Swift Judgments

You want concision? Oh, you’ll get concision.

I had a most interesting and informative discussion with Berkshire from EOTP today about quarter-season player evaluations. He’s working on a massive, detailed review of every player, because EOTP is a high-class site and that’s how they roll (will insert a link in this sentence as soon as it’s up). But down here in the internet trailer park that is the blogspot community, we like our player evaluations quick, rough, and dirty. Also, alphabetized.

Cammalleri: The disadvantage of the alphabet is that sometimes it forces one to start from a less than ideal beginning, because there’s not a lot needs saying about Cammalleri so far. I would like to see his production improve a little, but it isn't bad enough to be grounds for either disappointment or concern.

Cole: Is a lot like Cammalleri, but with more luck and easier opposition. Along with Pacioretty and Desharnais he’s moderately (and honestly) overperforming his ice time, and although I have a congenital aversion to UFA signings, I will concede that he was a good one.

Darche: Fourth line is what fourth line is and expectations must be adjusted accordingly, but nevertheless it’s reasonable to ask if the team could get more out of the soft, soft minutes he plays, were they played by… well, someone else. In a perfect world, Darche (or the man in Darche’s role) would be able to take some of the D-zone faceoffs off Gionta/Cammalleri, and thus indirectly help the collective offense.

Desharnais: Every time some commentator references the fact that the Canadiens are a small team, I feel a tiny surge of pride, because that says to me that they’re not susceptible to the occasionally-homoerotic fetishization of ‘BIG’ that plagues certain segments of the NHL elite. This guy is performing as well as Cole at one-fifth the cap hit- a trick I would very much like to see if Gauthier can repeat.

Diaz: It’s often been noted that the Canadiens are the gateway for a lot of Quebecois players/coaches/managers coming into the NHL; what gets less attention is that they’re a bit of a gateway for Swiss players as well. I like the principle behind the recruitment of Diaz, and the transition from the Swiss A-League straight to the NHL has to be one of the hardest leaps for a hockey player to make in a year, especially coming to a team with depleted D; considering all that, he’s holding up pretty well.

Eller: He’s looking better and I think he’s improving but over the season-to-date the boy has been a time-sink. Not as bad as Weber, though, and he gets the young-player-development exception, so we’ll give him till the half-season at least before we say anything cruel.

Gill: Looks, sounds, smells, feels, and probably tastes like a stay-at-home defenseman, and I have a long and depressing track record of misjudging stay-at-home defensemen (I have a Canadiens T-shirt that says ‘Komisarek’ on the back, which I cannot stand to wear any longer for the shame that comes upon me when I see it, but I keep it always as a reminder to myself of the fallibility of my opinions). So where Gill is concerned I’m just gonna say that I like his penalty-killing and I like the fact that he’s played more than two seasons in the NHL, and then I’m just going to shut my big mouth before I say something stupid.

Gionta: There is a Chinese phrase, 苦力, translated literally as ‘bitter labor’, which refers to the difficult, tedious, and unrewarding manual work necessary for any large project to be completed, and also accurately describes what Gionta has to do for the Canadiens. He’s taking the second-most defensive zone draws and facing the toughest opposition and has an ugly .894 on-ice save percentage behind him, and yeah, he doesn’t look half as golden as Plekanec, but he’ll look a helluva lot better if Martin ever stops treating him like a checking forward.

Gorges: The Rivet trade was the first big trade of my tenure as a fan, and I remember distinctly everyone in Montreal treating this dude like Ann Veal when he came in, but that was then and this is now and were it not for Gorges and Subban this team would be so far out of a playoff spot the fans would be demanding that the Canadiens tank for draft picks rather than fire Martin. (N.B.: It is very difficult to think of a cutesy alliterative phrase for deliberate failure which uses the name ‘Yakupov’.)

Moen: The Canadiens have had some terrible luck so far, with injuries and PP%, but Moen has been so lucky it’s almost gauche. One of the things keeping the Habs out of the toilet so far, insha’allah he sustains the unsustainable a little longer, until the other parts come around.

Nokelainen: I have this fantasy of one day finding three hockey players who can play fourth line minutes at fourth line prices and not get killed doing it. Until I find those players, though- or until the Habs find them, more accurately- there’s going to be a Nokelainen on the roster, sadly.

Pacioretty: Let us now sing the praises of Max Pacioretty, who we will indeed refer to affectionately as Patches, for despite that unfortunate incident with Letang and the shoulder he is still most beloved among serving Canadiens. All we can ever ask from our players is that they perform well enough to reimburse the team’s investment in them, but Patches pays it back with interest and dividends and a Christmas bonus.

Plekanec: He’s starting 60% of his shifts against top opposition in the defensive zone and he still leads the team in goals. The underlying possession numbers are not quite as rosy as the results, but the guy looks terrific and at this point I see no reason to argue with success.

Price: Is a very talented goaltender and we are very thankful that we have him.

Subban: Proving time and again that it is possible to be a remarkably mature, competent defenseman while still playing with the attitude of a fourteen-year-old.

Weber: This kid is one of the weakest links on the team right now; he eats up good time at evens and produces very little for it either on the scoreboard or on behindthenet. The fact that he is one of the very few Candiens to have connected repeatedly on the team’s famously shitty power play has bought him some goodwill, but he’s very much a work-in-progress and much depends on where that progress is when the season ends.

One paragraph of narrative: The Canadiens are a good team, but they're also struggling. The injuries on D, ahamdulillah, aren’t showing too badly on defense but they echo through the depth chart in other ways, most notably in the use of oughtta-be ‘first line’ forwards (Gionta/Plekanec/parts of Cammelleri) in defensive roles. The team could benefit from some better defensive-forward depth (glaring at you, Mathieu Darche), but given the injuries it may be short-sighted to pursue that too aggressively on the open market until we see what the team looks like when the wounded return. Moreover, two of the poorest skaters (Eller/Weber) are ongoing development projects. They’re still in the process of becoming the players they will eventually be, and if one isn’t going to have some patience with that process then one best get out of the business of growing young players altogether. You know that cliché about good teams playing through injury? This is what a good team playing through injury and getting killed on power play S% looks like. They’ll get better (results) when they get better (health).

[N.B.: You may have noticed that this list does not seem so very complete. Where, you ask, is Andrei Kostitsyn? Where is Aaron Palushaj? And how could you possibly leave off Louis Leblanc? Fear not, they may appear in later evaluations, but The Theory has a strict policy against committing to any assessment of a player until they’ve appeared in at least twenty games in a season. It is another indication of the Canadiens injury troubles that the list of players who meet that standard is so short.]

[N.B. again: I invite and encourage, nay, dare people to argue with me on this, particularly people with some kind of evidence. Either I'm going to learn something or you will, and isn't that what all of this is for?]

Trick

Just get it on net.

“You need to start from further back. Behind your skate.”

“No, I just need to get it on net.”

“You’d get more power that way.”

“But I wouldn’t get it on net.”

He sighs. We’ve had this argument before. We always have this argument when we go out to practice. He wants me to do it right. I want to do it however I can actually do it. We’d go around and around and around until he gave up, realizing that if I can’t practice the way I want, I won’t practice at all. And the boy likes to have somebody to practice with.

Today I am practicing proto-one-timers. Or, something that you might call proto-one-timers if you sort of squint and think kind thoughts, but to call them one-timers would be to accord them a dignity that they do not have. My ‘shots’ are not worthy of the name. But they are, increasingly, on net. He passes to me from the fringes along the boards, and I try to whack the puck without having to stop and control it first.

“You need to snap your wrists more.”

“No, I don’t.”

“It’d be more accurate that way.”

“Don’t need to beat a goalie. Just need to get it on net.”

After two hours, I can hit the net on passes from both sides, standing anywhere from the hash marks down to the front of the crease. That should be enough.

***

The problem with learning hockey from Canadians is that Canadians do not fully appreciate the complexity of their hockey philosophy and practice. The edifice of Canadian hockey knowledge is the Angkor Wat of sports thought: vast, labyrinthine, and covered everywhere in ornate detail. It’s taken the culture generations of dedicated research and development to produce this understanding of the game, and it is truly a magnificent thing. But Canadians themselves tend to think of it as easy and even obvious, as though it’s just the way hockey is and always has been. They look at the palace and think it’s a pebble.

Every single thing you do in hockey has at least 19 different rules about the right way to do it. Consider shooting. ‘A shot’ is not just putting the puck on net. Oh, no no no. You’ve got to point your toes this way and have your weight just so and make sure the puck is on the heel of your stick and behind your skates and drop your shoulder and open the blade and then close the blade and then open it again and also shift your weight and twist your wrists and hold your breath and lift your spleen and tense some weird little muscles under your butt that you never used before for anything and say the Heart Sutra four times fast in your head. Experienced hockey people do this and they look awesome and pick corners and such. Inexperienced hockey people do this and whiff the shot, fall down, and glare malevolently at their so-called ‘instructor’, who just looks disappointed and skates away, muttering, “That’s what happens when you don’t lift your spleen.”

And it’s not just one part of hockey that’s viciously intricate, it’s all of them. Skating, stopping, turning, passing, taking a faceoff, battling against the boards, everything. There is not one discreet hockey skill that can be explained in a single sentence. There are essays out there on the internet 50% longer than the longest post I’ve ever written just trying to explain good skating form. I get sore quads just thinking about them.

Now, before all y’all pile on with all your explanations of why every single element of that is really really really important, let me emphasize this: I KNOW. I know that in order to play hockey at all one must do at least 50% of these things competently, and in order to be good at hockey one must master them all. I’m not saying they’re wrong. I’m just saying it’s impossible to take it in all at once. It’s just too much. My brain doesn’t have the RAM to run all these processes at the same time. It overloads the synapses, and leaves me on my ass, staring at the inner Blue Screen of Death and not having moved the puck one inch.

There is an order of operations to everything in life, learning most of all. Trying to teach a textbook wrist shot to a hockey novice is like trying to teach calculus to a two-year-old: incredibly difficult and relatively pointless. We will learn things only when we need and want to know them. Toddlers do not need calculus, they need to describe the quantity of apple pieces they want. Similarly, I do not need to take a perfect wrist shot. I just need to get it on net.

***

I have zero physical advantages in my girl hockey class. I’m small and feeble even by lady standards, and the class leans a bit in the direction of jockish women- the sort who run marathons and participate in co-ed flag football leagues. They have actual muscles and far more kinesthetic intelligence than I do. I’m never going to outplay them on speed or strength.

But I have watched a bit of hockey in my day, and as the class wears on it becomes clear that most of the other participants have not. They don’t recognize the common terminology (offensive zone, crease, backhand, etc), they don’t know how offsides works, and they don’t play positions. But most interestingly, they do not defend the slot. At all. Ever. Last class I was fortunate to be teamed with one of the more talented chicks and therefore got to spend more than ten seconds in the O-zone, and I realized that I could just hang out in the low slot all day long and nobody would so much as look at me, much less actually try to cover me.

I’m no master strategist, but it doesn’t take much to realize that with even the tiniest bit of finishing ability I could kill on the totally nonexistent scoreboard. All I have to do is get the puck on net. Quickly.

So yes, I am deliberately plotting to exploit the tactical deficiencies of a beginner women’s hockey practice. This is not honorable. The honorable thing to do would be to point out to my defending classmates that there is this one place on the ice from which it is extremely easy to score and, therefore, one should try to keep opponents and pucks out of that area. The honorable thing would be to turn this into a teachable moment and improve everyone’s skills. The honorable thing would be to put the good of the group ahead of my own. An honorable hockey player would recognize that this game is meaningless as a competition and exists only for the improvement of the community, and therefore it is unseemly to take it too seriously, and utterly immoral to run up the score.

Unfortunately for my honor, this could be the best opportunity I ever get to score a goal. Competitiveness 1, Ethics 0.

***

I get to the next practice late and over-caffeinated, and the drills are as much of a struggle as they always are. I strongly suspect that no one in the history of the game has mangled a horseshoe as badly as we do in this class, although the breakouts are getting better. Also, I only get accidentally whacked in the head once, down 60% from last time (some of these women are going to be very surprised when they find out what high-sticking is). But my so-called ‘shots’ are not working any better in the drills this week than they were last week. Not auspicious.

Shinny starts and I’m beginning to doubt the plan. Could be they’re wising up and they won’t let me get away with it. Could be I’m still not good enough to finish the chances when they come. But the talented chick is on my team again, so insha’allah they will come.

And soon. First faceoff we win and gain the zone honest-like, no offsides and puck in deep, and she’s chasing it behind the net, three defenders on her. I know the girl in the black is going to hang back at the blue line, because she’s smart like that and also doesn’t like to have to skate end-to-end. So I go to the slot, alone- three girls on my one teammate and one on the far side boards covering another, nobody’s looking at me. So I wait. The puck will pop out into the middle. It always does.

It does. I whack it so hard the stick vibrates in my hands.

A goalie of my acquaintance once told me that you can hear a goal before you see it. A blocked shot is a dull thunk off padding. A missed shot is an echoey bang off the boards. And of course no one could mistake the dulcet ping that comes from a post. But a goal, most of the time, sounds like nothing. A goal is a split second of silence chased by a wall of noise.

This time the only noise is me. It is a most undignified whoop.

There is no feat of emotional control harder than attempting to stay cool after scoring the first goal of your entire life. It takes literally every reserve of classiness in my body to keep from launching into a full-on jumping/hugging routine. I have to visualize every old-school hockey ethicist I’ve ever seen sternly lecturing on the evils of goal celebrations. I have to remind myself in the harshest possible terms that I am a shitty hockey player and this game means as little as it is possible for any game to mean. But I still take the next faceoff grinning, with a high-voltage heat in my chest so intense I’m sure it must be visible through my jersey.

Nothing in hockey literature palls faster than accounts of games you weren’t at and don’t care about, so I won’t bother with the play-by-play on the subsequent fifteen minutes, suffice to say this: the second one was much the same as the first, and the third was a rebound off the blade of the ad-hoc goalie, and once I was safely changed and outside with no one to judge me except the hockey gods and the non-hockey pedestrians of Parkdale, I sang out loud the whole way home.

Next week, I’ll tell them about the slot. Promise.