In cycling they call it “burning a match.” As you plot out your race strategy, as you look at the twists and turns in a course and speculate where everyone else will hit a choke point, you think about these matches. They’re a metaphor for how much “good”…how much “win” you have in you. Maybe you’ve got 10 matches heading into an upcoming race. Maybe you’re stronger…or better caffeinated…or more robustly fed the night before…and you’ve got 12.
Either way, the theory goes that you enter a bike race with a fixed amount of matches to burn. Where and when you burn them is the difference between hitting your target finish and spending another week between races tearing apart your preparation.
As a guy who’s spending a hell of a lot of time on the bike these days, training for what will be an epic ride through Leadville, Colorado later this summer, I can’t help but carry the analogy into tonight’s game against Colorado. I can’t help but wonder if we came into this season with a set number matches and that we’ve cooked through the box already. …that we burned them all up tearing out across a 23 game streak.
My hope is that the theory breaks, that it’s deemed bullshit, that I get ridiculed for even considering how a two-wheeled analogy could carry over into the final stretch of a NHL season, but hear me out…
We have had an absolute hell of a run at the Joe the past few weeks. Before the Vancouver game on Thursday, it had been eons since Wings fans took put their hard earned dollars down on a pair of home game tickets and walked away anything but delighted. Major shit has happened in the world while the Wings were busy winning 20+ at the Joe. In that timespan, we’ve seen posture shifts in our country’s international policy. We’ve seen political candidates rise and fall out of relevancy in their bid or the White House. 23 games represents enough time to start your own home brewing enterprise, get to third base with even the most modest of women and fall in and out of love with any sample size of auto-tuned #1 hits that…by the end of tonight’s game…will have been lost forever to the dustbin of history, in that corner of the junkyard where all the no-talent, marketing machine produced non-artists go to fade into oblivion. The same corner, for the record, where we thought Kyle Quincey’s career was headed when we opted to keep him around instead of some kid out of Notre Dame.
Do the Wings have a fixed set of matches this year? And if so, have we burned them all up?
The skeptic says yes. He looks at the statistics and realizes how difficult it is to keep this pace at home for the rest of the year. He looks at the impact Pavel’s absence had earlier this week and prays, hopes, that the Wings can find a way to push past that loss…temporary as it’s projected to be…even though in the back of his mind he struggles to square how adding Buckets Cleary and Tiberius Howard wasn’t enough to bridge the gap between Pavel and Non-Pavel (if you read that “non” without the French accent, please revisit).
The optimist shrugs all this bullshit off. He doesn’t believe in matches. He doesn’t believe in a fixed number of wins a team is capable of at home. There’s no ceiling for him. There is only an elite goaltender, a budding re-falling in love with a former prospect and a third line that everyone from Babs to HSJ can’t stop blowing.
The question now, is do YOU believe in matches? …or is all this bullshit about probabilities, percentages and the likelihood of ripping off another massive home stand just loser-talk?
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