Follow @james_tanner123 It took a couple of weeks of unexpected company and last minutes overtime getting in the way, but me and the Old Man will finally get to kick off the 2014 hockey season tonight with our traditional beer and chicken-wings / hockey-game calorie overdose.
It's a great semi-monthly tradition where my Dad and I attempt to laugh in the face of modern medical advances by eating too much fried food and then washing it down with fermented sugar water.
This is also great news for my wife who gets to combine her two favorite loves: six hours of hockey games and being a designated driver!!!
The good times will be had while we indulge in the double header (made possible by modern technology, since both games are on the East Coast) of Arizona/Carolina and Chicago/Toronto.
The Coyotes will look to avoid going 0-3 on their 4 games trip out east. They will face Washington tomorrow.
The Lines look interesting, with Sarah McLellan tweeting out that Hodgson will be centering a third line of Korpikoski and MacMillan (which I like) and that Gagner will get moved up to play on the wing with Hanzal and Erat. I like this too, because Gagner needs to play with offensive players, but If I was the coach I'd play Boedker on this line in place of Erat and call it the top line.
Then i'd keep it together for more than five minutes. It drives me crazy when coaches switch things up and then revert back to their tendencies as soon as there's trouble. To my mind, this doesn't account for the adjustment period that is likely to result from change. Coaches make a move, expect immediate results and when they inevitably don't get them, they give up on them too soon.
Anyways, I don't think there's any competition, Vermette and Doan are two of the worst first line players in the NHL. Both could be more effective moved down the lineup in my opinion. If you added Erat to that line and used them as a shut-down pair, they'd still get tons of ice time and would be more effective, I feel.
Anyways, as I said yesterday, I am nervous about this game. The Hurricanes have 2 points. That isn't a typo. Their record is 0-8-2. Nothing is better for a struggling team than to play a team struggling more, except when the law of averages dictates that that team is due. You see, even the worst team in hockey history (the 1974-75 Washington Capitals with 21 points) averaged one win every ten games.
So, with infallible logic, I declare that if the Hurricanes lose tonight they will be the worst team of all time. While that's a joke, you should know I see worse conclusions made from stats on a daily basis as people fail to grasp what 'aggregate' and 'anomaly' mean.
Anyways, the Game looks to be one of those no-win situations. Either the Coyotes take down a team so abjectly awful that Julia Kristeva can't even watch them (sorry, that's just a shout-out to any Coyotes fans who might also be majoring in French Philosophy) and everyone says 'so what?' or they lose to the worst team in hockey.
So hopefully, the Coyotes take it down. November has to be better. Right? In October the Coyotes 3-5-1, which normal people would just call a 3-6 record, but this is the NHL. Most concerning about this record is the strength of the Western Conference. Six teams right now double the Coyotes point total. After that, the three teams who would be competing for the last 2 playoff spots (theoretically, I know it's early) are Chicago, Dallas and Minnesota.
That isn't good, because those are three really deep teams. The Coyotes leading scorer after the first month of the season is Yandle with 9 points in 9 games. That is a great start, but as he's not likely to score 82 points over a whole season, so it should be concerning that the team isn't scoring enough and their best player is almost certian to regress.
As for forwards, Boedker started hot and leads with 6 points, but that's skewed by 2 or 3 games. Erat is the only other forward with more than 2 goals, and I am pretty sure at least 2 of his goals were scored in garbage time after the games were decided.
Overall, October can be defined as the month in which Mike Smith played horribly (though better the last few games) some odd roster decisions were made and the teams two best players were Yandle and Ekman-Larsson.
I tried to take a positive approach to the season, but the team sandbagged me by sending away all the youth and dressing Chipchura, Klinkhammer and BJ Crombeen consistently.
Last year the Coyotes jumped out to a hot start they could not maintain. Let's hope this year is the opposite.
Stay tuned tomorrow as we talk about tonight's game and PLUS/MINUS the week in the NHL. It's the weekly hockey article that Newsweek called 'slightly more popular than Obama in Alabama.'
Thanks for reading.