Ryan Lambert

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While You Were Sleeping: Canada survives scare, Russia and US are closer than you think

Posted by Ryan Lambert under 2013 World Juniors on Dec 28, 2012

The good news for Canada is that it won another game thanks to its overwhelming offense. The bad news is it will likely lose another player because of a dirty, indefensible hit and can’t stop bad teams from pouring goals past Malcolm Subban.

Oh yeah, another win, this time 6-3, is one of those things that likely has Canadian fans reminding themselves, “You don’t ask how, you ask how many,” while they rock back and forth on their bathroom floors, but they might also do well to remind themselves of the fact that, “It’s not whether you win or lose, it’s how you play the game.”

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While You Were Sleeping: Canada disappoints in 6-goal win; injuries rule out two crucial players

Posted by Ryan Lambert under 2013 World Juniors on Dec 26, 2012

When I had to explain to my relatives over Christmas why I was waking up at 4:15 in the morning to watch a hockey game involving two countries that are not the United States, their immediate question was, “Is Germany any good?” I said that of course they weren’t. This is a four- or maybe five-team tournament and pretty much always has been no matter how many countries the IIHF allows to qualify.

So yes, the World Junior Championships kicked off in Ufa, Russia, today, but I’m not sure everyone on Team Canada got the memo. Sure, they trounced Germany 9-3 in a game that started at 4:30 a.m. Eastern Time, but one has to imagine that the many Canadians across the country who set an alarm for this one were disappointed to have not just caught it on DVR and gotten the extra three hours of sleep. The Canadians were often disjointed and calamitous in defense. I saw some comments soon after the game about how tough it was for Malcolm Subban (he said he was “nervous!”), who didn’t look great in conceding three goals but will remain Canada’s starter for the next game anyway, since he didn’t face a lot of shots, but hell, the Canadians conceded 28.

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Not having amnesty buyouts seems rather strange

Posted by Ryan Lambert under Lockout Thoughts on Dec 12, 2012

We are, at long last, inching close enough to a deal in these CBA negotiations that you can start to make out the details of it, still a ways off from finalization of said agreement though we may still be.

Included among these, as tweeted the other day by Chris Johnston of the Canadian Press, is that the NHL would very much like the salary cap to decline to $60 million after this season, if it happens, which I’m not so sure it will. This season would remain with a cap of $70 million — down very slightly from the approximately $70.2 million it was supposed to have been — and that’s a very nice concession from the league to the players that those on cap-constrained, mostly-good teams don’t have to get shuttled off to Long Island just yet.

But that day is coming, and it’s coming fast. We’re halfway through December. If you figure everyone has to have their ducks in a row by the draft or so, maybe by free agency, that gives you about six or six and a half months to figure out how they’re going to unload a ton of big-money contracts and become compliant with the new cap, which is now about 14 percent lower. The obvious answer to this question is the one to which the NHL turned in 2005: Amnesty buyouts. You get to buy out a few guys on your team with no cap implications whatsoever, and that’s a hell of a way to get under the limit, especially if you have any particularly bothersome big-money deals that expire in the near future (Scott Gomez).

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Here’s a plan that definitely won’t work

Posted by Ryan Lambert under Opinion on Dec 05, 2012

It should come as no surprise to anyone who’s been paying let’s say even the slightest bit of minimum attention to the NHL’s current labor negotiations. Things are, to put it mildly, not going very well.

Well, to be honest, things have actually iced over a bit, moreso than anything else. Players and owners met for more than hours yesterday then had some dinner, and it seems to have been fairly productive. They say there was progress, though varying reports haven’t exactly shed a lot of light on what exactly that means. The distance between the two sides is repeatedly termed small, a couple hundred million over five years, next to nothing on a per-club basis. And yet here we are, weeks later. Frankly, I and probably many other hockey fans won’t be satisfied with any of this stuff until they put a new signed CBA on NHL.com and we can look to make sure there’s a no-takebacks provision buried deep in the language. (Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer.)

But the point I guess is that people are desperate for hockey and skeptical that anything can get done. So desperate, in fact, that even people who have some amount of credibility in Canada, or should do, are now throwing some truly dumbassed ideas against the wall as a means of accomplishing who-knows-what.

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Claude Giroux’s neck injury escalated quickly

Posted by Ryan Lambert under Observation, Opinion on Nov 21, 2012

One of the concerns those in the NHL must have had when they began this lockout of theirs is that the game’s very good young talent would go overseas and get hurt. And while a few guys have picked up injuries here and there that might have worried their teams (Rick Nash and his shoulder being the most notable of these incidents), none were of particular concern.

Until late last week.

That’s when Claude Giroux, playing for  got hit in the head by some no-name player — literally, no one seems particularly sure of the guilty party — on a team called Krefeld Pinguine (of COURSE it’s the Penguins), and sustained something that we were told, at the time, was a very minor injury. Minor minor minor minor. “Stretched out his neck a bit.” No penalty on the play, though there’s no video of the hit online and apparently his team isn’t too happy about the lack of a call or disciplinary action for the guilty party. Maybe that’s to be expected, though, since Giroux had 19 points in nine games.

But given the assurances that there was nothing to see here, there was some optimism that the hit, and the resulting injury, couldn’t have been THAT bad. He missed Sunday’s game against Kölner Haie, but that was more of a precaution than anything. He was scheduled to return to practice yesterday.

Except he didn’t. Instead, he hopped on a plane back to North America to meet with some doctors in Atlanta.

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So about that Oilers trade rumor

Posted by Ryan Lambert under Rumours on Nov 07, 2012

Something that seems to have gotten lost in the shuffle in the last week, what with the cancelation of the Winter Classic and the renewed and possibly-positive negotiations for the new CBA, is the fact that Edmonton Oilers radio guy Bob Stauffer was conducting an interview with Kevin Lowe last Thursday and the team president dropped what would have, in any normal week, been a Hiroshima-quality bombshell.

Obviously people have been speculating for some time now that the Oilers would do well to move someone from their glut of ultra-promising and very good young forward prospects for someone who knew how to play defense a little better than Theo Peckham, and who could play with slightly more reliable healthiness than Ryan Whitney. Now, before you go writing your Nail Yakupov- and Jordan Eberle-related trade proposals on HFBoards, let’s first acknowledge that no such thing would ever happen in a million years. Nonetheless, Lowe had this to say:

You’re going into a game with lots of trump cards. That’s the only way you can make deals is if you have assets that are attractive to other teams. When you have assets then you can make deals.

So, absolutely, we’re at some point, whenever that is, we’re probably not too far down the road, we’re going to have to make some tough choices and maybe move some players, or a player, draft picks, to get a piece or two that finishes off the formation of what you feel is a championship team. Read the rest of this entry »

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Would KHL players really make us lonesome were they to go?

Posted by Ryan Lambert under Alexander Ovechkin, KHL, Sergei Kostitsyn on Oct 24, 2012

And so it was late last week that another Eastern European-born player said of the NHL lockout, “Screw it we’ll all just stay in the KHL anyway and make a bunch of money tax free and no one will call us lazy Russians even though we’re from Belarus or whatever and also sure run a much higher risk of injury and poor treatment but at least we won’t have to deal with Gary Bettman any more right?” Or something to that effect, anyway.

This time it was Sergei Kostitsyn who uttered these things, echoing the semi-vague threats of Ilya Bryzgalov and Alex Ovechkin before him, and perhaps even speaking for other, as-yet-unrevealed European-born NHLers currently playing in the KHL. And while his assertion that Columbus is relatively gloomier than Siberia may well be true — I’ve been to the former, but not the latter, but did find it to be more than a little drab — the actual threat he’s now espousing as well rings hollow for two reasons. Read the rest of this entry »

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