canada Page 4 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

Zac Rinaldo finds out the NHL isn’t screwing around
It’s easy to get lost and spin out with the amount of bad news every day, so you have to take the nuggets of light where you can find them. A world-class dipshit like Zac Rinaldo being told to fuck right off by an NHL team and sent straight to the minors because he’s an anti-vax giblet is one of tho...

NHL players in the Olympics has always been better in theory than practice
Late last week, one of hockey’s more annoying fights seemed to have reached yet another conclusion, when the NHL, the NHLPA, and the IIHF reached an agreement on sending NHL players to the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing. As with everything these days, it’s COVID-dependent, but the NHL schedule has ...

Does Big Ben even have anything left to run it back with?
One last run for the Pittsburgh Steelers and future Hall of Fame quarterback Ben Roethlisberger. The last ride for the six-time Pro Bowler and two-time Super Bowl champion is about ready to take off into the regular season. But how much does Big Ben have left at this point? Enough for a last dance?...

A bunch of Deadspinners sit around Kraken wise
Chris Baud, Jon Hoefling and Jesse Spector got together to talk about the Seattle Kraken expansion draft, in which the team surprised many by not going for big-name players like Carey Price, Gabriel Landeskog, Vladimir Tarasenko or Jakub Voracek. What’s up with that?...

Unleash the Kraken
They won’t admit it, but there is a decent amount of pressure facing the Seattle Kraken ahead of their first year as an NHL franchise. ...

Habs’ Brendan Gallagher is probably having a worse week than you
A Montreal Canadien was robbed last night. I’m not talking about being robbed in a hockey sense. The Lightning definitely won the Cup convincingly. I’m talking about actual robbery — Ocean’s Eleven style....

Coupe de “ill”
The Stanley Cup Final is a huge letdown after the rip-roaring semifinals, which isn’t really a surprise, because when the Lightning beat the Islanders to set up their title defense against the Canadiens, it was something of a fait accompli....

This is what the Blackhawks have always been
It’s probably a story that you’ve heard a million times by now if you have any sports leanings, but it needs emphasizing. In the spring of 2010, the Chicago Blackhawks were the center of Chicago. Not just Chicago sports, but Chicago. It was a meteoric and shocking rise, simply because three years be...

NHL refs are turning a blind eye to everything again
It used to be that I thought NHL refs, of the four major sports at least, did the best job. Which wasn’t an accolade so much as just not crashing the car in quite such a fireball. Baseball umps make up their own strike zone while daring anyone to argue with them about it. It used to be that NBA refs...

Nazem Kadri cost the Avs everything
Hockey is a truly vicious sport, in that the team that wins the Presidents’ Trophy — i.e. the team that is best over the largest sample size — rarely “justifies” that achievement in the playoffs. You have to go all the way back to the Hawks in 2013, another shortened season, to find a team that was ...

16-year-old Taya Currie is first girl drafted in OHL history
Eventually, there’s an important question that needs to be answered, but for now, this is simply really cool....

Now the Leafs have the calamity they’ve always wanted
Because everything is outsized with the Leafs, the idea that they’ve been coughing up genuine chances at the Stanley Cup year-after-year has grown at the rate and scale of The Blob. Being the Leafs, everything around them is audibly multiplied by at least 12, so the sheer volume that is emitted from...

After 28 years, hockey finally corrects its Habs-Leafs mistake
The NHL has been through so many realignments that sometimes you wonder if it shouldn’t just do a random draw before every season (actually, that’s not a terrible idea). It’s when you get to the real aims of past realignments that things get more interesting. ...

Do you smell what Steph Curry is cookin’? W's playoff hopes upgraded to simmering
Draymond Green may think the play-in games to the playoffs are beneath him, but Steph Curry apparently is going to drag Green and the rest of the Warriors there by their collective dick if he has to....

Once again, for those in the back: Cancel the Canucks season now, because this proposed schedule is doo-doo
The NHL came to its senses a tiny bit by pushing back the Vancouver Canucks’ return to the ice, but a team that already has a minuscule chance of making the playoffs still will be asked to play a grueling gauntlet of a schedule to close out the season....

Overtime Elite hires Kevin Ollie as Head Coach and Director of Player Development
Before signing top high school talent, Overtime Elite just inked a deal with 13-year NBA player and NCAA championship coach Kevin Ollie....

In one Texas town, a dead Black man and a hockey team’s divisive ‘thin blue line’ jerseys
Marvin Scott III’s family wasn’t notified of his death in the Collin County Detention Agency until nearly 15 hours later, and then only by a text message from the medical examiner....

Vancouver Canucks in full-blown COVID crisis with more than 20 players, coaches on protocol list (Updated)
UPDATE (4/4/21, 12:24 E.T.): Initial reports of 14 positive tests within the Canucks organization have swelled to more than 20 confirmed infections among the team’s roster and coaching staff, according to TSN’s Darren Dredger:...

Avs announcer John-Michael Liles and his wine cave are a life goal
I’ve always liked John-Michael Liles. He was the type of player I had spent decades as a Hawks fan wishing they would have. When my professional life combined with my fandom life, my cohorts and I must’ve dreamed up 50 different proposals to pry him loose from Toronto or Carolina to bolster the Hawk...

It’s important that the NHL tried Lake Tahoe, even if it didn’t work
It’s always funny, and easy, to laugh at the NHL and their constant failed plans. No league can step on a rake as quickly and thoroughly as this one. And there’s something truly symmetrical about Gary Bettman declaring the sun his enemy. But their “ski weekend” in Lake Tahoe was probably still worth...