Monday 2/17/25
What I'd expect to see happen in the Four Nations tournament...for Canada to make a goaltending change, defeat Finland, and then beat the US in the final. Or perhaps I should say they'd be better off making a goalie change. Defeating Canada twice would be a tall order for the US. They got a big break (soft goal) in that first game, otherwise I think you'd have seen a different outcome.
Brad Marchand played eight minutes and change in the game against the US. I found that revealing.
Connor McDavid was out there for over twenty-two minutes, which is a huge number for a forward. It was funny how easily he blew past Charlie McAvoy, but to be fair to McAvoy he did crank McDavid with a nice hip check.
Having said this, I can't care less about this tournament for the reasons I've already stated. Well, it's better than the normal All-Star weekend. Much better. You get to watch good players play good hockey. I just don't think it means anything besides that. One knows how I am--I like for things to mean something beyond just "Here's some entertainment." But in that regard I think this is fine.
As for the three fights that kicked off that US-Canada game that people raved about: It was staged, phony, fake. A big whatever. Childish.
The tournament is daft to me for a number of reasons, and one of them is how exclusionary it is. Where is Czechia? And this no Russia thing is idiotic and hypocritical. "You can play in the NHL but you're not welcome in our All-Star Game replacement tournament." These players aren't fighting a war against the Ukraine.
I also feel like you have a problem when players care more about a tournament like this than they do about their actual jobs and their real season and the team they play for.
The NBA All-Star weekend isn't unwatchable, but it's not far off. I say it's not unwatchable because I'm thinking about all of the horrendous MFA-machined fiction we see in the prose off on here which I'd describe as unreadable; that is, you couldn't sit down and read a work of that kind of writing in full if you wanted to (and no one actually does). Whereas, if you had a television that only got one station and this NBA stuff came on, you could watch it. But it's pretty bad. Somehow, it's considerably better than the NFL's Pro Bowl fare.
Baseball is the leader in the All-Star Game clubhouse, though the so-called Midsummer Classic isn't what it once was (but at least they will be going back to having players where their team's uniform).
I realize that the above makes me sound like I'm at the other end of the spectrum regarding this Four Nations tournament which people are all raving that they love (until they forget all about it in a couple days and rave that they love something else). I think most people are very simple, though. You jingle some keys in front of their faces and they'll rave about the keys as "literally the best thing ever."
I think if someone is a person who actually thinks, that what I'm saying would be similar to what they'd think. I am aware of context and history. Rendez-Vous 87 was a mid-season two-game affair, but that was a big deal because it was the NHL versus the Soviets and you didn't get to see those amazing Soviet players all that often back then. They were shrouded in some mystery and some of those Soviet players were among the ten best hockey players in the world at the time. One or two of them may have been top five.
What the Four Nations tournament most feels like to me is Canada versus the US but the league couldn't exclude everyone else so they added Finland and Sweden as token entries so that the US and Canada could play twice. Right? They couldn't have just done a US-Canada best-of-three. They had to make it look like it was this more-or-less good faith international event, but really it's just an excuse to have the US and Canada playing each other with the best players from each country instead of doing the normal All-Star break stuff. This is also one of the best opportunities for the NHL to create some buzz for itself in a way that the other Big Four North American sports leagues can't (or won't, in the NBA's case).
I'd like to see the Bruins trade both Marchand and McAvoy after this tournament. Teams will watch that McAvoy hit and think he's good even though he's not so he'll have some more value than he otherwise would. I'm sure he has all kinds of no-movement clauses in his contract, though, and he's a fat cat who isn't looking to push himself but instead just be comfortable and he's comfortable being the fat cat that he is here so it's not going to happen. The Bruins need to move on from this core group of players that they have, though. They're not going to win with them. They mostly just underachieved with them when they were better (or at least Marchand was).
I do like that the NHL lets its players play in an all-out type of tournament like this. Would it be so awful for the NBA if the All-Star Game was actually played as a game? A real, good faith game. Wouldn't that be cool to see? Treat it like an actual game of the season and these are your new teammates. You play defense, you try to win, all of that. I see what they do now and I wonder who it is meant to appeal to. Adults? Kids? If you were a kid and you liked basketball would you be excited to watch something like this or would you be off doing any of a number of other things?
I watched some of BC's terrible basketball team drop their latest and though I didn't see any of the game I learned the morning after that the BC men's hockey team broke their two-game slide. Their showing in the Beanpot final conveyed--or suggested, anyway--a lot to me I guess you could say. Some melted rink ice water in the face as to the team's mettle and championship prospects. It sounds strange, but you'd almost feel more confident for the team heading into the NCAA tournament if they won the Beanpot rather than the Hockey East title.
I had said the other day that Paul Coffey is the best skater that I've watched. Gretzky is in that conversation, too. People don't think of him that way--his physical skills actually get way underrated. People are so focused on saying he thought the game better than anyone else, as if they have anything else they could say on that score, which they can't--they're repeating something. Gretzky wasn't thought of as a speed merchant, but have you ever seen anyone catch him from behind? Skating isn't just speed or even principally speed. Edges are huge. Quickness. Lateral movement. Gretzky could skate like Barry Sanders ran. He'd be going this way and then that way--like a juking running back. The best lateral movement of any skater.
McDavid might not be the fastest guy in the league in terms of straight-out speed. He's obviously up there. What makes his speed unique is that he does everything at full throttle. He doesn't have to slow down at all. Same speed with the puck as without it, and same speed when he needs it in tight spaces with the puck.
The fastest hockey--collectively, I mean, in terms of game speed between two teams--I've seen occurs at the start of Game 2 of the 1987 Canada Cup. There's nothing in sports to match the speed and intensity you'll witness there.
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