Cale Makar Page 2 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights
The Washington Capitals only exist for one reason now
The NHL spent a good decade trying to revolve their league around a Pittsburgh Penguins-Washington Capitals rivalry, and more to the point, a Sidney Crosby-Alex Ovechkin one. Unable to come up with any original ideas, because it’s the NHL, it did its best to copy the Bird-Magic dynamic from the NBA ...
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. ...
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, ...
Nazem Kadri is in the Oilers’ shirts instead of his own head
On a night where suffocating defense was being celebrated across the sports spectrum thanks to the Celtics David Copperfield’ing the Warriors in the 4th quarter, the night’s other playoff action saw Nazem Kadri prove what a force he can be when he’s not letting his brain drip out of his ear....
Fight fire with fire, burning with fear
You have to hand it to Avalanche coach Jared Bednar. He does have one of the best checking centers in the NHL at his disposal in Nazem Kadri. It would be easy, explicable, and defensible to just toss Kadri over the boards every time the Oilers put Connor McDavid out there, and be done with it. After...
The stars come out in the NHL
Hockey followers love to taut that not only is hockey the ultimate team game — everyone gets a shift after all — but that the playoffs highlight this. It’s somewhat true, though it’s usually a top-end player or goalie taking home the Conn Smythe as the playoff’s most valuable player when all is said...
Connor Ingram goes from third string goalie to Nashville’s best bet at an upset
It may have been an impossible task after all. What more could Connor Ingram have done to stop the Colorado Avalanche other than grow a third arm or leg? In his second-ever NHL start, and first in the Stanley Cup Playoffs, Ingram went from Nashville’s No. 3 goaltender to Patrick Roy overnight. He’ll...
Before the playoffs start, we should take a sec to marvel at what the Blackhawks accomplished
No, that’s not being such a shitfuck organization that they’ve basically gotten themselves erased from NHL history or PR. Watch any of these ads for the Stanley Cup playoffs, and you won’t see one highlight or shot of a Hawk. Even though they won the Cup three times, or were the most popular team fo...
The Avs are really going to trust this to Mr. Darcy?
Once again, the Colorado Avalanche are the Showtime of the NHL. They were last year, though last season being what it was it doesn’t really count for evaluation/analytic purposes. But reverting back to an actual NHL schedule (or something closely resembling one) hasn’t slowed the Avs much. They pick...