canada Page 4 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights
Claude Giroux will be leaving Philly soon unadorned, as their best tend to do
Rarely do you get the symmetry of a player playing his 1,000th game in the NHL, all with the same team, at home, while it also serves as their last game in that uniform before he’s traded to a contender. It’s hard to not see the diverging stories. A player giving his entire career to an organization...
Hockey was never going to eradicate its racism problem instantly
It would be easy to label it “just another weekend in hockey.” And that’s what it was, as the NHL’s two minor leagues dealt with incidents of blatant and horrific racism....
Sorry Nate MacKinnon, but the NHL All-Star Game should be a Participation Game
What should an All-Star Game be: an opportunity to see the best players all playing in the same game, or a celebration of the sport and league that brings fans together?...
Let’s get back to a hockey World Cup
Now that it’s official and the NHL players won’t be going to the Olympics, some disappointment is understandable. The idea that Connor McDavid won’t play for Canada in a best-on-best tournament until his 30s is pretty ridiculous. Or that we may never get that line with him and Sidney Crosby. This to...
The Premier League’s holiday schedule is wonderful, and also needs to be ended
It wasn’t a huge shock that the BIG MEETING today with the Premier League clubs, managers, and assorted captains resulted in no change whatsoever. The Premier League, and those below it, will attempt to plow through the country’s latest COVID spike, as it decimates rosters, to try and preserve as mu...
The only question for the Canadiens is what took so long?
So If you feel like you heard some faint swearing in the air, and it vaguely sounded French (though Quebecois only vaguely sound French), don’t worry, you weren’t alone....
Your regular reminder that Connor McDavid is magic
On the night that Edmonton retired Kevin Lowe’s number 4, the Oilers and Rangers paid tribute the best way they could, by reviving the 1980s with an 11-goal thriller....
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. ...