Hockey Page 551 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

Golden Knights fan tries to get on TV, gets stiff-arm from reporter for his troubles
It was a manic Monday night for the Florida Panthers, as their magical run to the Stanley Cup Final, spearheaded by goaltender Sergei Bobrovsky and rising star Matthew Tkachuk, may have finally run out of pixie dust. Before the Golden Knights’ efforts to stop the Panthers from winning four out of fi...

The Columbus Blue Jackets hate their players
In the discussion of most irrelevant franchises in North American sports, the Columbus Blue Jackets would be high on the list, if not on top of it, if anyone could remember them enough to add them. You’d think they’d take some inspiration from one of their former fellow whos-its, the Denver Nuggets,...

Capitals chose logic over emotion with Spencer Carbery hire
As the NHL’s regular season ended, the coaching carousel opened up. Just like in every other recent instance in every sport, trendy names pop up. Some latch on, some don’t. In college football, it was Brent Venables for a while. In the NFL, Eric Bieniemy will be that guy until he’s a head coach. And...

What are the Florida Panthers, really?
The NHL will be more than happy to hook their star to an NBA narrative, so while all the fans north of the border bitch about a Stanley Cup Final between the Florida Panthers and Vegas Golden Knights, the offices probably aren’t upset about getting linked through dual South Florida 8-seeds playing f...

The Florida Panthers changing their narrative is the story of the NHL playoffs
The Florida Panthers were written off. Down three games to a lowly one to the Boston Bruins, the most dominant regular-season team of all time, needing two wins in their barn to even get out of the first round. Since that 6-2 loss at home to the B’s, the Panthers are 11-1. Three straight over the Br...

Dallas Stars’ fans made themselves look like imbeciles
How bad did the Stars’ fan base need to mess up to be the most despicable thing that happened on Tuesday night inside American Airlines Center? Jamie Benn’s cross-check to the face of a downed, prone Mark Stone was horrific, and likely set the final dominoes in motion for Dallas being eliminated in ...

Carolina Hurricanes and Dallas Stars haven’t thrown in the towel yet, unlike their NBA counterparts
We could be breaking out the brooms for all four NHL and NBA conference finals. The Denver Nuggets finished off the LeBron-LeLakers and the Miami Heat will eventually put the Celtics out of their misery on the hardcourt side of things....

What does the NHL have to gain by readmitting Joel Quenneville to the league?
It wasn’t hard to imagine the NHL getting back to this point. There are a couple teams in big markets — i.e. New York and Toronto — that have fallen under the dreaded canopy of “need to learn how to win in the playoffs.” There’s a feeling out there that these teams’ stars lack some sort of killer in...

Latest NHL marathon game should’ve barely lasted past regulation
You know that NHL playoff game that ended right before 2 a.m. Eastern? The one where Carolina and Florida still looked composed after nearly 140 minutes on the Raleigh ice and a Matthew Tkachuk goal with 12.7 seconds left in the fourth overtime, saving those brave souls who didn’t pass out from more...

Where are the Arizona Coyotes going?
The only thing more exciting to hockey fans than a player in free agency is an entire franchise going into free agency, which it now feels like the Arizona Coyotes have just done. And they certainly don’t mind treading all over the feelings of whatever Coyotes fans are left. It’s a cruel world, but ...

The Toronto Maple Leafs are about to do something stupid
The rest of the employees of the Springfield Power Plant gathering around the control center of Sector 7-G, with Lenny narrating for everyone the normal practice, “Get ready everyone, he’s about to do something stupid…” is what the NHL is now, gathering around The Six and wondering just what the Tor...

Jonathan Marchessault’s natural hat trick cements Golden Knights as Stanley Cup favorites
The Edmonton Oilers’ potential to turn back the clock officially stopped on Sunday night. Despite having two of the top five players in the league, a deep playoff run wasn’t in the cards, again. Three straight uninterrupted goals came in the second period off the stick of Jonathan Marchessault in th...

Gabriel ThreeYaksAndADog will miss all of next season, and the Colorado Avalanche era may already be over
In the salary-capped NHL, you get one, or two shots with one roster, and then you basically have to reshuffle everything around your core stars, and hope that new hand still produces a flush. It’s a constant game of draw poker. ...

It’s not supposed to be that easy, Connor
The NHL playoffs like to revel in its celebration of depth and the unsung. Everyone gets a shift, so everyone had better do a job or more, and the puck can bounce onto anyone’s stick or off anyone’s ass to change a game, a series, a whole spring. It is not always a stage for the leading men to provi...

Jeff Halpern needs to be the Washington Capitals' next head coach
Five years since the Washington Capitals’ Stanley Cup victory. Zero playoff series won since. Two head coaches, one internal promotion, and an experienced outsider since becoming champions didn’t pan out. And with one of the oldest cores in the NHL, combined with the rest of the league outpacing the...

The Stanley Cup will be lifted by the Oilers-Golden Knights victor
Among a final eight that feels like a changing of the guard in hockey more than most years, with old standbys proving their age by exiting the ice until the fall, the duo of the Las Vegas Golden Knights and the Edmonton Oilers stand out like a sore thumb. Not necessarily because they don’t also repr...

The New York Rangers eat dirt like the frauds they’ve always been
It’s important to review recent New York Rangers history to know why they ended up with a handful of their own dicks in the first round, to a New Jersey Devils team that is far more equipped for what wins in the NHL these days. Two years ago, James Dolan took a break from his normal paint-huffing ro...

Completely blowing it in the first round is good for business, history says
The loyalists in the overpriced seats at Boston’s TD Garden for Game 7 of the Eastern Conference first-round should’ve-been shellacking between the hometown Bruins and barely made it into the postseason Florida Panthers went from agitated, to full-on bittah in booing the 135-point getters in the reg...

The Devils go old school
Hockey looking back on its history is not usually a good thing. The game is better now, it’s faster now, there is more skill than ever before, and the sport is better off now that it’s moved out of its bar brawl past, even if Flyers fans still base their entire existence on thinking that’s how the g...

The Maple Leafs won the game they should have lost, which they never do
It’s almost always futile to look for “signs” or “omens” in playoff hockey. The next bounce off someone’s ass doesn’t really care what happened before, and apparently, this season, neither will the next call the ref misses but still manages to leave your D-man maimed, and the opposing forward an ope...