cale-makar - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights
Playoff hockey is stupid anyway
The NHL Playoffs gets its jollies from defying logic or explanation, and reveling in its unpredictability. That doesn’t mean it’s always a free-for-all, as hockey and its fans would have you believe. But it delves into the chaos and silliness more often than its brethren, that’s for sure....
The worst is the villain — in this case Aaron Rodgers — getting away with it
We here on the shores of Lake Michigan have been eating it from our neighbors to the north, the Green Bay Packers, for 25 years or so. When it goes on that long, you really stop dreaming of revenge or the tables ever turning your way, and certainly of things evening out. But there’s always a faint e...
Someone tell the Avalanche the season started a few months ago
Maybe Nathan MacKinnon is going to have to ban everyone from drinking soda again. Or let them drink soda, whatever isn’t what they’ve been doing this season. ...
The best from the start
There’s an old hockey axiom that any young defenseman needs 200 games in the NHL to come into his own. Unlike most of the sport’s theories, which are usually grizzled old horseshit that everyone has just gone along with out of terror for ever rocking the boat in any way, it holds some water. It’s a ...
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 ...
P.K. Subban was just a little ahead of his time
Hockey still can’t seem to recognize its need for a rockstar. While not the biggest problem with hockey’s culture at the moment (hi there Hockey Canada), the ethos that no player can stand out or be above the team keeps the game from having vibrancy or personality. And vibrancy and personality are w...
It’s also the start of NFL propaganda season
You always have to hope that the Sunday night game, or really any primetime NFL game, is a good one. Because when it’s bad, there’s just far too much dead time for Cris Collinsworth’s brain to drip out of his ear. I don’t mind Collinsworth as much as other people. He can be a little too “Everything ...
Hornets buy back favorite hoodie from Goodwill
When Kenny Atkinson ultimately passed on the Charlotte Hornets head coaching job, the thought was at least Mike D’Antoni will keep LaMelo Ball, Miles Bridges, and the rest of Buzz City entertaining. After the former Houston head coach’s meeting with part-owner Michael Jordan this week, it seemed all...
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 ...
Make it a best of 13
Usually, especially in a Stanley Cup Final, you need at least a few games before the level of play truly takes off. Coaches and teams want to try different things, chase their matchups, or keep things tight as they can to preserve already exhausted players until there is absolutely no choice. No one...
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 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...