I feel like those prospect rankings have Kravtsov and Fox in opposite positions compared to everyone else’s.
Definitely a weird rankings. Just going off the panthers guys, most lists have Tippett and Denisenko in the top 10-15. They didn’t even make his top 50.
Random but it's insane how much of a fraternity the NHL is, where everybody seems to go way back with everybody. Guess that has a lot to do with how much more of a focused group/filter system it is of the top guys all playing with/against each other at an early age compared to other sports.
It’s a rich people sport, not that many play it and if you are elite you play with the elite at a young age.
https://theathletic.com/1091811/201...nd-the-teams-cap-hit-says-about-the-senators/ essentially they are at $60.1 million against the cap but only spending $43.5 million in real cash. All recent moves have been done to ensure the player they receive has previously been paid their signing bonus. "No one should criticize the Senators for refusing to overpay veterans for marginal gains, but disappointingly, the Senators have failed to take advantage and leverage their cap space to help make the team better in the future as the Hurricanes did with Patrick Marleau."
Scotty Bowman story from that podcast - When he wanted to bust players for curfew, he’d give the hotel doorman a jersey and have them ask the players for autographs as they came in. The next morning they all denied staying out past curfew , he’d break out the autographed jersey. Lol
It’s comical that people will defend him and blame fans for the Sens current mess. Like Trumpers actually.
Dorion needs to go for sure. However his hands are tied. He has the smallest front office in the league as well as the smallest budget. Every decision is made to keep Eugene living a lavish lifestyle. It’s always about taking money out of the team and putting it into Eugene’s pocket. Yet some actually believe the company line about cutting costs because fans aren’t showing up. Saying it now, Chabot signs an OS sheet next summer.
That’s why Canada wins every gold medal at the olympics, also why we are the top hockey country in the world
For anyone that doesn't have an Athletic subscription and loves hockey, I highly recommend it. https://theathletic.com/1087181/201...rick-kanes-trainer-this-is-my-harrowing-tale/ Spoiler I’m dying. This is it, the end. I’m sure of it now. Through the blobs of sweat on my glasses, I can see a strange white light in the distance, and if my thighs and lungs weren’t on the verge of bursting into flames, I’d be running straight toward it. Anything to end the agony. I’m working out in a small, nondescript South Loop gym with Ian Mack, the performance coach and movement expert — “body nerd” is his self-assigned descriptor — who helped Patrick Kane have the best season of his career at age 30. There are a handful of professional athletes here on a Wednesday afternoon, decompressing after their own hours-long workout, including the Devils’ Connor Carrick, the Avalanche’s J.T. Compher, and free agent Riley Sheahan. I’m almost certain they’re laughing at me. Oh, wait, that’s because they are. By this point, I’ve lunge-walked, barefoot, back and forth across the artificial-turf floor a couple times, careful to keep my toes pointed straight ahead and my back knee just off the floor. I then went back and forth again, this time leaning my leading knee to the right, so it hovered over the outside edge of my foot in the 1 o’clock position. I went back and forth yet again, this time with my knee at 11 o’clock. With each pass, I think I’m done. With each pass, Mack tells me to go back in the other direction. With each pass, I contemplate ways I could hurt him. With each pass, I realize he could certainly out-run me. My thighs are burning. My knees are violently shaking. My heart rate is maxing out at 180 beats per minute, though it feels closer to 18,000. I’m 39 years old, so by the 220-minus-your-age formula, my heart is right on target, Mack tells me. Hooray. Finally, mercifully, my torture is over. “OK, that was a good little warmup to get you going,” Mack says, clapping his hands and smiling. “Ready to begin?” Shit. Mack is a body evangelist, a man with the granular knowledge of a sports scientist and the boundless enthusiasm of a television preacher. He believes the human body has almost limitless potential, and that so much of it remains untapped. Through his Tomahawk Science program, he eschews weights for a carefully crafted series of body movements — many of them awkward, many of them difficult, many of them just plain weird-looking — that will maximize performance. Talk to him long enough, and you’ll believe Kane can be at the top of his game not only well into his 30s, but into his 40s and beyond. He’s certain that Kane will only get better, aging curves be damned. A career-high 110 points in a career-high 22:29 per night (behind only Edmonton’s Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl among NHL forwards) is pretty strong evidence that Mack might be on to something. Kane certainly believes in him. He’s with Mack in the gym six or seven days a week, from 6:30 a.m. till about noon, typically burning about 1,700 calories. Mack is here from 4:30 a.m. to 7:30 p.m. every day, until the NHL guys scatter to the winds in September. Kane’s success quickly has made Mack a hot commodity in the NHL. He has about a dozen NHLers and a handful of two-way guys retaining his services this summer. Next summer, he’s expecting somewhere around 30 clients. Some of them, like Kane, Carrick and Compher, live in Chicago. Others take great lengths to commute just to take part in Mack’s unique sessions. The gym is small and underwhelming, with individual saunas tucked away in each bathroom and high-tech recovery equipment cluttering the main entrance. You’re expecting Ivan Drago’s training laboratory, not the Brady Bunch’s backyard, but it does the trick. Mack doesn’t need fancy, expensive equipment, anyway. He just needs space to move. That said, with so many new clients on the horizon, Mack and his team — including his director of nutrition and wellness, Sam Gibbs, who commutes weekly from Toronto — are looking to expand into a larger space in the near future. When I arrived, six players were finishing up their roughly 170-minute workout. It’s difficult to describe what they were doing. Remember Catherine Zeta-Jones wriggling her way through the laser grid in “Entrapment?” It was kind of like that. But while doing and maintaining deep squats. And dancing a strange mixture of a Maori haka and The Robot. In slow motion. But nobody’s worried about how they look in the gym. They’re worried about how they’ll play on the ice, and deep into the future. Mack talks a lot about how people today will live to be 110, 120, 130. And it’s his goal to make 120 the new 50. But a quarter of the way through my workout, I’m pretty sure I’m not going to make it to 40. There’s a resistance band around my knees, and Mack has me sidestepping my way back and forth across the gym, just a few inches at a time. I’m bending over a little at the waist, and clenching what few core muscles I have. My knees are bent and twisted uncomfortably inward, while my feet are again pointed perfectly straight. This was Sheahan’s idea, shouted out from the peanut gallery. This is the part when Sheahan’s 60-something dad tapped out (players often bring in family members for a once-over from Mack, who then offers a feasible plan going forward to help them out). So while my body wants to quit, my pride won’t let me. It’s the feet that are the trickiest part of this. Stand up and walk a few steps normally. Look at your feet. Chances are, they’re pointed out a little bit, toward 11 and 1 o’clock, as you stride. “The path of least resistance,” Mack says. “The body’s always looking to rest.” It’s comfortable, but inefficient. So try walking again, this time with your feet perfectly straight, toes pointed straight ahead. Feels weird, right? It stresses out your ankles and torques your knees. Mack is steering into this skid, trying to rebuild the body’s natural mechanics. He works with athletes in every sport, and there are a couple of NBA guys in the gym as we work. But hockey has become his specialty, because the sport puts such abnormal stresses on the body — the balancing on skates, the hunching over the puck, the torque of shooting, the way the back leg kicks out to the side with each stride. The human body is not designed for hockey. Mack tries to undo the damage of decades of playing the game, while simultaneously making it better equipped to do so. He’s going for stability, mobility, agility, flexibility. It’s probably worth pointing out here that I have none of those things. My body’s a mess. I have no core strength, no trunk strength. While hockey players are all butt and thighs with spindly little lower legs, like thoroughbred horses, I have no butt and oddly muscular calves. (In fact, one guy at Mack’s gym saw me and asked, “Can I borrow some of your calves?”) I’m at my local gym (or a hotel gym when I’m on the road) five days a week, and have been for a couple of years. I do some basic weightlifting — chest presses, rows, pull-downs and leg presses, etc. — three days a week, and do an hour of interval training on the elliptical the other two days. My workouts are as much an excuse to get away from my kids long enough to listen to podcasts and watch grown-up TV shows, but for an old fat guy, I’m doing OK. But I have a lot of things against me. For one, I eat like a 5-year-old, and have zero interest in changing my diet so that I could actually lose weight and become truly healthy. For another, I have four spinal conditions — a 52-degree curve in my spine that I’ve had since high school, a fractured/slipped vertebra at the base of my spine called spondylolisthesis, four (and counting) arthritic vertebrae, and a bulging disc impinging on a nerve. I used to be 6-foot-3. I’m closer to 6-1 now, as my spine continues contorting. I once had a physical therapist say my hamstrings were “bricks.” Any number of massage therapists have expressed amazement and mild terror upon seeing the train wreck that is my back. There are no real feasible surgical solutions, so it’s just pain management at this point, and has been for more than 20 years. A job that entails hunching over a computer, squeezing into cramped airplane seats and contorting to look over the edge of a press box doesn’t help. The tl;dr version: I’m really, really inflexible with very little core strength, and I can’t do a whole lot about it. “Yes, you can,” Mack says, a glint in his eye. “You’re in the right place.” Mack doesn’t recruit athletes, and he doesn’t ask his clients to recruit for him. All of his clients reached out to him, not the other way around. So you won’t see him cajoling Kane to get Brent Seabrook into his gym, though he firmly believes he could help him skate faster and more efficiently. You won’t see him stalking the halls at the Blackhawks’ practice facility to lure Jonathan Toews, though he’s sure he could help improve the captain’s explosiveness and his quickness. Mack believes this because he believes in his work, in his science, in his results. He hasn’t studied Seabrook, Toews or anybody else for that matter. He only studies the clients he has. But there’s not an athlete — or a middle-aged sportswriter, or a player’s 60-something dad — that he doesn’t think he can help. Mack’s science and the movements are complex, but the philosophy is simple. The wider the base of movements and mechanics an athlete has, the taller the pyramid of potential can be built. If you come in at a level 2 like me, he’ll start you at a level 3. If you come in at a level 99 like Kane, he’ll start you at a 100. Always pushing, always building a little wider, and aiming a little higher. (OK, I might have been flattering myself when I said I was a level 2. The high-tech band strapped around my chest said my heart rate had already spiked to 119 when I bent down to take off my shoes before we began.) Anyway, after making it through the lateral band walking, slowly then quickly then slowly then quickly again; sideways then diagonal then sideways then diagonal; on the inside of my feet then on the outside of my feet then on my toes — first with a band around my knees and then a tighter band around my ankles — my hips feel like they’re dislocating and my knees don’t know which direction to face anymore. I’m already on my second towel, little puddles of sweat forming between the fake blades of grass on the floor. “Have him do the quadrupeds,” Carrick calls out while he chills in a lounger, his legs encased in NormaTec recovery boots. So I get on all fours, knees pointed awkwardly inward, hands far in front of me, flat on the floor. My carpal tunnel is extremely displeased, with the base of my right hand in blinding pain, but I know better than to whine about it in front of hockey players. Mack has me lift my right hand and my left foot, and stretch them out as far as I can, then slowly return them to the floor. I repeat with the left, and do several reps. Then he has me do the same, but this time, rather than return them to the floor, I touch my elbow to my knee on the way in, keeping my core engaged the whole time. Right side, left side, right side, left side. I feel about as graceful as my overweight cat falling off the windowsill, but I make it through. “How’d he do?” Mack asks. Sheahan raises his left hand like a Roman emperor, and gives me a 45-degree angle thumbs-up. “Pretty good,” says Carrick, who just completed a three-hour workout and once burned 4,200 calories in one session. Then he offers up some genuine encouragement. “Showing up is everything.” Damn right. Anything in the name of journalism, right? Eat your heart out, Hunter S. Thompson! Of course, I don’t say any of that. I don’t have the wherewithal (or the breath) to do anything more than grunt at this point. We finish up my session with some low hurdles. Rather than run through them, I’m going through them as slowly (“controlled” is the term Mack prefers) as possible. Start with the right leg — slowly lift it up so your knee is at a 90-degree angle, slowly torque your knee so your lower leg is parallel to the floor, slowly rotate your hip so your foot hovers over the hurdle, slowly bring your weight to the floor without stomping. Do the same with your left foot, across eight hurdles. Now do it backward. Now do it starting with your left foot. Now do it backward. My form is terrible, but I was determined not to make a fool of myself in front of everyone. “Haven’t knocked over one hurdle yet,” I said to Mack just before I knocked over the second-to-last hurdle. After about 45 minutes — counting our little chats that I used as pretense to catch my breath — we’re done. The monitor says I burned 875 calories, and I didn’t lift a weight or run a single step. Mack is as convinced that I can become more flexible, mobile and pain-free as he is convinced that Kane can win the scoring title at 40. “Our key objective was to introduce your body to movement — specifically the spine, hips and shoulders,” Mack texts me the next day. “These joints offer the biggest return to stability and mobility. The trick is to appraise what you can and can’t do well (from a movement standpoint) and keep programming within your means from that regard. HR and metabolic output are not necessarily chief targets for us. Just performing the motion will be taxing enough (as you discovered). Once you ‘master’ the movement pattern, we add other parameters (like time, speed and intensity) to scale the exercise. This makes our options limitless.” It was the first step of a long journey, should I choose to take it. My thighs were sore, my hips hurt, but I was able to get out of bed. I even did my hour on the elliptical that morning, just to get my legs moving again. I was indeed alive, and my body indeed continued to function. A pleasant surprise. I felt pretty good about it, frankly. Like I had accomplished something. For a guy my age, with my various ailments, I made it through a workout that even the pros find difficult and useful. It was a nice thought. It didn’t last. Later in the day, Mack sends me an email with a full workout, the kind that the pros spend hours a day working their way through. All that weird “Entrapment” dancing and the like. It’s proprietary, so I can’t share all the details, but it involves things like planking for “about 10 minutes,” which is “about nine minutes” longer than I can plank; those same “quadruped” movements I did, only with the torturous resistance bands around the wrists; and various agility and explosion work that surely would have resulted in a trip to the hospital. “We got to four of the 12 categories listed below,” the note says, “and did about 1/4 of each category. So you completed approximately 1/12th of a pro workout.” One-twelfth. And it damn near killed me. Shit.
Didn’t expect this one before point but I’ll take it Saying $9.5 million AAV. Don’t see how they fit that in without bridging point but we shall see. I don’t think this deal will be as bad as the cap goes up but I wasn’t expecting him to get a number that equals kucherov.
the elite goalies are getting that number. Price, Lundqvist, and Bobrovsky set the market. Vas wasn't going to take much less.
Absolutely. And this is why it’s best to trade those elite goaltenders to a team stupid enough to pay a goalie that contract.
I agree with this in principal but I still say that Henrik was worth every penny since he carried some terrible teams.
Already traded Miller and will probably have to dump Johnson + Killorn after this season. (If not another of the 2 before this season) That's 60 goals and 140 points.
I would rather dump them than vasilevsky, it’s always fine and dandy until you are really struggling because you can’t find a decent goalie...the sharks and flyers come to mind, the blues too until the miracle man came in. That is one in a 100
I mean I didn't say it was the wrong move- it's the one I'd make too. Just that their depth is going to take a pretty massive hit over a 2 year span. Nature of NHL roster decisions when you draft that well.
It was directed at you since you made that comment but I was referring to the general argument that you don’t pay a goalie that much, I get it. But at the same time if you let him walk, you create a whole new set of issues. We are not talking about lundqvist or price here either, vasi is still young.
On one hand it is a lot for a goalie and will hurt depth, on the other hand I remember the decade long search the Lightning had trying to find a goalie post Khabi and those were some pretty dark days. Not having a good goalie prospect in the system after who the hell knows what happened with Ingram is also a factor. I’m glad to have him locked up but it is a steep price.