Bleacher Report - Articles by Ryan Leng

Dallas Drake Retires After His Third Season With The Detroit Red Wings

Ryan Leng — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 11:10:58 -0400

How would you imagine encountering Dallas Drake in this year's Stanley Cup playoffs? Would it have been a nice stroll? Would it have included mild small talk? Do you think you'd go so far as to develop a friendship with this Dallas Drake, who is old enough to be your dad?

Yes. Papa Drake would take you for a stroll—a frosty stroll that would end with you on your ass feeling like a biker who has just hit a gaping suicide door, gasping the word f—k.

Well Dallas "Dali (as in Dali Lama)" Drake officially retired today. Which is a good thing, if you don't like the Detroit Red Wings.

Almost twenty years ago, he came with little fanfare to Detroit, during the Wings' best draft year in recent past, featuring stars Sergei Fedorov, Niklas Lidstrom, and Vladimir Konstantinov. He wasn't actually in Detroit, however. He was drafted his freshman year at Northern Michigan University and spent the next four years playing hockey in the ass-death cold of Marquette, Michigan.

After he finished, he played a good rookie season and a half with Detroit. Unfortunately, Drake had to break into a lineup that contained Sergei Fedorov (who played in the NHL while Drake was finishing up at college), Ray Sheppard and Steve Yzerman, who had a combined 132 goals and 295 points that season. So it came as little surprise that Drake was traded to the Winnipeg Jets with his partner in pink slip, Tim Cheveldae. I don't know what Dallas Drake thought about leaving Detroit at the time. But I would imagine he at least thought, "Well, at least I'm still used to this godawful cold."

I'm not a psychologist, but once I took a class on it to fulfill a college requirement. So proceed with a grain of salt. In that class, I read somewhere that weather affects personalities. Winnipeg's average January temperature is -20, which requires thick blood indeed.

Against previous plans to retire, Dallas Drake reconsidered and came back to Detroit for one last crack at the Stanley Cup. Again, he arrived with little fanfare—but I wouldn't imagine it mattered much for someone who was staring down the barrel of his fortieth birthday.

By this year's playoffs, he filled the physical role on an unlikely brute squad, featuring Nicklas Kronwall and Pavel Datsyuk (who won the Lady Byng, ironically). Drake didn't so much knock into players as he knocked through them. I noticed him every time he was out on the ice, relentlessly dogging and out-skating much younger and more talented opponents. He played some of the best hard-as-nails hockey I've seen in years.

So while Sid the Kid has a stack of publicity stunts on his to-do list this summer, Dallas Drake can retire with the Stanley Cup, at home, content that he finally won it all.

Thanks, Dali, for a great season.

(Here's to old-time hockey.)

Detroit Red Wings-Dallas Stars Game Six Preview: Coach Leng's Notes

Ryan Leng — Mon, 19 May 2008 07:19:14 -0400

Someone shouted “Clear!” and in a snap, the Dallas Stars were defibrillated back to life. That's good for hockey in Dallas and tough tiddy for fans in Detroit.

Before Saturday, everyone kept returning to Marty Turco’s bad record in Detroit like it was a mosquito bite they just had to itch. Tired of hearing about it, Turco led his team to victory with 37 saves—many of them glorious—and some great offensive play.

That’s right. Marty Turco’s offensive play was a major game breaker.

Now, the Red Wings find themselves in the crucible of the American Airline Center for game six in Dallas—a game six that should have been as needless as the period in Bleacher Report’s logo.

Because of this loss, over 20,000 die-hard Red Wing fans went home grouchy. And on a Saturday too.

Allow me to consult my coaching notebook.

What the Stars need to do to win:

Marty Turco must play as well as he did the past two games, and perhaps even better, to fan the flames of his team’s confidence.

Moreover, the Stars defense must continue to collapse down low and take away Detroit’s shooting lanes. If they do, the Red Wings will be hard-pressed to score.

The Dallas Stars’ stars must be their stars. I didn’t write that just to say “stars” a lot, because their team needs it to be true.

While Brendan Morrow has kept up his scoring pace, Mike Ribeiro, Brad Richards and Mike Modano have been rather quiet, notching six points and only one goal between the three. If the Stars should advance to the Finals, they will need more production out them.

What the Red Wings must do to win:

Primarily, they must relax a little, and those mental mistakes will disappear.

They need to stop turning over the puck in their own end, and their defense needs to get back to playing like the NHL’s best. Their forwards have to communicate and catch their third attacker, who has hurt them the past two games.

Offensively, Detroit needs more secondary scoring. Dan Cleary has been snake-bitten all playoffs and is due for a goal big-style, and the same goes for Mikael Samuelson. These two players need to fill the offensive gap that Johan Franzen has left.

Marty Turco burned the Wings not once, but twice, because of wimpy dump-ins and bad line changes. Detroit forwards must come into the Stars’ end with speed and get it deep without sending the puck to Turco first.

See you at the bar.

Holmstrom Agonistes: Eyeless in Dallas

Ryan Leng — Thu, 15 May 2008 06:47:14 -0400

Perhaps enough has already been written on the matter, but after spending two tedious hours of reading through the NHL rule book and watching Tomas Holmstrom's ass on video replay, the verdict is in:

Tomas Holmstrom is guilty of bupkis.

Come back in one year!

Of course, if you're a Red Wings fan, this comes as no surprise. Holmstrom has a long history of getting called for bupkis. For instance, in game four of the Colorado-Detroit series, he was bowled over by a Colorado defenseman. As Holmstrom sprawled out on the ice, his stick tripped another Colorado player. Holmstrom was called for tripping, while his mugging was ignored, and the Avalanche scored on the ensuing power play.

In the same game, Jose Theodore made a save on a Detroit shot, and Holmstrom poked at the rebound. Three Colorado players surrounded him immediately, and a fourth put him in a sleeper hold and dragged him roughly to the ice.

While the mugging was not ignored, Holmstrom still received a matching slashing penalty for a slash that he did not commit.

Against Dallas, Holmstrom was called for diving when Mike Modano cross-checked him. Versus commentator Eddie Olczyk weighed in on the matter, saying that he thought a dive ought to nullify the previous penalty. Fair enough. Yet Versus never showed the replay. I replayed the tape myself and it was clear that Modano got his two minutes worth, and that Holmstrom was, again, guilty of bupkis.

Sure, he frustrates his opponents. Sure, he has little finesse. And everybody knows that he's not that great looking. But come on.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and submit that Tomas Holmstrom is so frustrating by virtue of the fact that his play is effective. And more importantly, that effective play is typically legal.

Which makes sense: If Holmstrom actually cheats, then goalies have a legitimate excuse for letting in a goal. Since that excuse usually doesn't exist for Holmstrom's opponents, it exacerbates their frustration.

Beside's being eyeless in Dallas, I can arrive at no other conclusion but that referees have blacklisted Tomas Holmstrom. For bupkis. The officials ought to receive the same treatment.

Unfortunately for Marty Turco, whether Holmstrom interfered with him or not, Pavel Datsyuk's bullet-drive would still have beaten him. Sorry Marty. It's not like it hasn't before.

Granted, disallowing that goal did not lose the game for the Red Wings. Turco and co. played their best game of the series. What galls me is the fact that a beautiful goal was disallowed, which can only be bad for the game.

Perhaps the league should change the crease rule, if it actually exists as it was called (which it doesn't), to a reviewable play. It boggles my mind that the league actually thinks a referee's eyes and judgement alone are good enough to make the right call. It's the playoffs, foax. These bad calls are serious.

But, in the immortal words of Tupac Shakur, "life goes on." Game four this Friday. In Detroit. Go Wings.

Nobody's an Angel: Weighing in on the Chris Osgood-Mike Ribeiro Altercation

Ryan Leng — Mon, 12 May 2008 13:12:23 -0400

Here’s the breakdown on that altercation between the Red Wings' goalie Chris Osgood and the Dallas Stars' star:

In the last seconds of a game that was all but over, Mike Ribeiro charged from the blue line toward Detroit’s goal. He veered off to the left, and Osgood angled his stick at him, clipping Ribeiro in the jaw. Understandably pissed, Ribeiro slashed Osgood on the collar.

Stars’ goalie Marty Turco called Osgood’s butt-end a “gutless play.” Cut the angst, Marty—you of all players are in no position to criticize others after your performance in that game.

Osgood said he didn’t mean to butt-end Ribeiro. Then he explained why he did mean to do it.

After witnessing a mugging of Kris Draper, Osgood probably thought Ribeiro was taking a run at Detroit captain Nicklas Lidstrom (Actually, it was Bryan Rafalski behind the net.). It is unlikely that Ribeiro was trying to put Rafalski on a stretcher, but it is likely that he was trying to send a physical message for the next game.

Ribeiro’s slash was flagrant as all get-out. Yes, goalies are well padded. But not on the side of the neck, which is dangerously close to where Ribeiro’s two-hander came. He could have been trying to chop Osgood’s head off.

j/k

Sort of.

But in the battles of hockey rhetoric, all we ever have are the results and not the intentions. The league handled it well. That said, it is likely that Darren McCarty and Mike Ribeiro (if he has a sense of accountability) will fight each other in the early stages of this game.

And I don’t mean to disparage the fine play of Darren McCarty, but his five-minute absence from the ice will hurt the Wings far less than Ribeiro’s will hurt the Stars.

The bottom line is, clichéd as it may sound, that nobody is an angel. Especially after taking a butt-end to the face.

From The Desk of a Hockey Apologist: The Fighter as Substitute

Ryan Leng — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 10:01:36 -0400

Every time a player injures another player in the NHL, the media drags out their watchdogs, who wonder what to do about the “crisis of violence” in the sport. I remember the coverage after the Bertuzzi-Moore cheap shot. Before cutting to the machine gun racket of a skirmish in Iraq, Fox News produced a trio of “analysts” (emphasis on the anal) to deride the sport. They repeatedly showed Todd Bertuzzi sucker-punching and slamming Steve Moore’s head on the ice, as well as several other clips of violent incidents.

Granted, nobody can deny that those incidents happened, but when you splice together ten minutes of goon footage, of course the sport looks horrible and barbaric, regardless of how many clean players there are in the sport.

Reader, I humbly submit the following: I’m a beer-league hockey veteran, who has never made peace with cell phones (I smashed mine last year after a dropped call), computers or copy machines. And if someone had filmed my whole life, I’m sure s(he) could come up with ten minutes of violence and shameful behavior. Trust me, if you watched that film, you wouldn’t want to be around me for long. But that film would not be an accurate portrayal of my life, as I am docile and harmless 99% of the time.

The NHL has a difficult time trying to justify the violence that occurs in its games. Hockey has a unique system of dealing with violence in the game. It is substitution. I know of no other sport that has this. Let me explain.

We see it less and less, but traditionally, that substitute has always been the fighter. Whenever a player injures or attempts to injure an opposing player, the fighter steps in to fight the injurer, or even better, to fight the other team’s fighter. If the injurer has a sense of courage and accountability, he accepts the fighter’s challenge. If the injurer fags out, the fighter on his team will surely accept the challenge.

After the fight finishes and the referees break it up, the players sit out for five minutes, at the end of which, the fighters are almost certainly cooled and collected. Having seen justice carried out, the crowd and teams can relax and enjoy the rest of the game.

Notice that the injured player, the one who has the most cause to fight, is not supposed to enter into the violence. If he were to do so, his rage has a variety of weapons at its disposal: a hard stick and fist, two sharp skates, and the ability to skate very fast. Therefore, the fighter, or substitute, metes out justice in a relatively fair and orderly way to restore peace to the community.

The fight tradition is a simple acknowledgement of the contagious and reciprocal nature of violence, and an attempt to stem it. Don’t get me wrong. The fight is not a good tradition in a moral sense. Violence still exists in the game in spite of it. But it is the lesser of two evils. The fight is a mechanism—albeit a flawed one—for stopping the upward spiral of violence, whether it is sucker punching or taking a run at a player. Without such a mechanism, the escalation would continue indefinitely.

Which is exactly what you see with the Bertuzzi-Moore incident. If you think back, you will remember that Bertuzzi’s sucker punch happened in response to a check that Steve Moore gave to Marcus Naslund (the league-leader in scoring at that time), which gave him a concussion and a few broken bones. The problem was that a fighter did not fight Moore during that game. Instead, the Canucks were left to brood over the incident for three weeks before Bertuzzi committed his crime.

The fighter’s role as substitute is to stop the revenge cycle before it reaches a boiling point and affects the whole group of players. What the media fails to understand is the nature of substitution, which has been around since time out of mind. The ancient Hebrews had animal sacrifice, and the Anglo-Saxons had weregeld (man gold) to fix the same problem of escalating violence.

My suggestion, then, is that all this crap could have been nipped in the bud by a fight during the game where Steve Moore hurt Marcus Naslund. Yet four years later, the feud seeks new victims, and the game suffers for it.

Mule Variations: Johan Franzen's Stubborn Success

Ryan Leng — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 07:31:45 -0400

The Detroit Red Wings have often been accused of being small and weak up front. Their forwards, critics would assert, are certainly talented, but when the playoffs arrive, they aren't resilient enough to succeed in the playoffs.

Perhaps there was some truth in that. At the 2007 trade deadline, the Wings signed Todd Bertuzzi, a 6 foot 3, 230-pound bruiser who also happened to be a forty goal scorer. Folks in Michigan relaxed, knowing their Red Wings were no longer the chief pussies of the NHL.

But when the playoffs arrived, Bertuzzi found it hard to find his place on the team, and after the Wings lost in the conference finals, Bertuzzi decided it was time to split.

Fast forward to the present. Todd Bertuzzi is golfing in Anaheim, and his old team is up two games to none against the Colorado Avalanche.

One of the biggest reasons for the Wings success is Johan Franzen, who scored a hat trick Saturday. Now, if you're not from Detroit, you might be thinking this guy is a new phenomenon. However, he played last playoffs as well and netted some clutch goals, equaling Bertuzzi's playoff stats.

Johan Franzen, who is also 6 foot 3 and weighs 220 pounds, had a good season this year, especially down the stretch. He ended the season with 27 goals and 38 points, and he has carried that momentum into the playoffs. Thus far, he is second in the league in playoff scoring.

Nicknamed "The Mule," a name that Steve Yzerman first coined, Franzen speculated about its origins. "Probably," he said, "because I'm strong and [I] work hard."

Mr. Franzen, I think players call you that because you're stubborn and you won't move when defencemen want you to.

Once thought to belong only to North American players, Franzen possesses a strong playoff constitution, which in layman's terms means he is a money player. He has smooth hands around the net, a heavy shot, and a body check more like a Mack truck than a mule.

Far from being the goon Bertuzzi has turned out to be, Franzen plays a hard yet clean game, has a distinct air of humility to him, and always credits the team above his personal successes.

Which is why it's time to get behind "The Mule."