Hockey Rambling

Yesterday, I wrote about where teams stand with regards to cap space and the off-season. Remember, the draft starts October 6th and free agency on October 9th, with the last day of playoffs potentially being September 30th. That doesn’t give us much time to cover what may happen. Today, I want to start the discussion [...]

A good read from Greg Wyshynski and Emily Kaplan over at ESPN about the NHL bubble. They got nine players to talk about the experience inside the bubble from both Toronto and Edmonton. This means talking about the food, entertainment, amenities, security, safety protocols, and everything else. It’s… eye-opening. The NHL got its security protocols [...]

The NHL announced the rest of its award winners on Monday, including top defenceman, goalie, rookie, and including the MVP to his team. Months ago, I wrote about who I thought should receive the various awards: Vezina can be found here and the others here. This was before the finalists were even announced, so they [...]

A couple of teams were eliminated last week and now we are down to two. As I’ve been doing throughout the playoffs, here is a post-mortem on those teams. New York Islanders The player who jumped out at me the most is obviously Brock Nelson. He’s a big forward who hit his breakthrough at just [...]

It’s time to take the Dallas Stars seriously as a team that could legitimately win the Stanley Cup, led by their red-hot backup goalie. Dallas 4, Tampa Bay 1 (Dallas leads series 1-0) Anton Khudobin was the big story again. The Stars goalie stopped 35 of 36 shots he faced, including all 22 shots the [...]

According to Darren Dreger, contract talks between the St. Louis Blues and Alex Pietrangelo have broken off to the point that the Blues have told their star defenseman to pursue free agency. https://twitter.com/DarrenDreger/status/1307108220935245825 I had assumed that the Blues had viewed Pietrangelo as a true foundational piece, so I’m surprised that it’s gotten to this [...]

We now have a Stanley Cup Final, which gets going on Saturday. Lightning 2, Islanders 1 OT (Lightning win series 4-2) If you picked Anthony Cirelli in your overtime challenge, congratulations. Cirelli scored 13:18 into overtime to send Tampa Bay to the Stanley Cup Final. Here’s the goal, which didn’t look like it went in [...]

We’ve seen lots of young players head overseas as their teams try to continue their development, and that makes all the sense in the world with so much time between last season and next season. I also saw Joe Thornton went back to Davos where he played during the lockout but he hasn’t suited up [...]

The Isles and Bolts went to the wall in Game 5 on Tuesday. During these strange bubble times, it had been posited that elimination games were a bit easier to close out with teams more readily able to fold and go see their families for the first time in weeks. However, New York wasn't going [...]

We got some quotes from Flyers coach Alain Vigneault but by AV’s own admission, he hasn’t had his exit interviews with his player since the end of their playoff run. So, we got a lot of vague phrases and we were short on detail. Hopefully there'll be some clarification in the coming days/weels. One quote [...]