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Well, thought Steve Yzerman, as his eyes scanned down the list of contracts he now controlled as General Manager of the Tampa Bay Lightning, Team Canada this ain’t.

It remains to be seen if Yzerman is the blossoming young executive genius the Lightning hope they’ve signed. For his entire — brief though it may be — executive career, Yzerman has always had two things at his disposal: Talented colleagues and a shitload of assets.

Now, he doesn’t really have either.

It’s almost like it’s 1983 again, and Yzerman has just shown up to his first Red Wings training camp and taken a look at a list of his teammates.

Not exactly a list of future stars, and not one aside from Yzerman would be around to witness the team’s ultimate revival.

Now the Lightning have some assets, and certainly they have more assets than the 1983/84 Red Wings, but they’re assets that are either untouchable or not even close to touchable enough to be worth moving.

And I don’t think Yzerman wants to move them, at least not yet.

Yzerman knows, firsthand, about being a talented player stuck on a bad team in a struggling market. He was there, passing pucks to Ron Duguay and John Ogrodnick, while Mike Ilitch was giving away cars at Red Wings games in an attempt to lure fans to Joe Louis Arena.

The cars helped. But Yzerman helped more.

As much as Yzerman might want to see himself in Steven Stamkos — a fiery young sniper who idolized Yzerman as a kid — I’m sure he can also identify with Vincent Lecavalier. In fact, Lecavalier’s career right now seems almost an echo of where Yzerman’s career was when Scotty Bowman became his coach and asked him to change his game.

With Stamkos now the team’s best goal-scorer, and Martin St. Louis still a very reliable points producer, Lecavalier can perhaps best serve his team by embracing the kind of all-around game that Yzerman played during the second half of his career. Stamkos can play the Sergei Fedorov role; Ryan Malone is a poor man’s Brendan Shanahan; St. Louis can be the veteran producer that the best Red Wings teams always seemed to have — think Igor Larionov, Brett Hull, Luc Robitaille and Vyacheslav Kozlov; and Victor Hedman’s cerebral game is … well, nobody on earth is Nicklas Lidstrom, but it’s certainly an excellent star to shoot for.

So that leaves Lecavalier, the former supreme scorer, the lightning rod (heh) for criticism after every team failure, the principle in every trade rumour and the team’s highest-paid player. Yeah … Stevie Y has been there.

I am sure that one of the first conversations Yzerman will have with Lecavalier will convey to him exactly that.

Hey, V, I’ve been there. You’re taking a lot of heat for everything that’s gone wrong the last few years. But I just want you to play and lead this team. Don’t worry about your points. Worry about setting an example for every young guy that comes into this dressing room. Worry about the way they play the game. Show them how to play the game. Be the glue that holds this team together, and when this thing turns around you’ll quietly be the reason why it happened. I don’t give a shit if you score 40 points next season, so long as you do it playing defence, winning faceoffs and holding your teammates accountable.

So I don’t think Vincent Lecavalier will be traded, unless a deal presents itself that’s just too good to pass up. I don’t think St. Louis will be traded either, unless next season goes so horribly that only a total rebuild can undo the damage. I think Steve Yzerman knows that you don’t win anything without a wily veteran and a strong captain who can do whatever is asked of him for the good of the team.

The only question is whether Vincent Lecavalier can be that kind of captain. I think he can learn to do it because, as history has already proven a couple of times now, when Steve Yzerman starts to talk to you about how to lead a hockey team, you fucking listen if you know what’s good for you…

I am predicting nothing for Saturday night. Nothing at all. Except one thing.

I don’t know what to expect anymore, so I’m not going to pretend I have any read whatsoever on the mental state of this Red Wings team.

When I think they’re tired, worn out, beaten down and ready to call it a season, they blow the fucking roof off the joint and murder any goaltender unlucky enough to be tasked with trying to stop them.

When I think they’ve recaptured their passion, are playing with vigour and desire and are about to put together on of those serious 2008-esque runs that leaves a trail of broken hockey teams in their wake … then they forget to show up.

But the next time they do that, the season’s over, so there’s not exactly any margin for error to speak of in this situation.

All they can do is trust to God Johan Franzen, and trust in their coach to keep them on an even keel and ready to play. As has been said many times this year after those occasional games when the Real Detroit Red Wings deign to make an appearance: If they play tomorrow like they played last night, there’s not a team in the league that can beat them.

But I’m not predicting anything. Except one thing. We’re getting to it.

As I’ve mentioned before, if this season has proven anything about this team to me, it’s that Mike Babcock is the best hockey coach in the world. They don’t give the Jack Adams award to the guy with a stacked roster, but they really need to make an exception for the man.

Over the course of the 2009/10 season, Babcock has:

• dealt with injuries to nearly every elite player on the roster, many of them measured in weeks and months, not days, of missed time.
• switched up his lines like he was working with a house league team that requires equal ice for every player.
• benched the goalie who took him to the last two finals in favour of an untested rookie.
• gave that rookie the reins behind a team that was fighting tooth and nail to keep the longest streak of playoff appearances in North American sports alive.
• improbably reeled off a scorching hot streak down the stretch that not only kept the playoff streak alive but also somehow pushed the team to the 100-point plateau, which looked impossible in February.
• benched the winningest goaltender in NHL history in the Olympics in favour of a goalie who had never won a significant championship and coached the Canadian Olympic team to a gold medal.
• did it all while making the most bad-ass facial expressions ever seen behind a hockey bench.

So yeah … I think Mike Babcock has put in some serious fucking work this year.

Topping it all off, at least in my book, is that every time on of his teams has faced adversity, they’ve met it head on.

What else can you ask of a coach other than that his team never quits and always, ALWAYS shows up for big games.

Like I said above, I’m not predicting anything for Game 5 in San Jose tomorrow, but I’m sure The Coach would agree with me posting the comment he made before Game 7 of the Phoenix series:

“They are all going to be ready to play tonight,” Babcock said. “They are going to be more than ready.”

I will write a season-ending post as soon as the season ends.

For now, there’s still one more game to play. And possibly another one after that.

I could list about 276 sports cliches right here and they’d all be just as boring as they are true.

So instead of taking that shit one game at a time and playing with desperation like our backs are against the wall and each shift is your last … just …

Never a bad thing to take to heart.

Go Wings.

Okay fellas, come on in here for a minute. I’ve got something just tremendous to say to you.

Men, you are down two opportunities to nothing to the San Jose Sharks. That’s twice now that they’ve just taken the tremendous opportunity to seize the moment and enjoyed it, and twice that you have done just a fantastic job not seizing the moment.

But that’s okay. I know all of you play this game for fantastic opportunities like tonight, and I know that our best players are going to do a terrific job seizing that moment. I’m a big believer in not shitting the bed in important games. That’s an important part of playing at this time of year.

Besides, I can tell you how we’re gonna win fellas, because I’ve killed a shark before. I have — it was a great white, I found it in a saltwater tank in a little resort on the coast of Africa. I spent my bonus for our finals appearance last year paying to have the tank constructed and the shark trapped in a net, brought onto a boat and helicoptered in from the ocean. It was just a fantastic opportunity to kill something I had never killed before and I really wanted to just be a part of it.

That’s what life is, you know fellas? You seek out an opportunity to kill something new, you realize it, you savour it, you remember it. And then you get back out there and look for some new dangerous animal to murder.

I’ve killed a lot of things, fellas. I have. I’ve had some tremendous luck in terms of just being in the right place with the right gun and the right game in my sights. But man, the moment when I killed that shark? That was a special moment. I felt I really just responded to the challenge of ending the life of an endangered species. There’s no question, in my mind, that to take apart an animal as old and dangerous and as feared as a great white shark, your best weapons have to be your best weapons, and fellas I felt my mind and my machine gun really stepped up in that battle.

But the fact that I ultimately blew dozens of holes through that shark’s brain stem before blowing the fuck out of it with a huge-ass grenade isn’t really important right now. What’s gonna help you, fellas, is how I gave myself the opportunity to do that.

You see, I like to kill things with shotguns and machine guns and sometimes with grenades. I find that grenades are just a tremendous way to blow animals up. Very satisfying. But you can’t really use those weapons in salt water, especially not with a shark swimming around all friggin fast and buzzing around your net looking to take a bite out of your arm. I’m a big believer in the importance of having all your limbs operational when you are locked in combat with a predator. That’s a huge part of fighting for your life. You cannot afford to lose your limbs at this stage of the game.

And in that tank, under the water, the shark had the advantage. There’s no question, the gills were a huge part of that. Being a creature that lives underwater, having this fight take place in a tank full of the stuff was a tremendous way for the shark to keep the upper hand, swimming around and being underwater and everything that goes along with that. It was a very difficult challenge for me to overcome. I felt like the shark was dictating the pace of the fight.

I knew that in order to really kill that shark, I had to find a way to get myself onto my home ice. The same home ice that we’re going to be on tonight. So I ignored the shark for a moment, and used my shotgun ammunition to blast dozens of holes into the walls of that tank. Then I hopped out of the water and sat there on the edge of the tank, enjoying what was just a fantastic alcoholic beverage as I watched the water level slowly sink to nothing.

I tell you fellas, the look on the face of that shark when it realized what I was doing … just utter helplessness, fear and confusion. You savour moments like that. Those are the moments that make you feel like, ‘Boy, I am just a fantastically devious killing machine.’ Those are the moments you look back on years from now.

When you come up with an ingenious plan to give yourself a complete advantage over one of nature’s oldest and most-efficient man-eaters, you know you’ve earned it.

And when that water was all gone, and that six-metre-long, two-and-a-half ton shark was wiggling around helpless in the empty tank. Fellas, that was when I understood what home-ice advantage is all about.

‘You’re on my turf now,’ I said to that shark. ‘And I’ve got just a tremendous opportunity to blow the fuck out of you right now.’

And fellas, the smile on my face as I unloaded clip after clip into that endangered animal … that’s a smile that I’ll keep with me forever. And the swig of liquor I took directly after I climbed out of the bloodstained tank, tossing my grenade over my shoulder as I walked away … that’s just a fantastic taste that I will tell my grandkids about someday.

So yes, fellas, you are in a dire position tonight. And you have a tremendous opportunity to put yourself in a hole that not even I could shoot my way out of. But you also have just a wonderful, fantastic chance to seize the moment and really just kill something and watch it die. And there’s nothing better in life than that, fellas. When you kill something with your teammates, and I really believe this, you walk together forever, walking on an African safari, killing all sorts of other things.

That’s all men, now, go and have yourself just a fantastic meal and nap and I’ll see you back here a couple of hours before the game.

(team begins to leave the ice)

Wait … Todd, you come with me for a second. We need to have a that talk again. The one about the difference between killing animals and killing people and about taking fantastic metaphors literally. We’ve taken enough penalties in this series already.

So … that post yesterday, it said Wings in seven, right?

Honestly, a 4-3 defeat is not the end of the world. The Sharks could have made that game a blowout early, but they couldn’t quite close the deal. And if the reffing — admittedly, this was seen from my seat in a crowded bar 20+ feet from a smallish screen — hadn’t been Sarah Palin-level retarded, we might have been dealing with OT, which means we would have been dealing with some Dan Boyle vs Evgeni Nabokov goodness and possibly a 1-0 lead instead of a deficit for the Red Wings.

But it didn’t happen, and full credit to Joe Pavelski for playing an awesome game and making the other Joe look slow, superfluous and shitty.

Now … on to the rest of the predictions, because I want to look back at the end of the playoffs and see exactly how many of these I got wrong. I’m on pace — except for my Cup final pick of another Det/Pitt rematch — to pretty much be staggeringly wrong, and I would like to see just how bad I can get. Keep reading →

It’s tough not to smile this morning, what with the Washington Capitals so powerfully demonstrating the immense chasm between Contenders and Pretenders when it comes to handling Game 7 pressure.

So … to review. Things you don’t want to do in a Game 7: Don’t rely on your superior skill level to assure you of victory; don’t settle for backhanders from 30+ feet away; don’t take retarded penalties with one minute left in a period; don’t over-handle the puck in your own zone and the neutral zone; don’t …. employ the world’s “best” player an assume that alone will guarantee you a win; don’t employ a “Norris-trophy nominated” defenceman who does not play defence.

Things you do want to do in a Game 7: Do work hard, because you don’t get shit without outworking the other team; do make sure your team employs Nicklas Lidstrom and Pavel Datsyuk; do secure the services of Mike Babcock as your head coach.

You want to know when I stopped worrying about the Wings chances in Game 7 Tuesday night? When I read this:

“What I talked to the team about was, they are all going to be ready to play tonight,” Babcock said. “They are going to be more than ready.”

And that was it. If he’s not worried, then why should I be?

Mike Babcock is not going to win every single big game. No coach, or team, can do that. In the long run, it’s impossible. But here’s why he’s the best coach in the world: When the season is on the line, his team always, ALWAYS shows up ready to play.

Yes, they lost Game 7 last year, but they were three inches from tying it in the final minute. They lost to Anaheim in 2007, but that was a 4-3 Game 6 final after Game 5 was decided on a shifty OT goal that still gives me nightmares sometimes.

The point is — I simply cannot remember seeing a Mike Babcock-coached team lay an egg in a big game. Bounces don’t go their way, they sometimes don’t quite have enough to find the victory, there are the injuries and bounces and bad calls that every team endures … but there’s never been a big loss that makes you think, ‘Huh. We just weren’t ready to play tonight.’

Which brings us nicely to the series with San Jose that begins tonight. San Jose, a team of considerable talent and questionable heart, cannot make the same claim in big games. They just can’t, because they haven’t in the past and by now it’s happened often enough that, when it looks like it might start happening, they start thinking about it happening, which makes it happen.

All of which is to say that, when it comes to big-game, must-win, crunch-time hockey, a fictional stuffed donkey battling chronic depression put it best:

“We can’t all, and some of us don’t. That’s all there is to it.”

– Eeyore

San Jose compares relatively favourably with Detroit in all the tangible categories — they have a dangerous group of forwards, an effective defence corps that includes a Stanley Cup- and Gold Medal-winning quarterback and a goaltender that, while inconsistent, is certainly capable of being effective. Which leaves those tricky intangibles to consider — things like heart and will and confidence and the ability to remain calm and composed in the swirling eye of a playoff hurricane.

(Incidentally, a little more than a dozen or so years ago, Nicklas Lidstrom built himself a house in the swirling eye of a playoff hurricane. It’s still standing and he lives there quite comfortably. He says he finds the breeze refreshing and the rain keeps his garden healthy. He mows his own lawn.)

Here are some intangibles to consider:

• Evgeni Nabokov’s career statistics vs. the Detroit red Wings: 29 games, 8-17-2, 3.53 GAA, .888 SV%.
• Joe Thornton’s career playoff stats: 82 games (Hey, a full season. Neat.), 12 goals, 44 assists, 56 points.
• Patrick Marleau’s career playoff stats: 98 games, 38 goals, 27 assists, 65 points.
• Dany Heatley’s career playoff stats: 39 games, 10 goals, 29 assists, 39 points. (Remember, this is Heatley’s first year in San Jose.)
• And for comparison, Henrik Zetterberg’s career playoff stats: 92 games, 45 goals, 42 assists, 87 points.
• Pavel Datsyuk’s career playoff stats (minus his rookie year in which he played 21 games on the third/fourth line: 84 games, 24 goals, 41 assists, 65 points.
• Johan Franzen’s career playoff stats: 70 games, 30 goals, 28 assists, 58 points.
• Points-per-game numbers for the team’s Big Three: San Jose - .73, Detroit - .85.

Actually, now that I think about it, those things are pretty ‘tangible’ after all, given that they’re statistics accumulated throughout seven careers of playoff performances. Oh, and Nicklas Lidstrom plays for the Red Wings, too. I mean, he’s not nominated for the Norris Trophy the way Mike Green is, but he’s a pretty good defenceman and I feel he is at least equal to Dan Boyle.

There was more sarcasm in that last sentence than in an entire Norm MacDonald standup set.

Look, if San Jose plays like San Jose, and the Red Wings play like the Red Wings … this series is over in five or six games.

If San Jose shows up for big games and the Red Wings don’t, then San Jose wi — except we established above that Mike Babcock doesn’t let that happen. He tells them stories about blowing the fuck out of lions with a grenade launcher and it’s hard not to be pumped up after hearing that. So scratch this scenario. When the series is on the line, the Wings will show up.

So that leaves it up to San Jose to out-skate, out-hustle and show more heart than the Red Wings. It is possible that this will happen, and it is also possible that I will be struck by a comet while performing fellatio on a midget with Celine Dion on the stereo and professional soccer on the television.

Some may think that this is arrogance; that I’m being needlessly derisive and negative about the Sharks’ chances. To those people, I would say, what chances? This is the NHL Playoffs, and these are the San Jose Sharks. Joe Thornton is still wondering whyit gtets so hard to score in late April and Patrick Marleau swear he is *this* close to figuring out what this friggin’ letter on the top left of his jersey stands for*.

Okay. Fun’s over. In all seriousness, I don’t give the San Jose Sharks I’ve come to know and deride much of a chance. I will concede however, the possibility that something finally clicked in those final two games against the Colorado Avalanche, and that there is a slim chance that the Sharks finally understand the level they must compete at to be successful. If that happens, or if their mascot lures Pavel Datsyuk into the bowels of HP Pavillion with the promise of a crazy new James Brown ringtone remix, then this series could go the distance.

In the meantime, however, I’m sticking with Wings In Six.

(*UPDATE: I was just reminded that Patrick Marleau isn’t the captain anymore. That doesn’t change anything. In my mind, he never was.)