case aren’t justified.

Pomp, Circumstance, and Bloat

The weekend that was featured some great storylines.  We traveled to a bygone era in some respects, as many paid more attention to a horse race and a boxing fight than a Game 7 in basketball.  Churchill Downs, which typically dominates the first weekend in May, saw its TV time decline a bit, despite a record-breaking crowd attending, due to other events.  The two best-known boxers in today’s world staged a fight in Las Vegas.  Throw in NBA and NHL playoffs, and Saturday was a day for couch potatoes.  On Thursday or Friday, one couldn’t help but be psyched about the weekend to come.

On the other side of it, however, the fragments make a much less pleasing whole.  In the end, all we saw this weekend was pomp and circumstance with very little substance.

Take the perennial first Saturday of May exercise.  While fun, exciting, and most importantly different from the rest of the sports world, the Kentucky Derby is about two minutes long.  In broadcast terms, that’s roughly equivalent to the amount of time they sing “My Old Kentucky Home” at the track.  The Derby broadcast and preview shows start early in the afternoon, with lots of blather about a bunch of horses (who are always largely unknown until the week before the Derby) who will run a mile and a quarter in about two minutes.  It’s the traditions that make the race, not only the iconic façade of Churchill Downs but also the hats and fashion.  The race itself is two minutes.  Other than that, the emphasis is elsewhere.

As for the “Fight of the Century”, it may have been a larger actual sporting event based on TV time, but the hype overwhelmed the fight itself.  Perhaps more importantly, the money is what overwhelmed the event.  Tickets to the weigh-in went for hundreds of dollars, and tickets to the fight itself went for thousands.  The audience featured many celebs, Jamie Foxx sang the anthem, and Jimmy Kimmel walked out in Pacquiao’s party.  All of this runway leading up to what many thought was going to be the best fight in recent memory...and it was a snoozer. This is boxing’s problem, in a nutshell.  Fights are rarely judged on whether they are “good” or not.  They are now judged by size.  Even the adjectives used to describe fights inherently acknowledge that the performance of the boxers is not as important.  How many times has any mega-PPV fight been discussed in terms of how good it will be, versus how big it will be?  This weekend was no different, with more time spent discussing Mayweather’s promotional skills and the obscene amount of money involved in the fight than whether the two guys were evenly matched.

That is not to say there aren’t some boxing purists or diehards out there who wanted to see the fight for the purposes of thoughtful analysis.  I believe there were, and they got to…for $100 a pop in HD.  That money rarely feeds into an objectively good fight, it feeds into the promotion and the hype surrounding the sports element. 

There was another example this weekend that I failed to mention in my opening paragraph, but there’s no better example of bloat than the NFL Draft.  Of course it’s fun, and yes it’s important to showcase the arrival of a new class into the biggest cash cow of the four major sports leagues, but do we think the draft needs to be spread over three days?  Round 1 has all the big showtimey picks, and the drama at the top of the order is always palpable, but after that we are really talking about risky plays, the majority of which won’t be on an NFL roster four seasons from now.  I am also struck by how little average sports fans remember each draft.  They remember the picks in the draft, but do they conjure up images of the guy’s photo with the Commissioner on Draft Day?  It’s a spectacle, a way to stimulate our senses for instant gratification of sports, when there really isn’t much that changes the sports landscape (in the short run or long run) in at least one (and maybe part of another) day of the three-day TV broadcast.  And yet, we are constantly reminded of when the Draft is and how significant it is for the future.

I’m going to insert what SAT teachers call an “idiot’s paragraph” here, where I straw-man, likely in an unfair manner, the argument of someone else.  There are those who will comment here and say “late-round picks do pan out, such as Alfred Morris or Julian Edelman, so those players change the landscape.”  You would be certainly right there are momentous things that happen on Day 3 of the draft that matter down the line.  But do you know during the Draft that those guys are gonna be that good?  The short answer is you don’t, it’s all a guessing game that is force-fed to sports fans as if every pick will alter a team’s fortunes.  In the case of Rounds 1-3, there might be some truth to that, not only because of who teams pick but also who they don’t pick (opportunity cost for you Econ people).  Afterwards, we’re really talking about execs in a room making educated guesses.  And this is dubbed must-see television!?

I don’t want to beat the drum too much on this point.  Sports is, in the end, a business.  Money is a fact of it all, both on the media side and on the promotional side.  But weekends like this one drive home that sometimes fans focus not on the essence of sports, but on the fringe features.  In some cases, this is what makes sports such a great cultural rallying point, as fans enjoy the scene with one another regardless of their differences.  But sometimes the fringes dominate the narrative.  While the Derby is so different that it deserves its place in the collective sports psyche, the big events this weekend turned out to be all promotions and fluff.  The best event of the weekend, a well-played basketball game between the Spurs and Clippers, was about the quality of play (there should be more discussion about the garbage foul call on Duncan when Chris Paul shot from the elbow, but overall a great game).  I prefer those games, and so should you.