ST. LOUIS — Trailing 3-0 early in their semifinal game against the Pacific Division, the hometown crowd roared when the Central Division — flush with four hometown Blues players — finally scored.
Then they realized it was actually Patrick Kane who had scored, and the boos that dominated Kane’s entire weekend in St. Louis returned.
“Had a lot of fun this weekend, and I thought that was a pretty cool moment,” Kane said. “Tried to like put my hand up to my ear to hear the boos, but then I was showing them that hey, I’m playing with the Blues players, I’ve got the same jersey as them. Just had fun with it.”
Kane scored again later in the glorified scrimmage to briefly tie the score at 5-5, but the Pacific then pulled away for a 10-5 win.
As all in attendance (and on the ice) are aware, none of the players are giving nearly 100 percent effort — Kane said he checked on one breakaway to see if there was a backchecking defenseman, only to discover there was no one nearby — but the Blackhawks’ All-Star did seem slightly annoyed at the Central Division’s continued struggles.
Since the NHL switched to the current format, they’re 1-5.
“Central can’t get over the hump,” Kane chuckled. “We won one last year and lost in the final. Every time you look at the roster, you always think you have a really good roster with some of the players that are on the team, and for whatever reason, we can’t do it.”
Tracking finally imminent
NHL commissioner Gary Bett-man announced Friday that the league will fully implement puck- and player-tracking technology starting in the playoffs, and then leaguewide at the start of next season.
All-Star Weekend announcements about tracking are nothing new, as the NHL has teased it for years but later quietly pushed back the timeline. This declaration feels official, though.
The technology is expected to transform the modern-day state of hockey analytics, which currently use a number of singular event-based metrics — like shot attempts (Corsi) and zone entries — as stand-ins for possession heat maps, which have been realistically impossible to create.
The computerized tracker will produce roughly 2,000 data points per second, however, providing far more conclusive and complete information about a game or a player than manual tracking does.
Kane favors playoffs change
Kane was asked Thursday about the NBA’s proposed playoffs format change to include a No. 8 vs. No. 9 play-in game.
He offered a different, but equally interesting, format change in response.
Kane’s idea — not that he’s the first one to suggest it — is a conference- and division-free 16-team playoff, with the No. 1 team in the league playing the No. 16, No. 2 playing No. 15 and so forth.
Even if those teams are as far apart as Boston and Los Angeles.
“I always found it was fun in playoffs to play some different teams,” he said. “I know they like the divisional matchup and the rivalries, but I think that’s where rivalries are created: in the playoffs. Obviously, Vancouver wasn’t in our division but we had such a big rivalry with them — whenever we’d play them in the regular season after our playoff series, it was a crazy game. I know they want the rivalries from the division, but I think you can create that rivalry from somewhere else.”
