NHL Playoff Picks: Jonah from Fucked Up Vs. a Southern Stathead: Round 1, Part II

In the spirit of scientific discovery, VICE is pitting a hardcore expert from Ontario against a hockey savant from the South to determine what becomes if Canadians get hardcore and Americans get hockey.

Representing Hoser Hardcore: Jonah Falco, drummer of Fucked Up, guitarist of Career Suicide, every damn thing on the Mad Men demos. Jonah has not watched a full hockey game on television since first-term Clinton, but he’s attended a few since then. Representing the Forechecking Eagle: Sam Page, Nashville native, NYU student, Predators blogger. He’s one of the new breed of fans who have been developing, testing, and applying advanced statistical analysis to non-baseball sports. As far as can be determined, Sam has never moshed to the Cro-Mags.

(This is Part 2. Part 1 is here.)

VICE: Top-seeded Rangers face the Senators. Who’s winning?
Sam: Nearly everyone is already calling this for the Rangers, for obvious reasons: a gritty playoff style, a cup-winning coach, and Vezina-favorite Henrik Lundqvist. Ottawa, though, had an incredible offensive year, with an Orr-esque season from defenseman Erik Karlsson. They may be the better puck possession team. Special teams is a wash: Ottawa is good on the power play and pedestrian on the penalty kill, New York vice versa.

Goaltending was the difference this season—Lundqvist was excellent; Craig Anderson, below average—but it’s effectively impossible to predict which goalies get hot and carry their team in the playoffs; all it takes is one fluky run for an upset. That, and Ottawa winning the season series 3-1 means it goes to 7. But I think the Rangers win.

Jonah: Well, OK, as a Torontoite, I’m going to have to go against Ottawa and take New York. The Rangers are strong, and the only reason I know the Rangers are strong is that a guy who occasionally cuts my hair is a diehard, dyed-in-the-wool Ranger fan. And he’s born and raised in Hamilton—the only reason he likes the Rangers is because he was around in the late ‘70s in New York, during the punk explosion. He lived there in the early ‘80s. He saw Bad Brains and Urban Waste at A7, except his memory isn’t 100 percent, and he called them Urban Style. But this guy—this guy is Rangers through and through, and every time they come to town it’s always like a big to-do. So I’m going with the Rangers, hands down.

OK, Capitals vs. Bruins.
Sam: A month ago, this series would have looked like a Boston sweep. While the Capitals have turned it on, Alexander Ovechkin especially, they lost two goalies late in the season, and are turning to Braden Holtby, with just 18 career NHL starts. He’s facing Tim Thomas and Tuukka Rask, a hell of a tandem. Star power is something: Ovechkin and Alex Semin are certainly able to take over games, but Boston’s +67 goal differential to Washington’s -8 is pretty hard to ignore. Bruins in 5.

Jonah: Here’s what I know about DC. Ovechkin is a legend. I’ve seen the Capitals play a few times, and he actually didn’t do much in the games. But DC is just a boring town, and possibly a boring team. I’m going with the easy choice here. I’m going to say the Bruins are going to take it. I think that, in hockey, at a certain point you have to take muscle over finesse. “Who cares what you do, ‘cause we are the Boston crew,” right?

How about San Jose and St. Louis?
Sam: The Blues are the best defensive team in hockey: fewest goals allowed, fewest shots allowed, best save percentage. Goalies Jaroslav Halak and Brian Elliott set a franchise record with 15 combined shutouts (though the guy with six—Halak—will start Game 1).

San Jose still has a great top-six forward corps, led by Joe Thornton and Patrick Marleau, but their lack of forward depth means not much credible secondary scoring. This showed in the two teams’ season series: four games, three Sharks goals, four Blues wins. Conventional wisdom says regular season results don’t matter in the playoffs, but studies differ. Blues in 5.

Jonah: Oh, St. Louis all the way. That’s a hockey town. San Jose—I’ve been there, it’s a strip mall with a streetcar. I also had a Sharks T-shirt when I was little. I don’t know anything about the San Jose hockey franchise, but I’ll tell you what: the people of St. Louis deserve something, so I’m hoping the cosmos aligns for them. I don’t even have to talk about Drunks with Guns. I don’t even have to talk about Cardiac Arrest. And who’s from San Jose? We’re talking about Berkeley; we’re not talking about Bad Posture. It’s not Oakland. Does Oakland have a hockey team?

Not since the Seals. That was in the late ‘60s. It was this weird short-lived outpost of big-time hockey on the West Coast.
Wow, that is knowledge.

The Coyotes and Blackhawks.
Sam: This series pits Mike Smith, maybe the West's best goalie—.930 save percentage, eight shutouts—against the worst, Corey Crawford—.903, none. Still, Smith will be facing a Blackhawks team one goal behind the conference lead.

Hawks captain Jonathan Toews’s return from concussion may be the difference: his teammates play much better when he's around. If they lose, it’s because of Crawford. The Coyotes’ sneaky-good offense, led by Radim Vrbata and ageless wonder Ray Whitney, may force Chicago to backup Ray Emery, who took over in similar fashion last year for the Ducks. If the Hawks get goaltending, though, I like them in 6.

Jonah: Now I know the Blackhawks. That’s Loons’ favorite team. I already made my choice. Phoenix has The Feederz and Frank Discussion. They’re kind of like one of the more radical and brutally honest and confrontational bands in a way that others weren’t. Others sort of used the antithetical nature of punk as a conduit to confrontation. And Frank Discussion and The Feederz did it in a different way. So there’s no doubt that this series is going to be a fight. I don’t know how many players are from Phoenix. I don’t know how many bona fide roots-in-the-ground Arizonans there are on the Phoenix Coyotes. I don’t know how many roots-in-the-ground Arizonans there are period. It’s a wasteland. I don’t respect a wasteland very much. I have to give it to the Blackhawks, obviously.

On music alone, you gotta think about … where were the Crucifucks from? Oh, they were from Wisconsin. But, anyway, The Feederz is a pretty strong statement in favor of Phoenix, but when you go to Chicago you’re thinking: history of hockey, Clark Griswold, the Effigies, Out of Order, the classic Victory Records weird vibe that kids get exposed to before they understand. You know, you got Naked Raygun, you got Happy Toons and Dead Fink—there’s some deep knowledge for the heads. You got Albini—Big Blackhawks, man. This is an X-Files I-want-to-believe moment, and I want to believe the Blackhawks will slap around the transplanted US team. Those teams need to be taught a lesson.

Last one. The Devils and whatever team plays in Florida.
Sam: The Panthers had a splashy offseason, signing and trading for a slew of new players, leading to this amazing press conference and the club’s first Southeast Division title. Their minus-24 goal differential, however, is the worst from a playoff team since the lockout. They’re also the only playoff team under 40 wins and they won't get any "bonus points” for losing in overtime or shootouts here.

The Devils are to a man better, and won more games in a tougher division. Florida has a goaltending edge—Martin Brodeur is well past his prime—but it’s a slight advantage and barely matters. New Jersey in 4.

Jonah: What’s going on with these series, by the way? There’s no aggregate shit like in soccer, is there?

No, it’s a best-of-seven series.
OK, gotcha. I have allegiance to New Jersey for reasons other than punk. I have family from there. Hoboken is family ground; there’s a vegetable shop there that is in the family—through marriage, but nevertheless—and I used to go there loads as a kid. I had this New Jersey Devils crewneck sweatshirt. But, at the same time, now that I think about it, I remember I came home from school one day to find my mother had bought me a Florida Panthers hoodie. Embroidered. But I thought the hoodie was bullshit because I really only fucked with the Original Six —I didn’t respect the expansion teams back then, when I cared—so I wouldn’t wear it. But Florida—I feel like they’ve had a few good seasons, no?

Well, they had a really good year early on, in ’95, when they went to the final against all the odds. But they basically haven’t made the playoffs since then.
I’ll tell you what: you’ve got Mental Abuse versus We The Living.

We The Living?
We The Living. I think their famous song was called “Fudge Ripper.” Anyways, you know what? I‘m going to say that Florida is going to upset. This is the time of climate change. I mean, the North isn’t cold and the South isn’t cold anymore. This is the time of the weird and reactionary personality of the United States taking over the civilized cosmopolitanism. Florida’s going to take it. Sorry, New Jersey.

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