In this week's episode of The Athletic Hockey Show:
- Would you want Tony DeAngelo on your team?
- The one Leafs rival I couldn't forgive when he joined the team
- We wonder if Marc Bergevin has already won the GM of the Year award
- The Senators are very bad, but are they historically bad?
- Looking ahead to Team Canada 2022
- Granger Things features a weird NHL-themed Super Bowl bet
- Gary Bettman's legacy, Sam Gagner's big night and lots 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)
Penalty minutes are a fascinating stat. They’re supposed to be a bad thing, signifying that you’ve broken the rules and were punished for it. In any other sport, constant fouls and penalties might get you nailed to the bench. But for much of hockey history, the PIM has been viewed as a positive. Rack up a lot of penalties, the thinking went, and it showed you couldn’t be pushed around.
That approach to the game has been shifting in recent years, as the game moves away from glorifying violence in service of The Code. In fact, it’s really hard to overstate just how much the NHL has changed in the last decade or two. To a fan who only started watching recently, the penalty-filled contests from the past must seem like a different sport.
But it happened. So today, let’s look back on some of that history, with a simple question: What’s the story behind your favorite team’s highest single-game PIM total? How long ago did it happen, who was involved, what were the repercussions, and just how crazy did things get?
For some of you, this may be a chance to revisit some games from an era that you miss. For others, it will be a reminder of just how far we’ve come, and how ridiculous the sport used to be. In either case, I hope you’ll learn something about your team’s history. Take a moment to see if you can guess which game will show up for your team, then let’s see if you’re right. (All game data is pulled from Hockey Reference)
Mighty Ducks of Anaheim (Anaheim Ducks): 117 PIM vs. Dallas, March 13, 1998
We’ll start with a good example of a game that wasn’t all that long ago but feels like it’s from an entirely different era. Back in the 1990s, guys like Craig Ludwig could take brutal runs at guys like Teemu Selanne for the simple crime of being too good. And when they did, it wasn’t hard to see how the rest of the game might go.
Ludwig basically accuses Selanne of faking an injury in that clip, and it’s true that the Finnish star didn’t miss any games. But that leaping elbow is brutal. Ludwig was suspended for two games; today it would be closer to 20. The Ducks took matters into their own hands, with tough guys Dave Karpa, Warren Rychel and Brent Severyn leading the way.
Arizona Coyotes: 94 PIM vs. Vancouver, January 21, 1998
We’re sticking with Coyotes history here, although if you extend back to the Jets you can find five games with a higher total. This one didn’t feature any major incidents but did have several spirited scraps, including this first-period bout between Scott Walker and Michel Petit. A lopsided score didn’t help — that will be a theme on this list — as the Coyotes ran away with a 6-1 win. Eight different players received fighting majors by the time it was over, including Trevor Linden, but Donald Brashear didn’t draw any of them. (He was kicked out early, and finished his night with 22 PIM in just two minutes of ice time.)
Boston Bruins: 195 PIM vs. Minnesota North Stars, February 26, 1981
The Bruins have had some of the sport’s best rivalries over the years, with everyone from the Habs to the Leafs to the Penguins to the Whalers. So it’s a bit of a surprise to see the North Stars show up as the opponent here, thanks to a fight-filled first period between two teams that were headed towards a potential playoff matchup and wanted to set the tone. Things got started early, with a line brawl seven seconds in that saw Minnesota’s Steve Payne rack up 29 minutes on his own. Things escalated from there, with a full-scale brawl nine minutes into the game that spilled into the benches and hallways, and had local law enforcement getting involved.
Things settled down after that, but the two teams set an NHL record for penalties in a period.
Buffalo Sabres: 192 PIM vs. Minnesota North Stars, March 31, 1992
The 1991-92 Sabres were enforcer-laden even by NHL standards of the era, featuring three players with 300-plus PIM and four more who hit triple-digits. Put it this way: The second most penalized game in Sabres history came less than two weeks after this one. And we’ll meet that one later.
The record-setting game against the North Stars started off scrappy but turned into something else late in the first when Buffalo’s Donald Audette was stretchered off after getting tangled with Minnesota’s Jim Johnson. It wasn’t an outrageously dirty hit, but the Sabres went looking for payback, and things blew up from there. The big line brawl came late in the second, and the exclamation mark came when Johnson dropped the gloves again with seven seconds left.
In this week's episode of the Puck Soup podcast:
- Thoughts on Tony DeAngelo, where he'll wind up, and his alleged burner account
- COVID problems continue for the NHL and NWHL
- Tyler Toffoli continues to wreck the Canucks
- Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl are so fun
- Penguins GM candidates, including my thoughts on John Ferguson Jr.
- Which of the Golden Globe best picture nominees have I heard of?
- The return of the threesomes quiz
- And more...
One of the great things about the NHL, we’re often told, is that anything can happen. You never know who’ll beat who, or who could be traded, or what playoff matchups we’ll get, or which stars might lead the league in a given category.
Often, that’s true. But not always. Because every now and then, there’s a glitch in the NHL matrix and the hockey gods end up serving up the same thing over and over.
So today, let’s celebrate Groundhog Day with a repetition-themed quiz. Answer the 15 questions below, and see how well you remember some of the things in hockey history that happened, then happened again, and maybe a few more times after that. And then, what the heck, go back and take the quiz again and again. Today’s the day for it.
Once you’ve submitted your answers, scroll back up to see how you did using this handy guide.
0 – 3 correct: Watch out for that first step, it’s a doozy.
4 – 6 correct: This is pitiful. A thousand people freezing their butts off waiting to worship a rat.
Once you get about three weeks into a season, you’re in a bit of a weird zone as far as what you’re learning. Most teams have see enough action that we’re no longer overreacting to every individual game. But it’s also early enough that we know that any surprising trends are likely to turn out to be noise. You still have to notice them and break them down, but you know there’s a good chance it will all come out in the wash, and maybe soon.
So what do you do? Sometimes, you’ve just got to sit back and watch the stars shine.
We got to do that this weekend, as the hockey gods decided to serve up some serious Saturday night star power. We got to see three of the league’s biggest stars record overtime winners, all within minutes of each other. And it was pretty great.
First up, Alexander Ovechkin in his first game back from the COVID list. One against three? Not a problem.
Not to be outdone, Sidney Crosby capped off a Penguins passing clinic to beat the Rangers just moments later.
Wow, that’s a tough one for the Rangers. Sure hope they stayed cool about it.
And then came Connor McDavid’s winner against the Leafs, which was very nice and you can watch it here. But at the risk of messing with our sudden death theme, that’s not the McDavid goal we’re going to remember from the weekend. Instead, it was this end-to-end rush through four Leafs.
That’s just silly. I’m a Leafs fan, and I can’t even be mad. My favorite part is the way Jake Muzzin realizes he’s beaten and makes a valid business decision to try to just reach out and grab McDavid on the way by, and even that doesn’t work. McDavid is just so much fun, and last night’s five-point performance (along with six assists from Leon Draisaitl) was a solid encore.
Hockey is a team game where everyone has a role and the depth guys are often the difference between winning and losing. But ultimately, the NHL is like the NBA and NFL and every other sports league: It’s better when the stars shine brightest. That doesn’t happen often enough in hockey, for a variety of reasons. But every now and then, the best find a way to break through, and we all get to sit back and watch. That happened on Saturday, so let’s forget about wins and losses and rankings and just enjoy it, if only for a moment.
OK, moment’s over. Let’s get to this week’s rankings.
Road to the Cup
The five teams that with the best chances of becoming the first team in history to win a Stanley Cup in July.
It won’t be a Dubois/Laine-level blockbuster, but we’ve apparently got another trade request involving a former top-five pick.
Per, @FriedgeHNIC, Sam Bennett’s agent Darren Ferris says Bennett “would like a change of scenery.”
Elliotte said there’s been radio silence from the Flames and that the team is in no rush on this matter.
Bennett has one assist on the year, his career high in points is 36, and he hasn’t even topped 30 since 2016. So yeah, the line won’t exactly wrap around the block on this one. Still, there’s a good chance that some team out there will feel that a change of scenery could reignite a guy who came into the league with high expectations. Let’s see if it happens, and how long it might take.
Spoiler warning: The Flames are not in the week’s top five.
5. Boston Bruins (5-1-2, +6 true goals differential*) – Bad news: They lost to Zdeno Chara and the Capitals, snapping a four-game win streak. Good news: David Pastrnak is back. The good news is more important than the bad news.
4. Washington Capitals (6-0-3, +7) – Nine games in, they’re the only team that’s played a full schedule without suffering a regulation loss. They’re also starting to get their stars back, with Ovechkin returning on Saturday and Evgeny Kuznetsov and Ilya Samsonov expected soon. They get the Bruins in a rematch tonight.
Puck Soup is a podcast featuring me and Ryan Lambert. We release one free episode each week during the season, plus mailbags and other bonus episodes for Patreon subscribers.
"Biscuits" was the Vice Sports hockey podcast, hosted by DGB and Dave Lozo. It ran for two seasons; the final episode was in July, 2018. You can find the archives below:
