NHL 2011-12: Early Season Review

A few of my random thoughts and observations a month-and-a-bit into the 2011-12 National Hockey League season:

For a team without it's best player - Sidney Crosby - since the closing months of last season, and it's second-best player - Evgeni Malkin - for a fair amount of time to open this campaign, the Pittsburgh Penguins aren't slowing down. It's a good hockey team now. Imagine how much better it is when Crosby gets back?

Detroit's fast start and subsequent collapse has been one of the big stories in the West. You have to assume that it's just a funk that the Red Wings are going through. I mean, with a roster that features Nicklas Lidstrom, Henrik Zetterberg, Johann Franzen and Pavel Datsyuk, they aren't going to be bad forever. Playoff appearances are a part of the Wings' DNA. It's a long season. They'll figure it out.

Boston Bruins fans chant "Thank you, Kessel," whenever Tyler Seguin scores goals against the Maple Leafs, who gave up the pick that snared Seguin to Boston in the famous Kessel trade. Lately, that chant's been heard a lot. Seguin has already scored his first hat trick - against Toronto, naturally - and looks like being a superstar of the game for a long time to come. Playing with the likes of Patrice Bergeron and David Krejci certainly won't harm the kid's development!

Crosby Watch has taken on a life of it's own. I've lost count of the number of articles and tweets I've read promising that Crosby will be "back on the ice this week" yet still the Pens captain remains on the sidelines. Concussion is not an exact science, of course, and conditions can apparently change rapidly from day-to-day. The fact is, not even the doctors looking at Sid on a daily basis are completely certain of his comeback date. In the mean time, let the media circus begin!

Edmonton's young line of Jordan Eberle - Taylor Hall - Ryan Nugent-Hopkins is scaring people all over hockey. And with good reason. Nugent-Hopkins' hat trick vs. Vancouver in the Oil's losing effort was spectacular stuff. These three kids, they have all the moves, and probably make each other better, too. Just think, as good as they are now, these are still kids with lots to learn about life in the National Hockey League. Oh yeah, they're going to get better!

Dallas are best in the West? Yeah, it felt weird writing that, but the Stars are leading the Western Conference right now and they're playing good hockey. Jamie Benn, Loui Eriksson and Kari Lehtonen are all playing out of their skins. Who said the Stars needed Brad Richards to create offense?

Can't believe that Columbus - a league-worst 2-11-1 at time of typing - weren't the first team to jettison their coach in Season 2011. Scott Arniel certainly deserves to be gone, but St Louis got in first, firing their head coach, the unfortunate Davis Payne. Unfortunate because Payne was a guy who had his team just one game below .500, had some key injuries and hadn't had many home games. That's a tough pill to swallow. The Blues must've been ultra-desperate to get Ken Hitchcock.

What Columbus needs to do immediately and without much more thought on the matter is sack their coach and the GM. The league's second-highest payroll has done nothing but look horrible since the outset. Whatever sort of a team they've put together, it's backfired spectacularly, and not many people saw it coming. So much for a new era in C-Bus. It's looking worse than ever before for pro hockey in Ohio.

Fantastic to have the Winnipeg Jets back in hockey. The league really is a better place for having a classic franchise name back and skating, as compared to a franchise - the Atlanta Thrashers - going absolutely nowhere quickly. The big different between Atlanta and Winnipeg is the fan support. It's overwhelming to say the least. That first home game that the Jets ended up losing to Montreal, you'd swear the team had won the game and the Stanley Cup the way the home fans cheered their team. They were people just glad to have top-line hockey back in their neighnbourhood, and it was good to see.

Also fantastic is hearing Dave Strader, one of the most criminally-under rated hockey play-by-play voices in the world, calling games weekly for VERSUS, whose coverage has the sharp look of NBC, and whose name will switch to the NBC Sports Network on January 2. The combination of Strader and Brian Engblom is perfect. Now, to get rid of Pierre McGuire...