Hockey Rambling

  Kudos to Garth Snow and Doug Weight for turning the Islanders into this season’s fire-wagon team. These guys have played 32 games and 22 of those have had six goals or more scored in them. I’m not even shoehorning those shootout goals into the result to skew the stats like NHL.com does. These are [...]

  Nearly a month ago I looked into the league-wide scoring bump, and where that scoring was coming from. At that point (November 17), the league average for goals per game was at 5.99. Heading into last night’s action, it had slipped to 5.88. That’s still a big bump over last season’s 5.45 goals per [...]

The Injury Bug Spreads To Hall, Dubnyk, among others… […]

Ryan Getzlaf made his return to the Duck lineup sooner than I had anticipated, but it was a pleasant surprise. The Ducks also got Jakob Silfverberg back last night. Suddenly, their lineup wasn’t looking so bad, but then of course another injury, this time to Corey Perry: {source}<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Perry has his knee [...]

The big news from Sunday night was that Auston Matthews would miss Toronto’s home game against Edmonton with an “upper-body injury.” He took some friendly fire on Saturday night, colliding hard with Morgan Rielly, leading to some speculation that was when the injury occurred. What the injury actually is I doubt will be revealed by [...]

Atkinson Scratched, Marner Breaks Point Slump, plus much more… […]

It was the Artemi Panarin show in Newark on Friday night. After his team fell behind 2-0 on goals from Marcus Johansson and Brian Boyle, Panarin had three primary assists on three second-period goals for Columbus. The prettiest of the three was probably on Scott Harrington’s goal where Panarin finds him as the trailer through [...]

  I’d be more concerned if the Blues weren’t running over people, but we should probably discuss the changing situation on the St. Louis power play. After a couple of games of running Vladimir Tarasenko on both units, he was pushed exclusively to the second unit last night. Except, whichever unit Tank is on is [...]

  My big pickup for this week was Tom Wilson, which has worked out better than I could have imagined. The power forward is enjoying his time on the top line with Nicklas Backstrom and Alexander Ovechkin. He put up a four-point night along with four PIM, three SOG, two hits and two blocked shots. [...]

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