It’s been a while since we checked on Everyone’s Favorite Goalie – well, I mean, Everyone’s Favorite Goalie before Terrier fans were introduced to the John Curry clone that is Kieran Milan. (Thanks to blog commenter “Ogre” for jogging my memory to cover this topic.)
When we left last BU’s former starting goalie, Curry had returned to the AHL after impressing in his NHL debut around Thanksgiving. He then went on to set the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton Penguins team record for number of wins in a season in March, ending the season with 37 (33 in the regular season, 4 in the playoffs.) Curry earned those 4 playoff wins by leading the Baby Penguins team through the first round of the playoffs against the Bridgeport SoundTigers, but not without suffering a knee injury in Game 5 of that series. (Of course, the SoundTigers are the team in which Curry participated in the now famous “goalie fight” last year. Can I just tell you that still, a year later, we play that video in the office when we’re having a particularly rough day? Or maybe it’s just me.)
Due to Curry’s injury, backup Adam Berkhoel received most of the starts in the Baby Pens series against the pesky Hershey Bears, which the Bears won on their way to the Calder Cup finals (in which they currently have a 3-1 series lead over the Cory Schneider led Manitoba Moose.)
But why is it then that a detail-oriented hockey fan might find Curry’s name on the active roster for the Pittsburgh Penguins in the Stanley Cup Finals? Because despite his knee injury, Curry was called up to be the third string goalie for the remainder of the playoffs for Pittsburgh. He is on what sports fans and writers call “the taxi squad.”
The taxi squad is a term used mostly in hockey and football, and means basically the same in both. In the NFL, the taxi squad equals the practice squad – reserve players allowed to practice and be a part of a team in the event of an emergency (if you lose two defensive ends in successive weeks, for example, you can call one up from the practice squad, where he’s already familiar with your coaching style, your playbook, and their teammates.) In my constant effort to make myself feel special, here is where I’ll mention that my second cousin Alan Zemaitis played on the taxi squad of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers a few years back. (Yep, the boy I played blocks with at that random family reunion when I was two technically played in the NFL. No, I haven’t seen him since I was two.)
Where the NFL and NHL differ when it comes to their taxi squad is the playoffs. Because the NFL has no farm league per se, it must never worry about sharing talent with their development system. (And when they did have a development system, NFL Europe, its season was separate from the NFL season.) However, in the NHL, your farm leagues (the ECHL and AHL) and your main league play their seasons concurrently. Thus, once one of your farm teams gets eliminated from post-season play, but you have other teams still playing, you can take a select group from the eliminated team and send them to the teams still in play.
Now, this does not mean that the Buffalo Sabres, who were not in the post-season at all, could send goalie Ryan Miller to AHL’s Portland, who were in the playoffs. The players on the taxi squad have to be on certain types of contracts – like Curry’s two-way deal we spoke of a lot last November – that allow them to be used on multiple teams within the same system.
The Penguins organization in the 2009 postseason is an excellent model in which to illustrate the “taxi squad” idea. The Penguins essentially have 3 teams – the ECHL Wheeling Nailers, the AHL’s Wilkes-Barre Scranton Penguins, and the NHL’s Pittsburgh Penguins. All three teams made their league playoffs. The Wheeling Nailers, home of former BU Terrier Boomer Ewing, were eliminated in the first round of their playoffs, while both the AHL and NHL Penguins won their first rounds. Thus Ewing (along with a few Nailers teammates) was sent to Wilkes-Barre Scranton in the event they were needed due to injury or other lack of players.
The AHL Penguins then were eliminated in the second round of the playoffs, while NHL Pittsburgh advanced. Wilkes-Barre Scranton then sent a selected number of players on certain types of contracts, including Curry, to Pittsburgh for the remainder of the playoffs, to act as emergency backups since the team they would normally be kept active with is no longer in play.
So why is it called a “taxi squad?” Well, for that we turn to the 1940s Cleveland Browns. According to legend, the Browns’ owner, who also owned a taxi business, attempted to circumvent NFL roster limits by employing extra players as “taxi drivers” with said taxi business. Those players probably never drove a taxi, but were ready in the event a Brown’s starter went down.
Therefore, despite injury and Wilkes-Barre Scranton being eliminated from the Calder Cup playoffs, Everyone’s Favorite Goalie has the opportunity to be called up during the Stanley Cup Finals. And if Marc-Andre Fleury keeps letting up softies like he did on Saturday evening, who knows what could happen if the Penguins-Red Wings series ends up in a seventh game…
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