May 20 2015

Dobber

2015-05-20

Thoughts on Babcock, McLellan, Babcock, Nash, Babcock and more Babcock …

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A tight game, so it’s telling when you see the players with low ice time at the end of regulation. Those are the players who are trusted the least, and in the case of Chicago there are some interesting names. (Not that it mattered, given that they each ended up more than doubling their ice time after the six-period game)

1. Kyle Cumiskey – 6:36. This one is understandable. It’s Cumiskey’s first playoff game in the NHL since April 2010. Joel Quenneville put him in the lineup and sat David Rundblad. He ended up playing over 18 minutes.

2. Kimmo Timonen – 9:23. An aging veteran who missed most of the NHL season with a blood clot. Doesn’t really play more than 10 minutes per game these days anyway.

3. Antoine Vermette – 9:23. Wow. The most coveted forward at the trade deadline is still in the doghouse.

4. Teuvo Teravainen – 9:58. He usually gets around 12 minutes for every 60, but in a tie game the coach wasn’t taking chances.

5. Bryan Bickell – 12:17. This one is understandable. Bickell is up and down with the ice time. His size and playoff track record sees him on the first line one game, but his horrible inconsistency and regular season output sees him on the fourth line the next game.

6. Brad Richards – 13:10. As with Vermette, this is telling. In a tight game, the coach has little faith.

In the case of Anaheim, there was one line that saw little ice time – Emerson Etem, Rickard Rakell and Jiri Sekac. Combined, they don’t have 300 NHL games between them.

It was the longest game in Chicago’s (deep) history. And Corey Crawford’s 60 saves were a career high.

Remarkably, not one player in this game was credited with nine shots on goal. Eight was the high.

The biggest Mike Babcock rumor floating around is that he will sign with the Sabres. Apparently he’s buddies with Tim Murray. My order of preference would be to either stay with Detroit, coach Conner McDavid (off the table now), or hit the swimming pool between games in San Jose. Buffalo would fall fourth on that list. And any thought of Toronto would just send me into a laughing fit.

Regarding Mike Babcock and the Leafs. First of all, I said all along that he would never come to Toronto. Why would he? I would run the other way. Far away. But second of all – he couldn’t turn this into a playoff team. Not this year. Not next year. Not the year after that. Maybe by 2019-20 he could. But the fans would have chased him out of Toronto long before then. So why would Toronto fans even want him? Wouldn’t it be smarter to hire a coach like Peter DeBoer and let that coach put up the losing seasons? And then in five years, hopefully Babcock’s contract expires and you hire him then when a decent team is ready for him?

Babcock would do well with the Sabres, a team which has actually taken a couple of steps into a rebuild. With Evander Kane, Sam Reinhart, Tyler Ennis and Jack Eichel, they have a foundation. Plus they have several quality young defensemen on the way (or already here) and I’m positive that this team will bring in a goaltender. The Sabres won just 23 games last year – I think they’ll up that by 50% next season. Yep. They’ll win half a game to make that prediction work. A snow storm will cancel the game at exactly the 10-minute mark of the second period and the NHL will determine that it’s worth half a W. Okay, I’ll stop now.

Back to the Leafs. About a dozen years ago it was pretty clear to me that they couldn’t draft and I felt that their entire scouting staff should be fired. Why it took them another decade or more to realize this was beyond me. But a clean slate in that scouting department is exactly what the team needed. With 25 or so new faces and new perspectives, I can’t wait to look back on the next few drafts from my perch in 2023.

So now the Leafs are addressing development. The AHL coach – Gord Dineen – has been let go. Assistant coaches, too. Just a full-on house-cleaning for this team. And long overdue.

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Still speaking of Leafs. And minor-league systems. Ron Wilson has dipped his toes back into the hockey coaching waters. The Hamilton Bulldogs have hired him on as an assistant coach. He took the job, no doubt, because his coaching was soundly lauded by hockey fans in the Hamilton/Greater Toronto area. Seriously though, I think he was just bored and wanted to get back into it, and probably realized that he’ll have to work his way back up again. Though, with his track record, he can move up the ladder awfully quick if he so chooses.