Q: How difficult has it been for you to sit and watch rather than be playing

PAVEL DATSYUK: Oh, I tell you, just this is not fun to watch. I take in lots of beer.

Me too, Pav. And I don’t even have the luxury of imagining how different things would be if only I was on the ice.

Well, I suppose I do, but even in my over-active imagination, the most I could pull off would be to take a Donald Brashear swing at Evgeni Malkin’s head as he blazes past, then ankle-burn my way over to the penalty box.

And that wouldn’t help anyone.

Pavel Datsyuk in skates and a uniform, however, would look better than a Playboy centrefold right about now. It’s still somewhat unreal that the Wings managed to beat Chicago and take this lead on Pittsburgh without him. It’s pretty staggering, really.

Had you told me, before the playoffs, that Datsyuk would miss most of the conference finals, I wouldn’t even ask you if he was going to play in the Stanley Cup Final, because I would have just assumed we wouldn’t be there.

So … yeah. This is welcome news, and may even cut down on my beer consumption.

(The rest of the Datsyuk/Osgood interview is here.)

Lead, transitive verb: (1): to direct the operations, activity, or performance of <lead an orchestra> (2): to have charge of <lead a campaign> (3): to suggest to (a witness) the answer desired by asking leading questions b (1): to go at the head of <lead a parade> (2): to be first in or among <lead the league> (3): to have a margin over <led his opponent>.

Sidney Crosby — captain, prodigy, wunderkind, man-crush of several thousand otherwise heterosexual Pittsburghians — does not lead the Pittsburgh Penguins. If he did, they wouldn’t be in the Stanley Cup final. In fact, it would be unfair to criticize him for not leading, despite the ‘C’ on his sweater. So can we all stop pretending this series is some sort of referendum on his ability to “lead”? Because we won’t know the answer to that question for another ten years or so.

Crosby is 21, he’s the captain of his team and his team is in the Cup final and they’re in trouble. So the natural cliche is to ask if the young star can “lead” them from the depths of despair and to the promised land. Yeah, sure … an easy article to fill inches on an off-day, but…

Leadership doesn’t work like that. The two definitions above, in bold, are probably the ones that best apply how we use the verb in the cliche-ridden language of sports … but neither of them are something I would be comfortable applying to a extremely talented 21-year-old kid.

I know, because I’m Canadian, that to disparage a Canadian captain’s leadership ability on the ice is to emasculate him in the eyes of our collective tribe. Our leadership, after all, is what separates our boys from the Russians and Swedes, at least in the eyes of Don Cherry.

But I don’t care whether you’re a commie, a viking or a hoser from Kingston … you ain’t leading shit at 21 years old.

You can fit right into the fabric of the team. You can get along with everyone in the dressing room. You can use your otherworldly talent to take over games and tally impressive statistics. But you’re not leading by the actual definition of the word and the concept.

I mention this because Crosby is nominated for the Mark Messier leadership award:

Boston’s Zdeno Chara, Pittsburgh’s Sidney Crosby and Calgary’s Jarome Iginla are the three finalists for the 2008-09 Mark Messier NHL Leadership Award presented by Bridgestone, the National Hockey League announced today.

Mark Messier solicits suggestions from club and League personnel and NHL fans in compiling a list of potential candidates. However, the selection of the three finalists and the ultimate winner is Messier’s alone.

And good for him. Mark Messier needs to perpetuate the image that he was actually a wonderful leader instead of a great hockey player who’s teams missed the playoffs more than they made them. So he gives out an award every year. I can dig it — though I would point out that a real leader *cough*Yzerman*cough* would never stoop to such shameless self-doctoring of his Real Leader Of Men image.

Anyway, examine those three nominees. Think hard about them. This is an exercise. I want you to picture them each, in their respective dressing rooms in between periods with their team down two goals; then, I want you to picture them each working with coache and teammates on a set play in a hasty huddle at the bench with 30 seconds left and the team down one; then I want you to picture them facing the media after an ugly loss, explaining why it happened and how the team can improve; and finally, I want you to picture them speaking to their teammates, one-on-one, about each player’s role on the team and how he can better handle the responsibilities of that position.

I’m not asking you to picture them all Mark-Messier-esque — with that carefully contrived fire in his eyes and that store-bought hateful stare drilling a hole through an opponent in the faceoff circle. That’s not leadership anyway,that’s competitiveness, and nobody would deny that Sidney Crosby has tonnes of that.

I’m asking you to picture the nominees performing the quiet, day-to-day responsibilities of someone who, in the words of those definitions above, “directs the operations, activity or performance of” and “has charge of” the hockey team.

That’s true leadership. It’s why good coaches are so very valuable and why the best captains aren’t the loudest or even the most outspoken, but are without fail the most determined, the most dedicated and the best communicators in the dressing room. They’re also often the ones who have the bright, shiny rings.

And I’m not intending for this post to be a slight on Sidney Crosby’s hockey skill, which is off-the-charts phenomenal. Nor is it intended to portray him as the petulant crybaby that some fans enjoy depicting. Though he should stop talking to the refs so much, if only so that they’ll take him more seriously when he does.

I like Sidney Crosby. I do. I’m just saying that, a 21-year-old in is position — no matter how talented and nice and fake-plastic-athlete he may be — is not the guy who will lead a hockey team to victory.

He might “lead” a victorious team in scoring. He might “lead” the parade if they somehow win. But the quiet, competent, level-headed leadership that authors true success in sports and everything else…. Dude. He’s 21. He’s not leading Bill Guerin and Sergei Gonchar anywhere. So stop talking about it.

I have no one to blame for this but myself. I wrote some time ago, no doubt giddy from a promising beginning to another post-season, that if the Red Wings found themselves in the Cup finals, I would incorporate the sonnet into the poetic playoff predictions.

Sonnets, it turns out, are fucking hard to write at 10 a.m. the morning of the first game when you’re slightly hungover and drinking black coffee because you ran out of cream and the convenience store down the block is closed.

Sonnets would probably be hard to write under any circumstance, but I am merely emphasizing my handicaps. I promised, however, and therefore must deliver. “Shall I compare thee to a hockey puck? Thou art less vulcanized, yet also softer.”

See? That sucked. This is going to be difficult.

Anyway, Our record thus far in the playoffs (I didn’t even make predictions for the last round, because it was far too obvious what was going to happen and I told everyone who would listen we’d get a rematch, so I get a 2-0 on that one) is a very exciting 11/14. We’ll ignore my Bruins-over-Canes in five outburst because I think that it’s been well documented that every single person alive who watches hockey also picked the Bruins, even the Hurricane fans.

But enough of that. It’s poetry time. We’ll do the sonnet, and the two easy ones, just for fun:

Stanley Cup finals

No. 2 Detroit Red Wings vs. No. 4 Pittsburgh Penguins

Through haunted streets, our footprints traced the path

Returning us to fights that we have fought

The days loom bloody, sure to end in wrath

As students display lessons dearly taught

Bruised bones, not broken, strain and ache to heal

Before the snarling beast awakes anew

Once joined, beyond a doubt, the battle’s real

Taxing tired bone and weary sinew

For heavy hangs the head that wears the crown,

But heavy, too, lie burdens on the young

A sea of promise deep enough to drown,

As bards replay songs they’ve already sung.

We tell this story though the ending’s known

The old king, laughing, stays upon the throne.

~~~~~~~

A boy named Sidney said he was a man

Except nobody could understand –

“It’s a beard,” he exclaimed,

“I’m just young, so it’s lame.”

then he covered his face with his hands.

~~~~~~~

Two huge stars face off

against a whole galaxy

I know how this ends

~~~~~~~

The prediction: Red Wings in seven.

I know what you may be thinking but — despite the title in the header of this blog — this is not a website dedicated to the Chicago Blackhawks Game 4 performance.

In fact, one of the reasons we named the blog ‘Dirty Games’ is so that we could call that sort of cheap, thuggish and staggeringly impotent behaviour exactly what it is: An ugly, failed ploy from an increasingly desperate and outmatched hockey team.

We usually pride ourselves on being something of a thinking person’s sports blogger. When the topic turns to athletics, we try to provide the context, the overarching themes and the literary metaphors to lift the discussion from sports bullshit to somewhat more legitimate grounds. It rarely works, but we try to do it anyway, because there’s not enough of that kind of sports writing — or at least there’s not enough of that kind that’s any good — floating around the internet.

Today though? Fuck it. The Blackhawks deserved to get the shit pummeled out of them yesterday, if only to restore karmic balance to the universe. And one of the other reasons we started this blog is so that we could swear with motherfucking impunity.

The Hawks didn’t show up for the game and got their asses handed to them. You cannot ever bring less than your absolute best game against the Red Wings in the playoffs and expect to have a chance. It’s pretty much a given by now.

But the best part of this entire series has been the coaching matchup and the postgame press conferences. If the games themselves have been — in a metaphor the entire hockey world has slept with like a security blanket through the entire series — Big Brother vs. Little Brother, then the coaching matchup has been teacher vs. student. Or maybe principle vs. student. Or principle vs. special-needs-short-bus-riding student. It’s honestly not even that close.

The point is that Joel Queneville has been outclassed, out-thought, outmaneuvered and made to look like an increasingly frustrated and whiny little bitch. Basically, it’s May, so he’s doing what he does. But the meltdowns, as well as Mike Babcock’s explanations of what’s really going on, have added some much-needed drama to a series that has pretty much lacked it on the ice.

Here’s Babcock, explaining why Kronwall didn’t deserve a penalty, and why Quenneville is lying and he isn’t:

I guess to me, you hit the guy in the head, you hang out your elbow, hit the guy in the head, you’re headhunting for him, like when he’s… But that to me is not what I saw there.

So, now, good thing about it is you’re asking a biased guy. I heard Joel Quenneville talk about it. What he does is he comes in, whether he believes it or not, he tells you what he’s got to tell you. I actually believe what I’m telling you. It’s the facts.

I mean, I went over it a hundred times. Before I came in here, I wanted to see did he leave his feet. Kroner, what he does, usually he’s got so much pop in him, he explodes through the guy. At the end of the check when he’s done, he’s off the ice.

That wasn’t the case here at all in the situation. Anyway, enough of that. What else?

It’s fairly obvious that the Red Wings are more talented than the Hawks, but if you switch the coaches in this series, the Hawks would be at least tied and probably up 3-1 right now.

Consider: The Blackhawks had what one could call — without any sort of hyperbole — the best pre-game situation they could hope for:yesterday. Nicklas Lidstrom, the six-time Norris winner and best defenceman in the last 30 years? Out. Pavel Datsyuk, Hart trophy nominee, the team’s leading scorer and reigning defensive forward of the year? Out. Kris Draper? A heart-and-soul component of four cup-winners, a former Selke winner and the best faceoff man in the NHL? Out.

Add to that the motivation the Hawks could utilize to avenge the evil Niklas Kronwall for his “gutless” hit on their treasured teammate, Martin Havlat. Add to that the Willis Reed-esque motivation of Havlat demanding to play despite still being a little bit woozy. Add to that a raucous home crowd and the momentum of a miraculous overtime victory in the previous game.

I mean — what the hell else do you want? Aside from politely asking Johan Franzen if he would mind not playing the role of Force of Nature tonight, and him agreeing for reasons known only to The Franzen … you couldn’t ask for more.

And then you go out and get smoked 6-1?! With all those factors in your favour?! And you have nothing to say after the game but some reprehensible bullshit about “the worst call in the history of sports”?!

Meanwhile, Mike Babcock calmly gets his team ready to play, missing Hall-of-Famers or not. They play a balanced game, avoiding dumb penalties and emotional bullshit, and dismantle their opponent. And all Babcock says is that “I thought guys were gonna step up.”

Not to put too fine a point on it, but everything about the Blackhawks’ effort in this game was moronic, pointless and self-defeating. They couldn’t even manage to extract proper thuggish revenge, if that sort of juvenile achievement was indeed their goal.

Mike Babcock finished the game looking like the same kind of classy coach he always does. He should have worn the fedora he sported at the Winter Classic, just to remind everyone how much of a pimp he can be.

Quenneville, meanwhile, looked like a harried father — a man who agreed to take his own kids, as well as the neighbours’, to the zoo, only to realize, with a dozen brats running wild everywhere and other patrons giving him increasingly dirty looks, that he’d bitten off far more than he could chew. He had, quite simply, no control of the situation. For a professional coach, that’s a pretty damning indictment.

Yep. Teacher vs. Retarded Student, indeed. It’’s called being out-fucking-coached.

Athletes are taught, from a very young age, that they shouldn’t “play tight”.

Playing tight, a whole whack of Junior, Pee-Wee, Amateur and Professional coaches will tell you, leads to nothing but losses. If you are too terrified of making a mistake to relax and play your game, the theory goes, you’ll be too tense to play effectively.

You’ll squeeze your stick too hard and miss easy scoring chances. Your vision that allows you to sense your teammate behind you and drop a pass right to his stick, will betray you and you’ll find yourself paralyzed with the puck, afraid to make the drop pass because it might be intercepted.

You must “play loose” if you’re going to succeed, is the popular wisdom.

Unless you are trying to beat the Detroit Red Wings. Then you’d better play tight. Like, squeeze-the-stick-until-it-breaks tight.

Because while the popular wisdom might dictate that playing loose will allow you the mental time and space to make enough plays that the occasional error is forgivable … when you face a team that can take nearly every single mistake you make and capitalize, that wisdom should go out the window.

The Chicago Blackhawks biggest strength in the 2009 playoffs has been their ability to play loose. To fall behind and come back and make charges and give up goals and then find a scrappy, endearing, oh-just-look-at-those-young-pups way to earn them back.

Now, in this series, it’s their biggest weakness. Against Vancouver or Calgary, a cute little cross-ice pass at the blueline might work; and if it doesn’t work maybe you get the puck back; and if you don’t get the puck back, it probably gets cleared to centre ice or your own end and you go and retrieve it and try again.

This is what happens when you try that against the Red Wings. You lose quickly, and the goal comes with a combination of creativity, ruthless efficiency and execution that the assembly lines of Detroit can only dream about.

If this was perhaps the first time in this series the Blackhawks had made a careless, “loose” mistake that came back to immediately bite them in the ass, maybe it would be okay for them to write it off and continue to, as their coach will no doubt do in the next 48 hours , state that “we just have to keep playing our game”.

But they cannot continue to play their game and have a hope in hell of victory in this series. Their game is the kind of game that involves give and take and the free-flowing type of offence that results in chances as well as turnovers and odd-man rushes. If they play their game, this series will not see a sixth game. I don’t write that as a Red Wings fan, but as an observer in general.

Their opponents are too quick to turn Blackhawks’ weaknesses into Wings’ strengths. The Red Wings are clinical and they thrive on errors made against them. They surely don’t mind if the Hawks continue to generate chances with their styles, so long as they also continue to make mistakes.

If I was Joel Quennville, I’d have an awesome moustache and a looming vacation tell my team to try, just once, playing tight. Grip the sticks hard. Dump it in and chase it. Make a simple pass, even if it takes longer to get the puck to the net that way. Hang back on defence until you’re sure it’s safe. Play safe.

Yeah, yeah. Safe is death, is the conventional wisdom. You can’t play tight. You don’t abandon the style that got you this far. You dance with da gurl what brung you. I get it.

But look, the Red Wings can play your game, and play it better than you can. They can take every inch you give them and turn it into a mile.  And now, they know it. If you don’t think they’re going to be swooping like Hawks (see how good they are at playing your game? They stole the name!) to scoop every messy turnover and shove it down your throats … then as a team, the Hawks are either too young, too stupid or too arrogant to have any chance of coming back from a 2-0 series hole.

And now, speaking as a homer once again, I have one thing to add: Please continue to play loose, Blackhawks, and please continue to give the puck to Pavel Datsyuk, because he really needs the help right now and one of those gifts is bound to open the floodgates.

One of the easiest things to do in life is to say ‘fuck it’ and walk away. Things ain’t happening. You get the short end of the stick. You keep shooting and nothing goes in. It goes in and then it doesn’t count. You show up on time and the bus breaks down. Do a good job and get a pink slip. Sometimes a middle finger and a retreat seems like the obvious move.

It’s easy. It’s an appropriate response, even. Sure some people would be disappointed, but they wouldn’t really blame you. And even if they do, you’ve got plenty of reasons why you did it. A lot of them are perfectly understandable.

Things don’t break our way, so we walk away. A lot of us do it, in small and in what we think are meaningless ways, all the time.  Hell, sometimes, it takes a concerted effort not to fold your tent. So it’s inspiring when a bunch of guys shut their mouths in the face of less-than-perfect circumstances and go to fucking work.

The way the Wings chased Jonas Hiller from the nets, played their own brand of hockey and refused to give a single inch after being outplayed, outmuscled and outreffereed in Game 4 is the stuff, plain and simple, of men who understand what it is to look in the eye of something ugly, nasty and possibly futile and say, ‘Yeah, I’m down for whatever.’

This series might not end with a Detroit victory. It might, and then it might end next round. This is one of the more phenomenal collections of talent I’ve seen in 15 years of watching professional sports, but they ain’t guaranteed shit except a sixth game in Anaheim. And that doesn’t matter.

They’re demonstrating that they won’t lose. They’ll have to be well and truly beaten. Isn’t that all we can ask of the teams that we cheer for?

For all the bullshit involved with being a sports fan … for all the idiocy and stigmas and targeted marketing and network television ratings and steroids and arenas that have different names than they used to … at least we get those occasional moments when you understand why you bother.

When the collection of millionaires that have you really have no business being emotionally invested in can demonstrate what it means to stare down failure and refuse to even think about taking the easy way out … well, I don’t feel so bad for dropping $15 on a hat and sacrificing a some Saturday nights.

I can't take credit for this. Thank fark.com.

I wrote a piece after the Cup win last year about how this team meant more to me than the others, because they’re the ones I watched from the very beginning. It’s rarely more true than when the line that leads them to victory is Hossa-Franzen-Valtteri Filppula, while Lidstrom and Chris-fucking-Chelios patrol the blueline. It’s a strange thing to watch the past, present and future come together like that.

Kudos to the Ducks — excepting Chris Pronger, of course — for being a more than worthy opponent. When Perry scored and then Bobby Ryan ran over Hossa, you guys must have thought you’d finally beaten these foreigners down. I can’t engage in vicious trash talk (aside from pointing out that Chris Pronger looks like a severely retarded kid who grew up down the street from me) but I will say this:

These Red Wings are NOT the San Jose Sharks, motherfuckers. Do not get that twisted for one damn second.

I wrote a post the other day that drew a little bit of attention to our little corner of the internet. Who would have thought that unleashing amusing insults about another hockey team and finding great YouTube clips of players you really like would receive more attention than an earnest discussion about the future of the newspaper industry?

Oh … everyone would. Right.

Regardless, we got about 50 comments on that piece about the Wings and Ducks, though if you discount the ones without any semblance of coherence, insight or even sentence structure the number probably goes down a bit. Such is the nature of the Internet, and of course it’s well known that most Ducks fans cannot even speak, let alone type, in proper English.

Okay. Stop. See that? That was a good-natured joke. I know lots of Ducks fans who can read and write and speak. Okay, actually, I don’t know any Ducks fans, but I’m sure the vast majority of the ones that do exist are literate.

But we digress. That’s only tangentially related to the point I want to make today. And that point is this:

A lot of people are retarded. I already knew this, but reading random comments from Ducks fans has driven the point home. I’m not from Detroit and neither are all (perhaps even the majority of) Red Wings fans. Neither (for the most part) are the players, the coaches, the management and anyone employed by the organization above the level of, say, the valet or the beer-and-popcorn-guy.

I am well aware that Detroit, as a city, is not doing very well right now. Here in some parts of Southern Ontario (where I do actually live) we have a substantial part of our workforce employed by the automakers as well, and they are also struggling. So I definitely understand the tragedy of the situation, though our economy is more diverse and we certainly aren’t in the same dire perdicament.

But … all that, as sad as it is, has fuck all to do with anything about hockey, aside from who can afford to buy the tickets to the games.

You could demolish everything in the city of Detroit except for Joe Louis Arena and make homeless every man, woman and child … and Pavel Datsyuk could still deke the shit out of Ryan Getzlaf with his eyes closed and one of his beautiful Russian hands tied behind his back.

So comments like these, and there are hundreds of them out there every time someone talks about the Red Wings …

-u gona watch us win in ur stupid bankrupt fuckyng detroit…

-This from some buffon from shit hole detroit. Ducks in 5. Will give you one win at home to keep the natives from rioting and burning down what’s left of your shithole city.

… accomplish nothing but to make you look like a fool. The Internet is free for the perusal of fools, haters and idiots alike, but you guys really shouldn’t make it so easy to spot you.

Anyway, the only reason that I wrote these 500 words, and made a point already obvious to anyone with a brain, is to ask you guys who do engage in this kind of trash talk … why?

Theoretically at least, you guys are all American. The economic situation in Detroit hurts industry in the country as a whole. Bashing the city has no impact whatsoever on its very talented hockey team composed largely of Canadians and Europeans, and all you’re doing is rubbing the fear and uncertainty of a nasty recession into the faces of a city that is on the front lines of it.

I realize, intellectually, that sport goes back to the whole my-clan-is-superior-to-your-clan thing, and that we’ve sublimated the desire for full clan-on-clan warfare into the spectacle that is modern professional sports. And I’m grateful for that, both because I love sports and because I dropped out of karate too early to learn to be an effective warrior.

But still … taking on the city to spite the fans of a particular team makes little to no sense, especially when the two cities are located in the same country. How hard is that to understand?

If you want to bash the shit out of the Wings, or any other team, have at it. I realize there’s not a hell of a lot of stuff you can say about a franchise that’s been at the top of the pile for close to 20 years now … but you can still make fun of Chris Chelios with a well-placed diaper joke, or claim that Osgood’s a terrible goalie playing behind a dominant team, or even misguidedly call them they “Yankees of hockey”.

I promise you that last one would provoke me enough that you would get a lengthy screed in response.

But bashing the City of Detroit? You’re just being petty jerks and saying hurtful things to people who have nothing to do with the conflict you’re purportedly discussing. It’s dumb and should be beneath any fan with neurons still firing.

For instance, I would never say that someone from Anaheim is so stupid they can barely comprehend basic spoken instructions; so ugly and stench-ridden that waitresses cringe when duty compels them to get within four feet of them; so mean-spirited and hateful that nearly everyone acknowledges mention of their name with an ‘Oh … that asshole’ and so completely rejected and dismissed by society as a whole that they have to resort to skull-numbingly stupid invective and violent cries for attention just to feel as though they’re a part of the human race.

Of course I wouldn’t, because that doesn’t describe a random person from Anaheim.

That right there describes Chris Pronger.

Well, the first round somehow went mostly as predicted by my seat-of-the-pants verse. We went 7/8 on overall predictions with the Flyers over the Penguins in seven games being the one we totally whiffed on.

No matter. In my own egotistical little world, I think this gem, made before a single playoff puck had been dropped, more than makes up for that little miscue:

Prediction: Caps in seven (with Varlamov in net before the end of it)

They don’t come more accurate than that, folks.

So, with visions of success — and of the local weatherwoman Chris Pronger banged in Edmonton one day writing a tell-all book —dancing in my head, Dirty Games is proud to present Round Two, in all its poetic glory.

We’re going to stick with haikus and limericks for this one. But seriously, I really will do some sonnets for the next round. And if when the Wings make the final I may delve into the sort of epic poetry that Milton would produce were he a) alive and b) privileged enough to call himself a Red Wings fan.

Without further ado:

Western Conference:

No. 2 Detroit Red Wings vs. No. 8 Anaheim Mighty Ducks

A reputation
Can stick to a man like glue
Watch out for elbows

Once upon a time they were Mighty
Making hits, scoring pretty goals nightly
Then they came to the Joe
Left with tags on their toe
And now these birds aren’t so flighty

Prediction: Wings in six

No. 3 Vancouver Canucks vs. No. 4 Chicago Blackhawks

Age may bring wisdom
It also brings broken hips
Whither Mats Sundin?

A goalie nicknamed Bobby Lou,
Lamented that he could not score, too:
“All my teammates have done,
is put me up by one.
Now it’s my job to somehow see it through.”

Prediction: Canucks in seven.

Eastern Conference:

No. 1 Boston Bruins vs. No. 6 Carolina Hurricanes

Does hard work pay off?
Seven long games, and for what?
Crap, here comes Chara!

At the Garden, their voices all shout:
“Please, Bs, end our long Stanley Cup drought!”
They’ll be halfway there,
After this brief affair,
Quickly blowing the Hurricanes out.

Prediction: Bruins in five

No. 2 Washington Capitals vs. No. 4 Pittsburgh Penguins

Gary Bettman came
Not to watch this, he just came
Right there in his pants

It’s Sid versus Alex for real
And it does have a certain appeal
Will Sidney Crosby pout?
Will Alex knock him out?
It’s a show Malkin’s planning to steal.

Prediction: Penguins in six.

Mr. Getzlaf, good to see you again. Mr. Niedermayer, it’s been too long. Mr. Pronger … don’t ever touch me. You’re an asshole.

It’s Ducks vs. Wings again, and I couldn’t be more excited, but things are a little different around here this time. We all still remember the epic battle we fought in 2007. Who could forget a series, and a selection of dangerous elbows aimed at heads, like that one?

Times change, and more importantly, rosters change. But there’s no hate like old hate. And man, do I fucking hate Chris Pronger and the rest of those band of neanderthals.

I will exclude Teemu Selanne, because he’s a legend. And J.S. Giguere, because he sucked all year and lost his job right after his father died, so I just feel bad for him.

The rest of them — hate. Not like the Sharks, whom I dislike because they have no heart, but whom I also secretly love because they made me look good by doing exactly what I told everyone they would do. Not like the Avalanche, whom I used to hate with the kind of intensity that supervillians have for the masked dude who foiled their schemes, but whom I now just pity because watching that franchise is like watching a young man with AIDS waste away.

I hate the Ducks like it was all fresh and new and I just met them the other day and then came home to find them banging my wife six hours after I shook their hand. I don’t care that we haven’t seen them since 2007. It feels like Chris Pronger was lining me up for an illegal elbow while I was walking to work yesterday.

And all of this is awesome, because I am sure that what the Ducks are thinking right now is the same thing they thought — and were pretty close to being right about — two seasons ago:

‘We can intimidate these guys. We can bang them and elbow them and hurt them. We can scare them into submission if we’re nasty enough.’

And that’s just totally awesome, because no. They can’t. They will be humiliated if they try. They don’t know that yet, but they’re going to find out real fucking soon and watching them realize it is going to be as awesome as the first time 14-year-old-you snuck a peak at some pornography.

This is a different Red Wings team. And I am sure that, watching the Ducks thug their way into an upset of the Sharks last night, they saw a series of nasty, intent-to-injure and intent-to-intimidate hits and smiled to themselves as they watched the Ducks make their way to the penalty box.

Your average dumb penalty, when taken against this Red Wings power play, is approximately 57% dumber. The Ducks jumped out to a 2-0 series lead against the Sharks when Joe Thornton and Co. went 0-for-12 in the first two games of the series with the man advantage.

If there is anybody reading this who thinks that you can give this Red Wings power play 12 chances to score over two games and still win those two games, then I will say this to you, Mr. Pronger: You’re an asshole. Don’t touch me.

If they do that, they will lose. There are ways the Ducks could wrestle this series away from the Wings — if Osgood isn’t at his usual playoff best; or if the Ducks play the trap, stack their potent defence back at the line and wait for mistakes — but there are many more ways the Wings could win it.

A quick review of the players who weren’t wearing Wings uniforms — or who were sitting in the press box — the last time these two teams met. It’s a pretty interesting list.

First of all, just because we were speaking of intimidation, there are these two guys:

Brad Stuart, Niklas Kronwall: Considering the last time the Wings met the Ducks, Kronwall and Mathieu Schneider were hurt, Chris Chelios was playing major minutes while hurt and our entire blueline consisted of Nicklas Lidstrom and some warm bodies … these guys are somewhat of an upgrade. The very first time that a Duck is unfortunate enough to keep his head down coming out of his own zone or admire a pass as he moves up ice, that’ll be one of those moments of clarity.

Oh, shit. Speaking of defencemen we didn’t have last time, there’s this guy, too:

Of course Jonathan Ericsson can be intimidated! He’s Swedish! Don Cherry told me that all Swedes will back down if you push them.

There is also, since we’re discussing additions, the matter of this little guy named Darren Helm, who I would really like to watch in a reality-TV style documentary. I often wonder if he does everything the same way he plays hockey. I have this mental image of little Darren Helm racing through a Sobey’s, his cart almost-but-not-quite out of control, bouncing off the shelves as he madly grabs cereal, milk, frozen pizza and whatever else he can get his hands on before making a mad dash to cut in front of someone just pulling into line at the cashier, sending them sprawling into the gum rack.

But yeah, Darren Helm isn’t exactly your daddy’s easily-intimidated Red Wing, either:

I mean, I could go on for a very long time about how different this team is from the one the Ducks remember from 2007. And for sure, the Ducks are different, too. They’ve got better depth on defence with the addition of Ryan Whitney. They’ve got a new goaltender (though it would be tough for any goalie to be better than J.S. Giguere’s been against the Wings over the years, so I don’t know if that’s an upgrade or not). They’ve also got Bobby Ryan, who I should have added up top to the list of Ducks I really like, because I thought he was a bust, but he’s proving that he’s anything but and I love guys who get written off then come back strong.

But the core of the team — Pronger, Niedermayer, Getzlaf, Perry … is pretty much the same.

Oh, Jeez. That reminds me, speaking of the core of the team. I almost forgot a couple of key additions, what with getting so caught up in the intimidation angle.

The last time the Ducks met Johan Franzen in the playoffs, he was a third-liner who killed some penalties and maybe dished out a check or two while playing a mostly defensive role. Now he has 19 playoff goals, eight of them game-winners, a couple of Red Wings franchise records for playoff scoring and a big ol’ dose of confidence that gives him the belief that he can embarrass you with his hands and skating as well as with his size and strength. His play has created an internet meme, and really, you can’t ask for more than that.

Plus, and dammit I cannot remember his name right now, but there’s some other guy on this team that could also make a difference. Crap! What was it? It was kinda like ‘Mule’, but not. A different kind of animal, maybe? This is terribly embarrassing. I mean, the guy is probably pretty popular. Came here as some sort of free agent or something. Shit! It’s on the tip of my tongue and everything … but anyway, that guy, whatever his name is, he might be able to make a difference, too …

Right! That dude! He’s good, too.

Anyway, my whole point — aside from taking the time to find videos that proving how awesome the Red Wings are — was a serious one. I’m not worried about the Ducks. Not at all.

If the opening series against Columbus was indicative of anything, it serves to illustrate how ready Babcock had this team for the playoffs. It’s not the same team that was beat-up, bruised and sent home in 2007. Not only, as I’ve gone to great lengths to display, is it a new cast of characters, it’s a different attitude.

I never thought I’d say this about the Red Wings, because they’re such mild-mannered, respectful people, but there’s a swagger about this team, and I love it.

Chris Osgood, whatever you think of him as a goalie, epitomizes it. They doubt him, so fuck them. He knows he can do it. Nick Lidstrom is going to lose his Norris trophy race this year to Mike Green, who can’t play defence at anywhere close to his level. Pavel Datsyuk is going to lose the Hart trophy to a fellow Russian, despite being the best all-around hockey player in the world right now. Henrik Zetterberg and Johan Franzen signed long-term deals that were questioned in some places because of their respective injury histories. Darren Helm an Jonathan Ericsson have been dogs in a minor-league cage all season. Now that they’re off the leash, you think they’re not starving to prove they’re ready to stay here with the big boys? Marian Hossa has been called a ‘traitor’ in so many places one would think he criticized the Bush administration.

Anaheim knocked off the No. 1 seed and justified their season. The Red Wings still have a big goddamn chip on their collective shoulder. Watch what happens.

“It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out of your door,” he used to say. “You step into the Road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off to.”

Yeah … this is an essay about JRR Tolkien, the hero’s journey and how it applies to flameouts in the NHL Playoffs. Deal with it.

That's the look.

One of the most common elements of any story, from the most banal of children’s literature to the great epics of all time, is the plucky hero confronting the unknown.

If you took the posters from 100 adventure movies and the covers from 100 fantasy novels, more than half of them would feature the protagonist as he gazes with a mixture of fear and purpose into the abyss of whatever awaits.

It’s not always because he wants to, and it’s never without trepidation and anxiety, but the hero unfailingly works up his courage and forges on. The hero is usually given a chance to back out; to leave the task to others, to escape while there’s still time or to just take the blue pill and “you wake in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe…”

But they don’t, of course. If they do, there’s no story. If they do, the adventure goes on without them, we all read a different book or see a different movie and nobody remembers or cares about the hero who almost rose to the occasion, but couldn’t quite do it.

Which is why nobody will remember, or care, about the San Jose Sharks. Assuming of course that they proceed to lose the first-round series that they currently trail 2-0 to the Anaheim Ducks.

And while Frodo wished that the ring had never come to him, the Sharks actively worked to qualify for the 2009 playoffs.

I haven’t set this entire post up to make fun of the Sharks (that one is reserved for when they do finally lose) but to try and explain the kind of mentality that produces success in the playoffs, and to try and figure out what’s keeping the Sharks (and what kept all those great — in the regular season anyway — Ottawa Senators teams) from ultimate glory.

There are a few things to consider, and they all deal, as Bilbo so aptly described, with the dangerous business of going out your door.

First, it’s just not that hard to play hockey in the regular season. The schedule is set several months in advance. You can plan travel days, practice days and book your tee times for the three-day November layover in Florida well before the season begins. You know which team you’ll be facing, and then which team you’ll be facing after that. You know that you’ll lose some games and hopefully win a bunch more. You know that a handful of those games will be against the best teams in the league, and that a whole bunch more will be against the bottom-feeders. The rest will be against teams that are solid, but not great. You know, in short, what to expect and when to expect it.
Second, though it seems obvious to say, the stakes in the regular season are low. This applies especially to the Sharks (and the Senators of old). When you’re reasonably sure, before the first puck has been dropped, that you’ll be in the playoffs come April, it doesn’t matter so much if you drop a home game that you should have won — or even if you somehow steal a game you had no business winning. It’ll all balance out and you’ll be there at the end.

Finally, there’s time to fix things. If someone gets hurt, they have time to heal. If the goalie implodes, you can send him home for a week or two to get his head on straight. If the team stinks out the joint, you can fire the coach. And any glaring weakness can be addressed at the trade deadline, which is only a few weeks before the end of the regular season.

So yeah, the regular season is competitive professional hockey, and it would certainly be difficult to predict the outcome of every game. But … it’s a known. It’s expected, it’s familiar and there is a fairly large margin for error.

It’s not a dangerous business and you — assuming you’re a professional who has been playing hockey his entire life — certainly don’t have to go very far out of your door.

The playoffs, though, are unique. Moreso in hockey than in any other sport, they are a dangerous business; a chaotic arena where anything can happen in an instant and the smallest twitch of a skate or bump in the ice can set in motion events that can destroy a team’s season.

“The quest stands upon the edge of a knife. Stray but a little and it will fail. But hope remains, if friends stay true.”

Unlike football, basketball, baseball or soccer, where one team tends to control the play (by virtue of possessing the ball at the time) a large part of a hockey game is spent with the puck in nobody’s possession, as it flips and rolls down the ice into the zone, gets tangled among several feet along the boards and careens off the glass and down the ice, waiting to be recovered by the first man who can reach it.

That’s the unexpected. The unknown. You can go to where you think it will be, but it won’t always be there. You don’t even get it back after you give up a goal. You have to win a battle every time you want to possess the puck.

In the regular season, where thousands upon thousands of these battles are fought over months — between some players who know they’ll be in the playoffs, and some players who know they won’t be there — it all tends to even out.

But in the playoffs, the one battle you lose could be the one that kills you. If you’re not prepared for the unexpected, if you’re not willing to face that kind of unknown, you’ll be paralyzed. And then you’ll lose every battle. And then you’ll go home, muttering cliches about how you “didn’t get the bounces”.

Or if you’re Sharks coach Todd McLellan yesterday: “We just didn’t get the puck luck we needed.”

You’re never going to get all the puck luck you need if you’re worried about the puck luck. Thinking about how chaotic and fraught with danger every bounce of the puck can be will leave you so tight you won’t be able to hit an open net.

The puck is going to bounce. You’re going to win some of those bounces and lose them, and McLellan is right that a lot of them will be lucky.

The key thing, in both the hero’s journey and the Quest For The Cup (I probably owe the NHL royalties for typing it with caps like that) comes from embracing the unknown. It’s only when Frodo and the other hobbits find their sense of adventure, when Harry Potter just makes the damn broomstick fly without worrying about the proper way to do it and when Neo looks up at a room of strange people and announces “I know Kung Fu”, that the heroes are able to be effective in their endeavours.

The Sharks faltered the last few weeks of the regular season. So did the Detroit Red Wings. It was only natural on the part of both teams, having long ago locked up home-ice advantage in the playoffs.

But, the difference is, the Sharks felt that to let up, even for a game or two, would cost them as they prepared to launch into the great unknown. They worked hard through the last weeks, losing more than they would have liked, but doing it with the utmost concentration and Very Serious Looks on all their players’ faces.

“If we want to go into the playoffs with a half-hearted effort and we think we’ll turn the switch on, I don’t think that can happen,” said coach McLellan.

They didn’t take any lighthearted moments to remember what they love about the game and why they should be fighting for it — an essential element of any literary hero preparing to go into battle. There’s a reason that Frodo is shown laughing and cavorting in the Shire, and later in Bree, Rivendell and Lothlorien. Moments of untroubled glee are a necessary part of preparing to enter the underworld for a struggle against the unknown.

They were deadly serious all the time and now they can’t loosen up when they desperately need a light moment.

The Red Wings — and I would normally hate to use my favourite team as such a homerific example, but they’re perfect here — on the other hand, allowed themselves a deep breath before the plunge.

“We were a little bored at the end of the season,” said Chris Osgood. “That sounds bad, but it’s honest. We were looking forward to playoffs 100%. We couldn’t wait to get through that last month. I was actually shocked by how many wins we got in March.”

“It’s good we got this over with and no one got hurt in these last two games,” Detroit coach Mike Babcock said. “We get a day off tomorrow and get prepared. It’s not like we haven’t been through it before. We understand what it takes and how hard it is going to be.”

And that’s the difference. The Sharks never took a breath. They’ve been playing as hard as they can all year under the comforting umbrella of the expected regular season. They stressed over the way they were playing in the leadup to the playoffs, and the looming uncertainty made it even more important to be playing as well as possible going into the fray.

Now they’re facing the unknown without a blueprint for handling it. They’ve got a few seasons of failures in their head and no recent success to draw upon. They also don’t have a reserve to dip into and … well … there’s not a lot left.

Right now, if you offered Joe Thornton the blue pill, he’d swallow that motherfucker in a minute.