Canes Advance, Dansby Talks No. 1, WHL Championship Begins, Two Big Suspensions, and Other Blackhawks Bullets
We had two games on the schedule last night for the NHL and have two more tonight. Dallas skated past Seattle for a big 5-2 win, giving the Stars a 3-2 lead in their series. The Canes needed overtime but were able to eliminate the Devils. We’ll get to that a little more in a moment. Tonight, the Leafs will look to extend their season again. This time, they’ll have to do it on home ice with all of the pressure that comes with playing in Toronto on their shoulders. The late game will have some drama involved as well, with two major players on the respective blue lines missing because of suspensions.
- Carolina’s social media game was exquisite last night after eliminating the New Jersey Devils. This video was *chef’s kiss* and the best thing out of the NHL last night on Twitter.
- Man, poor Erik Haula! He should probably just sign with Carolina at this point, right? If you really can’t beat em…
- I thought this was an interesting perspective. There is a another former No. 1 overall pick in Chicago who happens to play for the Chicago Cubs — shortstop Dansby Swanson. His path to Wrigley was a bit unique, however. He grew up in Georgia and went to Vanderbilt, but was drafted by the Arizona Diamondbacks. He was traded to his hometown Atlanta Braves before he ever made it to the majors, but helped lead the Braves to a World Series title. Paul Sullivan of The Chicago Tribune wrote a nice column asking Swanson about the pressure of being a top overall pick.
“No. 1 picks always are associated with a certain type of performance level that is expected, right?” Swanson said. “I feel like a lot of that pressure comes from the outside in. It’s more of a challenge of just learning to manage the outside voices. Whoever this is that’s going to be drafted first … ”
- The WHL championship series begins tonight at 7 PM CT with the Winnipeg Ice hosting the Seattle Thunderbirds. As you can see in the graphic below, there is a truckload of future NHL talent playing in this series — 17 drafted players! And three of them are future Blackhawks! There’s a lot of Central Division prospects other than the three Hawks players in this tournament, so it’s worth watching.
- Two significant suspensions are going to impact the Western Conference series between Vegas and Edmonton. As I wrote about on Thursday morning, there was a good chance both Darnell Nurse and Alex Pietrangelo were suspended for the next game of the series. On Thursday we found out both will indeed miss the next game. I was at least a little surprised it wasn’t more than one game for Pietrangelo.
- The NHL announced the three finalists for the Vezina Trophy last night. No Blackhawks, but that’s not a shock.
- Unfortunately, Ryan Reynolds isn’t going to own the Ottawa Senators. ESPN’s Emily Kaplan reported on Thursday evening that his group is not moving forward with their bid. It would have been incredible to have him be part of the NHL ownership group. There are a couple other groups with celebrities in the bidding, including Snoop, so we’ll see if one of the NHL approves one of those collections to buy the team.
- META: We got a sudden wave of folks reaching out about being blocked/banned/spam-listed by Disqus this week, so I’m going to take a wild guess and say there was likely a bug. If that has happened to you and you’re thinking, “Why in the world would they banned me?!” – we almost never ban anyone, except for the worst of repeat offenders – we probably didn’t ban you. So, if you find yourself getting a notification about being banned recently out of nowhere, try logging out, clearing cache and cookies, restarting, and logging back in. In the past when things like this have happened, that usually clears it up for folks.
- Finally, the NFL released its schedule last night. Lu did an incredible job with his Star Wars themed thread with the full slate.
