nhlplayoffs Page 3 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights
The Lightning Look Like Toast
“We’re still playing Tuesday. We’re still alive.” That’s Lightning head coach Jon Cooper giving an exhaustive list of everything positive about this opening-round series for Tampa, which could indeed end on Tuesday, just not in a way he or anyone else could have ever predicted....
![The Lightning Dug Themselves Into A 2-0 Hole, Then Nikita Kucherov Made Things Worse [Update]](https://images.deadspin.com/tr:w-900/ealuylr8ju7f7dxze85z.jpg)
The Lightning Dug Themselves Into A 2-0 Hole, Then Nikita Kucherov Made Things Worse [Update]
Now that the Columbus Blue Jackets and Tampa Bay Lightning have played two playoff games against each other, let’s check in on the team that Vegas all but guaranteed would have a spot in the Stanley Cup final:...
The Flames Are A Different Team If Mike Smith Gets Hot
The Flames led the West with 107 points and yet are not what anyone would call favorites to come out of the conference. That’s perhaps unfair, perhaps unwise, but a team as explosive as the Flames still tends to amount to nothing much if it doesn’t have competent goaltending. One game is just one ga...
Calgary's Andrew Mangiapane Didn't Have To Embarrass Philipp Grubauer Like That
Flames winger Andrew Mangiapane decided that the best time to show Calgary he was worth calling up on the last day of 2018 was in Game 1 of his team’s series against the Colorado Avalanche. With less than six minutes left in the second period, the 23-year-old was able to deke his way past three defe...
Good Lord, The Caps Don't Like Making Things Easy
Just because the championship monkey is off the backs of the Washington Capitals doesn’t mean the team has forgotten where it came from. In Game 1 of the series with the upstart Carolina Hurricanes, the Caps showed flashes of the team’s former self best known for handing momentum right back to posts...
Leafs' Nazem Kadri Sets Up Beautiful Breakaway For William Nylander With Pinpoint Feed
After going down against the Boston Bruins early, the Toronto Maple Leafs spent a majority of Game 1 (so far) effectively defending seemingly every scoring opportunity their opponents got. The Leafs have now gotten to the point where they’ve been able to turn that strong defense into some magical of...
Islanders Fans Reminded Everyone What Home-Ice Advantage Sounds Like
The way-ahead-of-schedule resurgence of the Islanders has coincided with a partial return home, to the Nassau Coliseum, where they’re playing half their home games as they figure out a way to get out of Brooklyn. So it’s only fitting that their playoff opener was back in the old barn, thanks to an a...
Sharks' Joe Pavelski Takes One On The Chin For His Team To Score Opening Goal
Once the Stanley Cup playoffs start, the debate over whether the structural integrity of your face is more important than a goal no longer becomes a debate. There are only two options that players have: give up your face, or let your team down. Less than 15 minutes into Game 1 of the Sharks-Golden K...
A Cranky And Wishful Preview Of The 2019 Stanley Cup Playoffs
The Stanley Cup Playoffs begin Wednesday, and while it is considered an incontrovertible truth that the Cup is a better entertainment than the NBA Playoffs, it is also its own hot mess in uniquely weird ways, starting with this....
NHL To Continue Using Playoff Format Everyone Hates
We’re about to enter year six of the NHL’s current playoff setup, a format that has garnered mostly complaints since its inception. To be fair to the league, hockey fans can and do complain about everything, but the format’s drawbacks do seem to outweigh its benefits. So, just a few days out from th...
Alex Ovechkin's Face Said It All
“This moment...” Alexander Ovechkin started, flanked at the podium by the Stanley Cup and the Conn Smythe Trophy. He never once that I saw looked at the latter, but he kept glancing toward the big one, the one he had kissed and lofted and screamed into and shared with every single one of his teammat...
The Game Clock Broke In Vegas And Caused Total Chaos
If ever you need confirmation of the theory of general relativity, just watch your team in a Stanley Cup clincher. After Lars Eller scored the go-ahead (and soon to be Cup-winning) goal with 7:37 left, time started doing funny things, depending on who you were rooting for. While those final minutes ...
The 2018 <i>Hockey Night In Canada</i> Season-Ending Montage Is Here<em></em>
Hockey is over for the summer. That sucks! Perhaps, maybe, the only thing that can get us through those lean months will be the annual masterpiece that is the Hockey Night In Canada season-ending montage, set this year to Oasis (??). Here you are....
The Capitals Are Finally Champions
This year was different. The Washington Capitals are Stanley Cup champions....
This Is Evgeny Kuznetsov's Time
Before Game 4, a reporter spotted in Evgeny Kuznetsov’s locker a bottle of Fuck Off pills. It’s a gag gift—you know the sort of thing—even if I’m not sure exactly what the gag is supposed to be. But, uh, it might’ve worked. Because Kuznetsov went the fuck off, racking up four assists in the Capitals...
The Golden Knights Have Lost Their Mojo
There is no secret to what is happening to the Golden Knights, now down 3-1 in the Stanley Cup final after playing nigh-unbeatable throughout the playoffs. The zamboni has transformed back into a pumpkin, and not just a regular pumpkin, but a gross smelly rotted one. ...
Braden Holtby Made The Save Of His Life
If you have not yet seen Braden Holtby’s game-saving save with two minutes left in Washington’s 3-2 Game 2 win, well, first see Alex Ovechkin’s reaction on the bench:...
Tom Wilson Is At It Again
I’m so annoyed that after the pure mainline rush that was Game 1, I have to think about Tom Wilson’s dirty-ass play. Imagine how Jonathan Marchessault feels:...
Embrace The Spectacle Of Stupid Fun Hockey
They have been telling us for decades—a necessarily nebulous “they,” but one that includes the NHL itself, needing to sell the present brand of hockey shaped by rule changes and coaching revolutions and swollen goalie gear, and certain fans, trying to convince themselves that we’re watching the peak...
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