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The state of California turned into the center of the hockey universe at the end of June, and not solely because the National Hockey League held its’ annual player draft in the Staples Center in Los Angeles. A secondary story coming out of the draft was the emergence of players drafted who were California natives, and developed their skills in that state’s arenas. It’s not as if young kids in California can strap on their skates and hop onto a frozen river or pond and eat, sleep and breathe hockey like the kids in Canada do. But that’s what made this story interesting. The players drafted from California, four in total including two in the first round, honed their skills as youngsters by playing inline hockey on pavement rinks prior to graduating to junior hockey on regular ice rinks. The inline hockey experience enabled these youngsters to develop keen passing skills and a top flight speed game, as the inline game is usually played at a faster pace than the pickup games on snow-covered ponds in the frozen north. The four players drafted this year were Beau Bennett, picked 20th by the Pittsburgh Penguins, Emerson Etem, drafted in the 29th slot by Anaheim – both chosen in the first round – Jason Zucker, picked by Minnesota, and Taylor Aranson, tabbed by the Nashville Predators. Zucker was born in California but moved to Las Vegas at a young age and developed his skills there. It will be interesting to follow the careers of these players to see how successful they are in the NHL. If the California player pipeline continues to grow, you might see NHL scouts in the future taking surfing lessons and desert survival training in order to hunt down more talent.

How much does good scouting and drafting mean to the success of an NHL franchise? Well, it helps to have a high draft choice, judging by recent Stanley Cup champions. The Chicago Black Hawks picked Patrick Kane first overall in 2007, got Jonathan Toews third overall in 2006 and defenseman Brent Seabrook 14th in 2003. The Pittsburgh Penguins used top 3 picks to get goaltender Marc Andre Fleury, Evgeny Malkin, Jordan Staal and Sidney Crosby. The Anaheim Ducks hit on Ryan Getzlaff and Corey Perry in the same draft (2003), and picked Bobby Ryan second overall. The Washington Capitals haven’t won a title yet but have built a strong competitive team using high draft picks on Alexander Ovechkin, Mike Green, Alexander Semin and Nicklas Backstrom. Here are some of the Philadelphia Flyers recent top picks: Jeff Carter, Mike Richards, Claude Giroux and James VanRiemsdyk (2nd overall), all major contributors to their long playoff run this year. The biggest winner in this year’s draft may be the Boston Bruins. Already a strong playoff contender, the Bruins added a potential superstar in second overall pick Tyler Seguin. The pick was courtesy of the generosity of the lowly Toronto Maple Leafs, who grossly overpaid for Phil Kessel in a trade.  History shows that other than the first few picks in a draft, it takes 2-3 years for prospects to develop, so any surprise teams next season will probably be teams who drafted well from 2006 to 2009.

When the Chicago Black Hawks competed for and won hockey’s biggest prize, the Stanley Cup, recently, much was made of the long drought the team had endured since its’ last title, in 1961. I was just starting to get into sports around that year but don’t remember watching much hockey until the mid-’60s when Toronto was battling to win the Cup. I thought it would be interesting to look back at that 1961 team since I didn’t know much about them. The one thing I did know was that the team had three of the sport’s all-time greatest players on its’ roster – Bobby Hull, Stan Mikita and goaltender Glenn Hall. Hull and Mikita were making their first appearances in the Stanley Cup Finals. Hall was a great goalie who once played in 502 consecutive games. The players were real workhorses  back then, and earned every dime they made. The Hawks defeated the Detroit Red Wings in six games to earn the title, and had ousted the defending champion Montreal Canadiens to get to the finals. The league only had 6 teams at that time and Montreal and Detroit were both considered the class of the league, so the Hawks’ drive to the Cup was no fluke, they beat the best to win it. The team captain was Ed Litzenberger, a player I’d never heard of until I researched this post. He was certainly less famous than the captain of the opposing team in the finals, Detroit’s Gordie Howe. Tough guy Reg Fleming was on the roster, and I’m sure he spent most of the series keeping Wings’ goon Ted Lindsay away from guys like Hull and Mikita. The roster was dotted with players with great hockey names – Chico Maki, Eric Nesterenko, Ab McDonald, Bill Hay, Elmer Vasko and Pierre Pilote (great hockey name if I’ve ever heard one).  Congratulations to the 2009-10 Black Hawks on their Stanley Cup win, and a shout-out to their hockey ancestors from 1961.

 The long wait is finally over for Chicago Black Hawks fans. After a 49 year drought, the Hawks wrapped up the Stanley Cup title when young star Patrick Kane scored in overtime to defeat the game Philadelphia Flyers in game 6 in Philly. The Black Hawks are a surprise champion this year, even though they made the natural progression from being eliminated in the conference finals last year to winning it all. There weren’t many prognosticators picking them to win. It’s a strange situation in Chicago in that most of the moves made to build this team were made by former general manager Dale Tallon, who was fired after last season. The team basically got lucky in finding Cup winning goaltender Antti Niemi, a former backup, and now has a situation where former starter Cristobal Huet is making over $4 million dollars per season. Another strange situation was captain Jonathan Toews winning the Conn Smythe Trophy as MVP even though he was scoreless in the finals, but the trophy is actually given to the MVP of the entire tournament, so Toews is deserving, although Dustin Byfuglien (that’s a lot of letters for a name pronounced Buf-lin)would have been a good choice also. Despite not scoring, Toews dominated the faceoff circle in the finals and just generally provided leadership. Credit has to be given to coach Joel Quenneville also. After the Flyers held serve by winning games 3 and 4 at home, he made the strategic decision to break up his big line of Toews, Byfuglien and rookie Patrick Kane, and the result was balanced scoring and 2 solid wins to secure the Cup.

As the Stanley Cup Finals wind down this week, it’s a good time to take one last look at our local team, the Buffalo Sabres, and try to figure out what they need to do to take the next step and advance in the playoffs next season. Lindy Ruff will be back as coach, and perhaps be under more pressure to produce than he has been in his entire tenure here. The team had an excellent regular season, winning the Northeast Division title and qualifying for the playoffs for the first time in 3 years. The team seemed to be built for success in the post-season, just like Sabres’ teams of the recent past under Ruff. They had solid goaltending, balanced scoring, great penalty-killing ability and played a tight defensive game for the most part, posting a 31-0 record when leading after 2 periods. Then everything came unraveled in the opening round series against Boston. In trying to decipher what the Sabres need to tweak in order to continue to build on this season, I would suggest looking at the teams that have had success in this year’s playoffs, including the bottom 3 seeds in the Eastern Conference, and what they have in common. Two things jump out at me – each of those teams has a dominant, physical defenseman and each has at least one player with some past Stanley Cup success on their roster. The Chicago Black Hawks have a pair of young, tough defensemen in Duncan Keith and Brent Seabrook and have gotten significant contributions from fourth-line center John Madden, who helped win Cups in New Jersey. The Philadelphia Flyers have a two-fer, Chris Pronger, an intimidating defenseman with Cup experience, a player with Cup experience (even though he’s never won one) in Danny Briere and a coach who has won in Peter Laviolette. Look at the two other Eastern teams who had surprising success – Montreal had Hal Gill on the blue line and Brian Gionta (another former Devil) scoring timely goals, Boston surprised the Sabres with some great play from Zdeno Chara on defense and clutch plays from veteran Mark Recchi, who at 41 has had a wealth of playoff success. The Sabres have a potential dominating defenseman in rookie Tyler Myers but he needs to grow physically. That seems strange to say since he’s 6’8 but he needs to fill out, become stronger and develop a mean streak. If he does that and continues to improve his game with experience, with his skating ability he could become THE dominating defenseman in the NHL. The Sabres found a couple of potential gems in the playoffs in Tyler Ennis and Nathan Gerbe and I see them having regular roles with this team all next season. There will surely be subtractions from the roster also. I have to believe Tim Connolly’s days are numbered. He disappeared in the playoffs and has been a major underachiever, mostly because of injuries, in his time here. The team’s front office seems to love him for some reason, perhaps because they still feel the need to justify the Michael Peca trade from years ago, in which Connolly was the main player aquired. Craig Rivet, the captain, will probably also be gone, and the team needs to figure out where young defenseman Chris Butler fits in. As for who becomes the new captain if Rivet leaves, the job should go to Mike Grier or maybe Paul Gaustad. One possibility might be to name Derek Roy captain. He is a talented player who also was invisible in the playoffs and naming him captain might be a good way to force him to take a leadership role on the team. As for possible free agent additions to the team, there are some interesting names on the list of potential free agents – aging guys like Bill Guerin, Recchi, Kirk Maltby, Tomas Holmstrom, Doug Weight and Madden, some younger possibilities with Stanley Cup experience – Alex Tanguay and Petr Sykora. An interesting name on the list of free agent defensemen is Jay McKee. Bringing back Grier turned out to be a great move, so resigning McKee, who was a warrior when he played here, might help the team. Let’s hope that Darcy Regier doesn’t stand pat with the current roster, since it appears that both Boston and Montreal have surpassed the Sabres in the division. With Ottawa being a regular Buffalo nemesis and Toronto sure to show some improvement, standing pat won’t cut it.

When flamboyant Oakland A’s baseball owner Charles O. Finley decided to expand his sports empire by purchasing the NHL’s Oakland Seals franchise, he immediately transformed the team into the California Golden Seals and outfitted them in uniforms that matched the colors of his highly successful baseball team, right down to white skates to match the A’s unusual white baseball spikes. Imagine the “figure skater” jokes these players had to endure from players on the opposing teams….and you know hockey players are especially brutal when they get a chance to question their opponents’ manhood.

The NHL playoffs have been a crazy ride so far this season, especially in the Eastern Conference where the 2 bottom seeds wound up playing for the conference title. The Philadelphia Flyers are amazingly back from the dead and in control of their series with Montreal so far. Since trailing 3-0 in game seven in their previous series, the Flyers have scored 13 unanswered goals in coming back to win that game, and posting back-to-back shutouts over the Canadiens. That’s back-to-back shutouts with a journeyman backup goaltender playing. Michael Leighton has played well since taking over in the nets for Philly, but I feel the team’s success is more a product of the players’ smothering defensive style around him. They’ve protected him well, keeping the Montreal shooters outside and around the edges and clearing the sightlines for Leighton to make saves by bulldozing any Canadiens’ players that dare try to block his vision. That’s usually a recipe for success in the NHL playoffs, along with timely scoring. In the West, The Chicago Black Hawks have continued to be road warriors, winning twice in San Jose to open the series and extend their road playoff win streak to seven. San Jose has a horrid history of playoff failure, and even though they’ve advanced to the final four, all it took was losing those 2 home playoff games to the Hawks to bring out the critics once again.   The Sharks are still a powerful team and I expect them to win in Chicago and make this series competitive, but it is starting to look like the Stanley Cup final will again be a battle between an “Original Six” team (Chicago) and an “Additional Six” team (Philadelphia).

Kudos to the Philadelphia Flyers for battling to overcome an early 3-0 deficit last night to defeat the Boston Bruins 4-3, enabling them to complete a historic, epic comeback in the series. They became only the third team in NHL history to come back from a 3 games to none deficit and win the series. There were 2 factors that turned the series in the Flyers’ favor. The first was the injury to goaltender Brian Boucher, forcing backup Michael Leighton into the spotlight in the final 3 games. Leighton played just well enough to keep his team alive, but mostly the change in goal forced his teammates to tighten up their game defensively around him. The second factor was the return from injury of Simon Gagne, who wound up scoring 4 goals in the 4 games he played, all huge ones.  It will be a long, tough off-season in Boston after the Bruins blew both a 3-0 lead in games and a 3-0 lead in the final game. The Flyers’ surprising win sets up a strange pair of conference final series, with the Western Conference finals featuring the top 2 seeds – San Jose and Chicago, while the Eastern Finals will have the bottom 2 seeds in the Flyers and Montreal Canadiens. San Jose is attempting to wipe out a sorry history of being eliminated early in the playoffs after highly successful regular seasons, while Chicago has developed into a solid Stanley Cup contender after going fairly deep into the playoffs last year with a young team. In the East, the Canadiens have already knocked out the top regular season team in Washington and the defending Cup champion in Pittsburgh, and also have a history of coming out of nowhere to steal Stanley Cups in seasons when they weren’t expected to win. The Flyers also have a solid franchise with a winning history so this series should be a classic.