Please excuse the over 24 hours late recap. Last night left me punishing my head against a wall. When I regained consciousness, I was in and out of the emergency room as I worked on my weekly Winging it in Motown article. I knew what everyone would write their game recap on, and I knew what I needed to write mine on. I just didn't want to do it, because it's not going to be the popular opinion.

Sometimes, we just know too much about hockey.

I was quite enthused about one James Howard, and his performance against the NHL team known as the Vancouver Canucks. Osgood put the team in a, seemingly, unspeakable hole early in the game and I nearly thought the game was over. Howard came in, and while he looked god awful doing it, he made the saves he needed to make, had no chance on the two goals he let up, but rallied as Detroit took the victory. Victory, such an underused word these days.

In my recap, I was elated. As someone who has watched Howard in the NCAA and AHL, a good two/three dozen times, I know what the guy is capable of. I was never too happy with Howard in his previous NHL stints. Sometimes he just didn't look ready, other times the team in front of him just didn't gel and sat too far back on their heels with a rookie goalie in net. It's a common mistake, but not something that should lead to a goalie going 1-7 in three year's worth of games. I wrote some things, that eerily came into play after the Edmonton game. Here's a sample:

• "I was amazed at the number of people writing him off, especially about him being a "bust draft pick." "
• Let's hope that confidence will help him iron out some of the rebound issues, and we can still count on him for reliable backup minutes.
• I think you've got to ride out Howard until he falls apart (he likely will, but don't write him off again, please).

I asked, passionately. This is a rookie goaltender. I don't care how old his is, he's going to hit some bumps. Those bumps are going to look like mountains when you've got a team in front of him that refuses to take care of the puck in their own end and refuses to play in the 1st period like they do in the 3rd.

But what do I see after yesterday's game? Essentially, Howard's head called for on a platter. I'm surprised there isn't a bounty on his head, to be quite honest.

I don't mean everyone, though. I had a good discussion with Chris at Motown Wings about it -- he was the only one I could bring myself to respond to. Because Chris gave reasons why he's unhappy with Howard. What I'm absolutely sick of hearing is how Howard "doesn't look like an NHL goaltender." What does that mean? What am I supposed to say to that? How many people saying this are actually goalie coaches? Because I'm sure not, so I admit that I don't know everything to look for. What I do know is that Jimmy Howard is a 25-year-old goaltender that Detroit has groomed, nitpicked, and observed much more frequently than I have for the past five seasons. If they did not believe that he was an NHL goaltender, he would not be in the NHL. Detroit is painfully picky with their prospects, if they did not believe he was capable of 25-30 games, there would be three goalies on Detroit, or Howard would be part of an ugly goaltending committee on a team like Toronto or the Islanders. Joey MacDonald much?

Yet, many fans are absolutely done with him. A guy who has spent a grand total of three weeks in the NHL. Sure, he had spotty time in a few seasons before that, but what kind of unfair pressure is it on a goalie to say "here, you get this one start right now and if you don't play well, you'll never see the NHL again." I thought Howard was good in most of those games, much better than a 1-6 record. But he sucked against St. Louis, and then again last night. But keep these things in mind (bullets are nice):

• Chris Osgood, for the second straight season, has not outperformed Howard by any stretch and has showed no signs of putting together a reasonable season.
  
• Chris Osgood let up two of the weakest goals in his career against Vancouver, and Howard held on to get the win.
• Jimmy Howard is a rookie goalie -- name me a rookie goalie that was flawless (or even close to it) as a rookie and I'll close down this blog right now. It's rocky road, look no further than superstars like Roberto Luongo, J-S Giguere, and Miikka Kiprusoff as guys who needed multiple NHL stops before they put that together. Am I putting Howard in that company? No. But I'm saying that teams who gave up early on goaltenders regretted it later.
• Jimmy Howard had a .936 save percentage in his relief effort against Buffalo, and his start against Colorado and Vancouver. As I told Chris at Motown, goalie stats mean nothing this early in the year (and look no further than Osgood's 08/09 regular season vs. his playoff to see what they mean overall), but you can't look at that and say he's been absolutely awful.
• Detroit has not had a rookie goalie since the Maracle/Hodson days. Joey MacDonald does not count, I think Detroit kept him on the roster accidentally.
• Howard actually saved a few pucks in the second and third period -- even overtime. And, gasp, he didn't just bend over and take it in the shootout like every other goalie we've had since the shootout era started.

That said, Howard sucked last night. Inexcusable. For some reason, he was sliding all over the ice and he even tripped over himself two or three times. Nerves? Bad ice? Untied skates? Lack of talent? All four? Who knows? He needs to be better. But the amount of people writing him off -- after he bailed out Osgood against Vancouver. He made a dozen huge saves, there's no way we wouldn't have had two points in that game if Babcock left Osgood in for another goal.

And as I predicted -- and a few people emphasize in the comments to that post, he was bound to fall apart. That's the way it goes for rookie goalies. Especially rookie goalies who were never consistently stellar in the AHL (though to be fair, he was not nearly as inconsistent in the AHL as some are making it out to be right now, just because it's easy to throw that out there and make him sound like a joke) and were not really drooled over in their draft season. But how can you see that one game and determine that's it for him? Under different circumstances, I might agree. but I watched the goals over and over again. And if you can all sit there and tell me that the defense did their job on all of those goals -- again, I will give up this blog right now and stop watching hockey. I feel insane sometimes. Why isn't anyone else talking about this. How 'bout this -- quick breakdown.

Here are the highlights. They're not long -- right now we're just focusing on the two and a half minutes which features Howard getting lit up for five goals. Watch them -- and please, let me know if you agree with me or not here.

Goal #1 -- Rafalski gets mauled behind the net and falls, a common defense mechanism for him. Cleary and Bertuzzi drift behind and chases the puck. In doing so, one of them (or some other neglectful defender on the ice) leaves an Oiler that I cannot identify wide open in front of the net. He gets a centering feed and puts it on net and Stuart steps into him, Howard makes a nice pad save and kicks the rebound over to the boards, where it should be. Filppula fires a weak clearing attempt up the boards that is stopped, and Cleary and Bertuzzi basically abandon the defensive zone. An Oiler takes the puck and centers it to JF Jacques in the middle of the ice. I believe this is where Howard's mistake was, as he set himself for a Jacques' shot. Jacques either let the puck go past him or just missed it (this is likely, he's not good) and Pouliot has a glorious chance that Howard gets a piece of. Jacques puts in the rebound and Rafalski does his best statue impression in front, not moving from the point of Pouliot's shot to the moment after Jacques scored. Howard was down and out and had no chance, but made himself look extra scrub like by spinning and sliding to basically the low slot. I think there were three faults here, it doesn't all fall on Howard. Filppula should have cleared, Rafalski should have done.. anything in front of the net, and Howard should have picked up that he had a 3-on-1 and not a 2-on-1.

Goal #2 -- Rafalski (whoa, common theme already!?!) gets absolutely walked by Hemsky inside the blueline. He thought he was a blitzing linebacker or something -- there is no need to charge at a dangerous stickhandler like Ales Hemsky. He totally flies past and basically vacates the zone. This creates an odd-man situation down low, but Hemsky (who suffers from superstar syndrome -- everything he does has to be highlight reel, even though he'd be much better if he kept it simple) loses it to Zetterberg, who loses it in the corner. Hemsky centers a pass to a defenseman in the high slot who unleashes a high shot that Howard makes a nice save on. The rebound goes airborne, and Penner outmuscles Rafalski (no way, really?!) and bats it in out of mid-air. I don't actually blame Rafalski for getting outmuslced because Penner is 6'4 and currently on fire. The only fault on this play in my eyes is Rafalski for getting blown past in the first place. I don't see how you can expect Howard to perfect corral that high shot when he had to move from his post to the top of the crease. The rebound wasn't great, but it wasn't terrible. It was up in the air and it was headed to the side of the ice, and not up the middle which is traditionally where "bad rebounds" live. Think about how absolutely perfect that timing had to be for Penner to get to the front of the net at just that moment and be able to bat the puck in, under the crossbar, before Howard could react. Also on the play, Ken Daniels says raises doubts about his own sexuality by saying, "and it's a hot guy who gets it!" as Penner scores.

Goal #3 -- Penalty kill, so we know right from here how fun this one is going to be. One of the biggest problems with the penalty kill is the fact that Detroit allows the cross ice pass way too easily. This time, Hemsky seams it across the ice for a one-timer, which is out of the 6'5 Jonathan Ericsson's reach so that should tell you that he had no idea where the cross ice man (aka "his" man) was standing. Ericsson did block the one-time attempt, and it went out front. Filppula engaged an Oiler for it and lost, and Howard tripped over his skates pushing to the middle of the ice (d'oh). The Oiler got it to Hemsky. Howard pushed over too far and left Hemsky a lot of net to shoot at, but still, Hemsky picked his corner. I do think this was Howard's worst goal of the game. Ericsson blew the cross-ice pass to start it all, but the defense did have the pass covered once Hemsky had the puck. Hemsky hesitated, and Howard pushed over too far -- I think tripping and falling may have thrown him off, because he had to get over a little quicker than he should have needed to. I think a little less of a push and a little more of a challenge would have been good, because Hemsky would have had less net to shoot at and he, theoretically, wouldn't have been able to pass it across and take advantage of Howard being aggressive. But aggressiveness typically goes hand in hand with confidence. Raise your hand right now if you think Howard was at all feeling confident before taking on this shot. Still, bad.

Goal #4 -- Bertuzzi fired an ill-advised pass to Rafalski (gasp!) who lost it to Penner (?) who springs Hemsky for a clear breakaway. Hemsky fakes, dekes to the backhand and puts it five hole. It wasn't the prettiest deke, but I let Howard off the hook. As I mentioned earlier, Hemsky suffers from superstar syndrome. He, like pretty much every roller hockey player I've ever played with, feels the need to make every breakaway look as effortless as possible. As a result, Hemsky has become quite adept at making goalies look stupid by keeping the puck on the ice and minimizing movements to keep goalies guessing. He's easily one of the best in the league at this. He's got one of the best career shootout percentages, and I can assure you that 80% of the shootout goals he's scored were in this same vein. He waits as long as he can to make a move, and then makes one quick move to open the goalie's five hole. He'll try to go five hole, and if he doesn't he'll try to put it off the post. Bertuzzi was the most at fault here, but I don't understand what Rafalski was doing either. Howard challenged, but Hemsky hit his five hole. Didn't look great, but there's not much he can do. It's Hemsky. Maybe on another player I'd look at it differently. But Hemsky made no mistake on the move, he knew exactly what he was going to do.

Goal #5 -- I'm not even going to get into this and try to sum up what happened one play at a time. Howard made a great point blank save on Penner to start off the play, and then things get messy as the Oilers have four or five whacks at a lose puck while Penner is down and out. All I want you to notice on this one is that Penner was all over Howard's legs, and the puck was loose for a couple of seconds. Tell me right now if Penner was Holmstrom, would he have been called for goaltender interference. And if the ref was Brad Watson, would the play have been allowed to continue that long? It was loose, so it's the right call, but this just seems like the kind of play Detroit gets screwed on a dozen times a season, Howard flailed and did all he could, but no Detroit defenseman was able to bail him out and Edmonton eventually scored. You can't really fault the defense, you can't really fault Howard. If you don't like the term "puck luck" look at a play like to this understand the difference between teams who catch breaks and teams who don't.

Is all of this fair? I need some feedback here. I spent about 45 minutes there watching each goal frame by frame about 15-20 times. To clarify, I'm not at all trying to argue that Howard played well. Because the goals were only part of it, Howard did a lot of random flailing and looked like an entirely different goalie than he did against Vancouver. But he got the job done, and I'd argue that we'd be hearing none of this if Howard only surrendered two or three.

Anyway, I'm not too happy with the Wings right now. I do think that the Wings are extremely lucky to get a point. I really want to leave the discussion for this open to Howard-only, but I do have a few other thoughts. First, Leino and Cleary have been invisible lately, and Leino was the guy I singled out for being the best in the Sweden games. Second, why did Datsyuk and Zetterberg shoot on Khabibulin. Especially against Datsyuk, Khabibulin is someone who has been miserable against Detroit over the years. He bites on dekes. Both of them took a shot from the slot like they were shooting on a goalie in warm ups. If they don't want to play in the shootout, they shouldn't be forced to play.

And the perfect icing on the cake is that Filppula broke his wrist and is out 6-8 weeks. Wooo! What now? Eurotwins are obviously broken up based on the fact that Helm, Abdelkader, Draper, and Williams are the team's only natural centers. Eaves and Helm were actually great against Edmonton so hopefully either one of them will get some ice time. So I'm not even going to play around with lines tonight, because they'll depress me.

What I do want to suggest is what happens if Detroit loses out the rest of this road trip? They'll be without Filppula still, and Franzen, -- and that's missing a lot of their high end offensive firepower. I almost wonder if Detroit would take a chance and just call up a guy like Cory Emmerton, Mattias Ritola, or even Dick Axelsson or Tomas Tatar, and just give them a few games on the top two lines. Why not? The need for high end skill is reaching desperate levels. These guys aren't NHL ready, which is very against how Detroit usually deals with young players. But Detroit doesn't usually have two of their top six forwards out during their worst season start in recent team history. Just saying, it might be time to think outside the box.

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