Down Goes Brown

The Stanley Cup final matchup is set, and it’s a good one. In one corner, the Florida Panthers, back for the second year in a row with a chance to avenge last year’s loss and finally capture the first championship in franchise history. In the other, the Edmonton Oilers, featuring the best player in the world and a dynamic supporting cast, and looking to bring the Cup back to Canada for the first time since 1993. It’s quite possibly the two best teams in the league, and certainly two of the most exciting. Читать дальше...

Ah, playoff overtime. It’s the best. Just pure adrenaline and/or terror, depending on your perspective, a universal experience so good that it inspired one of history three or four good tweets.

With just four teams left, the battle for the Conned Smythe Award is really heating up.

We’ve made it to the conference finals, with four teams left and a dozen playoff losers already sulking on the sidelines. It’s time to let them all know that we’re not mad, just disappointed.

We’re down to four teams in the NHL playoffs, which means it’s time for the copycats to get to work.

Every year, right before the season starts, I get to write one of my favorite columns of the year: My oddly specific predictions. That’s the piece where I try to predict what will happen with alarming and frankly unnecessary specificity. I lay out one call for every team, some of you take notes and others just laugh at me, and a good time is had by all.

The symmetry was almost perfect.

In the history of the NHL’s foray into the world of replay review, there are two moments that stand out as crucial landmarks, the key signposts that pointed us towards where we wound up. The most recent came in 2013, when Colorado center Matt Duchene scored a goal despite being roughly a mile offside.

The play is, to this day, widely misunderstood. The linesman didn’t somehow miss the fact that Duchene was offside; rather, he thought that the Predators... Читать дальше...

The second-round series between the Boston Bruins and Florida Panthers is, to a neutral observer, a puzzle without any hope of a satisfying solution, the sort of matchup that leaves fans of every other team exhausted and slumped over with their eyes rolled so far back into their own head that they can see into the past, where the only outcome that would feel like a win would be for Gary Bettman to announce the series over, declare both teams the loser, suspend everyone involved, and fold both franchises. Читать дальше...

Welcome to the NHL playoffs, where it’s all about goaltending.

It really is that simple, right? Sure, we like to pile on the narratives, arguing about which rosters have the most talent or experience or heart, sprinkling in subplots about who knows how to win or who wants it more. But most of the time, that’s just noise, and deep down we know it.

Want to know who’s going to win a playoff series? Figure out who’s going to get the better goaltending. There’s your winner.

Of course... Читать дальше...

Yesterday was Mother’s Day, which was hopefully a pleasant day for you and your family and/or explains why your wife seems like she's mad at you today. It also seems like as good a day as any to honor all those hockey moms out there by tackling a simple question sent in by a reader.