Sorry, but I’m about to use a word many consider an obscenity.
Expansion.
In the wake of the arena deal in Pittsburgh that comes after years of maneuvering and bluffing, the Penguins seem destined to remain in western Pennsylvania.
Kansas City, with a new downtown arena operated by the Anschutz Entertainment Group about to open, probably won’t land the Penguins. Neither will Las Vegas, Houston, Oklahoma City, Portland, Ore., or Hamilton, Ontario.
Here’s what the NHL should do: Award expansion franchises to two of those cities for 2008-09.
All things equal, my choices would be: a) Kansas City, which benefits from having a new arena and no NBA competition; and, b) Portland, which has a deep hockey tradition with the minor-league Buckaroos and major-junior Winter Hawks, and has become disenchanted with the Trail Blazers.
Expansion would take the NHL from 30 to 32 teams. There could be four divisions of eight teams, or eight divisions of four teams. Regardless of the divisional alignments, the playoffs remain the same, with eight teams from each conference.
The regular-season schedule could be four games against the three divisional opponents, three against the other 12 teams in the conference, and two against teams from the other conference. That’s an 80-game season and it still gets the league back to having every team visit every arena every season. But if the NHL wanted to stay at 82 games, include an additional interconference home-and-home for every team, starting with matchups among the six Canadian teams – such as Montreal vs. Edmonton, Toronto vs. Calgary and Ottawa vs. Vancouver on Canada’s Hockey Day – and going from there.
Of course, technically it would dilute the talent pool, but it’s funny how the folks who whine about that possibility the most long for the days when the NHL virtually was a Canadian, or at least a North American, closed shop. The internationalization of that talent pool – the same thing has happened in baseball and basketball – has changed that picture. Plus, the expansion of NHL jobs by roughly 6 percent isn’t going to make that much of a difference.
The NHL doesn’t get enough credit for this, but for all the carping from its dinosaurs, the league was ahead of the NBA in opening its doors to Europeans, and unforgettable competitions such as the Summit Series between the Soviet Union and Canada set the stage. Swedes and Finns came and then the defecting Eastern Europeans, such as the Stastny brothers and Alex Mogilny and Sergei Fedorov, before the Iron Curtain fell, the Soviet bloc crumbled and nations such as the Baltics and Slovakia were reborn.
I was covering the NBA draft the day commissioner David Stern prefaced his disdainful announcement of the Trail Blazers’ stunning selection of then-Soviet national team center Arvydas Sabonis in the 1986 draft with a snide reminder that the NBA was “America’s Game.” Sabonis actually was a prideful Lithuanian who celebrated when his homeland regained its independence, and it was insulting to label him either a Russian, which under any standard was incorrect, or a Soviet, which implied acceptance of Moscow’s reach.
The NHL, for all its faults, took a worldview sooner. The NBA has its share of European stars now, of course, but we still can have a national television crew spend the night pronouncing the name of the Nuggets’ Lithuanian, Linas Kleiza, as if it’s the same as the kid with the blanket in “Peanuts,” and calling him a “Russian.”
That worldview makes expansion less of a problem.
Protection
When the Avalanche played at Minnesota last weekend, the Wild’s Brent Burns delivered a clean hit on Joe Sakic and the Avs made a quick change to get Scott Parker on to confront Burns, who declined to stay around and address Parker’s concerns.
We all understand the principle – protect the stars. But in a league that prides itself on a one-for-all mind-set my question always has been: OK, who aren’t you supposed to hit (or suffer the consequences)? Who determines who is a star and who isn’t? (And “you know one when you see one” is not a good enough definition.) Is a clean hit on Matt Cooke a dirty hit on Markus Naslund?
Is a clean hit on Brett McLean a dirty hit on Sakic?
Is the Flames’ Stephane Yelle, a valuable defense-first center, “good enough” to make the Avs’ Wojtek Wolski a marked man for knocking Yelle out of the lineup with a hit Wednesday in Denver?
After about a million showings of Steve Moore’s “original” hit on Naslund – a clean one, in my opinion, and not only because it was unpenalized – there still are diametrically opposed views on the issue. Of course, in Vancouver, it generally is viewed as either an unconscionable cheap shot or (at the very least) a hit that should have had Moore required to drop the gloves whenever any Canuck asked for the next 23 years – even if it was in a bar after an old-timers game. But most of that is based on who Naslund is, not on the hit itself.
(Chris Neil’s hit on Chris Drury would have been an unnecessarily cheap shot against anyone, by the way.)
There shouldn’t be Jordan Rules or Crosby Rules in the NHL, but that always seems to be the basis of all of this. And the Avalanche shouldn’t stoop so low as to be a part of that kind of thinking.
Oh, that Patrick
Membership in the Hall of Fame hasn’t mellowed Patrick Roy. The owner-general manager-coach of the major-junior Quebec Remparts was fined $2,000 by the Quebec League for his argument with Chicoutimi coach Richard Martel last week. The game was at Chicoutimi, where Roy also got into trouble earlier this season after being accused of shoving a team official in an argument stemming from a group of fans blocking the Remparts from boarding their team bus.
SPOTLIGHT ON … THE SLOVAK CONNECTION
Last weekend in Minnesota, Wild winger Pavol Demitra watched as Avalanche center Paul Stastny took sole possession of the NHL record for the longest points streak by a rookie. It was a bit eerie for Demitra. Like many Slovaks in the NHL, Demitra was young – 5 years old – when the Stastny brothers, Peter and Anton, defected from Czechoslovakia in 1980, leaving the national team during a tournament in Austria and making their way to North America to join the Quebec Nordiques. Their older brother, Marian, joined them a year later. They became nonpersons to the Czechoslovakian state, so young players in that hybrid nation, including Demitra, weren’t able to watch the Stastnys play or even hear much about them. By 1989, communist rule ended, and by 1993, the nation was broken up into the Czech Republic and Slovakia. The name “Stastny” again was magic in Slovakia, since the brothers came from the capital of Bratislava. Peter Stastny eventually wrote his autobiography, “Hockey on Two Continents,” a best seller in his homeland. “I read his book when I was older, and what he did with his brothers was amazing,” Demitra said in St. Paul, Minn. “He has done so much for Slovakian players and for our country.” In 2007, Peter lives in Bratislava and St. Louis, and represents his native country in the European Parliament. Marian is in Quebec City, where he owns a golf course, and Anton has a furniture business in Lausanne, Switzerland. Oh, yes, and then there’s Paul, who was born in Quebec City, spent time in New Jersey when his father played for the Devils, but for the most part was raised in St. Louis. “I knew Paul when he was a young little boy, and he has turned out to be a great player,” said Demitra, who played for the Blues when Peter Stastny was a team scout and occasionally brought his sons to the rink. As of last week, the NHL listed 23 Slovakian skaters on league rosters, including Demitra and Marian Gaborik of the Wild, Marian Hossa of the Thrashers, Marcel Hossa of the Rangers, Miroslav Satan of the Islanders and the Avs’ Marek Svatos. There are only two goalies, Colorado’s Peter Budaj and the Canadiens’ recently recalled Jaroslav Halak. Having 25 NHL players from a nation with a population of only 5.4 million, not much more than Colorado’s 4.6 million, is pretty impressive. They have the Stastnys to look up to as trailblazers.
PENALTY BOX: NOLAN’S POSTURING SLAP IN FACE OF NHL
Miscreant: Islanders coach Ted Nolan.
Infraction: Expressing shock – shock! – that Isles winger Chris Simon was suspended a minimum of 25 games for swinging and nailing the Rangers’ Ryan Hollweg in the face with his stick.
What’s wrong with that: Yes, you can argue that Nolan was merely standing up for one of his players – he has known Simon for many years and was being loyal. But in this case, Simon got off lightly, and to complain about this relative slap on the wrist is so ridiculous, it diminishes Nolan. He would have been better off to say nothing, or that he supported Simon, without supporting what he did. If the league had done what Nolan said he thought was fair – suspend Simon for just the remainder of the regular season – it would have set a terrible precedent, for the Islanders included.
Top 10
Polls close Friday morning:
(Rk. Prev. Team Comment)
1. 3 Ducks Teemu cracks 40…goals
2. 4 Red Wings Dominate Preds
3. 1 Predators Erat out four weeks
4. 5 Devils Best in East now
5. 2 Sabres Dropping like a rock
6. 6 Canucks Angling for third seed
7. 10 Senators Getting a quorum
8. 8 Penguins K.C., never mind
9. – Wild Backstrom No. 1
10. 9 Sharks Guerin gets hat trick
Terry Frei can be reached at 303-954-1895 or tfrei@denverpost.com.
