2019-2020 NHL season thread

So. ... I went to Cornell as an undergrad (If you follow along, there is a purpose related to Eruzione, even if I go all over the place and get a bit purposeless). Ivy League sports are fun, and I enjoy them, but they are still Ivy League sports. One year I was there, the basketball team (which I actually had delusional ideas about walking onto when I got there, but that is another story) made the NCAA tournament. Every year for a long time it was Princeton or Penn as the Ivy representative, except that one year, it was Cornell. ... which got destroyed by Arizona in the first round (Az had Steve Kerr, Sean Elliot, Tom Tolbert and Jud Bueschler).

Aside from that, the sports worth watching were hockey and lacrosse, and I wasn't into lacrosse at all. Hockey games were really fun, and they were very good (Joe Neiwendyk was there when I arrived). To this day, I still follow along (ranked #1 in the country at the moment and having an excellent season).

About 15 years ago, they started this ongoing series that has Cornell playing Boston University at Madison Square Garden every other year on the Saturday after Thanksgiving. I think they basically just rented out the garden and had no clue how the game would be received when they came up with the idea. It was before other NCAA programs started scheduling similar games at NHL arenas.

The impetus was that well before I was in school, Cornell and BU had had a really intense rivalry, to the point that one of the chants at games when I was there was the band playing something, stopping and the students chanting, "Screw BU, [that night's opponent] too." And that was at a time when Cornell never played BU anymore, because BU had joined another conference with some other teams, Hockey East, because the Ivy schools were insisting on starting the season later and putting a bit more emphasis on academics over the hockey schedule.

The first time they did Cornell-BU at the garden about 14 or 15 years ago, they sold the place out. More than 18,000 people (and about 80 percent were Cornell alums and their families, most of whom probably didn't know a hockey puck from a urinal puck). I met a guy who worked for MSG afterward, who had negotiated the deal with the schools, and he said they were shocked by the crowd size and reception. In subsequent years, the size of the crowds hasn't been quite as large, but they have gotten 15,000, 16,000 for each of the games, and everyone was finding it profitable enough that a few years after the first game, they started scheduling Cornell games against other teams during the off years when they didn't play BU, like Michigan, Penn State, Harvard (even though it is a conference rival they already see twice a year), and they can count on thousands of alums and their families to show up (it leads to mini-reunions around the game).

During each of those Cornell-BU games, in the middle of the games they try to show some famous alums in the stands or in one of the boxes, and during the second period, they always do the obligatory Mike Eruzione tribute and he waves to the crowd. And every year, I do have that thought like, "Wow, he really milks this for all its worth," which is why I am maybe a bit more ambivalent toward him than I was when I was 12. But I certainly don't begrudge him any of it. Unlike some people living off past glory whose glory wasn't really that glorious, he was a key part of what I think was the greatest sports event in my lifetime.

 

Thanks! I have reservations about sharing things on here, so I appreciate it.

I'll take it full circle to the NHL again. The Rangers own the rights to Cornell's best player, Morgan Barron. Which makes it doubly fun for me now. He was a 6th round pick , and at the time looked like a real project coming out of a prep school (not junior hockey) in Nova Scotia. They were drafting more on potential and trying to project, obvionsly, and some things I read at the time even criticized the pick. He is tall, big body, can skate. ... but he was pretty raw.

He's a junior now. Last year, he started to break out and at times he looked like a man amongst boys. This year, the difference has been even more noticeable. He's big, has gotten even stronger and he's clearly worked on his skating. You notice him every time he is on the ice, and he's clearly now one of the best NCAA players.

With all the high round picks the Rangers have had since the rebuild, it's cool that every story I read about their prospects now has his name near the top, mentioning him as possibly ready next year if he forgoes his senior year (which I suspect he will). He plays center and I thought a NY Post story yesterday about the Rangers prospects had it right when it said he could be a Brian Boyle type of player in the NHL.

 

I watching a little of Detroit last night in NY, and I was thinking how they should skip the lottery this year and just give Detroit the #1 pick out of a sense of decency. The NHL is a league with so much parody, and even the bad teams aren't really that bad. ... but Detroit is the biggest exception to that I have seen in a few years.

The Rangers are about to be a seller at the deadline, but they are still nominally in the playoff race, so officially the line is, "We are playing for a playoff spot."

Even with that, given how emotionally difficult the trade deadlines were the last few seasons (last year, I get the sense Zuccarrello was like a gut punch to that dressing room), I can see how they might have subconsciously started mailing it in after coming back from the break.

But against Detroit last night, they came out like Mike Tyson in his prime against Marvis Frazier. They saw the Detroit jerseys and it looked like they started licking their chops. True to every Detroit-NY game, though, Jimmy Howard stopped a barrage in the first period. I really only get to see him against New York. I know he's been an excellent goalie, but if he had played his whole career the way he plays against the Rangers, we'd be talking about him like Dominik Hasek or Patrick Roy. It looks like Howard is having a tough season, and he actually let 4 through last night, but it was the kind of game where he probably had nightmares last night about pucks coming at him from all angles.

They do the home and home rematch tonight in Detroit.