NHLBy Dave Lozo on

Welcome to the first mailbag in the post-Bowling Green Massacre era and post-Atlanta Falcons as the chokiest choking dogs to ever choke era. Nothing helps heal the wounds of such tragedies like a good mailbag, so let’s make ourselves feel better by conquering evil through the magic of questions and answers. Mailbag, man.

1. Choked Out

I thought about this question for eight hours. The answer: there is no equivalent in hockey and maybe any other sport for the degree to which the Falcons shit the bed in the Super Bowl. It’s a unique choke for the stage and for the type of choke, as it was almost exclusively the coaches that did the choking.

You probably flashed to the Leafs blowing a 4-1 lead late in Game 7 in 2013, but that was a first-round series and it was less about the Leafs choking and more about the Bruins doing work. If you want to cite that 1942 Stanley Cup Final that saw the Leafs rally from down 3-0 to win the series 4-3, the Leafs outscored the Red Wings 15-4 over the final three games.

https://youtu.be/VnhIv4D1U98

There’s nothing in hockey that’s anywhere close to blowing a 25-point lead midway through the third quarter of a championship game. Think about how dominant the Patriots were over the final 22 minutes and consider that despite all of it, they didn’t get the game tied until the final minute with the aid of a turnover and baffling play-calling at every turn by Atlanta.

The Falcons were basically doing things in an attempt to lose and the Patriots still nearly ran out of time to tie it.

The NHL equivalent would require for a team leading 3-0 in a Stanley Cup Final to enter the third period with a 3-0 lead, only to bench its top two forward lines and top defense pairing, then order their players to ice the puck at all costs. After that backfired and resulted in a Game 4 overtime loss, the coaching staff would need to repeat that scenario three more times to match what the Falcons coaching staff did to its players.

It’s so cruel that I wouldn’t want to see it happen to any team. Except maybe one coached by John Tortorella. That’d be fun.

2. Commish for a day

I feel like I get this question monthly, but my current platform is:

— Ban offside

— Get rid of the salary cap

— Pucks off the netting are still in play

There are way too many whistles in today’s game. Offside is dumb. What’s the point of it? It’s to prevent offensive players from getting behind defenders to score goals. That’s such an NHL type of rule.

“We want more offense but here’s a rule that isn’t really necessary and its sole purpose is to limit scoring. Anyway, we’re looking for ways to add offense to our sport. If anyone has any ideas, let me know. Ah, yes, Jeff, I see you have your hand up. What’s your idea? Oh, it’s requiring goaltenders to wear slightly tighter pants? Great, let’s go with that. That should do absolutely nothing. I love it.”

The same goes for pucks off nets above the glass. Just keep playing. The puck comes to rest in the attacking zone and you’re blowing a whistle because… you always have? Keep the play going.

And a salary cap is nothing more than a way to keep money out of players’ pockets. Screw that. Spend whatever you want. This is America. And Canada. But mostly America.

3. DeBoer’ing Answer

For the first time ever, Peter DeBoer appears as though his team won’t have a regression in his second year.

With the Florida Panthers, DeBoer went from 93 to 77 to 72 points before being pushed out the door. With the New Jersey Devils, he went from 102 to 48 (in 48 games) to 88 to out the door midway through the 2014-15 season.

His San Jose Sharks tenure was set up to match his one with the Devils, as he lost in the Stanley Cup Final in his first year. But unlike his time in New Jersey, the Sharks are on pace for 107 points and have just as good a shot as anyone in the West of getting to the Cup Final again.

(Photo by Christian Petersen/Getty Images)

The Sharks weirdly have the same exact score-adjusted Fenwick (53.1) this year as they had last year. Based on ice time for his key players, he’s taken a “if it ain’t broke, don’t try to fix it” tack.

DeBoer had a bad team most of his time in Florida and sort of got screwed a little in New Jersey, as his boss was handing out bad contracts like candy on Halloween and he was forced to use a washed-up Martin Brodeur more than he’d like.

There’s a good chance DeBoer will go to his third Cup Final in six years. You could do worse.

4. One Wish

Gary Bettman steps down as commissioner and I am announced as the replacement.

5. Getting Interference

https://twitter.com/fansided_dave/status/828643552439713792

For the first half of the season, I felt the league was getting it right way more than wrong. I think back to the 2014 Stanley Cup Final when Dwight King fell on Henrik Lundqvist as the Kings scored, a goal that should not have counted. That type of play was being overturned properly.

Now, it feels like most of the interference challenges can go either way for totally arbitrary reasons.

For instance, how is Kevin Hayes dragging Carey Price away from his net not interference? It’s incidental contact? Almost all contact with goaltenders is incidental. He yanks him out of his crease and lets Rick Nash get a tap-in goal. Why don’t more players on breakaways just hook their skate into a goaltender’s pads and drag him away?

That’s not interference, but somehow officials deemed this play, where Michael Raffl of the Flyers and Ryan Murray of the Blue Jackets skate near Sergei Bobrovsky’s crease as interference because Raffl bumped Murray into Bobrovsky? Really?

Murray himself chooses to skate through his goaltender’s crease and then… really, it’s too confusing. It stopped making sense a couple months ago.

The issue is the reviews for this (and offside) are done on a tablet that isn’t even large enough to enjoy pornography, never mind discern what happened on a play where there was a tiny nudge. Let Toronto handle these reviews. The NFL took reviews out of the hands of on-field officials forever ago.

If the same people are always reviewing goaltender interference, at the very least, the calls will be more uniform. They may not be accurate, but at least they will be consistent.

5. Death Becomes’er

https://twitter.com/drewm9090/status/828644918134525952

Yes. One day, we will all be dead, rotting in the ground or spread across the world as ashes and we won’t have to think about a team as objectively evil as the Patriots having success. That, my friend, will be a wonderful day.

6. Morgant-nay

I don’t know what’s happening here. But this feels like a good way to end this.

About Dave Lozo

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