MLB's new ABS replay system is an apparent success. Could the NHL learn from it?

Here’s a sentence you’ve never seen me write before: Replay review is good.

It works. It’s doing what it’s supposed to do. I’m glad it’s there, because it’s making the game better.

Just not in the NHL.

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Matt Duchene's OT controversy was a message from the hockey gods to ditch replay

The symmetry was almost perfect.

In the history of the NHL’s foray into the world of replay review, there are two moments that stand out as crucial landmarks, the key signposts that pointed us towards where we wound up. The most recent came in 2013, when Colorado center Matt Duchene scored a goal despite being roughly a mile offside.

The play is, to this day, widely misunderstood. The linesman didn’t somehow miss the fact that Duchene was offside; rather, he thought that the Predators had directed the puck back into their own zone, which would negate an offside call. But the optics were terrible. Everything about the play looked wrong, up to and including Duchene’s muted celebration. He knew he’d gotten away with one, as did everyone watching. And eventualy, the confusion and frustration of such an obvious missed call coalesced around a seemingly easy solution: Why don’t we have replay review for these plays?

And now we do, and it’s awful, but hold that thought. Because for the other key moment, we have to go back even further. Now it’s the 1999 Stanley Cup final, and we’re in triple-overtime of Game 6. With the Sabres fighting to extend the series, Dallas star Brett Hull collects a rebound and scores the Cup winner.

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No more offsides? Uncontested faceoffs? The end of EBUGs? Rules Court returns

Welcome back to Rules Court, where you submit your ideas for NHL rule changes and three of us (Sean McIndoe, Ian Mendes and Sean Gentille ) vote on them. Everything is up for discussion – on the ice or off, big or small, ideas that feels realistic and others that very much don’t. You make your case, and then the three of us reach a verdict. Convince at least two of us, and your rule is passed.

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Five ways to improve offside review if we can’t just get rid of it, which we absolutely should

There was a very dumb moment in the NHL last week.

Well, there were a few, because it’s the NHL, but the one I’m referring to happened in a game between the Golden Knights and Maple Leafs. A few minutes into the game, Phil Kessel scored a goal to put Vegas up 1-0. This was cool, because it was the 400th goal of Kessel’s career, his first as a Knight, and was also the game in which he tied the all-time ironman record. The building was rocking.

And then came the review. Well, that’s not actually true, because first came the now-required extended pause to think about the review, making sure the coach has plenty of time to squint at an ipad while everyone else stands around waiting for them to make up their mind. Then came the timeout, because Sheldon Keefe and the Leafs still weren’t sure. Then came the review, which went forever. The Leafs had challenged the play for being offside on the zone entry, a full 19 seconds before Kessel scored. There was no clear view that showed whether it was or wasn’t, but if you spliced together a few angles it looked like it probably was, by maybe an inch or two, for a fraction of a second, although it probably wasn’t quite conclusive if you were a Vegas fan.

Then, after an almost seven-minute delay had sucked all the life out of the building, the verdict finally came in: No goal.

Then the Knights scored immediately and the whole thing didn’t matter. Hot dog don’t lie.

I’m not knocking Keefe and the Maple Leafs for the challenge. It worked, after all, and they were just doing what teams are supposed to do in that situation, which is to look for any nitpicky detail they can find to get them off the hook for allowing a goal. But imagine explaining all of that to a new fan. Imagine them seeing all the excitement from Kessel’s moment, then telling them that a league that’s been starved for offense for 25 years and counting somehow feels the need to stand around for seven minutes to see if there was a way to make it go away. It’s madness.

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Puck Soup: The Panthers hired who?

On this week's episode of the Puck Soup podcast:
- We look back at the first three games of the Stanley Cup final
- Jon Cooper wants to change the offside review rule
- The NHL awards show was decent, but more importantly, which voters are we mad at?
- Catching up on the coaching news, including some stunning news that breaks as we're recording
- The Hockey Canada scandal, and what comes next
- Nicklas Backstrom could be done for a while, and I have a suggestion for who the Caps should get to replace him
- Plus ketchup popsicles and other important topics...

>> Stream it now:

>> Or, listen on The Athletic or subscribe on iTunes.

>> Get weekly mailbags and special bonus episodes by supporting Puck Soup on Patreon for $5.

The Athletic Hockey Show: Happy birthday to you

On this week's episode of The Athletic Hockey Show:
- Ian tells me who's birthday it is today, and gets a very emotional reaction from me
- I think I was wrong and the NHL was right about that offside review
- Offside review is still terrible, though
- Jesse Granger has Conn Smythe odds, including one big name with wildly high odds
- Devils fans tells us how many Cups they'd give up to beat the Rangers
- The all-disappointment team, goalie injuries, this week in history and more...

The Athletic Hockey Show runs most days of the week during the season, with Ian and I hosting every Thursday. There are two versions of each episode available:
- An ad-free version for subscribers that you can find here
- An ad-supported version you can get for free wherever you normally find your podcasts (like Apple or Spotify)

The Athletic Hockey Show: What if?

On this week's special "what if?" episode of The Athletic Hockey Show:
- What if Gretzky stays in Edmonton?
- What i the Sabres win the McDavid lottery?
- What if the linesman doesn't miss Duchene's offside?
- What if Patrik Stefan scores into that empty net?
- What if Don Waddell back-stabbed Brian Burke at the Sedin draft?
- And more...

The Athletic Hockey Show runs most days of the week during the season, with Ian and I hosting every Thursday. There are two versions of each episode available:
- An ad-free version for subscribers that you can find here
- An ad-supported version you can get for free wherever you normally find your podcasts (like Apple or Spotify)

This is all your team’s fault: One part of the modern NHL to blame on every team (Western edition)

Welcome to the conclusion of a two-part series in which I try to find a rule, tradition or other piece of the hockey world that each team can take the credit (or blame) for introducing.

On Tuesday, we looked at the 16 Eastern Conference teams, and thank them for giving us icing, the draft lottery, trade calls and the all-star game, among other things. Today, it’s on to the West. As before, we’ll be looking at changes that were big and small, good and bad, important and trivial, and everything in between. We just want to make sure all 15 Western teams – sorry, Seattle, maybe next year – have some small piece of today’s NHL that they can claim as their own.

Chicago Blackhawks

Thank them for: The limit on how curved a stick blade can be

For the first century or so of hockey, stick blades were flat. It wasn’t until the 1960s that the curve blade fell into wide use, making it easier to lift the puck and occasionally producing unpredictable shots that were harder for goalies to stop.

There’s some dispute over who actually came up with the curved stick; most versions of the story mention Bobby Hull and Stan Mikita of the Hawks, although New York’s Andy Bathgate had claimed that they got the idea from him and some sources credit the initial innovation 1920s star Cy Denneny. But either way, it was Hull and Mikita who took the idea to the next level, taking to the ice with ridiculous curves that became known as banana blades. The NHL eventually put a limit on how much curve was too much, a fact that still makes Kings fans cry.

Edmonton Oilers

Thank them for: The post-Cup group photo

The 1980s Oilers had plenty of chances to innovate when it came to winning Cups, since they did it kind of a lot. They’re often given credit for starting the tradition of the first handoff by giving it to Steve Smith in 1987, the year after his infamous own-goal. But I’ve always loved the story behind the 1988 win, when Wayne Gretzky made the apparently impromptu decision to gather everyone for a team photo.

We hadn’t seen that before, and it was an undeniably cool moment – especially since it became Gretzky’s last moment in an Oiler jersey.

Los Angeles Kings

Thank them for: Your current coach not being able to take a job with another team

Not your current coach in the sense of a guy you fired but who remains under contract. I mean the guy who’s behind your bench, right now, for tonight’s game. Other teams can’t just show up and hire that guy for a different job.

Yeah, that doesn’t seem like the sort of thing we should need a rule about. There’s a story here.

It comes from December 1986, as the legendary Pat Quinn was halfway through his third season as Kings’ coach. He stunned the league, and his employer, by announcing that he’d accepted a job as the new GM of the Canucks, with the intention of starting after the season ended.

Quinn, a former lawyer, argued that he was within his legal rights to negotiate with another team, even as he was still working for the Kings. The NHL didn’t necessarily dispute that, but considered Quinn’s attempt to coach one team while signing a contract with another a conflict of interest. They hammered everyone involved with heavy fines, and suspended Quinn from working anywhere for the rest of the season, and from coaching a team until 1990. Not surprisingly, various appeals, threats and lawsuits followed. It was kind of a mess.

So the next time you about a team needing to ask permission to talk to a coach that some other team already fired, you can trace it back to the Kings, the Canucks, and the lawyer/coach who knew an upgrade when he saw it.

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How I’d fix the NHL’s replay review system

I’ve spent a big chunk of the last few months writing about replay review. It’s been unavoidable, because the officiating has become the dominant story of the 2019 postseason, and there’s a growing cry for the league to do something. For many, that something is more replay review, for everything from hand passes to majors and match penalties to (most recently) even tripping minors.

I don’t necessarily agree, at least with some of the more extreme proposals. I’ve laid out my case for why I think replay review for penalties would be a disaster. I’ve outlined the five hard questions the league needs to ask before they go any further down the replay path. I’ve tweeted about it. Lord, so many tweets.

So I’ve made my point. Some would say I’ve beaten it into the ground. But here’s the thing: One of my pet peeves in life is people who complain about everyone else’s ideas without ever saying what they’d do instead, and I’m getting dangerously close to that territory. Anyone can stand on the sidelines and say “this is broken.” At some point, you should be willing to offer up some ideas for how to fix it.

This feels like the right time to do that, since we’re told Gary Bettman will present his plan to the competition committee today. Maybe my ideas are better. Maybe they’re worse. Maybe they’re exactly the same, and Bettman will tweet the Spiderman pointing meme at me and I’ll transform into a corncob.

The point is, I’ve done enough complaining. It’s time to be part of the solution. So here’s my 10-point plan for expanding and also shrinking but mostly fixing replay review. Read it over. Pick it apart. Agree with it, or don’t. Tell me why it is in fact me who has been the idiot all along. Fair’s fair. Here we go.

Step 1: Expanded review for black-and-white calls

We’ll start with the change we can probably get almost everyone to agree on. We’ll expand replay review to include hand passes, like that Timo Meier overtime miss. Today, those can only be reviewed if the puck is batted directly into the net. Now, we’ll be reviewing them anywhere along a play that leads to a goal.

We’ll also add pucks that are directed with a high-stick, which is the same category of play. And while we’re at it, we can include the review of pucks that hit the netting, which we learned this postseason is already on the books but in an extremely limited way. That gets expanded here.

The review would come from the league war room, which is already responsible for automatically reviewing just about everything goal-related, like kicking motions and pucks crossing the line. It’s a little bit of extra work that will occasionally add a few seconds of extra time before we can face off and get back to playing, but it will be worth it.

That all feels like common sense. Those additional reviews would be rare, but they’d be important, and we should be able to do them in a way that avoids any controversy.

Of course, careful readers will notice that there’s one detail we have to nail down first …

Step 2: Define what “leading to a goal” means

This was one of my tough questions from this post. What does it mean for a play to lead to a goal, and where do you draw the line? Is it based on a certain number of seconds? Distance from the net? The puck staying in the zone? Some touchy-feely “we’ll know it when we see it” sense of intuition?

Not in our new system. For us, a play leads to a goal if the defending team never regains possession. If they touch and control the puck at any point after the missed infraction, then we don’t worry about it. You had your chance to make a play, you can’t blame the miss anymore.

In other words, our message here to the players is straightforward: Keep playing hockey. If there’s a glove pass or the puck hits the netting or whatever else, don’t stop and wave your arms around like a tattling first-grader. Keep playing. If the miss causes a goal, we’ll take care of it with replay. Otherwise, keep doing your job. A missed call earlier in the shift doesn’t give you a magical do-over on everything else that happens afterward.

Admittedly, we’re introducing a sliver of subjectivity here, because possession can be dicey. But we already have a relatively common play where officials need to make this kind of judgment: Delayed penalties. We’ll use the same definition here.

Note that simply making contact with the puck isn’t possession, so Meier’s hand pass still falls under this expanded review even though the puck deflected off Jay Bouwmeester’s leg. Our expanded rule would also have waved off the Blue Jackets’ goal in Boston, because the Bruins never got the puck back after it hit the netting. But this play from a few years ago where over a minute of game time and multiple possessions go by while Jack Edwards has a meltdown? Get out of here. Keep playing hockey.

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Five hard questions the NHL needs to ask before they expand replay review

Expanded replay review is coming to the NHL, in some form. The Athletic’s Pierre LeBrun reported over the weekend that league leadership has already met to come up with a proposal for expanded review and will present it to the competition committee on Tuesday, with the GMs getting a look next week.

LeBrun reports that the recommendation will not include judgment penalty reviews, at least this time around. That will be disappointing to some fans, especially in the wake of controversial moments like Cody Eakin’s major and Tyler Bozak’s uncalled trip. But it would likely include a review of plays like Timo Meier’s hand pass, among other scenarios that aren’t covered by the current rules.

I’m with pretty much everyone else in believing that the NHL has a crisis on its hands. The officials have become the story of the playoffs and that’s never a good thing. I think the Eakin call was a bad one, as I said at the time. I think the hand pass was an obvious miss. And I think Bozak should have been given two for tripping on Thursday. Three big missed calls, which is three too many.

But now what?

You already know what I think about replay review for penalties. I’ve made my case that it would be a disaster, and I’ll keep banging that drum if only because in a few years when we do have it and everybody hates it, I won’t have to hear about how nobody could have seen this coming. And I think there’s a good chance that any sort of expanded review will be a mess too because it’s being implemented by the same minds that came up with the current offside and goalie interference reviews. Are you happy with how those have worked? Not many of us seem to be.

But here’s the key point: I don’t want expanded replay review to be a mess. I’d have no issue with a well-implemented replay system that makes the game better. I don’t want this league to screw up yet again. I don’t want us to all be sitting around in a few years, screaming at each other over freeze-frames of plays we barely even notice today.

For now, I’m accepting reality by conceding that I’m probably going to lose this argument and that significantly expanded review is almost certainly coming in some form. And yes, that will likely include penalties at some point, even if it’s not this year. The question now is whether it can be done in a way that doesn’t prove my warnings right. I’m not optimistic, but I don’t think the task is impossible.

But the first step is that we have to stop pretending this is easy. Stop saying “just get it right,” as if that hasn’t occurred to the league or its officials. We all told ourselves that offside review was going to be easy, but it hasn’t been – and that’s for a call that in theory should be black-and-white. We figured we were just going to catch the Matt Duchene plays and nobody could object to that. Instead, we took a play that nobody had a serious problem with since Leon Stickle in 1980 and turned it into something we all fight about every few days. And we did all of that without catching even one single Duchene-style play along the way. We now have teams with employees whose job it is to watch every zone entry for potential offsides, all for the purpose of taking perfectly good goals off the board because of a fraction of an inch that nobody even noticed in real-time. If we’d seen what was coming, nobody would have been in favor of this four years ago.

Why did the offside review system we got end up being so different than what we expected? Because we didn’t really think it through about how it would work. We saw a missed call or two, we wanted to fix it and we figured that replay review would be easy. We were all wrong. Let’s learn some hard lessons from that.

Sure, complain about this year’s playoff officiating. If your team is one of the ones who got screwed by those ridiculous calls, you have every right. Scream at the sky, stomp your feet, type in all caps. Get it all out of your system. And then let’s start asking some tough questions about what we’re actually going to do.

Here are five to get us started.

What should be the standard for changing a call?

There are two basic schools of thought here. The first is that replay is there to catch the obvious errors. Mistakes happen, officials get screened and we need a failsafe for the really big misses that are obvious to everyone except the guy with the whistle. In theory, that means replays should be rare and short because it takes one look to see that yep, Timo Meier committed a hand pass. You don’t even need the slow-mo part most times and certainly not the frame-by-frame breakdowns. Often, one look at real speed is all you need.

It goes without saying that the NHL doesn’t do it this way because reviews aren’t rare and they’re certainly not short. The league has gone with the other philosophy, which says that once you’ve triggered a review, you might as well try to make the best call you can. After all, you’ve already stopped the whole game, you’ve got all these fancy cameras and multiple angles and everyone is standing around. Might as well take the time to really figure out what happened. If that means that you only end up being 60 percent sure that you got it wrong, well, that can still be a call worth changing.

Neither of these approaches is necessarily right or wrong, but you have to pick one. And you have to communicate it clearly to fans. Today, the NHL lives in a weird middle ground where the rules say that the call on the ice is supposed to stand unless the evidence is overwhelming, but the reviews clearly aren’t called that way. (Did you ever see a view of the Gabriel Landeskog offside that showed with 100 percent clarity that his skate wasn’t touching the line? Me neither.)

Pick a lane, and communicate it clearly every time you have a review. No more middle ground.

One more thing. If your standard is that we’ll only change the calls that are obviously wrong, prepare to be surprised by what people think is obvious. That Bozak trip? Not a penalty to everyone’s eyes. Lots of people thought the Cody Eakin major was absolutely the right call. Few penalty calls are ever really obvious to everyone watching. Stuff like hand passes and pucks into the netting should be better, but even there we can run into grey areas or views that might seem inconclusive.

Again, this isn’t a reason not to try. But it is a reason to stop pretending that any of this is going to be simple, or that you’ll make everyone happy with the results.

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Puck Soup: Yet another replay review disaster

In this week's episode of the Puck Soup podcast:
- The Avalanche get screwed by the terrible offside review rule
- In hindsight, were the Blue Jackets right to go all-in?
- Thoughts on Charlie McAvoy's hit and suspension
- More officiating controversies from around the league
- An interview with actor Bill Camp
- Ken Holland is hired in Edmonton
- Greg tries to stump me with an on-the-spot quiz about the 1992 Jays, which, come on
- Brad Marchand acts like a jerk, again
- Our conference final picks, and lots more...

>> Stream it now:

>> Or, subscribe on iTunes.

>> Get weekly mailbags and special bonus episodes by supporting Puck Soup on Patreon for $5.

Puck Soup: First round wrapup, second round picks

In this week's episode of the Puck Soup podcast:
- We try to make sense of a ridiculous first round, including the Hurricanes' game seven stunner
- That missed call in Sharks/Knights leads to a spirited debate about replay review for penalties
- What's next for Mike Babcock and the Maple Leafs?
- I give this ad read thing another shot
- Ryan interviews the lead singer of PUP
- We make our second second-round picks
- I try to fake my way through a discussion about Marvel movies
- And more...

>> Stream it now:

>> Or, subscribe on iTunes.

>> Get weekly mailbags and special bonus episodes by supporting Puck Soup on Patreon for $5.

Eight games that changed the results of the NHL draft lottery

OK,​ so maybe there​ really​ wasn’t​ a lot​ of​ suspense​ to be​ had in Tuesday’s​ draft lottery. You​ could​ have saved yourself​​ some time by just reading my preview, which correctly predicted the Devils winning the top pick. Or you could have skipped that too and just known which team Taylor Hall plays for.

Hall is Mr. Lottery, a fact he’s embraced over the years and was quick to remind us of that night:

They talk about Gretzky’s 92 goals or Sittler’s 10 pts in one game as records that may never be broken. But winning 5 draft lotteries in your first 9 years in the league? In 2 different draft lottery eras, no less. That is a record that will stand forever.

— Taylor Hall (@hallsy09) April 10, 2019

It’s possible that Hall is just unstoppable, and nothing could have prevented the lottery from playing out the way it did. Then again, maybe you don’t buy into that particular brand of superstition.

If so, then you’ve come to the right place, because it’s time for the annual round of “Find a single game from the season that would have changed the lottery outcome.”

This has been kind of a hobby of mine over the years. For every draft lottery, once you know who won, you can look back and find games from that season that altered the results. The most memorable example is probably the infamous Patrik Stefan flub, which ended up sending Patrick Kane to the Blackhawks instead of the Oilers. Edmonton’s win in the last game ever played at Rexall Place ended up costing them Auston Matthews. A late Geoff Sanderson goal in 2004 cost the Blue Jackets the Alexander Ovechkin pick.

You can do this all day. It’s fun. Or, depending on your perspective and how close your team came to a franchise-altering lottery win, extremely un-fun.

First, let’s explain what we’re even talking about. Many fans assume that the NHL draft lottery just involves a barrel full of ping pong balls with each team’s logo on them. That would be the easy way to do it, but the league is looking for more control over the odds. So instead, they use 14 numbered balls, and draw four of them. That gives them 1,001 combinations, which they assign in advance to the qualifying teams. (You can read about the whole process on this page; the actual number combos can be found here; these were the actual winners.)

Those combinations are handed out based on the final standings, which means that it’s not really teams that are winning or losing the lottery at all – it’s spots in the standings. There are three winners every year, and this year the lucky slots were 29th, 26th and 20th. Whichever teams were holding down those spots were going to win. We just didn’t know that until Tuesday night.

(I’ll pause here to acknowledge that you can get into some “time traveler steps on a butterfly” arguments here, where changing the results of one game ends up impacting other things that happen in the future. If you feel very strongly about this and won’t be able to enjoy this premise because of it, I encourage you to go argue philosophy in the comment section of a Mirtle article while the rest of us have a little fun here.)

Some years, there’s no single game that would change a certain result. For example, in the Connor McDavid lottery in 2015, no team was even within five points of the Oilers on either side, so they could have won or lost a few extra games without changing anything. But other years, we get plenty of what if scenarios.

This is one of those years. By my count, there are 12 teams that could have won or lost one of the three lottery draws based on changing the outcome of just one game on their schedule. So that’s what we’re going to do today. Here are some of the (many) games from the 2018-19 season that could have altered the result of Tuesday’s draft lottery.

Arizona Coyotes – March 26

The Coyotes finished with 86 points, two up on Chicago for that winning No. 20 spot. But they also would have held the ROW tiebreaker, so just having them lose an extra game doesn’t do it. No, we have to flip the results of a game where they beat the Blackhawks. And luckily, we have two to choose from.

The first was a 4-1 win in Chicago on Oct. 18. But all else being equal we prefer more recent games – less time for those butterflies to get stepped on, and all – so let’s go with March 26. On that night, the Hawks and Coyotes went into the third period locked in a 0-0 tie. Arizona’s Nick Cousins banged home a rebound to make it 1-0, and the lead held up for a regulation win.

If the Hawks get that first goal instead and win the game, the Coyotes end up dropping to 20th, and they’re holding the lucky combo to move up to the third-overall pick. Instead, they’re picking 14th, all because of one game.

See how this works? Fun, right? Trust me, it’s going to get so much worse.

Florida Panthers and Buffalo Sabres – November 30

The Panthers finished tied with the Coyotes but make for an easier case because they wouldn’t have owned the tiebreaker against the Hawks, meaning all we have to do is turn any ROW into a regulation loss. Meanwhile, the Sabres finished two points back of the Rangers and held that tiebreaker, so they move into a winning spot with one additional regulation win. That gives us plenty of games to choose from, but it’s always fun to try to change two results with one game, and we get a chance to do that here.

We’ll head back to Nov. 30, as the Sabres visit the Panthers in Florida. The night before had seen Buffalo’s 10-game win streak come to an end at the hands of the Lightning, so you could expect a bit of a letdown for a tired road team on short rest. And indeed, the Panthers largely dominated the game, outshooting Buffalo 43-24. But Linus Ullmark stood on his head, and the Sabres held a 2-1 lead late in the third. That’s when Casey Nelson took a high-sticking penalty, and the Panthers converted on the power play to tie the game and send it to overtime, where Aleksander Barkov would win it.

If the Sabres manage to hold onto their lead, they win in regulation and end up finishing 26th and winning the second-overall pick, while the Panthers drop down to 20th and pick third. Two teams, two high picks, both gone because of one game.

Keep your sticks down, kids.

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Grab bag: Hall of lame

In the Friday Grab Bag:
- Everyone's talking about Gary Bettman's Hall of Fame induction, but we shouldn't be and we don't have to
- A neat idea that the NHL should steal from the international sports world
- An obscure player who was drafted just before Martin Brodeur
- The week's three comedy stars
- And a look back at the moment John Tavares became a New York Islander

>> Read the full post at Vice Sports

Podcast: Conference call

In this week's episode of the Biscuits podcast (which was taped yesterday):
- We look at both conference finals
- Does Dave want back on the Caps bandwagon?
- A heated argument about adding more replay review
- Lundqvist for Rinne
- Leafs front office drama
- Goalie chant etiquette
- Is the Winnipeg crowd really that loud?
- Reader questions and lots more...

>> Stream it now:

>> Or, subscribe on iTunes.

Saturday storylines: Kids and the Hall

In the words of the immortal Badger Bob Johnson, it’s a great day for hockey. Emphasis on the “day,” as seven of today’s eleven games will start in the afternoon — or even the morning, depending on how far west you are. That includes four 1:00 ET games, making it the day’s busiest start time. But the best matchup of the day is one of the few evening games, and we’ll start there.

HNIC Game of the Night: Penguins at Maple Leafs

This is the third Saturday-night meeting between these two teams, with the last coming just three weeks ago. But plenty has changed on both sides since then.

The trade deadline was part of that, with the Penguins making a big change by bringing in Derick Brassard while the Maple Leafs went the more conservative route by settling for Tomas Plekanec. We’ve also seen a pair of major injuries since that last meeting, with Auston Matthews (shoulder) and Matt Murray (concussion) both sidelined; neither is expected to play tonight, although it sounds like Matthews might be getting close.

But the bigger story, at least in Toronto, is the change in the team’s fortunes since the last matchup. The Leafs went into that one riding a five-game win streak that had them back within range of the Bruins and Lightning in the Atlantic race. That streak had included wins over the Lightning and Predators. Things were good.

They’re no longer good, at least temporarily. The Leafs lost that Penguins game but then rolled off four more wins. But since then it’s been four straight losses, matching a season high, with the nadir coming in Monday’s 5-3 loss to the lowly Sabres. That slump has put an end to any talk of moving up from third spot in the Atlantic, and it’s raised some concerns over Frederik Andersen‘s play. Even when the Leafs were rolling, it was often due to their goaltender’s strong play. Now he’s given up five goals in each of the last two games, and three or more in five straight, and it’s fair to wonder if his workload is catching up to him. If so, the Maple Leafs might be in trouble.

Of course, that’s the nature of goaltending, and if Andersen stands on his head and shuts out the Penguins tonight then we’ll all declare that he’s back and move on to the next narrative. A win tonight would go a long way to calming any jittery Leafs fans out there and keep this four-game mini-slump from turning into something more. We’re still a long way away from any talk of 18-wheelers and cliffs, but it would be nice to nip this streak in the bud before we get there.

As for the Penguins, they come in riding three straight wins and holding down first place in a tight Metro race. After Phil Kessel‘s early heroics carried the team long enough for Sidney Crosby to heat up by mid-season, now it’s Evgeni Malkin who’s looking scary, with eight points in his last four to sneak into the Art Ross conversation. That’s not the guy you want to see when your goalie is slumping.

Hey, speaking of stars riding hot streaks that make Canadian fans sad…

>> Read the full post at Sportsnet

Podcast: Put your skates in the air like you just don't care

In the Vice Biscuits podcast:
- On Andrew Cogliano's suspended streak
- Making the case for Nathan MacKinnon as MVP
- These offside reviews are so stupid that even the NHL has to do something
- Why isn't Willie O'Ree in the Hall of Fame?
- Dave and I agree to move in together
- Plus the reader questions get R-rated and lots more

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Grab bag: Cowboy up

In the Friday Grab Bag:
- These skate-in-the-air offsides are a mess, but the fix is so simple even the NHL can't screw it up
- Winnipeg reacts to a rare moment in the spotlight
- An obscure player from the last Jets playoff win
- The week's three comedy stars, featuring a butt goal
- And a YouTube look back at happier times for the Oilers, starring weird card-playing cowboys

>> Read the full post at Vice Sports

Grab Bag: Rules are rules

In this week's Grab Bag:
- Everyone hates the offside review, but don't we need to get the rules right?
- A look at Gary Bettman's state of the union address
- An obscure player who was Jake Guentzel before Jake Guentzel
- The week's three comedy stars, including Catfish Guy
- A YouTube breakdown of Mario Lemieux's greatest Stanley Cup moment

>> Read the full post at Vice Sports

Podcast: Conn artists

In this week's episode of Biscuits, the Vice Sports hockey podcast, Dave and I tackle important questions like:
- Who should win the Conn Smythe?
- Actually, it's Evgeni Malkin, why are we even talking about this?
- Wait, people think Jake Guentzel should win? Seriously?
- Who should the Predators start in net for game three?
- Is offside review working?
- Is there a point to Gary Bettman's annual state of the union address?
- Is the officiating worse in the playoffs?
- How easily could a referee fix a playoff game?
- What's my crazy idea to make the regular season matter again?
- Our thoughts on Catfish guy
- Wait, that lost one wasn't a question
- Our thoughts on Catfish guy?
- And lots more...

>> Stream it now on Vice Sports

>> Or, subscribe on iTunes.