Community Picks: Florida Panthers 0% vs Ottawa Senators 0%

Wayne Gretzky stood at center ice in the building he made famous Wednesday night and saluted the fans. ''My gosh, I wish we could be out there and play for them again but we can't do it anymore,'' Gretzky said to cheers from thousands of supporters - most clad in orange, blue and white team jerseys - in a tribute ceremony to mark the final Oilers game at Rexall Place. Gretzky was among scores of former Oilers of the NHL and World Hockey Association eras to join fans bidding goodbye to the rink after almost 42 years of hockey. Continue to Article

April 07, 2016 1:03:am EST

(Ed. Note: The column formerly known as the Puck Daddy Power Rankings. Ryan Lambert takes a look at some of the biggest issues and stories in the NHL, and counts them down.) 9. Doubling down Yeah, you made a bad choice for Masterton. But you know what you should do in that case? Waste your Sunday column defending it as childishly as possible . 8. Shane Doan Not content with being a Bret Hart-level hero in Canada for no particular reason, Shane Doan is now in the “espousing years-old ideas like they're new ones he came up with” business. In 2012, Adam Gold presented an idea at the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference titled, “ How to Cure Tanking .” The premise was simple: The team with the most points after being mathematically eliminated at the end of the year gets the first overall pick. [ Join a Yahoo Daily Fantasy Hockey contest today ] It gained a lot of traction and praise in the NHL last season , when the tanking discussion surrounding Connor McDavid and Jack Eichel was too significant to ignore. This ignores the fact that the idea is bad and dumb for a lot of reasons, but would it be better than the bad and dumb lottery system we have now? Maybe. Anyway, this idea is now four years old, and was talked about on multiple occasions last season. So imagine the surprise when your ol' pal Shane “dirt on his dungarees, elbow in your chin” Doan miraculously came up with a cool idea to fix the draft: What if the team with the most points after being mathematically eliminated at the end of the year gets the first overall pick? But wait, he thought of this a long time ago too:  “This concept was born during a conversation Doan had with a friend amid the league’s most-recent lockout that nixed the first half of the 2012-13 season.” I'm not saying he stole the idea and called it his own, but boy, Shane Doan sure is getting a lot of credit for “coming up” with something that has been around and well-known for a while. And again, even if the “Gold Plan” were the greatest thing since sliced bread (also Shane Doan's idea), it wouldn't change the fact that in this day and age, players aren't the ones that aren't trying to win. GMs are. And if anything, incentivizing mediocrity is worse than incentivizing losing. 7. Being Tampa The Tampa Bay Lightning have a really good team on their hands. Deep everywhere. Until the injuries pile up. Last week Anton Stralman broke his leg . This week Steven Stamkos is out due to a blood clot in his arm. Both are likely out months, if not for the season. In the end, that may just be effectively the same thing, because a Tampa without these two players (Stralman is a possession monster, Stamkos somewhat quietly had 36 goals).  And maybe you say, “Well, there's no replacing either of them, but at least you can get a significant portion of Stamkos's production back by calling up Jonathan Drouin.” Nah, sorry, Drouin's day-to-day with a lower body injury . Who knows when he's back healthy? Might want to hold Nikita Kucherov, Victor Hedman, and Ben Bishop out of the lineup once in a while down the stretch. Let 'em rest up, keep 'em healthy. Except you can't do that because the Bolts still haven't locked up a playoff spot. This is really not fun right now. 6. Throwing your stick in the air, waving it like you just don't care who you injure Duncan Keith got off easy , if we're being honest. Clear intent to injure, long history of doing cheap crap just like this, etc. Missing the rest of the regular season and one playoff game is hardly a punishment. Two previous suspensions for the guy, a five-gamer for elbowing Daniel Sedin in the head, a one-gamer for slashing Jeff Carter in the face. Sidenote: How did he only get a double-minor and a game for this ? That doesn't get into how he behaved in the 2013-14 playoffs against St. Louis, when he was just going full-on lumberjack to the point that even Don Cherry was like, “What's with this guy?” Then there's this slash . There was one a few weeks ago on Johnny Gaudreau that I can't find video of but knocked Gaudreau out of the game. And so on. You could probably find instances of him baseball-swinging half the league. He does it constantly. Six games. What a joke. Of course, that hasn't stopped crybaby Chicago fans from going full conspiracy theorist and breaking video down like it's the damn Zapruder film. Yup, Charlie Coyle did a not-nice thing to Keith before Keith tried to give him a free rhinoplasty, and that's why the NHL should never have suspended Keith for as long as they did! Because you know what they say: Two wrongs make a right. 5. KHL calling Pavel Datsyuk jumping to the KHL would theoretically be bad for Detroit because of how indefensibly awful they were when he was out of the lineup earlier this year. It would be worse because his cap hit would still apply to their total, meaning they probably couldn't replace him. 4. Avoiding the problem Mark Stone has been out a while now. You may recall that it's probably because Dustin Byfuglien caved him way the hell in. But the Senators are being awful cagey about saying that the injury Byfuglien gave him with that huge, mega-clean hit was a concussion. He missed the Sens' game the next day. Then on Monday, he ducked out of practice after just a few minutes. Dave Cameron said it was the flu or something. Didn't practice yesterday. Now he's doubtful for the rest of the year. Is it perhaps likely that, I don't know, he has a concussion from when the massive man checked him into oblivion? In fact, during the game, they called it a chest injury. Why haven't the Sens said it's a concussion? Might have something to do with the fact that Stone got clobbered and then went out for another shifts after being very briefly checked out by the team's medical staff for five minutes. He apparently told his trainers he was okay . Seems an awful lot like ducking concussion protocol to get a good player back on the ice. Seems like something a team could get fined for if they disclosed that he has a concussion now. I dunno, folks! Tough to say for sure he does have a concussion but Occam's razor and all that. 3. The Panthers A bit of a mea culpa here: Earlier this season I said the Panthers were shaping up to be another Calgary/Minnesota/Colorado/Toronto. They were being out-possessed and outchanced every night, and playing very low-event hockey, but had a sky-high PDO that made them look better than they were. The feeling was that if they didn't change their approach, they were going to collapse just as all those other teams had. Now, they're looking pretty comfortable atop the division. In part because they changed their approach. They're still carrying a huge shooting percentage, but over the last 30 games they have the 10th-best score-adjusted possession number in the league (51.6 percent) and have dramatically improved the rate at which they generate high-danger chances while still limiting the ones they allowed. Prior to the start of February, they were a net negative in terms of high-quality chances (47.7 percent), possession (48 percent), and shots on goal (also 48 percent). That's not winning hockey over the long haul. But they've been so good for this last stretch that they're now just minus-17 in shots on goal, minus-5 in high-danger chances, minus-75 in shot attempts. These are all massive turnarounds that have them close to the break-even point in terms of percentages for the season. Further, since they improved the team with a few low-risk trades at the deadline to shore up their depth (much-needed), their league ranks in those three areas — attempts, high-danger chances, and shots on goal — are sixth, fifth, and seventh, respectively. Extremely impressive. This is what good hockey teams actually do: Figure out what's wrong with them, and fix them on the fly. Anaheim did it this year, and now it seems Florida did it too. Rather unexpectedly. They still don't strike one as being particularly likely to get all that deep into the playoffs, but they're a whole hell of a lot better than they were. Credit where it's due. 2. Blaming everyone but yourself Patrick Roy continues to amaze. Yeah, maybe Matt Duchene shouldn't have super-celebrated his 30th goal of the year given the state of the game, but Roy's demonstrable calling-out of his second-best player was effective in helping him accomplish what he set out to do: Distract from the fact that his team got clobbered, again. The Avs are awful and Roy is a pretty big reason why. He is, in fact, probably the biggest reason (not that Joe Sakic is helping). But hey, no one was saying that after Roy kicked the stuffing out of Duchene for celebrating. That's brilliant gamesmanship, really. Just a very impressive maneuver to avoid being asked why his team is so dismal once again. But at this point, how is anyone reminded of anything other than the Oilers when they look at this club? Talented, but run by proven incompetents who are only in their positions because they were good players 20 years ago. They're not going anywhere, and as long as they don't, embarrassing stuff like this is going to pile up. Fortunately, because Sakic is bad at his job, Roy is always going to have a lousy player to blame for his problems. Must be nice. 1. Enemy territory Canada lost to the U.S. twice on Canadian soil and our wonderful women brought home the gold . What a nice thing to have happened in one of the best rivalries in all of sports. (Not ranked this week: Everyone on the bubble in the Atlantic. Do you guys just, like, not want a playoff spot? Let us know. We can give it to New Jersey or something.) Ryan Lambert is a Puck Daddy columnist. His email is here and his Twitter is here . (All statistics via War On Ice unless otherwise noted.) MORE FROM YAHOO HOCKEY : Continue to Article

April 06, 2016 4:27:pm EST

The Florida Panthers are the Atlantic Division champions, meaning that they’ll face whichever teams ends up in the first wild card spot in the Eastern Conference. That will most likely be the New York Rangers or the New York Islanders, depending on which team most wants to not play the Pittsburgh Penguins in the first round. [ Join a Yahoo Daily Fantasy Hockey contest today ] Panthers co-owner Doug Cifu was on Sirius XM NHL Network Radio this morning to discuss the team’s division title and all the strangeness surrounding the team this season, from rats to Kevin Spacey to a lack of relocation rumors. During the interview, he started talking about home ice advantage in the playoffs, and what that means for the first round: “The great news is that we got home ice advantage for the first two rounds, because we won the division. The Rangers and the Islanders are both really strong teams. I don’t know which team I’d rather get.” Thus ends the clichéd portion of Cifu’s answer. We’re now entering locker room bulletin board material. “I guess the Rangers have a great, world class goalie. In a coin flip, I’d probably prefer the Islanders but it’ll be a great buzz down there. Obviously a ton of transplanted New Yorkers down there.” Here's the full interview:  Now, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with this statement at face. Henrik Lundqvist is a world-class goalie with a storied playoff history. The New York Islanders’ goaltending situation is … well, they started a guy named Gibson last night who wasn’t John or Mel. And the Rangers generally have a deeper team than the Islanders, and a coach that’s guaranteed to be there next season. That said … WHAT ARE YOU THINKING? Yes, you’re stating the obvious. No, it’s not a state secret that you don’t want to face Henrik Lundqvist in a playoff series. But now the Islanders are going to come into that playoff series with a “you want us, you got us” chip on their collective shoulder and upset you and deprive us of that all-Florida Atlantic Division semifinal we all want to see. But like Cifu said, there will be a large number of Islanders in Sunrise who will enjoy it. -- Greg Wyshynski  is a writer for Yahoo Sports. Contact him at  puckdaddyblog@yahoo.com  or  find him on Twitter.  His book,  TAKE YOUR EYE OFF THE PUCK , is  available on Amazon  and wherever books are sold. MORE FROM YAHOO HOCKEY Continue to Article

April 06, 2016 3:48:pm EST

The Kingston Frontenacs have the same mentality that every regular season conference champion has entering the second round of the OHL playoffs. “We don’t feel like we’ve achieved anything yet,” said coach Paul McFarland. Recent – and not-so-recent – history should indicate otherwise. As the Frontenacs prepare to open their Eastern Conference semifinal series Thursday against the Niagara IceDogs, it marks the first time they’ve made it through the opening round this century. The last time they got this far was in 1997-98 when current coach of the ECHL’s Brampton Beast Colin Chaulk led the team in scoring. With the help of future NHLers Matt Bradley, Mike Zigomanis, Jan Bulis and midseason acquisition Matt Cooke, Larry Mavety’s Fronts downed the Oshawa Generals in seven games before losing to London in five. Captain Roland McKeown maintains the organization’s lean track record isn’t a burden. “We weren’t here for the 17 years it’s gone on,” McKeown said. However, when the Frontenacs wrapped up their first-round series against the Generals in Game 5 at home last Friday, McKeown admitted it was nice to be on the other side of the handshake line. “It was just nice to get a series win. I’ve been here four years now,” said the veteran blueliner, who turned 20 in January. Kingston has had some near misses since 1998, but none was glaring than two years ago. The Frontenacs built up a 3-0 series lead against the Peterborough Petes, but wound up bowing out after dropping four straight games. McKeown, Florida Panthers first-rounder Lawson Crouse, Los Angeles Kings prospect Spencer Watson, centre Conor McGlynn, left winger Ryan Verbeek and goaltender Lucas Peressini were the holdovers from that 2014 defeat. Then-coach Todd Gill was fired and McFarland, an assistant with the Generals, replaced him. He sought to turn the page, only by looking ahead and improving. Continue to Article

April 06, 2016 2:10:pm EST