connor-mcdavid Page 3 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights
Here come the Pens again, falling on our heads like a memory
The NHL season has been invigorated by some surprise teams and new blood announcing themselves as either contenders now or soon to be. The New Jersey Devils sit atop the Metropolitan by open lengths, redefining what the Devils mean as a whole with their obscene amounts of speed and skill. The Dallas...
Is it time to say hello to the Kraken?
It was wholly unfair to the Seattle Kraken that they had to be the expansion team to follow the Vegas Golden Knights. The Knights warped everyone’s view of what an expansion team should be, reaching the Stanley Cup Final in their very first year. The Knights took advantage of a swath of moronic NHL ...
Tom Brady and the infinite sadness
Thursday Night Football is usually a pretty sad occasion as ritual, given the mess that it tends to be with the short rest and everyone still very much sore from the game they played just four days prior, and the lack of practice time dulling any sharpness. But last night was particularly acute. ...
No surrender in Calgary
One of the familiar tropes in the NHL is the “poor ol’ Canadian team.” Lord Stanley’s chalice hasn’t been parked north of the border in 29 years, and there must be a reason for it. After all, the first two Great Bettman Lockouts were somewhat based on the fact that Canadian teams couldn’t have their...
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 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...
This is probably as close as Connor McDavid will get
There’s not much more that Connor McDavid can do. For that matter, Leon Draisaitl should be attached to that lament permanently now, after he also averaged two points per game in the playoffs with maybe two functioning limbs. They’re the only players to average two points per game in the playoffs ov...
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...
Auston Matthews is nearing an elite, rare echelon for American hockey players
The NHL’s most prestigious individual award was first handed out in 1924. Calvin Coolidge just became President of the United States. It took until Barack Obama’s final year in The White House for someone born and raised in America to win the Hart Memorial Trophy, the league’s most valuable player a...
Is the NHL now rigging games for Connor McDavid?
OK, obviously not. But maybe?...
This looks like Connor McDavid’s time
This could finally be it. The NHL is starving for its next superstar. Alex Ovechkin and Sidney Crosby’s first-round exits with Washington and Pittsburgh left a void for a television-ratings hockey juggernaut....
Oilers enjoy the sounds of silence at expense of Calgary crowd
It’s tempting to try to glean some kind of lesson from big games. We all try to do it, all the time, just as fans. The playoffs are not all that different from the final few episodes of a prestige television series’ season. You know there’s not much left, and you’re looking for any clues you can get...
Here’s to feelin’ good all the time
The NHL’s second round hasn’t gotten off to the most rousing start. The Lightning did that efficiency thing where they play just well enough for just long enough to win, even if it did involve Nikita Kucherov turning Aaron Ekblad into a tetherball set. The Avalanche looked unstoppable, and the Range...
Gary Bettman must make the Oilers wear their ‘80s jerseys for the second round
Much like the Canadiens-Leafs series last year, this is why the NHL rejiggered its playoff system nearly a decade ago. To get things like the Edmonton Oilers vs. the Calgary Flames in the playoffs. OK, Gary Bettman’s NHL was only really concerned with getting Penguins-Capitals as often as possible a...
We have a new standard for pants-filling
When it comes to truly historic pants-shittings, they generally get to be known simply by the name of the place they took place. Say “Belo Horizonte” to any fan with even a reasonable amount of soccer knowledge, and they’ll know it was Germany 7-1 Brazil. Except that was a deeply flawed Brazil team ...
Darnell Nurse’s dangerous headbutt warrants suspension
Why athletes decide it’s a good idea while wearing helmets to throw a headbutt, I’ll never understand. It only risks concussions for both temples involved. Darnell Nurse’s plunge at Los Angeles Kings’ defender Phillip Danault was dirty and downright idiotic. It should cost the Edmonton Oilers’ assis...
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...