8 ARMS TO HOLD THE STANLEY CUP THE NHL 2021-2022 SEASON THREAD (INCLUDING LIGHTNING HANGOVER AND KRACKEN SHENANIGANS. HOCKEY IS THE BEST)

Odds on a 2021-2022 season starting on time?

❤️🧡💛💚💙💜 pic.twitter.com/7zqT0A2gJj

— luke prokop (@lukeprokop_6) July 19, 2021

https://www.cbc.ca/sports/hockey/nhl-predators-prokop-announcement-1.6108113

very cool moment

Very nice

Vegas got Fleury, does Seattle take Price? Seems risky/expensive, but they have basically a full cap to work with.

Hoping Josh Bailey remains an Islander for life, although he was exposed last time too.

https://theathletic.com/2711747/2021/07/19/luke-prokop/

unlocked interview

price is prone to injury. fleury's issues were different, if i recall correctly, where it was him mostly not performing for a long while when his team needed him. so, i don't know if it's a fair comparison.

i think it'd be a bad move for seattle to acquire price, but i assume he actually really wants that to happen. he is in the last stage of his career and would most likely retire there and be close to family, so it makes sense for him.

i feel like they'll take holtby, though.

I'd take holtby or quick before price

so sounds like kraken's not taking any expensive players?

I haven’t heard of half of these drafted players. Supposedly they were no side deals.

weird

Yeah, you would think that Seattle would try to copy what LV did.

This time around teams may have been better at not leaving exposed players they would actually hurt to lose.

They did copy LV in the fact that they drafted a Fleury.

pens fan here (as i've probably mentioned before itt). pretty bummed that they basically got two penguins out of this thing. one of which actually hurts a little: mccann via toronto after he spent like two days as a leaf on paper. tanev's a trip, but gonna miss jared.

anybody else watch this thing live? chris fowler was so bad. painful to watch at times.

The NFL-ization of side events is second only to extortive owners

xpost was he the one who called the Hurricanes the Carolina Panthers

i missed that part! but it sounds about right. overall just a terribly awkward performance. with the move to espn, makes me worry that we'll have to suffer through him forever now.

They did copy LV in the fact that they drafted a Fleury.

Two Fleurys! They'll be twice as good as Vegas

are the kraken now one of the biggest and heaviest teams?

all their d men are at least 200 lbs and 6 feet tall (except for gavin bayreuther)

and they have the two biggest players in the nhl in oleksiak (6'7", 255 lbs) and macdermid (6'5", 233 lbs)

the nucks are going to get pushed around unless we get some bigger boys

re: the penguins, i'm sure they would rather have lost pettersson or zucker, but with a flat salary cap, room must be made. everyone loves tanev but he's a fourth-liner with four years left on his contract who's about to turn 30 (and his injuries are only going to mount with the way he plays)

mccann is a more significant loss, but he too is in the pens' bottom six when everyone's healthy, and you can't have everything. (i have seen him tentatively penciled in as seattle's no. 1 center lol.) they *should* be able to get bottom-six help more cheaply, perhaps leaving room to upgrade the goaltending

every half-decent team is desperate to shed salary; at least the penguins didn't have to embarrass everyone involved by trading away draft picks just to get arizona to take on their shitty contracts, e.g. flyers/ghost bear and islanders/ladd

Yes thank you Arizona for taking the contracts no one wants. Islander fans feel it was a fair deal for the most part, lol.

You have to admire the way Paul Holmgren has it in for the Flyers.

Just popped in to post a picture of when the Stanley Cup showed up at a Rush show I saw, which is among the most hockey things ever:

https://i.imgur.com/36I4fSP.jpg

congratulations to the handful of teams that *didn’t* wildly overpay for bad expensive defensemen today

otoh at least the flyers, blackhawks and canucks didn’t draft a sex offender (yet)

The Flyers had Billy Tibbets years back (but so did the Pens, iirc), so they have already checked that on their organizational bingo card.

kraken dman jamie oleksiak's sister is penny, a canadian swimmer, who is doing very well in several events in the summer olympics

Did not expect Vegas to trade Fleury to the Blackhawks for a prospect, and then Fleury saying he might retire in response.

Caps resigning Ovi for five more years seems more normal, but am wondering what his age 40 year will be like.

all of western pennsylvania wants the return of MAF, for better or worse (though neither hextall nor burke are likely to be sentimental about it)

pretty comfortable with the penguins doing very little so far -- the only deal i'm honestly envious of is dougie hamilton's, and they had nowhere near the room. i guess hextall does have a rep (unlike jim rutherford) of not making deals for the sake of it

might have taken (pittsburgh's own) brandon saad at that price, but that's about it

I wonder if Hextall is really there for the inevitable tear down/rebuild more than anything.

perry to tampa is very heartbreaking

xp i'm still not clear on why rutherford suddenly abdicated in january; i think hextall was just the best available candidate (i cannot explain burke's involvement at all)

pens did win their division and had excellent advanced stats, so i'm not sure tearing it all down because the goaltending was an utter disaster vs. the isles makes sense . . . but of course they haven't addressed the goaltending either

tbh i don't think ownership will allow hextall to tear it down yet. they might not re-sign malkin or letang after next year -- much more likely to let letang go, i'd imagine -- but crosby (and probably malkin?) is there as long as he wants to be. which i'm fine with

Not suggesting they will tear it down yet, just that Crosby/Malkin can't be good for too much longer and then . . . .

i'm still not convinced pens fans' goaltender panic is warranted, but i too am fine with just minor tweaks to the roster cuz i like what so many of them bring and the chemistry has largely been solid. gonna remain butthurt about mccann for awhile though. on the other hand, as a "reba" fan, we have a brock now. HAAIIEEE!

;_;

After a Hall-of-Fame career and 46 years of broadcasting Pittsburgh Penguins hockey, Mike Lange will be retiring from his play-by-play duties.

Ladies and gentlemen, Elvis has just left the building.

Thank you, Mikey: https://t.co/zMePmPrTmM pic.twitter.com/M4jForHpSq

— Pittsburgh Penguins (@penguins) August 9, 2021

well scratch my back with a chainsaw, grandma, mikey is retiring!

it sounds like he'll be popping in from time to time on penguins radio to shoot the breeze with the ole two-niner, so that's good.

RIP Tony Esposito

indeed

An MTU Huskies legend

Lundqvist done

also r-r-r-r-r-r-r-ick jeanneret to retire after season

https://c.tenor.com/BOBSv9PBFdEAAAAC/lundqvist-net.gif

Carolina's poison pill offer sheet to the Habs' Kotkaniemi is hilarious.

the pettiness is funny — and i guess it helps distract from both teams drafting or signing assholes this summer — but idg why carolina would trade away a good young goalie, let dougie hamilton walk, then offer $6m for a forward who scored five goals last season

habs should take the picks and use them to get eichel or something

mookie, I am a very petty person.

Yeah, I would probably take the picks. I believe the qualifying offer is 10% of expiring salary, so Carolina will have to offer $6.7M next year to keep his rights. I guess Carolina can walk away if he isn't worth $6M after next year, but if that happens those picks will hurt even more.

really wonder how often restricted free agents are offered offer sheets and *don't* sign them

just reread my post above and qualifying offer is 110% of expiring.

well, i hope the hurricanes are happy now!

Big Z back to the Island after a 20 year break.

i think there was a 2x ot in the first round?

i'm a bad pens fan! first game, round 1. pens won in 3OT! seems like 3 years ago.

pretty remarkable game/series by draisaitl, who is clearly having trouble moving

and god knows it would be unfair to note that the avs fucking slashed his ankle every chance they got

classic trouba; such a shame the rangers are choking away a 2-0 lead

Swing... And a miss. 🤷 #StanleyCup | #GoBolts pic.twitter.com/obEPhat2jl

— Sportsnet (@Sportsnet) June 10, 2022

what a shame

I approve

free (and great) hockey

torts + flyers = distinct comedic possibilities

Circus, meet your ringmaster.

I'm actually good with it in an accelerationist way.

Report is Trotz turned down a $7M/yr offer from the Flyers. He's no dummy.

tbf i think torts is pretty good at turning a bad team into a team that's at least hard to play against, and that may indeed be what the flyers need right now

but he's not the guy you want running an actually good team -- good players won't put up with his bullshit for long -- so a four-year term is kind of a surrender

this is maybe a little overlong, as the point is *very* thoroughly made, but also grebt/otm/imo

https://chaoticneutralzone.com/the-magicians-game

From the little bit I know about him, he sounds very much like Billy Martin.

yikes

yikes

i love this

Mo Seider winning the Calder is the high point of the Wings last several seasons

have to say that that *seems* like a pretty egregious too-many-men situation, but i don't think anyone really wants to see that militantly called

you could also not let kadri torch your defence

(i mean i would be fuming if i were a tampa fan . . . but i'm not, and they've won the last two cups, so)

yeah hard to imagine that ever being a penalty, and especially not in SCF OT

‘we’d have called it if we’d known it would lead to a goal’

I had gone to bed. Am I right that the TV guys didn’t mention it at all on the broadcast?

it wasn't easy to see on the ice...the goal itself was hard to see! it wasn't a story until Jon Cooper dramatically stormed out of a press conference

7:30 without a whistle

advertisers grinding their teeth

jack johnson, stanley cup champion

lightning were on the wrong side of a bunch of crucial calls, but in the end the avs deserved to win

btw looool corey perry

that waved-off icing with about 30 seconds left was ice fucking cold

also correct, as hedman had slowed to a crawl. one of the few brave moments by an official in the entire series

kinda rude that yzerman and sakic were so good *and* so good at building teams

only hall-of-famer to wear 19 for the penguins is brian trottier; probably missed their chance to hire him as GM

strong move by the leafs to add jason spezza to their front office tho

great stuff in here: https://theathletic.com/3384425/2022/06/27/hall-of-very-good

Good stuff. Love watching the Probert/Clark vid but the aftermath is such a bummer

love sean mcindoe

also love all this first-ballot Canucks HOF class

Wings hire Derek Lalonde as head coach, I like it.

mike grier is about to become the first black general manager in NHL history (with the sharks)

i couldn't imagine that hughes and gorton would ever choose juraj - from what i had read, he seemed totally outclassed by several of the other top 10s

but even still, and as a habs fan, i love the chaos of all this

hope the dach thing works out though, romanov was a darling

kinda think Juraj had the highest ceiling, idk

loving the Canucks pick

Flyers manage to find someone in the top 5 to draft who has skating problems smdh.

Then the Flyers just traded three picks for scumbag Tony DeAngelo. I'm done with this team and I am actively rooting against them now.

#ThatSealsTheDeal

Pens refusing to break up their core. Might work? Seems like they could some more young guys.

Johnny Gaudreau is apparently leaving Calgary to be closer to family. Which means either Philly (they have no cap space), the devils (tons of cap space) or the isles (I can only dream).

1) asking 75+ regular season games from both Syd + Malkin and then run the table against other, younger teams seems... unlikely.

2) Gaudreau leaving Calgary to join one terrible team (Philly) one team stuck in liminal space (isles) or one plucky team that is still maybe 3 years out with flabby goaltending is WILD to me

having a core that old isn't ideal, but the other options were worse. they weren't going to find a point-per-game second-line center better or cheaper than malkin at $6m. they weren't going to find a #1 defenseman who plays 23 minutes a game and is coming off his highest-scoring season who is better or cheaper than letang. rust is also a deal at $5m.

those guys weren't the reason they've lost five straight playoff series (the last two were absolutely due to goaltending), and i don't think those salaries should prevent them from addressing other needs. (really wish hextall hadn't extended jeff carter last year tho -- he fell off a cliff in the second half of the season.)

also it would have been pretty painful seeing malkin in another sweater.

the only takeaway i have from gaudreau is that he must fucking hate calgary, or darryl sutter, or something

also we need a new thread jimmy

i mean the pens are going to be utterly fucked when crosby retires no matter what happens; not much point trying to cushion the fall with half-measures now

yeah I was thinking the same thing—-the rebuild is on hold until Crosby retires

we're getting into the 'for how much?' part of the day

e.g. the flyers just gave nic deslauriers (8-5-13 and 113 PIM in 81 games last year) a four-year deal at just under $2m per

columbus just gave erik gudbranson (6-11-17 in 78 games last year) four years at $4m per

just insane shit

None of these deals are brick stupid yet i usually wait until something truly crippling happens

That Deslauriers deal is incredible. The guy has never scored 20 points.

OK then

50-PERCENT CAPACITY IN PHOENIX: THE NHL 2022-2023 SEASON THREAD (INC AVALANCHE HANGOVER & SALARY CAP SHENANIGANS. HOCKEY IS THE BEST)