The NHL’s public rationalization for overloading the schedule with interdivisional games the past three seasons was that it wanted to emphasize rivalries.
The real reason was that the league’s Eastern time zone power bloc loves minimizing its travel — and travel expenses.
Whether the matchup is Maple Leafs vs. Senators, Kings vs. Ducks, Oilers vs. Flames, rivalries can still thrive when the schedule goes back to six games against divisional opponents next season.
And maybe the Avalanche can find a real divisional rival.
When the Wild and Avs meet today in St. Paul, Minn., a lot will be at stake as the teams jockey for position in both the division and Western Conference standings. In the final game of the regular season next Sunday in Denver, when the Wild and Avs meet for the 24th time in three seasons, it could affect one — or both — team’s playoff seeding.
And yet, does it really feel like a rivalry?
By the NHL’s way of thinking, it should.
It doesn’t.
Even in a pro sports world of mercenary athletes, rivalries can start with geography and be heightened by competitive stakes. A rivalry doesn’t become one with a wave of a hand or the point of a finger. It can’t be ordained. It has to happen. Franchises can and do have more than one rivalry, and the “most heated” ones can fluctuate for each team.
But wouldn’t it be more entertaining if an atmosphere of true rivalry — the one natural matchup above any other — developed between the Avalanche and one other team in the division?
Within the Northwest, the Wild is the prime candidate to match up with the Avs. The Flames and Oilers, a three-hour drive apart, have the Battle of Alberta, while the Canucks make up the third side of a western Canada rivalry triangle.
Despite that, I’m tempted to make the argument for, and to hope for, a major rivalry developing with the Flames, because of the similarities of the Rocky Mountain markets. I’ve been going to Calgary for nearly 30 years, dating back to when the Atlanta Flames moved and the first three seasons in Calgary were played in the tiny — and musty — Stampede Corral, and later covered hockey in the 1988 Olympics at the new Saddledome. And it has always reminded me of Denver. Our boom-and-bust cycles haven’t coincided, but both markets have been through them.
The Flames, not long ago one of the whining “small market” franchises, are back on their feet financially. The Canadian dollar is roughly on a par with the U.S. dollar. That’s a huge help to the Canadian franchises, because all NHL salaries are based on U.S. dollars.
When I was in Calgary last week, traffic was snarled downtown, with many sidewalks closed and cranes all over, because there’s a construction site roughly every other block.
With the price of oil skyrocketing, it now makes more economic sense to go to the great expense of getting crude oil from the Alberta oil sands, and it has gotten to the point where virtually everyone employed in the oil industry in Calgary — often thanks to stock options — is wealthy. Wealthy enough, in fact, to not wince about spending $153.50 for a fifth-row seat at the Saddledome.
Home prices have skyrocketed, in some cases doubling in two years. Condominium and luxury apartment towers are going up, including in previously, ahem, “marginal” areas on the fringe of downtown.
But a Rocky Mountain rivalry probably is too much to hope for, given the Flames’ — and their fans’ — more natural reasons to get all hot and bothered over games with Edmonton and Vancouver. A rivalry isn’t much fun, or even a rivalry at all, if the feelings aren’t mutual.
That leaves Minnesota and Colorado as the U.S. markets in the division. There are some intriguing similarities. Both markets have a showcase NCAA program, and — especially in Minnesota, and more so in Colorado every day — popular youth hockey programs.
Yes, there are other Western Conference teams that make sense — the Red Wings and Dallas, especially — but the No. 1 rival should come from within the division.
Adams favorite:
If the vote were conducted today, Montreal’s Guy Carbonneau probably would win the Adams Award as the league’s coach of the year. The former heady NHL center is in his second year as a head coach, and he has done a terrific job of helping get the moody Alex Kovalev to play as if this is a contract year — although he’s locked up through next season — and to get the most out of a balanced roster.
“I’m thinking more and I’m acting more as a coach now than as a player,” Carbonneau said on a conference call. “Sometimes I’m thinking of when I was a player, ‘I used to do this, I used to do that.’ There is some truth in that. It doesn’t really work in the long term, so I’m acting more as a coach now than I used to.”
SPOTLIGHT ON . . .
Marc Crawford, coach, Kings
Crawford is back in a Steve Moore lawsuit.
When the news broke Friday that Moore’s side had agreed to add Crawford as one of the defendants in the lawsuit that long has been pending against Todd Bertuzzi in Ontario, the initial reports didn’t mention that it sounded a bit familiar.
When Moore initially attempted to sue in Denver in 2005, the defendants included Bertuzzi, Crawford, Brad May, Brian Burke, the Canucks and the Canucks’ ownership.
That case was tossed out for jurisdictional reasons — primarily because Bertuzzi’s assault on Moore took place in Vancouver — and Moore subsequently filed cases in both Ontario and, as a fallback, British Columbia.
But in Canada, the list of defendants was pared down to Bertuzzi and the Canucks. Now the Bertuzzi side has succeeded in getting Moore’s legal team to add Crawford to the suit, in effect diluting some of Bertuzzi’s personal risk.
I’m on record: Crawford — whom I still like — is far from blameless in the series of events that led up to the March 8, 2004, attack. There isn’t enough room here to go through the entire story again. So I won’t. What hockey doesn’t want to face is that he is the embodiment of the old-school hockey attitude that would be on trial as much as any single person if this case ever goes to trial.
Even if you take at face value, and I don’t, necessarily Bertuzzi’s claim (disclosed in court documents months ago) that Crawford had said Moore must “pay the price” for his earlier hit on Markus Naslund, it’s ludicrous to take the leap of faith to assume that he meant for Bertuzzi to: a) take a “cheap shot, sucker punch from behind” (the exact words used on the Vancouver radio broadcast at the time) on Moore; and, b) keep punching after Moore was driven to the ice, leaving Moore with a broken neck, a concussion and an ended career.
And isn’t it curious that the Bertuzzi team didn’t seek to have the Moore side bring in May, in 2004 a Canucks winger who spoke of a “bounty” on Moore; and Burke, then the Canucks’ GM, as additional defendants? Gee, why would that be? Oh.
May and Bertuzzi are Anaheim teammates, and Burke is the Ducks’ GM. And isn’t it curious how Burke found a way to bring both May and Bertuzzi to Anaheim? They just happen to be under his wing as the controversy continues. What a coincidence.
It’s going to be settled out of court. That’s a virtual given. The league can’t allow it to go to trial because, among many other reasons, so many involved would be put in the position of having to tell the truth about what they heard and saw leading up to the mugging.
