Taylor Hall has just been named the NHL 1st Star for this past week because of his stellar play and production (4 GP, 2G, 7A, 9P). The narratives are writing themselves right now. Hall has learned the 2 way game, he’s one of the best LWs in the NHL, he’s taking the team on his back, etc. The Taylor Hall love-in is in full effect and I expect it will stay that way for some time. I also believe it’s well deserved by Hall who sits 7th in NHL scoring and number 1 for portside wingers.
But this is the 2nd year in a row the Oilers have had a player explode in the final segment of the season. The biggest difference between this year and last year, however, is that the Oiler who dominated his last month of league play in 2012-2013 didn’t get the kind of love being doled out to Taylor Hall. No, the treatment that he got last year was very different indeed.
Nail Yakupov’s April of 2013 was epic. In his final 14 games he scored 11 goals and added 4 more assists. He went Supernova and climbed the Rookie scoring charts right to the top where he beat out Jonathan Huberdeau. On the final day of the season, with a near heroic Hat-Trick, he beat his rival based on the Tie-Breaking goals total. Surely perceived as a great feat by the NHL’s media class, right? Wrong. It was all but laughed away at the time.
Compare, if you will, Taylor Hall’s last 14 games in which he has scored 5 Goals and 11 Assists for 16 points. The young Oiler forward has less than half as many goals as Yak had in a similar 14 game stretch and now the MSM are practically writing love poetry for the Kingston kid, but Yak didn’t even get a box of chocolates and a mixed tape. There’s something a little uneven about this, no?
@jonrmcleod Garbage time is different. Counts less. Yakupov went 26 games with 1 goal, more than half the season.
— Mark Spector (@SportsnetSpec) June 29, 2013When Yak was electrifying the crowd the media pundits downgraded his accomplishments by claiming it was done in “Garbage Time…. Somehow scoring in the NHL was much easier in the last part of a wasted year in 2013 than it apparently is in 2014. Now we’ll also have to forget that the Oilers were a better team last year and if such a thing as “Garbage Time… actually existed it wouldn’t have occurred until much later in the season for the 2012-2013 Oilers.
In fact, one could likely make the case that this current Oiler team has been playing in Garbage Time since November. So why hasn’t anyone stepped up yet to say that Taylor Hall’s accomplishments during this late stretch count less than during other parts of the year? Why hasn’t anyone from the Edmonton media stood up and said, “Whoa, points are nice but it’s April in a lost year. This isn’t a big deal.…
Well maybe they haven’t because it’s a ridiculous position to take. It was in poor form last year with Yakupov and the fact that no one has even considered using that argument for the accomplishments of a Canadian only raises eyebrows to the motives behind doing it to a Russian in the first place. There is no easy time in the season to score goals or put up points, unless you’re a foreigner, I guess.
I love what Taylor Hall is doing out there and he deserves all the credit he can get right now. I just had to shake my head at the fact that last year we saw similar success (some might say it was even more spectacular) over a stretch at the end of the season and it was immediately shot down as “Garbage Time… achievement. But maybe “Garbage Time… only applies to players without Canadian Passports.
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