The Florida Panthers are having a tough go.
In their last five games they’ve earned just a single point, while handing two to Washington, Winnipeg, Montreal, Tampa Bay and Boston. Hell, in their last 12 contests, they’ve only grabbed two points twice. That is not good.
But they aren’t dead yet. I mean, they’re pretty much dead -after all, they are last in the NHL… Read the rest of this entry »
It looks like Anders Lindback might miss Nashville. Or, at least, Shea Weber. (Scott Audette, Getty Images)
It’s not easy becoming an NHL team’s number one goaltender. There are only 30 positions available and hundreds of goaltenders looking for their shot. Talented young goaltending prospects often find themselves starting out in the ECHL, simply because there’s no room on a team’s AHL affiliate. Players gradually work their way up the depth chart until they finally get called up to the big club — and end up as the perennial backup, stuck behind an aging incumbent or an undrafted Finnish phenom.
Getting a chance to finally take centre stage and stand in the spotlight as a team’s go-to goaltender is a rare opportunity. At the start of this season, five goaltenders were given that opportunity after spending last season as a backup: Cory Schneider, Anders Lindback, Sergei Bobrovsky, Braden Holtby, and Tuukka Rask. The results so far have been mixed.
Shown: the glove of Columbus rookie Cody Goloubef
I last played pro hockey during the 2008-2009 season, and had only started seeing some real safety innovations over the last year or two of my playing days. Kevlar socks were just starting to surface, and some players (hi) were wearing slash guards (as an oft-chopped offensive player, they were a godsend), and some others were starting to wear extra caps on their skates to make shot blocking less painful.
Steps were just generally being taken to prevent the loss of games due to injuries.
Well last night a Twitter conversation with @RedditCBJ, @PhotogBlake and @JoshSmith29 led me to something I hadn’t seen before: an additional pad added to gloves to protect your paw when you’re blocking shots. The image you see above is a zoomed-in shot from @PhotoBlake, who took that picture of Columbus defenseman Cody Goloubef’s glove last night. The picture below is Derek Stepan, who also uses it (as a number of Rangers apparently do). Read the rest of this entry »
A lot of things are easy to quantify in hockey – Steven Stamkos is a good goal scorer because he scores a lot of goals. This is not a subjective opinion, that is just a thing that is. Grading General Managers, however…well that’s not so easy.
So, for our purposes today, I wanted to keep it simple. I wanted to call attention to the teams who currently have the most good deals on their books (no matter how they acquired them), because accomplishing that is an art. We always hear about all the terrible deals around the NHL, and about all the overpaid players, but forget that some teams are out there doing it right.
…For the most part.
Almost every GM has made some gross misstep along the way, so it’s impossible to call anyone infallible, but as things currently sit, a few teams are in pretty darn good shape. Let’s show them some love. (Oh, and a note: the numbers shown are they players’ cap hits, not their real-dollar salaries for the year.)
(Note: not having Mike Gillis on this list – from the Sedins, to Burrows, to Hansen to Higgins – was a regrettable oversight. Dean Lombardi didn’t get included because hey, gotta draw the line somewhere, and I don’t care for a deal or three of the Kings.)
Philadelphia Flyers
GM: Paul Holmgren
Cost: #1 – NHL’s highest payroll (no space under the cap)
Well, rough start. But hear me out.
Paul Holmgren takes a lot of s***. He got rid of Mike Richards and Jeff Carter, then they won a Cup. He used that cap room to get Ilya Bryzgalov, who then proceeded to suck. He traded James van Riemsdyk for Luke Schenn, and JVR’s recent success hasn’t looked great on him (though Schenn is secretly having a pretty decent season).
But on the other hand, he also has some real talent under extremely reasonable, and in some cases ridiculously good contracts. Consider:
Claude Giroux was signed as a restricted free agent which leaves you with little bargaining power, but still: he’s making $3.75 million this year and next to be the team’s captain, face of the franchise, and leading point-getter.
But wait: he’s actually not the leading point-getter right now (go ahead, gasp). That’d be Jakub Voracek, who’s making $4.25 mill (through 2016). He’s got 25 points in 23 games, good for (T)7th in the NHL. Other deals of note: Read the rest of this entry »
There really hasn’t even been that much of this.
The Boston Bruins are currently 8-1-2, first in their division by two points even with at least a game in hand on everybody, including three against second-place Toronto. They’re also only one point behind the East-leading Devils, who have played two additional games.
Obviously being 4-0-1 on the road is a really good way to inflate your point total, as is being 4-1-1 at home, with that one regulation loss being the kind of defensive disaster teams like the Bruins see once every three years at most.
But one thing that’s been kind of lost in Boston making yet another run toward the top of the conference, if not the league, is that it has not been all that impressive in doing so. At least, not in the way to which the hockey world at large may have become accustomed over the last two seasons. They played 30 games last season in which they scored four goals or more, and they won 20 by a margin of three-plus. This was a team that would back opponents against the ropes and just pummel them. Mercilessly. Until they were battered and bloodied, sometimes both figuratively and literally. Christ, they had six games last season in which they beat their opponent by six or more goals. All of them were shutouts. Read the rest of this entry »
You have to feel for the guy. He has goals in three straight losses (of the five straight as a team), he’s eighth in the NHL in scoring (15 points in 12 games), and it just seems like there’s nothing he can do. Hamonic can “snap” all he wants – batting in game-winners for your opponent would be annoying…
(Thanks to @garik16 & @ericdavidmorris for the .GIF)
… – but Tavares is under contract until 2018, and stuck being the guy trying to drag an Isles team whose ownership has shown no interest in winning to the playoffs. Guessing the ice feels tilted uphill at this point.
First off, just so fans of the Flames and the Wild know, I’m going to take this seriously. That said, I am live-blogging a Flames/Wild game in the middle of February, so not that seriously.
Here’s why this is happening: everyday on the Backhand Shelf Podcast, Jake Goldsbie and I pick a “lock” winner. We scan the schedule and say “the Kings are going to beat Columbus” (I think I literally lost on that once this year). You get one point for correctly calling a favourite to win, which should be easy but hockey is a gambling nightmare, and two for picking an underdog. At the end of the week, whoever wins gets to assign the other guy to cover a game he normally wouldn’t watch (what we would call a “generally not-that-interesting game). In this case, Goldsbie didn’t just want me to write about Flames/Wild, he wanted a live blog.
The truth? I wasn’t that bummed about his pick. I find both teams fairly interesting. Uh oh. Puck drop. Let’s get this going! Excuse any spelling/grammar errors – this will be pretty stream-of-consciousness.
16:52: Do live-blogs go up or down? Seriously. Do I post above this or below after? Oh this is off to a terrible start.
16:05: Those white Minnesota Wild jerseys are 63,345,425,000 times better than their red Christmas tree sweaters. The Flames, on the other, need a total makeover. Or just their thirds. Yeah, their thirds would work just fine.
Random: how much of a jersey golden age was it that everyone – Isles, Oil, Flames etc – look so much better in the old digs? The late 90s, early 2000s were a mess.
13:30: We’re calling him Who-dler, not Hud-ler? Really? I’ve been doing it wrong, apparently.
13:00:
@jtbourne If you have Center Ice or some such, you should switch feeds occasionally and work that into the live blog.
— Pat (@SanJoseSharts) February 12, 2013
I like that idea, Pat. I will, definitely at intermission.
12:08: “Fan right or Fan wrong” is a feature that Sportsnet (or whoever) needs to absolutely bury. “Should you murder your seat-mate at intermission? Text 98787 to vote!” Read the rest of this entry »
Jo Innes, Ryan Lambert, Daniel Wagner, Cam Charron, Ellen Etchingham, Jake Goldsbie, Darren Kritzer
