the-nhl Page 17 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights
Jordan vs. LeBron, the SEC, Urban Meyer and other things we’d like to leave in 2021
As 2021 comes to a close, we’re granted the opportunity to look back fondly (or not so fondly) on all the insane things that happened in sports this year, from the athlete anti-vax movement to the entire Urban Meyer saga, from the NHL’s near-constant blunders to the NCAA’s unprecedented coaching car...
Top 10 sports moments of 2021
Happy New Years’ Eve everybody! I hope you’re getting ready to kiss 2021 goodbye and good riddance, but before we celebrate another revolution around the sun and kick off 2022, I want to take one last look at some cool moments from the past 365 days....
Aaaand we’re back to the start
This is my last Mourning After of 2021, and in some ways it feels like the first. Not that we’ve been running in place, so much as we sprinted around the track and ended up back where we started. Which is how Jerry Seinfeld described horse racing, I guess. “We were just here! What was the rush?!”...
Hear me out: The NHL should split up its schedule
The NHL schedule has been jumbled by the league’s latest COVID-19 outbreaks, resulting not only in games being postponed now, but the withdrawal of the game’s top players from the upcoming Olympics....
The IIHF thinks women are more contagious than men
In theory, the International Ice Hockey Federation (IIHF) isn’t a for-profit agency. Much like FIFA. This is a laughable farce, of course. But there is relief that the facade of shepherding the game and promoting its growth crashed to the sidewalk long ago. They’re barely trying to hide it anymore....
2021's most inspiring sports figures
Just a few short years ago, there was a push for athletes to be nothing more than mute entertainers. Luckily enough, they refused to “shut up” or “stick to” whatever sport they played....
Let’s get back to a hockey World Cup
Now that it’s official and the NHL players won’t be going to the Olympics, some disappointment is understandable. The idea that Connor McDavid won’t play for Canada in a best-on-best tournament until his 30s is pretty ridiculous. Or that we may never get that line with him and Sidney Crosby. This to...
It’s the lack of answers that's so frustrating
I see the sentiment a lot the past couple days that it’s March 2020 all over again. But it isn’t. We are armed with so much more information than we were then, and there are vaccines. The one thing…well, I won’t say “miss” about March 2020 and beyond, because it sucked, but perhaps the biggest diffe...
The Premier League’s holiday schedule is wonderful, and also needs to be ended
It wasn’t a huge shock that the BIG MEETING today with the Premier League clubs, managers, and assorted captains resulted in no change whatsoever. The Premier League, and those below it, will attempt to plow through the country’s latest COVID spike, as it decimates rosters, to try and preserve as mu...
So who is going to play hockey at the Olympics?
This week, maybe even today, the NHL will announce that it won’t be sending its players to Beijing for the Olympics. Too many games have already been postponed to keep the three-week break needed for the Olympics, and even with the complications of buildings being booked for concerts during it, that...
Buck Showalter is the right guy in Queens
If it feels a bit like the end times lately, that feeling probably isn’t helped by the New York Mets — yes, the New York Mets — conducting themselves as a competent organization with a legitimate plan and hopes. ...
Avalanche, Panthers and Flames done until Christmas
The NHL has multiple rosters’ worth of players in COVID protocols, with the number growing seemingly by the hour. The obvious thing to do, the thing that we would have expected in the era of “an abundance of caution” (remember that?) would be for the league to shut things down for a couple of weeks,...
The puck stops here<em></em>
The NHL really needs to be asked and answer what kind of product it’s offering fans right now. It isn’t just the 60 players in COVID protocol at the moment. It’s the fact that the league does not make any exception to the salary cap for teams that are stripped of a chunk of their roster due to COVID...
Do you have to pay attention to the Anaheim Ducks?
Surprise hockey teams don’t come around in the same way as they do in the NBA. In professional basketball, generally the newest team that you have to watch has one or two young stars that are starting to find it. Like Memphis with Ja Morant of late, or the meteoric rise of the Suns. Not only do you ...
How are they gonna get this back in the tube?
Feels like we’ve been here before. The headlines from yesterday, they certainly have a familiar ring....
It doesn’t sound like the NHL is going to the Olympics
There are few good ideas in the pandemic. The most you can muster is, “Well, I guess that’s the best they can do.” The urge to try and have anything normal is an understandable one, it’s just there are so very many limits to how to get to that safely, so we either can’t have them or just ignore the ...
So, about that pandemic…
The Detroit Lions, finally in the win column after beating the Vikings last week, head into their game on Sunday without 19 percent of their roster due to injuries and coronavirus....
Old coach yells at cloud, shakes fist in air
In the past week, the NHL news around here has been excessive violence, more excessive violence, the Flyers being hellaciously awful, and the latest lunatic turns in the decade-long saga of the league trying to make fetch happen in Arizona....
Somehow this Coyotes story got dumber… and better
Maybe I should have waited a day. Because nothing with the Arizona Coyotes fails to get better, or funnier, or more abstract when you give it more time. As the layers get unpeeled, the aroma that wafts through the air really defies belief. It is both hilarity and bafflement, mixed in with old people...
Does the NHL vet its owners?
I wish I could write stuff like this as fiction. But unless you wrote it as Mel Brooks-ian farce, I don’t know how you’d make it believable. And I have to say that I really want to see the city of Glendale actually chain up the doors to Gila River Arena when Coyotes players attempt to show up for a ...