stanley-cup-final Page 2 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights
Let’s find a way the Boston Bruins might lose in the playoffs, if there is one
While Gary Bettman might not think there’s anything wrong with the current playoff system (he’s wrong!), it is pretty clear that this set-up has robbed March and the first half of April of most of its drama. We’re basically down to seeing whether a wheezing Penguins team (whoops!) can keep their lun...
The Vancouver Canucks are the worst
For an organization that has spent almost its entire existence accomplishing nothing, the amount of noise the Vancouver Canucks generate is certainly outsized. Three lost Stanley Cup Finals is the sum of their 53-year existence, and yet it feels like the drama they create always seeps into the great...
What does Jack Edwards have to be so smug about anyway?
The idea of a particular villain, a true public enemy, still exists for most hockey fanbases. More than any other sport, one player can send an opposing arena into hysterics by merely hopping over the boards. Rivalry as an idea in sports has calmed down over the years, given player movement and othe...
If the goal to all but clinch the Stanley Cup is scored and no one sees it, did it really happen?
There was no goal horn. No point to the net from the closest official. No audible cheer from the Avalanche faithful in attendance at Tampa’s Amalie Arena. All for the decisive shot and score from Nazem Kadri that essentially won the Colorado Avalanche the Stanley Cup....
Andre Burakovsky and the Lightning have a history
As Game 1 of the Stanley Cup Finals ended late Wednesday night, with the opening game of the championship series going to overtime, a hero and villain presented themself. For Colorado, Andre Burakovsky, a player commonly thought to be one needed to step up in order to lift the Cup did just that. In ...
It’s OK, Matt Swarmer, Chicagoans were too drunk or distracted to remember that
The Chicago Cubs matter insomuch as they give the fine people of the Windy City an excuse to day drink and eat hot dogs. Outside of that one year, this season isn’t that much different from most others. They’re 23-35, 10 games back of the division leading St. Louis Cardinals, and nine games out of t...
Whatchagonna do NHL?
The NHL Department of Player Safety needs to get to the bottom of this quickly. The video evidence against Lightning captain Steven Stamkos allegedly spitting on Alexis Lafrenière appears damning, yet not conclusive. Why else would he cock his head back and lunge forward with his lips puckered at th...
The waiting is the hardest part
The Colorado Avalanche are waiting. And waiting for a Stanley Cup Finals opponent hasn’t treated those favorably in returning from mini-vacations in the past. We’re finishing up the 35th NHL postseason in which first-round games are contested as a best of seven, starting in 1987 and featured every y...
Auston Matthews is nearing an elite, rare echelon for American hockey players
The NHL’s most prestigious individual award was first handed out in 1924. Calvin Coolidge just became President of the United States. It took until Barack Obama’s final year in The White House for someone born and raised in America to win the Hart Memorial Trophy, the league’s most valuable player a...
Failure to capitalize: Washington out in first round for fourth-straight season
The Washington Capitals just pissed away their first-round Eastern Conference series against the Florida Panthers. The President’s Trophy winners were on the ropes in three straight games. And the Panthers won all three of those postseason contests in succession, two in overtime and one after traili...
Leafs on precipice of some kind of history
Nobody ever tweeted about a Florida Panthers playoff series victory before last night, when Carter Verhaeghe, off a pass from Claude Giroux – trade deadline acquisition and bringer of tons of vicarious Panthers fans from Philadelphia – lifted Florida to a 4-3 overtime win over the Capitals, and a 4-...
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 ...
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....
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. ...
Hank’s for nothing, old buddy
Henrik Lundqvist’s No. 30 was raised to the Madison Square Garden rafters Friday night, a well-deserved honor for the future Hall of Famer who backstopped the Rangers for 15 years and won everything but a Stanley Cup as one of the best and most consistent goalies in the business....
The Blackhawks are forced to face their reckoning, 11 years too late
The details are always worse than you can imagine, even if the overall arc of the story is exactly what we all expected. And so it proved as the Chicago Blackhawks released the findings of their internal investigation into how the organization handled accusations of sexual assault and harrassment by...
The last thing we need is a Maple Leafs docuseries
The whole behind-the-scenes docuseries has been a bit played out. Hard Knocks started it, and it came to hockey almost a decade ago with the 24/7 series that tracked the two teams in that given year’s Winter Classic for the month leading up to the New Year’s Day game. Some of it was compelling stuff...
Robin Lehner has big shoes to fill with the Golden Knights, but his feet look about the right size
Almost a month ago now, the Vegas Golden Knights shipped their Vezina-winning netminder, Marc-Andre Fleury off to Chicago to dump some salary. Fleury had been arguably Vegas’ best player since the franchise’s inception in 2016. He’s been without a doubt, the most beloved player as the face of the fr...
Unleash the Kraken
They won’t admit it, but there is a decent amount of pressure facing the Seattle Kraken ahead of their first year as an NHL franchise. ...
No, the Lightning didn’t cheat
At some point in the next couple days, the Tampa Bay Lightning will win their second consecutive Cup. Could be tonight, or maybe the Canadiens have one last death rattle in them and send this series back to Tampa on Wednesday. It’s hockey, weird things happen, we’ve seen 0-3 comebacks, but here it’s...