atlantic-division Page 2 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights
Let’s find a way the Boston Bruins might lose in the playoffs, if there is one
While Gary Bettman might not think there’s anything wrong with the current playoff system (he’s wrong!), it is pretty clear that this set-up has robbed March and the first half of April of most of its drama. We’re basically down to seeing whether a wheezing Penguins team (whoops!) can keep their lun...
The Toronto Maple Leafs load up for their first-round exit
The Atlantic Division in the NHL was already a hell gauntlet. With the Boston Bruins suddenly turning into a team of frost giants that can skate (then again, it’s probably likely frost giants could always skate, given the conditions in the Jotunheim), it’s only become more so. It’s just three teams ...
The NBA asked us to watch basketball that made load management a priority
At least the NBA, unlike some of its sporting league counterparts, keeps its CBA negotiations mostly under wraps. They’re going on right now, as both owners and players have the option of opting out of the current agreement by March 31, which would end the deal on June 30. One of the things to leak ...
![And now for the NHL trade deadline, which is much more boring than the NBA's [Updated]](https://images.deadspin.com/tr:w-900/850fb66a9734c1d7a647e4a05bbf391e.jpg)
And now for the NHL trade deadline, which is much more boring than the NBA's [Updated]
The NBA can shift its entire axis in a trade deadline — like Brooklyn shipping Kyrie Irving to Dallas and Kevin Durant to Phoenix — or in free agency. The NFL is starting to put more jazz into both its deadline and offseason. MLB could if any owner wanted to actually spend money outside of Queens. T...
The best games on the NBA schedule the week of Feb. 6 — the NFL season is over, get used to it
Sunday is the season finale for NFL 2022. All that is left until post-Labor Day is free-agent signings, trades, the NFL Draft, and position battles in practice. Sure some of you are looking forward to the speculation, but that can’t possibly compare to seven hours of actual game action. For those of...
Kyrie Irving tells Nets to trade him now or he leaves as a free agent
Brooklyn Nets heat magnet and resident conspiracy theorist Kyrie Irving wants the team to deal him elsewhere prior to the NBA trade deadline or he’ll leave as a free agent, as reported by ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski and The Athletic’s Shams Charania....
What does Jack Edwards have to be so smug about anyway?
The idea of a particular villain, a true public enemy, still exists for most hockey fanbases. More than any other sport, one player can send an opposing arena into hysterics by merely hopping over the boards. Rivalry as an idea in sports has calmed down over the years, given player movement and othe...
Bruins get a finger in the wind and then jammed in their own eye
As far as public statements go, this one rings pretty hollow:...
We’ll never be rid of the Bruins
The Boston Bruins will never be considered anything close to a dynasty. It’s probably sobering for Bruins fans how close they are to being one, if anything can actually be sobering for Bruins fans. Had Zdeno Chara hit the other side of the post in Game 1 against the Hawks in 2013, and if Brad Marcha...
The Buffalo Sabres are… fun? Is that what this says here? That can’t be right
You know you’ve gotten things unfathomably wrong for an unfathomably long time when you are held up as an example of why teams in any sport shouldn’t rebuild. That was always the call when a GM was threatening to tear it down from paranoid fans and media alike. “Look at the Buffalo Sabres! They’ve b...
Maple Leafs have no bottom
I am as guilty as anyone else of turning the NHL into “How The Maple Leafs Turn.”You spend enough time commenting on how everyone’s always commenting on the Leafs, and well, you’re then part of the problem. But every time the Leafs do something, it’s generally causing some sort of ripple given their...
The Maple Leafs are going to try again with Matt Murray and that’s great for the rest of us
The NHL season kicks off for real tomorrow night (the two appetizer games in Prague don’t count, especially because they involved the Sharks), or as it’s known for most of the hockey covering world, “Six months of how does this affect the Leafs?” Yep, the sport’s biggest soap opera, the question of ...
The Florida Panthers are apparently done being good or interesting
We’re still very much in a time where teams in any sport are going to overreact to playoff results. They have 82 or 162 games of sample size where they play everyone and aren’t confined to one matchup with one team at one time with one status of health, but whatever happens in four to seven games st...
That’s the difference between the goalies
Hockey — as weird, random, and boorish as it can get — is a pretty simple game at times. The storylines coming out of Game 3 were that the Tampa Bay Lightning authored some market correction to get back into the Stanley Cup Final after a 6-2 win to get the series to 2-1. And with no team having won ...
The NHL finally gets its era-shifting Final with Lightning vs. Avs
Hockey being what it is, mostly weird and random, rarely throws up the two best teams in the NHL’s showpiece, the Stanley Cup Final. Sometimes we get close, and most seasons it’s actually hard to decipher who are clearly the best teams. With shootouts and overtime goofiness affecting the standings, ...
The third period has become to the Rangers what the third quarter is to the Celtics
The New York Rangers lost their first game at Madison Square Garden during these Eastern Conference finals to the Tampa Bay Lightning, 3-1 last night. They’ve scored one goal in the last seven-and-half periods, and they haven’t really deserved much more than that....
The waiting is the hardest part
The Colorado Avalanche are waiting. And waiting for a Stanley Cup Finals opponent hasn’t treated those favorably in returning from mini-vacations in the past. We’re finishing up the 35th NHL postseason in which first-round games are contested as a best of seven, starting in 1987 and featured every y...
The Tampa Bay Lightning have channeled Admiral Ackbar to get back into the series
Perhaps the biggest sign that a team has entered its own class in the NHL is that it can play any way it has to, or wants to, to win. Whatever you ask of them, they have an answer. Some pretenders like the Hurricanes, once you take away their preferred style — in the case of the Canes it’s dump it i...
Looks like that’s it for the Boston Bruins, the dynasty that almost was
In every sport now, it seems one of the most fascinating things to watch is when an organization decides a particular roster has run its course. Thanks to salary caps everywhere (or just the totally not but really is a cap in baseball) there always comes a time when you have to pull that trigger as ...
Is the NHL’s Presidents’ Trophy curse real?
The Florida Panthers breezed through the first round of the playoffs and then got bounced from the second round so fast we barely had time for the annual discourse about the Presidents’ Trophy and whether it’s a curse for a team’s Stanley Cup hopes....