nhl Page 14 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights
The Toronto Maple Leafs disappoint their fans by winning
No one does a post-mortem like the Toronto Maple Leafs. For the past six years, it’s been an April tradition. The Leafs spit up all over themselves in the playoffs, and then the next week the rest of the playoffs are drowned out by the wailing from southern Ontario about who needs to be traded, who ...
Every athlete accused of mistreating women is as expendable as punter Matt Araiza
I don’t want to offer a silver lining in the Matt Araiza case, because a woman was still allegedly gang raped, and the Punt God’s reported innocence doesn’t lessen the victim’s trauma. However, in the year that it took to conclude the legal matter, did anyone miss Araiza? As much as his leg cannon c...
Which sport has a clear-cut GOAT?
It’s a conversation that’ll lead to a fight over drinks and is a common one among sports fans. Who is the greatest of all time in their given sport? But which sport has the easiest GOAT to figure out isn’t discussed nearly as much. As far as I’m concerned, there are two options: Hockey and horse rac...
Gabriel ThreeYaksAndADog will miss all of next season, and the Colorado Avalanche era may already be over
In the salary-capped NHL, you get one, or two shots with one roster, and then you basically have to reshuffle everything around your core stars, and hope that new hand still produces a flush. It’s a constant game of draw poker. ...
The Chicago Blackhawks, the worst team you know, got all the luck
Tanking isn’t a plan, at least in leagues with a lottery. It’s a wager. A GM or front office or owner isn’t putting up money, other than the lack of tickets and merch they’ll sell while their team is shit. They’re putting up a season or many of complete haplessness with rosters devoid of useful play...
It’s not supposed to be that easy, Connor
The NHL playoffs like to revel in its celebration of depth and the unsung. Everyone gets a shift, so everyone had better do a job or more, and the puck can bounce onto anyone’s stick or off anyone’s ass to change a game, a series, a whole spring. It is not always a stage for the leading men to provi...
In the battle of COVID vs. sports, evil vs. entertainment, sports won
Now that COVID is officially over, and everyone can throw their masks in the trash, (Is that how this works?), it feels like a good time to declare that sports beat COVID. If you’re wondering who was keeping score, I was, and sports handily outlasted the virus — that killed very few, if any, athlete...
Jeff Halpern needs to be the Washington Capitals' next head coach
Five years since the Washington Capitals’ Stanley Cup victory. Zero playoff series won since. Two head coaches, one internal promotion, and an experienced outsider since becoming champions didn’t pan out. And with one of the oldest cores in the NHL, combined with the rest of the league outpacing the...
The Edmonton Oilers keep dressing the worst player I’ve ever seen
Thanks to the flat salary cap for the past few years, and the existence of a hard cap at all for nearly two decades, a lot of NHL rosters look the same. You can’t build super teams, and if you weren’t lucky in the past few years to get a high draft pick to take a true star, you’re left with a lot of...
The Stanley Cup will be lifted by the Oilers-Golden Knights victor
Among a final eight that feels like a changing of the guard in hockey more than most years, with old standbys proving their age by exiting the ice until the fall, the duo of the Las Vegas Golden Knights and the Edmonton Oilers stand out like a sore thumb. Not necessarily because they don’t also repr...
FIFA wants to promote women’s soccer — as long as there’s money in it
“FIFA is a non-profit organization” is one of the biggest oxymorons in the world. You don’t get a good portion of the organization indicted for corruption if the body is mainly focused on merely the health of the sport and building it from the bottom up. Gianni Infantino’s latest episode of throwing...
We said the Pirates would be interesting
Guess who has the second-best record in baseball. No, really, go on. Maybe you watch a ton of baseball and you already know. But if you’ve been distracted by NHL and NBA playoffs, the answer may surprise you. It’s a certain team that a certain charming and handsome writer not so long ago said very w...
Jerry Reinsdorf, why don’t you stop talkin’ for a while?
We can’t be far from sports teams and organizations banning any of their management team from speaking at any kind of conference or forum. It’s what started the whole Gregg Berhalter fiasco, even if he thought it was a private, closed event. Jerry Reinsdorf pulled the same trick yesterday, and with ...
The New York Rangers eat dirt like the frauds they’ve always been
It’s important to review recent New York Rangers history to know why they ended up with a handful of their own dicks in the first round, to a New Jersey Devils team that is far more equipped for what wins in the NHL these days. Two years ago, James Dolan took a break from his normal paint-huffing ro...
Completely blowing it in the first round is good for business, history says
The loyalists in the overpriced seats at Boston’s TD Garden for Game 7 of the Eastern Conference first-round should’ve-been shellacking between the hometown Bruins and barely made it into the postseason Florida Panthers went from agitated, to full-on bittah in booing the 135-point getters in the reg...
Playoff hockey is stupid anyway
The NHL Playoffs gets its jollies from defying logic or explanation, and reveling in its unpredictability. That doesn’t mean it’s always a free-for-all, as hockey and its fans would have you believe. But it delves into the chaos and silliness more often than its brethren, that’s for sure....
The worst is the villain — in this case Aaron Rodgers — getting away with it
We here on the shores of Lake Michigan have been eating it from our neighbors to the north, the Green Bay Packers, for 25 years or so. When it goes on that long, you really stop dreaming of revenge or the tables ever turning your way, and certainly of things evening out. But there’s always a faint e...
When did the NBA playoffs become the NHL playoffs?
The first round of the NBA playoffs usually isn’t all that good, which doesn’t stop people from complaining about it. The difference between the top seeds and lower seeds is large enough that those series should result in nothing more than dress rehearsals for the true powers and the later rounds. W...
All talk, no substance
I know money isn’t really a thing to ESPN. $400 million a year certainly sounds like a lot of cheese, but it’s not really anything more than just an accounting number to them. So I shouldn’t be surprised that they don’t put much effort into their NHL coverage, despite that being the cost. ...
Sports leagues are ‘stepping up’ to ‘save’ you from sports betting ads
The burgeoning sports gambling industry in America took a blow Wednesday after professional leagues across the country combined forces to form the Coalition for Responsible Sports Betting Advertising, a group designed to “regulate” the boom in bookie ads currently flooding the internet and corruptin...