NHL Playoffs' Justice Not Always Fair

I’m not sure where the April showers are so far, but it is the fourth month of the year, and this is Detroit, so whether the rains come or not, the hockey fan is about to venture into “that time of the year.”

It’s a time of mysterious injuries of the upper and lower body; a time of a game every other night, each the most important the Red Wings will have played thus far.

It’s a time of guys trying to get off the schneid; a time of “puck luck” and a word that rhymes with it. It’s a time of struggling power plays and stealing home ice. It’s a time of ricochets and “lively boards” and a time to panic.

It’s a time when goalies “would like to have that one back” unless they’re “standing on their head.”

It’s a time when skaters are being “Johnny on the spot” and speedy, pesky guys who are great on the “PK.”

It’s a time when you can’t let anyone come into “your building” and shove you around and a time to play a “good road game.”

It’s trailing in a series, 3-1, and declaring that you’re just taking everything “one game, one period, one shift at a time.”

It’s playoff hockey time in Detroit, where every fan wakes up the morning of Game 1 of the first round and sees that a panic button has been installed on their TV remote, ready for the run.



It’s a fun time to be on Twitter and to listen to talk radio to parse the thoughts of the suicidal as the Red Wings fight through a series, and I’m reminded of a line from Steely Dan’s song, “Black Friday,” which is about the financial ruin of stockbrokers.



“I’m gonna stand out by the door; gonna watch the grey men as they dive from the 14th floor.”

There’s nothing quite like a long playoff run in Detroit, the legions of which have so smarmily given the city the moniker of “Hockeytown.”

It’s springtime hockey, which is significantly different than fall and winter hockey.

As the temps increase, so does the pressure. The checking turns tighter than a cheapskate’s wallet.

The other three major team sports’ postseasons don’t have the element of luck, chance and quirkiness that playoff hockey is rife with.

Last year, during the ALCS, the Tigers’ Miguel Cabrera hit a shot down the third-base line in the sixth inning of Game 5 that struck the bag and shot over the head of Texas 3B Adrian Beltre. The fortuitous hit drove in the go-ahead run and started a four-run rally that swayed the game in the Tigers’ favor.

But playoff baseball isn’t filled with bad hops and caroms and the feeling of kismet that playoff hockey provides.



Nor does basketball or football; those sports’ matches are overwhelmingly decided by talent, scheme and execution.

Hockey is the fickle finger of fate of sports. It’s blood, toil and sweat—and broken noses, jaws and teeth—but so often the final score is as fair as a crooked judge.



In basketball, if you outplay, out-rebound and outshoot your opponent, you win by 25 points. In baseball, if you bash the ball, pitch the ball and catch the ball, they’ll call it a laugher. In football, if you outclass the enemy, you’ll cover the spread and then some.

Playoff hockey will have none of that kind of justice.

The shots-on-goal counter can read a two-to-one ratio. The playing surface can look tilted in a 45-degree direction. The outplayed, outshot team can look like it’s wearing skates made of lead.

Yet the scoreboard won’t indicate any of that.

Playoff hockey isn’t interested in following formula or offering up the usual cast of characters as heroes. It’s sometimes not enough to lead in every category one can think of, because in the only one that matters—the final score—you just might find yourself on the losing end.

A successful playoff run in hockey lasts about two months, has more ups and downs than a teeter-totter during recess and plays with the emotions of fans like a cat with a ball of yarn.



Brendan Shanahan is a three-time Stanley-Cup-winner and a playoff hockey war horse. He came to Detroit in a trade in 1996, anxious to win a championship. He got it, eight months later. Then he got two more, wearing the Winged Wheel on his chest as if it had been branded there.

A couple Aprils ago, I sat across from Shanahan while he was in town prepping for a Fox Sports special involving two local high school hockey teams renewing a bitter rivalry.



He clued me in on how a hockey player looks at a playoff run.

“You close yourself off to all other things,” he said. “Eating wasn’t enjoying food—it was just adding more fuel to your body. Sleeping wasn’t rest, it was something you needed. Everything was done for the next game. You sequestered yourself in the hotel with your teammates and you got blinders on.”

Shanahan was just over a year removed from retirement when we spoke and he already was pining for participating in playoff hockey.

“I miss playing for the Stanley Cup,” he told me, plainly.

Yet playoff hockey isn’t just the Shanahans of the world, who played in 184 postseason games and scored 60 springtime goals.

It’s also a quiet, shy kid playing with a bottle of water, sitting at a table with his name on a placard during a media meet-and-greet, looking like he was feeling foolish by his mere presence at such a gathering.



Darren Helm, just a couple days removed from scoring the overtime goal that sent the Red Wings into the 2009 Stanley Cup Finals, was another of those accidental heroes that the playoffs are so famous for conjuring up.

I was roaming the big media/players room the NHL set up at the Renaissance Center in advance of the Red Wings-Penguins final when I caught Helm playing with his water bottle. He was so young the bottle might as well have had a nipple on it.

Yet he was the hero of the moment—except no one was talking to him.

Too many other stars to grab sound bites from, I guess.

I chatted Helm up for a bit and strained to hear him. He had just scored the biggest goal of the Red Wings' season but had the countenance of a boy meeting his girlfriend’s father for the first time.

Brendan Shanahan and Darren Helm—two playoff heroes, two ends of a spectrum.

But this is springtime hockey, so they’re also one and the same.

Quiet Helm Lets Skating, Checking Do The Talking

As long as there’s been hockey, there’s been The Pest.

He’s the gnat circling your face. The army of ants invading your picnic.

The hockey pest is a whirling dervish of skating, checking, and supreme harassment.

They’ve had nicknames over the years—like hockey gangsters.

Bugsy. The Rat. The Little Ball of Hate. Terrible Ted.

What pack of NHL banditos would be complete without guys with monikers like that?

Yes, those are actual tags hung onto some of the game’s greatest disturbers.

Bryan Watson so infuriated the great Bobby Hull during a Red Wings-Blackhawks playoff series that Bobby himself called Watson “buggy”, which got turned into “Bugsy.”

Kenny Linseman seemed to be so close to his opponents as to be inside their jerseys. No doubt it was an exasperated victim of Linseman’s persistence who first called him The Rat.

Pat Verbeek possessed the typical physical trait of the NHL pest: he was short. Hockey players have often subscribed to the Napoleonic Complex. And Verbeek added just enough mean-spiritedness to his play to be dubbed The Little Ball of Hate.

Terrible Ted, of course, was Ted Lindsay. Enough said.

So how could a certified hockey pest be such a nice, quiet kid? How could he be so unassuming and shy that you think you’re talking to a high school freshman instead of a key player on the defending Stanley Cup champions?

Darren Helm and I spent some quiet moments together Friday during Media Day prior to the Stanley Cup Finals.

Of course, that’s easy to do, because Helm makes a clam with lockjaw seem talkative by comparison.

This is how deep the Red Wings are: on just about any other team in the league, the player who scored the game-winning goal, in overtime, to send his side to the Cup Finals would be mobbed by reporters on Media Day—the first opportunity to get 1-on-1 time with the hero.

Yet there Helm and I were, amidst all the frenzy, while the cameras and microphones and notepads surrounded, well, everyone else, it seemed.

“I’m more of a depth guy,” Helm said, as I strained to hear him. “I just try to chip in.”

And this is the guy who coach Mike Babcock called “The Energizer Bunny”?

Someone replace his batteries!

Naah.

Helm does his talking on the ice, and that’s where he gets all pest-like.

Helm, making a nuisance of himself during last year's Finals

Blazing speed. Obnoxiously persistent checking, to the point where sometimes you swear the kid is working with two sticks. Or that the Red Wings are working with two Helms: one for each side of the rink. At the same time.

I asked him how he learned to skate so doggone fast.

He gave me one of his “Aw, shucks”, embarrassed grins before practically whispering, “Just hard work, I guess.”

I didn’t buy it. And I won’t, until I see a rabbit on a treadmill at the gym.

Or until I see a gym, period.

Helm is the 22-year-old Manitobian who propelled the Red Wings to where they are now—about to take on the Pittsburgh Penguins in the Stanley Cup Finals: The Sequel—thanks to his goal at 3:58 of overtime on Wednesday night in Game Five of the conference finals against Chicago.

Not that you would know it.

The reporters continued to ignore Helm as he told me about how his parents instilled a work ethic into him and that “anyone in this room” could have gotten that series-winning goal—present company excluded, of course—and that he plays “hard between whistles.”

The more I talked to him, the more I either wanted: a) him to be six years younger, or b) my daughter to be six years older.

Memo to all you dads out there: you’d be thrilled if your little girl came home with a kid like Darren Helm in tow.

The Red Wings, for all their success, have remained an even keeled, level-headed bunch. There’s not a prima donna in that dressing room. And there won’t be in the future, if the future is in the hands of players like Helm and Jonathan Ericsson and even Henrik Zetterberg, who’s not all that old yet himself.

I liked Helm from the get-go last year, when he functioned as a sort of X-factor for the Red Wings in the playoffs.

The speed, of course, stood out first. How could it not, when Helm makes everyone else on the ice look like inanimate objects?

Then there’s the dogged checking—fore and back—which is so thorough that you can practically hear the other team’s guys sigh in annoyance from the press box.

And don’t forget Helm’s uncanny ability to “chip in,” as he puts it, with the occasional big goal.

Why, he’s Kris Draper—only 16 years younger and with more of a scoring touch, at least so far.

Since we had so much time to chit-chat, I asked Helm to describe the series-winning goal against the Blackhawks.

“The play was pretty fast,” he said of the course of events, in which a Brett Lebda shot from the point ping-ponged off the end boards and ended up in the goal crease, behind goalie Cristobal Huet.

“The puck was just lying there. I poked it in.

“But it all happened pretty fast.”

Only Darren Helm could describe scoring a clutch goal as if he was a mugging victim, giving his statement to police.

But just because Helm is young and looks like he’s about to cut your grass for ten bucks, doesn’t mean that the kid isn’t mature.

To wit, about the big goal on Wednesday night: “That goal doesn’t mean anything now. We’re trying to win the Stanley Cup.”

Ahh, so THAT’S why everyone was leaving him alone.

Why bother talking to a kid who just scored a goal that doesn’t matter anymore?

Especially when you can barely hear what he’s saying.

No worries; Helm’s play is like fingernails on a chalkboard to his beleaguered opponents.

He’ll get his unflattering nickname, soon enough. Which means he’s doing his job quite well.

Helm Can Be Red Wings' X-Factor

You know you've reached at least some sort of cult status as a pro athlete, when people start dubbing young, up-and-coming players as a "little" you.

Kris Draper has, believe it or not, achieved that status.

Don't look now, but Draper is a grizzled, 15-year veteran now. He's one of those four-time Stanley Cup winners that dot the Red Wings' roster.

The Draper story is near legend in these parts.

Purchased for $1 from the Winnipeg Jets. Speedy Gonzalez on the ice. Founding member of the Grind Line. Face smashed like an egg shell into the boards by Claude Lemieux. Eventually, one of the premier face-off men in the league, and maybe one of the best penalty killers in history. Scores a goal every other full moon.

Today, Draper is one of the faces of the Wings who kind of functions as an unofficial team spokesman. He's no longer an afterthought with reporters; he's one of the first Red Wings whose opinion is sought out.

Now here comes a player that has been called, by some, a "little Kris Draper." I'm one of the some.

Darren Helm is 21 years old, skates like he was shot out of a cannon, and seems to make the other team nervous out there because of his speed and forechecking ability.

Draper is 37, and with most teams that means he's nearing his swan song, but with the Red Wings, that really doesn't mean jack. How can it, when last year the team employed a 43-year-old goalie and still keeps a 46-year-old defenseman on its roster? And, correct me if I'm wrong (but I'm not), but isn't Nicklas Lidstrom 38? And isn't Lidstrom simply the best defenseman in the NHL, and in Europe, and in the Milky Way?

So it's not like Draper is being booted out the door by the emergence of Helm, who made quite an impression in last spring's playoffs. But there certainly is room for two jitterbugs like Draper and Helm on the payroll.

Helm sat out the first four games of the first round, and was inserted in time for Game 5 against Nashville, when the Red Wings found themselves in a shaky 2-2 series tie. He didn't come out of the lineup the rest of the way.



I was stunned at how much influence Helm, a rookie who had just seven NHL games under his belt come playoff time, had on the tempo of the game whenever he was on the ice. It wasn't just his speed, which is blurring, but it was his puck sense and his knack for being around it. In short, you can usually tell who the veterans are during the playoffs. There's an intangible there. They play with a certain calmness and are able to harness their amped up energy. So here Darren Helm was, flying around the ice, but in control and making things happen. Maybe this is the highest praise: I felt absolutely no uneasiness whenever Helm was on the ice. To the contrary: I WANTED Helm on the ice, and as much as possible.

Helm chipped in four points (2 G, 2 A) in his 18 playoff games.

Yet Helm's place on the 2008-09 Red Wings is hardly sealed. Competition is fierce, and there's no guarantee, none at all, that Helm will be among the Red Wings when they prepare for their season opener a week from Thursday against Toronto. Helm's biggest hurdle, it appears, is Finnish forward Ville Leino.

Coach Mike Babcock had nice things to say about Leino after last night's exhibition against Atlanta, but said this about Helm: "I think Helm's an NHL player. Every time he's on the ice, something happens. He's an elite skater; he's got good hockey sense."

You know, just like a little Kris Draper.