| UPCOMING GAMES |
| NO SCHEDULED GAMES |
|
LAST 10 GAMES
|
| 4/27 |
FLA 5 at TBL 3 |
Won |
F |
| 4/25 |
TOR 4 at FLA 0 |
Lost |
F |
| 4/23 |
NYR 2 at FLA 3 |
Won |
F |
| 4/21 |
FLA 0 at BOS 3 |
Lost |
F |
| 4/20 |
FLA 2 at NJD 6 |
Lost |
F |
| 4/18 |
FLA 1 at NYR 6 |
Lost |
F |
| 4/16 |
FLA 2 at NYI 5 |
Lost |
F |
| 4/13 |
PIT 3 at FLA 1 |
Lost |
F |
| 4/11 |
FLA 2 at WPG 7 |
Lost |
F |
| 4/7 |
OTT 1 at FLA 2 |
Won |
F |
| Won-3 Lost-7 OT-0 |
|
 Florida Panthers
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Schedule
Roster
| Eulogy: Remembering the 2012-13 Washington Capitals (Puck Daddy) |
| (Ed. Note: As the Stanley Cup Playoffs continue, we're bound to lose some friends along the journey. We've asked for these losers, gone but not forgotten, to be eulogized by the people who knew the teams best: The bloggers who hated them the most . Here is Puck Daddy’s own Ryan Lambert , fondly recalling the Washington Capitals . Again: This is a roast and you will be offended by it , so don't take it so seriously.)
We are gathered here today to mourn not only the loss of the Washington Capitals, but also the loss of their chances of reasonably competing for a Stanley Cup any time in even the relatively near future.
You tend to hear a lot of talk about how one team or another has a "window" in which they can reasonably win the Stanley Cup. San Jose, for example, has had its window open and close so many times — by the media's reckoning — that Doug Wilson finally installed a revolving door to save on energy.
Another team for whom we hear entirely too much about their "window" is the Washington Capitals.
But the thing about that is if it was open at all any more (and frankly, it probably wasn't), it was open in the way that smokers crack their window on the highway, and that horrible high-pitched sound of wind rushing in so loud that you can't hear the radio any more was the voice of a thousand Alex Ovechkin apologists who wanted nothing more than for that incredible back half of the season to once again be reality, rather than outlier.
Just as death is inevitable, so too was this result; the kind of slow, heavy train you could feel coming miles away if you touched your hand to the track, its whistle a deep and mournful cry carried to you by the wind.
Of course the Capitals were going to trip in the first round. It couldn't happen any other way. Because, with the Capitals goes the Southeast Division, and nothing in the history of hockey has ever been more fitting than the last-ever champion of the worst division in the history of professional sports than losing at home to a six-seed that finished the regular season with one fewer point.
|
| Posted: 05/14/2013 |
| NHL-National Hockey League roundup (Reuters) |
| May 13 (The Sports Xchange) - Former NHL coach Mike Keenan signed a contract to coach in Russia. Keenan, currently an analyst for the MSG Network, announced via Twitter from the Ural Mountains on Monday morning that he will coach Metallurg Magnitogorsk of the KHL. Keenan coached the Philadelphia Flyers, Chicago Blackhawks, New York Rangers, St. Louis Blues, Vancouver Canucks, Boston Bruins, Florida Panthers and Calgary Flames from 1984-2009. He won a Stanley Cup during his one season with the Rangers in 1994. ... |
| Posted: 05/13/2013 |
| "Iron Mike" Keenan to coach Russia's Metallurg (Reuters) |
| MOSCOW (Reuters) - Mike Keenan, who coached the New York Rangers to Stanley Cup glory in 1994, will take charge of Metallurg Magnitogorsk after signing a two-year contract with the Russian club on Monday. "On May 13 an agreement was signed between Metallurg Magnitogorsk and the Canadian specialist Mike Keenan," the Continental Hockey League (KHL) team said on their website (www.metallurg.ru). Keenan, 63, replaces fellow Canadian Paul Maurice who quit last month following one season in charge after the team were knocked out of the KHL playoffs in the first round. ... |
| Posted: 05/13/2013 |
| Ice hockey-"Iron Mike" Keenan to coach Russia's Metallurg (Reuters) |
| MOSCOW, May 13 (Reuters) - Mike Keenan, who coached the New York Rangers to Stanley Cup glory in 1994, will take charge of Metallurg Magnitogorsk after signing a two-year contract with the Russian club on Monday. "On May 13 an agreement was signed between Metallurg Magnitogorsk and the Canadian specialist Mike Keenan," the Continental Hockey League (KHL) team said on their website (www.metallurg.ru). Keenan, 63, replaces fellow Canadian Paul Maurice who quit last month following one season in charge after the team were knocked out of the KHL playoffs in the first round. ... |
| Posted: 05/13/2013 |
| Mike Keenan will coach Metallurg Magnitogorsk, according to hilariously intense KHL video (Puck Daddy) |
| Legendary NHL coach Mike Keenan has signed a 2-year contract to coach Metallurg Magnitogorsk of the KHL. We’ll just go ahead and assume it’s to launch a thousand “Iron Curtain Mike” jokes.
From Metallurg’s press release, about the “Canadian Specialist”:
May 13 an agreement was signed between Magnitogorsk "Metallurg" and the Canadian specialist Mike Keenan. The agreement is for two years.
Mike Keenan was born in October 21, 1949 in Baumanvill, Ontario, Canada.
A professional hockey player. From season 1979/80 years starting coaching.
Since the season 1984/85 started working as a head coach in the National Hockey League, coached eight teams: Philadelphia Flyers, Chicago Blackhawks, New York Rangers, St. Louis Blues, Vancouver Canucks, Boston Bruins, Florida Panthers and Calgary Flames.
In 1987 and 1991, the position of head coach national team Canada wins Canada Cup. With the club New York Rangers Mike Keenan won the Stanley Cup in 1993/94, in addition, three went to the finals of the NHL playoffs.
The team announced Keenan’s hiring with the single greatest introduction video we’ve ever seen:
OK, second-greatest, behind this one .
Keenan isn’t the first North American coach to take over Metallurg. Dave King coached them from 2005-06, and Paul Maurice was the team’s coach last season.
Now comes the most difficult part for the KHL team: Hiring a translator that can capture Keenan’s unique brand of whimsy, and meeting Jeremy Roenick’s asking price when he comes out of retirement to play for Keenan again (we assume).
|
| Posted: 05/13/2013 |
| What We Learned: Pittsburgh Penguins have to get rid of Marc-Andre Fleury (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.
One of the things people said constantly throughout the Pittsburgh Penguins' six-game series victory over the New York Islanders was that their play was well below the expected level of quality.
In fact, the most common refrain was that this particular brand of awful play -- rife with defensive irresponsibility and baffling lack of execution for a team that was pretty much incredible from start to finish this year -- was probably only good enough to get them past a try-hard pretender like the Islanders.
Against a real team, it was generally agreed, this kind of play would result in them losing the series in short order, probably pretty badly.
But that kind of talk ignores two things. First, we were told repeatedly by just about everyone that if there was any team the Penguins, not exactly fleet-of-foot, didn't want to take on in the playoffs, it was these New York Islanders. And yeah, they had their hands full throughout, but still never really looked to be in all that much trouble; the scores were close, yes, but they still only needed six games to put these guys out of their misery.
Second, and more important, is that — lo and behold — the second they took Marc-Andre Fleury out of the crease, they won both games. That's not to say that Tomas Vokoun really won them either game, because he didn't. He posted a shutout in Game 5 because almost any goaltender in the world (with at least one notable exception) would have, but he was also victimized on occasion by the bad defensive work that didn't help Fleury much either.
But the fact of the matter is that if you have pretensions of winning a Stanley Cup, your goaltender has to at least be league-average. The Penguins, with their galaxy of stars and excellent coach and top-quality GM, have that goal. They do not have that goaltender. People will argue that Fleury is a winner, insofar as he won a Stanley Cup. Four years ago. Since that postseason, when he posted just a .908 save percentage and a not-good 2.61 GAA, his save percentage has crept above .899 precisely zero times. This year, when he gave up 14 goals on 128 shots in four games before Bylsma dead-bolted the door to the doghouse from the outside.
Or at least, he should; there's only so many times an entire team can roll its eyes and think, "Oh no, not again," like a pot of petunias, before it's the only reasonable course of action.
I don't know how much longer we need to suffer through the narrative that Fleury is any good at all before it crumbles to sand and is scattered by the wind. That is, if it hasn't done so already behind save attempts like this and this and most notably this .
I mean, look, the fact of the matter is that apart from one good playoff run five years ago in which he fell a game short of winning the Stanley Cup for that not-quite-ready Penguins team, he has always been sub-average, and now things are getting markedly worse .
|
| Posted: 05/13/2013 |
| Fake Paul MacLean has his bug-eyes on you, Michel Therrien (Photo) (Puck Daddy) |
| Oh, this is devious. From Tuesday night’s Game 4 of the Eastern Conference quarterfinals in Ottawa, the eagle eyes of reader Krazy Kanuck caught the following:
In a series during which tensions ran high between Montreal Canadiens Coach Michel Therrien and Ottawa Senators Coach Paul MacLean, it appears MacLean’s evil doppelganger has taken up residence behind the Habs bench.
Fake Paul MacLean first came to prominence during a Senators home game against the Florida Panthers in January, when he freaked everyone out.
The twin turned out to be Mike Watson, 54, who manages an auto supply store in Ottawa. His company had seats behind the Sens bench, and he finally showed up to the delight of fans who watched Paul MacLean coach while Paul “MacClone” watched.
Now, Watson’s back for the playoffs.
Someone tell Brandon Prust that this is just a carbon copy, and that a herd of bug-eyed fat walruses isn't coming to maul him ... |
| Posted: 05/07/2013 |
| Calder Trophy Finalists: Gallagher vs. Huberdeau vs. Saad (Puck Daddy) |
| The 2012-13 Calder Trophy were announced on Monday, with right wing Brendan Gallagher of the Montreal, Canadiens, center Jonathan Huberdeau of the Florida Panthers and left wing Brandon Saad of the Chicago Blackhawks are the three finalists for the award given “to the player selected as the most proficient in his first year of competition,” as voted on by the Professional Hockey Writers Association.
The Calder field was, by far, the most crowded for any major award in the NHL this season. Seven players were within four points of each other at the top of the rookie points standings, with Nail Yakupov and Huberdeau tied at the top with 31.
Yakupov also led all rookies with 17 goals, thanks to a final-game hat trick that pushed him to the top. Gallagher was second with 15 goals, while Huberdeau was third with 14 goals after leading all rookies for most of the season’s second half.
On defense, Jonas Brodin of the Minnesota Wild (23:12), Justin Schultz of the Edmonton Oilers (21:26), Brenden Dillon of the Dallas Stars (21:22) and Jake Muzzin of the Los Angeles Kings (17:53) all played big minutes and contributed plenty.
So who wins the Calder this season? |
| Posted: 05/06/2013 |
| What We Learned: Why ‘letting them play’ is nonsense in the NHL (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.
No one is going to sit here and disagree that wide-open hockey is preferable to the brand displayed by teams trying to grind out wins.
No one likes board play. No one likes a thousand guys standing in the neutral zone during breakouts. No one — as we learned when the Rangers did it last year — likes the focus to be on blocking shots. No one likes obstruction.
For this reason, we are told so very often that the most important things officials can do in the playoffs is "let the boys play."
It's a fun concept. When the whistles are away, teams are allowed to play at 5-on-5 hockey which is obviously the best way to determine which is better. Ideally, all 60 minutes of every playoff game would be played at even strength. But the problem with this insistence on letting guys play is that when you do so, they tend to start committing penalties, and that, in turn, necessitates that, at some point, some of the infractions actually have to be called.
So while it's all well and good to say that for the sanctity of any individual game to be upheld, the referees should certainly not start blowing the whistle and sending guys to the box, the fact of the matter is that it's their jobs to do so. Guys break the rules, guys go to the box.
This, for some reason, doesn't make sense to people at all times.
Take, for example, Brian Strait's penalty on Sidney Crosby in overtime yesterday afternoon, a call which resulted in the Penguins' power play overtime game-winner. That it was called in overtime was somehow this egregious thing, according to Mike Milbury and Jeremy Roenick and a thousand thousand Internet commenters, a decision made by a referee overstepping his bounds.
Had this call — which was the right one because Strait got beat on the inside, took his hand off his stick and pulled Crosby down from behind, easy-ish fall or not — been made in the first period, the number of eyebrows it raised around the hockey universe would have been precisely zero. This is the kind of thing that typically happens when a coach puts a decent enough defenseman like Brian Strait on the ice in a high-leverage situation against a generational talent like Sidney Crosby, after all.
But that it happened in overtime was somehow outrageous.
|
| Posted: 05/06/2013 |
Yahoo!Sports
|
| GAME STATS |
|
GP |
W |
L |
OT |
| HOME |
24 |
8 |
11 |
5 |
| AWAY |
24 |
7 |
16 |
1 |
| TOTAL |
48 |
15 |
27 |
6 |
| MAY STATS |
|
GP |
W |
L |
OT |
| HOME |
|
|
|
|
| AWAY |
|
|
|
|
| TOTAL |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
| SOUTHEAST DIVISION |
| Team |
GP |
W |
L |
OT |
PTS |
GF |
GA |
| WSH |
48 |
27 |
18 |
3 |
57 |
149 |
130 |
| WPG |
48 |
24 |
21 |
3 |
51 |
128 |
144 |
| CAR |
48 |
19 |
25 |
4 |
42 |
128 |
160 |
| TBL |
48 |
18 |
26 |
4 |
40 |
148 |
150 |
| FLA |
48 |
15 |
27 |
6 |
36 |
112 |
171 |
| EASTERN CONFERENCE |
| Team |
GP |
W |
L |
OT |
DF |
PTS |
| 1. PIT* |
48 |
36 |
12 |
0 |
46 |
72 |
| 2. MTL* |
48 |
29 |
14 |
5 |
23 |
63 |
| 3. WSH* |
48 |
27 |
18 |
3 |
19 |
57 |
| 4. BOS |
48 |
28 |
14 |
6 |
22 |
62 |
| 5. TOR |
48 |
26 |
17 |
5 |
12 |
57 |
| 6. NYR |
48 |
26 |
18 |
4 |
18 |
56 |
| 7. OTT |
48 |
25 |
17 |
6 |
12 |
56 |
| 8. NYI |
48 |
24 |
17 |
7 |
0 |
55 |
| 9. WPG |
48 |
24 |
21 |
3 |
-16 |
51 |
| 10. PHI |
48 |
23 |
22 |
3 |
-8 |
49 |
| 11. BUF |
48 |
21 |
21 |
6 |
-18 |
48 |
| 12. NJD |
48 |
19 |
19 |
10 |
-17 |
48 |
| 13. CAR |
48 |
19 |
25 |
4 |
-32 |
42 |
| 14. TBL |
48 |
18 |
26 |
4 |
-2 |
40 |
| 15. FLA |
48 |
15 |
27 |
6 |
-59 |
36 |
|
