Thursday, February 18, 2010

Where we at II

Right, so, then we have a bunch of people we call defensemen. I...really don't know what to do with them. Any of them. To start with, there are the Albatross Twins. The good news, I guess, is that, barring any crazy Parent Trap-style magical body switches, there is now an undisputed champion of their macabre race to the bottom. Michal Rozsival has started to use his body to make plays. And what do you know? He's been steadily improving over the last few months to the point where he's actually looking decent. Not $5 million decent, but decent! I'm hard-pressed to complain about him lately.

And then there's the other guy. Wade Redden, somehow, despite being terrible as soon as we signed him, has actually gotten steadily worse over the course of the last two seasons. I've moved beyond rational theories. Right now, I think that his skates are connected to an in-shoe heating system which therefore melts all the ice directly around them, causing him to be skating in puddles which put him 3 steps behind absolutely anybody he is trying to outskate. He also often slips on the watery ice, causing him to end up a few feet away from wherever he intended to be. Then, when the puck is anywhere near him, this water that his Hot-Skates have just melted starts to re-freeze around the puck, thus attaching it to the ice surface ever so slightly. This slight bond still allows Redden to hit the puck free of it with his stick, when attempting a pass or rare, elusive shot, but because of the bond, the puck doesn't travel as far as intended, and it often travels off in a completely wrong direction.

Not buying it? Would you believe Gypsy curse?

Wade Redden, on a team full of streaky players and roller coaster performers, is the only man who has really managed to be consistently shitty this season. Congratulations, you fuck. You win the Worst Ever crown. I have no follow-up to this. He's worth a $6.5 million annual cap hit, we have him under contract for another four seasons after this one, he's thoroughly untradeable, ownership won't spend $6.5 million to pay a guy in Hartford for 4 years (though they are paying $1.4 million to keep a Brashear there for one more season), and he's over 26, so if we buy out his contract, we're still on the hook for...(trust me as I do some math here)...$1.92 million a season for 8 more seasons. (Post a comment asking for an explanation of that number, and I'll give you one.)

That contract puts us in a tight spot of, as you well know, already spending $11.5 million of cap space and only having those two guys to show for it. So, we move on as best we can. Marc Staal is widely considered to be our most solid defenseman, but he hasn't exactly had a hallmark (hallMarc?) season. He's been up and down. Girardi has been our most manic defensemen, having multi-week stretches where he was our best D-man, and stretches where he was awful.

The kids, Del Zotto and Gilroy, are just kids. I like what I've seen from them, but they don't have the experience to be solid defensemen. The big problem here is the problem we're starting to see not just with Del Zotto and Gilroy but also with Staal and Girardi: they have no one to learn from. Their example-setting veterans are Michal Rozsival and Wade Redden.

This is where those contracts start to burn us in more ways than just the cap space. Torts has said he doesn't want to rotate in more 'Pack defensemen, like the promising Bobby Sanguinetti, the surprisingly-still-around Corey Potter, and the probably-leaving-next-season Ilkka Heikkinen, because he's concerned about ruining their development. Put aside for a moment the irony of letting Heikkinen walk next season for fear of "ruining his development" by letting him play with the big club a bit. It's fairly revelatory that bringing a kid up in this environment could ruin his development. It's because we have a culture of losing, but it's also because we have no veterans they can actually learn from. Imagine if we had a big, physical, stay-at-home defenseman -- even a washed-up one -- who could teach these kids that you play defense with your body.

Which brings us back to the four kids who, evidently, are good enough at hockey that we're comfortable stunting their development by keeping them up out of the minors. You wanna know why Staal has progressed so slowly this year, why Girardi is so manic, and why Gilroy is floundering? It's because they have so much to learn and no one to learn it from.

And so, again, our attention turns to the coaches. Granted, there's nothing Torts did to deserve Redden's weighty contract. But he is the coach. And if management won't let him stick Redden in Hartford where he belongs, surely he can get away with scratching the man for more than 2 games total. Or at least with calling up a seventh and then not giving Redden more than 3 minutes on the ice. God knows he was willing to do that with some forwards for a good part of the season.

What I'm looking for is that "accountability" stuff. We know Torts came in preaching "we'll play defense by playing offense; they can't score if we have the puck" and has less than a season later already changed his tune to "we'll play offense by playing defense; control the puck in your own end and the chances will come." Fine. But what happened to that other thing he came in preaching: veteran accountability? When 19-year-old Del Zotto takes a 2-minute penalty for unsportsmanlike conduct for arguing with a ref (a crime to which Torts himself is surely no stranger), he gets screamed at and sent to the end of the bench for the remainder of the period. Why, then, do we never see that kind of treatment for someone like Redden, who is surely singlehandedly responsible for far more goals against than that one? That's on the coach. It's his responsibility to teach the kids how to be reliable defensemen, and he just seems to be chastising and rewarding the wrong things.

This deserves to be its own post.

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