The Philadelphia Flyers are like a cheese- steak sandwich, double meat, double cheese, “with” onions.
Real messy.
After their 9-1 loss last week to the Buffalo Sabres, Flyers chairman Ed Snider was so distraught it wouldn’t have been surprising to hear him finish his spiel with, “Off with their heads!”
He told the Philadelphia Daily News: “I’m devastated, really. I’m embarrassed. And I’m going to look at everything, starting with me. It’s a real rough situation and it’s upsetting. The one good thing is it’s happening now. It’s fixable. To me, everything is fixable and we’re not going to rest until we fix it.”
That sounded like one of those pronouncements that precede a news conference announcing the firing of a coach, at which the owner or general manager says this is being done because they can’t fire 23 players.
That could happen soon, to respected coach Ken Hitchcock, if the Flyers – who are 1-6-1 after Friday night’s 3-2 loss to the Florida Panthers – don’t get going. But the Flyers backed up the owners’ words by waiving Petr Nedved, Niko Dimitrakos and Nolan Baumgartner and calling up three members of the AHL Philadelphia Phantoms. Nedved and Dimitrakos ended up with the Phantoms, who play in the old Spectrum, after clearing waivers.
Snyder has every right to be angry, and it doesn’t portend well for the future that Peter Forsberg, who seems uneasy wearing the captain’s “C,” continues to be injury-prone. This time, he has a sprained wrist, suffered against Tampa Bay on Thursday night, but he isn’t expected to be out long. Because he plays such a tough game, dishing out as much as he takes, and keeps coming back injury after injury, it’s unfair to call him “fragile.” He still can be the best player in the world when he’s healthy. But this ongoing, what-next drama is one of the reasons the Avs’ decision to let Forsberg leave would have been defensible if the team’s offer to him hadn’t been so cynically constructed as to virtually guarantee it would be rejected.
Hockey long has led long-season sports in an overreaction to the first few couple of weeks of the schedule. The Flyers are a bit lumbering and it can be argued that they made some mistakes in judgment in reacting to the new rules and standards. Derian Hatcher, signed after his hometown Red Wings bought him out, often imitates a big glacier and is a minus-10 through the Flyers’ first eight games. And it didn’t help that Kyle Calder, acquired from Chicago after the Blackhawks were horrified by his arbitration-awarded contract, doesn’t have a point all season.
The Flyers aren’t this bad.
They’ll get back in the Eastern Conference hunt if they get anything approaching decent goaltending from Antero Niittymaki, and if Forsberg stays on the ice and plays and acts like a leader.
Selling out
When the Avalanche sellout streak ended at 487 last week, it was labeled the “longest-recorded” such streak in the NHL.
That’s because record-keeping of sellout streaks has been spotty, unreliable and even subject to definition of terms. The Toronto Maple Leafs talk of not having an unsold ticket since the end of World War II, but also acknowledge that some games haven’t been sellouts because of “glitches.”
It also has been apparent the past couple of years that the Avalanche was using a liberal definition of sellout. Why didn’t that particularly offend me? Because it wasn’t a ridiculous stretch, and anyone in sports and entertainment will tell you that there almost always will be “widow” singles or other unsold tickets, because of mix-ups or otherwise, to even an absolutely “sold-out” event.
Fact is, the Avalanche has been – and still is – a relatively hot ticket, despite prices that while not out of line in the NHL, still are the sort to induce sticker shock when the invoice or credit-card bill arrives. And, yes, the first time the Nuggets don’t sell out a game this season, I won’t hold my breath until someone in the media screams: “See, this isn’t a basketball town!”
Comparisons of sellout streaks among the major-league sports can be dubious because of season lengths and capacity. The Elias Sports Bureau doesn’t keep or issue information on sellout streaks.
But this much we know:
In the NFL, the Washington Redskins have the longest sellout streak, ongoing at 323 games. The Broncos are next, at 295.
The Cleveland Indians sold out a major-league record 455 straight home games, beginning June 12, 1995, until the streak ended April 4, 2001. The Boston Red Sox have an ongoing streak of 307 sellouts. Both teams passed the Rockies, who held the record after 203 consecutive sellouts from 1995-97.
The NBA record is 814 straight sellouts, set by the Portland Trail Blazers from 1977-1995. The asterisk is that they played in Memorial Coliseum – with a capacity of slightly fewer than 13,000 – for all but the final four games of the streak, which ended when the team moved into a new arena and a misbehaving roster hastened the end of the love affair between a team and Oregon’s largest city. The Boston Celtics and Chicago Bulls had streaks of 662 and 610 games, respectively.
Farewell to a Pioneer
When Vic Heyliger died at 94 earlier this month in Colorado Springs, hockey lost one of the sport’s U.S. pioneers. Self-taught while playing on a Massachusetts pond near his parents’ farm, he played at the University of Michigan and then with the Chicago Blackhawks. He coached Michigan to six NCAA championships, including the first-ever title in 1948, went into semi-retirement, moved to Colorado Springs and was coaxed into returning to coaching to help get the program going at the Air Force Academy.
He was inducted into the U.S. Hockey Hall of Fame in 1974, and that’s another area in which hockey does it right: It doesn’t wait until its builders or other prominent figures are dead to properly salute them.
Terry Frei can be reached at 303-954-1895 or tfrei@denverpost.com.
Thanks to the NHL’s ridiculous scheduling format, the league’s most exciting young player will make his only Denver appearance in a three-year span Wednesday night.
If you’re there, don’t blink or linger too long at the concession stand. You might miss something from the Capitals’ Alexander Ovechkin.
Leading the way in a two-season rookie crop last season, Ovechkin had 52 goals for the Capitals and won the Calder Trophy as the rookie of the year, beating out the much-touted Sidney Crosby of Pittsburgh. He also was selected as a first-team postseason all-star – heady stuff for a 20-year-old. One goal, against Phoenix, came with him sliding prone on the ice, and he made a blind, one-handed swipe that not only got the puck in the net, but landed him in highlight segments for weeks. At the Olympics in Turin, he had five goals in eight games for Russia and was named to the tournament’s all-star team.
The Moscow native can still be uncomfortable speaking English, but he handled the transition to the North American game and life with aplomb. In the European style, he plays his “off” wing – a right-handed shot, he is on the left side – and takes advantage of the better shooting angles. He had three goals in six games for the 2-1-3 Capitals heading into Washington’s Saturday night meeting at home with Tampa Bay. After that, the Caps will be off until Wednesday, when their appearance in Denver opens a four-game Western road swing for Washington.
“Our team keeps on getting better,” Ovechkin said in a preseason conference call. “We’ve got some good players. Our goal right now: Go to the playoffs. My goal is the same. Work like last year, try to play hard all the time, try to score goals and try to work to help the team win.”
Ovechkin’s mother, Tatiana, won two gold medals as a member of the Soviet Union’s 1976 and 1980
women’s basketball teams at Montreal and Moscow, respectively.
His father, Mikhail, was a well-known professional soccer player.
How natural an athlete is he?
In early October, he appeared at a charity golf tournament in Springfield, Va., sticking to the par-3 fourth hole and hitting with every group that passed through. He had never played golf before.
Among his shots: A hole-in-one.
“I guess it’s easy,” he said jokingly with reporters.
Top 10
Polls close Friday morning.
Rk. Prev. Team Comment
1. 2 Sabres All right, I’m sold
2. 1 Ducks Routed Wings
3. 4 Sharks Give Stars first loss
4. 6 Stars Pacific’s strongest
5. 10 Wild Road tests upcoming
6. 9 Devils Rest of division stinks
7. 3 Red Wings Look terrible on coast
8. – Oilers Split with Canucks
9. – Canadiens Unbeaten ’til Chicago
10 . – Thrashers Hartley’s quick start
