| Columbus Blue Jackets News | | | Philadelphia Flyers Cannot Regret Trading Mike Richards and Jeff Carter: Fan's Reaction (Yahoo! Contributor Network)
The day of June 23, 2011 seemed like any other relatively normal early-summer day. It was sunny. It was warm. It was welcoming. It wasn't for Mike Richards and Jeff Carter, whom the Philadelphia Flyers dealt to the Los Angeles Kings and Columbus Blue Jackets respectively, and reshaped their entire franchise in one fell swoop. Now come the complaints from many Flyers fans who say the team made the wrong moves at the wrong times, as Richards and Carter find themselves four games away from doing something they couldn't do in Philadelphia: hoist a Stanley Cup. Dodger Stadium Winter Classic; 10 worst NHL fans; ‘While The Men Watch’ debate (Puck Headlines) (Puck Daddy)
Here are your Puck Headlines: a glorious collection of news and views collected from the greatest blogosphere in sports and the few, the proud, the mainstream hockey media.
• Viggo Mortensen is a huge Montreal Canadiens fan. What better way to remind the world of this fact than by wrapping Kirsten Dunst in a Habs flag at Cannes, continuing an odd red carpet tradition for Aragorn. [ OMG Yahoo! , via Martin Leroux]
• Marty Brodeur on the Mark Messier guarantee ghosts of 1994 haunting the New Jersey Devils in Game 6: "I know if you guys look at it, it looks the same, but it's different teams and a different way of playing the game and it's 18 years ago and that's a long time. I know I'm feeling a lot different. I'm feeling a lot more appreciative of what's going on." [ Fire & Ice ]
• Bruce Driver on 1994: "I ended up going to New York and played with Mark, a tremendous leader and one of the best captains of all time. In 1994 against us, Mark did what he did, backed it up and scored three goals. But from our standpoint, the way we looked at it, we blew the game." [ NYT ]
• Great piece on the friendship between Devils fans and Rangers fans, unnatural that it is. [ WNYC, via Michael Raphael]
• No structural damage in Michal Rozsival's knee after that Dustin Brown hit. [ Sportsnet ]
• Mirtle with poll on fighting that finds hardcore fans love it, non-fans loathe it. [Globe & Mail, and see graphic ]
• Earl Sleek sees a lot of the 2003 Mighty Ducks of Anaheim in the 2012 Los Angeles Kings. Say, are those the Devils on the other side of the bracket? [ Battle of Cali ]
• Los Angeles Dodgers President Stan Kasten wants to pursue a Winter Classic at Dodger Stadium. Read this and other stories in our new book "[Expletive] No One Would Be Saying If The Kings Weren't In The Cup Final." [ LA Times ]
• Rich Hammond on the matter: "Gary Bettman has sneered (literally) at any suggestion that a Winter Classic could be played in a warm-weather environment. And while the Kings would love to host an outdoor game — Luc Robitaille is a particularly big proponent — AEG is also in the planning stages of a new downtown football stadium, which would probably be a more likely location in the event that Bettman stops sneering." [ LA Kings Insider ]
• The 10 most annoying hockey fans. Including you, Guy Trying To Get on TV. [ THW ]
In which Dustin Penner, Jeff Carter and Mike Richards edit their NHL narratives (Puck Daddy)
Why are the Los Angeles Kings in the 2012 Stanley Cup Final?
Because the two drunk, locker room cancers helped set up a lazy fat-ass for the game-winning goal.
At least that's how it would have been framed about eight months ago, when the narratives about Mike Richards, Jeff Carter and Dustin Penner had defined them as players. The first two were banished from the Philadelphia Flyers, ostensibly for cap relief in the pursuit of a No. 1 goaltender (or, failing that, Ilya Bryzgalov) but mostly for a culture change in the dressing room.
Penner, meanwhile, was (a) a waste of salary compared to production and (b) out of shape and (c) lazy to the point where his general manager suggested he might be better off playing for the El Cid Lounge in a men's softball league .
In overtime of Game 5 in the Western Conference Final on Tuesday night, Richards won the faceoff near the defensive zone. Slava Voynov moved it up the boards, and Penner kept the puck alive in the attacking zone on the forecheck, sending a nifty backhand pass to a streaking Carter. He fired the puck off of Phoenix Coyotes goalie Mike Smith with Richards causing chaos on front of the net, helping to clear the slot for Penner to fire home the rebound over Smith's glove. With that, the Kings were headed to the Cup Final.
This trio was maligned and decried for the better part of 2011-12. Yet it was this Dry Island of Misfit Toys that has the Kings four wins away from the first Stanley Cup.
What We Learned: Embarrassing LA sports media moments while covering Kings playoff run (Puck Daddy)
Hello, this is a feature that will run through the entire season and aims to recap the weekend's events and boils those events down to one admittedly superficial fact or stupid opinion about each team. Feel free to complain about it.
It's possibly the greatest bit of investigative journalism conducted since Woodward and Bernstein brought down Richard Nixon.
This exemplary, collective effort of sleuth work is currently ongoing in Los Angeles, Calif., where an entire media market has unearthed the NHL's shocking secret:
The city has a professional hockey team.
Over the past week or so here at Puck Daddy, we've tried to document every startling discovery made by the intrepid Los Angeles media, like how to properly pronounce Anze Kopitar's name (it's hard because he's from Bosnia or something), the real name of this Drew Doughty character ( it's actually Brad !) and that hockey is in fact not played with a ball, but rather a little piece of rubber known as a "puck." That last one makes me pretty uncomfortable because of the word it rhymes with. ("Duck" — sorry, I just don't trust 'em; they have weird beaks).
Just how villainous is this team, operating as a sort of sporting sleeper cell? They got all the way to the Western Conference Finals without one local noticing. That takes real criminal talent. And not only that, but, the NHL had the diabolical idea to hide it right under the Los Angelinos' noses, by having their home games played at the Staples Center. You know, where the Lakers play. Further, they named the team the Kings to intentionally confuse even the savviest media organization into thinking they are the NBA's Sacramento Kings.
Astonishingly devious stuff. More twists and turns than the Da Vinci Code, which I've read three times just to make sure I understood it all.
The best bit of this journalism on this pressing issue comes, of course, from the city's paper of record, the Los Angeles Times, winner of 44 Pulitzer Prizes since 1942, including three in 2012. It was for that towering beacon of journalistic excellence that columnist Chris Erskine successfully scruted several of the team and sport's most inscrutable mysteries .
For instance, that thing I said earlier about the puck (again, yuck… oh and that's another gross word it rhymes with), I learned it from Erskine. Apparently they even freeze the thing. And that's a huge point of concern, because, "The hardest shots can reach 110 mph and tear flesh, crush bone, even kill you if you're not careful." Yikes, you guys!
( Coming Up: Rick Nash to Boston?; Tororella defends Prust; Ryan Suter faces his future; Evegni Malkin is having a pretty good season; why Lundqvist is King; why the Capitals can't win with Ovechkin; the Islanders know how to party; Canucks might keep Luongo; Ryan Miller on the CBA; Flames and Oilers coaching news; and are the Kings in trouble?)
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