hockey Page 21 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights
Jack Hughes is quietly having a historic season
The buzz over the 2019 draft seems quaint now. Or it did. Back then, especially because it involved the rivals Devils and Rangers trying to race to the bottom to get one of the top two picks, it picked up more buzz than hockey lotteries normally do. No, it wasn’t the McDavid-Eichel draft (and the Ei...
College hockey is just as mad in March
You and I have probably been spending the last week the same way, staring at our monitors watching St. Peter’s destroy any chance we had at winning our office bracket challenge. We’ve been so enticed by the upsets, bracket busters, and magical run by Michigan (with Juwan Howard returning to the side...
The Golden Knights are so desperate they tried to trade a player they couldn’t trade
It was only a few days ago we chronicled that increasingly desperate situation the Golden Knights find themselves in. They have nothing more than a crimp grip on the last wildcard spot in the Western Conference, with the Dallas Stars having four games in hand on them just a point behind. ...
This Rickard Rakell pickup is very Penguins-y
The NHL trade deadline passed about an hour ago, and it wasn’t the most boring in the history of the game but it wasn’t the most exciting. The Bruins got better with Hampus Lindholm coming to town a couple days ago, except Hampus! Hampus! might not be that good anymore. The Avalanche, already the le...
Claude Giroux trade signifies the Flyers are a total failure
Knowing that the dagger is coming doesn’t make it hurt any less....
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...
The Golden Knights are running out of racetrack
Normally, a team five seasons out from its creation fighting for a playoff spot would be a mark of success. They’ve built and grown over four years, taken their lumps, accrued draft picks and developed their own, and were starting to see the first signs of something real. But nothing is normal about...
Aaron Judge evades vaccination question
Players in Major League Baseball continue to show their ass, and it looks like their teams are growing weary of it. NYC mayor Eric Adams reiterated that there will be no exceptions in NYC’s restrictions for private employees, and it’s particularly a problem for the Yanks and Mets because those playe...
Baseball is back to not caring what you think
You know, just for a second there, I thought baseball might give everyone a little time to enjoy the lockout being over, to soak in the excitement of the anticipation of spring training games and the season that will start right on its heels. To feel the reflected heat of the Arizona and Florida sun...
Maybe Jack Eichel should shut up
Jack Eichel returned to Buffalo last night, his first game in America’s basement refrigerator since his trade to Vegas. It did not go well, much like pretty much anything in Eichel’s career hasn’t. The Knights lost 3-1 to the Sabres, and losing is something they’ve been doing a fair bit of since Eic...
Devil’s Advocate: Banning the shift shows that MLB is moving in the right direction
I’ve never had too strong an opinion on whether or not Major League Baseball should ban the shift....
Singles were already available
Negotiations in MLB didn’t really get any better yesterday. There was buzz that the players gave up even more in their quest to get the luxury tax threshold raised, even though they still haven’t really asked for any guarantee that more than a few teams would even approach it. This was met with mor...
It’s happening to the Maple Leafs again
Even though we Chicagoans don’t get a spring — it’s winter until one day somewhere in May when it’s just suddenly summer and we’re all instantly drunk outside — that doesn’t mean we can’t recognize the signs of spring approaching elsewhere. Sure, we’ve been robbed of one of them in spring training. ...
What of Alex Ovechkin now?
I haven’t made any attempt to hide my enjoyment of Alex Ovechkin when writing about him in the past. I find his pursuit of Wayne Gretzky’s goal record to be one of the more fascinating aspects of the NHL right now. His metronomic yet stratospheric production over 17 years now is really astonishing, ...
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...
There’s some historic goaltending going on in the NHL right now
The NHL would love for you to believe that Toronto’s 10-7 win/what-have-ya over Detroit on Saturday — and to a much lesser extent the hapless Devils and Hawks hurling themselves at each other to the tune of an 8-5 scoreline on Friday — as evidence that it’s goal-apalooza on the ice these days. The r...
It’s time to crack down on racist and abusive fan behavior at the high school level
Since spectators have returned to high school sporting events, hate speech and verbal abuse from fans has become more noticeable, if not more common. It’s almost as if the decline in social interactions reset fans to their baser instincts, and they forgot how to at least act civilized. Across the co...
Ovechkin ‘calls for peace’ but fails to denounce Putin’s invasion of Ukraine
Alexander Ovechkin finally addressed the crisis in Ukraine, saying some words in a press conference in Philadelphia that sounded nice but were ultimately meaningless....
Washington D.C.’s most famous athlete is notably silent on Putin invading Ukraine
As far as approval ratings go, Alexander Ovechkin’s standing among Washington, D.C., natives is as high as it gets. He’s arguably the greatest professional athlete to call the District of Columbia home. He’s been there for 17 seasons. He’s a 12-time all-star. He led the Capitals to a Stanley Cup tit...
No one is prepared for the Florida Panthers to be this good
Mason Marchment had his first career hat trick Friday night, leading the Florida Panthers to a 6-2 rout of the Minnesota Wild in a game that could be a Stanley Cup Final preview....