Hockey Rambling

Can a Canadian-based team win the Stanley Cup for the first time since 1993? The fun will begin on Monday night, with the Canadiens travelling to Tampa Bay to face the Lightning. Later today, our writers will give you their Stanley Cup and Conn Smythe picks, so you might have a pretty good idea of [...]

There was only one goal scored in Game 7 between the Islanders and Lightning, but those types of games turn out to be nailbiters instead of snoozefests when there’s so much on the line. In the end, Andrei Vasilevskiy didn’t make any mistakes, making 18 saves in the 1-0 shutout win for Tampa Bay. Vasilevskiy [...]

Montreal and Vegas played a game that looked like most of the games this series: tight-checking, low-scoring, and on a knife’s edge of mistakes. The Habs were able to hold on to a 2-1 lead for a large chunk of the night, but a third-period goal sent it to overtime again. Alec Martinez was able [...]

Carl Gunnarsson has retired from the NHL after 12 seasons. He always seemed kind of underrated, but he generally brought really good defence to the middle of any blue line. He was a reliable part of many successful Blues teams, including the Cup winner in 2019. He retires at the age of 34 with over [...]

Vegas decided to go with Marc-Andre Fleury in net on Tuesday, and even in spite of the gaffe from game three, it’s tough to argue against it. Both he and Lehner deserve to be leading a team through the final four, but there’s only room for one guy in the crease at a time. The [...]

In this week’s Eastern Edge, we’ll look at the most disappointing player from each team in 2021. This will be the first of two parts, where we’ll cover the first eight teams of the conference in alphabetical order (i.e. Boston to New Jersey). Check out last week's edition as we discussed discrepancies between regular season [...]

As the expansion draft approaches, there are a handful of questions I keep coming back to. I keep asking myself what lessons the GMs have learned from Vegas, what the flat cap might do to prices, how quickly Seattle could possibly contend, and more. As far as individual teams go, there are few more interesting [...]

I went to my Twitter followers for topic suggestions this week. Here we go! https://twitter.com/Striker0777/status/1406626697403723782 I was surprised to see that 180 players fit this description. Wow – 180 players hit their team’s cap space by at least $5M. And that’s just the ones signed for next year! We still have this year’s crop of [...]

The Islanders/Lightning series is now a best-of-3 heading back to Tampa Bay for Game 5. Despite a late push by the Lightning, the Islanders were able to hang on with a 3-2 win in Game 4. And I mean hang on. Watch this last-second save by Ryan Pulock. Not Semyon Varlamov. Ryan Pulock. https://twitter.com/NHLonNBCSports/status/1406444950900854787 After [...]

Josh Anderson sure picked the right time to break his slump. Anderson scored a gift goal with 1:55 in regulation to tie the game after Marc-Andre Fleury misplayed the puck. Then he scored the game-winner in the first overtime to give the Canadiens a seemingly improbable 3-2 win and a 2-1 lead in their series [...]