national-hockey-league Page 9 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

How every team will lose in the 2022 NHL playoffs
As the chase to the Stanley Cup begins, the Eastern and Western Conferences have completely different outlooks. Colorado or Calgary look the part to be the Western Conference champions, and I’m not sure there’s anything the rest of the field of six can do about it. The Eastern Conference is as wide ...

Didn’t take long for the NHL Department of Player Safety to sour the playoffs
This train is never late. The NHL had a good night last night. The playoffs kicked off, and it’s hard to find a bad matchup anywhere (though Flames-Stars and Avs-Predators should be nothing more than ritual killings). And though there were only two competitive games of the four last night (the Canes...

Please, please no more John Buccigross songs
The only thing worse than having to listen to Gus Johnson these days, and he’s been a real chore for years now, is having to listen to someone trying to be Gus Johnson....

You should root for the Florida Panthers
I know there’s a lot of obstacles. First off, hockey is probably the most provincial sport we have, and once everyone’s team is out, those fans tend to not give a fuck about whatever happens next. We’ve spent so much time coming up with reasons to hate everyone else it’s impossible to change gears. ...

A Knights' fail
BWAHAHAHAHAHA! Look at these dumb fuckers! They’re $10 million over the salary cap and still couldn’t finish in the top three of a division full of fuckwits and bindle-carriers! They couldn’t finish ahead of the Kings! The Kings who are led by Anze Kopitar and Drew Doughty, whose tires are so bald t...

Maybe Jack Eichel just isn’t that guy
If you’re trying to blow your own face off and fall down a sewer for comedic effect instead of securing a playoff spot, you’d have to give the Vegas Golden Knights an Emmy for their performance last night. Needing just about every point they can get to pass the Dallas Stars for the last wildcard spo...

Alex Ovechkin is the best, no matter what he might stand for
On Wednesday night, Alex Ovechkin recorded his 50th goal of the season. It is his eighth 50-goal season, which ties the record for most in NHL history, along with Mike Bossy and Wayne Gretzky. But Ovechkin’s accomplishment is far more impressive than those two’s, and eight 50-goal seasons in any era...

Enough with Barry Melrose
Dear God, don’t ever let Barry Melrose broadcast another hockey game ever again....

At least know why you’re voting for Patrice Bergeron for Selke
It’s an unwritten law in the NHL. If Patrice Bergeron is upright, averagely ambulatory, and plays more than 50 games, he’s going to win the Selke Trophy for the league’s best defensive forward. And it’s not easy to argue against this, as Bergeron has been the league’s smartest player for a decade or...

NHL Players Association clears itself of any fault in Chicago sexual assault case
Aren’t those supposedly independent self-investigations just so handy? The NHL Players’ Association released a report Friday (late on a Friday afternoon on a holiday weekend, more specifically) indicating that NHLPA executive director Donald Fehr did nothing wrong in handling reports of sexual assau...

Mike Bossy, scoring star of 1980s Islanders dynasty, dies at 65
Mike Bossy, star of one of the NHL’s greatest dynasties, died Thursday night according to TVA Sports, a French-language network in Canada where Bossy was a hockey analyst....

Farewell to my first and last
The generations of sports fans who grew up learning and loving a sport and team through the radio are disappearing these days. Another one came to a close on Thursday night in Chicago, though this one was a little different. We were a group out of place and time, which we came to identify ourselves ...

It’s math time with Chris Pronger boys and girls!
As one of my editors pointed out yesterday, maybe we should just be relieved that Chris Pronger can type at all given how his career was ended. That’s generally the hope for any hockey player, as forlorn as it may be. And perhaps Pronger was trying to do the right thing and illustrate how so many fo...

Johnny Hockey is on one
Pacific time zone hockey tends to get ignored in the same fashion as west coast baseball. It’s hard to win an MVP or another award when your games are on at 9 and 10pm, as you’re cutting into hockey writers’ drinking time. You have to put on a world-class and ear-shattering whining campaign to get s...

We are too broken and hopeless to deserve a Maple Leafs-Panthers series
At least for one night, I didn’t manage to motherfuck something. The Toronto Maple Leafs and Florida Panthers put on a hockey game dressed as Calvinball last night, with the Cats getting a 7-6 win in OT. It wasn’t even that simple, if a 7-6 game can ever be simple....

There’s something in the water in NBA and NHL arenas
Rarely does it make sense to link the NBA and the NHL, other than they tend to play in the same buildings at the same time of year. You wouldn’t really call them roommates, because when one is home the other never is. Though that probably makes them perfect roommates, come to think of it. Still, on ...

It was a Hockey Men weekend
The appeal of hockey, to an ever-shrinking insular fanbase that gets more and more shrouded by a new one (though not big enough), is that it’s not the other three sports. There are good reasons for that, we all love our cults. And then there are bad reasons for that, grounded in racism and sexism, h...

🎵Now, this is a story all about how the life of Seattle Kraken DJ... is awesome🎵
The in-stadium experience is what makes going to sporting events fun. The energy that radiates from other fans of your favorite team, the mascot’s antics, and fan interaction through graphics on the jumbotron and the in-stadium camera crew make attending a live sporting event an unforgettable experi...

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...

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. ...