USA-Latvia Liveblogging

I’ve got an odd venue for liveblogging USA-Latvia, as I’m at a Tex-Mex bar near my office with the laptop on the bar. Terminally uncool? Yep, that’s me. The television is muted, so Ray Ferraro is talking, but the only sound is Mexican adult contemporary pop. Kinda surreal, really.

One resource you might like is Justwide’s USA Olympic roster — USA Hockey only provides it in a Microsoft Word .DOC, which is merely inconvenient for us Mac users and dangerous for PC folks (who knows what fun lurks behind a humble macro?).

First Period: I arrived just in time to see my boy Erik Cole take an inadvertent slash across the face, but he was back out a few minutes later. If you liked seeing John-Michael Liles jumping up on the play that resulted in the first USA goal, get used to it — we Canes fans have been treated to that sort of play all season long. Peter Laviolette isn’t afraid to let defensemen who can skate join the rush. Team USA doesn’t appear sluggish, but Latvia is obviously trying to spread the ice on odd-man rushes, the classic play against North American-based teams. Their goal was scored exactly this way, as the right D for Team USA (didn’t catch who) was unable to cover the two men on him effectively. Lack of experience together prevented good communication between him and goaltender John Grahame to isolate on one forward.

Second period: Was I saying something? The USA looked ragged, but was managing to hold puck possession until about 14 minutes in. Grahame had also looked solid to that point under limited work; not exactly afterward. Latvian goaltender and Canes 2002 hero Arturs Irbe has stood his ground, and his team’s experience together showed, interrupting passing lanes and connecting where Team USA simply wasn’t able to. The talent disparity is clear, but so is the brains disparity (at least under current travel- and team composition-related conditions) that goes the other way, giving us Latvia 3, USA 2 through 2. Peter Laviolette didn’t look to have lost his composure, but let’s hope he has a couple of ideas in the dressing room. Read More »

Franchise

The 2005-06 NHL season has seen quite a run of jersey retirements: Paul Coffey’s #77 in Edmonton, Mark Messier’s #11 in New York, and this week Scott Stevens’s #4 in New Jersey. But for Carolina Hurricanes fans, none surpassed Saturday night’s celebration of Ron Francis Night at the RBC Center in Raleigh. His #10 was raised to the rafters, the franchise’s first official jersey retirement in Carolina, and it was fitting that this milestone honor a man three cities called “Ronnie Franchise.”

Videos in the ceremony showed highlights from his whole career, but most of the program focused on his time with Carolina from 1998 through March 2004. Francis thanked Canes owner Peter Karmanos and general manager Jim Rutherford for offering him a multiyear contract at age 35 to return to his home franchise, spoke of old teammates, coaches and team staff that helped him on his journey, then addressed the fans. He talked about realizing the passion local residents brought to their sports, the wonder of seeing Duke, Carolina and State fans uniting behind one team, and the new heights of tailgating the Caniacs brought to the NHL during the 2002 Stanley Cup Finals run. The common thread through Francis’s entire speech, though, was deflected glory. People talk about how hockey players often seem more humble, more human, than other professional athletes; Francis epitomized that throughout his speech, a player never completely comfortable with the spotlight instead passing the accolades on to everyone around him.

Camera pans through the crowd showed several groups of Whaler- and Penguin-jerseyed fans there for the tribute. As a Caniac who still has a battered white 1995-96 Whaler jersey in his closet, I’m glad the Hartford folks in particular came down, but as a hockey fan, I felt bad for them having to endure the accolades for Carolina in general and Karmanos in particular. I don’t believe the fans of North Carolina deserve the enmity they receive from disaffected ex-Hartford followers (especially much of the old hockey staff at ESPN), but I can understand the Whaler fans’ anger, and their hatred of Karmanos is certainly fair.

Read More »

Shootaround

Crossing my mind as I watch Canes-Isles:

• Marcus is gone, thankfully. May we never speak his name again.
• Nobody saw it but Center Ice subscribers, but the Flyers-Hurricanes game on Tuesday was a spectacular show, and a good example of how physicality is still part of hockey under the new rules, no matter what Steve Yzerman says. Philadelphia’s Michal Handzus was physically dominant at both ends of the ice for much of the game, the game wasn’t overburdened with penalty calls, and yet the clear violations were whistled where they weren’t before this season. By the way, I was thinking this even before the Canes lit the lamp twice in the third to tie it, then eked out the shootout win for their eighth straight victory. Sorry, Eric, but we’re definitely keeping Coach Laviolette.
• Jody points today to a very solid article out of City Journal discussing the “marriage gap”: the vast gap in out-of-wedlock birth rates between college-educated women and women who did not finish post-high-school education.
The piece defies short excerpting, so read the whole thing.

Thoughts? What’s on your mind?

Skatearound

I’ve got a few NHL thoughts to break up the football monotony. I’ll also have some travel talk eventually — bowl season is coming.

I’ve now posted photos from the Carolina Hurricanes’ 8-6 triumph over the Philadelphia Flyers a few weeks ago — after the VT-BC game in Blacksburg, I drove to Raleigh for the Friday nighter at RBC. Hockey photos are hard to do successfully with a consumer-level digital camera: the camera tries to force colors into balance, but the expanse of white ice throws this off badly. But after some time with iPhoto 5, I’ve got a good number of them looking acceptable.

Speaking of those Southeast-leading Canes, Scott Burnside’s Around the NHL feature at ESPN.com took notice this week that with sagging numbers in quite a few traditional markets, perhaps Southern fans and teams have been unfairly maligned:

If we assume that “real” hockey towns would have embraced the new NHL instantly, as has been the case in Philadelphia, Detroit and all of the Canadian markets, then maybe we’ve misjudged the standing of the game in markets like Long Island, New Jersey and Buffalo. Or perhaps we’ve unfairly besmirched hockey fans in places like Carolina, Atlanta and Nashville.

I’ve beaten this drum for years, and it’s nice to see a traditional columnist echo my conclusion for once. Per the mainline hockey press pre-lockout, when a Canadian market had attendance problems, it was a sign of savvy fans refusing to accept a bad product (Calgary in particular). But when Carolina got low turnouts after falling from the ‘02 Cup Finals run to the worst record in hockey the next year, it meant that those NASCAR-loving rednecks would never learn to support this great game. News flash: hockey isn’t part of our culture like in Canada or Minnesota, but we can recognize crap when we see it. We’ve had pro teams and public rinks for the better part of 15 years now, and we’ll turn out given a game worth watching. The new NHL has met that standard, and that should be good news for everyone who loves hockey.

Scheduling from Oblivion

Time to throw in my two cents on the NHL schedule announced yesterday. There’s been quite the outburst of whining over Tampa Bay opening its Stanley Cup defense against Carolina, as well as other teams having to play lots of games against Carolina, and on and on. We might as well go back to 1997-98 on ESPN, when you could hear the tears behind the sarcasm whenever they had to mention the Canes (er, “former Hartford Whalers”). Maybe the loudest arena in NHL history (per CBC’s Don Cherry) should just implode. And what would have happened if the puck had bounced the other way on Brett Hull, with 90 seconds left in Game 3 of the 2002 Stanley Cup Finals? That horrible team — that stain on the NHL’s existence — might have (gasp) won the hallowed, precious Cup. (Let’s pause for a second here… I’m sure that thought sent some sensitive readers straight to the floor.)

(Yes, I’m a little angry at the moment. Why do you ask?)

But back to rational analysis. I like the emphasis on divisional rivalries, but the problem is that divisional rivalries mean nothing in the playoff race, where everything’s per-conference. I also like the interconference scheduling, similar to baseball’s interleague play — each division plays one cross-conference division at home, one on the road, and skips the other entirely. (For example, the Canes play one game at each Pacific Division team, host one game each against the Central teams, and skip the Northwest this year.)

On a purely personal note, the Canes are playing at home the one Friday night I’m almost certain to be able to go to Carolina, and I may be able to make every game they play at Washington. Good times.

A way to fix the divisional meaninglessness problem would be to revert to the old-style four-division setup with divisional playoffs, and such an idea has been proposed, according to the Chicago Tribune. So, without further ado, the BTN.org NHL Realignment.

• Should the St. Louis Blues move to anywhere non-traditional within reason (e.g. Kansas City or Oklahoma City), a mini-realignment would move them to the Adams Division (for a regional rivalry with Dallas) and the Washington Capitals to the Patrick Division. Happy, Caps fans?

Teams I tried to keep together: the existing Eastern and Western Canadian blocks; the old Norris Division (substituting the Wild for the North Stars), the California teams plus Phoenix, the Florida clubs, NY/NJ, PIT/PHL. Everything else was geared toward regionality. Unfortunately, Buffalo and Toronto couldn’t go together, and I wasn’t able to keep Washington out of the ex-Southeast barring a St. Louis move.