Puck Soup: We're back

In this week's episode of the Puck Soup podcast:
- The weekly free shows are back for another season
- There won't be a lockout in 2020 after all, as the NHL and NHLPA decide to keep the peace for two more years
- Reactions to the Mitch Marner deal
- Thoughts on how Marner impacts Patrik Laine and the rest of the unsighed RFAs
- What's going on with Dustin Byfuglien, and what it might mean for the Jets
- Ryan tries to stump me with another round of "Is this a real movie?"
- An interview with director Gabe Polsky of the new hockey documentary “Red Penguins"
- And lots more...

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Grab Bag: Everybody wear white tonight

In the Friday Grab Bag:
- What Scotty Bowman can teach us about how we can make playoff overtime so much better
- The Winnipeg Wait Out is coming, and it's going to be awful
- An obscure player with a great name
- The week's three comedy stars, featuring Paul Maurice's strategic brilliance and Dustin Byfuglien's dad strength
- And a catchy 1987 song about the Jets that gets disturbingly awkward really quickly.

>> Read the full post at Vice Sports

Weekend wrap: Early statements

It’s one game. The first game doesn’t necessarily tell us much about how a series will play out — remember the Bruins thumping the Lighting in their second-round opener? — and there’s a good chance that this one still has a long way to go, with plenty of twists and turns baked in.

But even with all the obvious caveats in place, things couldn’t have gone much better for the Jets on Saturday night. They won the game, which is obviously the important part. But not all wins are created equal. Sometimes you steal a game, or barely hang on, or win even though you didn’t put together a 60-minute effort. Sometimes you win games you probably deserved to lose.

And sometimes, you show up and are clearly the better team from start to finish. That’s the sort of game the Jets put together on Saturday, scoring on their first shot and pumping three goals past Marc-Andre Fleury before the game was eight minutes old. The Golden Knights regained their footing from there to keep the game respectable, but that’s all they did, as the Jets largely shut them down the rest of the way. Despite playing from well behind for almost the entire game, the high-flying Knights managed just 21 shots and never seemed to be taking the game to their opponents.

Again, it’s one game, and maybe we got the result we should have expected – with the Jets coming off the high of a Game 7 win in Nashville and the Knights seeing their first action in nearly a week, some early Vegas rust may have been inevitable. If the series goes long, that discrepancy in time off may yet come back to hurt the Jets.

But that’s if the series does go long; it didn’t look like it would on Saturday. And while Fleury was brilliant against the Kings and still leads the league in post-season save percentage and goals-against average, it’s fair to point out that he’s now given up three goals or more in five of his last six games. With Connor Hellebuyck looking sharp lately, that’s not a good sign for the Knights.

We’re still in uncharted territory with this Vegas team, which now trails a series for the first time. Maybe they rebound with a better effort tonight and take the series back home tied at one. But the early returns are in, and they’re clear: The Jets were the better team through one game. Now we find out how many more they need.

Road to the Cup

The five teams that look like they’re headed towards a Stanley Cup.

5. Your team: That’s right. With only four teams left in the playoffs and a suddenly unwieldy five-team power ranking format to work with, we can confirm that your personal favourite team is holding down the fifth spot. Congratulations, and never let it be said that we don’t give credit where it’s deserved.

4. Tampa Bay Lightning: Nikita Kucherov hasn’t done much in the conference finals so far. But he did find a creative way to make last night’s highlight reel: by kicking Brett Connolly.

Dangerous play by Nikita Kucherov on Brett Connolly at the end of Game 2 pic.twitter.com/jiTvhccn8I

— Brady Trettenero (@BradyTrett) May 14, 2018

3. Vegas Golden Knights: We knew their success was already getting attention from outside of the hockey world. But here’s a new audience we may not have counted on: professional gamblers.

>> Read the full post at Sportsnet

Grab bag: When cats attack

In the Friday Grab Bag:
- The officiating has been terrible in this year's playoffs. So what do we do about it?
- Please stop complaining about the playoff format
- We all know who Lou Lamoriello's first ever draft pick was. But his second pick also went on to have an impact on the Maple Leafs.
- The week's three comedy stars get weighty
- And a YouTube breakdown of the Nashville Predators' cat going on a murder spree.

>> Read the full post at Vice Sports

Saturday storylines: Happy birthday Connor

We’ve got nine games on the schedule tonight, including several teams coming off their bye week and a few more about to head out for theirs. We’ll start our roundup with one of those teams, as they get ready for a break under some interesting circumstances.

HNIC Game of the Night: Oilers at Golden Knights

Happy birthday, Connor McDavid.

Well, OK, you’re an Oiler. “Happy” probably isn’t in your vocabulary these days. All the best on your special day? Wait, “best” doesn’t work either. Look, just have some cake and be done with it.

In one of those scheduling quirks that was either a fun coincidence or somebody at league headquarters with a strange sense of humour, McDavid will be spending his 21st birthday in Las Vegas. And to make matters more interesting, this is the last game before the Oilers’ bye week. If things were going well, this would probably be a great time for the players to decide to stick around town and kick off a well-earned vacation by helping their captain celebrate the milestone.

Things are, as you may have noticed, not going well for the Oilers, which will probably put a bit of a damper on the party. You know that classic image of a sad child in a tilted birthday hat, sitting at an empty table because he invited all his friends and nobody came? That’s McDavid these days, except instead of friends it’s competent wingers.

This is the part where we’d normally start running down some facts and figures to paint a picture of how a team’s season has been going, but at this point that’s starting to just feel cruel. The Oilers season is a write-off. “Thanks for pointing that out,” Edmonton fans are no doubt thinking — nobody else had mentioned it except for literally every hockey writer on Earth.

So we’ll skip the autopsy and just head straight to the burial. The Oilers are basically done heading into the second half, and they get to head into their bye against one of the league’s best teams, in the league’s toughest building. The Knights are fun, fast and good, kind of like what we all expected the Oilers to be. At the very least, they might serve as a reminder that there should be brighter days ahead in Edmonton. If you can build a Cup contender out of spare parts you found scattered around in one off-season, surely you can do it with the best player in the world.

Somebody will. Whether it’s Peter Chiarelli and Todd McLellan or some other combination remains to be seen. How the Oilers perform over the second half will have a lot to do with how that turns out, which makes this game worth watching. Even if it won’t be the sort of going-away party the Oilers were probably expecting when they first saw the schedule.

>> Read the full post at Sportsnet

Early World Cup observations

(Editor's note: The following is from an email exchange Sunday night between Dave Lozo and Sean McIndoe, aka Down Goes Brown.)

Lozo: OK, so now that we've both made bad jokes on Twitter about Green Day canceling shows at the World Cup, I thought I'd email you to see how your Sunday is going. Me? Two fantasy football losses, 2-1 in my picks pool with two games pending, and I want to believe Alex Ovechkin touched that puck at the end of the Sweden game.

Here are my three thoughts about the World Cup so far:

1) Team USA will lose to Canada and their tournament will be over after two games, which cracks me up because the NHL did everything it could to get USA and Canada into the semis.

2) Team Europe is great because they are old, like me, and really stuck it to Torts, another thing I enjoy.

3) This isn't World Cup-related, but I've been crapping like an untrained dog during a thunderstorm, so some of these emails may come from the toilet.

Ps: You know Canada has gold in the bag, right?

---

DGB: Hi Dave...

Both of my fantasy teams are 0-2, and I don't actually mind because I made a conscious decision at the beginning of the season to just accept that the entire hobby is just dumb, stupid luck and no rational person should care about it. Check back with me next week at 0-3 and find out how that's going.

Oh hey, speaking of dumb and stupid, let's start with Team USA. I haven't understood most of what they're doing all along in this tournament, from hiring Tortorella to the roster selection to benching Dustin Byfuglien on Saturday. They were never going to be the favorites, but they've got enough talent to at least have a shot. But they seem to want to do it with one hand behind their back, all in the name of grit and heart and compete and all of the other buzzwords that badly run hockey teams seem to love.

But all of that said, there's a part of me that could still see them pulling off the upset tomorrow night. They have the goaltending to make it happen, and if they get a bounce or two maybe they can make it happen. It's also possible that they already all hate Tortorella and can't wait to quit as soon as things go bad, but I can see the US winning this one. And besides, the best possible result would be a USA team that bragged about being built to beat Canada doing that, then finishing 1-2 and missing the playoffs anyway.

Am I crazy?

---

Lozo: Are you crazy? Absolutely. Fantasy football is the greatest thing ever created, as it allows us to fill gaping voids in our lives with legal gambling. This email is sponsored by DraftKings.

I know that as a Canadian, your default setting is to be all, "Oh geez, USA can do this and anything can happen because we Canadians are a humble people and want to take it one game at a time." I call bullshit! Bullshit, I say!

Do we have the goaltending to steal this one? Yes. Will that goaltending be in net? No. Jonathan Quick has squeezed a career out of two great months in 2012 playing behind a dominant 5-on-5 team in the postseason and now because of that and a fluky showing in a 1-0 loss to Canada in Sochi, Americans have deluded themselves into thinking Quick can steal a gold medal. And by Americans, I mean Dean Lombardi, the Kings GM who put together this deficient team.

And beyond that, this USA team isn't good. And yeah, we're not dressing Byfuglien, perhaps our best defenseman, and yeah, we left Phil Kessel, Tyler Johnson, Kevin Shattenkirk and other great players home in the name of grit and Abdelkadering, but how about Patrick Kane only getting 4 minutes in the first period against Europe? Or Max Pacioretty on a third line? Or Max Pacioretty on a fourth line in practice Sunday? Torts is really the crazy one. Jack Johnson is on this team!

The ideal ending to this tournament is Team North America beating Canada in the final on a Jack Eichel penalty shot in overtime, allowing me to claim that as a USA gold.

I did not write this on the toilet.

---

>> Read the full post at Vice Sports

The 12 NHL stars who are hardest to hate

One of the common knocks against hockey fans is that we seem to be wired to go negative, always thinking the worst of everyone who takes to the ice. And there’s some truth to that. After all, if you name a star player in today’s NHL, you’ll probably find legions of fans who’ve decided that they just don’t like him.

When Drew Doughty and Erik Karlsson went head-to-head for the Norris Trophy, it wasn’t enough for fans to prefer one guy over the other – they had to decide that the other guy was a bum. Alex Ovechkin has a ton of fans, but also plenty who see him as an unrepentant hot dog who can’t come through when it counts. Carey Price is a year removed from a Hart trophy, but he’s a Hab and nobody who plays for Toronto or Montreal will ever be universally liked. And let’s not even get started on P.K. Subban.

Remember, there’s a difference between merely being popular and not being hated. Sidney Crosby is almost certainly the NHL’s most popular player, but for some reason, lots of fans have painted him as a boring whiner who’s been overexposed by the league. If we can’t get behind Crosby, then who do we like?

Well, there still seem to be at least a handful of exceptions to the rule. So today, let’s take a look at the rare players who have managed to pull it off. Here are twelve NHL stars who’ve proven to be the toughest to hate.

Jaromir Jagr, Florida Panthers

Why we like him: We might as well start with the easy one. In the years since his return to the NHL, Jagr has morphed into one of the league's most beloved players. That's largely thanks to his age – it would just feel wrong to hate a guy who's still going strong at 44 – and the near-legendary work ethic that goes with it. But he's also revealed a fun side, cracking jokes on social media and showing off that rarest of NHL possessions: an actual personality.

Mix in his apparent commitment to play for every team in the league before he retires, and it's become just about impossible to dislike Jagr.

Why it might be OK to hate him just a little: I'm not sure I can come up with a great reason to hate the current-day version of Jagr. But can we at least acknowledge that it's a little weird that we wound up here, given how divisive Jagr was earlier in his career?

When he first broke into the league on an already-stacked Penguins' team, he quickly became the poster child for the flashy European star that so many North American fans had trouble with, all fancy moves and flowing hockey hair. By the time he was doing his own trademark celebration, lots of fans (and at least a few players) had had enough of him. And that was before he bailed on the Penguins, bombed for the Capitals, and bolted for the KHL.

Mix in his weird return in 2011, in which he infuriated Pittsburgh fans by feinting at a homecoming and then scorning them for their fiercest rivals (which a small handful still haven’t forgiven him for), and it wasn't that long ago that Jagr would have ranked high on any list of the most-disliked players. But we all mellow with age, apparently, and now he's become basically untouchable. That's been a pretty cool evolution to watch, but it would have been downright bizarre to suggest it a decade or two ago.

Jarome Iginla, Colorado Avalanche

Why we like him: He's the other obvious choice for this list. While he doesn't quite have Jagr's longevity (yet), Iginla is firmly ensconced in the "beloved veteran" pantheon at age 39. He's a surefire Hall-of-Famer who's done everything short of win the Stanley Cup – and even that lone gap on his resume comes with an asterisk. He's scored 600 goals, won two Olympic gold medals, and he had the loyalty to stick with one team way longer than he probably should have. You can't really ask for more.

Why it might be OK to hate him just a little: As one of the last of the true power forwards, there's a good chance that at some point he's flattened somebody on your favourite team with a shoulder or a fist. But even that's tough to get too worked up over, given that he was probably smiling when he did it.

>> Read the full post at Sportsnet

Five big names who didn't make the cut on my awards ballot

Today is the first day of the playoffs, with series kicking off in Tampa, Pittsburgh and St. Louis. That means it’s also the last day for PHWA members to submit their award ballots. So if you noticed your favorite sportswriter rushing around like a flustered kid who left his homework to the last minute, that’s why.

The league prefers that we don’t reveal our ballots before the winners are announced, since if too many of us do that it will kill the suspense. That’s fair. So today, I won’t tell you who got my vote. Instead, I’ll tell you who didn’t.

As background, we get to include five names for each award, listed in order from first through fifth. Sometimes, that ends up being a pretty easy list to fill out – you might move guys up and down as you go, but the five names you’re going to include are a lock. Other times, you might have to scramble to fill out a top-heavy field. And more often than not, you wind up with what feels like the toughest scenario: Too many names and not enough spots, and some deserving candidate has to go.

That happened a few times this year. So here are five names that I went in fully expecting to cast a vote for, but who ended up missing the cut. For what it’s worth, ballots aren’t due until the puck drops on the first playoff games, so if you’re convinced that I’m indefensibly wrong on any of these, make your best arguments in the comments.

Dylan Larkin, Red Wings, Calder

Larkin was easily one of the best rookie stories of the year. He was looking like the Calder favorite early in the year, and was still solidly in the conversation by midseason. He was named to the all-star team, then wowed everyone by winning the fastest skater competition. He relinquished his favorite status as the season wore on, giving way to the great Connor McDavid vs. Artemi Panarin debate on 2016. But surely he had to be on the ballot, right?

Apparently not. In a tough Calder race that featured seven or eight candidates who had a strong top-five case, I was surprised to be unable to find room for Larkin. That’s partly due to a slow finish – after back-to-back two point games in early February, Larkin managed just one multi-point game in his last 29, recording only six points total in March and April. It’s a long season, and you’d expect a young player to have a cold stretch or two. But Larkin’s slow stretch was just enough to drop him behind some of his fellow rookies.

Your thoughts on Larkin’s Calder case probably has a lot to do with how you interpret the award. Some voters factor in a degree of difficulty, especially when it comes to age. Maybe a season like Larkin’s at the age of 19 is more impressive than what Panarin did at 24. I think there’s a great argument to be made that Larkin is a better long-term prospect than Panarin, who may have already peaked.

But the Calder isn’t the Best Prospect award. It’s for the “most proficient” rookie, as defined by the NHL, and you don’t get bonus points for being younger than the competition. Sorry, Dylan.

>> Read the full post at The Hockey News

Weekend report: Lightning drama, Habs hope, and the Jets need a miracle

Faceoff: Lightning rods of controversy

If you were going purely by the off-ice headlines, you could be forgiven for assuming the Lightning were a franchise in disarray. These days, it seems as if the only weeks that don't bring a new crisis in Tampa are the ones that bring an escalation of an existing one instead.

Start with the ongoing Steven Stamkos saga, which continues to drag on with little evidence of progress beyond the occasional lowball offer. With Anze Kopitar's extension with the Kings now signed and sealed, the lack of a Stamkos deal stands out even more. Until something gets done, fans will be left wondering if the Lightning might be forced to trade their superstar captain—a scenario that already played out once before in Tampa, just two years earlier, with Martin St. Louis.

But the Stamkos situation has been overshadowed this month by the drama around Jonathan Drouin, the talented 20-year-old who's yet to really break through at the NHL level. It's probably fair to go ahead and describe Drouin as an ex-Lightning now, after he walked away from the team's AHL affiliate last week in an attempt to force a trade. What remains to be seen is where he ends up, and how long general manager Steve Yzerman decides to make him wait before it happens.

In the meantime, Drouin is getting at least lukewarm support from his former teammates, including Victor Hedman, the star defenceman who'll need a new contract and big raise of his own next year (and who's represented by the same agency, though not the same agent, that handles Drouin). Between St. Louis, Stamkos/Drouin and Hedman, we may be looking at the ghost of Lightning headaches past, present and future.

So sure, it's tough times for the Lightning—right up until they take the ice. The team has been on fire lately, winning seven straight heading into the weekend and moving to within three points of the lead in the Atlantic. After a slow start that dragged on through the season's first two months, the Lightning suddenly look like the team that went to the final last year, not to mention the team that plenty of us were picking as Stanley Cup favourites.

That win streak came to an end Saturday, when the Lightning dropped a 5-2 decision to the Panthers in an entertaining game that featured plenty of action at both ends. The loss leaves the Lightning tied with the Red Wings for second place in the Atlantic, five back of Florida for the division lead. Not bad for a team that was tenth in the conference less than three weeks ago and out of the playoffs entirely.

And as for the off-ice drama, it could still all work out in the team's favor. Yzerman insists that he'll be able to extract maximum value for Drouin even while his hand is largely being forced, and given how the St. Louis situation turned out, we tend to believe him. As for Stamkos, the Lightning's recent surge probably quiets some of the trade talk that would have otherwise built toward the deadline. After all, if the sniper really is set on hitting free agency, who'd be most willing to sacrifice the future to have him aboard for a stretch drive and playoff push? Only an elite team that had the talent to take a serious run at a Stanley Cup—and right now, that description sounds a lot like the Tampa Bay Lightning.

Race to the Cup

The five teams with the best shot at winning the Stanley Cup.

5. Florida Panthers (28-15-5, +19 true goals differential)—After losing four straight, they spent the weekend posting convincing wins over both the Hawks and Lightning to re-establish their top-tier credentials.

4. Dallas Stars (30-14-5, +28)—They dominated everywhere but the scoreboard in dropping a 3-1 decision to the Avalanche on Saturday. Still, they flip spots with the Kings for a very good reason.

3. Los Angeles Kings (30-15-3, +17)—Is that reason "So we could avoid having the exact same top five as last week?" Cannot confirm or deny.

>> Read the full post at Vice.com

Things just got interesting in Winnipeg

In a league where the best of the best monopolize most of the attention, there aren’t many sixth-place teams that could be described as “fascinating.” The Winnipeg Jets are becoming the exception that proves the rule.

The Jets are a deep team, one that’s stacked with young players at both the NHL level and beyond. They have an excellent blue line and an underrated cast of forwards. They have the talent to beat any team in the league on any given night, and they’ve already notched wins over the New York Rangers and Chicago Blackhawks. They’re a darn good team.

They’re also in the Central Division, where “darn good” isn’t good enough. At 10-9-2, they’ve banked 10 ROWs and 22 points, which would be good for third in the Pacific. In the Central, that leaves them sixth, looking up at five excellent teams, none of whom seem likely to have the sort of extended cold streak that would allow a team chasing them to gain big ground. A recent six-game losing streak appeared to have the Jets in danger of falling out of the hunt entirely, even before the calendar flipped to December.

>> Read the full post on ESPN.com

Seven opening night story lines to overreact to

The NHL drops the puck on its regular season tonight with four games, followed by seven more tomorrow. By Sunday, every team will have played at least once, which means we’ll be in a position to draw firm conclusions about how the rest of the season will turn out.

Oh, we’ll be told not to. We’ll be admonished and scolded and constantly reminded not to overreact to one or two games. But where’s the fun in that? We’re hockey fans. Overreacting to every little thing is what we do.

But it’s important to be prepared. So here are seven story lines to keep an eye on this week, along with prepackaged overreaction you should have ready to go, just in case.

Did this happen? Connor McDavid fails to register a hat trick in his NHL debut tomorrow in St. Louis.

Then that can only mean … : BUST!

Or maybe not: McDavid is the most heavily hyped prospect to enter the league since Sidney Crosby, and when you factor in the explosion of media coverage over the last 10 years, he may be the most hyped ever. He’ll be under a microscope every time he takes the ice, with fans looking for signs that he can somehow live up to it all.

And he almost certainly will … eventually. But this seems like a good time to remember that teenage rookies rarely take the league by storm. In fact, in the two decades since the onset of the dead puck era, only one such player has managed a better season that Patrick Kane’s 72 points in 2007-08.

That would be Crosby, who totaled an impressive 102 in 2005-06, and that’s where some will want to peg the McDavid comparisons. But that was the first year after the season-long lockout, and scoring was way up thanks to a leaguewide mandate to make sure the entire game was spent on the power play. Scoring is down more than 10 percent from that peak, and there’s far less power-play time for the stars to divvy up, so Crosby’s total is almost certainly out of reach.

Since Crosby and Kane, no teenage rookie has had more than 63 points. McDavid isn’t your average rookie, but it’s not hard to see him topping out around that mark. And if he does, lots of fans will call it a disappointment. We shouldn’t. McDavid will be challenging Crosby for the Art Ross within three or four years; there’s no need to crank up the comparisons in Year 1.

Did this happen? One of the teams in tomorrow’s Dallas-Pittsburgh game ends up losing.

Then that can only mean … : The fancy-pants winger you traded for might score a lot of goals, but you can’t win in this league with a bunch of All-Star forwards if they’re supported by an average blue line and questionable goaltending!

Or maybe not: Before we go any further, let’s offer up some thanks to the league for providing this fantastic matchup on opening night. The Stars and Penguins may well be the two most entertaining teams in the league, and both spent the offseason loading up on even more offense. Seeing them pair off is a gift from the NHL, and I’m so grateful that I’m going to go an entire paragraph without criticizing the league for anything.

Yep. Sure will.

With that out of the way, I’m pretty sure one of these teams will indeed lose, since the league hasn’t quite reached its ultimate goal of giving everyone two points for every game played and hoping we won’t notice. That will give a head start to all the naysayers who’ll be lining up to criticize a team for daring to build around offense. And that will be especially true if we get blessed with the sort of 6-5 barn burner we’re all hoping for.

Look on the bright side, Stars or Penguins fans: You’re going to hear this stuff all year long. Might as well get used to it early.

>> Read the full post on Grantland

A look back at 20 controversies from this year's playoffs

I want you to think back to the afternoon of April 15. It was the first day of the NHL playoffs, with the opening faceoff just hours away. Do you remember how you felt back then? Calm. Happy. Even peaceful. Look at you. You were so young back then.

And then the playoffs started, and you’ve been filled with rage ever since.

This is what the NHL playoffs do. They sucker you in with the promise of the world’s greatest sport being played by elite teams with win-or-go-home stakes. Then they sideswipe you with one controversy after another, some serious, but most ridiculous. This continues until you’ve spent so much time screaming at your television that it becomes self-aware and starts automatically switching you to something less exciting, like gardening shows, test patterns, and the NBA playoffs.

This year has been no exception. We’re not even done with the conference finals, and there have already been at least 20 controversies in the playoffs. (I say “at least” because the fun thing about this sort of list is that while 20 controversies seem like way too many, I’m sure there are at least a few I missed. I look forward to hearing from irate Blues fans who can’t believe I didn’t mention that faceoff violation call in Game 4.)

It’s probably a good idea to pause for a look at the list now, before we all lose track and/or get committed. So in chronological order, here are 20 of the controversies we witnessed, debated, and severed friendships and family ties over during the 2015 NHL playoffs.

1. Stick and Stone Might Microfracture Your Bone

When: April 15, in Game 1 of the Senators-Canadiens series. The playoffs were roughly an hour old when all hell broke loose. Or, as hockey fans call it, “a slow start.”

What: Midway through the second period, Canadiens defenseman P.K. Subban slashed Mark Stone in front of Montreal’s net. The Senators rookie immediately fell to the ice writhing in pain. Subban was ejected; Stone left but returned in time for the power play before missing further action in the game.

That’s the short version; we covered the incident in-depth when it happened. Senators fans saw a vicious, premeditated attempt to injure. Canadiens fans saw a standard front-of-the-net battle gone wrong, made notable mainly by a player embellishing an injury to draw a penalty.

The aftermath: The league saw a five-minute major and nothing more, declining to suspend Subban despite intense lobbying by the Senators, who announced that Stone had suffered a microfracture. After all, Subban is a star defenseman, and those guys just don’t get suspended during the playoffs. (That sound you hear is every Detroit Red Wings fan putting their fist through their monitor.)

>> Read the full post on Grantland

The NHL playoffs all-bust team

We’ve crossed the halfway point in this year’s playoffs, which means we’re down to four teams left battling it out for the Stanley Cup. Making it this far is an enormous accomplishment, and we should take some time to celebrate the excellence of the players who are making it happen.

We should, but we won’t, because it’s way more fun to point fingers at the guys who didn’t get it done. So today, let’s assemble a dream team of playoff busts from the first two rounds.

One obvious disclaimer here: “disappointment” is relative. A first-liner who suffers through an awful series may still be more productive than a fourth-liner who meets expectations, but the star still gets the dreaded bust label. Fair? Maybe not, but that’s why these guys get paid the big bucks.

These lists are always tricky, since you’re dealing with a small handful of games and the boxcar stats can be misleading; I fully expect to wake up tomorrow to find the words “small sample size” spray-painted on my garage door. But I’m willing to take that chance, mainly because I just want to write a post about disappointing hockey players that doesn’t include any Leafs.

We’ll pick a full roster of centers, wingers, defensemen, and goalies. Spoiler alert: This is going to end up being a pretty impressive group that would win an awful lot of games under normal circumstances (if you could squeeze them under the salary cap). But if you had many of them in your playoff pool, you’re already out.

Center

Evgeni Malkin, Penguins — Let’s start with an easy one. The Penguins bowed out to the Rangers in five, but all were one-goal games. An extra goal or two could have turned the series around, which is why it was so frustrating to watch a superstar talent like Malkin struggle through a point-less series. That slump extended beyond the playoffs — he had no goals and just three points in his final 10 regular-season games — and it’s contributed to calls for the Penguins to trade him. (So far, it sounds like the team will stay the course.)

Paul Stastny, Blues — Stastny was the league’s biggest UFA signing last summer, at least in terms of average annual salary, and while his 46-point season was well under his career best, his solid two-way play still made him a key component of the Blues’ hopes. But his playoff numbers — just one goal and no assists in six games — were even worse. He didn’t play badly (his lined outscored and outchanced their opponents), and he certainly wasn’t alone, as pretty much every Blues forward not named Tarasenko could make an appearance on this list. But after yet another disappointingly short playoff run in St. Louis, it’s hard to argue that the Blues got what they paid for.

Tomas Plekanec, Canadiens — That Plekanec is, in theory, the Canadiens’ no. 1 center probably says more about the way the roster has been built than it does about the player. But that’s where he’s slotted in, and one goal and four points in 12 games doesn’t really cut it.

>> Read the full post on Grantland

Grab bag: I hear they want a plickspect

In this week's grab bag:
- Should the NHL have renamed the top advanced stats?
- An obscure player who gets pepper-sprayed
- Comedy stars
- Introducing the "plickspect", for all your trade rumors needs
- And the 1991 San Jose Sharks make a very... odd... NHL debut.

>> Read the full post on Grantland

Beyond the DMV: Other ways NHL stars get preferential treatment

They told him he couldn't smile for his license photo,
so he thought about Marc-Andre Fleury in the playoffs

.

It's August and there's not much happening in the NHL, which means it's time for the hockey world to find something completely harmless and blow it up into a manufactured controversy. Luckily, Sidney Crosby was kind enough to get the ball rolling for us.

In what's become a major story in Pittsburgh, Crosby was apparently allowed to skip to the front of the line at a local DMV over the weekend. This has led to accusations of preferential treatment and has some fans painting Crosby as a diva who can't be bothered to follow the same rules as everyone else.

It's all nonsense, of course. Expecting a celebrity to sit and wait for an hour while getting mobbed by fans would be silly. And besides, it's not like Crosby is the only NHL player who occasionally gets to experience the benefits of fame.

In fact, sources tell me that some of the biggest names in the hockey world often get special treatment:

Roberto Luongo - The managers at the moving supplies store never call security on him even though he goes in once a day to randomly yell "No I don't need any packing tape or boxes today thanks!" and then runs out of the room crying.

Dustin Byfuglien - Managers at the local grocery store have confirmed that they would let him cut in front of the other customers in the checkout line, in theory, if he ever left any food behind for anyone else to buy.

Alexander Ovechkin - Cops are always letting him off the hook for making illegal turns, since it's not like anyone could reasonably be expected to remember the difference between left and right.

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Gary Bettman, Donald Fehr and the NHL Lockout's Guilty Conscience

Hey, did you hear that the NHL lockout ended? It totally did! In fact, after four months of hearing about how far apart the two teams were, on Saturday night the deal actually came together kind of quickly.

Almost… too quickly.

Call me crazy, but doesn’t it seem like something must have been going on in the background during all of this that lead to the sudden ending. In fact, I can almost picture it now…

Follow @blogesalming or Dave Nonis will take your job.

Full lyrics after the jump.

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The discarded out-takes from the NHLPA's message to fans

Hey, remember that NHLPA video from a few weeks ago? You know the one: various star players looking into the camera, earnestly describing their love for the game and their frustration over the ongoing lockout? Let's be honest -- it was pretty darn effective.

Of course, not every player who auditioned made the cut. And a few of them took more than one take to get their message just right. The NHLPA kept the good stuff for the final product, and tossed the rest in the trash.

Luckily, Bloge and I happened to be hiding out nearby and were able to grab the out-take reel.

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Lemieux: Was deceptively fast going from center ice to the goal, often arriving before the opponent's defence was ready for him.
Roy: Was deceptively fast going from the goal to center ice, often arriving before the Avalanche's goaltender was ready for him.

From An in-depth comparison: Mario Lemieux vs. Patrick Roy, one of 24 chapters of brand new material available exclusively in The Best of Down Goes Brown.
Buy today: Amazon.com | Amazon.ca | Kindle | Barnes & Noble | Nook | Chapters/Indigo | Kobo | iBooks

This is non-core: The agenda at the latest round of CBA negotiations

"Seriously, thanks for taking some of the heat off."

The two sides in the ongoing NHL lockout spent most of the weekend holding face-to-face meetings in New York. That sounds like good news, until you find out that the talks focused exclusively on what the participants refer to as "non-core" issues.

Yes, despite a lockout that's already cancelled the entire pre-season and could begin wiping out regular season games as early as this week, the two sides apparently decided not to bother discussing critical issues like the division of revenue, free agency or limits on contract length. You could forgive hockey-deprived fans for wondering what the point was. After all, if you're not going to cover the important issues that are standing in the way of an agreement, what's left to even talk about?

Plenty, as it turns out. Despite a strict code of silence surrounding the proceedings, my spies were able to get a hold of the agenda for one day's worth of meetings. Here's what a day of "non-core" negotiations between NHL owners and players looks like.

9:00 a.m. - A relieved Gary Bettman announces that now that the NFL replacement refs have been removed due to their unprecedented incompetence, they've all gone back to their regular full-time jobs of managing the owners' public relations strategy.

9:30 a.m. - The owners and players engage in an extended argument over whether the coins that Flyer fans repeatedly pelt their families with during the first game back should count as hockey related revenue.

9:55 a.m. - The owners reassure a furious Donald Fehr that Jim Devellano's recent comments about an unwritten rule against using offer sheets was completely false, in the sense that they're pretty sure they actually did write it down at some point.

10:15 a.m. - A sheepish Darryl Katz apologizes for his earlier outburst in which he threatened to move the meeting to the boiler room unless everyone agreed to pitch in and buy him a pony.

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An in-depth review of NHL 13

The two logos in the bottom corner mark
history's last known example of the NHL
and NHLPA being on the same page.

Today marks the official release of NHL 13, the latest version in the much beloved series of hockey video games from EA Sports. Fans around the world are busy downloading the game or lining up at stores in anticipation of seeing what the developers have come up with for 2012.

Of course, this year's version may be more important than most - after all, thanks to the pending lockout the game could be the only NHL hockey that fans get to see for months. But is it any good? I got my hands on an advanced review copy, and I can report that the results are mixed.

Here are some of the new features, latest improvements and unfortunate bugs that can be found in NHL 13.

What's New

• The developers are hyping that the new "True Performance Skating" system, although there are still moments when the skating animations remain completely unrealistic. For example, when I skated towards a defenceless opponent while controlling Raffi Torres, my skates stayed on the ice.
  
  
• Players will be able to choose from five different difficulty settings: Easy, Medium, Hard, Impossible, and "Guy who has to handle public relations for the NHL owners".
  
  
• "NHL Moments Live" is a new feature that promises to let fans relive the most memorable moments from recent seasons, which has Edmonton Oiler fans excited since previous versions of the game never included the draft lottery.
  
  
• In a nice bit of cross-promotion, the game will access the worldwide database of FIFA Soccer 13 owners, find the one with the most pathetically abysmal record, and promote him to president of Maple Leafs Sports and Entertainment.
  
  
• The game can also be purchased in a special "Stanley Cup Edition". It turns out to be exactly the same as the regular version, except when you try to take it home from the store Gary Bettman will refuse to hand it over until you've posed awkwardly for photos with him while everyone boos.

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A hockey fan's guide to the World Series

This was an important sports moment from
1993, so it's safe to say Kerry Fraser didn't see it.

The World Series opens tomorrow night in St. Louis, with the Cardinals playing host to the Texas Rangers. And while some hockey fans wouldn't dream of switching over to a baseball game after waiting all summer for the NHL season to start, many will no doubt be tempted to tune in knowing that a championship is on the line.

So if you're a hockey fan who's thinking about checking out some of the World Series action, here's a handy guide to some of the subtle differences between the two sports to help you follow the action.

World Series: By late October, 28 teams have already been eliminated from championship contention.
NHL: By late October, no teams have been eliminated from championship contention with the exception of Winnipeg.

World Series: If you see the defence standing around helplessly while a player circles the bases before scoring, you'll know that batter has hit a home run.
NHL: If you see the defence standing around helplessly while a player circles the rink before scoring, you'll know that Phil Kessel has decided to try this year.

World Series: It took the sport a generation to recover from the cancellation of the 1994 World Series due to a player's strike led by hardline union head Donald Fehr.
NHL: I'm sure whoever's heading up the NHLPA these days would never do something like that.

World Series: For the second straight year, the Texas Rangers have won their first two playoff rounds under the leadership of popular manager Ron Washington.
NHL: Nobody with "Washington" on their jersey ever wins two playoff rounds in the same season.

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