Thursday, June 10, 2010

Cleaning up the Hockey Season That Was...

Last night marked the end of a journey.  Around 10:20 Central time, Patrick Kane ended the hockey season with a goal that gave the Chicago Blackhawks their first Stanley Cup in almost 50 years.  That goal put an emphatic, yet odd end to a season that saw some peaks (the Olympics) and valleys (the Patrice Cormier incident in the junior leagues), so perhaps the delayed celebration was appropriate after all.

Now, for the pain in the ass part (besides not having hockey for three months): trying to figure out what each team should do in order to raise Lord Stanley's Cup in 2011.  Needless to say, this will be as big of a pain in the ass as trying to move Dustin Byfuglien from in front of your team's goaltender.  This will take a while, so if you happen to see many parts like this, there's nothing I can do except do the research.

Naturally, the first two teams that I should talk about are the Blackhawks and Flyers.  First, the newly crowned champion Blackhawks:  They have a potentially bad situation as far as the cap goes.  Obviously, if they did their homework on the players in the lower levels, then there's no reason why they can't keep this run going for years.  The biggest question is what to do with the huge contract of Cristobal Huet.  It's clear that Antii Niemi is the number one goaltender in Chicago now, yet Huet is being payed like a number one goaltender.  If Huet gets moved, then it could help ease some of the cap pressure for the Blackhawks.

The Flyers:  It looks like Michael Leighton is the team's number one goaltender, but as the team proved, you can never have enough good goaltending.  Remember, the Flyers began the season with Ray Emery, who went down early, and then it was Brian Boucher, who was injured and had bouts of inconsistency, and then Leighton, a waiver claim who played very well before going down to injury.  Ironically, it was the inconsistent Boucher that saved the Flyers' season.  Depth is a concern, as that was exposed in the Finals, and for that matter, nearly exposed in the Bruins series.  And don't forget about Chris Pronger, who despite being a money player, has moved around three times since the last lockout.

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