We're back everyone! A hastily-written 2012-13 NHL season preview

So, not so surprisingly, I've been somewhat quiet around these parts and though I'd rather not go into it, there was a really good reason why. That said, on Saturday at long last the puck will be dropping on the 2012-13 NHL season and there is just a ton of stuff to get excited about, to say nothing of the premier matchups (Chicago-Los Angeles, Pittsburgh-Philadelphia, New York-Boston) that we get on opening day alone.

However, given the consequences of the NHL's work stoppage, rather than the full 82-course serving of a standard NHL season, we'll be seeing a slap-dash truncated 48-game menu this time around. What's even more wild is that the 48 games each team plays will be played entirely within a span of 99 days, which means less of a developed and cohesive performance all around and more of a frenetic breakneck scramble to make the postseason, which will be played out in full.

If anyone remembers last season's 66-game NBA slate in which it seemed like the Knicks were playing about five times per week, this will be something like that. No one is entirely sure how different teams will respond to it, and as a result of the condensed schedule certain teams one might have expected to be title contenders (the Rangers, Detroit) might fall victim to exhaustion due to age or an aggressive style of play while teams not quite ready to make the jump (Edmonton, Florida) could take advantage because of their relative youth in the shortened schedule.

The important thing to understand, however, is that with only one other example of this situation to fall back on, no one is really sure how this will shake out, though if it ends the same way, I won't really be complaining. Either way, it's going to be kind of hard to predict who to bet on in the horse race, but because we need to fill these column inches, here is who might be Secretariat, and who might be Zippy Chippy.

Zach Parise and Ryan Suter can go home again

Hockey does not have "bringing my talents to South Beach" free agent bonanzas. Yes, there are teams that win championships as a result of being heavily stocked with talent and depth that rolls them to a Stanley Cup, but often those teams are built as a result of deftly scouted drafts with the occasional smart free agent signing sprinkled in here or there. Look no further than the 2009 Penguins or the 2010 Blackhawks for evidence. While free agency is a large part of hockey, the tendency, often, is for teams to lock up their prized young assets early on, or at least attempt to do so, with a massive contract that gets them paid, but keeps them in the fold through their formative years. Many stars stay with the same organization for the vast majority of their careers and few championship teams are built almost exclusively on big-name free agents. The closest team in recent memory that might fill that description is 2002 Detroit Red Wings, an astonishingly old team which had four Hall-of-Famers (Steve Yzerman, Igor Larianov, Brett Hull and Luc Robitaille), six more players that are certain to be inducted at some point (Pavel Datsyuk, Sergei Fedorov, Brendan Shanahan, Nicklas Lidstrom, Chris Chelios and Dominik Hasek), two more that just might join them (Darren McCarty and Tomas Holmstrom) and two players that had already scored overtime Cup-clinchers for other teams in the previous six years (Hull and Uwe Krupp).

They were an immortal squad built on the backs of veteran acquisition and free agency in a way that is a dramatic outlier from how the NHL, generally speaking, has done business. Even that team, however, was no situation of LeBron James and Chris Bosh signing contracts as the top two free agents with the same team. Seeing the top two names on the market go to the same place is rare. Seeing them go to a small market is rarer still. And yet, on July 4, 2012, while most of us in the U.S. were prepping for our barbecues or traveling to to someone else's, the Minnesota Wild, they of the one division title in their history, three playoff appearances all time and none since George W. Bush was still in the White House, managed to sign Zach Parise and Ryan Suter to identical 13-year $98-million contracts that will carry them both from the age of 27 to their post-retirement fishing days near the Superior Hiking Trail.

The Minnesota Wild are not a good team. Despite a surprising first half before a tumbling second in 2011-12, they are an unbalanced mixed of unfulfilled promise (Dany Heatley), inconsistent offense (Devin Setoguchi) and a whole lot of youth. And yet, somehow, some way, they took the two prizes of free agency in this offseason, Suter, the top defenseman on the market, and Parise, the top forward available and given his combination of youth, leadership, offensive production and defensive dedication arguably the most desired free agent in the history of the NHL. While the idea of the Wild attempting to lure Suter and Parise to Minnesota as a package deal had been floated for months due to the fact that both are friends, Parise is a Minnesota native and Suter is from neighboring Wisconsin, the notion had been met by most hockey insiders and fans alike with scoffing and amusement.

As a lifelong Devils fan, I personally felt as if of all the teams in the hunt for Parise, Minnesota was probably the least likely destination. Rumors that the Rangers, Penguins, Flyers, Blackhawks and Red Wings would all be hot on his trail seemed a far more likely result to anyone paying attention, and despite the rampant assumption that Parise would simply go to the highest bidder like any free agent might, the New Jersey Devils, the team which had drafted him, groomed him for eight years and that he captained to the Stanley Cup Final this June was in the mix right to the very end. Ultimately, and Parise and Devils GM Lou Lamoriello both confirmed it, the top free agent on the market wasn't interested in getting $120 million from the major powers of the NHL like Pittsburgh, Detroit or Chicago. The money would be there wherever he went. This was about playing in front of his biological family in Minnesota or his professional family in New Jersey.

In the end Parise's decision was between Minnesota and New Jersey, and New Jersey lost out.

2012 Stanley Cup Preview

The Stanley Cup matchup couldn't have worked out better for THE GREAT MAMBINO. Our resident NHL expert, Pucklius, will be on the precipice of a heart attack, as he roots for Devils legend Martin Brodeur to hoist the trophy one more time. Que-Ese, TGM's favorite utilityman and promoter-extraordinaire, is on the other side, cheering for the Kings of the city of angels.

We've been giving you previews all along the way as these teams have fought through battle after battle just to have their names etched next to Lord Stanley. But for this final round, I asked Puck and Que one question:

Who has the better playoff atmosphere?

LA Kings Bandwagon Fan Crash Course Educator

As the Lakers unceremoniously went down 3-1 in their eventual loss to the Oklahoma City Thunder, I quickly realized that like a lover scorned by a hateful broad, I'd have to find a new steed to hitch my wagons to for a sweet sweet rebound.

Enter YOUR...Los Angeles Kings.

I'm sure I'm not the only one. Los Angeles, like Boston, Philly or Miami, is a frontrunners town. Whichever of our teams that is in the driver's seat, that's the one we'll readily and happily attach our interest to, regardless of whether we've watched a game this season, know the best player's name or hell, even the rules of the sport. This is just how it is. Don't blame me. I didn't found the city.

Fellow Lakers fans (and even some of you Clippers refugees that may have found your way over to this glorious stink-free blog), I realize the spot we're in. You want to keep the adrenaline going by rooting for a team in the playoffs, but yet, you don't know a damn thing about hockey. Or maybe you know a bit, but you've been preoccupied with checking out Kenneth Fareid's offensive rebound rate and the progress of the Kings wasn't on the front burner. Look, I get it. That's why we're here.

I've exchanged a series of e-mails with MAMBINO ace hockey writer Pucklius, asking questions inn order that us bandwagon Kings fans might get a crash course in puck education. Let's be honest; at the end of this, no one is going to mistake you for a pedigreed NHL fan born in the swamps of Calgary. However, you MIGHT just learn enough to have a passable conversation about possibly the only champions in LA this June. Onward!

Blood in the Hudson: Rangers vs. Devils

If you grew up in the New York metropolitan area in the 1990s, the 1994 Eastern Conference Finals left a mark on you. It didn't matter if you liked hockey or if you didn't, but the Devils were playing the Rangers, 1940 was emblazoned into your psyche and Mark Messier was busy carving out a place there for himself, too. Of course, if you liked hockey, then it was a horse of a different color entirely. The 1994 Eastern Conference Finals in the NHL were a series with drama that was almost unmatched by any other postseason series in the history of sports. Granted, I have a particular soft spot for both hockey and this series in general, but if you look at the facts -- and we will do that in a moment -- there is no postseason series I have seen in any sport that has proven its equal, though the 2001 World Series comes close.

To wit:

The 1994 season is widely remembered as the campaign in which the Rangers finally broke the curse of 1940, when the team opted to burn its mortgage on Madison Square Garden in the bowl of the Stanley Cup in celebration, thereby desecrating a sacred object and sentencing the team to more than half a century without a championship. Or so the theory goes. While the Rangers' victory over the Devils in that season's Eastern Conference Finals is not forgotten, people often forget that while the Rangers had the second-best record in the NHL that season, the Devils had the second-best just six points behind them. Add into the mix the natural geographic rivalry of two teams that played across the river from one another, as well as a bitter dynamic for New Jersey in which the Devils played consistent ugly duckling to the big, bad Blueshirts -- something that is still the case despite the Devils being the more successful franchise since 1994 by an extremely wide margin -- and what lay ahead was a dream set up to a dream series.
So to recap, this is what we were presented with before that series:

-- The two best teams in the NHL's regular season by the most significant empirical metric
-- A natural geographic rivalry between two teams and fan bases that hate each other
-- A measure of recent history, as the Devils and Rangers had played a bitter seven-game series two years earlier
-- A chance for the Devils to finally crawl out from big brother's shadow
-- A chance to reach the Stanley Cup Final, the most that could possibly be at stake between these two teams given the League's format

Next Stop to Stanley: Kings vs. Coyotes Preview

(Que-Ese is struggling with computer difficulties, so I'm posting on his behalf. Skynet is taking over)

Well folks, here we are. The Kings are who we thought they are and even better than I thought they could ever be against the Blues. Turning in the most impressive playoff series in franchise history, the Kings are playing the best hockey in the NHL right now.

The Blues were supposed to be a team built similarly to the Kings in every way; Strong defense, stronger goal keeping, and timely scoring. And yet, the surge that is Dustin Brown’s epic playoff physicality once again set the tone of a suddenly confident hockey club.

To put it simply, the Kings got Swag.

Stanley Cup Playoffs Round 2 Preview: Late Night With the NHL

If you watch as much of the Stanley Cup Playoffs as I do, you have to be prepared for some late nights. After all, the postseason, with its potential for games that theoretically can never end is often full of overtime epics that stretch into the early morning hours, and this season's rendition has been no exception. In fact, the first round of the 2012 Stanley Cup Playoffs had a record 16 overtime games, with the piece de resistence being between Chicago and Phoenix, a series that saw overtime in the first five games.

So, of course, it's only fitting that the last game of the round, last night's Game 7 thriller between New Jersey and Florida, which didn't start until 8:30 p.m. despite being on the east coast so as not to coincide with the end of Game 7 between the New York Rangers and Ottawa Senators, needed more than 60 minutes to be decided. After all, Game 6, too needed more than 60 minutes to be figured out, resulting in Ilya Kovalchuk's beautiful backhand feed after noticing he had lured in both defenders on a 2-on-2, which Travis Zajac took in front of the net and deposited between the legs of Scott Clemmensen to save New Jersey's season.

But what was surprising about Game 7 between New Jersey and Florida was not that it needed more than 60 minutes to be decided, but that it needed more than 80. Double overtime isn't something particularly unheard of, but overtimes have ended surprisingly early this postseason. Only three of the 16 overtime games this season reached a second extra period in the first round and the vast majority of games were done within about 10 minutes. This seems to run contrary to the typical postseason overtime trend of "try to end it quickly and if you can't settle in and lock down the neutral zone and wait for a break," not because games aren't ending fast on the whole but because they aren't ending immediately and still aren't running on forever.

No need to worry, though. The Devils and Panthers solved that problem for everyone Thursday night by keeping the sportswriters, TV watchers and schedule-makers up deep into the evening in a holding pattern until somebody scored. As someone who is, shall we say, emotionally connected to one of these teams, it was an experience that was euphoric at its end but excrutiating for the rest of the duration. After all, playoff overtime is a precarious tight-rope walk where every slight shift in weight or brief mental mistake -- and those are inevitable -- could mean the end of a game or a season. The playoffs are stressful. Game 7 doubly so. Game 7 in overtime triply so. A Game 7 in double overtime? You get the idea. And despite nibbling on my fingers for most of the late evening, it was an immediate and explosive relief when Adam Henrique did this.



The game wouldn't have gone that far, however, were it not for the absolutely stellar play of Martin Brodeur. As we've noted here earlier, Marty has struggled for stretches of this season and started to look his age -- an age that will reach 40 next weekend -- and while the Panthers did manage a furious third-period rally that tied the game with less than four minutes left, both of those goals were the result of an unbelievable amount of pressure and maybe a little too much contact with Brodeur put on by Florida. After all, people will forget that a third Florida goal early in the third period was waived off as a result of goalie interference, but they may not forget that the Panthers peppered Brodeur with an almost absurd 19 shots in the third period alone, a number that in the hayday of New Jersey's Cup-winning defense of Scott Stevens, Scott Niedermayer and Ken Daneyko would have represented what he saw in an entire game.

All things considered, Brodeur was probably the best player on the ice, outplaying fellow elder statesman Jose Theodore with 43 saves on 45 shots, and the win was reassuring for a fan base that has started to wonder if Marty can still put out the top performances. After all, before last night New Jersey hadn't won a playoff series in five years and Brodeur hadn't won a Game 7 since the Devils topped the Mighty Ducks in the decisive final game of the 2003 Stanley Cup Final nine years ago.

And then there was the devastating collapse against Carolina in 2009 that no Devils fan in their right mind ever speaks of.

Next Stop To Stanley: Kings vs. Blues Preview

As we noted before, the Kings are who we thought they are. After destroying the dreams of Vancouver's children, the boys from LA turn their focus to the St. Louis Blues.

If Vancouver was supposed to be the offensive Goliath of the playoffs, providing a serious threat to the Kings, the Blues are the defensive equivalent. Besides the Blues, there was no other team in hockey that played defense as well as the Kings. Both teams are made up of strong defenseman and Goalies who play with supernatural abilities. Many, including Kings Coach Daryl Sutter, are calling for this series to be one of the lowest-scoring series of all time. 

While I think this certainly will be a series with tight play on the defensive-end, I believe goals will come at a greater clip than expected. The Kings found an offensive rhythm in the Canucks series that should carry over even against the large bodies of the Blues.

Many will point to the Kings 3-1 record against the Blues in the regular season as a sign that this will be a cakewalk. However, the wins earlier this season do not count for squat as the Blues were playing without a healthy Andy McDonald and Alexander Steen. These two players provide a huge offensive kick for the Blues and will change the dynamics/matchups for the series. My predictions will follow below but first the Mambino 3 keys to the Kings-Blues series.

They Are Who We Thought They Were: The LA Kings

Nobody pays any attention to the NHL until the playoffs. There are a whole lot of sports that Americans find more enjoyable...until the playoffs roll around and hockey FORCES you to pay attention. This year's playoffs are no exception and many across the country are finding out about a secret that some Los Angelenos have known for years; there is a hockey team in LA named the Kings.

Hockey is sort of a big deal in my family (translation: my grandparents are from Canada). My grandfather used to have season tickets to the Kings when they first came to Los Angeles in the Forum. Ultimately, he moved on to being a more American-American and spent his hard earned cash on season tickets with the Dodgers. But this Canadian blood inside me has left me with a passion for the game and the expertise to explain to you, the somewhat playoff hockey fan, who the hell these Kings are, why they are playing out of their mind, and why I think they are going to play for Lord Stanley's Cup in a few short weeks.

2012 NHL Stanley Cup Playoffs Primer

So, once every year -- let's call it, "spring time" -- people remember that not only is hockey going on, but it's playoff time. Now every sport's playoff time is better than its regular season (take note, BCS) due to the increased stakes and the ratcheted-up intensity that results from it. Out of all of the major sports postseasons we see in North America, the Stanley Cup Playoffs stand out above them all as the best.

Don't buy it? Let me count the ways.

Oh. Hey. We've Got a Second Half to Play.

I'm going to be brutally honest in admitting that with the Giants playing in this football game you might have heard about this coming Sunday, I'm a little preoccupied with my own emotional anxiety this week. Really. But I was still able to look past the looming specter of next Sunday, not just to take the rockin' good time that was the NFL's annual touch football beauty pageant last night, but to notice that earlier in the day we had this thing called the NHL All-Star Game.

There was, granted, very little defense in a game that more or less devolved into superstars trying to set each other up for crazy two-on-ones without applying any actual hockey strategy. After all, we wouldn't want to risk committing penalties on a weekend when the players almost certainly had no practice running a penalty kill with each other. Despite the fact that really only half the game was played, we did get to see some pretty cool goals and some sweet celebrations to boot. And let's not forget Claude Giroux's attempts to knock down his Flyers teammate Scott Hartnell because he promised to donate $1,000 every time he fell to the ice.

But now that Hartnell's donated $4,000 to charity, it's time to focus on some more pressing matters, namely the second half of the NHL season, which will get underway Tuesday night when 26 teams take the ice. As per the NHL's usual situation, the playoff races in both the East and West are looking particularly tight at the moment. Of the 30 teams in the League only eight are more than five points out from a postseason spot, which means we'll have 22 teams fighting for 16 spots as the calendar starts to approach April. However, if we're going to be more specific about this than simply who might be headed for early spring tee times with old Jewish authors (Goodbye, Columbus! Get it?!), you're going to need a list of what the big stories are as we head down the stretch of the 2011-12 regular season.

Here's your primer. Or at least the best one I can muster.

Pittsburgh's Sid-uation
Most of the hockey world has kept its eyes on Pittsburgh this season not for who is there, but for who notably isn't. When he's healthy Sidney Crosby is according to most accounts -- including mine -- the best player on the planet. Ever since he suffered a concussion more than a year ago however, he has spent far more time rehabilitating and seeing chiropractors than he has playing hockey. Crosby had a much publicized -- and enormously successful -- return earlier this season when he scored two goals in his first game in more than 10 months and wound up tallying 10 points in 8 games. However, the headaches returned and he's been off the ice ever since, leading to much speculation which was complicated this weekend by two startling revelations, the first being that Crosby was determined to also have suffered an injury to his neck in addition to a concussion, and that Sid is apparently good friends with Tom Brady. Because of an otherworldly season by Evgeni Malkin, the Penguins have managed to stay afloat despite injuries to numerous players in addition to Crosby, most notably Kris Letang (who has since returned) and Jordan Staal, but there is no doubt that Crosby brings Pittsburgh to a different level. While the Pens expect him to return for the playoffs, questions will linger until he returns to the ice and in the worst way possible, the NHL could feasibly have found its own Peyton Manning.

NHL All-Star Game: Like you in the school yard, but cooler.

Depending on your perspective when it comes to these things -- that is to say the "right" perspective or the "wrong" one -- the best part of each sport's annual midseason break is almost certainly never the All-Star Game itself. When it comes to that yearly talent showcase, each of the four major sports is prone to injury replacements, popularity contests and local host ballot stuffing that denigrate the game at its finest. And did I mention that they don't exactly play defense at these things?

As a result, the best event of the weekend gets trumped by what's around it. The MLB All-Star Game is never as fun to watch as the previous night's Home Run Derby. The NBA All-Star Game can't possibly match up to the Slam Dunk Contest. The NFL Pro Bowl is always completely inferior to, well, anything else that's on TV that night.

When it comes to my favorite All-Star weekend of the four major sports -- the NHL -- the game itself, while periodically entertaining, is nearly devoid of physical play and often results in goofy scores like 12-9. The Skills Competition on Saturday night, however, is almost always a safe bet for some impressive moments (let's see you fire a hockey puck 105.9 miles per hour), or at least some highly goofy and entertaining ones. But of all the events and innovations that the NHL has introduced to its All-Star format -- and there have been many -- the clear-cut greatest thing the League has done -- and arguably the greatest aspect of any sport's All-Star format, will be on display tonight in Ottawa.

Tonight at 8 p.m. ET, the NHL will put on its second annual NHL All-Star Fantasy Player Draft. The NHL has come up with several different All-Star formats to attempt to drive up interest, be it the obvious of Eastern Conference All-Stars against West, the more inventive version of the defending champion against the rest of the League or the North American players against the rest of the World. But as Leagues always scramble for ways to breathe fresh life into a stale product, they have come up with plenty of incredibly stupid ideas, but the NHL has come up with a phenomenal one.

All of us played sports as children, all of us have experienced the long-entrenched process of two captains alternating picks for their teams and all of us have known how awful it feels to be picked last. Or perhaps that final one was just me. But seeing it done with athletes this superior is a fresh and exciting change to an All-Star Game -- and it makes for phenomenal television. At the NHL's first Fantasy Player Draft a year ago, the very real drama that unfolded as captains Nicklas Lidstrom and Eric Staal selected their teams was fascinating to watch.

State of the Devils: The Trouble with Marty

By all accounts, the New Jersey Devils are doing quite well relative to their expectations this season. The 2011-12 NHL regular season is roughly halfway over, and while the Devils' place in the postseason is far from assured, they're currently sixth in the East -- a better mark than expected Cup contenders like Washington, Pittsburgh and Tampa Bay. Ilya Kovalchuk, with 38 points in 38 games leads the team in goals and is playing like his contract requires, Zach Parise has overcome a slow start to put up 38 points himself, Patrik Elias is playing like he's 26 again, putting up a team-leading 40 points, and the Devils may have uncovered diamonds in the rough both old (Petr Sykora has turned a training camp invite into 22 points) and young (All-Star rookie Adam Henrique's numbers -- 13 goals, 21 assists, plus-9 have him looking like a future star).

After some rocky beginnings, the Devils appear to have bought into new coach Peter DeBoer's system, and his aggressive penalty kill is so impressive that New Jersey not only leads the League at 90.4%, but with an NHL-best 11 shorthanded goals in 70 opportunities (15.7%), the Devils are actually more likely to score down a man than on the power play, where they've scored 22 of 148 times with the man advantage (14.9%). That may say more about how bad their power play is than anything -- and it is fairly bad -- but the point is they aren't handicapping themselves with mistakes, and their aggressive forecheck is creating opportunities, which are leading to wins. Need an example? Look no further than Wednesday night, when Kovalchuk displayed just how effective New Jersey can be at forcing chances off its defense.

But as any dedicated Devils fan could tell you, the positive signs the team has display are encouraging, but with the team unlikely to compete for a Stanley Cup this season, they are just background noise for the two biggest weights that hang on New Jersey's shoulders. The first is Parise's uncertain contract status, but as neither side seems to be talking during the season, with little news to report, there is little to talk about. The more prominent concern, however, is the uncomfortable process that every team must deal with eventually, that of an aging superstar losing his skills but needing a face-saving ride off into the sunset. The Devils have never really dealt with that before. It's unusual that one of their star players remains with the team through the end of his career -- particularly since New Jersey has never seemed particularly interested in cultivating "stars" -- but the closest approximations the Devils have dealt with so far are the three men whose numbers hang in the rafters.

Of those three, none of them ever presented the Devils with the uncomfortable quandary. Ken Daneyko retired when his skills had clearly eroded (though not before providing an emotional boost by playing in Game 7 of the 2003 Stanley Cup Final after being a healthy scratch through the first six games), Scott Stevens had his career end due to a concussion and Scott Niedermayer played the last five seasons of his career in Anaheim. While the retirement of their numbers is warranted (though some could argue Daneyko's place in that lot), none of them represented the awkward situation nor the titanic stature of Martin Brodeur.

You Guys Missed A Hockey Game On Monday

The smart money here says that BockerKnocker's biggest moment of sports-centric anxiety on Jan. 2 came when the New York Knicks suffered an awful early-season home loss to the immortal Toronto Raptors, a franchise whose claim to fame is Vince Carter winning the 2000 Slam Dunk Competition, those stupid head bands they all wore in the first round of the 2001 playoffs and that Isiah Thomas didn't completely destroy that franchise for the next decade.

Frankly, you'd think Steven Spielberg could have made their nearly 20-year history more dramatic by now.

It is worth noting however, that the Bockers' unfortunate loss to Toronto came after what was really the top sporting event of the day, at least for New Yorkers. Sure the Rose Bowl wasn't bad, and the Fiesta Bowl was entertaining, too, but I enjoy sporting events that don't end because of spiking a football after the clock hits zero and a kicker missing two game-winning field goals.

We celebrate achievement, not ineptitude.

This is where the 2012 Winter Classic comes in. Even if we want to put aside the awesome and historic atmosphere and history that comes with having an annual outdoor hockey game, though this, admittedly, is hard to do, what we had Monday night was a game that had everything. Excitement, physicality, drama, rivalry, back-and-forth action up and down the ice, picturesque snowfall -- anything the NHL could have hoped for it got Monday afternoon when the Rangers rallied from a two-goal deficit to upend the Flyers at Citizens Bank park.

In many ways, the NHL got the game it was hoping for a year ago when the League leveraged every ounce of sex appeal it had in the 2011 Classic at Heinz Field, pitting Pittsburgh and Washington against one another in hopes to showcase the personal rivalry between Sidney Crosby and Alex Ovechkin, arguably the two biggest stars and best players in the game. Mother nature didn't cooperate that night, bringing unseasonably warm rain that forced the game's faceoff to be delayed until the evening and created ice conditions that were acceptable but far from ideal.

This time around, despite the a slight two-hour delay in puck drop, we had an ideal setting, an even better game and even a little controversy before and after on both sides. The Flyers mixed things up by robbing us of seeing Ilya Bryzgalov pontificate on the universe mid-game when Bryz himself revealed during a press conference that backup Sergei Bobrovsky would be getting the start. On the side of the Rangers, head coach John Tortorella turned some heads when he intimated that the games dramatic final minute was perhaps orchestrated by the refs and American broadcaster NBC in hopes of pumping up ratings, a suggestion that is both ludicrous and almost certain to earn the coach a hefty fine -- though it should be noted he apologized Wednesday.

And just what was so dramatic about that final minute you ask?

The Unbearable Lightness of Being Ilya Kovalchuk

I believe it was one of the brightest, most gifted poets of our time who gave us the immutable, profound maxim of "Mo' money, Mo' Problems".

Few in the NHL can come to grips with that concept more significantly than New Jersey Devils winger Ilya Kovalchuk, a man so gifted as an offensive weapon that no one equaled his scoring prowess over his first seven seasons in the league, and a man whose contract was so controversial that it literally warranted a re-writing of the book on contacts in the League. For all of his goal-scoring gifts -- and with 380 goals so far in his 10-season career, those gifts remain potent -- there is an undeniable weight that sits on his shoulders considering that he has one of the biggest contracts in the history of the game.

At times that can make his rough public moments all the more brutal, as it did in New Jersey's last game, a 4-2 loss to Carolina Monday night. The Devils had already fallen behind 3-0 before coming alive in the third period and closing to within 3-2. With the team pressing for the tying score in the final minute after pulling its goalie, Kovalchuk wheeled with the puck near the left corner of the offensive zone and attempted a pass up to the blue line where center Adam Henrique was jumping on the ice following a line change. The pass missed Henrique and cleared the zone, a happenstance that isn't particularly rare in the game of hockey, but in this case Kovy's feed was so unfortunately aimed that it drifted all the way to the other end and into New Jersey's open net, sealing the game for the Hurricanes.



Those are the types of moments that cause New Jersey fans to quickly bring their palms to their foreheads, and it isn't the first time they've had to do it with Kovalchuk. The Russian sniper initially came to New Jersey as the big fish of the 2010 trade deadline, an impending free agent set up for one of the biggest paydays in NHL history, who had been lost in the obscurity the hockey hotbed that was Atlanta, Georgia. With the Atlanta Thrashers unable to come to a long-term deal with Kovy, he was shipped to New Jersey in a surprising gamble for the typically stingy Devils, who thought he might be the missing piece of the fungible roster's fourth Stanley Cup in 15 seasons. Once he arrived, Kovalchuk continued to have a solid season (he finished with a total of 41 goals and 44 assists in 76 games), but once in the postseason, the team went cold in a five-game first-round loss to the rival Flyers. That series featured Kovy, who was never used to playing with anyone else who could score, hot dogging so much on the rink that it's a shock Takeru Kobayashi didn't try to eat him.

Mambino Does Hockey?

The closest I came to writing about hockey was a post about the kid who netted a shot from center ice, only to have his prize money taken away from him. The NHL requires some actual knowledge about hockey, and maybe about Canada too, two things I don't particularly care for. Therefore, enjoy this guest post from my buddy Pucklius (He has a nickname that we all know and love him by, but if I were to repeat it here, I wouldn't be breathing tomorrow morning). It's a preview of tonight's 24/7 - Road to the Winter Classic on HBO. HBO does some fine work with this stuff -- Hard Knocks and the 24/7 Boxing series are as good as it gets. Personally, I wouldn't have cared to check this out tonight, but now I feel morally obliged. A small victory for the NHL in its never-ending pursuit to attract more fans.

Oh, and the guy went a little overboard with the youtube links, but some of them are actually pretty epic.