Columbus Blue Jackets News Clips Apr. 24, 2019

Columbus Blue Jackets PAGE 02: Columbus Dispatch: Bruins top Maple Leafs in Game 7, will face Blue Jackets in second round PAGE 04: Columbus Dispatch: Dean Kukan making impact with increased playing time PAGE 06: Columbus Dispatch: Young Blue Jackets learned from Monsters' title run PAGE 07: Columbus Dispatch: Blue Jackets' success unites us all PAGE 09: The Athletic: ‘Jackets required’: Inside Columbus’ playoff jacket tradition PAGE 12: The Athletic: Playoff Primer: What to look for in Blue Jackets-Bruins series PAGE 15: The Athletic: Alexa! How do scouting and technology merge in the playoffs for CBJ? PAGE 20: Columbus Dispatch: Blue Jackets' game-plan goal is primarily simplicity

Cleveland Monsters/Prospects PAGE 22: Cleveland.com: Cleveland Monsters fall 2-1 to Syracuse in Game 3, lead AHL first-round series 2-1

NHL/Websites PAGE 23: AP: The name on the back matters: NHL is now marketing its stars PAGE 26: AP: Part of Seattle’s NHL future is honoring its hockey past PAGE 28: The Athletic: The Natural: Rising TV star Patrick Sharp finds a new grind to embrace in retirement

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Bruins top Maple Leafs in Game 7, will face Blue Jackets in second round

By Brian Hedger, Columbus Dispatch – April 23, 2019

BOSTON — The waiting was the hardest part.

After eight days, three practices, a dress rehearsal and a lot of questions about “rest versus rust,” the Blue Jackets finally know their opponent in their first trip to the second round of the Stanley Cup playoffs.

It’s the Boston Bruins, who took a 2-0 lead in the first period Tuesday night at TD Garden and turned it into a 5-1 win in Game 7 of a hotly contested series against the Toronto Maple Leafs — the second straight year Boston has eliminated Toronto in that fashion.

Coincidentally, Columbus kid Sean Kuraly — Boston’s fourth-line center — did the most damage. After assisting on the game’s first goal late in the first period, scored by Joakim Nordstrom, Kuraly scored a backbreaker early in the third to put the Bruins up 3-1 on his second point of the game.

“I think when I find myself thinking the least amount is when I find myself making good plays,” said Kuraly, who’s from Dublin and played in the Ohio AAA Blue Jackets program. “It’s kind of like I don’t really know what was going on at the time. I was just playing, kind of taking what was next. I just found myself close to the net and just put it on net, really.”

Whether he remembers it or not, it was a beauty of a goal. After scooping the puck with one arm on his stick in the neutral zone, Kuraly split two defenders, skated into the offensive zone and fired a wrist shot under the crossbar on the far side of the net.

It was his first goal of the playoffs and fifth playoff goal of his career.

“It’s a blast,” Kuraly said. “You just get lost in the game in the playoffs. That’s the most fun. I grew up idolizing these games and dreaming of being in these games and watching them on TV. It really is a dream come true.”

The team he watched growing up in Ohio?

“Well, my family is all from Toronto, so it was the Maple Leafs,” he said.

Now, after helping Boston take them out, he’ll get a crack at his other childhood favorite — the Blue Jackets.

Kuraly still skates at the Ice Haus in the summer, often with Blue Jackets players and other alums of the Ohio AAA Blue Jackets, so he’ll see a lot of familiar faces when the series shifts to Nationwide Arena next week.

The opening game is set for 7 p.m. Thursday at TD Garden, which was the only part of the series schedule released Tuesday.

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“We got to watch a lot of (the Blue Jackets’) series because it was on other days than ours, but they’re playing really well and they’re probably one of the hottest teams in the league right now, after taking down Tampa,” Kuraly said. “They’re going to be a tough team.”

The same can be said of the Bruins, who are built similarly to the power-heavy Blue Jackets and finished second only to the Lightning in the Atlantic Division and NHL standings.

Boston has a high-caliber top line, led by Patrice Bergeron and Brad Marchand, and balanced scoring depth up front. The Bruins are also talented and deep on the back end, led by veteran Zdeno Chara and Charlie McAvoy.

The Blue Jackets went 1-1-1 in three games against the Bruins this season, all within a three-week stretch late in the season. Their lone victory was a 7-4 win March 12 at Nationwide Arena, when Boone Jenner led the way with his first career hat trick.

“My initial thought is they beat a really good team, because I thought Tampa was lights-out and saw them firsthand late in the year,” Bruins coach Bruce Cassidy said. “So, clearly, we’ve got our hands full.”

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Dean Kukan making impact with increased playing time

By Adam Jardy, Columbus Dispatch – April 23, 2019

Dean Kukan doesn’t remember which Lightning player had the puck, or which one was bolting toward him down the center of the ice begging for a one-timer.

Skating backward during the third period of Game 4 of the first-round series against Tampa Bay in the Stanley Cup playoffs, all the Blue Jackets defenseman remembered was what followed. With the Jackets clinging to a 4-3 lead and trying to close out the series sweep at Nationwide Arena, Kukan sacrificed his body, diving to the ice to neutralize the scoring chance.

It worked. Kukan’s 6-foot-2, 186-pound frame absorbed any attempt to turn the odd-man rush into a scoring chance, sending the puck into the corner.

To the cucumber-cool Kukan, the encounter seemed as much a walk in the park as a key moment in a tight game on the biggest stage to that point of the season.

“You don’t really panic because you’re so concentrated and focused on the game,” he said Tuesday after practice and a film session. “You don’t really think about other stuff. It’s just, you play hockey your whole life. It’s just automatic, you do that. It was the right play there. It was good.”

When he got back to the bench, Kukan didn’t get any special praise from his coaches or teammates. The play was replayed during the team’s post-practice film session, but otherwise it didn’t register much on his radar.

That’s as much a credit to his personality as anything, and probably has a lot to do with how the native of Volketswil, Switzerland, found himself logging such important ice time. Signed to a two-year contract extension in March 2018, Kukan, 25, has played 44 games in the NHL — all with the Jackets — including a career-high 25 games this season.

With injuries thinning the defensive corps, Kukan played in the final eight regular-season games and skated in all four playoff games against Tampa Bay. Since getting into the lineup on a consistent basis, Kukan has found that the opening minutes of games help get him into a mental zone where he can focus on his job.

“Once I’m out there, I try to make a difference,” he said. “I try to battle really hard. That’s of course the first thing, always battle hard, but then also when I feel confident, I try to make plays. It’s worked well so far, and I feel like it gets better game to game.”

Bobrovsky, Jenner return

In the final practice before Wednesday’s flight to Boston, two familiar faces were back on the ice for the Jackets.

Forward Boone Jenner and goaltender Sergei Bobrovsky, both of whom had been inactive since the Tampa Bay series concluded to allow for what coach John Tortorella has described as “maintenance,” took part in the practice that started at the Ice Haus and ended at Nationwide Arena.

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“It felt really good,” Jenner said of his return. “It’s tough not being out there and practicing with the guys, but you’ve got to take care of what you can and try to get out there as quickly as you can.”

Bobrovsky said the time away from the ice allowed him to work on parts of his game similar to when the coaches have occasionally given him consecutive games off during the regular season.

“It’s important to manage your energy level at this time of the year,” he said. “You’re not going to develop much. It is important to get your game together and get enough energy to execute your game.”

Defenseman Markus Nutivaara, who missed the final two games of the Tampa Bay series after an illegal hit by Nikita Kucherov, did not skate.

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Young Blue Jackets learned from Monsters' title run

By Adam Jardy, Columbus Dispatch – April 23, 2019

At the time, Zach Werenski had no idea how close he was to the NHL.

Seven games into his American Hockey League career, the defenseman had joined the Lake Erie Monsters in the spring of 2016 hoping for a playoff run.

In a locker room occupied by fellow future Blue Jackets Oliver Bjorkstrand, Josh Anderson, Markus Hannikainen, Dean Kukan, Joonas Korpisalo and Lukas Sedlak, Werenski said he gained one appreciation from the run to the Calder Cup that was to follow.

“I think the one thing we can look back on is how long it is and how hard it is to win,” Werenski said Tuesday. “Obviously, the Stanley Cup’s a little bit different than the Calder, but I think we started at the same time and finished in late June. We’ve won one series here, and we have three more.”

With that group of future Jackets, the Monsters earned a No. 2 seed in the Western Conference and swept Rockford in a best-of-five series before beating Grand Rapids and Ontario to reach the finals. There, the Monsters swept Hershey to bring Cleveland a title one week before the NBA’s Cavaliers did the same.

The levels of hockey in the two leagues aren’t even, but the lessons learned could come into play after a lengthy rest between the first two rounds of the Stanley Cup playoffs.

Kukan said there was a level of confidence in the Monsters’ locker room that somewhat mirrors what this year’s Jackets team is experiencing.

“We just had a belief in the locker room that was really good, and it feels kind of the same way right now,” he said. “We have a really good team, and we’re all believing that we can do it. We didn’t know we were going to win, but I think everyone in his own head knew we had a good chance of winning because we were a good team. We had good character in the team.”

Kukan said the keys to the Monsters’ playoff run were a dangerous power play and stellar goaltending — two reasons the Jackets swept the Lightning in the first round.

Werenski said the difference between the two has been how magnified everything has been since this year’s postseason began.

“The whole city, the buzz of winning one round here, obviously it’s been a long time coming, and it’s well-deserved (for the fans),” he said. “In Cleveland, that buzz in the city wasn’t there until the finals. Here it started before the playoffs, then Game 3 and Game 4 was insane. Hopefully, we can do some damage in the next round and keep moving on.”

When the Monsters won, Werenski said, they had a small parade that was no comparison to the one that followed when the Cavaliers beat Golden State.

“We won a few days before (the Cavaliers), so we actually broke the curse,” he said with a laugh.

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Blue Jackets' success unites us all

By Rob Oller, Columbus Dispatch – April 23, 2019

After finally tasting NHL playoff success, Columbus has gone to the dogs. John Tortorella’s dogs, to be exact.

A day or two after the Blue Jackets swept Tampa Bay to advance to the second round of the Stanley Cup playoffs, Tortorella heard his dogs barking near the front gate of his home.

“When we had the two days off after our Game 4 win, I had some people drive up to my house,” the CBJ coach said Monday. “They were just so excited. Some were emotional talking about what they experienced in Game 4 and in the series.”

They also were strangers.

“I didn’t know who the hell it was,” Torts continued. “The poor dogs were barking at them, but we were still able to talk. That meant a lot. Some people would feel indignant about it; I’m not inviting everybody over to my house right now, but it was emotional to me, too, to see how much they care.”

These kind of things — sweet with a touch of crazy — happen between a city and its sports team when the franchise finds success. Fans drive to the coach’s home. Dogs bark. Everyone cries. The Hallmark Channel gets involved.

Do you feel it?

Tortorella does, not so much for himself — although the increased buzz in the city pleases him — but for Columbus.

“I’m excited to be part of a city that is so behind us,” he said.

You’ll hear a lot about how a loud home crowd amplifies the energy of the team. Less analyzed is what a successful team does for the city. When Torts coached the Tampa Bay Lightning to the 2004 Stanley Cup title, the Bay area went wild. Despite not being a traditional hockey market, it put even more bounce in the step of a sports market that had just won a Super Bowl in 2003.

“This reminds me a little bit of Tampa Bay early in my career,” Tortorella said.

Some similarities, yes, but Torts could find no comparison to what greeted him as he entered the main ice at Nationwide Arena on Monday.

“We thought maybe three or four hundred people would come out, and then we walk out there and we see the whole (lower) bowl (filled) — and that’s fun,” he said of the open practice that was free to the public.

Instead, an estimated 5,500 strong came to watch its NHL franchise scrimmage for about an hour. When practice ended, the crowd gave the Jackets a standing ovation. The players responded by raising their sticks. Two shall become one.

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Amazing what athletic success can do for a city. It is a special thing. A unifying thing. I enjoy attending the Columbus Jazz Orchestra, but the connection is more internal — between music and individual — than external.

The Jackets allow for the release of wildly demonstrative celebrations, during which fans emotionally engage both individually and in the community. You would never high-five a stranger on the street for no reason. But if the stranger is wearing a CBJ jersey? Start the party.

But for the connection to go viral, where everyone wants to join the fun, it requires winning often and at the highest level.

Jackets forward Ryan Dzingel explained how it works.

“The city likes winners and they’ve been spoiled by the (Ohio State) football team a lot, and we’re trying to give them another winner,” he said. “Just plain and simple, try to get it done for the city and for us and everyone in the locker room and everyone involved in this organization.”

These days, it feels like everyone is involved in this organization. Do you feel it? Woof-woof.

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‘Jackets required’: Inside Columbus’ playoff jacket tradition

By Alison Lukan, The Athletic – April 24, 2019

As the Blue Jackets prepare to take the ice against the Boston Bruins in Round 2, another team in Columbus is also getting ready to suit up for the games. The women in the players’ lives — who affectionately call themselves the “Lady Jackets” — are donning custom playoff jackets in support and celebration of the Blue Jackets’ playoff run.

“Every team does it now,” Natalie Atkinson said. “It almost seems like a friendly competition to see who comes up with jackets and what they look like.”

Natalie isn’t sure where the idea started in the league (a search of social media can reveal a variety of teams and their designs year after year), but the tradition began in Columbus three seasons ago thanks to Rachel Gagner. Gagner brought the idea to her friends, and it came to fruition in the form of denim jackets that were hand-beaded by Olga Bobrovsky, items Natalie affectionately refers to as “pieces of art.”

Every postseason, of course, the key is variety; so after hoodies were made last season, the ideas were floating among the Lady Jackets this year as the team chased a postseason spot.

“People talk about what they might like a little bit before, but we didn’t start discussing it as a group until I had the girls over for the last game of the regular season,” Natalie said. “We had just made the playoffs, and that’s when we discussed it a little bit more at length.”

With mere days to get 21 jackets made, Natalie wasted little time. White denim jackets were ordered and shipped overnight. She then took them and the final design to the embroidery group that does the sewing for the team store, meaning releases to use team fonts and numbering were already in place.

A week to the day that the team locked in their playoff berth, the women’s jackets were done.

The jackets are designed to emulate the players’ jerseys down to the star detail at the cuff (Natalie’s favorite touch) and have room for each wearer to add any additional detail they so choose, be it a country flag or something personal.

Ashley Duchene loves the design as is.

“Natalie went above and beyond,” Ashley said. “The logo on the side, the ‘Lady Jackets’ on the front, she did such a good job you don’t have to add anything.

“I love the colors! It’s so funny because I’ve always had to wear Team Canada colors (husband Matt has played in many international competitions), so to be able to wear the red, white and blue is fun even if I’m not cheering for (Team) USA.”

The women proudly wear their jackets at Nationwide Arena. Each has a story about how the jacket sparked a conversation with a fan or how someone recognizes her or the team because of their jacket.

A few Lady Jackets have been brave enough to wear their playoff gear into opponents’ arenas as well. Last season, Olga Bobrovsky, Felicia Weeren (whom Alexander Wennberg is dating) and Alisa Znarok

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(whom Artemi Panarin is dating) wore their playoff hoodies to Game 1 against the Capitals at Capital One Arena in Washington, D.C.

Decked in customized blue hoodies and ball caps, the three drew attention as they headed to their seats.

In that matchup, Washington built a 2-0 lead before the Jackets came back to earn the victory with a Panarin overtime goal.

How did Caps fans react to the Jackets’ family members right there in the stands?

“It was a fun little thing. They were not angry, but when we started scoring they started turning around and looking at us,” Znarok said, laughing. “Washington scored first and (the fans) were just showing us how cool they were, and we were trying not to say anything back. Then the Blue Jackets won, and that said it all that night.”

Of course, the Capitals went on to win the series and end the Blue Jackets’ season, but Znarok says she still wears her hoodie. “Even without the playoffs, we have them on.”

It’s not just the partners of players who have gotten in on the fun. Valerie Lachance, to whom David Savard is married, had gotten her two children custom jackets for last year’s playoffs. The kids were still able to wear them, so Lachance added something other teams have also done in the form of T-shirts bearing a cartoon of Savard’s face.

The Savard children. (Valerie Lachance)

Ashley wanted son Beau to have a custom jacket as well. Confident the Blue Jackets were going to make the postseason, she got to work even before Columbus had locked in a playoff spot.

Ashley ordered a bomber jacket from her favorite source for Beau’s clothes, Little Bibsy, and amassed a collection of patches that tell the story of 3-month-old Beau’s life in Columbus thus far.

“(Beau) is always obsessed in the (Jackets’ team) store when he sees the stuffed animals of the mascot (Stinger),” Ashley said. “He loves him, so I put a big yellow jacket type bug on the front.”

Additionally, there’s an “I love dad” patch on the side, an Ohio state flag on the arm and a cannon on the other arm and hood. Ashley took the jacket to the same embroiderer who did the women’s jackets to add Matt Duchene’s number 95 and “Daddy” on the back.

‘They are our rocks’

Of course, the women love to wear the jackets to support their team and celebrate the postseason. Zarnok refers to a Russian saying that goes “a little life we live” and says the playoffs are like that — a specific time set aside that is special and fun.

But the jackets also mean a little bit more.

“It makes us feel like a united front,” Natalie said. “Our guys are a team, and they have a special bond. We do, too. No one else understands what it’s like to be with a professional athlete better than your fellow wives and girlfriends. (The jackets) makes us a team and we’re united.”

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Ask a Blue Jackets player and he can give multiple examples of what’s asked of partners in the course of a hockey season in addition to work and family responsibilities. Sergei Bobrovsky describes how Olga agreed to move to a new country with him and “had his back all the time … even as a goalie, (who is) a little bit crazy.”

Natalie’s husband, Cam, laughs knowingly as he talks about getting a little extra sleep on a game day while Natalie cares for their infant son “when it really should be the other way around.”

“All the families, they all have sacrificed at one point or another to get us where we are today, and they are our rocks,” Cam said. “Nat’s my rock. She keeps our family together.”

When it’s all said and done, the jackets are more than they appear, much like the women who wear them.

“People think that our wives just show up to the game and it’s all glitz and glamour,” Matt said. “They think (Ashley) gets to come on the road and gets to stay in nice hotels and do all that. And it’s (really) such an unglamorous job for them. There’s a lot of great parts, and I know my wife really enjoys our life together and our lifestyle, but there’s so much behind the scenes. I mean, I go for five to six days and she’s stuck in a city that she’s been living in for barely months with our dog and our 3-month-old. Our baby was 6 weeks old when we got here. And to go somewhere … it’s unbelievable. She’s the woman behind everything you see. … She enjoys my career a lot, but when it’s over (in the offseason) it’s a nice deep breath for her, too.”

“It’s so nice that she can reap the rewards in the playoffs and enjoy that atmosphere and I know she’s having a blast watching the games. It’s nice to have her enjoy that, too.”

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Playoff Primer: What to look for in Blue Jackets-Bruins series

By Aaron Portzline, The Athletic – April 23, 2019

COLUMBUS, Ohio — The Blue Jackets defied all expectations with their first-round sweep of the Tampa Bay Lightning. As one Lightning executive told The Athletic: “They out-everythinged us.”

It’ll be a different challenge for the Jackets in their second-round matchup with the Boston Bruins, a best-of-seven series that opens Thursday in TD Garden.

Oh, the Bruins have plenty of high-end skill. But Boston is also a deep, battle-tested club that features one of the best forward lines in the NHL — one that has given the Blue Jackets fits through the years.

Here are some storylines, tidbits and numbers to chew on in advance of the series:

Bruins’ blitzkrieg

The Blue Jackets have had issues with the Bruins’ top line — Brad Marchand-Patrice Bergeron-David Patrnak — through the years, but then so has every NHL team. They combined for 106-154-260 with a plus-44 rating this season.

Put another way: They combined for 36-58-94 on the power play. The entire Blue Jackets team (regular season) totaled 34-64-98 on the power play.

Marchand (10-10-20 in 19 career games vs. Columbus) is the energy guy who plays in traffic. Pastrnak (4-9-13, 11 games) is a sniper. Bergeron (9-11-20, 23 games) has been regarded as one of the NHL’s best two-way players throughout his career. He dominates in the faceoff circle.

It will be curious to see if Blue Jackets coach John Tortorella keeps his forward lines intact — he rolled four lines at will against the Lightning — or if he’ll need to put together a shutdown checking line to play vs. Bergeron & Co.

So many weapons

Even when the Blue Jackets loaded up at the NHL trade deadline — acquiring forwards Matt Duchene and Ryan Dzingel — their scoring sputtered through the end of the regular season. Then when the playoffs started, the Blue Jackets suddenly found chemistry and four lines bloomed to life.

Twelve players scored in the first-round win over Tampa, the power play went 5-for-10 — three of the goals scored by the second unit — and 19-year-old rookie Alexandre Texier was a revelation with his play off the rush, his work along the walls and his 200-foot game.

The Jackets have their leading point-getter, Artemi Panarin (28-59-87), on a different line from their top goal-scorer, Cam Atkinson (41-28-69), making them a difficult club to check. And don’t sleep on the third line with Texier-Nick Foligno-Josh Anderson, who all scored big goals against the Lightning. Oliver Bjorkstrand, currently playing with Panarin and Pierre-Luc Dubois, has been one of the league’s top goal- scorers in the final weeks of the season.

Plenty of rest vs. a running start

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The Blue Jackets haven’t played since April 16, when they completed the sweep of the Lightning. By the time the puck drops Thursday, the Blue Jackets will have had four off days, three practices and an intrasquad scrimmage since they last played, surviving a fidgety week while they awaited a second- round opponent.

Boston’s challenge is to take a deep breath with only one day of rest between their Game 7 win over Toronto and the start of this series, but it’s nothing unusual for most of the players on the Bruins’ roster.

If the Jackets can get back in playoff mode quickly in Game 1, they could be the fresher team if the series goes deep.

Experience advantage

There are five Bruins remaining from the 2011 club that won the Stanley Cup and seven from the 2013 club that lost in the Cup Final. Four Bruins — Zdeno Chara (121), Patrick Bergeron (119), David Krejci (115) and Brad Marchand (91) — have played more than a regular season worth or playoff games.

Remarkably, Chara has played in 13 career Game 7s after the win over Toronto on Tuesday.

The Blue Jackets’ only Cup winner is defenseman Adam McQuaid, who played in 68 playoff games with the Bruins, including the 2011 and 2013 clubs. He’s currently out of the lineup with an injury.

For all but four Blue Jackets players, the first-round win over Tampa Bay was their first playoff series win.

Players each city will hate

Josh Anderson, Blue Jackets: Anderson simply unnerved Tampa Bay in the first round. He’s had big games against the Bruins, too, with 2-7-9 and a plus-3 rating in his last six games, including a career-best in points (1-3-4) on March 12.

He’s also had some memorable moments. On Oct. 30, 2017, he got up from a hit by Bruins behemoth Zdeno Chara near the end boards and goaded him into a fight. Did OK, too.

Anderson is a great example of why the playoffs (series) are so different than the regular season (games). His play late this season has generated significant respect from the NHL, and that should continue here in this series. But the Blue Jackets should expect the Bruins to push back when Anderson gets rolling, not fall to pieces as the Lightning did.

Brad Marchand, Bruins: Forgive us, Columbus fans if you’ve already developed a strong dislike of Marchand. He wasn’t the first Little Ball of Hate — that was Pat Verbeek — but Marchand has perfected the art of agitator in today’s less-violent NHL.

Don’t expect him to fight, but he goes 200 mph, finishes every check and has been known to lick — yes, lick — opponents when they get up in his grill. That’s just … awkward, man.

Dude can play, though. He had 36-64-100 and a plus-15 rating this season to go with 96 penalty minutes.

The meetings

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March 12 @ Columbus: Boone Jenner had a hat trick and Josh Anderson and Zach Werenski each had a goal and three assists in a 7-4 Blue Jackets win. The Jackets took a 5-1 lead, then watched Boston pull to 5-4 in the third period. Sergei Bobrovsky had 27 saves.

March 16 @ Boston: Matt Duchene scored the Jackets’ only goal in support of backup Joonas Korpisalo (31 saves), but Brad Marchand scored at 3:30 of overtime to end it.

April 2 @ Columbus: The Bruins delayed the Blue Jackets from clinching a playoff spot with a 6-2 win in Nationwide. A bizarre goal by Jake DeBrusk — deflected in front, it rainbowed into the net off Bobrovsky’s shoulder — was the start of a long night. Oliver Bjorkstrand and Duchene scored for the Jackets.

Goaltender matchup

Sergei Bobrovsky, Blue Jackets: Bobrovsky has started rewriting his reputation in these playoffs, with a .932 save percentage in the first round vs. Tampa Bay, the first series win of his career. Boston has been one of the clubs to give him trouble in the regular season, though. He’s 3-6-2 with an .889 save percentage and 3.90 goals-against average (the highest against any opponent) in 12 career games vs. the Bs.

Tuukka Rask, Bruins: Rask came up big against Toronto in the first round, sporting a .928 save percentage. He’s known mostly success against the Blue Jackets, too, going 9-4-2 with a .904 save percentage and 2.67 goals-against average.

Familiar faces

Bruins: Boston’s fourth-line center Sean Kuraly grew up in the Columbus suburb of Dublin and played four years at Miami U. … Defenseman John Moore was a first-round pick (No. 21 overall) in 2009 and played 86 games for Columbus (2010-11 to 2012-13) before he was traded to the New York Rangers in the Marian Gaborik deal. … Former Blue Jackets forward Brett Harkins is an amateur scout for Boston.

Blue Jackets: Defenseman Adam McQuaid spent the first nine seasons of his NHL career with the Bruins before he was traded to the New York Rangers in September. The Blue Jackets acquired him in a trade from the Rangers at the deadline. He’s been out since late March after a hit by Montreal’s Andrew Shaw. … Center Riley Nash spent two seasons with the Bruins before signing with the Blue Jackets as a free agent last summer. … Blue Jackets coach John Tortorella was born in Boston and attended high school in suburban Concord, Mass. … Blue Jackets GM Jarmo Kekalainen played 27 games for the Bruins in 1989-90 and 1990-91. … Former Blue Jackets captain Rick Nash, who is helping the Blue Jackets during these playoffs and could take a job in the front office soon, finished last season with the Bruins.

Injury report

Columbus: D Adam McQuaid (upper body), D Ryan Murray (upper body) and Markus Nutivaara (undisclosed) are out indefinitely.

Boston: D Connor Clifton (upper body) and D Kevan Millar (lower body) are out indefinitely.

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Alexa! How do scouting and technology merge in the playoffs for CBJ?

By Tom Reed, The Athletic – April 23, 2019

COLUMBUS, Ohio — John Tortorella keeps all his old scouting booklets from playoffs seasons past tucked away in his office inside Nationwide Arena.

There are pages filled with nuggets on opponents’ personnel, tendencies, systems and special-teams play. When his clubs made postseason runs in Tampa Bay and New York, each player received a copy.

Monday afternoon, the Blue Jackets coach retrieved a few booklets from 2012, the year his Rangers reached the Eastern Conference finals, to show to a reporter.

They are professionally produced.

They are glossy covered.

They are relics from an NHL era when there was no such thing as too much information.

As the Blue Jackets await their second-round opponent, there are no booklets, pamphlets or pages being distributed. It has nothing to do with the organization’s desire to go green. Players said their smartphones and tablets are not being inundated with scouting reports from Tortorella on the Maple Leafs and Bruins.

“Where it’s gone from then to now is night and day,” the 60-year-old Tortorella said. “We don’t give them booklets. I don’t put them in hotels (for home games). I used to do that. Like I said, I could suck the life out of a team pretty quickly as far as giving them so much information. It’s a different athlete now and you have to understand your team.”

Tortorella is not alone in such thinking.

Few aspects of the Stanley Cup playoffs have changed more radically in the past decade than how organizations gather, process and disseminate material involved with scouting. Rapid advances in technology, coupled with the fear of paralyzing athletes playing an instinctual sport, have fostered new ways of readying a team for a best-of-seven series.

The Athletic spoke to a sampling of coaches, team executives and scouts around the league. While every franchise prepares a bit differently, the Blue Jackets’ approach to playoff scouting is fairly standard.

The challenge for coaching staffs is to absorb all the information from a flood of sources — analytical breakdowns, data-driven video clips, individual player reports —and present it in a condensed version that makes sense to the team.

Blue Jackets assistant coach Brad Larsen never aspired to be a newspaper reporter, but he likens his playoff prep work to that of a journalist dealing with a deadline and shrinking news hole. Investigate, edit, trim. And then trim some more.

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“I will have notes and notes and more notes, and I will tell myself, ‘Well, I can’t tell them all that,’ ” Larsen said. “You can’t give them too many concepts. You have to determine what is the focus. What are the main points I’m trying to get across?

“We’re trying to write a small story for them in how we believe we can have success.”

Given the Blue Jackets’ stunning four-game takedown of the heavily favored Lightning in the opening round, the coaching staff appears to have found the right balance.

As one rival team representative observed: “Columbus looks like it’s playing totally unburdened.”

Blue Jackets coach John Tortorella holds up the playoff scouting booklets he used to give out to players during his time with the Rangers. (Tom Reed / The Athletic)

It’s unclear whether the Blue Jackets will have scouts in Boston on Tuesday night for Game 7 of the Maple Leafs-Bruins series. The winner faces Columbus starting later this week.

A source said no Blue Jackets scouts were listed on the press-box seating assignments for Game 5. It doesn’t necessarily mean they were absent. Scouts can show up at the security entrance before game time, flash league-issued ID and be granted an open workspace.

Twenty years ago, it would have been unthinkable not to have team personnel present at a game featuring a potential next-round opponent. The reports those scouts filed were massively important.

But the advent of high-definition television, the increased number of camera angles and data-driven technologies enable coaching staffs to collect almost every bit of information necessary.

They can cobble it together quickly, too.

The Blue Jackets did not know they were playing the Lightning until the final day of the regular season. Minutes after their chartered flight from Ottawa departed for home on April 6, coaches were opening their laptops and watching videoes of their first-round opponent.

The team’s video assistant, Dan Singleton, had pre-loaded their 5-on-5 play against Tampa Bay onto the computers. Tortorella, Larsen and fellow assistant Brad Shaw are the ones doing the majority of the work.

The Blue Jackets lost all three regular-season games to the Lightning by an aggregate score of 17-3. The staff didn’t bother reviewing the Oct. 13 contest because it was so long ago, but it watched the Jan. 8 and Feb. 18 games.

While the Blue Jackets were beaten soundly, the staff believed the team put in many good minutes and shifts against the Lightning. The video provided a good teaching tool and reinforced the group’s premise.

“You forget about it, but we played really well in that (Feb. 18) home game,” Larsen said of the nationally televised 5-1 loss. “By our account, we out-chanced them, 22-11.”

The coaches began to find Tampa Bay tendencies they thought they could exploit.

All video study is useful, but Shaw thinks regular-season games that include the Blue Jackets playing against an upcoming opponent is most valuable.

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“You tend to get your team’s attention a little more,” he said. “Guys like watching themselves on video.”

While the coaches have been culling information on the Maple Leafs and Bruins for six days, the assistants agree it’s difficult to scout the Toronto-Boston series without knowing whom the Blue Jackets will play.

“It’s hard to watch the games and watch both sides of the puck,” Larsen said. “It’s almost impossible.”

Added Shaw: “If I tried to start on two different teams, I would just get confused. There are too many balls in the air.”

Video scouting makes for long, laborious hours. If the Bruins emerge victoriously, staffs from Columbus and Boston will have their loads lightened a bit. The teams met three times in the regular season with all the games coming after the Feb. 25 trade deadline. In other words, those games are fresh in the minds of the players and almost all the personnel is the same except for injuries.

Coaching staffs don’t force players to watch entire games, but assistants sift through them from start to finish. They want to observe the flow of action, the surges and what might have produced turning points. Coaches love watching the overhead angles, which lets them examine how plays develop and offers them sight of all 10 skaters.

Singleton’s role is a vital one. He can produce clips that are requested and suggest others that he believes are beneficial.

One major time saver is the recent development of software allowing coaches instant access to clips by using keywords. Think of it has hockey’s video version of Alexa.

Shaw, who runs the Blue Jackets’ penalty kill, can ask for the last 20 power-play goals scored by the Maple Leafs, and have the footage delivered to his laptop in minutes.

Special teams are a huge part of scouting. Larsen, who runs the power play, said he can message Singleton and request clips on an opponent’s penalty-killing forecheck, defensive-zone coverage and how it defends a 5-on-3.

“It’s our job to overdo it and then get it down to a simple message,” Larsen said. “During the regular season, you’re still doing video work, but you are much more focused on your own team and how it’s playing. But when you are playing the same opponent possibly seven times in a matter of two weeks, the focus does shift.”

Analytics also play a part in scouting the playoffs. Shaw lauds the work of his team’s advanced stats personnel, especially as it pertains to evaluating the opponents’ special-teams play.

The Blue Jackets were a robust 5-of-10 on the power play against the Lightning and were successful on 5-of-6 kills.

“I really like how (scouting coordinator) Tom Bark takes the analytics and kind of looks inside the numbers, and it helps me look in the right areas,” Shaw said. “You don’t have to look at the whole map. He’s pointing out a few things (on the opposition’s power play) that are important to them and what they are really good at or what’s driven their success.

“He boils it down so you don’t have to digest all of it. He also puts it in layman’s terms.”

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While coaches and coordinators do the majority of the work, scouts attending games can still supply kernels of information. A lot of it deals with intangibles and minutia.

How does an opposing coach run his bench? Who does he trust in key situations? How do certain players react to adversity or dramatic swings in momentum?

“It’s not as critical to have a person at the games as it used to be,” an NHL team representative said. “But you don’t want to leave any stone unturned and you don’t want any surprises.”

Shaw smiled at the memory of a story illustrating how times have changed in playoff scouting.

While working as a Blues assistant, Shaw delivered a 15-minute presentation to players on opposing star defenseman Ryan Suter. The coach detailed the defender’s strengths and tendencies and how the Blues might be able to unnerve him.

“I was about halfway through it and I thought to myself, ‘This is probably too much stuff for these guys to absorb,’ ” the former NHL defenseman said.

Nowadays, attention spans are shrinking like news holes in papers.

As a player, Shaw recalled receiving playoff booklets. As an assistant, he witnessed a head coach slipping a page of scouting notes under the doors of players’ hotel rooms.

Tortorella has not gone to such lengths while guiding the Blue Jackets to three consecutive postseason appearances. Several players confirmed the lack of paper trails to The Athletic. Center Pierre-Luc Dubois said the only digital information he was given during the first round regarded faceoff responsibilities.

In the days leading up to Game 1, several players said they gathered in the locker room and watched about 15 minutes of video clips each day as a team. There were no break-out sessions.

“Part of the beauty in the way Torts runs things is that guys have to figure some things out on their own,” Shaw said. “It helps them take ownership. It helps them be smarter. It helps them invest in a game more. You have to think about these things because it’s not being spoon-fed to you.”

Some clubs still use sheets that include key scouting points, an NHL team representative said, but they are posted in rooms adjacent to the locker room and are not to be removed.

Information overload is dangerous at any time of the season but particularly in the playoffs.

“I go back to when I was a player,” Larsen said. “How much could I take in? When the puck drops, it’s a very instinctual game. You have to be really careful not to give them too much because at the end of the day they are making split-second decisions.

“It’s not football. You don’t get to huddle up and go over a play. You can be on offense and defense three times during a shift. A thinking player is a slow player. As Torts says, ‘We’re just trying to give them a foundation.’”

Scouting is more important in the playoffs than the regular season when teams move on from opponents in 24 hours. There’s never been a greater emphasis on systems, details and advanced metrics.

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It’s why coaches walk a fine line this time of year. They want players prepared but not overwhelmed. “It’s still their game,” Tortorella said.

“It’s going to be way more important what Columbus does than what Boston or Toronto is going to do,” an NHL team personnel member said. “You don’t want to take away how they play. You’re just looking for incremental advantages, that’s it.”

If Tortorella ever needs a reminder, he just has to reach into a desk drawer and pull out one of his old booklets.

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Blue Jackets' game-plan goal is primarily simplicity

By Rob Oller, Columbus Dispatch – April 24, 2019

The temptation in hockey is to get better by getting smarter, but sometimes the devil is in having too many details.

As the Blue Jackets emerged from their first-round playoff sweep of Tampa Bay, everyone crowed about how the game plan implemented by coach John Tortorella and his staff removed the teeth from the Lightning’s potent offense.

The Jackets gummed up the neutral zone and kept the Lightning’s big guns from skating straight down Broadway, where they like to do most of their damage. Instead of operating from the middle out, Tampa Bay’s scorers were forced to the edges, where they quickly ran out of room and patience.

The strategy message was to clog the middle and backcheck as if your life depended on it. It worked like clockwork, so it makes sense to ask Tortorella what strategic brilliance the coaches have come up with for the second-round series.

Answer? Less is more — just as it was with Tampa Bay.

“We have totally simplified (things into) a foundation of how we’re going to play,” Tortorella said, explaining how modern coaching has adjusted to modern players, who become distracted with details and prefer big-picture thinking.

Instead of overloading the Jackets with information about Tampa Bay, Tortorella pounded home concepts the players could easily digest and turn into action. It almost comes down to relying on key words — Physical. Clog. Slow. — to get results.

“Certainly, when you do play in a seven-game series, there are tendencies you concentrate on with the other team,” Tortorella said. “But don’t overload them. This is their game, and you’ve got to free them up, especially in the second round, when there is more pressure. Free them up.”

It wasn’t always that way. In Tortorella’s early days of coaching, there was no thought given to the danger of creating paralysis by analysis. The advance work for each playoff team included so much information that Tortorella needed booklets to hold it all. He still keeps the binders in his desk, in part to remind him to keep things simple.

“I could suck the life out of a team pretty quick by giving them so much information,” he said. “They had booklets, everything about (every player) and their systems. Where it’s gone from then to now is night and day. We don’t give them books. I don’t put them in hotels at home games. It’s a different athlete now. You’ve got to understand your team.”

You also have to understand yourself. Tortorella has evolved. He realizes that today’s players respond better to a less-is-more approach. Not only that, but minimizing pregame information maximizes a player’s intelligence on the ice. Rather than tell players the why, what and where of how to prepare for a playoff opponent, Tortorella wants them to think for themselves.

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The idea of figuring it out “on the fly” became evident when the Jackets trailed Tampa Bay 3-0 in Game 1. At that moment, no amount of analytics or scouting-report specifics would save them. There was no stopping and asking for directions. Instead, it came down to players falling back on fundamentals, key words and instinct.

Be physical. Clog the middle. Stay connected. Slow the Lightning.

Look for more of the big-picture approach as the second round gets underway. Not that details are unimportant; there will be video study, discussion of opponent tendencies and analytics available for anyone wanting them.

But the coaching staff mostly will keep things simple.

“Free them up,” Tortorella repeated.

It worked against Tampa Bay. Why change now?

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Cleveland Monsters fall 2-1 to Syracuse in Game 3, lead AHL first-round series 2- 1

By Ryan Isley, Cleveland.com – April 23, 2019

CLEVELAND, Ohio -- There was no need for brooms at the Rocket Mortgage Fieldhouse Tuesday night, as the Cleveland Monsters lost 2-1 to the Syracuse Crunch in Game 3 of the first round of the AHL Calder Cup playoffs.

The Monsters were looking for a sweep of the best-of-5 series after winning the first two games of the series over the weekend in New York, but the Crunch held off a furious late Monsters rally to keep the series going.

The Monsters’ downfall was that the offense just never got going in the first two periods. After they scored five goals in each of the first two games of the series and averaged 30 shots on goal, Cleveland mustered just eight shots total in the first two periods Tuesday, only three in the second period.

“I think we passed up so many shots in the second particularly,” Monsters coach John Madden said. “We didn’t put any panic in their game and we had a hard time recovering loose pucks in their zone."

The power play was not effective for the Monsters, either, as they were unsuccessful on all five opportunities with a man advantage.

Syracuse’s Alex Barre-Boulet scored the game’s first goal with 7:50 remaining in the first period when he wrapped around the net and forced the puck past Monsters goaltender Brad Thiessen. The game was still 1-0 heading into the third period, but the Crunch began the final frame on a power play.

“We didn’t have any big rah-rah speech, just stated the facts,” Madden said of preparations for the final period. “It’s a 1-0 game and we haven’t played our best hockey. Let’s get through the kill and go from there.”

Things didn’t work out that way. Andy Andreoff put a rebound past Thiessen, who made 25 saves in the game, for a power play goal just 31 seconds into the period.

Justin Scott got the Monsters on the board with 7:11 left in regulation when he took a pass from Zac Dalpe and got the puck past Crunch goaltender Eddie Pasquale for a shorthanded goal. The tally for Scott woke up the home crowd and propelled the Monsters to a strong finish tha ultimately saw them come up short despite an 18-7 edge in shots in the period.

“We were one shot away going into the third period from tying the game,” Madden said. “I thought the boys played well in the third and found their legs and found their game.”

The Monsters still hold a 2-1 series lead and will again go for the series win when the two teams meet in Game 4 on Thursday night at 7 p.m. at the Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse.

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The name on the back matters: NHL is now marketing its stars

By STEPHEN WHYNO, AP – April 24, 2019

Connor McDavid is eager to shrug off personal stats, awards and achievements and put the focus on his team in Edmonton.

Yet there he is on the cover of a video game or in a commercial for a bank.

Auston Matthews is the face of the franchise in Toronto. But he also got razzed by his Maple Leafs teammates for doing a stylish fashion photo shoot for GQ magazine.

“It was a lot of fun,” Matthews said. “Kind of something that definitely got you out of your comfort zone.”

The rink for long decades has been the comfort zone for so many hockey players who put their full energy into the sport and are indoctrinated from a young age that the logo on the front of the jersey matters more than the name on the back.

That team-oriented part of hockey culture remains entrenched, but the NHL is finally beginning to market its stars as the NFL and NBA have done with great success.

As dynamic players like McDavid, Matthews and Calgary’s Johnny Gaudreau settled in Canadian markets and star power spread to smaller cities without much hockey tradition, marketing players and not just teams is essential to growing the NHL’s fan base. For a sport that generally sees its TV ratings drawn from fans of the two teams playing — and where the Stanley Cup Final doesn’t pull in nearly as much as the Super Bowl or NBA Finals — it’s a concerted effort to build up personalities and players’ brands to become more popular.

“It is a changing landscape,” said Judd Moldaver, Matthews’ agent and senior vice president of Wasserman Orr Hockey. “Hockey players are such fantastic athletes and fantastic people that I believe the hybrid of playing for the logo on the front but also being able to optimize your individual situation. I think the two can coexist.”

Matthews, McDavid, Nashville’s P.K. Subban and other stars are sharing more personality than players of previous eras like Mario Lemieux and even Wayne Gretzky. No longer is it seen as selfish for Subban to host a late-night talk show or for Matthews to shoot a cellphone commercial.

“Why not try? Just because the person next to me doesn’t think that they can host their own show doesn’t mean that I can’t,” Subban said. “What people have to understand is we’re at the rink three hours a day. We have a lot of time. We have days off, we have travel days and obviously there’s certain points in the schedule where you can’t do anything but hockey because of the way the schedule’s set up and the travel. But outside of hockey, a lot of times I don’t go home. I have meetings, I have different things that I’m doing. I have all these other interests.”

Showcasing those interests is part of the NHL’s shift. The league this season debuted a “Skates Off” series of vignettes with a player from all 31 teams to show what they are like off the ice, including Jack

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Eichel being a guest DJ at a Buffalo classic rock radio station, Victor Hedman sharing his love of flying planes and Seth Jones showing his cooking talent.

“It’s nice to see those personalities come out,” said Nick Foligno, a teammate of Jones’ in Columbus. “That’s how you grow the game. You look in other sports and the personalities come out, and that’s what fans are drawn to.”

NHL chief content officer and executive vice president Steve Mayer knows this. Since joining the league in late 2015 after 20 years at talent and sports giant IMG, he has helped lead the charge to put more focus on star players whose abilities and personalities could play a role in attracting younger fans who are attached to social media in the digital age.

“Other leagues do this, and we really don’t do it as well — we want to get better at it,” Mayer said. “Other leagues it doesn’t really matter sometimes: You just tune in to watch the guy play. And we need to do that even more. … I want to be able to have fans even in (another) town (who) cannot wait to see Connor McDavid come to town because we have marketed him as one of our greatest players. I don’t know whether that happens enough.”

The NHL, Mayer said, has no interest in abandoning the team culture of hockey. But after a 2016 Magna Global study showed the average age of NHL fans rose 16 years over a span of 16 years — essentially stagnant — experts praised the league for trying to create more buzz among millennials and Generation Z.

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“They recognize this, and they’re in a cultural shift, a cultural transformation within hockey,” said Stephanie Tryce, assistant of sports marketing at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. “Generation Z is about a lifestyle. They’re interested in things like social responsibility and they celebrate more of their identities than in the past, so that’s going to force hockey to continue to make inroads into other markets like the Hispanic/Latino market. It’s a market that you can’t ignore, but it’s also a market that historically hasn’t been in hockey. So you have to grow that.”

Matthews is at the center of that. His father is from California, his mother is from Mexico and he grew up in a nontraditional American hockey market in Arizona. Moldaver works closely with Matthews’ parents to chart a course for off-ice endeavors, from commercials and endorsement deals to philanthropic efforts, all of which continue to grow for the 21-year-old.

McDavid’s star began at an even earlier age, and the 2017 NHL MVP who has arguably surpassed Sidney Crosby as the greatest player in the world is finding his voice off the ice, too. When NFL Canada asked Rams and Patriots players at the Super Bowl who McDavid was, several thought maybe the prime minister or an actor. Work is ongoing to make him more recognizable outside hockey.

Hockey is such a team sport that individualism has for decades been frowned upon. Adidas senior director Dan Near said it’s a delicate balance to try to sell personalities but not stray too far from the team.

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“I think there’s a fine line between doing it to promote yourself a little bit and being cocky, and I think we’ve got a lot of guys that do a great job of treading that line,” Ottawa’s Bobby Ryan said. “You’re starting to see guys be promoted a little more, and it’s nice because then you get to see some individual personalities come out, and in a sport where you’re so often wearing helmets and gear, people don’t get to relate to you face-to-face.”

Teams have been reluctant to some of the league’s efforts sometimes until they see the final product. Mayer recalls showing owners and general managers clips of potential ideas and seeing the hesitancy for propping one player up before they understand the wide-ranging plan to give the NHL more exposure.

Initiatives like “Stanley Cup Confidential” where a player from each of the league’s 16 playoff teams shoots a daily cellphone video is another baby step.

“We are not here to break the culture. We’re just here to show that certain players are dynamic and have personality,” Mayer said. “Players are starting gradually to see, you know what, it’s OK. I’m not disrupting the locker room and it’s OK to show personality and have some fun and smile.”

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Part of Seattle’s NHL future is honoring its hockey past

BY TIM BOOTH, AP – April 24, 2019

SEATTLE-Walking into the preview center for the new NHL franchise coming to Seattle is a sensory overload of pictures and video giving a peek at what is going to arrive in the 2021-22 season when the team begins play in its flashy new arena.

For those in charge of the franchise, the locker unveiled on Tuesday with the nameplate of Guyle Fielder on the front, filled with equipment from more than a half-century ago along and an old Seattle Totems sweater hanging on the frame is just as important as all the flashy technology of the future.

Fielder is far from a household name in hockey circles. But for a time in the 1950s and 60s, Fielder was one of the best hockey players in North America not playing in the NHL, and he called Seattle home for the majority of his career. So while pointing toward its future as an NHL franchise beginning in a couple of years, the new Seattle franchise wants to honor the city's hockey past, starting with Fielder.

When his career ended in 1973, Fielder had 1,929 career points — 438 goals and 1,491 assists — in the Western Hockey League. While the competition is not an equal comparison to the NHL, Fielder still has the fourth-most points of pro hockey players in North America, trailing only Wayne Gretzky, Jaromir Jagr and Gordie Howe.

"When you're coming into a town where we want to build our game. The game of hockey is such a great game and I think a lot of people don't know that there is a real history of it here," said Dave Tippett, former NHL coach serving as a senior adviser to the new Seattle franchise. "They've got two very good junior franchises here but the history of the game has been around here a long time. History with some different buildings. It's doing everything we can do to honor the game and to build the game."

The nod to Seattle's hockey history is important to Tippett and team president Tod Leiweke. And it made sense to honor Fielder first, with a locker dedicated to the 88-year-old that is a permanent fixture in the team's preview center. The franchise also unveiled an award in Fielder's name to be given out yearly to one of its future players.

"Tod is a hockey nut and he loves Seattle and he wants to make sure this franchise is built right and honors the past while also is doing everything he can do to build a top-notch franchise," Tippett said.

Fielder played in the era of the Original Six when breaking into the NHL was a difficult challenge for even the best players. When he failed to make the roster of the Chicago Blackhawks, Fielder decided to ply his trade professionally on the West Coast, mostly in the WHL.

Fielder developed into the best player of his era out West. His 22-year career spanned six different franchises in the WHL, but most of his time was spent in Seattle, first with the Americans and late with the Totems. It was his green Totems jersey that hung on the ceremonial locker. Nearby was the "Guyle Fielder Trophy," given to the points leader in the WHL each season. Watching Fielder be honored was his former teammate Jim Powers, one of the wingers who was the recipient of many of those assists from Fielder.

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It was emotional at moments for Fielder, who said he hopes he's still around to be at the first game in 2021.

"It was a great city to play in. They had great fans. I'm a little disappointed that they (didn't) have the National Hockey League here 50 years ago because they deserve it," Fielder said. "They are great fans. You wait and see. As the seasons go along they're going to support this team."

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The Athletic / The Natural: Rising TV star Patrick Sharp finds a new grind to embrace in retirement

By Mark Lazerus, The Athletic – April 23, 2019

STAMFORD, Conn. — Patrick Sharp stands in the far corner of the cavernous secondary studio set at the NBC Sports complex. His jacket is off, hung carefully on his chair behind the desk, and his tie is tucked between the buttons of his dress shirt.

He’s hunched over a few of the big screens that allow the set to become the home of NBC’s Premier League, shoveling food into his mouth during the second period of Game 4 of the first-round series between the Blue Jackets and Lightning.

His attention is split between his plate and the massive screen that takes up an entire wall at the front of the studio, which is showing the Columbus and Islanders-Penguins games.

Phil Cohn, the production assistant whose job it is to quickly assemble all the highlight packages Sharp and Jeremy Roenick will break down at intermission, yells over to him from one of the three chairs positioned near the entrance.

“What are you doing back there, Sharpie?”

“Eating,” Sharp responds, his mouth full. “It’s fish and it kind of smells.”

At that exact moment, Seth Jones scores to give Columbus a 3-1 lead, pushing Tampa Bay to the brink of an unthinkable first-round sweep after a record-tying 62-win season. Sharp takes a few quick forkfuls and returns to the desk to kick around some ideas and watch the rest of the period with Roenick and studio host Paul Burmeister. Cedric Paquette scores to make it 3-2, and Sharp is suddenly a Lightning fan, cheering for the story. He’s back in that playoff mindset that defined so much of his career, living and dying with the action. It’s reflexive. It’s instinct.

Steven Stamkos races through the neutral zone. “C’mon, Stammer! C’mon!”

Nikita Kucherov slaps one off the post. “Ohhhhhhh!”

Finally, with 2:08 left in the period, Stamkos feeds Brayden Point, who shovels a backhander past Sergei Bobrovsky for the equalizer. “OHHH! F*****’ right!” Sharp bellows. “Listen to them on the bench!”

Then the switch flips. He’s suddenly in broadcaster mode. Sharp and Roenick are deciding who handles what during the intermission report, as Cohn alters the highlight package (“the pack”) to fit the talent’s ever-changing whims. Just showing the goals is boring. Sharp wants to highlight a few of Andrei Vasilevskiy’s saves that kept the Lightning within striking range. Roenick wants to point out an offensive- zone penalty by Zach Werenski that led to Point’s game-tying goal.

Then, just as they settle on a game plan, Columbus’ Oliver Bjorkstrand scores with 1:14 left to make it 4- 3 Jackets. So much for that.

Cohn looks back to the set: “Well, what do you want to do now?”

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Sharp smiles as he throws his jacket on, straightens his tie and gets his makeup touched up. “You know, that was a wild f****** period. I think we just recap the period at this point.”

They’re on the air for all of 73 seconds thanks to a lengthy live look-in of the game in Pittsburgh. Once clear, Sharp takes his jacket off, drapes it on his chair, and walks off the set to grab a brownie and a drink out in the hallway. First, he turns back to Cohn: “Good work, Phil. You built a good pack, then you canned it, then you built another one. Great work.”

Patrick Sharp, on set with host Paul Burmeister and analyst Jeremy Roenick, keeps a close eye on Game 4 of the Blue Jackets-Lightning series. (Mark Lazerus/The Athletic)

You know what Patrick Sharp misses the most in retirement? It’s not the glory of scoring a goal and getting mobbed by his teammates in front of 21,000 screaming fans. It’s not the joyous atmosphere of a victorious dressing room, music blaring and fists bumping. It’s not even the fame and fortune that come with being one of the most visible athletes in a sports-crazed city.

It’s the grind, the mind-numbing drudgery, the monotony of a weeknight game in Raleigh in January, the mental anguish of a scoring slump — all the stuff he used to bemoan as a player.

“Like, figuring out which stick I’m going to use,” he says. “Training, getting my body ready to play, all the game-day prep and the season-long part. That’s what I miss. The bad stuff is what I miss. I miss coming home and not scoring in six straight games and feeling that anxiety. And that’s what I was looking forward to getting out of last year. I was like, ‘Oh, I’ve had enough of this hockey stuff. I’ve got to relax a little bit.’ And now that I’m able to relax, I miss the stress, as dumb as it sounds.”

It doesn’t sound dumb at all, really. Not if you know hockey players. “Retirement” is a scary word for any professional athlete, the idea that everything you’ve worked for your entire life is over in your mid-30s. Hockey players’ lives are so regimented, so scripted — bus at 10, skate at 11:30, bus at 12:20, lunch, nap, bus at 4:30, meetings, game at 7, bus at 10:10, flight at 11 — that it can be terrifying to suddenly have 24 hours of free time, to have to think for yourself, to have to live your own life apart.

What do you do when you’re 36 years old and have no real need for money? First-world problems, to be sure, but unnerving all the same. And Sharp, like so many other Type-A athletes, isn’t wired for sitting on the couch and getting fat. Hell, he’s actually lost weight since he finished playing.

We talked in the NBC Sports coffee room last Tuesday, his fifth of seven straight nights on the air, in between the 5 p.m. rundown meeting and puck drop in Columbus.

“My dad is probably the reason why I’ve stayed so busy in my first year of retirement,” Sharp says. “He was very successful in business and retired himself in 2000 or 2001. And since then, he’s retired from three or four different jobs. He doesn’t have to work, either, but he stays busy because he knows too much free time for him is not a good thing. I’ve taken after him and just tried to stay busy.”

For Sharp, that obviously meant television. Everyone knew he would end up on television — the reporters who sought him after games for his pithy soundbites, the teammates who watched him become a fan favorite with his goofy Blackhawks TV bits, the fans who made #PSIAVHM (that’s “Patrick Sharp Is A Very Handsome Man,” for the uninitiated) a trending hashtag on many a game night.

Everyone, that is, but Sharp himself.

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“I heard it all the time during my career,” he says. “I wasn’t so sure.”

So when NBC Sports coordinating producer Mark Bellotti reached out to see if he was interested in doing some studio analysis during the playoffs last year, Sharp was wary. And when Blackhawks vice president of communications Adam Rogowin emailed him clips of his early performances, Sharp watched them in his Stamford hotel room and cringed.

He was timid. Quiet. He stammered through his sentences. He froze for a moment every time Bellotti gave him a “10 seconds” warning in his earpiece, as if he was counting out the seconds while he tried to make his point — walking and chewing gum at the same time. That endearing arrogance that made him a media darling and a fan favorite as a player was nowhere to be found. He was out of his element, nervous and uncomfortable.

“I didn’t really have much to say,” he says now. “I was giving cliché after cliché, like a hockey player does. I was talking like a hockey player, not like a broadcaster.”

So Sharp did what he does. He went to work. He found a new grind.

Sharp leans back in his chair in a cramped conference room and pores over the multi-page rundown in his hand. Liam McHugh — pressed into host duties when Kathryn Tappen lost her voice — Sharp, veteran analyst Keith Jones and Bellotti sit around a small table with Panthers defenseman Keith Yandle, who’s getting the kind of test run Sharp got last spring. The room is ringed with production assistants and other staffers, with no square foot left unoccupied.

The focus is going to be on the two early games, of course, with two star-laden favorites on the verge of getting swept.

“Which do you want,” Jones asks Sharp.

“Same story both games,” he responds. “Doesn’t matter.”

“I’ll start with Pitt,” Jones says.

NBC Sports moved its studios to a former Clairol plant in Stamford, Conn., in 2014. (Mark Lazerus/The Athletic)

Someone brings up a cheeky tweet from Nationwide Arena reminding fans that brooms aren’t allowed in the building. A production assistant notes that no Presidents’ Trophy winner has ever been swept, which will be a key talking point. Jones points out that Lightning coach Jon Cooper has shaken up his lines, drawing a surprised look from Sharp.

“(Anthony) Cirelli-Kucherov-Stamkos?” he says. “OK.”

Next on the agenda is the concussion Alexander Ovechkin delivered to 19-year-old Andrei Svechnikov in a fight, which naturally brings out the gallows humor and the mocking of hockey’s frequently archaic, meatball mindset.

“Ovi’s hand is fine,” McHugh says, dryly.

“It’s the playoffs, get out there, kid!” Sharp says, channeling his inner meatball.

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Meanwhile, Mike Tirico is handling the call in Pittsburgh with Eddie Olczyk, and Bellotti wants to nail down the timing of the pregame hit they’ll do. “Eddie’s talking through this?” Sharp says, joking. “We might not get a word in.”

The talk returns to the two teams facing sweeps. McHugh asks Sharp, Yandle and Jones if they have any experience to personalize the analysis, and Sharp brings up the 2011 series in Vancouver, when the Blackhawks rallied from 3-0 down only to lose Game 7 in overtime. A staffer wonders aloud if the Penguins might just be tired from all these deep playoff runs.

“Sharpie, didn’t the Hawks get swept as a top seed?” someone chimes in, recalling the 2017 series against Nashville that dramatically altered the franchise’s trajectory.

Sharp smiles broadly and leans back in his chair. He was on the Dallas Stars that season.

“Not when I was there!” he says.

The rundown sheet in Sharp’s hand is OCD in print form, literally every moment of a half-hour pregame show planned in detail. Every clip, every topic, every interview is plotted out to the second. When Sharp first arrived in Stamford last spring, it might as well have been written in hieroglyphics.

“I still don’t even know what this is called, a shot sheet maybe?” he says.

Sharp brought the sheets home with him and recorded every edition of NHL Live on his DVR. He’d follow along and try to make sense of it. Sure, the details were different, but the gist was the same. Oh that’s what a bump is. That’s what a pack is. That’s relevant to me, that’s only relevant to the producers. Got it.

Sharp started watching more games around the league, and staying on top of the news. He’d listen to what Jones and Roenick had to say, really listen. He’d analyze how Olczyk analyzed, noting the timbre of his voice and the way he punctuated his points during a highlight. He picked Troy Murray’s brain. It was like breaking down an opponents’ penalty-killing strategy, or picking out a stick. Sharp was back to doing what he loved — honing his craft.

“Instead of watching Jeremy Roenick shoot the puck and learning how to shoot, I watched guys talk on TV and tried to mimic it the best I could,” Sharp says.

In short, he’s a producer’s dream. For a lot of former athletes, TV is a side gig, something to screw around with. For Sharp, it was quickly becoming a career.

“He can take it as far as he wants to take it,” Bellotti says. “I’ve been, honestly, amazingly impressed for a guy that had the career that he had. I’m sure he could have floated into some other things, but he’s really working hard at it. When we brought him in last spring, he had a little bit of that deer-in-the- headlight look. But, boy, the learning curve was steep.”

Inside one of the control rooms at NBC Sports. (Mark Lazerus/The Athletic)

Sharp’s confidence comes through during the 5 p.m. rundown meeting. The way he bounds off the set and pats the PAs and camera people on the back with a word of encouragement. The way he navigates the construction off the air and then deconstruction on the air of a clips package.

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The way he modulates his voice, his usual low-talking style ratcheted up a few notches the instant the red light turns on.

And in the way he improvises and jokes on the air, flitting between the two studios and playing off whichever partner he’s got for that week, that night, that intermission.

Now back in the CNBC studio, Sharp is leaning on the desk, intently watching the Blue Jackets and Lighting on the big screen. Columbus is up 2-1 and has just scored again with 7:37 left.

“I think it’s coming back,” Sharp says.

Sure enough, the play was offside. Once the review is complete and the goal overturned, Cooper explodes on the bench.

Sharp calls over to Cohn: “Oh! Phil! You get Cooper snapping after he said it was offside?”

“Already got it,” Cohn responds.

“‘That’s our f****** chance?’” Sharp says. “That’s what he says there, right? ‘That’s our f****** chance?’ Weird thing to be saying to a No. 1 seed. ‘Chance.’”

It’s a huge momentum swing, and the wheels are tuning in Stamford.

“I am now nervous for Columbus in this game,” Roenick tells producer Alexa Maremaa.

Sharp calms down and starts studying again. He asks for clarification on the pronunciation of Columbus rookie Alexandre Texier’s name and repeats it to himself four or five times. Sharp is fixating on the overturned goal.

“I’ll be out here,” he tells Roenick. “I’ll say, ‘If Tampa Bay comes back to win this series, that’ll be the turning point.’ Then you.”

The intermission begins, and Sharp quietly rehearses his line to himself. “If Tampa Bay comes back to win this, that’ll be the turning point.”

As the clock ticks down to their segment, Roenick, who wasn’t in the rundown meeting, wonders aloud if a Presidents’ Trophy team has ever lost four straight. Sharp immediately tells him that a top seed has, but not a Presidents’ Trophy winner. The cameras turn on, and Sharp instantly amps up the volume in his voice.

“If Tampa Bay comes back here, JR…”

Here’s the thing most players don’t want you to know. They read everything. They hear everything. And yes, they’re watching. Especially in the playoffs. Whether it’s at home on an off night (or after being eliminated), in the hotel before heading to the rink, or in the players’ lounge before and after a game, they’re watching. The pregame forecasts, the intermission analysis, the postgame second-guessing — they’re watching.

“I always watched as a player,” Sharp says. “I always listened to what Keith Jones was saying, I always listened to what (Mike) Milbury was saying. And it would make me mad sometimes. I’d want them to

32 say my name when I scored a goal in the playoffs, and all they talked about was (Patrick) Kane and (Jonathan) Toews, and I’d roll my eyes and say, ‘When am I gonna get my time?’”

He’s kidding, of course. Well, a little. There’s always been a kernel of truth in Sharp’s good-natured, big- brotherly barbs at his two more famous teammates. But now, they’re the ones waiting to hear what Sharp will say. Kane texts Sharp after nearly every broadcast. Brent Seabrook cracks jokes via text during the games. Toews chimes in regularly.

“All the guys I know watch it,” Sharp says.

And therein lies the tricky part. What’s going to happen the first time Sharp drops the hammer on a guy? The first time he weighs in on a controversial hit or suspension?

Does he even have it in him?

“That’s my biggest fear, to be honest with you,” he says. “Waking up the next morning and having a bunch of texts and phone calls for something I said that I was wrong on. I don’t think I’ll ever destroy someone because I have too much respect for what it’s like out there. And you don’t want to sit up there and act like you know it all. The difficult thing is being critical. If there’s a suspendable hit or something like that, and then it’s a quick reaction right back to the studio and they’re like, ‘What’s your take on the hit?’ Those are tough situations, and I’m still trying to find my way through. I try to be as careful as I can, but also, I understand that I’m entertaining up there. So I’ve got to call it the way I see it. Nobody wants to hear people just compliment everybody.”

That reticence is what made Sharp’s Blackhawks broadcasts a little awkward this season. The local broadcasts are a great way for a player to get his feet under him without the pressure of national TV, and Sharp lavishes praise and thanks on the Blackhawks and NBC Sports Chicago for letting him get those reps.

But the Hawks lost the first nine games he covered and you wouldn’t have known it by listening to Sharp on the air.

“I was ultra-positive,” Sharp says. “I didn’t want to say a bad thing about anybody. But they’re 0-9 when I was on the broadcast and we had an hour postgame show talking about what went wrong. It was tough to do. I’m still figuring that part out.”

There’s 3:58 left in the third period in Columbus, and Sharp has his jacket back on.

“OK, here we go,” he says, clapping his hands. “This is the game.”

Finally, Artemi Panarin scores an empty-netter to seal the Lightning’s fate as probably the biggest upset victim in Stanley Cup playoff history.

“PANARIN!” Sharp hollers, arms in the air as the broadcast shows the delirious Blue Jackets bench. “Look at them! They just won the Cup!”

Then the camera switches to the Lightning bench, and their now-stone-faced coach.

“Look at Coop,” Sharp says with a knowing chuckle. “He’s gonna be in here with us in two days.”

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Blackhawks equipment manager Troy Parchman keeps Sharp’s hockey gear at MB Ice Arena. The last time Sharp laced up was in February, when the Blackhawks were out west. Corey Crawford was recovering from his second concussion, and was skating again, virtually in secret. Sharp snuck in, put on his skates and shot at Crawford to help him get ready to return. He hasn’t been on the ice since.

While the Blackhawks have told Sharp he’s welcome any time, he’s resisted the urge to show up for a skate. And he has no plans to mess around in a summer beer league.

“No, because it’ll make me want to come back and play, and make a fool of myself,” Sharp says.

But that’s the thing. He really doesn’t want to come back. He’s grateful that the Blackhawks have told him he can stop by the room whenever he likes, just to say hello, but he rarely acts on it, even when he’s in the building for a broadcast.

He still sees Keith and Seabrook a lot because they live in the same Chicago neighborhood, and he texts with Toews and Kane a fair amount. But they don’t talk hockey. Sharp knows that the last thing a hockey player wants to talk about with his non-hockey-player friends is hockey. And more than anything, he doesn’t want to be That Guy — the broken-down has-been clinging to a past life, acting like he’s still one of the boys. Those are his friends in that room — from the four three-time champions to his little brother Alex DeBrincat, whom he mentored in his final season — but that’s not his room. Not anymore.

That was his biggest fear about retirement: Who he’d become when he was no longer Patrick Sharp, Chicago Blackhawk.

“When I would see old teammates, I could sometimes tell that they were stuck in that time warp,” he says. “They think they’re a player, but they haven’t played for 10 years. So they’re still acting and talking like they’re a hockey player, because they haven’t moved on from it.”

No longer worried about keeping up with Toews’ Tesla and Kane’s Hummer, Sharp traded in his fancy ride for a GMC Savana conversion van — a minivan on steroids, with comfortable seating for his two daughters (ages 7 and 5), a flat-screen TV and wifi. After a couple of months of sleeping in until 9 or 10 a.m., his wife, Abby, got him back on a daily schedule, mixing in exercise with his stay-at-home-dad responsibilities. (“She’s a fitness freak,” Sharp says.)

After 14 NHL seasons on the road, half of which he spent as an absentee dad, Sharp is connecting with his family. He’s home a lot more. And when he’s home, he’s not lost in his own head about his latest slump or some perceived slight. That’s another benefit to the new gig — the family’s summer home is an hour up the road in Connecticut. After working seven straight nights and living at the hotel all last week, Sharp took Friday off and met the girls at the house before returning to work Saturday.

Of course, it’s easier for Sharp to move on than for others. There’s nothing left to chase on the ice, no what-ifs to gnaw at him.

“There’s not really anything that I didn’t get to experience,” he says. “I was on bad teams, I was on great teams, I played international hockey, I even got to go to the All-Star Game once, which on a team full of superstars, I didn’t think would happen.”

The All-Star appearance came in 2011 in Raleigh. And all Sharp did was go out and post a goal and two assists and win the MVP. Even that came with an elbow in the ribs from Toews, who sardonically noted

34 that Sharp was “definitely the hardest worker out there,” poking fun at his buddy for being the only one who bothered trying in a game nobody else cared about.

“Hey, I wanted to win the MVP,” Sharp says with a grin. “I knew it was the only All-Star Game I was going to get to go to. So I worked for it.”

The handshake line in Columbus combined with a live look-in at Pittsburgh robbed Sharp, Roenick and Burmeister of another segment. At this point, it’s been nearly five hours since the rundown meeting, and they’ve had all of three minutes and 43 seconds of air time scattered over two intermissions. But the night’s just getting started.

Sharp heads next door to the main studio for the late game between Vegas and San Jose. When he walks in, Jones and McHugh are watching old clips to pass the time. Someone shares the latest insights from “NHL Trump,” a Twitter parody account that’s particularly popular on set and in the control room.

Finally, they get an extended segment to dissect the two sweeps.

“That could have been the turning point in the series,” Sharp says once again as they show the overturned goal. “It was not, however.”

An hour later, at 11:20 p.m., it’s time for another intermission report. Sharp stands at the desk, shakes out his arms, bangs the desk and says to himself, “Wakey, wakey.” The Sharks trail 2-0, and Sharp has no trouble pointing out that Martin Jones deflated his team by giving up a couple of “soft goals.” That part’s getting easier, it seems.

Another hour passes. Midnight is snack time — chips and some mystery meats. There’s fruit, but nobody’s touching it. The Jets win in overtime at 12:33 a.m., and McHugh, Jones and Sharp tape a quick segment that’ll be part of the final postgame after Knights-Sharks. Finally, at 1:10 a.m., Vegas wins. Time for one last recap.

Sharp stands at the desk and exhales heavily. Even his hair feels the weight of a long night, with one insolent strand falling across the right side of his forehead. On the air, he again dips into his personal experience to point out the significance of Jonathan Marchessault’s seemingly meaningless goal late in a 5-0 blowout. He knows all too well what it’s like to get off the schneid in a playoff series.

At the last minute, the production team managed to squeeze in a clip of the Vegas mascot — Chance the Gila monster — handing goalie Marc-Andre Fleury an inflatable donut as he walked off the ice. A very Vegas sight. “That is the best thing I saw all night,” Sharp says on the air.

At exactly 1:20:11 a.m., the red lights on the cameras turn off for the last time.

“Great work, everyone,” Sharp says. “You even got the donut in there!”

Everybody clears out and heads home — some to the hotel, some to nearby suburbs, some all the way back to New York or New Jersey. But it’s only one week into the playoffs. They’ll all be back in the rundown meeting in about 15 hours. The grind has just begun.

And Sharp can’t wait.

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