Grab Bag: The dumbest brawl ever

In the Friday Grab Bag:
- On the almost ridiculously stupid reaction to the Philip Larsen hit
- A small rant on GMs who won't ask players to waive NTCs
- An obscure player with an anniversary coming up this weekend
- The week's three comedy stars, all of which are children
- And a classic YouTube clip featuring Bryan Trottier and a live mic

>> Read the full post at Vice Sports

The Maple Leafs are fun. Enjoy it while you can..

This is a weird time to start writing about the Maple Leafs again.

When I first started writing about hockey, almost nine years ago, I covered the Leafs pretty much exclusively. Let’s remember back to what things were like back then. John Ferguson Jr. had just been fired. Vesa Toskala was in net. The Leafs were about to miss the playoffs for a franchise-record third straight year, and interim GM Cliff Fletcher was trying (and failing) to kickstart a desperately needed rebuild by trading away Mats Sundin and the Muskoka Five. That summer, they’d hire Ron Wilson, sign Jeff Finger, and launch a GM search that dragged on for months. Eventually, Brian Burke would arrive, promising that he could turn the whole thing around quickly.

It was, to put it mildly, a miserable time to be a Maple Leafs fan. At one point, I set out to write a multi-part series to answer the question: Is this the worst it’s ever been? The answer: Yes it was. I’d lived through Harold Ballard, Kerry Fraser, “draft schmaft” and Rask-for-Raycroft, but there had never been a worse time to be a Leafs fan.

Fast-forward almost a decade later, and here we are. The Leafs still haven’t won a playoff round. They’ve only made it once, and that didn’t end well. Other teams have built and rebuilt and won it all and crashed and burned, and there’s Toronto, still nestled away in the bottom third of the standings, as always.

All of which makes it feel a little odd to get to write this: We’re in the middle of a damn fun year to be a Leafs fan.

>> Read the full post at The Athletic

Ten lies every hockey fan tells themselves

You’re a liar.

It’s OK. I am too. So is everyone reading this.

If you’re a hockey fan, you lie all the time. And not just to other fans – we lie to ourselves. It’s part of being a fan.

But that doesn’t mean we can’t recognize when it’s happening. So today, let’s run through 10 lies that NHL fans tell themselves. It's OK to admit that you're guilty of some of these. Heck, it's OK to admit that you're guilty of all of them.

Of course, you could also claim that none of these apply to you. You'd be lying, of course, but that's OK too. It's what we do.

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Lie No. 1: My team doesn't dive

Hockey fans hate diving. Whether it's the full-on deep-six, the hands-in-the-air flying twirl or the only slightly more subtle embellishments like head snaps and overreactions, it drives fans crazy to see players try to work the refs.

While certainly not unique to the sport – check out basketball or soccer to see some real artists in action – diving seems to go against what we'd like to think hockey players are made of. And the worst part is, these days everybody does it.

Well, everybody except for your team.

No, somehow fans have convinced themselves that they happen to root for the only team that doesn't do this stuff.

And if one of their favourite players stands accused, they're willing to break down the clip frame-by-frame like it's the Zapruder film, until they've found the one angle that proves his innocence.

And in the rare cases where a player is guilty beyond all reasonable doubt? Well, he was just doing what any reasonable person would do, you see, because otherwise the refs never give him a call. Speaking of which…

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Lie No. 2: The referees are out to get us

Your team just lost a game in which they faced more power plays than they received.

What happened?

Was it bad luck? Just one of those nights? A case of a team getting outplayed and having to take the sort of shortcuts that lead to penalties?

No. It was the refs. The refs were out to get you.

Sometimes it's a specific ref; he made that one questionable call against you 17 months ago, so this is clearly becoming a pattern.

Other times, it's just a general league-wide bias. Maybe it's because somebody in the organization criticized a referee once and has never been forgiven (even though it wasn't anything that every other team has said).

Or maybe it's because your team is a smaller market and the league clearly doesn't want those teams to succeed (even though they shut down an entire season to get a salary cap specifically to help smaller markets).

Either way, you're not saying that NHL commissioner Gary Bettman sneaks into the officials' room before every game, twirls his mustache evilly, and instructs them to screw your team over. You're just not not saying it.

But look on the bright side: at least the referees have to give you a break every now and then. They're not completely biased. Unlike some other people you could mention.

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>> Read the full post at Sportsnet

Five players I can't figure out

I'm still confused.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the NHL's five most confusing teams, at least from my perspective. These were the teams that I just couldn't figure out. Were they good? Bad? Somewhere in the middle? I'd spent the season trying to work it out, and come up empty.

As it turned out, I wasn't alone. More than a few readers confessed to being confused by those teams too, not to mention several others. It was like having a support group. A support group of confused hockey fans, all watching the games unfold with their heads tilted like a puppy seeing a toilet flush for the first time.

Well, today I'm going to call another meeting of the confused hockey fan network. But this time, we're not looking at teams. No, today we're going to dive into some specific players that have me perplexed. In most of these cases, I thought I had a handle on things. But now I'm not so sure.

Maybe you can help me out. Or maybe you're just as confused as I am. Either way, I think it will be good for my soul to admit that I just can't figure these guys out.

Brian Elliott

What I thought I knew: After an up-and-down start to this NHL career, Elliott had settled in to a predictable pattern with the Blues. He'd play well. He'd post strong numbers, sometimes even league-leading ones. And then, just when push came to shove, the Blues would lose faith in him and hand the starter's job to someone else. Maybe it was the backup. Maybe it was a pricey trade acquisition. Maybe it was even a semi-retired legend, in a move we'd all agree to just pretend never happened. But time and time again, the Blues had no faith in Elliott.

And I was convinced that they were wrong. This was the classic case of a team over-thinking things, or maybe letting dressing room politics or a faith in intangibles override basic logic. The numbers didn't lie: Elliott was one of the best goalies in the league. And when the Flames nabbed him at a discount in the offseason, I was sure that they'd found their starter.

Where I'm at now: Sitting around wondering what happened. Which is also where Elliott finds himself most games these days.

Chad Johnson has been a great story, and you can't blame the Flames for riding the hot hand. Elliott got off to a bad start, and when you're a young team that hasn't earned a ton of self-confidence quite yet, you can't let yourself fall too far out of the race. The Flames are being smart here.

But… Elliott is still good, right? Every goalie has the occasional slump, so we can't panic over 13 games. Then again, Elliott's never really done much outside of Ken Hitchcock's goalie factory, and the Blues still didn't believe in him. Did they know something that the rest of us, including the Flames, somehow missed? 

>> Read the full post at The Hockey News

NHL stock watch: December

We’re nearing the two-month mark of the NHL regular season, which means it’s a good time to once again check in on trends around the league.

Some stocks are rising, some are plummeting, and some are holding steady — and we’re going to take a crack at figuring out which are which.

When we did this last month, the big stories through the first month were the rise of the next generation of young stars, struggling goaltenders, and the lack of firings.

The Florida Panthers were kind enough to take care of that last one for us, leaving room for some other stories to bubble up to take its place.

But we'll start this month's roundup with a story that seems like it may have some staying power.

Stock holding steady: Youth

October was all about the kids.

After stealing the headlines at the World Cup of Hockey, the league's kiddie corps hit the ground running once the NHL season started. Auston Matthews had his record-breaking debut, Patrik Laine was scoring in bunches, and Connor McDavid was unstoppable.

It was all sorts of fun — even if it couldn't last.

Eventually, you had to figure, conservative head coaches and the grind of a long season would bring these young punks back to earth.

Another month later, and we're still waiting. McDavid is running away with the scoring title, although a healthy Sidney Crosby should eventually give him a run for his money.

Maybe more impressively, Laine is sitting in second place on the goal-scoring list.

Even Matthews, who suffered through a 13-game goal-scoring slump, is still on pace for nearly 40 markers.

Mix in the performances of players like Zach Werenski, Mitch Marner, and even the technically-still-a-rookie Matt Murray, and we're still seeing a league dominated by players without so much as a full season of NHL action under their belts.

History tells us that the kids will slow down eventually. Then again, we said that last month, and here we are.

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Stock rising: Paying for goaltending

For years, conventional wisdom had been pushing towards what seemed like a counter-intuitive recommendation: Don't spend big money on goaltending.

While it may be the sport's most important position, it was simply too unpredictable to make a long-term commitment to.

If you locked in a goalie based on one or two strong seasons, there was a good chance you were buying fool's gold. Far better to gamble on cheaper short-term deals and spend the big bucks on positions that were easier to forecast.

And all of that still makes sense. But so far this year, the big-money goalies have been dominating. Take a look at the position's highest cap hits; which one of those guys would you really say is overpaid right now?

Sure, Henrik Lundqvist isn't having his best season, but he's been fine and should improve as the season goes on.

Braden Holtby and Cory Schneider have both been good. Tuukka Rask has been excellent, and Carey Price may be one of the most underpaid stars in the league (at least until he's eligible for an extension in the off-season).

Meanwhile, three players who had previously been held up as examples of the "don't go long on goaltenders" rule are all having Vezina-quality seasons. Corey Crawford, Pekka Rinne and Sergei Bobrovsky have all been up-and-down over the years, but all three have been worth every penny so far this season.

Really, the only deals in the top ten that aren't paying off this year are probably Ryan Miller and Ben Bishop, and both of those expire after this season.

There's really not a bad deal to be found at the top of the list. (At least until you get down to No. 11, which is a name we'll run into in the next section.)

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>> Read the full post at Sportsnet