Columbus Blue Jackets News Clips September 4-8, 2020

Columbus Blue Jackets PAGE 02: Columbus Dispatch: Columbus Blue Jackets won’t retain power-play guru Paul MacLean PAGE 04: Columbus Dispatch: showed Blue Jackets’ need for upgrade at center PAGE 06: The Athletic: Columbus grassroots hockey legend John Haferman is still changing kids’ lives

Cleveland Monsters/Prospects

NHL/Websites PAGE 13: The Athletic: When might fans be allowed back into NHL arenas? Experts weigh in PAGE 16: The Athletic: Duhatschek Notebook: How teams should plan for 2021, the goalie conundrum PAGE 20: The Athletic: Families in the U.S. not yet approved to join NHL players in the bubble PAGE 24: .ca: Quick Shifts: Would trading Frederik Andersen be a mistake? PAGE 30: New York Times: N.H.L. Conference Finals Begin After Hectic Second Round PAGE 33: The Athletic: Young defensemen using playoff stage to show how they are changing the position PAGE 37: The Athletic: The Athletic’s 2020 NHL playoff predictions for the conference finals and MVP PAGE 38: Sportsnet.ca: Five teams facing tough off-season decisions with flat NHL PAGE 40: Sportsnet.ca: Analyzing and predicting Round 3 of the Playoffs PAGE 44: The Athletic: Opening games of the conference finals weren’t as different as you might think PAGE 47: The Athletic: ‘Like a long, long road trip’: How NHL teams are coping with bubble fatigue

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Columbus Dispatch / Columbus Blue Jackets won’t retain power-play guru Paul MacLean By Brian Hedger – September 4, 2020

The quest to solve the Blue Jackets’ ongoing power-play struggle will likely head back in a familiar direction. Assistant coach Paul MacLean’s one-year contract will not be renewed for the 2020-21 season, general manager Jarmo Kekalainen confirmed Thursday, so the responsibility of coordinating the Jackets’ power play will presumably return to assistant coach ’s purview. Kekalainen did not offer a reason, but the cost of paying for three bench assistants instead of the usual two could have played a role — the COVID-19 pandemic has cost NHL teams a lot of money and also threatens to hold future revenue down. The Jackets also didn’t show improvement on the man-advantage under MacLean’s direction. Prior to MacLean’s arrival Nov. 21, the power play was successful 15.6% of the time in 20 games and ranked 24th among NHL teams. The percentage increased only a tick with MacLean, bumping to 16.8% in the Jackets’ remaining 50 games, and still ranked 24th during that span. Overall, the Blue Jackets finished 27th on the power play at 16.4% (31 of 189), and it only got worse in the playoffs. They went just 3 of 34 (8.8%) in 10 games, which ranked 22nd out of 24 postseason teams going into Thursday’s second-round games. MacLean, a longtime NHL assistant and also the winner of the in 2013 for his work as Senators , was the second assistant in as many years brought in at midseason to focus on the power play. The Blue Jackets had more success under the direction of hall of famer Martin St. Louis, who was hired Jan. 21 of the 2018-19 campaign, but he opted to focus on coaching his sons’ teams rather than returning for another season. Now, barring a third unforeseen addition to the coaching staff, Larsen will get another crack at solving the Jackets’ lingering power-play issues, which have vexed them since the second half of 2016-17. Impressive compliments A day after former Blue Jackets executive Bill Zito was hired as the ’ general manager, coach had some nice things to say about the team his new GM helped construct. The three-time winner of the Stanley Cup with the Blackhawks doesn’t know Zito like he does Blue Jackets coach or assistant Brad Shaw, but he knows a strong team identity when he sees it. "You look at Columbus, the way they play … the competitiveness of their team is something that you appreciate — whether that’s a trait from the day (players) were drafted to how they evaluate players," said Quenneville, who spoke on a video conference.

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"You’re watching a game early in the playoffs and they’re going into (five overtimes), Tampa and Columbus, and Columbus is very comfortable playing a Tampa team that over that kind of time is going to be dangerous. I think that’s something that we want to make sure that we’re looking to get to."

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Columbus Dispatch / Playoffs showed Blue Jackets’ need for upgrade at center By Brian Hedger – September 7, 2020

The Blue Jackets have plenty of reasons to feel good about what the pieces they have in place for the 2021 season and beyond. But there is one noticeable, important hole that they know must be addressed. "Our center ice position has always been talked about," coach John Tortorella said last month, when asked during a season-ending conference call what areas he would like to upgrade this offseason. "You just don’t find center-ice men in the league (via free agency). Everybody’s looking for those guys." He’s not wrong. NHL teams usually retain their top centers with long-term contract extensions, and those who do make it to free agency are typically signed quickly to massive deals that don’t always make a lot of financial sense. That doesn’t change the fact the Jackets need an upgrade in the middle of their second line, which became painfully obvious in postseason series against two center-rich opponents, the Maple Leafs and . The good news for Columbus is that it has developing No. 1 center in Pierre-Luc Dubois and an ideal third-line option in grinder Boone Jenner — but there is a glaring void between them. Here are three ways that general manager Jarmo Kekalainen can explore to fill the gap: Free agency This might be the least likely way, as Tortorella pointed out, but this offseason will be different because of coronavirus pandemic that limited the season to 70 regular-season games. The NHL’s revenue took a major hit, future revenue is in jeopardy with no clear date on when fans can return to arenas and the league’s salary-cap will remain at $81.5 million for the 2020-21 season. Cap- strapped teams may be looking to shed salary in trades, and free agents might have to settle for shorter- term deals for less money than in recent seasons. As for this year’s pending free-agent pool, it’s a bleak field for those needing a top-six pivot. Nashville’s Mikael Granlund tops the list at just 30 points this season (17 goals, 13 assists) and there really isn’t a fallback option. Free agency might be an option to add scoring depth, but the available talent is probably not enough to bring a second-line center to Columbus. Trade market Kekalainen will explore the market, but that doesn’t mean a deal should be expected. In fact, "Growing from within," is a term that fans should get comfortable hearing. "We have some really good young players that have taken a big step into the right direction and they’ll take another one or two in the near future," Kekalainen said, referring to talented rookie forwards Alexandre Texier, Liam Foudy and Emil Bemstrom.

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Should the Jackets go the trade route, however, they have a wealth of chips to use — including a stable of NHL defensemen, talented young forwards and a pair of in their mid-20s who performed at elite levels this season. The Oilers come to mind as a possible trade partner, needing help in net and on defense, and they have a skilled 27-year-old center, Ryan Nugent-Hopkins, who could fill the Jackets’ need. He only has one year left on a contract with a manageable cap hit of $6 million, though, so it would be a risk without Nugent-Hopkins agreeing to entertain the idea of staying in Columbus long term. Look within again? The way Alexander Wennberg ended the season was akin to sinking a birdie putt from 50 feet away to end a terrible round of golf. The 25-year-old center was one of best players on the ice, for either team, in the Jackets’ season-ending overtime loss in Game 5 against Tampa Bay — and his highlight-reel in Game 2 dropped jaws around the league. Wennberg clearly has the skills and size to be the center the Blue Jackets need, but he hasn’t performed consistently for three consecutive years now — after putting up a tantalizing 59 points in 2016-17 as the Jackets’ top center. Tortorella was asked if Wennberg’s play against the Lightning was more encouraging or frustrating, and his answer summed it up perfectly. "Both," he said. "It (ticks) me off and it excites you at the same time. Not even just the last game. Wenny wants to try and get better. He wants to see how he can improve … but it (ticks) me off. Why isn’t it there all the time?" Another option might be Texier, whom Kekalainen believes can play center, though he has skated mostly at left wing thus far. Shouldering the responsibilities of centering the second line might be a little much at this stage for the 20-year-old. Stay tuned, because the Jackets’ hunt for another skilled center should make for an interesting offseason.

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The Athletic / Columbus grassroots hockey legend John Haferman is still changing kids’ lives By Aaron Portzline - September 8, 2020

COLUMBUS, Ohio — Nearly 30,000 kids have been involved with the Columbus Club since it started in the late 1990s, just a couple of seasons before the Blue Jackets came to town as an NHL expansion team.

But it didn’t start with a grand plan to become one of the sport’s strongest programs in central Ohio, one of the flagship organizations in the world when it comes to introducing minorities and underprivileged families to a sport that is mostly white and incredibly expensive to play.

No, it started with co-founder John Haferman getting pissed off at a meeting when he worked for the Columbus Recreation and Parks Department.

A native of Lethbridge, , and an avid hockey fan, Haferman was pitching an idea to grow the sport in the Columbus inner city. He’d been introducing kids to street hockey and they loved it, so the logical step was to keep growing, he thought.

It wasn’t well received by a colleague.

“Why are you teaching black kids how to skate? They’ll never play hockey.”

“It was said by a gentleman in our department who is long since gone,” Haferman said. The comment still motivates him today, when hundreds of kids show up for practices, graduates of the club go on to college scholarships and veterans of the program return as coaches, often of their own kids’ teams.

“Don’t tell me I can’t do something,” Haferman said. “Don’t you tell me that these kids won’t do something if you just give them an honest chance like other kids have. Don’t you tell me it can’t happen.”

It’s no exaggeration to say that Haferman has changed hundreds of lives — and probably saved a few, too. He is a revered figure in the local hockey world, but he rejects all praise and seeks no spotlight.

S0 when it was announced in July that Haferman was one of three finalists for the NHL’s Willie O’Ree Community Hero Award, the CIHC erupted with joy. Club leaders asked current and former players to create video testimonials to help spark an online voting campaign for Haferman.

“With just the smallest bit of encouragement, they came flooding in,” said Dr. Nicole Kraft, a former CIHC board member whose son Danny spent several years in the program.

“It was riveting and shocking to see the places and the spaces that these people — the former CIHC kids — now occupy. They’re at military academies, in law enforcement, teachers, parents … their words were incredible, but they themselves were the testimonials.

“And all of these people were brought together by the gravitational pull that is John Haferman.”

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On Tuesday, during Game 2 of the Western Conference final between Vegas and , the league will announce the winner.

“My stomach … I don’t even want to talk about it,” said Lisa Adineye, whose son, Ayo, is the best player to come through the program. A 6-foot-4, 205-pound defenseman, he earned a Division I scholarship to play at Alabama-Huntsville.

“Watching what John has done with this program, from barely having enough kids to put together a single team to what it is now? I don’t think people understand the work he’s put in and the impact that’s happened.”

A mother’s imprint Haferman was born in Southern Alberta and raised in Edmonton before his family moved east to . But he was 10 or 12 years old, he said, before he realized that his upbringing wasn’t typical. “My parents started fostering kids when we lived in Edmonton,” Haferman said. “We had 18 kids living in our house at a time, so by the age of 12, I knew how to change cloth diapers. I was in charge of taking kids and playing games with them, keeping them busy until dinner or until school started, whatever.

“A lot of them were Cree Indians. That was my first inkling into the social injustice of kids being mistreated because of who they are or where they’re from.”

His mother was president of the Children’s Aid Society in , while his father was a Lutheran minister. The family left Winnipeg and came to America because those two jobs didn’t mesh.

“We got ostracized in our own church because my mom kept bringing Native American children with us to church,” Haferman said.

“My mom … she’s the one who taught me that if there’s something you see wrong and you don’t do anything, you’re just as bad as the person who’s doing it.”

The family settled in Bay City, Mich., then continued south to Columbus, where Haferman’s father found work at Capital University.

By 1984, John was working part time for the parks and recreation department, not really sure what he wanted to do for a living. By 1989, he was hired full time, working out of the Barnett Community Center on the east side of Columbus.

“The Sullinger boys, Kenny Gregory, Samaki Walker all came through Barnett,” Haferman said, “so basketball was really big.

“But I started doing street hockey with the kids at a time when some of the kids had never even seen hockey, much less played it. We incorporated it with all of the other stuff we did, baseball, football, soccer, basketball, etc.”

The next step was getting players on the ice, which is how the CIHC formed, after the ill-fated comment from Haferman’s colleague.

But with no rinks in the inner city, Haferman would not only need to organize transportation for the willing players — which he usually took care of himself in his old, beat-up van — but he’d need to fight

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for ice time. And with no equipment, Haferman went into overdrive to find skates, sticks, pads, helmets and sweaters.

Because their ice time was so irregular and often after hours, Haferman would drive each of the kids home after practice. He couldn’t just drop them back at a central location like the rec center, he said, and hope they got home.

Calling it a rag-tag group would be a compliment.

“We had 17 players, 15 helmets and 12 sticks when we started,” Haferman said. Three players had to share one helmet. During line changes, the player coming off the ice would have to pass his stick to his teammate coming onto the ice.

“We’re talking grassroots,” Adineye said.

But the roots found fertile soil.

By 2005, 120 boys and girls were part of CIHC, enough to form six teams between the ages of 6 and 16. By 2013, 350 kids were part of the program, an incredible 65 percent of whom were either minorities or girls.

“Every single kid who has stayed with our program has graduated,” Haferman said, “and 65-70 percent have gone on to college. We’ve had three kids win the (NHL’s) Thurgood Marshall scholarship. There are just so many stories.

“The resilience of kids in really tough situations impresses me a lot more than some kid from a well-to- do family with lots of money getting a scholarship. It’s amazing what the human spirit can achieve with just a little bit of resources.

“Every year, you’re like, ‘Man, I’m going to really miss this group.’ Then somebody comes along with an attitude that somebody might have just pushed aside, and those are the ones who catch my eye. Everybody’s ready to give up on him, and you give that kid a chance. We had quite a few of those, and those successes keep you coming back.”

Life lessons The players make incredible strides on the ice, but they also learn lessons that stretch far beyond the blue line. Haferman is a surrogate father to many players, an older brother to others and a confidant to many.

“You can’t help but wonder where some of these kids would be without John and his influence,” Kraft said. “They would not have had a hand held out to them to rise above some of the realities of their home lives. He’s been that hand to so many kids.”

Haferman and his staff have tried to foster a family atmosphere at CIHC. The older kids help coach the younger kids, and community service is part of the program. They do neighborhood events routinely, highlighted each year with the construction of a new playground in Columbus with Blue Jackets players and staff.

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“He has taught these kids how to give back, that having an eye for the community and what it needs is part of being an adult,” Adineye said. “They all mentor. They all help. They’re all part of it, boys and girls, even older kids and younger kids. They look out for each other, like brothers and sisters.”

But there have been difficult lessons along the way.

In 2016, 13-year-old Tyre King, who was involved with CIHC, was and killed by Columbus police after he reached for a gun while they tried to take him into custody. King was linked to an armed robbery and was wanted for questioning.

The organization was rattled by King’s death, and Haferman played a huge role in letting his friends and teammates grieve but also making it a learning experience.

There also have been unfortunate incidents around the rink.

Several years ago, Ayo Adineye complained to his mother that other players were telling racist jokes in the dressing room after practice. For a mother who was unsure about her son’s involvement in the ultra- white hockey world, it confirmed some of her worst fears.

“I flipped out,” Lisa Adineye said. “It’s totally weird trying to navigate those waters in the hockey world. When he told me that, I was like, ‘See … here we go.’

“Haferman … he went into the room and talked to the team about why this was hurtful, why it can’t continue, why it was wrong. This was before Black Lives Matter, before most people were willing to sit down and talk it out. It was great that he helped me handle what was a very difficult situation.”

There were racial slurs from opponents, too, though not as many at first. When CIHC was an easy mark, the games didn’t get very heated.

“We couldn’t score goals at first, right?” Haferman said. “We didn’t win games. There weren’t any incidents, really, because we weren’t taking anything from them.

“But when you start beating somebody you’re not supposed to beat? ‘How are we losing to these black kids?’ It brings out the worst in some people.”

Six years ago, a player from Olentangy Orange High School targeted Adineye with a racial slur during a game. It’s not in Haferman’s nature to let it slide, so he spoke with Orange coaches after the game.

“We decided we needed to do something about this,” Haferman said. “They agreed to bring their kids to one of our rec centers, and we had a conversation between our two teams. It was a huge moment. White suburban kids got to hang out with our inner-city kids. It’s probably one of the best things we ever did, a really open conversation.

“It takes somebody willing to understand they made that mistake and being willing to admit it rather than deny it, hide it and keep it locked up. They tried to correct it. There needs to be action, not just words. You have to make sure people are listening and learning.”

Lisa Adineye watched the proceedings very carefully.

“It was completely amazing,” she said.

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NHL, hockey world need to do more Haferman has been pleased to see NHL players — both Black and White — become more engaged in social justice issues in recent months. But the league and its players can do so much more, he said. He called the NHL’s decision to play games on Aug. 26, while other leagues refused to play in protest of Jacob Blake’s shooting by police in Kenosha, Wis., a “huge mistake.”

If the league was serious about reaching out to minority athletes, Haferman suggested the following steps.

1. Build rinks in the inner city. If you build it, they will come should not be the exclusive property of baseball.

“For years, I’ve been asking for them to build me a rink on the East Side of Columbus,” Haferman said. “Doesn’t even have to be a full-sized rink. But if you give those kids an opportunity, they’re going to grab it.”

Columbus is likely to continue building suburban rinks as interest in hockey continues to swell.

2. Make ice time and equipment more affordable.

It can cost between $12,000 and $15,000 per year for a kid to play travel hockey. Skates, sticks and equipment can cost several hundred dollars, even for used gears. One hour of ice time can be several hundred dollars.

3. Make NHL players more accessible.

Over two decades, the Blue Jackets player who was most engaged with CIHC was , who hasn’t played in Columbus since 2009.

“The first time he showed up was a couple of weeks after his child was born and it was a blizzard in Columbus,” Haferman said. “Half of our kids showed up for practice and he came down to practice with us. He did that probably six or seven times a year. He didn’t want cameras. But the interaction he had with those kids … it was priceless, and those kids will never forget that stuff.”

Haferman said NHL players have a huge platform to use.

“Are you just going to play games and go sit at home, or are you going to get into the communities and actually engage in some of the changes that need to take place?” he asked. “They’re the ones everybody recognizes. When you see them doing something, it’s easier for everybody else to help out that way.”

Former Blue Jackets forward R.J. Umberger showed up at the unveiling of an outdoor street-hockey rink several years ago. It’s still talked about in CIHC circles.

“R.J. was out there in flip-flops playing with the kids,” Haferman said. “The kids had a blast. So did he.”

Calling O’Ree a friend Meeting Willie O’Ree can be a transcendent moment for any sports fan. He is the Jackie Robinson of hockey, having broken the NHL’s color barrier with the on Jan. 18, 1958, 11 years after Robinson was finally allowed to play in the major leagues.

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“I got to meet him in 2000,” Haferman said.

But here’s perhaps the biggest compliment you can pay Haferman: Willie O’Ree, now 84, remembers meeting him for the first time.

“It was in Columbus, year 2000,” O’Ree said. “I went on the ice with his kids. I went on the ice with his kids four or five times since then. That’s a wonderful thing they’ve created there, a really special thing to be part of.

“We just struck it off the first time, me and John, right from the start. He’s a wonderful person. He’s just a beautiful person. You can see the kindness in his eyes. He loves the work he’s doing for the kids. I can’t say enough about him. I’m so happy he’s one of the finalists.”

O’Ree has come to Columbus many times dating back to 1998. On the wall of his office in his San Diego home are three sweaters: the AHL’s San Diego Gulls, his Boston Bruins sweater and an original Blue Jackets sweater signed in 2000 by then-president and general manager Doug MacLean.

“You know I love Columbus,” O’Ree said. “Just love it.”

When O’Ree comes to Columbus, he spends considerable time with Haferman, league co-founder Jeff Christian and other CIHC friends. Their favorite hangout? Roosters. O’Ree’s drink of choice? Rum and ginger ale.

Two years ago, when O’Ree was elected to the , he invited Haferman to be one of his guests. Haferman could bring a guest of his own, and he chose Ayo Adineye.

“It’s a circle, right?” Haferman said. “Obviously, Willie O’Ree was a tremendous inspiration to me and many others before I ever met him, and it’s an absolute thrill to call him a friend. He means so much to me and he’s helped us in so many ways.

“And here’s Ayo, who is a special young man. To be there that evening, to have Ayo with us — you remember those things forever.”

(Left to right) Ayo Adineye, Willie O’Ree and John Haferman at the Hockey Hall of Fame when O’Ree was inducted in 2018. Adineye is the star product of the Columbus Ice Hockey Club and is currently playing as a freshman on scholarship at Alabama-Huntsville.

Adineye has the potential to forge a pro career if he continues to improve. But there are early signs that he’ll be successful with or without skates.

He’s only a month into his freshman year at Alabama-Huntsville, but he has already met with the Boys & Girls Club of Northern Alabama, his mother said, and is drawing up a curriculum to start and coach a hockey club for minority and underprivileged youth in Huntsville.

“This idea of being the best version of yourself and giving back … it’s in there because of John,” Lisa Adineye said. “This is why I’m on pins and needles about him winning this award. I can’t explain to people how different he is, how special he is.”

O’Ree called all three finalists on the day they were announced. Dampy Brar of and Alexandria Briggs-Blake of Oxon Hill, Md., are the other finalists.

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“I know the work he’s doing,” O’Ree said, “so I was glad to make that phone call.”

Perhaps he’ll make a congratulatory call on Tuesday.

“There aren’t many people like (Haferman),” O’Ree said. “There are do-gooders, but I don’t think you’ll find a guy like John in every city. It’d be nice if you could. Our lives would be so much better.”

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The Athletic / When might fans be allowed back into NHL arenas? Experts weigh in By Sean Fitz-Gerald – September 4, 2020

David Fisman, an epidemiologist from the University of Toronto’s Dalla Lana School of Public Health, was asked over email about hope the NBA and NHL have for welcoming fans back into their arenas for their next regular season. His response was three words long. “Need a vaccine,” he wrote. The Impact, of Major League Soccer, became the first professional Canadian team to allow fans inside for a game when 250 spectators walked into Saputo Stadium — which can normally seat more than 20,000 — for a weeknight win last month. Teams across North America are wrestling with their own numbers. In Texas, where the state government allows stadium capacity of up to 50 percent, the Dallas Cowboys will open their season in front of fans. In New York, the Buffalo Bills will play in front of empty seats, at least for their first two home games. Both the NBA and NHL have targeted restart dates in December, and both are exploring plans to get at least a percentage of fans back into the stands. While it seems unlikely a vaccine for COVID-19 would be widely available by then, not all experts agree that necessarily disqualifies the conversation. Could fans return by January, even without a vaccine? “I’m hesitant to say it’s impossible,” said Dr. Lynora Saxinger, an infectious diseases specialist who is an associate professor at the University of Alberta. “But I do think there’s some fundamental questions that would need to be answered to see if you could make it reasonably safe. “And I say reasonably safe because I don’t think we can make anything completely safe. So reasonably safe is really what we’re aiming for.” Unlike the soccer stadium in Montreal, which is open air, NBA and NHL games are all played indoors, and Saxinger had questions about the airflow inside those arenas. She did not know, for example, what kind of evidence there might be of respiratory virus transmission in the stands — if someone sitting in front could end up exposing everyone seated behind them because of the air conditioning system. “So what are the big risks? The risks really have to do with the people that you’re close to, the direction of the airflow and whether there’s a lot of pinch points where people are going to end up clustering,” she said. “Because it’s hard to imagine filling an arena without having a whole bunch of people clustered all over the place.” She said she would also need answers to questions about movement inside the arena. How would masked fans avoid bottlenecks getting into, and out of, the venue? How would they avoid lineups at the bathrooms or concession stands? “The big question is: Would this be a setup for a super-spreader event?” she asked. “That’s the worst- case scenario. Someone is unwittingly infected and happens to be one of those highly infectious people

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— who appear to be rare, but are very efficient at spreading infection — and you have them all in one place.” Earlier this year, Italian officials blamed a soccer game for helping spark COVID-19 across an entire region. A Champions League match between Atalanta and Valencia, held in Milan in mid-February, reportedly drew more than 40,000 fans from the Italian province of Bergamo. Within a month, Bergamo was swamped with cases of infection. An official with a local hospital was quoted as calling the game “a biological bomb.” “If this disease were to ever go away — if — then maybe we’d be able to reasonably get fans back into the seats,” said Dr. Andrew Morris, an infectious diseases expert at the University of Toronto. “But I don’t see that happening any time soon. I think there’s a lot of work that the NBA and/or NHL and/or NFL would have to do to safely get fans back into the seats.” Morris, who is also medical director of the Antimicrobial Stewardship Program with Sinai Health System/University Health Network, suggested sports organizations could take a more active role in determining who is able to venture inside their arena. Teams could use rapid COVID-19 tests away from the arena gates. These kits could turn a swab or a bit of spit into a result within minutes, and Morris has advocated for their availability in the face of resistance from Health . (Though Health Canada’s stance on the tests since appears to have softened.) He suggested fans would also have to provide reliable contact information, which would help in contact tracing following the game, in the event someone seated nearby had tested positive. “All of these organizations have money where they can do things to make this work, and make this reasonably safer,” Morris said. “It all depends what’s going on in communities. I think that’s the real challenge with all of these: You may have to be nimble around allowing fans.” Some of the challenges seem easy on paper, he said, but might not be as simple in practice. Fans might be able to enter the arena at staggered times — to avoid that bottleneck heading into the venue — but a staggered exit plan could be less popular, with some fans waiting in their seats long after the game. “You’re going to probably have to say no concessions,” said Morris. “It’s not that it isn’t doable. But you’ve got to really figure out how to do it safely.” As with Saxinger and Morris, Dr. Isaac Bogoch’s gut reaction is that January would be too soon to get fans back into the arenas. As with his peers, though, neither did he rule it out entirely. “As far away as January seems right now, it actually isn’t that far away, especially when we’re thinking in pandemic timeframes,” said Bogoch, an infectious diseases specialist based at Toronto General Hospital. “The situation on the ground can certainly change rapidly. I think that it’s unlikely that something like that would happen in January. “But on the other hand, it’s very hard to predict more than 3-4 weeks in the future, especially with something like this. There very well could be vaccine programs that are started, or that could be in various phases of implementation.” Different regions could have different levels of control over infection rates, he said. There could also be changes to public health policy that would allow for more people to gather in one spot at the same time.

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“Can this happen in January? Maybe, maybe not,” said Bogoch. “I have no idea at this in time. Is it worth thinking about and constantly reevaluating as we progress through the pandemic and get closer and closer to that time? Absolutely.”

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The Athletic / Duhatschek Notebook: How teams should plan for 2021, the goalie conundrum By Eric Duhatschek – September 5, 2020

The NHL started with 24 Stanley Cup contenders and will be down to four by the end of the weekend, which means it took just over a month to shatter the championship dreams of five-sixths of the eligible teams. The common recurring theme among many of the eliminated teams thus far has been a curious, internal, collective call for big change. I say curious because every year, for every team that falls short of expectation, the outside noise is pretty predictable and negative. NHL GMs normally do a good job of blocking it out. But this year, even as oddball as these playoffs have been, it’s the teams promising changes – and four have already started making those changes, which is practically unprecedented. GMs tend to be a notoriously conservative group, and so, if they’re wheeling and dealing already, it’s because they’re feeling the heat. But I wonder if, counterintuitively, there will be less actual heat on teams next year – and consequently, if there ever was a year not to push all your chips into the middle in a go-for-it sort of way, the 2020-21 season might be it. Why? Well, in all likelihood, 2020-21 will be a year that starts without fans in the building and may eventually see a small, trickling return of paying customers at some point along the way. Logically, if you have a year with limited or no fans in the building, then you also have a year where the pressure to sell tickets is reduced. And if you have a year when the pressure to sell tickets is reduced, isn’t that the perfect time to take a slower, more methodical approach to building or rebuilding? It’s like getting a year’s grace period where you’re not having to worry, 41 times a year, about how a disenchanted ticket-buying public is going to react if things don’t go your way on the ice. Think of it this way: The most direct way the paying NHL customer tells a team they’re dissatisfied is by staying home and tuning out. But if ongoing COVID-19 concerns mean there’s nobody in the building to boo a struggling team, does that not open up a one-year window in which to do a quick internal reset and set your team up for 2021-22 when, ideally, spectators flock back and you really do need to win them over? NHL teams, once eliminated from the playoffs, have always had the opportunity to trade amongst each other, but rarely have done so in the past. The reason is, if you have a commodity to dangle – say, a first- round pick – then the normal pattern is to wait until every possible suitor is at the table, so as to maximize the potential return in your trade. But this year? The Maple Leafs and Penguins, and earlier this week, the Canadiens and Blues, couldn’t wait to get started. The Leafs got a first-rounder and a prospect from Pittsburgh for and the Canadiens got back-up goalie Jake Allen from the Blues, in order to reduce ’s workload next season. Those deals were just further proof that whatever used to be the norm isn’t anymore. The idea of making important changes based on the snapshot of life in the bubble makes little sense.

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On the other hand, if what you – as an NHL GM – saw of life in the bubble merely confirmed suspicions that you already had about the make-up of your team, then shifting players in and out makes more sense. I would just argue this: Any team that’s of a mind to make changes should do so but with the medium- term picture in mind. In other words, plot for two years down the road and not necessarily next year, because next year could be a mulligan and you don’t get mulligans often in pro sports. Better use it while you can. The sounding board I ran my theory past an NHL executive, who wasn’t exactly buying what I was selling, except to acknowledge that at this stage, it’s impossible to predict what next season might look like. “I can tell you, there’s a lot of things going through my head in terms of, are we operating, and if so when, and could we have a compressed season? Nobody can give you any direction now. I don’t think, for a second, we’re starting Dec. 1,” the executive said. “Do we really want to play with zero fans next year? We’ve done lots of modelling. I can tell you, the modelling without fans has got a real bad . We’ve started all this talk about starting in the bubble. Well, I will tell you, I don’t think the players will vote for that again. But let’s say they did and you started with a month in the bubble, OK, that’s fine. But if you didn’t have any certainty that you’re coming back with any fans, it sounds like it’s financial suicide to me. “That raises a lot of questions about what you’re saying – in terms of what you should do and what you shouldn’t do.” The netminding conundrum It’s been a baffling postseason on the goalie front. So far, with the second-round winding down, 41 goaltenders have made at least one appearance in these playoffs. Fifteen of the 24 teams have used at least two goalies and two clubs – Boston and Colorado – have used three. Now, obviously, a 24-team playoff is going to skew the numbers a little, but even on a percentage basis, in these playoffs, coaches have shown far more of a willingness to deploy a tandem or a rotation than they have in the past. So, for example, last year 22 goalies made at least one appearance, but four of those (Allen, Thomas Greiss, Anton Khudobin and Juuse Saros) played fewer than 60 minutes. Effectively, they were thrust into a mop-up role in a single game. Really, only one team – the Hurricanes, with Petr Mrazek and Curtis McElhinney – used two netminders. Some of what we’ve seen this summer has to do with injuries. Some with scheduling. But according to former NHL Martin Biron, now a television analyst, a lot of it has to do with a shift in philosophy as well, where teams went into this postseason uncertain about their goaltending and far more prepared to shift to someone with the hot hand, if necessary. On Twitter, Biron publicly supported the Blues’ decision to switch back to Jordan Binnington from Allen at a critical point in their opening-round series against the Canucks, on the grounds that while Allen may have helped play them back into the series, Binnington won a Cup for them a season ago. According to Biron, Binnington just couldn’t find his game this year. It happens. Calgary switched from Cam Talbot to David Rittich in a deciding game as a means of trying to shift momentum – and it didn’t

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work. Dallas switched to Ben Bishop this week in an elimination game against Colorado and Bishop was lit up for five first-period goals. But then Tuesday, with facing elimination, another ice-cold goalie, Thatcher Demko, came off the bench and practically singlehandedly kept them alive against Vegas. Demko has won back-to-back games and his performance in a 4-0 victory Thursday night featured a 48-save , the fourth most saves ever in a playoff shutout. Dominik Hasek (70 saves), Patrick Roy (63) and Craig Anderson (51) are 1-2-3. So, a strategy that’s worked unbelievably well for Vancouver backfired for two others. What did Biron make of it all? Because of the four-month layoff ahead of these playoffs, Biron likened them to the start of a regular season and says that historically, some goalies are really good right off the mark and others need time to find their game. “Carey Price is a great example,” said Biron. “Usually, he starts the season really, really good and then the wear-and-tear and the fatigue and the little injuries come into play and slow him down a little bit. This year, you got to see what a rested Carey Price can do. “Now, with some guys, there isn’t enough of a track record to know if they’re strong starters or not. Jordan Binnington is one of them. I don’t know if he’s a strong starter or not. But what I do know is the pressure of the playoffs – if you don’t feel right in the net – is going to magnify everything 100 times more than in the regular season. “If you’re starting the regular season and five or 10 games in, things are not 100 percent, or you’re still working out some kinks or details in your game, it’s not as big a deal. If you start 4-6 or 5-5 and have a good team, you’re still in it. But in the playoffs, you can’t start 4-6 or 5-5 because that usually means you’ve lost a playoff round or series.” Many people compare goalies to starting pitchers in baseball, but Biron thinks a more appropriate comparison is to quarterbacks in football. The difference, he says, is in football, if a quarterback throws an interception, the quarterback comes off and he can review the tape, analyze what happened and gets an opportunity to settle himself down. When he returns to the field, he’s had time to put that play behind him. In hockey, teams don’t have that luxury. A coach can call a timeout to settle things down, but that’s only a matter of a minute or two. “There’s almost not enough time to make that decision,” said Biron. “In hockey, it happens really fast – and you’ve got to make that change really quickly and a lot of times, you don’t have time to talk to your goalie coach. That’s why, sometimes, it’s better to wait until the end of the period to make a change, so you can reassess everything with your coaching staff. Unfortunately, hockey coaches don’t have the luxury of doing that very often.” What’s next in Boston? That’s two disappointing playoff finishes in a row for the Bruins that followed two exceptional regular- season performances. A year ago, they tied for second in the overall NHL standings and got to the seventh game of the Stanley Cup final before losing. This year, they were the regular-season champions and got a little unlucky to draw the Lightning in the second round. Without Tuukka Rask, the goaltending edge drifted to Tampa and that ultimately was one

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of a handful of deciding factors in an entertaining series, one that would have made an intriguing Stanley Cup Final. The question for GM Don Sweeney, is what to do next? He made two win-now moves with the Ducks at the trade deadline to add Ondrej Kase and Nick Ritchie at the cost of a first-rounder and Danton Heinen. Kase, at times, showed flashes of skill but was unfit for play half the time. Once again, David Krejci demonstrated the ability to raise the level of his play in the postseason (he led the NHL in playoff scoring twice in his career). This year, coming off that long absence, he was at it again – with 12 points in 13 games, same as Brad Marchand. But he’s 34 and Patrice Bergeron is 35 and while that remains a dynamic 1-2 punch down the middle, the window to compete for a championship is closing, as the years slip by. As noted above, rushing to make changes makes little sense when you’re as close as the Bruins were/are. Assuming Rask returns for the final year of his contract, the two biggest questions revolve around Torey Krug and Zdeno Chara, both unrestricted free agents. Chara is 43 and has already said he wants to press on for potentially one last championship hurrah. Krug is different. He’s 29, currently a $5.25 million player, one of the NHL’s top power-play quarterbacks and looking for a payday. In a normal offseason, some team somewhere would presumably be lining up to pay Krug top dollar as an unrestricted free agent. But this isn’t a normal year and it’s complicated further by the fact that both and Tyson Barrie are on the market at the same time. Where does Krug fit? Who is looking for what he can provide and has the financial resources to make it happen? Then, from Krug’s side, if the offer to leave is only slightly greater than what he can get from the Bruins to stay, does it make any sense to move on? If Krug does leave, chances are, Charlie McAvoy will step into his spot – or Matt Grzelcyk. But this isn’t the same as a Cale Makar, ready to take over for Barrie, the way Colorado positioned itself last year. Krug staying in Boston makes the most sense. Here’s a thought: If Barrie is forced to take a discount because of how this season unfolded, and Krug goes elsewhere, does it make any sense for Boston to bid on Barrie and sign him short term and see if a fit materializes? Movie time Back in April, we had a movie-themed week here at The Athletic, after sports had ground to a halt, and it gave me the opportunity to write a longish feature on Trevor Gretzky and Dylan Playfair who are forging successful careers as actors. They both appear in a film called “Odd Man Rush,” based on a memoir by Bill Keenan, a former Harvard hockey player, who spent a year meandering through the deep European minor leagues, with sometimes hilarious results. That story appeared here if you missed it. Some readers asked at the time if I could keep them apprised of when the movie was released. That happened earlier this week. Because of the pandemic, it didn’t go into the theatres but is available on a number of streaming services. Keenan sent the trailer along; here it is for anyone that wants a sneak peek. The Athletic LOADED: 09.05.2020

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The Athletic / Families in the U.S. not yet approved to join NHL players in the bubble By Joe Smith and Jeremy Rutherford – September 6, 2020

On Wednesday evening, Jordan Coleman, her mother and her 6-month-old daughter boarded an American Airlines flight from Dallas to Tampa. They put their masks on and squeezed into one row on what they thought would be the first step in a long-awaited reunion. Coleman’s husband, Lightning winger Blake Coleman, advanced to his first Eastern Conference Final with Monday night’s win over Boston. With families expected to be allowed to join players for the conference finals in the Edmonton bubble, Jordan Coleman couldn’t wait for her husband to hold their daughter, Charlie, for the first time in six weeks. To watch her crawl, pick herself up, wear her blue Lightning “Daddy” jersey. The goofy noises and bedtime stories over FaceTime calls only took them so far the last month and a half. The plan was for the Coleman family to begin their seven-day quarantine in Tampa, pass three COVID-19 tests in that span and then board a charter to Edmonton. But now the Colemans, along with all American-based families of players for the Lightning, Stars and Golden Knights, plus the winner of Game 7 between the Flyers and Islanders, don’t know if they’ll ever make it to the bubble. The Canadian government has not approved the NHL’s application for family exemptions. NHL deputy commissioner Bill Daly told The Athletic Friday that, while there was an agreement in the initial Return to Play plan to accommodate family travel, it was conditional on it being permitted by relevant government and health authorities. The approvals were not granted immediately, but the league re-applied with the hope that it would help that it had resounding success with the bubbles in Toronto and Edmonton (with no positive COVID-19 tests in six weeks). “Our application is being considered,” Daly said. “We are not in control of the timing of that.” The NHL Players’ Association confirmed Saturday they’re awaiting a ruling from the Canadian government but declined to comment further. There’s a realistic chance that by the time there’s approval from the Canadian government – if that approval comes – and families do their required quarantines – seven days stateside with three negative tests 48 hours apart, then five days in an Edmonton hotel separate from the players – the season will be over for two of the four teams remaining. The Canadian wives and families got approval this week to travel to Edmonton but the Canadian Lightning families have discussed not going out of solidarity if the families in the United States can’t, said Francesca Vangel, the fiancée of Lightning forward Pat Maroon. “I just feel like they’re making it really hard, so everyone just says, ‘Screw it,’” Vangel said, stressing that the league and NHLPA have been very helpful, and the families aren’t placing blame but are frustrated by the situation.

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“It may be more complicated than I ever know, and I’m sure it is. I just thought if it was something that was agreed upon in the beginning, it wouldn’t have been this difficult.” Throughout the weeks of the NHLPA’s Return to Play negotiations with the league, Lightning player rep Alex Killorn admitted that making sure families would eventually be involved was a sticking point. There were a lot of factors in the agreement, which also included a collective bargaining agreement extension, but players felt that if they were going to make this commitment – and take these risks – they wanted to know they’d eventually reunite with their wives and children. According to the 47-page agreement on Phase 4 protocols, players would be permitted to invite immediate family members (spouse or partner, children); the maximum was four, though there can be exceptions. They’d be provided with separate hotel rooms for the duration of the stay, with the opportunity to stay with the players upon satisfying their testing and quarantine requirements. The families, however, wouldn’t be able to enter the players’ rooms until testing and quarantine requirements were completed. They’d have to undergo daily health monitoring, including PCR testing, temperature screening and contact tracing. But before any of that could happen, the NHL and NHLPA needed two exemptions from the Canadian government for the families in the United States to 1) cross the border, and 2) waive the mandated 14- day quarantine. Those exemptions were given for the 52-person travel parties for all 24 teams returning this summer, so there was an assumption – or hope – that it wouldn’t be an issue for the families, especially if they could show that the bubble protocols worked. So once the Lightning got into the second round, a bunch of the wives and girlfriends started discussing the idea of going to the bubble, according to Vangel. They had heard there were two potential dates that they could enter the bubble, one for the conference finals and one for the Stanley Cup Final. But with the exemptions still not approved and the steps that would be required before reuniting with the players, the number of family members that will join the Lightning now appears to be few and far between. The Lightning wives group text was buzzing the last few nights, with emotions spanning from confusion and frustration to disappointment. For example, Bianca Bogosian has never seen her husband, Zach Bogosian, play in a playoff game in person. Some families have already decided it’s not worth the hassle, especially those with school-age kids like Lightning backup goalie Curtis McElhinney, who didn’t think a five-day quarantine in a hotel would be best for his children. “I’m not sure how many are going. There’s mostly all ‘maybes’ right now,” Blake Coleman said. “Guys with younger kids that are 2-3 years old, some of their wives backed out. It’s definitely not an easy process.” As McElhinney put it, “I’m not sure it’s worth it for our family. Two kids in a hotel with nowhere to go doesn’t sound like much fun, as much as I’d love to share that experience with them. Things could change, but for the time being, school is back, youth hockey is going on, and our daughter is riding horses again. They are busy and that’s a good thing.”

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A team services rep with the Lightning and one with the NHLPA have been in contact with the families, offering support and guidance to prepare them in case the application is approved. And they plan to have charter flights in each of the team’s cities, and potentially other ones, to pick up families and bring them to the bubble. When asked if there’s any concern by the league that the bubble could be compromised by adding families, Daly said, “There’s always a level of risk associated with adding people to the bubble. But we carefully considered those risk factors in constructing our proposed amendments to the Phase 4 protocol. And, in our view, the precautions we’re proposing would fairly balance the risk we’d be assuming.” For the Colemans, this is just another chapter in their crazy year. They arrived in Tampa Bay via trade in late February with Jordan Coleman nine-months pregnant. The four-month NHL shutdown allowed Blake time to be a full-time dad while they stayed in their Texas hometown, so life in the bubble is a big change where their only connection is through daily FaceTimes, usually one in the late morning and one in early evening before bed. “She talks to him in her little babble, she lights up when she hears his voice,” Jordan Coleman said. “He opens his mouth really wide to the phone, it makes her laugh.” So the idea of getting on a plane with Charlie and her mother, and flying to Tampa to begin the quarantine protocol, was a no-brainer for Jordan Colman, who is now quarantining at the South Tampa home of former Lightning goalie , who was teammates with Blake Coleman in New Jersey. Blake Coleman’s parents are joining them Sunday in Tampa, when they hope to start their pre-flight rounds of COVID-19 tests, if they can find a place to get the results quickly enough. The NHLPA rep told Jordan Coleman that it’s a good possibility that by the time the families can get to Edmonton and quarantine, the conference finals could be over. But they’re not giving up. “It’s been really hard,” Jordan Coleman said. “Blake misses his daughter a lot. I’m just committed to making this work. We’ve never been apart for this long, and Blake misses his family. It’s not a normal situation. I’ll be ready, take my tests and quarantine, if it means Blake can see his daughter.” Vangel said the wives and families are trying to not involve the players with this issue, knowing they’re focused on winning a Cup and “we don’t want to bug them anymore about it.” She said the families aren’t trying to blame anyone – the league, the NHLPA, the Canadian government. They’re just disappointed, especially being this close to the start of the conference final and not being sure. “A lot of us were getting very discouraged, trying to throw in the towel, and I was like, ‘Hey, we can’t do this’” said Vangel, who experienced the Cup celebration last season when Maroon won with the St. Louis Blues. “Let’s just try and stay calm and keep getting the information that we can. I know it’s frustrating, but this is special. This is something we should experience if we’re able to do it.” The Lightning families have been dealing with these conversations for five days, as their series was over early. Those wives and parents of players for the Stars and Golden Knights, and either the Flyers or Islanders, will be going through it soon. If families can go, it won’t be the same as the pre-COVID world where you could stand in a packed arena and be part of a massive Cup celebration.

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But they’re hoping they’ll get a chance to be even a small part of it. “I love this team of girls and I want them to experience what I did last year,” Vangel said. “They all deserve that. A lot of guys have played in Tampa forever and no one on Tampa (other than Maroon) has ever won a Cup. This is your dream that your husband, boyfriend, brother is playing for. You want to be there, and you understand there’s a pandemic, but the agreement doesn’t seem like it was real.”

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Sportsnet.ca / Quick Shifts: Would trading Frederik Andersen be a mistake? By Luke Fox – September 6, 2020

A quick mix of the things we gleaned from the week of hockey, serious and less so, and rolling four lines deep. This weekend’s blog was fueled by a triple shot of Game 7. 1. As GM Kyle Dubas responds to the trade inquiries he’s receiving on No. 1 goalie Frederik Andersen, surely there will be an element of seller beware. In two ways, we wonder if the results of Dubas’s splashy transaction of the 2019 off-season will be informing consideration around this one. By trading Tyson Barrie to Toronto entering the final year of the ’s deal, Colorado’s Joe Sakic was able to recoup a tangible asset (Nazem Kadri wrapped the playoffs with 9-9-18) under contract for a player he knew he’d be unable to re-sign at the going rate. And Dubas cut bait on a good player at fine value, Kadri, in part because of playoff gaffes. Dubas surely has an idea the kind of money Andersen will be looking for as an unrestricted free agent in 2021 and knows it’ll be difficult to accommodate under a flat cap, especially with Zach Hyman’s raise expected to take priority. So, if Andersen is doubtful to be part of Toronto’s long-term future, why not trade him when his value is at its highest (i.e., now)? There are potential trading partners here — Carolina, Minnesota, Calgary and Buffalo, to name a few — hunting for a goalie upgrade that have assets (defencemen) that should interest Dubas. (Fun fact: Brian Burke revealed on radio this week that the Flames were in the bidding for Andersen in 2016, but of the Leafs offered a higher draft pick to Anaheim and got the goalie.) But just because Dubas can trade Andersen doesn’t mean he should. I keep coming back to this: Is there a better starter available for $5 million or less right now that will be a better fit and perform as well as Andersen has behind a thin blue line? Because gambling on your goaltending in what may be the last bid for a run with the “Big Four” is risky. Robin Lehner and Jacob Markstrom are great — but expensive. Corey Crawford is superb when on his game, but injuries are a serious concern. A hungry-for-more backup like Alexandar Georgiev is intriguing but, ultimately, a guess. Matt Murray is young, accomplished and available, but his recent work is spotty. (Sidebar: Sabres goalie coach Mike Bales previously worked with Murray in Pittsburgh, and Buffalo is desperate for a proven No. 1.) Fact is, there aren’t 31 no-brainer No. 1 goalies to go around. Toronto has one at under market value for 2020-21. Tinker at your own risk. All that said, one name does raise my eyebrows… 2. Darcy Kuemper’s raise kicks in next season, at which point the goaltender’s AAV raises from $1.85 million to $4.5 million.

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I get that the new ownership is on tilt. The Coyotes are facing a financial crunch and must consider moving some desirable assets to recoup the draft picks lost by running their own illegal mini combine. But if the new regime is concerned about wise spending, the late-blooming Kuemper is still an incredible deal at $4.5 million. Once Markstrom, Lehner and get paid, Kuemper will likely be the 20th-highest-paid goalie in the NHL next season. Not too shabby for a starter coming off back-to-back .925-plus campaigns, the team’s regular-season and playoff MVP, and a guy named to his first All-Star game. If you need a goalie, heck ya, you’re calling. If you’re Arizona, trading Kuemper seems like a horrible way to boost your dressing room or excite the fan base. 3. A few thoughts on the Jake Allen trade: • With Vince Dunn and Alex Pietrangelo needing raises, Blues GM Doug Armstrong noticed more of a buyer’s market for goalies in the early going here as he began shopping Allen. “Some of the teams I talked to like Jake as a goaltender but didn’t want to give any assets at this time for that,” said Armstrong, preferring to grab a third-round pick and not retain any salary ($4.35 million) while he could. “For us, one in the hand was better than two in the bush.” • St. Louis was reaching a point with 25-year-old prospect Ville Husso, now with four AHL seasons under his belt, where it felt compelled to give him a crack at the NHL. “He needs to get those 25 to 30 starts [behind Jordan Binnington]. We need to find out. Our scouting information and our goalie coaches, they’ve given him a thumbs-up,” Armstrong said. “I talked to the minor-league general manager, development coaches. Everyone feels he’s ready for the opportunity, and we need this organization to provide opportunity for younger players.” • OK, but Allen is one of the NHL’s best backups. He posted a 12-6-3 record with a .927 save percentage this season, then found a higher level in the playoffs (2-1-1, .935). If this summer has taught us anything, it’s the value of a No. 2 goalie. (Only one of the final eight teams, Tampa, has got all its playoff wins from one netminder.) • Binnington’s playoff showing (0-5, .851) is why GMs use leverage to sign breakout RFAs to prove-it bridge deals. Big 2020-21 season upcoming for the 2019 Cup champ. • Just because Allen got traded, I don’t think that necessarily means St. Louis’s other trade-bait options with one year left (Tyler Bozak, Alexander Steen) should feel 100 per cent safe. Colton Parayko is the blockbuster option, but that’s a deal you can’t afford to miss on. • Armstrong is being so tight-lipped on the state of Pietrangelo’s extension talks, he won’t even say whether or not the sides have spoken since the Blues’ season ended. “Obviously I don’t think we’ve made any secret that we’d love to get Alex signed, and I think Alex has made it known that he would like to sign here, so we’re going to have to work through that,” Armstrong said. “At the end of the day, it’s a math equation.” Can you break down the figures in that equation, Doug?

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“It’s 81.5 million divided by 23.” Zing. 4. We’re not saying this Boston Bruins core can’t take another run at glory, but there is certainly a feeling this was their last best shot. Zdeno Chara wants another deal that will see him killing penalties at age 44. Matt Grzelcyk needs a raise. So does Jake DeBrusk, and his RFA negotiations could get sticky. The dependable David Krejci and Tuukka Rask are entering contract years, and there is at least some concern that the latter will play out his final season in Boston. Krejci, 34, had a heckuva playoffs, picking up his offensive contributions (12 points in 13 games) as David Pastrnak battled through a lower-body injury. He took overtime elimination by the hands of Tampa Bay hard, realizing the off-season and an unknown start date for 2020-21 only adds to the uncertainty. “It just kinda hit me after the game that the core group, a few of us, we have one or two, three years left. With the pandemic going on, you never know what’s going to happen. So, it’s just kind of – I just got a little sad right now,” said Krejci, cap pulled low, eyes pulled downward, away from the Zoom camera. “At the same time, I don’t regret coming into this bubble and fighting for the Stanley Cup. If I would have to do it again, I would.” The easy connection is to peg Torey Krug, a Michigan native, to rebuilding Detroit. GM has committed a grand total of $3.875 million to his blue line for 2020-21 and beyond. Essentially he’s constructing a back end from scratch. One could do a lot worse than bringing in a feisty 29-year-old with 75 games of post-season experience as a pillar. At his virtual locker cleanout, Krug used the word very twice to describe how little contract discussions have occurred between his agent, Lewis Gross, and Bruins GM Don Sweeney. As ever, though, Krug maintained his desire to remain a Bruin. But there will be no discounts on term here. Krug made like Myles Turner swatting away the notion of a one-year COVID contract. “I’m very opposed to that. I’ve bet on myself, and I’ve taken shorter term deals and less amount of money my whole career now,” Krug said. “This is my time in terms of my value at its peak, and I have the ability and I’m in a position now where I need to make the most of it. I’m very opposed to something like that. I’ve done it long enough now. That’s the situation I’m facing.” Krug has a young family and wants a handle on his future sooner than later. If Sweeney can’t accommodate the defenceman’s long-term request, we wonder if Krug’s negotiating rights get dealt early. That would give a prospective acquiring team the option of spreading his hefty cap hit over eight years. 5. This nugget, from Yahoo! Sports’ Mike Stephens: Sam Kim, the Maple Leafs’ brand-new video coach, previously served as Sparky, the mascot, from 2008 to 2011.

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Get your foot in the door by any means, kids. 6. Loved ’s metaphor for his never-say-die Flyers group, a team that has now pushed the Islanders to the brink with consecutive elimination survival efforts and three overtime victories: “I sorta feel like we’re that toy there growing up, that you keep punching in the face and it keeps getting back up. We’ve been whacked. We were down 3-1. And we’re still there. Gave ourselves a chance.” 7. The main attraction of Mike Sullivan’s overhauled support staff in Pittsburgh this week was the rapid return of to his former post as Penguins assistant, but the other name in the press release is even more intriguing for me. One of the first features I wrote during the pause centred around , who has now graduated from Wilkes-Barre/Scranton and finally made it to an NHL bench after a 25-year coaching career that has seen him claim championships at every level. “I’m ready. I’ve proven myself from the ground up, and I’m ready for the next challenge, which would be an NHL head coach,” Vellucci told me over the phone. “I’ve been a head coach my whole life and have the track record of winning at every level I’ve been at, and I’ve made the playoffs every year that I’ve coached. So, it’s something that I’m proud of. No matter what kind of team I have, I find a way to get us to the next level.” Lucky to survive a 1984 car crash with Al Iafrate shortly after getting drafted as a player, Vellucci’s story of perseverance is incredible one. Congrats on making it back to the show, coach. 8. chimed in Thursday night on the great goalie debate in Vegas: When you are up in a series but lose game 5. If there is any debate about starting the other goalie it should be done in game 6. Because you can always go back to your starter in game 7. Otherwise you are left with an impossible decision #my2cents — Strombone (@strombone1) September 4, 2020 Marc-Andre Fleury has a 3-0 record this post-season but a sub-.900 save percentage in those scattered starts. Not getting a start on the back-to-back and following consecutive Lehner losses feels like it might be the final twist of the sword. If his relationship with the coach Peter DeBoer is irreconcilable, one must wonder: Has Fleury started his final game as a Golden Knight? And in a flooded goalie market under a flat cap, who is willing to shell out $7 million in each of the next two seasons for a goaltender — however great — who will be 36 when the puck drops again? It’s not an impossible deal, but Kelly McCrimmon may have to attach a draft pick sweetener and/or retain salary. Also, at this point, with three in the Western semifinal, how does Vegas not take a stab at retaining Lehner? Twitter got me fired up for today’s game. Thanks for the motivation! — Robin Lehner (@RobinLehner) September 5, 2020

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9. Much has been made of the young Canucks’ impressive skill and the significant milestones being reached by Quinn Hughes and Thatcher Demko. Rightly so. But Vancouver had players dominating the post-season in a couple of the blue-collar categories as well. Veteran defenceman amassed 13 more shot blocks than anyone else in the playoffs (67) and his closest pursuer was teammate Chris Tanev (54). Meanwhile Elias Pettersson was a -drawing monster, co-leading in the category with 13. Moreover, he only took one minor himself for an NHL-best net of 12 power-plays created for his club. What an impact. As overheard by reporter Thomas Drance on an angry Golden Knights bench after Pettersson drew another one in Game 6: “It’s the same [bleeping] guy every night!” But it was not just Petey causing refs’ arms to raise. Vancouver’s Troy Stecher has also drawn 13, with a net eight power-plays created. 10. Covering the Islanders-Flyers series this round, I’ve gotten a kick out of some rather strong fan reaction from both sides. The series is 3-3. The total goals at even strength are 16-16. Philly has a tiny edge in 5-on-5 shots (173- 172), while New York has generated a few more quality scoring chances. Point is, in a series this tight — “greasy,” as Vigneault keeps calling it — little (mis)plays get magnified. Islanders fans flipped out when rookie goalie left his crease during Game 5’s overtime period and went behind his net to catch a rimmed puck. You can’t do that. By letter of the law, it’s a delay-of- game penalty. Yet Hart got off with a warning, and the Flyers’ Scott Laughton scored the game-winner shortly afterward. I asked Hart how concerned he was that he’d get penalized for his actions here: “I was just trying to knock the puck down off the glass there. I didn’t even notice it bounced right in my glove. So, I didn’t know what to do. I just quickly sprinted back to my crease and then got a warning,” Hart explained. “So, I just gotta be a little more careful next time.” 11. Blake Coleman, Barclay Goodrow, Pat Maroon, Zach Bogosian, Kevin Shattenkirk. The Tampa Bay Lightning upgraded its veteran depth with five small but significant parts over the past year. Alone, none of the contracts are that expensive, but there was a concerted effort to recruit proven NHLers with talents that can shine in a grind. Coach said GM Julien BriseBois sat down with the coaching staff to discuss what the group needed to make a go. “We were looking for some guys that had a little bit of dirt under the nails,” Cooper said. “Oftentimes it’s not how many (you) score, but it’s how many you keep out of the net. Are you going to be a pain in the (expletive) to the other team? Are you going to be able to wear a team down? And skill does that to a certain extent, but anybody that’s been a part of playoffs knows that, the game, it’s a grind, and you need those type of guys who can fight through that stuff. “We found them, and it’s clearly really helped us.”

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12. Any true sports fan who’s been to Boston has popped into The Fours. The iconic sports bar, located a Pastrnak wrister away from TD Garden, served its final plate of turkey tips on Monday, forced to turn off the taps after 44 years. The place was a pre- and post-game institution, its walls decorated spectacularly and endlessly with jerseys and photographs from all the local teams. A trip to the men’s room was like a walk through a Boston sports museum. You’d take the long way on purpose to get lost in the nostalgia. Sweet memories. And a bitter reminder that the industry around fandom — our beloved watering holes near rinks, fields and arenas — is taking a serious beating. Pouring one out for The Fours on this long weekend.

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New York Times / N.H.L. Conference Finals Begin After Hectic Second Round By Andrew Knoll – September 7, 2020

Against the sizzle of late summer, the ice in Edmonton, Alberta, is being prepared to host both of the N.H.L.’s conference finals, beginning with Sunday night’s Game 1 of the Western Conference series between the and . In the Eastern series, the Tampa Bay Lightning will clash with the Islanders, starting with Game 1 on Monday night. A conference semifinal round with three Game 7s makes for a tough act to follow, but these matchups feature no shortage of intrigue. No. 1 Vegas Golden Knights vs. No. 3 Dallas Stars Vegas nearly became the first team to lose a series after holding a 3-1 lead in two consecutive seasons. It did so against the last year and nearly fell victim to some supernatural goaltending from the Canucks rookie Thatcher Demko, who had stopped 98 straight shots — leaving Vegas’s star forward shaking his head in the postgame handshake line — before Shea Theodore’s game- winning goal in Game 7. Instead, the Golden Knights became the first franchise to advance to the conference finals in two of its first three seasons in the N.H.L. after having reached the in 2017-18, their inaugural season. The Stars endured a similar struggle late in their series, having reached Game 7 after holding a 3-1 lead over the . Joel Kiviranta, who had played only 11 regular-season games, scored a hat-trick, including the overtime winner, to finish off a battered Colorado side led by center Nathan MacKinnon, the playoffs’ top scorer to date. The Stars reached their fifth conference final since the franchise relocated to Dallas from Minnesota in 1993, with their last appearance in 2008. They won the organization’s only Stanley Cup in 1999. Dallas was a suffocating defensive team during the regular season, ranking second in goals-against per game while having only one player, forward Tyler Seguin, exceed 40 points. With 178 goals, it was the third-worst offense in the N.H.L. and the worst among postseason qualifiers. But the Stars have found their stride offensively in the playoffs. Defenseman Miro Heiskanen had led all blue-liners in scoring. And wing led the Stars in goals in both the regular season and playoffs. The familiar trio of Seguin, and Alexander Radulov clicked earlier in the postseason. Over all, they have the postseason’s fourth-best scoring average. A broader statistical analysis places the Stars at a significant disadvantage. They are the only team that has managed to reach the conference finals with a negative goal differential. Their goaltending, led primarily in the postseason by Anton Khudobin, has been unspectacular. He and Ben Bishop have backstopped the Stars to the worst team goals against average of any team that made it out of the first round. ImageGolden Knights goaltender Robin Lehner has 12 wins this postseason, including a Game 7 shutout against the . That is compounded by Vegas’s comparatively solid numbers. It is an eyelash behind the Stars in scoring in the playoffs but allows 2.33 goals per game compared with Dallas’s 3.5. Both teams have a formidable

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mix of speed and size, with Vegas being led by the two-way standout wing Stone. Much like how Dallas has been keyed by Heiskanen and John Klingberg from the back end, Vegas has seen Theodore and Nate Schmidt assume larger roles in its attack. In goal, the trade deadline acquisition Robin Lehner has started 12 of Vegas’s 15 games this postseason and earned eight victories. Marc-Andre Fleury, heretofore a franchise pillar, has won all three of his decisions. Both teams made in-season coaching changes, with Dallas dismissing Jim Montgomery for “unprofessional conduct” in December and Vegas tiring of volatile play under as a strong alternative became available. Dallas promoted the veteran assistant coach , while Vegas looked to Peter DeBoer, who had been fired by the Sharks amid their abjectly disappointing campaign. DeBoer has had the Midas touch in his first season behind the bench. He took over the Devils in 2011-12 and led them to the Stanley Cup finals. He replicated that feat when he assumed control of San Jose in 2015-16. But, as he’s in his 12th season as a head coach, DeBoer has found winning a championship elusive. No. 2 Tampa Bay Lightning vs No. 6 Islanders The Lightning have now reached the conference finals five times over the past 10 seasons, winning once before falling to the in the 2015 Stanley Cup finals, and losing in seven games three times. Last season, they won a record-tying 62 regular-season games, only to be swept in the first round. This season, they have become focused on becoming more adaptable. They emphasized versatility, doggedness and defensive ability by paying handsomely for a pair of bottom-six forwards, Blake Coleman and Barclay Goodrow, at the trade deadline. That has paid off, as the Lightning appear comfortable in either a battle of attrition or a free-flowing game with few whistles. They’ve also needed depth up front given that center , a two- time goal-scoring champion, has yet to play in these playoffs and right wing Nikita Kucherov, last season’s most valuable player and scoring champion, sustained an injury in Game 5 of their series against Boston. In the between-the-lines vernacular of the playoffs, one might surmise that Kucherov is a possibility and Stamkos is doubtful for Game 1. Center has led the Bolts in goals and points, as the team has put up elite possession numbers. Defenseman has lived up to his Norris Trophy billing by recording nine points in 13 games and a plus-11 rating, which ties him with two Islanders for the best rating in the conference. Goalie Andrei Vasilevskiy has been a leviathan in net and played every minute of the playoffs. He leads the league in victories and time on ice while posting a .931 save percentage and a 1.91 goals against average. While the Lightning finished off the Bruins in five games, the Islanders needed seven, three of which went to overtime, to advance past the Flyers. Whether that leaves their club energized or exhausted remains to be seen, but the Islanders have seldom shied away from adversity or physical play. Persistence, soundness and poise have been elements of Coach ’s team in New York, which is in its first conference final since 1993. The Islanders are the only team remaining that had to play a qualifying round series. They have advanced by consistently rolling four forward lines and three defense pairings that have all produced. The second-liners Josh Bailey and have been their leading scorers. The top line of Mathew Barzal, and Jordan Eberle has been a constant offensive threat. Semyon Varlamov has nine

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wins, but it was Thomas Greiss who earned the Game 7 shutout win against Philadelphia on Friday in Toronto. If the Islanders advance, it would be their first finals appearance since 1984, which was their fifth consecutive trip on the heels of four straight championships.

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The Athletic / Young defensemen using playoff stage to show how they are changing the position By Arpon Basu – September 7, 2020

EDMONTON — What we witnessed in Edmonton on Friday was obviously unique, with two series playing a seventh game on the same sheet of ice on the same day. We likely – or hopefully – will never see anything like it again. But we saw something else on that same ice sheet that appears we will in fact see again, but it is also extremely unique and somewhat unprecedented. When Vegas Golden Knights defenseman Shea Theodore scored the opening and winning goal in the third period of Game 7 against the Vancouver Canucks, he moved into the top-10 in Stanley Cup playoff scoring with 16 points, tied in points with Canucks defenseman Quinn Hughes, one ahead of Colorado Avalanche defenseman Cale Makar and five back of Dallas Stars defenseman Miro Heiskanen. Since the 2004-05 NHL lockout, defensemen have ended the third round of the playoffs – roughly the games played equivalent of where we are now – in the top-15 in scoring 22 times. But there were never four in the top-15 at once and never with defensemen who were this young. Theodore, at 25, is by far the oldest of the group, but still, what he’s doing at his age in these playoffs is extremely rare. What Heiskanen, 21, Hughes, 20, and Makar, 21, have done is almost unprecedented among defensemen in the postseason. Only two defensemen have had as many as 20 points at this stage of the postseason, and only three have been as high as third on the scoring list. D-men as top-15 scorers through 3 rounds Player Year Age GP G A Pts Rank Miro Heiskanen 2020 21 16 5 16 21 3rd Shea Theodore 2020 25 15 6 10 16 10th Quinn Hughes 2020 20 17 2 14 16 12th Cale Makar 2020 21 15 4 11 15 15th Brent Burns 2019 34 20 5 11 16 4th Erik Karlsson 2019 28 19 2 14 16 5th Dustin Byfuglien 2018 33 17 5 11 16 15th Erik Karlsson 2017 26 19 2 16 18 5th Brent Burns 2016 31 18 6 14 20 3rd 2015 31 17 2 16 18 8th Drew Doughty 2014 24 21 4 12 16 8th Brent Seabrook 2014 29 16 3 12 15 10th P.K. Subban 2014 25 17 5 9 14 12th 2013 26 15 3 13 16 4th Slava Voynov 2013 23 18 6 7 13 11th Dan Girardi 2012 28 20 3 9 12 9th Bryce Salvador 2012 36 18 3 8 11 13th

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Dan Boyle 2011 34 18 4 12 16 10th 2010 35 17 4 10 14 15th Nicklas Lidstrom 2007 37 18 4 14 18 3rd Chris Pronger 2007 32 15 3 11 14 9th Chris Pronger 2006 31 17 4 13 17 5th One postseason – and least of all this postseason – does not make a trend. But considering how young these guys are and how many more defensemen like this are coming, it would be fair to assume that seeing so many defensemen among the scoring leaders in the playoffs will start becoming commonplace. Because consider some of the names that aren’t there now but could be in the very near future, like Samuel Girard, 22, and , 23, as examples. Heiskanen’s coach, Rick Bowness, who has coached in the NHL for the better part of 35 years, does not see any way this is stopping simply because the nature of the position of defenseman is changing in the NHL. And in his view, it is changing for the better. “I think it’s the mentality of how the game is being played today,” Bowness said Saturday. “It’s a much faster game now than it ever has been and you need your D to be very mobile, to be able to go back and get pucks and skate it out, move it out, get out of your zone as quickly as you can. Miro, Makar, Girard, they’re perfect examples of it, they’re all very mobile. The young kids coming into our league today, they’re far more composed and they’re far less intimidated by playing in our league. They’ve had great coaching coming up, they’re very mature.” This zone exit and entry by Girard late in the first period of Game 7 between the Avalanche and Stars is a good example of the mobility Bowness is talking about. But that is not all that has changed, and again, Girard is a perfect example of that change. He is listed – and we emphasize the word listed here – at 5-foot-10 and 170 pounds. Makar is at 5-foot-11, 187 pounds. They formed a defense pair in Game 7 in the absence of hulking Erik Johnson and, with about a minute left in regulation, were on the ice for Avalanche coach with the game tied and Colorado’s season on the line. Heiskanen was on the ice with his partner Jamie Oleksiak for Bowness and the Stars at the same time. The preference for big, strong, defense-first defensemen is also making way for the effectiveness of smaller, mobile players. “The days of the big, stay-at-home defenseman, you can have one or two of those, the rest of them have to be very mobile,” Bowness said. “So I’m not surprised at what we’re seeing. It’s great for our league. The guys you’re talking about, and there’s a lot of other great, young defensemen in this league that are very exciting to watch – they’re tough to coach against, but they’re very exciting to watch – makes our game far more entertaining the way it’s being played today.” The shifting ratio of defensemen who are considered mobile and those who are more traditional, stay- at-home types is difficult to track, but one way of doing it is by looking at the size of defensemen in the NHL. In 2010-11, there were roughly the same number of defensemen who were under 6-feet tall who played at least half the season as there are today. But the number of defensemen who are listed at less than 190 pounds and meet the same half-season minimum has quadrupled over the past 10 seasons. D-men who played at least 40 games at...

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Year Less than 6 Feet Less than 190 Pounds 2019-20 30 32 2018-19 23 28 2017-18 29 28 2016-17 22 17 2015-16 25 15 2014-15 26 16 2013-14 28 15 2012-13 30 16 2011-12 29 11 2010-11 27 8 Makar, Hughes and Girard are all listed at below 190 pounds, and Heiskanen is listed at exactly that weight. Theodore is the exception here in the sense that he has more of a traditional defenseman’s build at 6-foot-2 and 195 pounds. But he doesn’t move like it. “He’s exactly what we’ve just been talking about, defensemen that can skate. He’s been outstanding in the games that I saw,” Bowness said. “The other thing, when we go back to the way the league is going, it’s a four-man rush now. It’s not a three-man rush, it’s a four-man rush. You need your D to join the rush all the time. With the pace of the league, there’s a lot more back pressure, so when you’re on the attack you better have four men going and you’d better keep going north in a hurry. Theodore is a perfect example of that. He’s been outstanding. He’s like Miro; there’s times they lead the rush. Which is just fine, that’s the way the game is, just go.” The difference in the position today is that NHL teams are looking for defensemen who can do this as opposed to trying to coach it out of them, to try and make offensively creative players into defensive robots who either dump pucks in or get it into the hands of their forwards as quickly as possible. There are few better people to appreciate that shift than Dan Boyle. Boyle played more than 1,000 NHL games from 1998 to 2016, had more than 600 points and won a Stanley Cup. He had a tremendous career. But he was also listed at 5-foot-11 and less than 190 pounds for most of his NHL career. He was a Hobey Baker finalist at the University of Miami (Ohio) and easily one of the best – if not the best – defenseman in the NCAA. Yet Boyle was never drafted. He had to scratch and claw for ice time in the NHL. And he had to prove to NHL coaches that he could adhere to their conservative definition of what a defenseman should be; low risk, mistake-free, safe. When you compare Boyle’s profile to Makar – who won the Hobey Baker as a sophomore at UMass in 2019 – they are not all that different. Same size, same playing style, same offensive mentality. But it took Boyle years to become an NHL regular, while Makar was drafted at No. 4 overall and walked right out of college into the a year ago. At Boyle’s second training camp with the Florida Panthers in 1999, at age 23, he was the final cut. General manager Bryan Murray called him into his office to explain the decision. “He literally said to me, he looked me in the face and he said to me – at least he was honest, you know, he didn’t lie to me – he said, ‘Yeah, we’re going to go with size. You’re going to be an NHL player one

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day, but we’re going to go with size.’ He cut me and they kept John Jakopin, and there was another guy named Mike Wilson.” Jakopin was listed at 6-foot-5, 239 pounds, Wilson was 6-foot-4, 195 pounds. Combined, they played 449 NHL games, or less than half Boyle’s final total. And this is what Boyle sees as the biggest change. It’s not that the game has changed as much as the willingness to open minds and provide opportunities has changed for guys who are built like him and think the game like him. “If you don’t have a coach that’s going to allow you to play that type of game … obviously you have to have the skill to do it and Makar, I literally love watching Colorado,” Boyle said. “I don’t watch a ton of hockey, but I love watching him play because I do see myself in him or vice versa. But I think that comes with, first, you have to have the skill, let’s not kid ourselves, but if the coaches behind the bench are saying, ‘hey, Cale, I don’t want you forechecking’ or ‘Cale, I want you to get the puck out, get the puck off your stick as soon as you have it’ – I’ve had coaches tell me that – then he’s not going to play that way.” Boyle said one of the greatest compliments he ever got as a player was when former two-way forward John Madden said he was the toughest defenseman to play against. Not because he was big and mean, but because he was shifty and unpredictable. And this is what has become the norm for NHL defensemen, as we saw in Edmonton on Friday. “(Madden) said you never know where he’s going to be. And I agree. If you know the defenseman’s going to be at the blue line, as a forward, it’s pretty easy to know where he’s going to be and where you need to be. But when the guy you’re supposed to be watching is on the other side behind the goal line, what the hell do you do, right?” Boyle said. “So if you look at the Game 7 goal, the Dallas goal, one defenseman goes around the net, gives it to his partner, who then goes around the net. And I just looked at Colorado and Colorado’s like, ‘What the fuck? Where are we going? Who am I watching?’ All of a sudden there’s three or four Colorado guys in front of the net, they don’t know who they’re supposed to have and then boom, the defenseman (Andrej) Sekera makes the pass to the Finnish kid (Joel Kiviranta) who scores the goal.” Boyle didn’t know he would be talking about this goal. But he remembered it perfectly because he loved how it was created. “I love chaos,” Boyle continued. “I always love chaos when I’m playing and I think with Makar and Hughes, they are creating chaos where a lot of coaches want to coach their teams in a way that there is no chaos. But I think that’s why those guys are so successful. Because they think outside the box. They’re creating chaos out there. And I just love every second of it.” Welcome to the 2020 Stanley Cup playoffs, an unprecedented tournament that will hopefully mark the beginning of the Age of Chaos in the NHL.

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The Athletic / The Athletic’s 2020 NHL playoff predictions for the conference finals and MVP By The Athletic NHL Staff – September 7, 2020

With the final four established, it is time to make predictions for the Eastern and Western Conference finals. To start, we wanted to look at the front-runners for the , awarded to the most valuable player in the postseason. Dallas Stars: Miro Heiskanen has been the Stars’ best player in the postseason, full stop. The defenseman has more points than any other player remaining in the playoffs, with 21, and his 16 playoff assists lead the league without any caveats. Heiskanen is averaging close to 26 minutes per game. With him on the ice, the Stars are outscoring opponents 27-17; when he’s not on the ice, the Stars are getting outscored 26-39. — Sean Shapiro New York Islanders: It isn’t easy to single out someone on the NHL’s most capital-T team, but Josh Bailey makes the most sense right now for a lot of reasons. He’s the longest-serving Islander, already at 911 combined regular-season and playoff games in an Islander uniform. Bailey added two assists to his 2020 postseason total in Saturday’s Game 7 clincher, giving him 15 assists and 17 points for the tournament so far. Having shed his unassuming label a couple of years ago — he seemed destined to be a nice third-liner after a series of 30- to 40-point seasons following his ninth-overall selection in the 2008 NHL Draft before posting good numbers on ’ wing — he’s now a full-on force for these Isles, the epitome of the buy-in and high achievement needed for a team without superstar skill to make it this far. — Arthur Staple Tampa Bay Lightning: Victor Hedman, who scored the double-OT winner to seal the Bruins series. The 6- foot-6 Swede is averaging 26 minutes a game and is a force at both ends of the ice (nine points, five goals in 13 games, including the round-robin). If the Lightning had won the Cup in 2015, Hedman might have won the Conn Smythe, as good as Tyler Johnson was. And Hedman would have a strong argument this year, though Brayden Point and Andrei Vasilevskiy are really close. — Joe Smith Vegas Golden Knights: Through two rounds of the playoffs, Shea Theodore is a runaway candidate for the Conn Smythe if Vegas wins the Cup. The 25-year-old defenseman leads all Golden Knights with 16 points in these playoffs. His six goals lead all defensemen, and he trails only Heiskanen in points by a blueliner. But what has made Theodore’s offensive explosion even more impressive is he hasn’t sacrificed defense to achieve it. Partnered with veteran Alec Martinez, Theodore has been part of Vegas’ most reliable defensive duo this postseason. In 269 minutes of even-strength ice time with him on the ice, Vegas has outshot the opposition 186-105 and outscored it 20-8, according to Natural Stat Trick. The Golden Knights have a deep, talented forward group, but to this point in the playoffs, Theodore has been one of their most dangerous offensive weapons while remaining one of their most reliable defenders. — Jesse Granger Stanley Cup winner No surprises here. Tampa Bay has been the pick since the start and cruising through Boston. Being the first team to book a ticket to the conference finals only increased our crew’s confidence that this is the Lightning’s year.

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Sportsnet.ca / Five teams facing tough off-season decisions with flat NHL salary cap By Rory Boylen – September 7, 2020

With the salary cap staying flat at $81.5 million for next season and an uncertain future after that, some GMs will be facing a tight squeeze that couldn’t have been planned for. Rosters were constructed and contracts signed with the belief the cap would keep rising. At one point before the COVID-19 pause, the league estimated next year’s upper limit would be between $84-88.2 million. So much for that. This new reality is leaving a number of teams in a pinch, which could open opportunities for those at the other end who wield plenty of cap space. We identified which teams were in the best position cap-wise heading into the off-season this week. But which teams are up against it and face tough choices? From this week’s NHL newsletter, here are five notable examples. TAMPA BAY LIGHTNING Projected cap space: $5.3 million Roster size: 15 With $5.3 million in projected cap space, Tampa’s pressing situation becomes obvious when you look at the contract work they need to get done. They only have 15 players currently under contract, but while there are no big UFAs for them to keep (Kevin Shattenkirk, Zach Bogosian and Pat Maroon have expiring deals), they have two RFAs who won’t come cheap. Mikhail Sergachev is coming off his entry-level contract and was second to only Victor Hedman in average even strength ice time among Lightning defencemen this season. But the bigger extension figures to go to Anthony Cirelli, the Lightning’s second-line who set a career-high in scoring and emerged in the Selke Trophy conversation. A couple of trades have already happened in the league, but Tampa can’t get involved until their season is over. NY ISLANDERS Projected cap space: $8.1 million Roster size: 21 They have $8.1 million in cap space, which doesn’t seem like a bad spot at first glance, but there’s one big contract in particular that makes this a tough situation. On this defence-first team, Mathew Barzal is the game-breaking offensive talent. In some ways, he’s their replacement for John Tavares. Well, now Barzal is an RFA with 207 points in 234 career regular season games, and just shy of a point per game pace in his two playoff appearances. Barzal alone could take up all of that space, and more, so the Isles could be an target for some team that does have salary space. On top of Barzal, the Islanders also need to re-sign RFA defenceman Ryan Pulock, who posted a career-best season, led all Isles defenders in ice time, and was used in all situations.

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ST. LOUIS BLUES Projected cap space: $6.3 million Roster size: 20 St. Louis already moved out a chunk of change in sending Jake Allen to Montreal and it’s still not enough room to get everything done. Heck, their current available cap space isn’t even enough to re-sign Alex Pietrangelo, who would be the best UFA defenceman available if he hits the market. Pietrangelo isn’t even the only top four blueliner who needs a new deal. Vince Dunn is an RFA and an exciting young piece of the group, and though he won’t come at too high a price off his ELC, it’s still going to be a notable pay bump. And then a new backup or 1B to Jordan Binnington must be found, or called up from the farm. ARIZONA COYOTES Projected cap space: $1.1 million Roster size: 17 They took a positive step this season, but now Arizona is going to feel a cap pinch that will make it hard to keep pushing ahead. With a little more than $1 million in projected cap room, the Coyotes are hoping to re-sign pending UFA Taylor Hall, who will be the premier forward available on the market. For that to be at all possible, other pieces will need to be moved out. Darcy Kuemper ($4.5 million cap hit next season) has had his name in early trade rumours, but that’s a problem in itself since he has been so excellent for them. CHICAGO BLACKHAWKS Projected cap space: $7.3 million Roster size: 19 As Chicago tries to build off a surprising playoff appearance after knocking off Edmonton in the best-of-5 qualifying round, we must remember they were six points out at the pause, last place in the Central, and needing to jump eight teams to get in. They really weren’t a playoff team in the 2019-20 regular season, so there’s work to do here. The problem is that GM Stan Bowman doesn’t have much cap space to work with, and he has to be considered on the hot seat at this point. The most pressing needs for the Hawks are a starting goalie or a tandem (Corey Crawford is a UFA and Malcolm Subban an RFA) and to re-sign RFA Dominik Kubalik after his 30-goal rookie campaign that earned him a Calder Trophy finalist nod. Dylan Strome is another RFA in need of an extension. Even if Crawford took a hometown discount to stay in Chicago, the available cap room right now is not enough to keep everyone, and certainly not enough to add meaningful changes. Brandon Saad and his $6 million cap hit will certainly be part of the trade rumour mill again, and perhaps Bowman could make some defencemen available. The problem is that there aren’t too many teams that can absorb many of these kinds of contracts right now.

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Sportsnet.ca / Analyzing and predicting Round 3 of the Stanley Cup Playoffs By Justin Bourne – September 7, 2020

In the conference semifinals my prediction total clocked in at 3-for-4, as I took an “L” picking a Colorado team that eventually got Joel Kivi-ran off the ice in overtime of Game 7. Injuries, particularly in net, were not kind to the Avs. Combine that prediction record with a 5-for-8 in the opening round and we’re still on the positive side of the ledger through two rounds. Time to take on the conference finals. Tampa Bay Lightning vs. New York Islanders What’s hard about an exercise like this is we can’t help but be biased to recent events, and while Tampa hasn’t played in a while, the Isles’ showing in Game 7 was that of a clinical UFC fighter submitting an opponent. It’s hard to call it a “fight” when one side never had much of a chance to throw a punch. The Flyers were on the mat from the opening bell, face contorted with their opponent in control until it was all mercifully over. Thomas Greiss called it “the best defensive game I’ve ever seen the team play.” Despite Mathew Barzal going pointless, Barry Trotz said it was his “best game since I’ve been here.” At no point did it seem like the Flyers may score, let alone win. And so, how can you watch that Islanders team and think they won’t take games off, well, anyone, Tampa included, in a best-of-seven series? In the 2018-19 playoffs the Tampa Bay Lightning were eliminated in four straight games by a Columbus Blue Jackets team that choked the life out of them, too. They added some ground and pound players in the days between, but again this year Columbus gave them a heavy fight before Tampa persevered (the only game in that series that wasn’t decided by a single goal was the one Columbus took). The Islanders are an awful lot like Columbus in make-up and style, but better. I set up my commentary on this series with that framing because of one important note, which should stand on its own here. The Lightning are the better hockey team, and I don’t think it’s close. The Lightning should win, and if the luck is equal or falls in their favour, they almost certainly will. Heck, the Boston Bruins aren’t that dissimilar from the Blue Jackets in style, with the same “but better” add- on, and they couldn’t stop this Tampa Bay juggernaut. But this whole intro is an ouroboros of sorts, which should take you back to the very top now. I can’t shake what the Isles just did, and nobody is beating them like that without a bloody war. At a glance… Goaltending: Andrei Vasilevskiy has a .931 save percentage in the playoffs, Semyon Varlamov is a .921, Thomas Greiss is at .960 through three starts. There’s almost nothing to be gleaned here, particularly because we have bigger samples sizes for everyone. But in a nutshell, both teams have goaltending. I’d say Tampa has the best guy (his “on” is as good as any goalie’s “on” in the world), but the Islanders have two guys who can play and play well. No blood here.

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Defence: Both teams were top-10 in goals against per game in the regular season (eighth and ninth), and are now second and third in the playoffs. Now, they accomplish that wildly differently. The Lightning are a top-five team in controlling shot attempts in their games. The Islanders were third-worst in the NHL there in the regular season, ahead of the Red Wings and Devils. They just block a ton of pucks and force a ton wide by staying in shooting lanes. Offence: With what we know from above, safe to say the balance of the play is going to be in the Islanders’ end this series. It’s just going to be a matter of Tampa finding a way to not just be there, but to actually score. They have to get to the inside. Of course, the Bolts scored the most goals in the NHL this season. The Islanders were one of three teams who made the league’s 24-team “return to play” series despite being in the bottom-10 in goals. BUT. Of the remaining teams, no one has scored more goals per game than the Isles, who’ve racked up 3.38 per contest. And nobody’s scored less than the Lightning, who are still at a pretty decent 3.00 goals per game clip, but it’s fun to phrase them as the “worst offensive team remaining in the playoffs by this one particular stat,” so let’s do that. (I imagine if Tampa had played Florida, Washington and Philly, and not Columbus and Boston, those numbers might look a tad different.) Special teams: Exactly what you’d expect here. Both teams were mid-pack or marginally better on the PK in the regular season. Tampa’s power play was eighth overall, while the Islanders was 24th. In the playoffs both power plays have been pretty meh (around 17 per cent, so Tampa has more to give there), and both PK’s have been within spitting distance of 82 per cent, which is a hair on the good side of average. Narrative forces: I’ll allow you a “rest versus rust” debate here, as Tampa’s had a few days off. You could also go with “offensive team versus defensive team” if you like. There was a time where you’d have thought of Tampa as skill and speed, and the Isles as “heavy,” but with names up front like Blake Coleman, Yanni Gourde, Barclay Goodrow, Alex Killorn, Anthony Cirelli, Brayden Point, Cedric Paquette, Pat Maroon…this Tampa Bay team has proven it has a share of grit too. Health: The Bolts are still awaiting the return of Steven Stamkos, though we have no real update on when he could be back. It seems like Nikita Kucherov will be a go for Tampa too, as he’s been skating. As is the case with most teams that make it this far in playoffs – nagging injuries, bruises and the rest aside – both teams are pretty healthy. And so the pick… Tampa Bay in 6. There doesn’t seem to be a style of play they can’t handle at this point, and that includes the Isles’ heavy, defence-first play. Vegas Golden Knights vs. Dallas Stars I made Stars Twitter upset when, in the wake of a Game 7 OT winning goal, I lamented the loss of Nate MacKinnon and the injured Avs rather than lauding the play of the Stars. I absolutely should’ve let the Stars have their moment, should’ve given Kiviranta his due for his insane performance, and celebrated the winners. And we’ll get to doing that here. I make no apologies for the point itself, however. The way MacKinnon was playing was like watching peak Tiger Woods roll over “competition,” and greatness is something to behold. But you don’t beat

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greatness by chance, and the Stars did a lot of things well, including “score a million times,” something they weren’t exactly known for in the regular season. Coming from the other corner, the Golden Knights and Canucks brilliantly re-enacted the Monty Python “Black Knight” sketch, in which the Canucks played the part of the armless, legless foe, continually taking on damage yet unwilling to step aside and admit defeat. These two teams won a series in seven games to get to a conference final that starts…oh my, it starts Sunday evening. We better get into the rest of this, then. At a glance… Goaltending: The Vegas goaltending situation is worth an article itself, but that’s not what we’re doing here. What we will do is note an edge in the crease for the Knights, assuming we’re looking at Robin Lehner versus Anton Khudobin most games. If Ben Bishop is able to get back and can be at the top of his game, it’s a different story. But that’ll be tough to find given how his return-to-play time has gone so far, with an injury and a few shaky appearances. If Marc-Andre Fleury gets in a handful of times, this conversation changes too. So for now we’ll say that Khudobin is coming off a series where he didn’t look particularly comfortable, and has a .909 save percentage in return-to-play action so far. Lehner is coming off a shutout (with an insane save) and is at a .918 save percentage. He has to be feeling good given the vote of confidence that came from head coach Peter DeBoer with the Game 7 start. Yes Khudobin can be solid. But for my money Lehner is one of the NHL’s best right now. Defence: This is where the Stars are supposed to thrive, having posted the league’s second-best goals against per game in the regular season, allowing just over 2.5 each contest. Vegas was pretty good there too (2.94, 13th in the NHL), but again, this is supposed to be the Stars’ bread and butter. Of the remaining teams left, though, Dallas has been the worst defensively, allowing a full 3.5 goals per game, including totals of 6, 4, 6, and 4 and in their last four outings. More than anything, we know this is something the Stars can be good at, and the Avs are just a great offensive club. So we’ll give them the nod here. Offence: Vegas isn’t the Avs on offence, who were the best offensive team in playoffs (four goals per game), and the league’s fourth best team there in the regular season. The Golden Knights were 13th in- season, averaging 3.15 goals per game. Still, 13th in the league isn’t bad – they can score – particularly when contrasted with Dallas’ standing of 26th there. Dallas scored just shy of 2.6 goals per night in the regular season, worst of any of the 24 play-in teams not named Columbus. Dallas has flipped that on its head in playoffs though, scoring over 3.3 times per game, second-best of the remaining teams in playoffs. They have depth, and it feels like offence can come from any number of players any night. I think we’re forgiven some skepticism this will continue, though, given those totals have mostly come against the (a bottom half defensive team this year), and the decidedly not-starting-NHL-goaltending of the injured Avalanche. Special teams: Everything was pretty middle of the pack in the regular season — both teams had power plays that were around 21.5 per cent, and Dallas’s PK was around the usual 80 per cent. (Always remember the special teams rule of adding the PK and PP together, with 100 being about average on

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special teams. Dallas checks that “100” box off a bit better). But Vegas’ PK struggled for a good team, killing off just 76.6 per cent of power plays faced, meaning they trail a bit in this category. In the post-season there’s been two spikes: Vegas has gone from killing at a 77 per cent rate to 88 per cent, and Dallas’ PP has gone from a 21 per cent unit to a nearly 29 per cent success rate. I’m guessing one of those two “improvements” is about to come back down to earth. Narrative forces: If you squint, you can call it another “offensive team” (Vegas) versus a “defensive team” (Dallas), but given what we’ve seen in playoffs I’m not sure that holds up. Dallas can glom on to the “plucky underdog” label that coaches desperately fight to earn, which tends to foster some dangerous “nothing to lose here” play. They’ve certainly got the “nobody believed in us” tag we hear numerous eventual champions espouse. Health: Ben Bishop hasn’t seemed entirely healthy yet, but that doesn’t mean he won’t be ready to go in the days to come. and Taylor Fedun are still listed as day-to-day for Dallas. Vegas’ Ryan Reaves will be suspended for a game. And so the pick… Vegas in five. The Stars have tons to love outside their biggest names. Radek Faksa is so effective, Roope Hintz is a force, Denis Gurianov is one of the most underrated players in the NHL today. They’re solid top-to- bottom (to say nothing of their best player, Miro Heiskanen), and are awfully hard to beat if they play well. But I do question their “game-breakers,” their elite guys who are supposed to help them power through when the games get thick. If Tyler Seguin and Jamie Benn aren’t doing it, how often can the Joel Kivirantas pull them through? I have my doubts about Seguin and Benn. Vegas is so well-rounded, and can play the game any way their opponent wants to go. I like their depth, I love their intelligence (guys like Mark Stone and Paul Stastny are elite thinkers), and I love the way their D can impact the play by jumping in the rush. It wouldn’t stun me to see Dallas win two and take it six games — any more than that though, and I’ll be legitimately surprised.

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The Athletic / Opening games of the conference finals weren’t as different as you might think By Arpon Basu – September 8, 2020

EDMONTON — Two days into the conference finals of the Stanley Cup playoffs and it would appear the series in the East and West couldn’t be more different. A 1-0 slog Sunday opened the Western Conference final, with the Dallas Stars hanging on to prevail against the Vegas Golden Knights, immediately followed Monday with an 8-2 blowout win for the Tampa Bay Lightning against the New York Islanders in the East. But, really, when you boil each game and each series down, there are far more similarities at play here than differences. And we are likely to get two great series to decide the Stanley Cup finalists as a result. Here are some of the main similarities that stood out to us after the first game on each side of the bracket. The matchup The Stars and Islanders were low-scoring teams in the regular season that suddenly had offensive explosions in the playoffs. But they were each well suited for the matchup because the strength of their respective games was keeping pucks out of their net. The Lightning and Golden Knights were always and remain offensive powerhouses, so that strength of defense was going to have to hold up for the Stars and Islanders. It did for the Stars in Game 1, and it absolutely did not for the Islanders. But there were reasons for that. When 1-0 is more dominant than 8-2 It would be easy to look at the Lightning’s 8-2 win and naturally assume they were the more dominant of the two Game 1 winners. But that would be wrong. What the Stars did to the Golden Knights on Sunday might have even been more demoralizing than the Lightning beating the Islanders by a touchdown Monday. It should be easy for the Islanders to park that performance and forget it. They will not dwell on something they were never really close to winning. The Golden Knights, however, had two days to think about how close they were to winning despite being suffocated in two ways by the Stars. First, the Stars dominated the puck for 40 minutes, hardly spending any time in their own end and playing defense the best way you can do it. By playing on offense. “For two periods that was Dallas Stars hockey,” Stars coach Rick Bowness said after Game 1. “We were skating, we were on top of them, we were creating a lot of offense from good defensive structure all over the ice. That second period was as good a period as we’ve played.” Then, the Stars retreated. They defended a 1-0 lead and allowed the Golden Knights to finally play in their zone for most of the third period. Somehow, it appeared equally effective. Stars goalie Anton Khudobin was forced to make some saves, yes, but he rarely had to make more than one at a time, and generally those saves came on shots from manageable distances. The Stars played two styles and excelled at both. That gives the Golden Knights a lot to think about.

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This is not meant to diminish just how dominant the Lightning were in Game 1 against the Islanders, but that game had a different feel to it. It was more quick-strike offense than it was sustained offensive zone pressure. It was skill manifesting itself on one side but not on the other. “It was one of those games where we get a chance, we made a mistake, they get a chance, it’s in the back of our net,” Islanders forward Jordan Eberle said. Those games happen, games where every mistake costs you in the worst way possible, but they don’t often happen twice in a row. What the Stars did, however, seemed more repeatable. We’ll see in Game 2 on Tuesday. The perils of a tandem in goal One team in each series has a legitimate level of mystery around its decisions about who will start in net, and one team in each series has no such mystery whatsoever. The Lightning will always have Andrei Vasilevskiy starting as long as he’s healthy. He is their unquestioned No. 1 and removes a layer of decision-making from coach Jon Cooper’s plate. For Bowness, Khudobin is the guy until Ben Bishop is healthy enough to play. But Golden Knights coach Peter DeBoer and Islanders coach Barry Trotz had to make difficult decisions regarding their Game 1 goalies, and in Trotz’s case, it showed why a true tandem system can sometimes be problematic. DeBoer’s decision to go with Marc-André Fleury in Game 1 did not blow up in his face at all because Fleury was the primary reason a game so thoroughly dominated by the Stars through 40 minutes remained 1-0. But it was still a case of DeBoer going with the guy who’s clearly been identified as his backup behind Robin Lehner to start the series. “The decision to play Marc-André was the same reason we started Lehner is Game 7; I thought he gave us the best chance to win tonight,” DeBoer said after the game. “He was fresh, he’s played well against Dallas, and he gave us a great game. I thought he was our best player. He gave us a chance to hang around when we didn’t deserve to be in the game early. So that decision was fairly easy.” Except, now what does DeBoer do? Lehner got them here. Fleury was his best player in Game 1. Trotz, meanwhile, openly acknowledged that Thomas Greiss forced him to change his original plan because of what he did in a 4-0 win against the in Game 7 on Saturday. Greiss got pulled before the game was 11 minutes old, and the Islanders were already down 3-1. “Probably the plan has taken some twists and turns,” Trotz said. “Obviously, I went with Greisser in Game 7 knowing that we had travel, there was a fatigue level going into a Game 7 and trying to get the fresh guy in net. With Greisser, he didn’t have a lot of work in that Philly game, in Game 7, so I felt like after a shutout you never want to take anything away from someone who gets a shutout. It’s hard to do in the , and it’s hard to do in the playoffs. So I went back with Greisser, but really, there’s not a whole lot our goalies could do tonight with a lot of the chances.” And that might be the toughest part of managing a goalie tandem, when a goalie’s performance forces you to deviate from your management plan. The fatigue factor has entered the chat

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When the Golden Knights played Game 1, it was their third game in four nights, which was not the case for the Stars. Yes, both teams had played in a Game 7 two days earlier, but the Golden Knights played the later game that day after playing the night before as well. The Stars deserved full marks for how they thoroughly dominated the first two periods of that game, but fatigue looked like a real factor. The Golden Knights were unable to pressure the Stars at all through 40 minutes, with each of their attempts to establish offensive zone pressure quickly turning into quick zone exits and transition opportunities for the Stars. Vegas was a step slow, and the Stars exploited it. “We got what we deserved,” DeBoer said after Game 1. “We didn’t play hard enough for long enough tonight.” For the Islanders, fatigue was impossible to avoid. They played Game 7 on Saturday night, boarded a plane Sunday morning and landed in Edmonton just before 2 p.m. on Sunday after spending six weeks in the Toronto bubble. “I don’t think how we played, I think maybe how you felt to start the game,” Islanders Anders Lee said when asked if traveling the day before the game affected how his team played. “But you’ve been through travel and transitions like this in regular season, playoffs, all before. So it just takes a few minutes to get your legs going a little bit, then you settle in.” In the playoffs, needing a few minutes to get your legs going often comes at a cost of minutes you simply don’t have. Because in those minutes, something like this can happen. Brayden Point is a phenomenal player, but Ryan Pulock doesn’t normally look like this in such a situation. The Lightning hadn’t played since last Monday and flew to Edmonton on Saturday, landing just after 7 p.m. Mountain time. That gave them an extra 19 hours to get acclimatized to a new bubble and a new time zone. They were rested. They were more comfortable in their new environment. And they exploited those advantages. “The bottom line is you’ve got to take advantage of a tired team,” Cooper said. “Let’s be honest, this is a one-off. They had to grind through a seven-game series and then travel and play and change time zones. We got to get a little bit of rest and heal some guys up. Yes, do we have to keep them engaged? We do. But let’s make no mistake here, we’re not going to see scores like this, or it’s very doubtful we’re going to see scores like this again. We gave up some chances and our goaltender made some saves, pucks happened to go in for us that may not go in otherwise. We were doing some good things, but we gave up some chances where we weren’t happy in the locker room with the way things were going. “So, we look at this game solely as a Game 1 win; whether you win the game in overtime or you win it the way you did, it’s just one game. Now we’re on even terms, there’s no travel, everybody gets the same rest. They get to recover, we recover a little bit, and it becomes a series. So to me, this was a game we need to take, and we did. Now it should be one hell of a series moving forward.” In one series like the other, fatigue will no longer be an advantage for one team over the other. But it was in Game 1. On both sides of the bracket.

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The Athletic / ‘Like a long, long road trip’: How NHL teams are coping with bubble fatigue By Joe Smith – September 8, 2020

When the Lightning headed to Glen Abbey Golf Club a few Fridays ago, it was more than just a fun outing on the Toronto-area PGA Tour course. It provided a much-needed mental boost. The team had been quarantined for six weeks at Hotel X with the other Eastern Conference teams. Most days had been monotonous and structured. Wake up. Get daily COVID-19 test. Breakfast. Meetings or practice. FaceTime the family. Sure, there are plenty of activities available at the hotel, from squash and pickleball to video games at a lush lounge, a rooftop pool and soccer at nearby BMO Field. But when you’re in the same hotel room for more than a month, missing milestones like the first time your 4-month old daughter crawls or your wife’s 30th birthday, it gets taxing. So even a full day at the golf course, playing in foursomes, competing in two-on-twos, was a major moment. For the first time, they got to go somewhere that was not the hotel or the rink. “It was kind of a breath of fresh air,” Lightning winger Blake Coleman said. “It’s becoming like ‘Groundhog Day’ here.” “It’s like a long, long road trip,” Stars forward Radek Faksa said. The physical demands of going on a Stanley Cup run are front and center, with everyone watching on TV as teams go through a grueling, four-round grind with hopes of hoisting hockey’s holy grail. But, behind the scenes, there’s a just as important mental challenge going on for the athletes —many of whom are fathers and husbands — dealing with stress, loneliness, anxiety and boredom. There’s a reason why among the Lightning’s 52-person travel party in the bubble, is their mental performance coach Ryan Hamilton. It’s why the Bruins sports psychologist, Max Offenberger, was doing Zoom calls and texting with players. Players and teams are handling it in different ways. Canucks backup goaltender Louis Domingue has picked up cooking. The Lightning’s Curtis McElhinney is reading books like “Antifragile.” There are video- gaming groups and ping-pong competitions, with FaceTime just as important as food when it comes to connecting with families. From talking with sports psychologists, authors and Navy SEALs, the team that handles this “bubble fatigue” the best will likely be the one that ends up on top. “In elite spots, it’s a pre-requisite you have the physical and technical skills — everyone has those,” said Michael Gervais, a Ph.D. in psychology who works with the Seattle Seahawks and athletes in all major sports. “The teams that harness the mental part of the game inside of these razor-thin margins will demonstrate a distinct competitive advantage. Really we’re talking about the performer’s ability to respond in a high-velocity environment, to think and respond quickly. The luxury of mistakes and luxury of timeout is not often afforded.”

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On one of their first days in the Toronto bubble, Lightning players and staff gathered in one of the hotel’s ballrooms for a meeting. Hamilton, who’s been with the organization for several years, led a 15-20 minute talk. He will occasionally give a few larger speeches to the team, like during camp, but is mostly used in one-on-one situations. Hamilton has since given a talk before each round: What’s been his message? “He reminded us to focus on what opportunities you do have and not focus on what you’re missing out on,” Coleman said. “Don’t focus on what’s not in your life, focus on the excitement around being able to play for a Cup, a dream of ours. I just think it takes a lot of energy out if you focus on things you don’t have vs. things you do.” The players were all given a copy of a book, “The Energy Bus” by Jon Gordon. The national best-seller provides 10 secrets for approaching life and work with positive forward-thinking, a roadmap to overcoming adversity and bring out the best in yourself and your team. NO MATTER THE ADVERSITY YOU ARE STARING DOWN, THE SWEPT AWAY FEELING OF YOUR STRESS RESPONSE, OR THE NAGGING DOUBT TUGGING AT YOUR CONSCIOUSNESS; YOU ARE NEVER MORE THAN 4, LONG AND DELIBERATE EXHALES AWAY FROM A SLIGHTLY CALMER, MORE PRESENT, AND INTENTIONAL PLACE. — RYAN HAMILTON (@HAMMY_SPORTPSYC) AUGUST 21, 2020 Lightning GM Julien BriseBois is a big fan of the book. It was one of the reasons that BriseBois and CEO Steve Griggs invited Gordon to speak to the Lightning team during training camp in September. Gordon, a motivational speaker, works with Clemson and Alabama football, and also counseled University of Virginia men’s basketball coach Tony Bennett, who led his Cavaliers to a national championship in 2019, one year after losing to the No. 16-seed in one of the biggest upsets in sports history. BriseBois and coach Jon Cooper are both voracious readers, and big believers in the mental part of the game. They realized they’d need some personnel changes and slight system tweaks to rebound from last year’s stunning sweep, but a lot of it would be between the ears. Gordon’s phrase that Tampa Bay should “attack” a new challenge and not “defend” their status as a great team were buzzwords players used during interviews in the following weeks. “I’ve seen it every year, there seems to be more of a commitment to a mental approach,” Gordon said. “There’s a lot of mental coaches out there, a lot of sports psychologists. You almost used to be embarrassed to say you worked with a sports psychologist. Now when you say, ‘I’ve got a sports psychologist,’ it’s like your trainer, your strength coach. It’s not a stigma. It’s your support team.” The Golden Knights don’t have a sports psychologist traveling with them, but they’ve made sure the players stay active. The Golden Knights have a “fun committee,” led by Nate Schmidt, Ryan Reaves and , that organized golfing outing, held a movie night (Will Ferrell’s “Semi-Pro”) and had a poker tournament. “Our leadership group has done an exceptional job of keeping things fresh,” Vegas coach Peter DeBoer said. “These guys always have access to somebody if individually they’re feeling not in a good place and need to talk.” There have been some comparisons to Navy SEAL training and deployment.

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The bubble at Hotel X is clearly not life or death, but there are some parallels in terms of the bigger- than-you perspective you need to have, while also making bigger things seem small. Nick Hays, a Navy SEAL for 10 years who has worked with the Falcons, Dolphins and Miami Heat, said an ideal analogy is their “Hell Week.” “You go six days without sleep, you’re put on 200 miles mostly with a boat over your head, with a whole crew of seven best friends,” Hays said. “It’s incredibly arduous. Some people ask, ‘What day do they quit?’ … People quit the moment they think about the end. … That’ll crush you. So the trick is making big things small. Don’t think about Friday on Monday. You think about the next meal, the next practice.” Hays recalled being deployed on a submarine for 56 days, and how his fellow SEALs bonded over an Xbox Halo tournament. They had a competition on a bursa climber. Another commander created a cooking competition. “It sounds stupid but so effective in keeping people engaged moving forward,” Hays said. “It provides your brain a break.” As much as you can keep yourself busy, and you seem cut off from the outside world, it’s important to maintain perspective on the common goal. “Anytime you’re in this sustained duration where it’s ‘Groundhog Day’, you get blasted with an onslaught of negativity,” Hays said. “When it comes to being stationed, I can tell you what works for us. You have to be serving something bigger than yourself. You have to look at the higher purpose. Any time you start feeling that demon on your shoulder whispering at you, all these negative things, turn on the TV and remind yourself why you’re there. “The entire nation is hurting. The entire nation heals the same way players do, even in their little bubble. Everyone feels isolated and feels like they have nothing to look forward to. You’re serving a bigger purpose. And that’s winning a Stanley Cup.” JB Spisso, a former Army Ranger and instructor at West Point who spent 10 years in Special Operations with the 75th Ranger Regiment, retired from active duty in 2010 and co-founded JBS Leadership Consultants to teach team-building and leadership skills. Among his clients are a number of NHL teams, including the , , Columbus Blue Jackets, Florida Panthers and . Spisso talked about the importance of getting things in order and having support back home for their families, whether that’s in-laws, parents or someone with the team. It is always so, given the grind of a normal playoff year but this summer perhaps more so than normal it might not be the most talented team that wins it all, Spisso predicted. Instead, it’ll be the team that has the most mental toughness, that is the most resilient, that will succeed, he predicted. “If I’m an NHL coach or GM that’s exactly what I’d be saying right now,” he said. “You need to dial it in, lock it in.” Bhrett McCabe is a sports psychologist who works with athletes that are used to isolation: PGA golfers. It’s a non-team sport, and the tour can be a lonely place, especially during COVID-19 times, where it’s going from the golf course to the hotel to binge Netflix and order takeout. They’re gone for three-to- four weeks at a time. McCabe said one area of focus is something they can control: their health. Make

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sure you’re monitoring and getting enough sleep. Eat right. The PGA Tour has a partnership with WHOOP, which has a band that monitors relaxation, stress levels and energy. “You wear it on your arm or wrists and it really gives you a real-life measure of what’s going on,” McCabe said. “HRV heart rate, a sign often of mental resilience, measure indicative of nature of stress. It works like an Apple Watch where you monitor your exercise.” What McCabe has found is the golfers who are successful are able to keep themselves busy during isolation by picking up a new skill or interest. “Something you can do remotely, learning something new online,” McCabe said. “Someone got their boating license. He really invested his time in online training. You start to read in a new area of interest, whether it’s politics or fitness. It’s about taking time to learn a new skill. “It’s been very effective to give them something to look forward to. In the bubble, it’s extremely routine and boring. As much as you want to hang out at the ballpark or rink, you can only hang out at work for so long.” The Lightning players have continued to compete in other sports, like soccer, pickleball, squash and tennis competitions. They’ll team up in groups of four for “Call of Duty” sessions, communicating through headsets from their rooms. Domingue became an internet sensation because of his cooking. Gervais said he’s got a handful of athletes from other sports who picked up cursive writing, penning letters the old fashioned way, to “do something stimulating.” “The loneliness that can creep in, it’s a mental health challenge for people that are struggling with some anxiety, depression,” Gervais said. “It’s that support. Nobody does the extraordinary alone. It’s too big, it’s too complicated, it’s too multi-dimensional and has a massive impact on the athletes that are experiencing an extended support mechanism that’s part of the fabric of what’s allowed them to be so successful. That’s family and friends and extended family, they’re all part of the fabric that got them to go the distance and explore the upper reaches of the potential. “The other is the environment they’re accustomed to, the 10-plus thousand fans. That environment, in of itself, has changed. Those who are able to internally identify and activate their ideal competitive mindset will have a distinct advantage.” Offenberger will never forget a call he got recently from a client who is an MLB player. “He was telling me how overwhelmed he was with what was going on,” Offenberger said. “He couldn’t see any of his girlfriends. He couldn’t go to his favorite club. It was just impossible. And I really just blasted him and said, ‘Maybe you should think about somebody other than yourself. Your-self indulgence doesn’t help you. Maybe you’ve got a neighbor that needs some help that doesn’t have a paycheck or is worried about his or her job. Show a little empathy.’ “He was furious. He hung up on me. The next day, he called me back and said, ‘I needed that kick in the ass.’ I didn’t mean to be unjust or hard on him, but sometimes the guys forget what they have and their ability to do whatever they want.”

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“Bubble fatigue is real,” Bruins coach said. “Some guys are fine and bear down and hunker down in their room, other people need fresh air, they need to be outside to see people, dogs, water. Otherwise, they feel trapped.” Players like Zach Bogosian have said it’s incredibly difficult to be away from their families (he has three children), “FaceTime isn’t the same.” They’ve lamented the monotony, eating the same foods, staring at the same wall and view every morning. “At least it’s always sunny it seems like,” Coleman said. Cooper said he actually felt “nostalgic” thinking about packing up in their Toronto hotel Friday before heading to Edmonton’s bubble Saturday. “This has basically been our home,” Cooper said. “I think it’ll be a good chance with the new surroundings to be like a reset for us, and I think that’s going to help with our mental makeup going into Game 1.” Before the Lightning headed to the bubble, Gordon gave another talk. This one was over Zoom to around 150 members of the Lightning organization. His message? “Staying positive through challenges and change,” Gordon said. “Winning today. And overcoming the five Ds — doubt, distortion, discouragement, distractions and division. We talked about grit. I think it really resonated.”

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