Abel to Yzerman
Schneider The Scapegoat?
by IwoCPO on 04/21/08 at 12:09 PM ET
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The LA Times’ Helene Elliott is upset, crestfallen even. Her Poultry are done and she’s pointing fingers. At Sasquatch for taking yet another idiotic, but typical, penalty at the end of Game 6 yesterday? Not by name. Nope, she’s throwing another defenseman under the bus, and that would be Mathieu Schneider.
When Niedermayer returned and General Manager Brian Burke had to make salary-cap space for him this season and next, Burke had to choose between trading center Andy McDonald or defenseman Mathieu Schneider. He dealt McDonald, the team’s top playoff goal scorer last spring, so he could keep his defense intact.
That was the wrong decision, not only because the Ducks lost McDonald’s playmaking and scoring but because Schneider is incurably soft and untrustworthy defensively.
Off the ledge Helene. Slowly. Schneider is “incurably soft”? Man, if you’re going to grab and twist, there’s no more painful spot than that, eh?
Do I consider Schneider a liability defensively? Yeah, I guess. But I think he showed over the years with us that he realized those shortcomings and made up for them with speed and fairly decent positioning.
But soft? Incurably soft? I never saw that in Schneider. In fact, I found him to have an edge to him, almost a dirty one. And if it were me? I’d be looking straight at the Captain who quit then waterboarded that team, forcing them to deal McDonald. Again, Scott Niedermayer was the feel-good hit of the winter when he came back, but I’m guessing some poultry are calling his loyalty into question now that they’ve been knocked out.
As for Schneider? It’s easy to say he might be looking back a little wistfully today, wondering if he’d made the right call. But as we found out last summer, it wasn’t exactly about the Cup with Matt. Only the cash.
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