TAMPA BAY LIGHTNING ARE THE CHAMPS 2020-2022 THE NHL 2020-2021 SEASON THREAD (INCLUDING LIGHTNING HANGOVER AND OFFSEASON SHENANIGANS. HOCKEY IS THE BEST)

Someone forgot to put 2 coincidental penalties on the board during NYI-BOS, and they wound up playing an extra minute of 4-on-4 hockey before play stopped/the officials realized it. I don't know how something that sloppy happens in a playoff game.

lol!

glad the habs are looking like doing it but kind of would like the leafs to score to make it interesting

carey price still got it

the habs are looking good!

xxp hey hey!

wow. did not expect the goalie to be pulled at that face-off.

xp :))

Lol leafs. Never in doubt (that they would lose).

I knew it was bad, but not havent-won-a-series-in17-years bad for the leafs.

feel bad for the nurses doug ford condemned to watching that

every other canadian team has won like at least 3 or 4 series in that same time period (and those canadian teams have generally not been any good!)

🗣️ OLÉÉÉÉ OLÉ OLÉ OLÉ

— Canadiens Montréal (@CanadiensMTL) June 1, 2021

Real Montrealers know no team will ever represent the city as well as the Maroons.

Having lived in Montreal since 1995 and hating the Habs has not, at all, made me bitter.

Glad I'm not emotionally invested in hockey--I feel bad enough as a bandwagon guy, I'm sure there are lots of people really shell-shocked tonight.

xp been wondering for a while but okay tell us why you hate them and bring it all

My dad raised me to hate the leafs and pity their fans.
I pity both tbh.

lol. This series is the first time I've watched full games in ages. Feeling bad for my dad who is hoping to see the Leafs win another cup...

xp been wondering for a while but okay tell us why you hate them and bring it all

― mookieproof, Monday, May 31, 2021 9:51 PM (fifty-six seconds ago) bookmarkflaglink

Not all of it is rational, it's sports!

It's part that they are the Yankees of hockey, in that they have had enough success already as it is why bother more, but also as in their fans are pompous and always quick to remind them of their rings and their celebrations of the past is so tacky (admittedly not as tacky as the Yankees let me be clear). I can't with the flambeau anymore. I can't.

The other part is you are a kid and you see the Mario Tremblay and Patrick Roy moment played in loop surely for years to no end it can't help.

Speaking of which, being a kid with all those great teams and superstars like the Avalanches, Red Wings, Penguins, etc, they probably felt less essential. My family's team is essentialy the Girondins de Bordeaux, I was born in Montreal but really my first few years were in Houston, it didn't really matter that I liked Brian Leetch and the Rangers for whatever reason, I was free of not loving the Habs.

But the biggest part for me is the ethnocentric chauvinism of fans which was probably all fine in the fifties when you couldn't get a worker to speak to you in french on St-Catherine, and I am always mad when anglo pundits don't believe Maurice Richard is a top five player ever. However, nowadays that same nationalism is as ugly and short-sighted as the current political equivalent. The french speaking punditry around the Habs is medieval in thinking and speaking hockey, but also in other more important issues. And anyway, who is the latest truly great French Canadian to play for the Habs? It's not like they have been contributing to development of hockey in the region in a positive way anyway (Quebec just doesn't produce players like they used to), so one hand it's nous autres but on the other hand it brings not tangible benefits to Quebec culture.

So all of that and then you get to hear about them 24/7 because of Montreal has to be, of course, a one sport city, which in a way was mirroring the short sightedness of Quebec culture until recently, it just becomes this awful thing.

Oh also they turned the Meccah of hockey into a shitty mall (with a good cinema nonetheless).

Imagine if they had done that to Fenway or Camp Nou.

i hear you but tbf they haven't won anything in almost 30 years; they're less like the yankees than, idk, the brewers or something

i suspect quebec produces as many good players as it used to, but also there are 25 more teams and the league draws from a rather greater pool than it used to. i mean it's not lemieux's or fleury's fault they got drafted by the best club elsewhere

sports fandom is inherently conservative, though! every fan will look back fondly on the times of victory, and i'm pretty sure that if mike keane or chris chelios had delivered, they'd be as fêted as Patrick or the '70s teams.

anyway i'm maybe too drunk to suitably make the point, but i think you're being unfair! i like the penguins, because i'm from pittsburgh, and have reasons to be proud of them and reasons to hate, say, the flyers and capitals. if the penguins were the lone team in the league from a location that spoke my language, i can imagine being even more invested

Isles win in OT and I can finally breathe for the first time in an hour or so.

fwiw Québec *does* have a problem with forming hockey players these days, the french media discuss it a lot-

players per million inhabitants:
quebec: 7.189
finland: 10.692
sweden: 9.57
canada overall: 11.49

i don't share Van Horn Street's anti-Hab consternation, possibly as a non-Québecer who moved to Montreal as an adult; i think i also have more <3 in my heart for québecois culture than they might, for understandable reasons. imo there is some of the Yankees in the Habs pedigree, but it's mixed up with a long recent history of being shitty which makes for a very good sports/fan narrative

pk subban forever though

Yeah the treatment of Subban was the final nail in the coffin for me.

I do have love for Quebecois culture in my heart. Just none for chauvinism across the board.

When the habs traded Subban that was it for me as well. I remember watching a playoff game the year after and was surprised to find myself actually not caring whether the Canadiens won or lost. If the team wants to go with a safe and boring style of hockey that's possibly defensible as a winning strategy, but don't expect everyone to keep watching and be excited about the team.

They'll probably win me back someday, but I haven't watched an actual game in several years at this point.

kk, suzuki and caufield giving a lot more reasons to watch again these days

I'm not enough of a hockey fan to care enough to make excuses, but I heard five minutes on the radio today (not a Toronto station) that made sense to me--evidently something people have been pushing for a while, so maybe it's been discussed here before: the ice surface needs to be larger. They were saying that the dimensions have been the same for decades, going back to a time when it was rare for a player to be over six feet tall, and when the pace of play was much slower. (Like if there were still a Polo Grounds around, and some guy hit 100 HR.) It's too expensive to retro-fit arenas, so they stay with it. With a team like the Leafs, they do really well in the regular season, when things are more wide-open, but in the playoffs, they don't (or can't) adapt to being boxed in. Which was exactly the feeling I got last night when I watched them trying to make something happen the last period: so many bodies in such a small space.

I am not a huge hockey head either... but why don’t people get boxed in during the season?

do you mean boxed in emotionally?

I'm not an expert either but I remember really enjoying Olympic hockey when it was played on the wider rinks. Seemed like the game flowed much better.

(xposts) According to the guy who was on there, there's just a more open style of play in the regular season; during the playoffs, he said, it becomes about taking up space.

I see... it becomes sumo wrestling on ice.

The point about the size and speed of players made a lot of sense to me, and I'm sure a skill team like the Leafs is hurt worst of all.

championship teams need both size and skill really

Yeah the Leafs failings are purely mental anyway.

I'll defer to the hockey people here (I can think of a baseball guy who would scoff at the idea that the problem is in their heads; I don't discount such factors myself), but I'll mention the Polo Grounds again, and another obvious parallel is the way they've had to adjust golf courses to the reality that guys now routinely hit 350 yards off the tee. With golf, I don't think you have to necessarily lengthen the course, you can also punish errant drives more severely.

Oh I 100% agree that rinks need to be re-sized.

it's not like players exactly cruise during the regular season, but the playoffs have a different level of intensity. everyone is trying to finish every check all the time, and at the same time the refereeing becomes more timid (i.e., bad) because the stakes are higher

i agree that bigger rinks would be better, but an even cheaper way to improve play would be to actually call the penalties that allow worse players to neutralize better players

that doesn't let the leafs or oilers off the hook, though -- colorado is just as skilled and doing just fine

One other option in golf: you simply take what used to be a par 5 and change it to a par 4. I don't know if it ever happens that cleanly, but I was watching a tournament on TV recently, and they were playing a par 4 that I'm pretty sure was some ungodly distance of at least 550 yards, maybe even 600.

well . . . par is meaningless. make them all par 7 and give everyone double eagles and the results will be the same. golfers are playing against each other, not a made-up number of strokes

Right--good point.

It probably matters a little in terms of the record book--lowest score ever at the Masters and such--but in terms of winning or losing, no.

how much bigger are we talking, though? the bigger the hockey rink, the more you introduce pacing into the game. i'm not necessarily opposed to a bigger rink, but i would be cautious as to how big, because one of the defining features of hockey is its speed and why i love the sport. while i enjoy european hockey, it's a much less subdued version of the sport, for the most part.

more subdued*

jesus that was a brutal hit

Vile. That might be a series suspension.

hope vegas can win a couple and extend that series because that was Good Playoff Hockey tonight

(also <3 MAF)

this, btw, is real class

This fantastic photo of Nikolaj Ehlers doing what he can to protect Jake Evans has been floating around various social media outlets without any credit to the photographer.

David Lipnowski/Getty Images pic.twitter.com/ltWa1Iblb2

— Seth Rorabaugh (@SethRorabaugh) June 3, 2021

Was that hit really as dirty as it sounds? Because it sounded truly wretched.