Larry Brooks had a nice little appreciation of Brad Richards yesterday.

Brooks also credited New York Rangers coach John Tortorella, who moved Richards off of Marian Gaborik’s line when it became obvious the two just weren’t clicking.

Tortorella deserves a lot of credit for his handling of Richards.

Given Richards salary, it would seem that he belongs on a top line. But given that Richards’ north-south North American style doesn’t seem like it will ever mesh with Gaborik’s more European east-west leanings, Tortorella doesn’t press the issue (at even strength, anyway).

Instead, Tortorella embraced Richards for the player he is. For all of his offensive talents, Richards is really just a solid two-way player who happens to have a great shot. To leave him as a top-line center would have negated some of his defensive strengths.

Tortorella figured that out back in October, when he first separated Richards from Gaborik, putting him on a more physical line between Ryan Callahan and Brandon Dubinsky. Richards told the New York Post he appreciated the move:

I’m not seeing the game the way I should be, and when that’s the case and things feel they’re moving quicker than they should, sometimes getting me to grind it out is the best way to get me going, and Torts knows that…Playing with Cally and Dubi, working down low and having zone time, I believe that will be good for me and good for the team.

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It was a little bit surprising when the St. Louis Blues fired coach Davis Payne earlier this month. The Blues were 6-7. Not great, but certainly not horrible.

It was even more surprisingly when GM Doug Armstrong hired Ken Hitchcock as the new coach, since the rumors had Hitchcock taking over in Columbus.

Armstrong obviously didn’t have much faith in Payne, but he also gave the St. Louis Post-Dispatch an interesting reason for the Hitchcock import:

The reality is, this is a business and we have a number of players that are going to want huge economic rewards over the next 18 months and we need to know what we have in these players. You want to make wise investments and I thought having an experienced coach would give us a better opportunity to know exactly what we had.

In other words, Armstrong felt Davis wasn’t doing enough of a job kicking the tires of guys like TJ Oshie, Chris Stewart, Carlo Colaiacovo, Alex Pietrangelo, and Patrik Berglund, none of whom are under contract past 2013.
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Kerry Fraser had a big piece on TSN about how Brendan Shanahan blew it by not suspending Milan Lucic for his hit on goalie Ryan Miller. Fraser says that without a Lucic suspension, it’s going to be open season on goalies:

Players (and more importantly goalies) would know that the League still considers them endangered and will continue to protect them from full blown body checks. It now appears that hunting season is now open. The license only takes “two minutes” to fill out and can be completed from the penalty box.

Apparently NHL GMs agree to some extent and have vowed to remind their players to protect goaltenders outside of the crease.

The thing is, how common is the scenario that got Miller hurt? How often are goaltenders hurt coming out to play the puck? How often do goalies come out that far to play the puck? You hardly even see goalies playing the puck behind the net anymore.

The Lucic hit was bad and he probably should have let up sooner, but it’s not a recurring NHL problem.

If the NHL is serious about protecting goalies, it needs to look at what teams are doing to their own goaltenders.

How many times have you seen a defenseman shove an opponent into the defenseman’s own goaltender? There’s no statistic tracking this, but it sure happened last night when Islander Blake Comeau (a forward) shoved Ranger Michael Sauer into Islander goalie Evgeni Nabokov. Nabokov writhed around in pain for a minute or two but was able to finish the game.

But who’s protecting Nabokov? Where is the outcry? Is an injury somehow less damaging when it’s inflicted by a teammate?

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Like a lot of NHL fans, I’m not sure why people are just now realizing that the Tampa Bay Lightning use a 1-3-1 system.

I’m also not sure why the 1-3-1 suddenly infuriated the Philadelphia Flyers Wednesday night.

But now, there’s talk about the NHL “doing something” about trapping teams.

Obviously, there are things that can be done.

Greg Wyshynski suggested a shot clock, which is an interesting idea.

But if the NHL really wants to kill trapping, they need to talk to their television partners.

Specifically, they need to talk to them about how they shoot NHL games.

Most NHL telecasts follow the puck through the three zones. Sometimes there are some shots from behind the goal up the ice, but for the most part, NHL games are shot like you’re watching above center ice. It makes sense, because viewers want to see the action. But in hockey, a lot of action occurs behind the play, too. And when you can see the whole play, it’s very easy to see what types of systems a team is running.

There’s never been a fan-driven outcry against systems because they’re tough to suss out on TV.

Even while Philadelphia was stalling, it was hard to tell exactly what was going on, because the camera was focused on the Philadelphia defensive zone. It’s only until Versus went to an overhead shot that fans could see the issue with Tampa’s 1-3-1:

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Scott Arniel has got to go in Columbus.

Not because his coaching is the reason his team has been awful. Not because of this weekend’s embarrassing 9-2 loss to the Flyers.

But because the team has obviously checked out on him.

With just two wins and an overtime loss, the Blue Jackets have five points in the standings, putting them 10 points behind the eighth seed.

If Blue Jackets GM Scott Howson wants to give up, he can keep things as-is and prepare to start dealing talent toward February. Or maybe he can even start earlier, like when stores have a Black Friday sale before Black Friday.

But if Howson thinks he’s assembled a competitive NHL team, it’s time to get rid of Arniel and bring in someone else. But he needs to do it now, before the playoffs fall out of reach.

Yet again.

Last season, the Devils were mired in a similar slump with coach John MacLean, although the Blue Jackets would kill for a slump like that right now, and Devils GM Lou Lamoriello didn’t make a coaching switch until late December. But by then, the playoffs were out of reach. Even though the Devils put together a lights-out second half under coach Jacques Lemaire, who took over for MacLean, there just wasn’t enough time for the Devils to push their way into the playoff picture.

If the coaching switch had been made sooner, the Devils might have made the playoffs.

So while it’s not entirely fair to solely blame Arniel for his team’s lackluster start, ultimately he’s the coach and he is responsible for how his team plays.

Saturday night in Philadelphia, we saw a team that was apathetic. We saw a team that was undisciplined. We saw a team that was lazy.

Arniel just cannot come back from that.

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More and more I wonder if Sean Avery has some kind of magical power.

The Rangers traded for him in February 2007, helping to put Avery on a more prominent stage than he had in LA as a King. Avery’s antics and agitating suddenly seemed more noteworthy.

Avery loved it in New York but couldn’t come to a contract agreement with the Rangers, so in the summer of 2008, Avery signed with the Dallas Stars. Avery had a four-year contract, but he wasn’t playing for the team he wanted to be.

In Dallas, he made his infamous “sloppy seconds” comment and the Stars decided to part ways with Avery, whatever it took, whether it meant stashing him in the AHL for the rest of his four years, or simply paying him not to play for Dallas.

But then, the Rangers decided they wanted Avery back and claimed him off of Dallas’ hands, with the Stars on the hook for half of Avery’s salary.

Not only was Avery back in the NHL, he was back playing for the team he wanted to play for.

Magical.

And then, just a few weeks ago, Avery was once again sent to the AHL, told that the Rangers had no place for him. Avery’s NHL career seemed over. Again. Why would the Rangers ever recall him? What would they need Avery for?

And yet, here we are. Avery is once again on his way back to the NHL. As a Ranger no less.

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The Rangers are getting a bit nervous about their lack of secondary scoring.

The team has just 12 goals in its first six games of the season. A third of those goals have come from Marian Gaborik. Another third have come from a combination of grinder Brandon Prust and sophomore defenseman Ryan McDonagh.

That pattern probably won’t be sustainable over the course of an entire season.

Much has been made of the lack of offense from players like Brandon Dubinsky, Ryan Callahan, and Brian Boyle. All three players saw career high scoring last season.

And that just might be the problem. What if last season was the aberration and the slow start this season is the more typical performance?

Look at Boyle. In his first 107 NHL games, he scored just 12 goals. In the next 82 games, aka, last season, he scored 21 goals. And now, in his first six games of this season, he has just one goal.

But looking at Boyle’s career, which seems more typical? Last season’s goal-scoring outburst or this season’s slow start?

For Dubinsky and Callahan, last season’s performance jumps weren’t as dramatic as Boyle’s. Dubinsky jumped from 20 goals in 2009-10, to 24 goals last season. Callahan jumped from a career high of 22 goals in 2008-09 to 23 goals in 60 games last season.

The problem is that the Rangers’ organization has been acting like both players’ scoring abilities were on the rise. The assumption has been that both will do the same or better this year. But what if the high point has already passed? What if none of those players continues to improve?

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Devils’ coach Peter DeBoer got a little bit of a break in Martin Brodeur getting slightly injured so early in the season.

The Brodeur injury instantly grabbed the team’s attention, focusing them on winning without their franchise goalie, and took their minds off of last season’s horrible start.

DeBoer has been doing a lot of mental coaching to try and shake-up a franchise that, historically, has always seemed to create tightly-wound, neurotic players.

For one thing, DeBoer has been riding Kovalchuk while he’s looking good, giving him over 32 minutes of ice time against Nashville over the weekend. One reason is because Kovalchuk has been skating well. But also, Kovalchuk does well with a lot of ice time, a holdover from his time in Atlanta. If the Devils can’t give Kovalchuk complementary linemates to get him going, at least they can give him lots of ice time.

Historically, the Devils have never been a team to ride one player (although Jacques Lemaire certainly was inclined to go to Kovalchuk when he didn’t know what else to do), but DeBoer sees a chance to pile on the minutes for Kovalchuk, so he’s taking it.

The Devils are just four games into the season, so it’s hard to say how representative these first few games have been. But it’s interesting to see how DeBoer is taking advantage of Brodeur’s injury to change things up a bit. Players will complain about change, but when a team is compensating for an injured goalie, just about everyone understands that a team needs to do whatever it can to remain competitive.

DeBoer knows that and he’s using that as an opportunity to make some changes (like moving Petr Sykora off of the top line and down to the third) and to keep his team focused on surviving, rather than avoiding a bad start.

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It’s nice that Rangers’ GM Glen Sather is coming out, very publicly, in favor of the NHL adopting some kind of no-touch icing rule. Sather’s in favor of the race to the puck stopping at the faceoff dots, rather than around the boards.

Sather was commenting on the state of icing in the NHL because of Oiler defenseman Taylor Fendun’s horrific leg injury, which occurred during a race for an iced puck.

But while I believe Sather is sincere in his comments, the timing, Fendun’s injury aside, is rather interesting. Because two games into a new season, the Rangers’ offense has been experimenting with a new (for them) strategy.

The team has been shooting the puck into the offensive zone from right inside the red line, an aggressive dump-and-chase maneuver. So far, it hasn’t been working for the Rangers, who lack the strength on their top line to get to the puck and lack the finesse on their second line to do anything productive when they have the puck.

But assuming the Rangers, and coach John Tortorella, stick with the dump-and-chase, especially one that starts right past center ice, there’s a good chance the team is going to be involved in a lot more icing races. So Sather, whose top line is two-thirds concussion victims, has a vested interest in doing whatever it takes to keep his players safe from the boards.

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I can’t imagine anyone is surprised Sean Avery was waived yesterday. Avery has lived in coach John Tortorella’s bad graces since before Tortorella coached the Rangers. It’s vaguely sad, though, since there are things Avery and Tortorella could have done to make the relationship work. I hardly consider myself an Avery fan, but he’s an interesting character who makes the NHL a more interesting place (for better or for worse). It would have been nice if he could have somehow held onto a slot with the Rangers.

What Avery Could Have Done

Get Serious. Avery never figured out how to exist as a serious NHL player. He plays the pest very well. He’s great at drawing attention to himself on the ice. But he never developed a three-dimensional game. He was never great defensively or offensively, which is how he wound up getting waived. But it didn’t need to go down like that. Avery could have worked on his defensive positioning. He could have made more of an effort to backcheck. And he could have made himself useful to the Rangers’ offense. Toward the end of last season and much of this pre-season, Avery was great at working the puck down low, behind the offensive zone net. He could maintain possession for what seemed like minutes. But he couldn’t dish the puck out. He was basically eating time off of the clock, which is sometimes a useful thing to do. But sometimes a team actually needs to score some goals. If Avery could have figured out how to get the puck out from behind the net, he probably wouldn’t have been waived.

Find the Line. Tortorella shied away from Avery because of a general feeling of Avery not knowing the line between tough and irresponsible play. For much of his time under Tortorella, Avery played timidly, like he was scared to play with too much aggression. This did nothing to endear Avery to Tortorella. Avery, instead of ignoring that imaginary line, should have worked hard to explore its boundaries, so he could play aggressively, without taking needless penalties.

Don’t Upset the New Guy. Avery actually played with Brad Richards in Dallas. Although play is a strong word, as Avery was a Star for just 23 games. But given how many Stars seemed to dislike Avery, I’m curious if Brad Richards coming to the Rangers might have hastened Avery’s departure from the team. Avery didn’t seem to love playing in Dallas and his lack of professionalism got him claimed by the team he wanted to play for all along. There’s an interesting symmetry if his time in Dallas also somehow got him removed from the team he wanted to play for all along.

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