Alex Ovechkin, USA/Canada rivalry and Byfuglien: Puck Daddy Countdown

(Ed. Note: The column formerly known as the Puck Daddy Power Rankings. Ryan Lambert takes a look at some of the biggest issues and stories in the NHL, and counts them down.)

5 – Byfuglien on the wing

Okay, look.

When you go through the 12 steps of dealing with John Tortorella as your national team’s coach, there’s a lot of things that come with “accepting what you can’t change.” He’s gonna select guys who shouldn’t be on the team. He’s gonna make those guys lay out for shots in a preseason tournament. He’s gonna call out other guys who are on the team for not working hard even when they play well but are simply overmatched. He’s gonna say a bunch of dumb stuff. He’s gonna make your team lose a lot.

You accept all that. Sure. It’s a problem, but what can you do?

But good lord, of all the dumb moves I thought John Tortorella would make as coach of the U.S. World Cup team, I never in a million years even considered that he would move Dustin Byfuglien, an All-Star defenseman, back to the wing.

It’s a position he hasn’t played with regularity in some time. A position he doesn’t like playing. A position at which he is less effective than he is on the blue line.

Really, though, that’s on me. I ought to have seen a move this monumentally not-good coming a mile away. Because he’s John Tortorella, and if you have a blindspot for any way on earth he could possibly shiv smart hockey fans, he’s going to take it. Telling him, “Hey we’ve got this guy who can play both defense and forward,” was an invitation to actually do it, and John Tortorella is nothing if not a gracious guest.

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The ostensible reason for this decision is that Byfuglien’s place on the blue line is relatively secure; he’s clearly better than a lot of the dross the U.S. brought to this tournament cough jack johnson cough. So Torts wants to kick the tires on the other six D — not too hard, though, because they’ve already been pretty well caved in by the Canadians in the first two exhibition games — and that’s all well and good. What is neither well nor good is keeping Byfuglien in the lineup because you want to rest… Brandon Dubinsky? Yeesh.

Alright, fine, it’s a meaningless exhibition in a meaningless tournament, so honestly who cares if Byfuglien even gets a few reps in goal? I get that. But what’s worrisome — or should be — is that this is just part of his decision-making process. And by extension, because they’re letting him coach the team, this is the USA Hockey decision-making process.

And it’s like, “Man, if you guys really want to beat Canada, how ’bout you stop doing this kind of thing?” I dunno. Just throwing that out there.

4 – Concussion spotters

Well, it’s not nothing: Elliotte Friedman says the NHL will announce in a few weeks that it is adding a team of four independent concussion spotters who will have the power to remove players from games if they are showing visible signs of having suffered a concussion.

That, in theory, is good. Especially because they will have the power to tell teams a player “must” be removed from the game. That’s better than the current system, with a team-employed spotter who can only advise that a guy “should” be taken out. After that it was up to trainers and, in the case of Dennis Wideman, the player himself.

There is, however, still some reason for skepticism here. If these four people are watching, what, up to six games at once, it might not always be easy for them to determine if a player in Game A should be pulled because they were monitoring similar situations in Games B and C, let alone the borderline headshot they might have missed in Game D.

Also, I would imagine that diagnosing concussions on TVs of almost any size is fairly difficult. But I’m no doctor. Hey, are these people going to be doctors?

“From what I understand, all four independent spotters have hockey backgrounds but none are currently affiliated with an NHL club.” Hmm, well, that’s not necessarily all that reassuring.

And you know that teams are going to try to play the, “Ah jeez, our phones aren’t working!” card every once in a while, like if an important player gets walloped on the noggin with five minutes left in a one-goal game.

So basically, this is a good start, but it’s probably not enough to make anyone legitimately think meaningful progress is being made. I guess we’ll see what happens when the actual hockey starts, but I’m not holding my breath for a sea change.

3 – Oh what a feeling when your logo’s on the ceiling

Earlier this week, the Bruins opened their new practice facility in Boston, and gave media a tour. Probably the biggest change that everyone noticed right away is that the team moved the Bruins logo from the floor — where people can step on it and get a lecture from some assistant equipment manager — to the ceiling, where only Lionel Richie can get to it.

This is a thing people have been saying should happen for years (and probably it’s a thing only media people care about in the first place). The thing NHL teams always said was that it makes it so you’re thinking about NOT stepping on the logo, and being mindful and all that stuff. Personally, I bet it was one of those things where no one wanted to pay for a new carpet.

Frankly I think this is a good decision for the Bruins, because it ensures there’s one place you’ll always see their logo above someone. Given how the past few seasons have gone, you probably won’t be able to say the same for the standings page on NHL.com.

2 – Alex Ovechkin

Here’s a guy who looks at the NHL’s new-ish playoff format and doesn’t understand. My man.

Well, specifically he says the format is “weird.”

“You play first team and fourth and then you play against Pittsburgh. … Then you think, why [do we] need to win Presidents’ Trophy to play against the best team?

Alex, great question. No one has a cogent answer to it because there isn’t one. It literally does not make sense that two of the best regular season teams in the league end up playing each other in the second round. But hey, we know how these things go, right? We do this, for much the same reason every Wednesday on NBC Sports tries to hammer out bitter feuds between, like, Minnesota and Boston.

It’s all because the League decided it wants to market pretty much exclusively to…

1 – Rivalries

Who doesn’t love a good rivalry, right? Bruins/Habs, Rangers/Islanders, Flyers/Penguins, Sharks/Kings. They tend to produce good hockey. Or at least entertaining hockey. Which is a neighbor to “good” at the very least.

Rivalries are what we see in the World Cup, which the NHL gets to schedule without the IOC or IIHF telling them what to do. USA/Canada for two exhibition games on back-to-back nights, then another round-robin game, then another one in the knockout round (assuming the US doesn’t get KOed by some meager-ass team it should otherwise throttle).

Four USA/Canada games in two-ish weeks? Yeah, who’s complaining, I guess. There’s some bad blood there and both the games so far have been competitive. Could that continue? Sure. Or it could turn into a situation where — because the US is so singularly focused on competing with Canada, while Canada is singularly focused on winning the tournament — you get another game like the Olympic semifinals in Sochi: an ugly slog with only one possible outcome.

And really, if there are four games between those two teams in so short a time frame, and since that’s all anyone in North America really cares about at the World Cup anyway (sans the rightly beloved North America team that is all so wonderful I can’t stand it), why not just have a 2016 Summit Series or something?

All the rivalry storylines in the world aren’t going to sell the average hockey fan on watching every Finland game, right? This is a fanbase that bails on the Stanley Cup playoffs the second their teams are eliminated. It’s an insanely provincial sport, so paying lip service by adding the Czech Republic doesn’t really do anyone any good.

Like if we’re going to market the USA/Canada rivalry — which is like marketing the Mom-and-Pop Store/Walmart rivalry — let’s actually do it. Because it can create some real intrigue. And otherwise it feels like we’re watching a lot of games to get to maybe six most hockey fans actually care about.

(Not ranked this week: Getting on ESPN.

Lots of excitement this week in the hockey world about “Wow, hey, we’re actually gonna be on ESPN for once!”

Understandable. ESPN drives sports culture in a way no one else can. But here’s the thing with this coverage: So far it has not been good. So far it has in fact been quite bad.

And I’m not talking about the calls of the games alone. Those have been, well, I mean they haven’t been good, to be sure. For instance, with the North American team up 5-1 in the first period over Europe on Sunday evening, the announcers spent a lot of time talking about how Europe had dominated the faceoff dot. And it’s like, “Hey, listen, maybe that doesn’t matter if you’re up 5-1 and dominating possession.” But now I’m getting off-topic.

The bigger problem is that if ESPN is covering hockey, ESPN is also getting Hockey Takes out there, and that’s not good for anyone. Stephen A. Smith talking about “constitutional rights” with about as much authority on the subject as Brian Pillman.

Is it better than Pierre, JR, Milbury, and the rest of the NBC Sports cadre of clownish “I played the game” talking heads? [Much love for Kathryn Tappen and Liam McHugh for putting up with them.]

I’m gonna say no. But since this is “in addition to,” I really feel like we’re getting the worst of both worlds here.)

Ryan Lambert is a Puck Daddy columnist. His email is here and his Twitter is here.

(All statistics via Corsica unless otherwise noted.)