local media

I don't think this became widely-circulated until last Wednesday or so, but I've heard that Jay Leno ran it on his show Friday, which means it's no longer fresh webjunk. Making fun of local TV commercials is far too easy and making fun of local TV commercials featuring athletes is easier yet, but this one still turns the hilarity up to eleven. The galling lack of media savvy on display here is part of what I really love about hockey players in particular and the NHL generally; athletes in sports that are plugged into the hype machine would have handlers, managers and drama coaches to ensure that a train wreck like this wouldn't happen.

Or maybe it isn't such a train wreck. I almost think Colby Armstrong (speaker #1, for the nonfan) is trying to see how purposefully bad he can say his line, figuring that he's still bound to come off better than Sergei Gonchar (speaker #3), whose line is still almost completely inscrutable to me, even after ten views of the commercial. Maxim Talbot (speaker #2) was having a lot of fun on the client's dime. I figure the admaker decided star power was preferable to a basic command of English when they decided to give Evgeni Malkin a cameo. The poor guy's uncomfortable speaking to the media other than through an interpreter, so he's left without anything to do but smile, remain mute and catch the keys.

Thinking About Where the Penguins Were a Year Ago

With regard to the fantastic news that there will be at least six more years of Sidney Crosby in my future, at the below-market rate of 8.7 M per year of the extension, I guess we should be glad he wasn't born on September 9th or October 2nd or something. Given #87's recurring number gag, I'm a little surprised they didn't wait until his birthday to announce the contract, but on the other hand, getting the deal done and making it public just a week and a half after the start of the free agent signing period is like an extra slap in the face of the Rangers and the Flyers, who both grossly overspent on free agents. For the Rangers, it was just like old times, and they'll be exactly the team I remember when they miss the playoffs next year. And apart from highlighting the lousy contracts that Scott Gomez, Chris Drury and Daniel Briere were handed, by comparison, Crosby's contract should serve as the de facto max contract for the Penguins when the time comes to re-sign the rest of the young talent. Sure, the CBA says you can get a contract equal to 20% of the salary cap, but when the league's best player is only pulling down an average of 18% (and that average should go down each year as revenues and the cap rise), it's a little tough to argue for more.

So, a year ago the team was on the block, had no arena deal, was coming off a terrible non-playoff season and was breaking in a first-time GM with a coach he didn't hire. Today the team is off the market, the State just passed the spending bill for the new arena, they turned in the second-highest points turnaround in league history and the GM just extended the coach another year (this counts as job security in the NHL). Yeah, things have changed.

MEMORANDUM

TO: Pittsburgh Penguins Fans

FROM: Russell Lucas

RE: 2007 Stanley Cup Playoffs Crowd Conduct Issues

It's been six long years since the Penguins darkened the door of the Stanley Cup playoffs. That drought is thankfully going to end within the next half-hour. Tickets for Games Three and Four of the series against the Senators (which the Penguins will win in five games) are already down to standing room-only and single seats. I expect the team will get a boost from the raucous and spirited home crowd, but figure this might be the time to mention a few lingering issues in the hope that we won't be embarrassed fanbasewise.

I. Ice Maiden Etiquette

Yes, I know they're lame. I don't know exactly whose terrible idea it was to add cheerleaders to NHL games or to give sequined and spandexed young women the job of cleaning up the ice instead of the overweight guys who always shuffled out during TV timeouts. I hope the fad fades, too. In the interim, though, don't abuse them. It's such a Ranger move.

II. The Wave

Listen, I can't say whether or not the last few games I attended were aberrations or part of a larger trend. All I know is that I saw The Wave, and there's just no excuse for that. There's really nothing more to say. You paid a lot of money for your tickets, so keep your eyes on the game and don't humiliate the city.

III. Kiss Cam Etiquette

While I am advocating the long-overdue elimination of The Wave, I am simultaneously urging you to continue the practice in place regarding the Kiss Cam. If the Cam should happen to alight upon you and your significant other, please do continue to grind tongue. This significantly enhances the entertainment value of the Kiss Cam. Do not fear that these displays are not classy. If the Arena management insists on subjecting you to the social coercion of training a camera on you in front of 17,000 people who vocally expect you to surrender your physical autonomy, then the least you and your companion can do is add some juice to the whole operation. In addition, soul kissing forces the Jumbotron producer to stay on his or her toes to cut away quickly. I'd like to see the day come when an entire Kiss Cam segment is edited like a Michael Bay movie.

Further, keep this tactic in mind if you should be in the same unfortunate position as this poor bastard. If you have some unresolved business with Johnny Law, there is no quicker way to have the camera leave you alone than to fill your date's mouth with your tongue. Don't forget this.

IV. Jaromir Jagr

Finally, while there is no way to safely predict whether his team will make it to the second round, I need to address an ongoing issue with regard to a former player now employed by the New York Rangers. Jaromir Jagr scored his 600th goal last November. Not many hockey players get there, and fewer still get there at the age of 34. It's typically an achievement reserved to long-time goal scorers scratching around in the last year or two of their careers. A night or so later he scored a couple more times to move into 15th overall and 1st among European goal-scorers. 439 of those goals, along with 640 assists, came while he wore a Penguins uniform. Apparently none of that matters, though. When the Rangers come to Mellon Arena the home crowd shows him the same sort of reception reserved in days gone by for the likes of Eric Lindros, Adam Graves or Ron Hextall.

I really don't get it. And I'm saying this as someone who fell in love with the raw intensity of a hockey crowd when, at eighteen, my dad took me to a Flyers-Penguins playoff game. The noise was so deafening that I was absolutely, positively convinced that our relentless chanting (and not the ten pucks put behind him) was what drove Hextall to his ill-advised decision to chase Rob Brown around the north end of the Civic Arena while wielding his goalie stick. So I know a little something about the upside of the angry crowd dynamic. I should also mention that the first pro football game I attended in person was the infamous 1984 Pittsburgh Maulers-Birmingham Stallions game, in which 65,000 fans used both drunken jeers and the perfect packing snow (which had been miraculously/intentionally left in the aisles at Three Rivers Stadium) to express their displeasure at Cliff Stoudt's incompetence as a pro quarterback and his brazen decision to take his incompetence to a joke league. Another fun story, though perhaps not the finest hour for humanity.

So, my question is this: what could possibly justify treating Jaromir Jagr in the same fashion as Ron Hextall or Cliff Stoudt? How can Jagr get the same sort of reception as Barry Bonds or Kordell Stewart?

Let me refresh your recollection:



Remember that goal? The one that Jagr said he "didn't know enough English to describe" and which Mario called the greatest goal he'd ever seen. That was the goal that buried the Blackhawks. Sure, Mario's actual game-winner came with a handful of seconds left in the third, but Jagr's goal was the psychological back-breaker, the one that announced there was no way that team was hanging with the Penguins over a seven-game series. Yeah, they could win a period or two, as they had in Game 1, but they wouldn't be holding the Cup at the end. They had to know it.

Whenever the Penguins would play the Capitals in Landover in the early- to mid-1990s, some loud protion of the Caps fans in attendance (that it, those who hadn't scalped their tickets to Penguins fans) would always make a whoop-whoop-whooping sound every time Penguin Larry Murphy touched the puck. It sounded weird, but apparently it was intended to show their displeasure following the years he spent with the Caps. It always struck me as a pathetic and self-loathing chant. The fans were taunting a guy who came to the Penguins after stays in Minnesota and Washington who immediately proceeded to win two Stanley Cups while being the most important blueliner on the most exciting NHL team of the early nineties. He fell up the stairs, went from rags to riches. You think he cared about the Washington fans holding a grudge against him? Of course not. Jagr, in contrast, hasn't improved his position since he forced the trade. Still, don't be that guy. Be the guy enjoying his own ridiculously talented team.

Dish Network Should Pay the Penguins a Commission

Back in the 2000-2001 season, the Penguins gave in to eight years' worth of fan complaints and brought back the familiar skating penguin logo shown to the left. The bad news to this good news was that the team replaced the taxicab yellow that Pittsburgh sports teams have long worn with a glittery hue they call "Vegas gold." Of course, I always figured this was a description, and not a prediction.

I've been following the Pittsburgh Penguins on a consistent basis for half my life now-- since 1989-- and some expectation of (1) impending financial ruin, (2) relocation, or (3) farce is part of being a fan of the team. In 1975 the team filed for bankruptcy to get breathing room from creditors and the players and coaches were padlocked out of their practice facility. The team's then-GM nakedly tanked the second half of the 1983-1984 season to set them up to draft Mario Lemieux. Just eight years ago, the team hired the greatest Czech hockey coach to lead the team despite the guy not knowing English, only to fire him after he disobeyed an off-season order to learn the language.

Still, though, the current situation might beat all of those. Last night fans kept one eye on the home game against the Devils and one eye on the impromptu meeting in Philadelphia between the team's owners and the state and local officials who are controlling the purse strings over the unbuilt arena. Lingering over all this is the ubiquitous file photo of the half-completed arena in Kansas City, a chandelier-like structure that's giving the team a come hither look.

At the same time, the on-the-ice outlook couldn't be brighter. After trading Jaromir Jagr in 2001, the team spent four seasons bottom-feeding for lottery picks, and that failure has paid off. The team's solidly positioned to make the playoffs this year, and the fans have responded with standing room-only sellouts. Even after last week's deadline deal for a 30 year-old and a 40 year-old, the Penguins possess one of the more unique distributions of scoring by age group, with four forwards scoring more than twenty goals and the ages of those players being 18, 19, 20 and 39. There's a literal generation gap in scoring prowess, not to mention the decided deficit in playoff experience that was made a bit better with the acquisition of Gary Roberts and Georges Laracque. Still, the young talent is routinely drawing comparisons to the early '80s Gretzky-Messier-Kurri-Coffey Edmonton Oilers. And the youth of the players has helped to stir the enthusiasm of that other demographic particularly immune to Pittsburgh's charms-- the 18-35 set who comes to Pittsburgh to go to school, then leaves to find employment elsewhere.

We knew Crosby was great, but he's matured into the team's de facto captain and will win the Art Ross trophy, at least, this year. We knew Evgeni Malkin was going to be great, but his 30 goals have exceeded even those expectations. Jordan Staal wasn't expected to make the team right out of being drafted in the first round, but he has not only been a fierce penalty-killer, he's also showing way too much offensive skill to be saddled with less than fifteen minutes a game of ice time spent mostly in penalty-killing and checking-line duties. He's got a 26% shooting percentage, and is one of only five players in the league who has scored more than twenty goals with a shooting percentage of 20% or better.

So where does that leave me? We moved into our current house two years and two weeks ago, and since that time we've been without cable TV. I could probably have gone on indefinitely with rabbit ears and Netflix, but the 14-0-2 run by the Penguins which ended two weeks ago pretty much cinched the decision to get some sort of pay TV. I mean, watching highlights on the internet or the local news and catching the occasional game in person or at a bar is one thing, but the team actually making the playoffs and me not watching is something else entirely.

The Dish Network guy comes on Tuesday, a few hours before the Penguins-Sabres game.

Sid's 20th Goal

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Seriously, the Calder Trophy is nothing, and I fully agree with that result on the basis alone of Ovechkin's twenty or so highlight reel goals from last year. There are bigger trophies out there, like the Ross and Hart, and Crosby's making a run at both of them this year. He's a better passer than Ovechkin, and now he's got his own off-his-skates goal for the For Your Consideration clips. He's still running roughly 1:2 in goals-to-assists, but if he keeps playing with Malkin and Recchi, I don't see anything other than an injury keeping him from the scoring title. I have doubts as to whether a one-line team, even with its one line like that one, will be able to make the playoffs this year, but we'll see an uptick in team defense when Mark Eaton returns from his wrist injury in the next month. At the very least, it should go down to the last few weeks.

There have been a lot of complaints about the NHL's unbalanced schedule.

And, to a large degree, I agree with them. While the increased number of intradivisional games have helped to try to recreate some of the longstanding and rancorous divisional feuds, it's also taken away one of the draws of seeing hockey in person. Under the old schedule, I always thought that one great argument for buying season tickets was that even with the sport essentially untelevised on any sort of wide, national level, you'd have the chance to see every great player in person at least once a year. That's not the case any more, and one of the public relations downsides for the sport that I've seen cited a few places is that with the unbalanced schedule there are certain Western Conference markets that won't have an opportunity to see the Penguins' young talent-- Crosby, Malkin, Fleury and Staal-- in person any more often than once every three years.

For his part, Crosby also agrees that the schedule needs to be changed. He'd like to see a setup where the Penguins play the Flyers 82 times a year. In the 5 wins this season, Sid's piled up 15 points (7 goals, 8 assists), or 7.5 points for every tooth of his Derian Hatcher chipped last year. Over a full season, that translates to a SEGA NHL '95esque 246 points (115 goals, 131 assists).

Mark Cuban and I have something in common:

We both wish we owned the Penguins.

Quote of the Day

Following Wednesday's loss to the Penguins, Los Angeles Kings center Michael Cammalleri was asked about his team's preparations for the game, and said, "We had to be ready because we knew none of those guys were out in the bars [Tuesday] night. They aren't old enough to get in."

87's steal-and-backhand...

...is in the below video clip, at about the 2:40 mark. It's the only video online I've seen thus far.

I do understand that this is all just for me.

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The team announced today that they're holding on to Jordan Staal-- at least for the time being-- and not sending him back to his junior team. I suppose they could be simply extending the experiment from 8 to 39 games, but I think this is a huge move. Keeping Staal on the roster not is a matter of both time and money-- time in that he'll be an unrestricted free agent sooner, and money in that the first year of his rookie deal now kicks in. This move says a lot of things the Penguin fanbase hasn't been hearing over the past five years, when there were a succession of salary dumps leading to the competitive absurdity of a franchise goalie spending extra time in the minors just to keep salaries low, while third- and fourth-line forwards were being signed largely because they possessed two-way contracts, and not because they possessed observable skills.

Yeah, this is a big move.

penguins 8, flyers 2

Aside, of course, from scoring the most points in an NHL season for an 18-year old in league history and selling tens of thousands of tickets, one great thing Sidney Crosby did for the Penguins in his rookie year was to resurrect the team's rivalry with the Flyers. It had languished for a couple of years while the Pens bottom-fed. Oh, sure, the local crowds still felt the same antipathy for the guys in orange and black, but it wasn't much of a fight. But last year Ken Hitchcock drove the Crosby's-a-diver bandwagon, and Derian Hatcher put his coach's taunts into composite form by repeatedly bludgeoning Crosby and truncating a tooth or two of the kid's. Sid responded by filling the net with the puck. Over and over.

Last night, he picked up from where he left off last year. The third goal of his hat trick was both poetry and irony. I'm still waiting for it to show up on Youtube (Internet Search-and-Retrieve Team: ACTIVATE!) and will post it here when it shows up. In brief, Hatcher gets control of the puck in front of his own net and starts to skate it out. He's looking to make a pass. In the blink of an eye, Crosby swoops in from behind, lifts his stick and backhands the puck into the net and past an unprepared Robert Esche in one motion. Hatcher never looked so old or leaden-footed.

Game #2/ Penguins 4 Devils 2

Yeah, I'm ditching writing about movies. This is going to become a Pittsburgh Penguins-only blog.

It was happiness built entirely on circumstance-- I freely acknowledge that-- but I was convinced on Tuesday afternoon that I was happier than I'd ever been or I'd ever be. To begin, I was nearing the end of Tom Perrotta's Little Children and I'm just insanely excited for the movie to come out. I really admire Field's In the Bedroom and I've spent some time the last few weeks conjuring a vision of what the novel (or, more precisely, the novel's themes) could look like on-screen.

A little after noon on Tuesday a co-worker stopped me in the hall and asked me if I like hockey. I said: yes. She offered me four tickets to that night's game, and I eagerly accepted. We'd never be able to take the kids to a game normally; it's too cost-prohibitive. The last time I'd taken Leah and Ruby to a hockey game was a couple of years ago when I'd gotten seats from my old firm. Gin had never been to a game, and she's just at the edge of being able to be carried in. So the five of us crammed into four seats in B15, right behind the net where the Pens shoot twice. It was a perfect night.

How perfect? Each of their first-round lottery picks from the past three years scored goals. Crosby and Malkin showed instant chemistry in being stuck together on the top line for the first extended time. Oh, I'll just repost what I wrote at the preeminent Pittsburgh sports blog, Mondesi's House:

...The crowd was smallish-- about 13,000-- but really into the game. The atmosphere is getting back to the 90s vibe, where every time you went to the Igloo there was the chance of something great happening.

We were in B15, so Malkin's goal was right in front of us. I just stood there gape-mouthed. Couldn't believe it. His deke and the backhand with his body twisted the other way is straight out of the 66 playbook. Mark Recchi made that comparison earlier, and while it's pretty heady, there are definite similarities. Plus, after seeing the way Aleksey Morozov (for his whole career) and even Markus Naslund (for the first year or so he played for the Pens) hung around on the periphery and waited for the puck to come to them, it's so different to see the way Malkin makes the play come to him, driving through the zone, seeking out contact, never giving up on a play. The guy's got all of four NHL games under his belt and plays with crazy poise.

Speaking of poise, I've seen Sid take penalties in both the games I've attended, and I think he's matured. He whines less, makes less of a huff and just goes to the box. It's still early, but that's a great sign that he's doing the things that a de facto captain has to do to get ice cred.

It's early, and there's no reason to get ahead of ourselves. It's probably more 88-89 than 90-91 or 91-92, but this team IS going to contend for a playoff spot. They work hard most of the time and are going to hover at least at .500...

Just how great was Malkin's goal? See for yourself.

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Today's Post-Gazette quotes Mark Cuban, who was in town a night early before the Cavs-Mavs preseason game, gushing over Malkin's handiwork:

After watching Malkin and Crosby last night, oh my God!" he said about 90 minutes before tipoff. "No wonder the Russians are coming after that kid. He should have been a state secret. Even if you'd have scored that fourth goal with a basketball, people would still be talking about it. There aren't many times, aren't many things anymore that you're watching and your jaw just drops.

Here's where I'm at with this. We moved into our present house in February of '05 and have been sans cable since then in the latest twist to our on-again, off-again relationship with the Devil's Wire. It's been easy to hold the line when the Penguins have been abysmal, but things have changed. Now it's down to this: if they go into Philly and beat a just-shaken-up Flyers team on Saturday night, I'm signing on the line that is dotted.

The Passion of the...oh, never mind

Yesterday I was still puzzling over how the Steelers could wallop the Chiefs last Sunday, then come out and play as sloppily as they did against the Falcons. Jason Whitlock has the answer. Turns out some of the Chiefs were...distracted.

It's probably going to take 11 wins to get to the playoffs again this year, and with this team's fondness for turning over the ball inside its 30 and awful special teams play, it's tough to imagine them going 9-1 down the stretch. To maximize that possibility, though, I'm now spending my free time finding out where the rest of the season's visiting teams are staying and cross-booking the dildo queens into the same hotel. Just doing my part.

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I'm glad I went to the Penguins-Devils game last week. Despite the loss, it felt like the team has turned the corner. Evgeni Malkin's first NHL goal won't have the replay potential of Mario's first shift steal-from-Ray-Bourque-and-deke-goalie-out-of-his-jock-breakaway debut goal, but it's a fine goal nonetheless, all the more because he showed a healthy disregard for the game's unwritten pecking orders by poking forcefully around the nether regions of the estimable Martin Brodeur. Brodeur was miffed that the slow whistle cost him a goal-against and made him into the answer to a trivia question on the night when he'd rather bask in the glow of getting his 450th win.

It's such a sublime pleasure to watch Brodeur work, even when he's stoning your team. His goaltending is so fluid and measured. There's none of the wrenching or jerking that comes with being out of position or being surprised by a developing play. The best point of comparison I can come up with is a character in the Marvel Universe named Taskmaster. Taskmaster is a bit player of ambiguous loyalties who wears a white skeleton mask and cowl and possesses the odd physical and mental ability to automatically mimic any gymnastic of fighting movement he sees. Back in 1987 when Steve Rogers was replaced by John Walker as Captain America, Taskmaster was brought in to teach Walker some high-end moves.

Brodeur is like Taskmaster. It's as if he has memorized every possible permutation of (a) location of his guys, (b) location of their guys and (c) location of the puck. From any given set of circumstances, there are a limited set of possibilities for how the puck will end up coming to the net, and as that set is whittled down by further movements of men and puck, he chooses that one rote sequence of movements that has the highest probability of keeping the puck out of the net. Of course, he starts the series of movements well before the puck is at the net, and so the end result of a glove save isn't just an isolated physical reaction, but the last of a succession of related movements that, when strung together with ruthless discipline and form, are highly likely to keep the other team from scoring. On television, where sometimes only the shots on net are shown, the effect is blunted. From where I sat behind the net, it's stunning how, well, natural he can make goaltending seem.

LOCAL NEWS

I. Oh, so that's how they're going to handle it.

Today's Post-Gazette carried this discussion with the director of The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, Rawson Marshall Thurber. The interview and Thurber's expressed affection for Pittsburgh provides a well-timed and welcome diversion from the recent local media feeding frenzy concerning one of his cast members. He also discusses acquiring the story and writing the screenplay, while mentioning that his screenplay eliminates Arthur Lecomte. Huh. Well, that changes things a bit.

Sure, it takes out the extra romantic angle, and rounds the story back into the familiar triangle (Thurber refers to the novel as a "[love] rhombus." Just last week I'd seen it referred to as a love trapezoid.) Apart from the additional relationship entanglement, though, the elimination of Lecomte seems to me to remove a really strong and influential (and hilarious) voice from the chorus of influences pushing in on Art. I haven't lost any faith in the project-- if Michael Chabon can be convinced the idea works, who cares what a meatball like me thinks?-- but I've got to think that subtracting Arthur Lecomte from the screenplay means that there's no guarantee the film couldn't, by some means, slide toward the mean of studio-indie coming-of-age films that arrive and depart quietly each season.

II. Yeah, Malkin.

If you're a huge Pittsburgh Penguin fan (as I am) and you went to five or so home games a year from the mid-nineties to the present (as I did), then chances are that you got to see at least two Mario Lemieux comeback games and at least two Mario farewell games. I know I did. I think I even got tickets a couple of times to coincide with comeback/farewell games. I went to the last home game in the '97 playoff loss to the Flyers where Mario said goodbye by scoring a last-minute breakaway on Islander-GM-in-the-making Garth Snow. These days, sadly, I seem to coincide my Penguin ticket-buying with the occasions where I'm most likely to be given a machine-painted resin figurine with an oversized skull. But sometimes I still get lucky. Like tomorrow, when I'll be able to see Evgeni Malkin's debut game. Yay, me. Of the four games they've played thus far, I've caught parts of three of them, and I like what I've seen. They're alternating great efforts with ungreat efforts, though, but are due for a positive showing tomorrow.