Neutral-Zone Crap: Caufield's father blasts Utica Comets AHL team

Plus, who are the best situational scorers in the NHL this season...The awful charging call on Ryan Lomberg last weekend...and a fourth line that is built for comfort, not speed

Cole Caufield was the subject of some taunting tweets from an opposing team over the weekend.

Paul Caufield has been around the game for a long, long time. His father, Wayne, is in the Wisconsin Hockey Hall of Fame. Paul himself is the all-time leading scorer at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point and his son Cole is a top prospect for the Montreal Canadiens. His other son, Brock, is in his senior year playing at the University of Wisconsin. He’s coached USA Hockey development teams and he manages an arena.

So he’s been around long enough to know that not everyone is going to have great things to say about him and his kids. He’s learned to tolerate the 30-year-old keyboard warriors who live in their mother’s basements and talk smack about his son without revealing their names. But when the snide and hurtful comments come from a professional hockey team, well, that’s where Paul Caufield draws the line.

While he was watching Cole play with the Laval Rocket of the American Hockey League Sunday night, he came across a tweet from the Utica Comets that hit a little too close to home. The fact that Cole was tagged in the tweet, which has since been deleted, had the senior Caufield fuming. A Tweet from the Comets’ social media account read:

The fact that the team followed up later with this tweet did nothing to placate him.

Utica Comets - WWWWWWW @UticaComets

For the record we know @colecaufield is the best player on the ice. Dude is unbelievable ‘Twas a joke

“I see this thing to my kid from a professional hockey team,” Paul Caufield said. “Bullying him. And I couldn’t believe it. I was like, ‘Is that a fake account or something?’ They didn’t just say it. They sent it to my kid. When professional sports teams do something like that, I think someone should be held accountable. With all the mental health issues the NHL is having, now you have an AHL team doing this stuff?”

It’s actually a good reminder how words can impact people in all walks of life, including professional sports. To the Utica Devils, it was probably all in fun, but the receiving end of what was supposed to be a harmless joke didn’t take it that way. And what’s far more important than the spirit in which a joke is delivered is the spirit in which it is received.

“There are a lot of pressures playing professional hockey, and you have a kid who is up (in the NHL) and struggling and he gets sent down,” Paul Caufield said. “As a 20-year-old kid, your mind is all over the map. He doesn’t need another professional sports team jabbing at him like that. That’s bad.”

FUN WITH NUMBERS: SITUATIONAL SCORING

You won’t find Pierre-Luc Dubois among the NHL’s top 25 scorers, but he’s getting some big goals for the Winnipeg Jets these days.

In hockey, there’s an old saying that suggests they don’t ask how, they ask how many. Well, we here at Hockey Unfiltered don’t just ask how many. We want to know how many mattered.

I’ve taken a few runs at this in the past, but every couple of weeks I’ll share with you a statistic that I find pretty intriguing. It measures situational scoring, specifically who produces offense at the most crucial times of the game. The results are in the chart below.

A couple of things to note, the most important being that goals are weighted more heavily than assists. Goals are worth one point, assists worth a half a point. That is how it should be in the real scoring race. This is the NHL, not the Capreol Silver Stick Tournament. Goals matter. It might be a bit confusing, so here’s a glossary.

FIRST: That denotes when a player scores the first goal of the game.
AHEAD: Any goal that puts a team ahead at any time of the game, including overtime.
TIED: Any goal that pulls a team into a tie at any point in the game.
COMEBACK: This is a goal that is scored when a team is trailing by two goals or more and is part of a series of goals that eventually ties the game.
WINNER: A game-winning goal, but not by the NHL’s definition. The game-winner in this category is the goal that puts a team ahead in a game to stay. So in other words, you could have a 7-6 game and maybe the first goal of the game was the game-winner.
OT: Overtime goal.
SO: Only shootout game-winning goals are counted in this category.
NHL: Where the player stands in the actual NHL scoring race.

So, in this system, some goals can be worth more than one and some assists can be worth more than a half-point. For example, the first goal of the game is automatically worth two points, one for being the first goal of the game, another for a goal that put that player’s team ahead in the game. If that goal happens to also be the game-winner, it’s worth three. If it happens to be the only goal in a 1-0 overtime game, it is worth four (first goal, ahead goal, game-winner, overtime goal).

Apologies for the way it looks, but this is a one-man operation here and that one man happens to be a luddite.

Now, a couple of things to remember here. First, I keep track of this stat myself by going through each game summary and I try my best for 100 percent accuracy. But if there are any mistakes, they’re small ones. It’s intended to give you a very good idea of the players who are coming through on the big goals.

You’ll notice some interesting things, I hope. For example, Connor McDavid is second in the actual NHL scoring race, but here he’s tied for 20th with the likes of Ryan Hartman, who sits tied for 116th in NHL scoring. Conversely, Pierre-Luc Dubois sits 38th in the actual NHL scoring race, but his penchant for scoring big goals puts him tied for fourth in situational scoring.

Let me know what you think. You might like it, you might think it’s stupid. The way I see it, it’s another way to measure a player’s value to a team.

YOU CALL THAT A CHARGE?

I was speaking with an NHL coach about the Ryan Lomberg charging major from Saturday night in the Florida Panthers’ game against the Carolina Hurricanes and he, like myself, was appalled. That wasn’t even a major penalty for charging, let alone a minor.

Rule 42, which deals with charging, says the following about dealing with goaltenders:

Well, watch the replay of the collision and decide for yourself whether Lomberg made a reasonable effort to avoid contact while clearly going for a 50-50 puck against Antti Raanta of the Hurricanes.

It continues to boggle the mind how the NHL insists on protecting goaltenders from clean hits while allowing its star players to be mugged on a nightly basis. Lomberg has been a healthy scratch for all but four of the Panthers’ games this season. If he lets up on trying to get that puck, my bet is coach Andrew Brunette would have told him to find a nice seat on the bench with a good view, because that’s where he would have been spending the rest of the game.

DRIBS AND DRABS

The Montreal Canadiens face their former teammate Phillip Danault tonight. They could probably use him right about now.

The Toronto Maple Leafs’ fourth line of Nick Ritchie, Jason Spezza and Wayne Simmonds just commenced a one-lap race around the rink. We’ll let you know who won in next week’s notebook…Phillip Danault, who couldn’t score to save his life for the Montreal Canadiens, would currently be tied for first on the Habs with three goals and would be second in points with eight…Interesting the guys who end up as coaches in the NHL. I covered both Travis Green and Derek King as NHL players when I chronicled the Leafs for the Toronto Star and they might have been the last players I would have pegged as future coaches. When King played junior, my good friend Mike Brophy, who covered the OHL for the Peterborough Examiner, used to refer to him as Derek ‘Burger’ King…I really wish Jack Campbell wouldn’t be so hard on himself. I get that players are their own worst critics, but too often he seems to personally put the blame on himself for losses. That can’t be great for his mental health…The Metropolitan Division is going to be wild to watch this season. The Pittsburgh Penguins are 4-3-3 and they’re in last place. Their .550 points percentage would put them fourth in the Central.