Friday Grab Bag: New fans, old feuds, and a YouTube clip that ends badly

In the Friday Grab Bag:
- A word about Dan Boyle, Cal Clutterbuck, and when players yell at the media
- The award finalists are being announced, and they're all wrong
- The three comedy stars, including the Blues' newest fan
- An obscure lottery winner
- And a YouTube clip that's light and fun and features the darkest ending in the section's history

>> Read the full post at Vice Sports

Handing out some regular season awards

The NHL regular season ends Saturday, but come Monday morning everyone will be busy obsessing over playoff matchups, and the 82 games we just spent weeding out 14 teams will be forgotten. So rather than waiting until then, we’ll do our year-end wrap-up a few days early. I mean, how much can really change in just 60 hours?

Let’s take a look back on the 2014-15 season by handing out a dozen made-up awards to the players and teams that made it memorable.

Biggest Season-Long Theme: Goaltending Is Voodoo

Andy Marlin/NHLI/Getty Images

Considering how often a goaltender can single-handedly decide the outcome of a game or a series or even a whole season, it might be the most important position in hockey. However, that poses a bit of a problem, because we do not understand how it works. Like, at all.

Look at this season’s top stories: You have Andrew Hammond in Ottawa, which was all kinds of fun but made no sense on any level. Just one year ago, Minnesota’s Devan Dubnyk was considered so awful that the goalie graveyard that is the Edmonton Oilers gave him away to the Predators, who gave him away to the Canadiens, who then assigned him to the AHL even though their other goalies were hurt. Today, he may be the league’s most important player.

We also had Rangers backup Cam Talbot, an undrafted free agent who had to replace injured All-Star Henrik Lundqvist and ended up outplaying him. In Winnipeg, a veteran with one of the league’s worst résumés and a rookie backup with three career games have combined to become unbeatable. The Sabres traded all of their goalies and acquired a guy in Anders Lindback who may well have been the worst in the entire league, and he’s playing so well he might single-handedly ruin their season-long tanking master plan. The Blues have an All-Star as their starter but thought it would be a good idea to sign the ghost of Martin Brodeur. The Stars had one of the most established guys in the league, and he was awful and ruined their season. Jimmy Howard is losing his job to a former 141st overall pick. Also, the Oilers now have a guy named Tyler Bunz, which is neither here nor there, but I still wanted to mention it.

None of this makes any sense, and yet we’ll do what we always do with goaltending: Wait until the season is over, look back at the random chaos that just went down, and pretend we saw any of it coming. Of course, we didn’t, just like we almost never do. How could we? Goaltending is voodoo.

It’s also going to dominate these awards. Sorry for the spoiler, but you had probably already figured that out.

Best Feel-Good Story: The Hamburglar

There’s no better proof of the “goaltending is voodoo” theory than Hammond, a 27-year-old rookie with lousy minor league numbers who gets called up as a we-have-no-other-choice emergency injury replacement and then goes on a history-making hot streak. Next thing you know, fans are throwing hamburgers on the ice and the Senators are making a miracle playoff run that could still see them steal a wild-card spot.

On Tuesday, Hammond was shelled for three goals in the first period of a must-win game against the Penguins. Then he stood tall the rest of the way as Ottawa roared back from down 3-0, earning a 4-3 win in overtime to keep their playoff hopes alive. It was a miracle, but Hammond didn’t seem all that fazed since pretty much every game he’s played this year has been a miracle. After the game, he was asked about the last time he enjoyed hockey as much as right now. “I don’t know if there’s another time in my life,” Hammond said. “It’s the NHL. It’s what I’ve always dreamed about playing.”

Does Hammond’s story make any sense? Not really. Can it last? Probably not. While it’s possible he’ll turn out to be the next Dominik Hasek or Tim Thomas, showing up late before kicking off a lengthy career as a top-tier guy, it’s much more likely he’s the next Jim Carey or Steve Penney. For now, though, that doesn’t matter. Andrew Hammond is making all of us feel like we could be NHL goalies, too.

Best Trade: Dubnyk to Minnesota

This one’s as easy as they come, so let’s up the odds a bit: Where does the Dubnyk trade rank among the best ever?

Remember, when the deal went down on January 14, the Wild were in 12th place in the West, eight points out of the playoffs, and riding a six-game losing streak. Their about-to-be-fired coach was losing his mind. Essentially, they were done. And then Dubnyk shows up, they win their first game 7-0, and they basically turn into the 1977 Canadiens.

Granted, that’s not all Dubnyk, but he’s started every game since the trade, and he’s been consistently fantastic. The Wild are headed to the playoffs as a wild card, and they’ll be just about everyone’s sneaky dark-horse pick to go on a deep run. If that happens, the Dubnyk deal really will have to go into the discussion for the great trades of all time. Not bad value for giving up only a third-round pick.

>> Read the full post on Grantland

10 of the NHL's strangest goaltending records

Ottawa Senators goaltender Andrew Hammond has become one of the season’s best stories. The 27-year-old rookie has come out of nowhere to post one of the best starts to an NHL career we’ve ever seen. After last night’s 2-1 overtime win over the Hurricanes, Hammond now boasts a career record of 11-0-1, and has tied Frank Brimsek’s record by starting his career with 12 straight games allowing two goals or fewer.

Now that Hammond has started writing his name in the record book, he’s in some elite company. When it comes to goaltending records, most fans know the basics. It’s Martin Brodeur for regular-season wins and shutouts. Patrick Roy for playoff wins. And, of course, Glenn Hall’s 502 consecutive games, which stands as probably the most unbreakable record in all of pro sports.

Those records are fun, but as regular readers know, I like to go a little more obscure. So today, in honor of Hammond’s miracle run, let’s take a look at 10 of the more unusual goaltending marks in the NHL record book.

Most Games Without a Loss at the Start of a Career: 16

This is one of the records that Hammond is chasing, kind of, or maybe not, since in today’s NHL an overtime or shootout loss only sort of counts. But in any event, Senators fans hoping that they’ve somehow stumbled on the next Ken Dryden probably won’t be thrilled to be reminded of the man who once started his career by going 16 games without losing: Patrick Lalime.

Lalime set the record with the Penguins in 1997, topping the 14-game mark held by Dryden and Ross Brooks. He cooled off, but still ended the season with an impressive 21-12-2 record, and finished fifth in rookie of the year voting. Oddly enough, that would be the end of his time in Pittsburgh, and his NHL action at all for more than two years. He finally returned to the league in 1999 as a member of the Senators.

It was during his time in Ottawa that Lalime established a reputation as a solid regular-season goalie who couldn’t win the big game in the playoffs. We’ve covered this before, but it’s worth repeating here: that reputation is nonsense, because Lalime had excellent playoff numbers. But a handful of bad games, including one memorable Game 7 meltdown against the Maple Leafs, sealed his fate.

Lalime ended up playing for five teams over 12 seasons, earning an even 200 regular-season wins. Andrew Hammond would probably be thrilled with that sort of career, even if it’s not quite Drydenesque. In any event, Hammond can at least know that Lalime is rooting for him.

Most Penalty Minutes in a Season: 113

Goalies occasionally get mixed up in physical play, and every now and then they’ll even drop the gloves and square off. But only one goaltender in NHL history has ever cracked the 100-plus PIM mark, and you’ll never guess who it was.

Wait, did literally everyone just guess Ron Hextall? OK, in that case everyone is right.

Hextall topped the century mark for three straight years in the late ’80s, peaking with 113 PIMs in 1988-89. Those seasons give Hextall the top three spots on the all-time list, and while he calmed down in later years, his name still appears three more times in the top 25. More impressively, his 1988-89 total doesn’t even include his most famous meltdown from that season, since that occurred during the playoffs.

The record for most PIMs in a season by a goalie who wasn’t Ron Hextall is 70 minutes, and the owner of that mark actually is a bit of a surprise. It’s not a noted crease defender like Billy Smith or Eddie Belfour, or a slugger like Sean Burke, Ray Emery, or even Patrick Roy. No, the non-Hextall title goes to Tom Barrasso, who set the mark during a 1988-89 split between those oddball Buffalo Sabres and the Penguins.

Most Points Scored in a Game: 3

Hey, speaking of guys getting KO’d by Ron Hextall …

>> Read the full post on Grantland