Quick Hits: Jackson LaCombe, Refs & More

The surprise earlier in the week was the Jackson LaCombe Olympic selection. With Seth Jones unavailable, the Anaheim Ducks top-pair option got the call. The snubs many pointed to were Adam Fox and Lane Hutson, two defensemen who presumably should make the USA team to begin with.

The argument for LaCombe is that he’s the replacement for Jones. He’s a bigger-bodied defenseman who can step up in a third-pair shutdown role, something Hutson and Fox wouldn’t do.

The other layer to things is that LaCombe, for a while was an overlooked defenseman. He was a great player on a bad team. Now that the Ducks are good, people are starting to see how good he is, even if a lot of the games are on late at night for the East Coast fans. He’s the type of defenseman who many scouts and hockey minds are high on, and even if the stats aren’t there, the value is. It’s helped the Ducks become a top team in the Pacific Division and explains why Bill Guerin selected him.

The Refs Are Out to Get Your Team

The Tuesday night game between the Minnesota Wild and Montreal Canadiens saw one of the officials, Eric Furlatt, to be exact, miss a call. It was an obvious error where Lane Hutson was called for a trip when Marcus Foligno fell. It’s a call that everyone, including Furlatt, would admit was a botched call, yet the penalty stood, leaving many fans frustrated with the officiating.

This saga mirrors the Armando Galarraga perfect game or near-perfect game. For those who aren’t baseball fans, the story is that a pitcher had a perfect game going, and the final out was called safe by the umpire, and video review showed the runner was clearly out. The call stood, and it weighed heavily on Jim Joyce, the umpire who made the blunder. He admitted afterwards that he messed up the call and later apologized, something Furlatt also did afterwards.

The refs can provide great life lessons, especially when they make the wrong call to make the fans believe they are out to get them. They are a reminder of human error, which is one of the joys of sports. They show that in life, some things happen that are out of anyone’s control and can appear to put someone at a disadvantage but the good teams and players never use the bad calls as an excuse. The refs are also a reminder that sometimes you can make the best case and the best argument, a convincing one to be right, yet still lose the case.

More Quick Hits

Shane Wright is on the trade block. He was the fourth overall pick in the 2022 draft, yet never turned into the star the Seattle Kraken hoped he’d become. Another team will give him that chance, and with centers being hard to come by, don’t be surprised if a team overpays to get him.
LaCombe was the headline Ducks player to start the week but Beckett Senecke was the star to end the week. The rookie scored a hat trick in the 4-3 win over the Calgary Flames and has 18 goals on the season.
The Philadelphia Flyers canceled practice because of the snowstorm, and the New York Islanders also weren’t able to practice. The two teams play each other on Monday, and the fascination is what type of game will come from minimal practice (the assumption is a sloppy one at the start)
The Florida Panthers swept the three-game midwestern road trip and are back in the playoff mix. Nobody was counting them out anyway.
The New York Rangers have three losses in a row and only two wins in their last 10 games. That letter didn’t light a fire in that room, and things look poised to go from bad to worse.
The Edmonton Oilers put on a scoring clinic against the Washington Capitals on Saturday night. They scored six goals with Evan Bouchard scoring three of them while Connor McDavid scored two goals, five points, and the game-winner. McDavid has 90 points to lead the league, and there’s plenty of chatter about whether Nathan MacKinnon or Macklin Celebrini should win the Hart Trophy but at the end of the day, he remains the best player in the world.