Won the Trade

nhl official stephen hiff’s family and friends all dressed up to celebrate his league debut and first call

Holy fuck this is incredible work, giving a narrative of the top four from the 2015 draft class (Connor McDavid, Jack Eichel, Dylan Strome, Mitch Marner) and what happened in the eight years after.

It also REALLY shows off why Connor and Jack are two of my current primary blorbos. Speaking of which, I have got to get more on the page for the November project...

---

I haven't gone to see if there's a postscript based on the happenings of the 2023 Stanley Cup Finals and the offseason, but what a head rush thinking of how things stood as this post ends.

The Leafs had just had their postseason breakup with Kyle Dubas, who would be hired as President of Hockey Operations for Pittsburgh within a week or two, bringing his assistant, Jason Spezza (remember him from the story about Mike Babcock earlier?), with him. The Leafs would then hire Brad Treliving to replace Dubas. Treliving had just left the Flames in what most saw as a conflict with their head coach at the time, Daryl Sutter, whose position as a locker room cancer deserves its own narrative post. Treliving's philosophy for how to improve the Leafs is currently playing out with dismal results, if not in the standings then certainly in the interpersonal "grit" so many Leafs uncles (as in "your uncle who's a Leaf fan") hoped to see.

Jack Eichel went on to win the Cup, but he did more than that in the final round. Going up against the Cinderella story that was the Florida Panthers, a team that only squeaked into the playoffs at all through a single game (lost by Pittsburgh, won by Chicago) that had monumental results for all three teams, Eichel and the Knights continued their rough, physical playstyle, and when Matthew Tkachuk laid an open-ice hit on Eichel that coincided with a toe pick that sent Eichel dropping downward toward Tkachuk's shoulder, Eichel's entire medical team as well as his agent looked on in horror as the hit took Eichel down so hard that he lost his helmet in the fall. Eichel got up, cursing vividly, and rushed off the ice -- one is required to do so if the helmet can't be immediately re-secured -- as well as rushing down the tunnel. It was the kind of hit that made any number of people wonder if Eichel's neck surgery would hold.

Eichel was back on the ice almost immediately. He'd only had the wind knocked out of him. The surgery had held, and Eichel was still healthy, still playing well, still able to compete at the top of his game. He is still receiving texts from other hockey players who are grateful to him for paving the way for others to get artificial disk replacement instead of fusion surgery, a choice that may improve quality of life for players for the rest of their lives, not just their hockey careers. For a non-negligible number of patients, fusion surgery is more properly described as a first fusion surgery: a substantial fraction of people need a second, and even a third, surgery afterwards, in order to retain movement and freedom from nerve pain. The number of patients who need additional surgery after artificial disk replacement is much smaller.

Connor spent nearly the entire summer with best friend Leon Draisaitl, who spent a few weeks in Europe before returning to train with Connor's Toronto trainer and attend Biosteel Camp with him. The two of them mentored Connor Bedard together at Biosteel Camp, and then went on to have a highly successful preseason together-- their highly-paid, sensitive, prone to crises of confidence (that lead to crises on the ice) backup goalie looked like he was going to have a bounce-back year. And then the regular season started, and about all that's going well for the Oilers is that Connor and Leon are still absurdly talented (when Connor's not playing injured; he was out for a week or so with an upper-body injury about which we know nothing).

Mitch's wedding was indeed one of the highlights of the summer; in fact, Mitch was also a star guest at various other weddings over the summer. He's having a slow start to the season, and is still being talked about as if he's the best trade target of the Leafs' "core four" (Mitch, Auston, Tavares, and Nylander, who has yet to sign a contract for next year)-- but good luck with that now that his no-trade clause has kicked in.

It's also possible that Mitch feasted on a little schadenfreude over the summer, because before the season started, Mike Babcock-- attempting to make a return to the NHL after his Leafs contract finally expired-- lost his job before training camp could even get started. (Another turn of events that deserves its own post.)

Dylan Strome is still proving valuable to the Washington Capitals. Niklas Backstrom is stepping away from the team as he questions what his future's going to look like; it seems like his hip hasn't really come back fully from the surgery. Strome is now centering Ovi's line, with Backstrom gone for the foreseeable future. If Ovechkin is going to break Gretzky's goal record-- and for the first time, it's starting to seem like an "if" and not a "when"-- it might very well be with a Strome assist.

The Jack Eichel & Noah Hanifin Primer

begging you to click through to the powerpoint because there's so many links and gifs but if you wish, I'm putting pics of the slides under the cut!

I could not have done this without the contributions of @lostandmost thank you for being insane about Jack and Hanny with me <3

tl;dr at the end !

sometimes jeichel is like a peanuts character to me

"he looks like a hockey player"

isles @ pens || 31.12.23

okok so i'm normally not this canadian about things, i don't follow hockey but

but

the sens and panthers had an ICE-WIDE fight the other night that ended up shelling out ten min in the sin bin to EVERYONE ON THE ICE WHO ISN'T A GOALIE

LOOK AT THIS

the two seconds on the ice during the initial release from the penalty box to IMMEDIATELY throw hands

the continual zoom in on the player's grandma

the booting up of eye of the tiger as the refs desperately try to separate players

i cannot believe national hockey sometimes holy shit

kay so a friend of mine who's a lot more knowledgeable on the hockey tea but wishes not to be identified directly has provided me with more context.

I need to preface with the fact I've been informed that one tkachuk brother (matthew, on the panthers i think) was already IN the penalty box BEFORE the bawl rolled out, which is why we the video kept going back to number 19 in the bin in between shots of gramma tkachuk in the stands and brady in the pileup, there was not a direct fistfight between the brothers but the whole sibling thing couldn't NOT have contributed to the aggro vibes that night

here is the additional tea:

it is also important to note that after everybody gets sent (essentially grounded to their rooms), the A/V guys seemed to scramble to get the backstreet boys into song rotation so the video could be ended with the blaring of

EVERYBOODDDDDDYYYYY (yeeeah)

There's no question that NHL hockey is miles better in terms of skill and action than it was in the 70's - 90's, but brawls like this happened all the time back then. It was notable in division games (of which there used to be eight (eight!) per season) when a bench-clearing brawl didn't break out.

Brady Tkatchuk is currently second in the league with 50 penalty minutes. He or someone else might top 200 this year.

The single-season record is 472.

I mean, yes, he very much did slash the goalie, and deserved to get his shit jumped for that, but this was a ten-person hugfest, not even a proper brawl.

I have subsequently spent some time perusing big hit / fight videos on the yootoobz and agree with many but not all of them, and the fight compilations are... predictable (DET-COL "Fight Night at the Joe" is always gonna be there) , with a consistent undercurrent of disappointment that several more entertaining ones (Jim Schoenfeld / Wayne Cashman going at it in the Zamboni enclosure) don't show up more often.

But, back to the topic at hand, the third-best hit I ever laid on someone was while playing as a goalie (admittedly, it was on my own teammate, who had done something obnoxious during warmups, so I steamrolled him when he had his head down during breakaway practice. Message delivered).

Speaking of messages - Mike Smith, you dive like you're trying out for the ten-meter platform. Come on, man.

For everyone in the tags wondering if this means you should get into hockey: Yes, you should absolutely get into hockey*. It takes about one season to go from "super fast humans on frictionless surface do heroically dangerous things but it all just looks like Brownian motion from here, swirly swirly" to understanding the finer points of how the game is structured, seeing each game turning into a narrative, and grokking in fullness why certain things (like "You touched our goalie, you fuckhead!") are considered grounds for immediate on-ice execution by the opposing team.

You know how competitive sports are basically just stylized combat? Hockey is... less stylized than most. And that's the modern, civilized version.

* (Do not get into hockey if you're grossed out by blood. We can do you love and blood without the rhetoric, and we can do you blood and rhetoric without the love, and we can do you all three concurrent or consecutive. But we can't do you love and rhetoric without the blood. Blood is compulsory. They're all blood, you see.)

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern have been issued coincidental minors.

alexa play night changes by one direction 😭

first gif by @werenski

the beautiful game

also matthew, brady and grammy tkachuk

Chaos entity Gritty paid a visit to the Philadelphia Zoo, animals seem to have accepted him as one of their own

I was legitimately gonna lose my bananas on the ice today...

↳ BUFFALO SABRES: SPEED DATING | JJ PETERKA & JACK QUINN

↳ THE CAPTAINS OF THE NHL: BY THE NUMBERS

KING DERMY

A celebration of Arizona and Travis Dermott

he committed a federal crime against those children

sometimes you ask for things and people go sure, why the hell not