I have a dear friend, Scott O’Neil, who is the production manager at 92-CITI-FM. He’s the guy who makes all my NHL, NASCAR and NFL Reports sound so good.
O’Neil is like most sports fans. When it comes to anything other than his two favourite teams, he’s a smart, sophisticated fan who can look at objectively at any issue — either on-field or off.
However, when it comes to his two passions — the Minnesota Vikings and Detroit Red Wings — he can get downright apoplectic. Nervous, cranky, bitter. When his teams don’t win, he’ll be happy to whine about it for hours on end.
In fact, before the playoffs started last week, he was giving it the old “woe-is-me” routine about his beloved Wings and how they were going to get ambushed and upset by the Columbus Blue Jackets, a decent club, but a club that shouldn’t be in the same league as the Red Wings, let alone the same opening-round series.
So while Scotty was going off about how “Ozzie had to be at his best,” and how “Kronwall can’t take any stupid penalties,” and about how “this team will get frustrated by (Columbus goalie) Steve Mason and start taking too many offensive chances,” I couldn’t help but wonder what it’s like to love a team so much that you actually become irrational when talking about them.
Anyway, after the Wings disposed of Columbus 4-1 and 4-0 in the first two games on the Western quarterfinal, I tried to figure out exactly why the Red Wings are so successful.
Here’s a five-point conclusion:
1) Chris Osgood is a much better goaltender than the so-called experts think. Nobody wants to give Ozzie any credit, but he’s been superb for a number of post-seasons and looked unbeatable in Game 2 this past weekend.
2) The Wings play just as well in their own end as they do in the opposing end and they’re frightening in the offensive zone.
3) The Red Wings special teams are better than any other special teams in the game today — when they want to be. The Wings scored three power-play goals in Game 2 and allowed none. In Game 1, they scored one power play goal and allowed none. This Wings team, right now, is just about perfect.
4) They aren’t bored anymore. The 82-game regular season appears to bore the Wings to tears. They have not shown either cockiness nor boredom in the first two games of the post-season.
5) The Wings move the puck better than any team in hockey. Some teams can’t complete one pass in a row. Watching the Wings breakout, you’ll often see them complete five, six, seven passes in a row. No team handles the puck better and no team breaks out of its own end quicker (OK, maybe Boston’s break out is just as good, but they don’t handle the puck as well).
The Wings are a great team that should win their second straight Stanley Cup title. However, saying that that suggests that another team’s goalie won’t steal a series from the Wings and we’re already watching Nikolai Khabibulin, Henrik Lundqvist and Roberto Luongo steal series right now.
What is it that one very smart general manager once said? “We call it the Stanley Cup playoffs because we can’t call it goalie.”
There is little doubt that most Canadian hockey fans — and perhaps just plain old hockey fans in general — have fallen in love with the Pittsburgh Penguins. Most polls out there would suggest that the majority of fans in this country will be cheering wildly for the Pens, although not necessarily booing Detroit at the same time.