hockey Page 15 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights
Hockey Canada is as rotten as you thought
Sporting higher-ups being brought in front of a government hearing isn’t restricted to these borders, as yesterday the CEO, president, and chief of the board of governors of Hockey Canada were questioned by Canadian MPs over a settled lawsuit by a woman claiming she was gang-raped by eight players w...
The most exhausted pro athletes are…
The funny thing about sportswriters complaining about how a professional season is too long is if you ask a person if they’re overworked, how many are going to say no? Any amount of work is too much. Interview me after a long shift or following a session with a therapist, and I’m ready to chase get ...
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 Rangers will almost certainly learn all the wrong lessons
To figure out where the New York Rangers are going after being dumped out on their ass by the Tampa Bay Lightning, it’s important to retrace how, and especially why, they got here....
9 Black Athletes Who Integrated Professional Sports
After Jackie Robinson started at first base for the Brooklyn Dodgers on April 15, 1947, ending a six-decade ban on Black players in Major League Baseball, opportunities slowly began to expand for athletes of color. Robinson’s historic achievement—a formative moment of the postwar civil rights moveme...
Looks like that’s it for the Boston Bruins, the dynasty that almost was
In every sport now, it seems one of the most fascinating things to watch is when an organization decides a particular roster has run its course. Thanks to salary caps everywhere (or just the totally not but really is a cap in baseball) there always comes a time when you have to pull that trigger as ...
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...
American Athletes who gave their lives in service
It may be rare these days, but there was a time when some of the best athletes in America went off to fight in wars. Some did so willingly, others were drafted....
Your AEW Double Or Nothing preview
It’s now a Memorial Day weekend tradition, as AEW has its other tentpole PPV (and they still call them “PPVs”) from Las Vegas. If you’re a weirdo like me, it’s no longer the holiday that kicks off summer but this event. It’ll actually be the start of a pretty frenzied summer of activity, given that ...
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....
The Flames cost us a truly transcendent moment
The going story out there has been that the NBA Playoffs have been kinda trash. It’s easy to see why people think that, because there’s been a ton of blowouts, and neither of the conference finals has produced a close game in eight tries. What we want out of the playoffs are moments and performances...
Craig Berube and the St. Louis Blues can’t even bring themselves to say racists are bad
I’m used to things turning ugly when the St. Louis Blues are involved. It’s St. Louis, after all. The NHL must be praying that the Avalanche punt them into space in Game 5 so they can continue to pretty much ignore everything that’s gone on here. It’s what the league does best, considering that Davi...
Nazem Kadri kept it in check, the Blues reverted to type and got it shoved where it belonged
At the top, this isn’t some kudos party for how Nazem Kadri reacted to the racist threats he received from Blues fans after Game 3. This is just about his response on the ice, and we’ll get to some deadbrained hockey reaction to the more serious stuff in a second. ...
If the Lightning can’t choke you out, Andrei Vasilevskiy will
The narrative, the easiest one to reach for which is generally what most hockey observers want to do before hitting the bar, is the two-time defending champ Tampa Bay Lightning must be playing great defense because the Florida Panthers have scored just three goals in three games. And while that’s no...
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...
Baseball is less fun when NO ONE MOVES THEIR BACK ROW
Sporting leagues should enact a per game minimum of fun-yet-stupid plays attempts. For the NBA, each squad should be required to take at least 15 30-foot plus jumpers. There should be at least two trick plays per team in NFL games. I don’t know what it is for soccer or hockey. Maybe it’s something a...
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...