The Leafs shit the bed last night. There’s no other way to say it. In fact they shit their own bed and every other bed in whatever Florida hotel they were in.

It happens. One might say: shit happens.  And to cheer ourselves up, there’s nothing like pointing and laughing at the misfortune of others.

I took a look at the entire NHL season so far to find some of the worst games played this year.  Just a few days ago, I watched some of the Avalanche - Coyotes epic battle, and I have never seen so many people fall down in such a short period of time.  Well, not since the warmups for the game, anyway.

Little remarked upon bit in this delightful* bit of business is how Doan doesn’t bother to stop and see if he just destroyed his team’s teenage defensive star, he just goes to get himself looked at.  Jake Chychrun is a brick shithouse, so maybe it’s not a surprise that he went on like nothing happened but Doan missed part of the first period.  Lucky Doan was okay, frankly.

The Coyotes scored one goal, or was it the Avalanche? Well, who cares, they snoozed to a one goal game while people who’d paid actual money to watch them fall over their own skates at least had lots to laugh at.

* Only because no permanent damage seems to have been done.

But surely that’s not the worst game of the year? There has to be shittier games than that.

Remember the 10-0 Montréal loss to Columbus.  That was a good one. That 10 goal deficit is the worst goal deficit of the year.  Couldn’t happen to a better team.  They had to listen to the cannon go off 11 times too (one goal was disallowed).

That was at least exciting (and funny) for one side.

You can shit the bed by being epically outshot too. And the Vancouver Canucks hold that honour this year. On January 6, they were outshot 84-21 (all situations Corsi) by the Calgary Flames.  That’s the biggest Corsi differential of the year so far.  What makes this even better is Vancouver won the game 4-2.  So we can laugh at both teams.

The dullest, shittiest games are the ones where no one does anything. That Avs-Yotes snorefest was one of those, but the worst, the game with the least total shots of any kind this year was — you know who was in this game don’t you? You do. It was the New Jersey Devils beating the Flyers three days before Christmas 4-0.  The total all-situations Corsi in the game was 67, three more than the differential in the Flames-Canucks game.

That’s twenty-something shots per period for both teams combined.  That is just slightly more than one shot per minute of game play. Or a single shot in less than half the shifts played in the game.  Did they just lie down and sleep after the Devils got their lead?  These teams are supposed to hate each other, they’re supposed to be epic rivals to rival all the other epic rivalries in that division.  Cory Schneider got a shutout though.  On 16 saves.  That was a shitty game.

Speaking of goalies, let’s pick on some that aren’t Leafs goalies teaming up to let in seven, which the Leafs have now done twice.

The biggest goalfest of the year was the 8-7 Penguins win over the Capitals on January 16.  But the worst save percentage (for the game) came four days later when the Capitals tuned up the St. Louis Blues 7-3 on only 18 shots on goal.  Jake Allen and Carter Hutton split the game nearly evenly and had save percentages of .600 and .625.  Now that’s shitty goaltending.

Sometimes you’re good in net and it just doesn’t matter.  There’s been one scoreless tie that’s gone to a shootout this year and that was a Montréal - Edmonton game on February 2.  Edmonton won that one, and really, if you play 65 minutes and can’t score on the Oilers, how shitty a team are you?

What’s your favourite memory of someone else’s misfortune?  Tell us about who else was shitty this year so we can forget all about last night.