pacific-division Page 1 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights
The Golden Knights are trying to build the wall
No, not that wall. Calm down, Jethro. ...
NHL 'tough guys' are always cheapshot artists; The cause of increased scoring revealed
For a sport that really loves to tout how tough its players are, hockey players don’t seem to have much tolerance for anything that makes them feel bad in the slightest. At least on the ice. Morgan Rielly of Toronto was just the latest to wet himself when an opponent reminded him just a little too m...
Edmonton can’t beat the team they want to beat most
With all apologies to the Vancouver Canucks, actually, no, no one should ever apologize to the Canucks for anything. They know what they are and what they’ve done. While they may be on top of the Pacific Division, the other teams in that division are still going to measure themselves against the Veg...
Penguins on the edge; The Canucks are for real?; A bad hockey take for the ages
No one ever wants to admit the end is coming, much less is here. Especially when there are signs that it’s still a bit of a ways off, if one knows where to look. There will come a day when the Pittsburgh Penguins will recede into the background, which they haven’t really done since the beginning of ...
Maybe we have to take the Vancouver Canucks seriously
I know, the words “take seriously” and “Vancouver Canucks” having a get together in the same sentence is awkward for everyone. At least everyone outside of Vancouver, as there perhaps is no team that takes itself more seriously than the Canucks, which is what underlies their never decreasing sense o...
Islanders lose way with Patrick Roy; Sex assault charges rock WJC; Why is Corey Perry with the Oilers?
The hammer may be coming down on members of the 2018 Canadian World Junior team faster than we thought. Over the past couple of days, two players — Carter Hart of the Flyers and Dillon Dube of the Flames — had taken indefinite leaves of absence from their teams. - Sam Fels Read More...
The Los Angeles Kings are getting itchy
Rarely is it a good sign when, A) the head coach is being asked if his job is in jeopardy, and B) the coach doesn’t have much of a problem with that being asked. That’s where the Los Angeles Kings, along with coach Todd McClellan, find themselves after either losing or tying their 12th of 14 games l...
What do the Edmonton Oilers want with Corey Perry?
The Edmonton Oilers have been the NHL’s hottest team for a good long while now. They’ve won 13 in a row, and since that woeful 2-9-1 start, they’ve gone 24-6-0, which over a full season would be a 131-point pace. They’ve vaulted themselves out of the Motel For Men where the Sharks live, that they sp...
Eastern Conference is a mess; Bruins don't need centers?; Sam Reinhart makes history
We’re halfway through the NHL season, which is now meant as a device to make everyone look stupid. Or really, to make me look stupid, which isn’t all that hard, because I’m stupid. After 41 games, we should have an idea of who is what and who’s going where. But in the Eastern Conference, we really d...
Jennifer Botterill exposes hockey-culture stupidity; Kraken mascot beef comes to a head; goalie trouble for top teams
There is a segment of hockey fans that have always wanted to watch the bubble of hockey men discussing hockey things get totally pierced by even just the smallest bit of logic. For that is the true enemy of most things that have been hockey ethos. So a hearty thank you to Jennifer Botterill, who dur...
You're reading this correctly: The Kings might actually be the best team in hockey
You’d be forgiven if you’ve lost track of the Los Angeles Kings for a while. We’re coming up on 10 years since their last Stanley Cup. They haven’t won a round in the playoffs since, with four pretty inglorious dirt naps in the first round in the interim. They threw up (maybe literally) some pretty ...
This week in the locker November 18, 2023
I and many other Chicagoans used to sit in our simple Midwestern homes, huddled by the coal stove or whatever people picture us doing in the winter (it’s not that far off, it’s just huddled at the bar), and have a good chuckle at how New Yorkers were sentenced to a life with James Dolan. Here was a ...
The Oilers season is already slipping away
One month into an NHL season isn’t probably the time to panic — unless you’re the Edmonton Oilers and the pressure cooker started a couple years ago. A 3-9-1 start has already left the Oil with something close to a Sisyphian climb. Sure, there’s 69 games left, but we’re just a week from Thanksgivin...
Qatari ownership has come to sports on this continent, and is it just the beginning?
We’d wondered when Middle Eastern regimes would come for U.S. sports. They’ve got their mitts all over soccer now, warping how that sport works in Europe. They’ve completely altered golf. Boxing too. And yet it seemed that North America was the last frontier. ...
Where are the Arizona Coyotes going?
The only thing more exciting to hockey fans than a player in free agency is an entire franchise going into free agency, which it now feels like the Arizona Coyotes have just done. And they certainly don’t mind treading all over the feelings of whatever Coyotes fans are left. It’s a cruel world, but ...
Tempe voters put an end to the Arizona/Glendale/Phoenix Coyotes sideshow
It was a bad idea from the start. When Gary Bettman enacted his Great Southern Strategy for the NHL, the original Winnipeg Jets, and the Phoenix area never quite fit into it. Phoenix wasn’t a captive market like Tampa or Nashville were, with the hockey teams being the only games in town during the w...
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...
The Calgary Flames were undone by a gimmick
While sneaking into the bottom rung of the playoffs is something to be eschewed in the NBA given that it rarely leads anywhere, there’s still a perception in the NHL that all you have to do is “get in.” The NHL has dined out for decades on the idea that the playoffs set everything anew, and that one...
L.A. Kings, Pacific Division prove why overtime and the shootout are a plague upon society
The idea that the NHL regular season is just an 82-game preseason is maybe the last vestige of a time when 16 of the then-21 teams made the playoffs. These days, when exactly half the teams are culled, some genuinely decent teams don’t make it. Teams like the Knights last year can rack up over 90 po...