Rabble rabble rabble: sieves, sieves, and sieves

Well, that sucked.

For the first time since I can remember, Detroit is 0-2. 0-2 in what should be considered two homes games. I’m not sure if the Sweden thing turned into a distraction, but I hope they were because I don’t want to see this team play like that ever again.

Detroit came out absolutely flying both Friday and Saturday afternoon. I can’t even remember a time, regular season or playoff, last season where Detroit came out so motivated. Ignorant and forgetful of how many times they fell apart last season, I commented on Friday during the second period how comical Detroit’s domination was. They must have felt the same way, because they stopped trying.

So what do we know after two games:

• Our goaltenders possess qualities similar to sieves.
• This team still doesn’t understand that when the pressure is on, you need to ICE the puck and not finesse it out of the zone.
• This team is still going to try to win games with inconsistent efforts, i.e., taking full periods off.

Fantastic! I can’t wait to write about the same problems as last season.

On the bright side, it’s just two games. And St. Louis is a good team, a team that could have challenged, at least Chicago, all of last season if they got their act together sooner than January, for the third straight season. I think Andy Murray is a tremendous coach, and I think his “we may not be more talented, but we will work harder” strategy is very effective, especially considering they’re quite talented to begin with. But still, the sky is falling and such, and we need to panic, I guess.

What concerns me the most is both of our goalies blow. Sorry, I wish I could have been more delicate with that one. I was patient all of last season with Osgood letting in a lot of goals and Conklin looking rather bad but somehow not letting in as many goals, but I was hoping just one of our goalies would have had a good start to the season. Unfortunately, Osgood was busy letting in a lot of goals on very few shots, while Howard was busy letting in very soft goals at very bad times.

I was a little surprised to see that the consensus on other blogs and message boards was that Howard sucks, and I even saw people suggest Danny Cloutier. Ugh. While I wish Howard performed better, both goalies sucked equally. Osgood didn’t let in any weak goals, really, but anyone letting in 4 goals on 17 shots every night is not going to hack it in my Thursday night Aluminum adult roller hockey league (TNAARHL), let alone the National Hockey League (NHL). Osgood just has a problem making semi-difficult saves. He let up one bad rebound that led to a goal, but other than that, the shots weren’t that bad. But in a starting goaltender, you expect that he’ll make some saves to keep you in the game.

Howard, meanwhile, was rather good for about half the game. He didn’t have a lot of work in the first period — shots were 14-1 at one point, but at one point in the second they were 18-15 for St. Louis, and he made most of those saves. He had no chance on Tkachuk’s goal, which was just luck, but the rebound on the Andy Mcdonald goal was not great. So through about 18 shots, he had 16 saves — more than Osgood. Then he decided to show the entire NHL what it took the AHL a while to figure out — Howard has an exploitable five hole. Brad Boyes barely squeaked on by in, and 12 seconds later, Patrik Berglund blew a shot through him. A good shot, and he never should have had that mini-breakaway, but he did go five hole and it was a back breaker — Howard probably should have had it.

However, he did make 27 total saves. At Chris Osgood’s save percentage, Detroit would have lost 7.5-3. Howard sucked and there’s no getting around that, but I’m just suggesting that people calling for his head give him a chance, because what we need is a regular season goalie. Osgood is clearly the playoff guy, but both are going to need to be much better for Detroit to get to that point, not just Howard. Give it time, it’s two games under strange circumstances.

Now, in defense of both, the Red Wings in front of them enjoyed a leisurely skate around the ice while a professional hockey team on the other end outworked and embarrassed them. Really, Detroit controlled most of the play for both games. But St. Louis capitalized on their chances and took advantage offensively when the ice was tilted in their favor. Ugh. This is really not at all what I wanted to write about today. On the bright side, they probably outworked the Michigan Wolverines through about three quarters of their game. Garbage.

So what else to we know? Brett Lebda is really, really bad and was at fault for most of the goals scored this weekend — and that’s not even a joke. He took a hard jolt from Tkachuk and seemed to favor his ribs, but the Detroit News’ Chris McCosky suggests that Babcock used the injury as an opportunity to keep Lebda on the bench. I hope he realizes that Derek Meech is Lebda’s backup. Dammit. What’s the point of such a deep top 5 when that #6 is going to be that bad. Honestly. How bad would Darren Helm, Justin Abdelkader, Patrick Eaves, or any quick forward, look on the blueline. Sure they’ve never been trained to position themselves, or keep their composure, or read the play, but neither has Lebda. To his credit, he started last season this same way and was actually pretty solid for the final 55 games or so, though many people were already convinced that he sucked because of what they saw in the beginning of the year. Still, not cool.

The rest of the defense didn’t look too bad. For having more people there than anyone else, Niklas Kronwall was probably the worst. He had a hard time keeping pucks in the zone on the powerplay — I hope the J-Willy haters out there saw that as I did, because while I’m okay with Williams, I’m watching his play on the point like a hawk, and it’s clear Kronwall was the weak link on that unit. Nobody else on the blueline looked that bad.

Up front, Ville Leino, Pavel Datsyuk, Henrik Zetterberg, and Johan Franzen were really the only players with discernible hunger out there. Slick Kirk Maltby is tied for the team lead in scoring, but even he didn’t do anything after he somehow found himself with two points after the first 20 minutes of the season. I like the guy, and I like nothing more than seeing a guy like him go shelf on a shorthanded breakaway, but I hate how he only seems to have these games when his job is on the line. It’s no secret it was him or Eaves down to the wire for that final forward spot, and now that he won, it might be a while until Eaves is a regular, but I assure you it will be before Maltby records his third point of the season.

Bertuzzi looked.. okay, in spurts. Better today than yesterday. I don’t like him at all on the powerplay. I know he plays the “rover,” but I don’t think that fits on Detroit’s powerplay. He seems to stand too close to the puck carrier and it makes it really easy for a defender to cover him and the puck carrier, eliminating the advantage part of the man advantage. Speaking of powerplay, Filppula needs to be about 50x more noticeable than he was to stay on it over Ville Leino — I see no reason why he should be, right now, but I’d take both over Bert.

Anywho.. it was a very disappointing weekend overall. Neither game was even particularly enjoyable, because once St. Louis started pressing you just knew they’d take the lead soon, even when Detroit was up two goals. I just so wanted at least one of last year’s problem to be eliminated, but so far, no good. My heart goes out to brave souls like Drew who flew out to Sweden to watch that garbage in person. Hopefully the beautiful Swedish women made up for the ugly Swedish hockey. In much better news, my first Friday Prospects feature went up on Winging it in Motown on, you betcha, Friday. Give it a gander and let me know if that’s something you might be interested in.

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