Kukla's Korner Hockey
Trying to be original is the best defence
by George Malik on 05/23/08 at 12:21 PM ET
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It wasn’t like this in 2002. The internet was certainly in bloom, but the concept of everyone having an instantaneous opinion was confined to message boards and the last vestiges of IRC.
Now, what was the excuse for ten or fifteen hockey writers from the U.S. and almost every one from Canada to take a final trip before the NHL Awards, the draft, and the pre-lockout free agent fireworks that would follow, and TSN and Sportsnet to go nuts…
It’s sixty to eighty people having an opinion within the first five to ten minutes, and another twenty within an hour.
It amazed me “back in the day” when newspaper writers could jaunt down to the locker room with their dictaphones, file a legible story within an hour, and get it off to be edited and sent off to the printers’ presses so that your newspaper had something more than, “Wings beat Flames, and it was way cool.”
Now? Man, if you don’t write something witty, sarcastic, opinionated, and/or engaging, and it isn’t online within four hours of the end of the game, the world keeps spinning without you, and you’re yesterday’s news.
No wonder these journalists are grumpy…
And there’s a reason that “us bloggers” don’t sleep very much at this time of year when our teams are still in it. I try to keep tabs on the local and national press with a “Wings/Penguins” Firefox window with about 25 tabs open, and another at least decent attempt to take a look at what others are thinking in a 44-tab window. To keep Snapshots up-to-date, I slept for about four hours a night during the Conference Finals, and I’m guessing that I ought to take up cat-napping over the next two weeks. It’s worth it, don’t get me wrong, it’s worth every early wrinkle under my eyes, and it’d be more worth it if Paul wasn’t the only one of the few, the proud, the accredited, but it is what it is.
So I’m going to go against my usual protocol and actually pull a “pick ‘em,” though I’m not going to disclose the number of games, because I’m not one for spending fifteen paragraphs telling you that so-and-so is going to score on a snap shot at the 1:03 mark of the second period because his line is more evenly matched up against the other team’s fourth line because coach so-and-so knew at the 35-second mark to put them over the boards because he had a pre-cognizant dream where his uncle Fred drove a city bus—which is what these endless previews and predictions end up reading as.
The game’s written on the ice, and no matter how many reams of paper or megabits of bandwidth writers can take up boldly proclaiming the smallest details, once the puck drops, it’s all out the window. That’s the beauty of the game.
My take? Detroit, and Detroit because of the system. The Detroit Red Wings have been a team built upon a system of high-skill, puck-possession hockey with an emphasis on building offence from a foundation of strong team defence, anchored by veteran calm and straight-ahead coaching. The Penguins don’t have guys who know what Mike Babcock says about the Stanley Cup Finals being a completely different level of play than the rest of the playoffs because they’ve been there two, three, or four times, and have at least one loss for their trouble. They don’t have Nicklas Lidstrom, despite the suggestions by the Penguins’ website that Sergei Gonchar is in the same stratosphere, which he’s not. They also don’t have Tomas Holmstrom’s rear end, and it’s hard to bet against a team whose biggest pest will out-discipline you while standing three inches in front of your goalie as pucks are fired at his head.
Homer’s bought into the system that is Red Wings hockey, and that’s going to prevail. That’s not to say that the Penguins aren’t a worthy opponent, that they’re too “young” (they’re not) or too “inexperienced” (not really). They don’t have the system, not yet.
Back to the blog…I swear, I’ll learn to drink coffee yet…
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