On Frozen Blog » ECHL

The Bluechip Options in Net Are Numerous

pucksandbooks — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 12:43:56 +0000

Though unable to track down John Carlson in Hershey last weekend I managed to see Braden Holtby start both weekend home games in the Bears’ net. I’d never seen Holtby perform in person, and I was well aware of the mega-buzz he’d been generating the last two hockey seasons, and so I was thrilled at the chance to get to see him perform on successive nights.

The Capitals selected Holtby in the fourth round of the 2008 Entry Draft, 93rd overall. Generally NHL teams don’t find gems in net there, but Capitals’ scouts have scored prime talent deep in drafts in recent years. Holtby sure appears to be another one.

You don’t derive hard and fast conclusions from the observations of but two games, but I thought I’d pass along a few top-level impressions I garnered of Holtby, which are colored and supplemented by conversations I had with Bears’ team officials and media who follow the team closely. The upshot is this: there’s a lot of substance to the buzz — the Caps indeed have yet another bluechip netminding talent in the pipeline.

It’s too early perhaps to tell whether or not Braden Holtby will one day vie for a no. 1 position in net in D.C., but there can be no mistaking his raw physical talent and his heady, beyond-his-years composure as a 20-year-old playing at an All-Star level in the second-best hockey league in the world.

Holtby this week flew to California to compete in the East Coast Hockey League All Star game. His play in 2009-10 has been so strong that many in South Carolina and Hershey agree that he should have competed in both of those leagues’ All Star games this season. Ironically, he’s played fewer games in the ECHL this season, and yet qualified for that league’s honor game. But his numbers in Hershey are beyond gaudy: 13-2-1 in 16 games, with a .938 save percentage and a microscopic 1.74 goals-against. I don’t care if the Bears are a behemoth of a juggernaut this season; those are sick numbers for any goalie, let alone an American League rookie.

Photo by Tim Stough, Inside Hockey

Impressions:

I first noticed Holtby’s physical stature. He’s listed at a modest 6 ‘1, 205, but he seems to play a lot bigger than that in net. His statistical numbers would suggest as much.

Although he credits Marc-Andre Fleury as an inspiration Holtby isn’t your classic butterfly netminder. Indeed, he plays upright a great deal, it seems to me. Perhaps his is a bit of a hybrid style; it sure seems very much his own.

One of the very first things I noticed about Holtby was how effortlessly he moved as a skater. He’d be first out among Bears on Giant Center’s ice for warmups, and I watched him stride powerfully for a few laps in all the bulk of his gear. He really moved noticeably fast, with great fluidity. He just seemed exceptionally comfortable in all his armor for the task. It was something I haven’t noticed with Capitals’ goaltenders of the present or recent past.

Holtby moves in noticeably sudden and fast bursts in attacking shooting angles from his starting, upright position. Very quick, very aggressive. He seemed to bounce back up on his skates from his butterfly movements with efficiency, regaining his sense of the threats behind or to his sides with terrific poise. Semyon Varlamov may well exhibit the greatest athleticism of any Capitals’ prospect in net, now or ever, but I think Braden Holtby should also be classified a strong athletic netminder.

His stickhandling is a real strength. Twice on a single penalty kill last weekend I saw Holtby clear pucks all the way down the ice and on the opposing net. A number of Bears’ staffers commented on this aspect of his game to me.

Neither of Holtby’s weekend starts required much in the way of brilliance on his part. Saturday night the Bears mauled Wilkes-Barre Scranton 7-2, in which Holtby faced just 22 shots, and on Sunday Syracuse managed just 19 shots in the Bears’ 4-3 victory. I’m eager to see more of him, most particularly with a heavy workload.

Holtby got his start in hockey playing on a backyard rink built by his father in Saskatchewan, who also played goal — “I always watched my dad when he played goal and I wanted to be just like him.”

He shares with this blogger a keen appreciation for Jessica Alba.

Boudreau Biography Slated To Hit Bookstores Next Fall

The OFB Team — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 20:10:47 +0000

Fantastically exciting news: Capitals’ Head Coach Bruce Boudreau will have his biography published next fall, and its author is one of the best hockey writers in the business, Tim Leone of the Patriot News. Dulles, Va.,-based Potomac Books is the publisher of the as-yet untitled bio.

“Washington Capitals head coach Bruce Boudreau has signed a deal with Potomac Books, Inc. to publish his autobiography. The book, co-written with Tim Leone of The Patriot-News in Harrisburg, Pa., is scheduled to come out in October of 2009. It will chronicle the colorful Boudreau’s playing and coaching career and his storybook rise to the Capitals after more than three decades in the minor leagues. Boudreau guided Washington from last place to the Southeast Division championship in 2007-08 and won the Jack Adams Award as NHL Coach of the Year. Leone, a winner of numerous national and state sportswriting awards, covered Boudreau during his tenure as head coach of the American Hockey League’s Hershey Bears.”

On Thursday Leone told me that he has at least a working title for the book.

“It’s a good bet it will be called Gabby,” he told me.

“A lot of the book deals with [Boudreau's] playing and coaching career before the Caps, but obviously with Hershey and his Caps’ ascension there’s tons of Caps stuff.”

Former Cap Keith Jones penned Jonesie last year, and while that work contained a fair bit of Caps-related anecdotes, Leone’s book promises to be the most Caps’-centric published work to date. Caps’ media relations pro Nate Ewell on Thursday couldn’t identify any mainstream book publication that had had the Caps as its focus.

Leone began his collaboration with Boudreau in May of this year, and the interview process of a hockey coach nicknamed “Gabby” was, as you might imagine, lengthy.

“We probably did about 40 hours of interviews at his house in Harrisburg, and I was just kind of leading him through his career, year by year, person by person, elliciting all sorts of stories and anecdotes and cool stuff,” Leone told me.

The book will incorporate the Caps’ 2008-09 season, and this morning Leone acknowledged that sales next fall would be helped were the Caps to do something like win the Stanley Cup this season. I asked him what aspect of the book that’s already been completed might most pique the interest of Caps’ fans.

“Last season, the storybook nature of [Boudreau's] coming up, turning the team around, and the excitement that built around the team and within the team and outside the team in the stands.”

That sounds like a good read to me. Then again, I’ve come to appreciate that anything Leone writes is something I enjoy. He’s already signed one of his books for me; I’m looking forward to taking another work of his up to the Hershey press box next fall and getting a second signed.

The Selling of a Six Pack to a Southerner

The OFB Team — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 10:31:27 +0000

A brand new colleague in my office, Victoria, not yet six weeks in her new gig, hails from Gulfport, Mississippi. She’s a young twenty-something, bright and engaging, and while college on the West Coast and two brief employment stints in D.C. have well dulled her Mississippi drawl, it’s still abundantly clear that she’s a seriously southern girl. We’re happy to have her. Like others her age, Victoria enjoys meeting friends after work for cheap beers at happy hour. As you might imagine, her family, most of whom still reside in Mississippi, has zero connection to the sport of hockey. Victoria has a boyfriend named John who hails from Oregon and who works for the Department of Energy, and Victoria has reported to me that he has no interest in hockey whatsoever. All of this made what the two of them did on Thursday rather startling to me.
I pass Victoria’s work station each morning en route to my office. Thursday morning near 9:00 I was startled to see on her computer screen the Washington Capitals’ web site. She was perusing it. Naturally, I asked her why.
“I didn’t make it to a single game last year,” she told me. “I don’t want that to happen again this year.” Victoria the Delta darling was searching the Caps’ site for hockey tickets for her and her boyfriend.
Turns out, Victoria had been to a Caps’ hockey game before, in 2006, during her first-ever visit to Washington. It made an impression.

“It was fast-paced, high energy, and I loved the way the crowd got into it,” she told me.
“I got the bug I think,” she added.
A bug for hockey!, said the Dixie doll.¬†
Now Victoria’s ticket search became my search on her behalf. Prior to her lone NHL game two seasons back, Victoria had attended a Mississippi Sea Wolves hockey game as a young teenager back home. The Wolves, of the East Coast Hockey League, were once coached by Bruce Boudreau. Fate, I thought.
“That was the first I’d ever seen an ice rink,” she noted with a smile. But it was her experience years later in a big-league rink in the big city that made the lasting impression.
I asked Victoria why she hadn’t made an appearance at a Caps’ game last season, when they’d become so hot a story in town.
“I changed jobs within DOE last year, changed offices, and I was just so busy with all the changes.”
I never push hockey as a cultural experience among my co-workers, but if they stop by my office and ask questions about the sport, I answer, in generous, often gratuitous detail. I’ll give them two-and-a-half hours of my time, if I’m busy, and discuss my game-playing scars, my fake teeth, ‘Slapshot’ and Killer Kaminski. Last season a nuclear engineer from London from our third floor, a very slight former rugby player named Adrian, stopped by my office the morning after watching Alexander Ovechkin for the first time on television.
“You can’t take your eyes off him,” he explained, highly animated, his eyes wide and arms gesturing wildly. “We’d have loved to have had him on our pitch!”
I guided Victoria to the Caps’ ‘Six-Pack’ plans. They seemed budget friendly to a young professional couple. We perused all of the plan options, comparing the ratio of weeknight to weekend games. We decided that the ‘Original Six’ slate was the most appealing, offering as it does both next Saturday’s home opener against the ‘Hawks (sold out) and that snazzy late January Saturday matinee against the Wings.
“Are the Wings good?” Victoria asked me, reminding me, forcefully, of her regional naivete.
She still had to sell the investment to John, but first I wanted to make sure that she could still land that Six Pack, cause I knew tickets were flying fast. I told Victoria to find seats first and make the selljob to John second.
My suspicions were well founded. A Caps’ sales rep informed my Project Puck Convert of that plan’s unavailability. Victoria, I could tell, was close to crestfallen. Now this really became my mission.
“Let me reach out to a friend,” I told her. “No promises, but let me see what I can do.”
Actually, before I could have a phone chat with a Kettler Capitals friend that same sales rep pinged Victoria with the idea of going to the Original Six set but sitting in different seats for the games. Perfect.
“I’ll go with you if John won’t,” I assured.
Victoria’s boyfriend actually put up no resistance at all. In fact, Victoria reported his being excited by the investment.
“He’s excited because I’m excited,” she said.
“Last year, I saw everyone on Metro dressed in their red sweatshirts and their red jerseys,” she explained. “Sometimes, I couldn’t even get on the trains they were so crowded.
“I wanted to be one of them.”
She is.

Hockey as a Desert Rose in Sin City

pucksandbooks — Sat, 24 May 2008 04:21:27 +0000

I was dreading my business trip to Las Vegas this past week. For starters, Monday’s temperature there was a hockey unfriendly 108 degrees. And please, spare me the “It’s a dry heat” defense. Pizza ovens harbor little humidity, and I don’t want to reside in those either. Mercifully, a cold front swept through some time on Tuesday, and by the time my plane touched down the desert had cooled by some 40 degrees and was being kissed by 25-30 mph breezes.
But I was also lodging at the Green Valley Ranch resort hotel. It’s stunning — in an ostentatious resort in Sin City kind of way — but my schedule allowed for no real fun. Let’s just say this property isn’t conducive to starched shirts, stiff business shoes, and nine-hour days inside, away from the sand-bottom pool hard by outdoor refreshment cabanas (plural).
There’s a minor pro hockey team in Vegas — the Wranglers, ironically a member of the East Coast Hockey League. They’re having themselves quite a season. Tonight, in Cincinnati, they meet the Cyclones in game 1 of the Kelly Cup Finals. You’ll recall that Bruce Boudreau won a Kelly Cup with the Mississippi Sea Wolves in 1999.
Thursday’s Las Vegas Sun bore a column by Ron Kantowski titled ‘High-sticking in June is just weird.’ I loved how his column began:

“It was 108 in the shade Monday — and the Wranglers were getting ready to play another hockey game.
One hundred and eight degrees. Hockey.
That had to be the strangest convergence of diametric entities since Julia Roberts married Lyle Lovett.”

One of the Wranglers told Kantowski that before arriving in Vegas he’d never shot a puck in triple digit temps. Turns out, this is the first time in the history of pro hockey here that a team has played for a championship. The defunct Las Vegas Thunder of the defunct International League never made it to the Turner Cup finals.
In Friday’s newspapers there was talk of how a Wrangler Kelly Cup triumph wouldn’t likely occasion the outpouring of community enthusiasm that UNLV’s national championship winning golf team did a few years back. I know that this is a desert and all, and that golf thrives in warm weather climates, but a parade and screaming locals for a golf team? Did they parade down the Strip in golf carts?
The Wranglers are a Calgary Flames affiliate. Former Caps’ farmhand Chris Ferraro is rostered with the Wranglers, although he’s been out of action since a March 1 cheapshot-punch to the head.
The ‘E’ is 20 years old, and known mostly for its development of tough guys during that time. Still, it’s sent more than 350 players to the NHL. And things may be looking up for the league — NHL teams today are sending well regarded draft picks to develop there.
It was nice to see the local media cover the minor pro hockey team with the enthusiasm it has this week, and it made me wonder about the prospects of bigger things puck here. Las Vegas, after all, is a name you hear associated with a new NHL team. It is a sports-loving city — well, it’s at least a city that follows sports scores very closely!
Boxing of course reigned supreme here until about 1990, then that sport whithered. This made me think: could big-league hockey fill a bit of that sporting void?
There was a story in Thursday’s Sun about three minutes of silence observed Monday afternoon by the Wynn and MGM Grand casinos, in remembrance of the Sichuan earthquake. The memorial pause, it’s estimated, cost the casinos between one and two million dollars in revenue.
In a nook of the Green Valley Ranch’s sprawling and luxurious recreation area sits a secluded enclave known as the Pond. We’ll call it Area 69. It’s shrouded in nearly as much secrecy and intrigue. It’s a layout, a lair, for libertines. It’s where the free-spirited sunbathe sans a full compliment of swimwear. It’s partitioned off from the resort’s larger paradisical pursuits by thick shrubbery, a preponderance of palms, and angled cabana paneling that affords tantalizing glimpses of the overexposed within. Its organization and aura — from fancy waterfall to stylized seclusion to massage mattresses — fairly screams orgy at all hours.
Cursed cool temperatures!
I peered through Area 69’s peeping portals on each stroll past the bacchanalia, not because I’m a voyeur (in the strict technical sense) but rather because of the parlor’s novelty and allure relative to my typical business lodgings.
So Sin City has at least one frozen pond and one filthy one. They seem to coexist just fine.
So let’s talk about expansion.

How About Some More Pro Hockey in Washington, the Hockeytown?

pucksandbooks — Fri, 23 May 2008 15:59:21 +0000

Could suburban Washington, D.C., become home to a minor pro hockey team in the not-too-distant future? Such a team would first need a home here, and in Montgomery County, Maryland, intrigue is swirling around a new arena feasibility study and county officials’ publicly stated support for construction of an 8,000-10,000-seat arena, likely located in Germantown.
Last July, the Maryland Stadium Authority commissioned the feasibility study at the behest of Montgomery County and determined that a new arena in Germantown could bring “an estimated $7.5 million in net revenue a year” to the county. The reporting on this has been carried by the Gazette Community Newspaper chain. You can find the paper’s most recent coverage of this story here and here.
Addressing the rosy economic forecast for a new arena, the feasibility study noted:

“Based on our analysis of the economic underpinnings of the proposed arena, its likely operating revenues and costs, its competitive environment, and the performance of similarly situated arenas throughout the U.S., there is little doubt that the forces required for financially successful arena operations have been in place for quite some time.”

The study further noted that the arena, which would need anchor tenants such as minor pro basketball (the Maryland Nighthawks currently play in county high school gyms) and hockey, could become “a treasured community asset.”
The pricetag for such a building could go as high as $60 million.
Here’s where things get even more interesting. HOK Sports of Kansas City, the builders of Camden Yards, were hired by the county last year to conduct preliminary site evaluations. Among the sites under consideration: Montgomery College’s Germantown campus and the current Montgomery County Fairgrounds.
Montgomery County is home to more than 1,000,000 residents, and among the driving forces for a new multipurpose arena there is high school graduations. The county’s swollen high school student enrollments force commencement ceremonies out of the county, where no suitably large host facilities exist, often inconveniently and in a costly manner downtown.
A study, community need, and community interest in such a project still needs also a political champion, and this idea appears to have that as well, in the person of County Councilman Michael Knapp.
“I’m going to push for the county to pursue this,” he told the Gazette last summer.
East Coast League teams have had stints on the outer periphery of Washington — the Chesapeake Ice Breakers played in the modest Show Place Arena in Upper Marlboro, Md., in 1997 and ‘98, while the Richmond Renegades had a healthy stint in the E of 1990-2003. Neither made much an impression on the region’s hockey fans. Richmond’s Renegades today compete in the Southern Professional Hockey League — an even lower rung in hockey’s pro hierarchy. What’s being talked about and seriously studied today in Montgomery County represents, potentially, the most significant inroad to minor pro hockey taking root as a supplement to the Capitals in the region really for the first time.
And these are different times. If hockey is experiencing an Ovechkin-led renaissance-revolution in the region, it’s hard to imagine a county as affluent and heavily populated as Montgomery not supporting its first-ever minor pro team. And likely, with the Nighthawks, two of them.
Or put another way: if not now, when?
Interestingly, the feasibility study claimed that the new arena wouldn’t cannibalize business from other venues. Still, it’s not certain where the Capitals stand on the matter. It’s early in the process, and any new arena is still years away from its opening night puck drop, but the next generation of Hanson brothers could be coming to a new rink near you at the height of Washington’s embrace of hockey.

Bear Sightings to Continue for Another Year or Two

pucksandbooks — Thu, 22 May 2008 15:29:47 +0000

The Washington Capitals and the Hershey Bears have jointly announced that the affiliation agreement between the two clubs have been extended through the 2009-10 season with an option for the 2010-11 season.
Previously affiliated for seven seasons from 1977 to 1984, this next season will be the fourth in this most recent marriage. Currently, the Capitals are also affiliated with the East Coast Hockey League’s South Carolina Stingrays.
Additionally, per Tim Leone, it was also announced that Bob Woods’ contract was extended and will be the head coach of the Bears for 2008-09 with Mark French as an assistant.

Hockey Rinks from South Dakota to South Africa

The OFB Team — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 20:12:23 +0000

Ever wonder what professional ice hockey teams play in New Zealand? How about Dubai? Where can you catch a pro game next time you’re in Bahrain, or Spain, or mainly on the plain?
Well a dedicated French hockey fan named Sam has completed quite a project: a Google map of every professional hockey team’s ice rink in the world–over a thousand of them–including each team’s logo and a link to its home page.
From the SIJHL to the OHA; from the Mini-Big-Egg in Taiwan (home of the Sharks) to Boondall Iceworld (where the Brisbane Blue Tongues play); every arena that hosts a professional team is shown on this wonderful map.
Click here to see for yourself; it takes a couple minutes to load, but once it’s done you can zoom in and see just where the Heerenveen Flyers or the Neumarkt-Egna Wild Goose call home.
[Tap of the stick to Odessa Steps and the New York Times.]

Bears Assign Three

The OFB Team — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 23:49:33 +0000

Hershey Bears President and GM Doug Yingst announced the reassignment of three players to the ECHL’s South Carolina Stingrays.† The three are forwards Steve Pinizzotto, Stephen Werner and defenseman Patrick McNeill.

Capitals Continue to Swim with Stingrays

pucksandbooks — Thu, 09 Aug 2007 01:07:17 +0000

Per the Washington Capitals press release:

The Washington Capitals have renewed their affiliation agreement with the South Carolina Stingrays of the ECHL for the 2007-08 season, vice president and general manager George McPhee announced today.
“We are excited to have extended our affiliation with South Carolina as the Stingrays prepare to celebrate their 15th season,” McPhee said. “Our prospects have had a terrific experience with the Stingrays, and we look forward to continue working together.”
Six Capitals prospects spent at least some time with South Carolina in 2006-07, the third year of the affiliation, as the Stingrays finished 36-27-4-5. Six players who have played for the Stingrays are currently under contract with Viktor Dovgan, Daren Machesney,Travis Morin, Sasha Pokulok, Steve Werner and Kyle Wilson.
“Our affiliation and relationship with the Capitals has certainly\ngrown over the last three years,” Stingrays head coach Jared Bednar said. “We hope to continue that success and develop players for the next level.”