** Official 2020-2021 Montréal Canadiens Thread **

Quand t’es rendu à considérer Karl Alzner c’est comme le gars dans un bar à 2h55 du matin qui a le goût de se mettre et que finalement la toutoune de tantôt est fourrable finalement.
 
-Mike- said:
Les Leafs vont prendre un peu de maturité et ils devront sacrifier un de leur top 3 pour aller chercher du leadership

Un gars plus vieux mais qui impose dans le vestiaire, un genre de Weber mais moins vieux. John Carlson ou Roman Josi, bref un gars établit, pas la saveur du jour, un vétéran qui enfile les bonnes années.

Ca consoliderait la défense et ca apporterait une nouvelle chimie
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Y'ont pogné Joe Thornton en promotion, tout un deal pour 750.000 il vient avec la canne et les lunettes de lecture incluses.

speed545 said:
Est ce juste moi ou Buffalo sera a surveiller?
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Setak said:
il on 2 première ligne solide mais le reste c'est un gros ???
Il on pas mal de jeunes aussi donc il peuve surprendre mais je ne crois pas qu'il vont être si fort que ça.

Sur papier le CH est beaucoup plus fort et balancé
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C'est qui le gardien de but a Buffalo.

C'est ça je pensais lol - non.
 
lord_galathon said:
And he's still in Dallas. What's your point?
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Que c'est un no-name qui s'est rendu en finale de la coupe, tout comme Binnington est un no-name qui l'a gagné l'année d'avant.

On est plus dans les années 90 ou tu avais un esti de gap entre les tops comme Hasek, Roy, Brodeur et Belfour et tu tombais ensuite à des Osgoode, Lalime ou whatever.

La position de gardien de but a tellement évolué que la différence entre Carey Price et Tuuka Rask ne va pas te coûter une coupe Stanley. Carey Price dans une équipe qui n'a pas de centre #1 ou de défenseur #1 ne gagnera pas plus que Tuuka Rask ou Binnington qui lui a un centre et un défenseur de premier plan.
 
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Omokocha said:
Que c'est un no-name qui s'est rendu en finale de la coupe, tout comme Binnington est un no-name qui l'a gagné l'année d'avant.

On est plus dans les années 90 ou tu avais un esti de gap entre les tops comme Hasek, Roy, Brodeur et Belfour et tu tombais ensuite à des Osgoode, Lalime ou whatever.

La position de gardien de but a tellement évolué que la différence entre Carey Price et Tuuka Rask ne va pas te coûter une coupe Stanley. Carey Price dans une équipe qui n'a pas de centre #1 ou de défenseur #1 ne gagnera pas plus que Tuuka Rask ou Binnington qui lui a un centre et un déefenseur de premier plan.
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Granted - Buffalo feront pas plus les series...
 
lord_galathon said:
Es tu vraiment en train de compare Tampa Bay a Buffalo?
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Tampa Bay sont devenus le Tampa Bay qu'on connaît aujourd'hui quand Hedman a décollé.

Si Dahlin devient ce qu'il pourrait être (Il n'était pas un 1st overall pick par hasard), Buffalo vont devenir un contender. C'est pas plus compliqué ça.
 
Je me suis abonné à The Athletic. Ils ont une promotion où les 6 premiers mois reviennent à 1.25$ et je me suis dit qu'à ce prix là ça vaut la peine de l'essayer. Jusqu'à date je suis très impressionné. Les articles sont vraiment de meilleure qualité que la scrap de clickbait de TVA Sports, Habsolument Fan, Dans les Coulisses et autres sites du genre.
 
This is all your fault.

Well, not your fault, personally. But this is your favorite team’s fault, with “this” being … well, something. A rule, a tradition, a protocol, or something else that’s a part of the NHL. The sport is filled with little details that we’ve become used to over the years, and almost all of it has an origin story, and sometimes that story might involve your team. This week, we’re going to try to find one example for every team in the league.

In some cases, we’ll be talking about actual rules you can find in the rulebook. In others, we’ll be working with less formal guidelines, interpretations, traditions and unwritten rules that have evolved over time. We’ll cover big changes and tiny ones, the relatively new and the age-old, some good and some bad. Honestly, a few of these are just here because I want to tell you a weird story from the history books. But the goal is to give every fan base something from today’s NHL that they can point to and say “Hey, that’s because of us.”


Boston Bruins

Thank them for: Icing

This one’s a little hazy, because it goes all the way back to the 1930s. But apparently we can thank the Bruins for one of hockey’s oldest rules.

Here’s the story. In the NHL’s earliest days, there was no rule against a defending team relieving the pressure by just lofting the puck down the ice over and over. If that sounds like a problem, you agree with the Bruins, a newbie team that had been complaining about the situation since their very first home game in 1931. That came on Dec. 8, 1931, against the New York Americans, who took a 3-2 decision thanks in part to their strategy of just firing the puck down the ice whenever it was in their zone, causing frustrated Boston fans to litter the ice with garbage and bottles. The Bruins retaliated in a rematch weeks later by icing it a reported 89 times in the same game, including 42 in the first period of what ended up being a scoreless tie.

Because this was the NHL and it takes forever to make an obvious rule change, it wasn’t until 1937 that Bruins GM Art Ross finally convinced the league to pass a rule against the practice.

Ottawa Senators

Thank them for: The draft lottery

Do NHL teams tank? That depends on how you define tanking. Is it any team that goes into a season already resigned to being bad? Do they have to actively dismantle their roster? Keep key players out of the lineup? Or is it not a tank unless a team is actively throwing games? That can’t be it, because no NHL team would ever do that.

Or would they?

That’s the question that hangs over the 1992-93 Senators, thanks to owner Bruce Firestone. He reportedly made the claim after having a few pops around some local media, as revealed days later by Roy MacGregor.

The NHL investigated the claim, which was denied by everyone else involved, and ultimately didn’t find any proof it was true. Still, it quickly became clear that a lottery would be needed to avoid any future confusion over who was actually trying, and the new system was brought in for 1995. As for the Senators, drafting Alexandre Daigle with that 1993 first overall pick was probably punishment enough.

Montreal Canadiens

Thank them for: A power play goal ending a minor penalty

Sometimes you’re just too good. That was the problem for the 1950s Habs dynasty, one led by legendary names like Jean Beliveau, Rocket Richard, Doug Harvey and Boom Boom Geoffrion. They won five straight Cups, and as you might imagine given all that talent, their power play was unstoppable. A little bit too unstoppable, as it turns out.

Back in those days, a minor penalty meant a team stayed shorthanded for the full two minutes, even if their opponents scored with the man advantage. With the Habs frequently racking up two or three goals on one power play, the other teams decided they needed a change. At the 1956 board of governors meeting, the league votes five teams to one to change the rule to what we have today. I’ll let you guess which team was the one vote in favor of the status quo.
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https://theathletic.com/2145692/2020/10/20/down-goes-brown-this-is-all-your-teams-fault-eastern-conference-edition/
 
New York Rangers

Thank them for: Not being able to wave your arms around in front of a goalie like a buffoon

NHL scoring rates plummet as defense-first hockey overtakes the league, entertainment value suffers and TV ratings decline? Huh, tough one, let us think it over and maybe get back to you in two decades.

Sean Avery acts like an idiot? Yeah, we’ll have a new rule for you by tomorrow morning.

Columbus Blue Jackets

Thank them for: Netting around the rinks

A lot of these are meant to be fun. This one isn’t. In one of the most tragic incidents in modern NHL history, a young fan was struck and killed by a puck during a 2002 game in Columbus. The tragic accident led to the league making netting mandatory at each end of the rink, and despite objections at the time that they’d obscure the view of fans in the seats and watching at home, everyone got used to them almost immediately. These days, new fans probably wonder why they weren’t there all along.

Florida Panthers

Thank them for: Goalie interference review

This one’s a little questionable, since there wasn’t just one incident that led to interference reviews appearing in the rulebook. If you want a more Panther-specific option, you could go with “no pelting the other team with fake dead rats.” But I think this one applies too because while the Panthers weren’t the only team to get screwed over by a bad interference call, it’s hard to find one much worse than this.

That’s from the 2010-11 season. The NHL held out for a while after this play, but having an obvious miss happen in a big market seemed to shift the conversation. Refs immediately started calling the rule differently, and Panthers GM Dale Tallon submitted the first proposal for interference replay review in the aftermath. That idea was shot down, but by the end of the year the demand for replay review was impossible to ignore and it was only a matter of time before the rules changed.
 
Detroit Red Wings

Thank them for: The loser point

Who should we blame for the dumbest rule in the NHL? Everyone. From Gary Bettman to the GMs who could change it to the coaches who alter their strategies to the media that still lets the league get away with spouting nonsense about it, it’s a stain on the entire sport.

But who can we blame for coming up with the idea? That would apparently be Red Wings legend Jimmy Devellano.

The longtime Wings executive and former GM is the one that typically gets the credit for suggesting the NHL’s new overtime format in 1999. And at the time, it made at least a little bit of sense – teams were playing for ties in overtime, making sudden death a boring slog. Remember, this was before the shootout, so Devellano’s idea to encourage teams to go for the win had some merit. And he also got the league to adopt 4-on-4 overtime, which led to today’s 3-on-3, so if you like that then you can thank Devellano.

But yeah, that stupid loser point. Whatever sense it made in 1999 was wiped out by the shootout’s arrival and the end of ties in 2005, yet we’re still stuck with it to this day. Is that Devellano’s fault? Probably not, but like the mad scientist who sees his well-intentioned creation break free and wreak havoc, he’ll always shoulder at least some of the blame for the misery his idea has caused.

Carolina Hurricanes

Thank them for: Hybrid icing

The debate over how icing should be handled had been a constant fixture in NHL circles for decades. Some loved the excitement of an all-out race for the puck; others argued it was too dangerous, especially for the defenseman going back at full-speed with an attacker right behind him. Occasionally, someone would get hurt, and there would be renewed calls for a no-touch rule – sometimes from unlikely sources – but nothing ever changed.

The final straw came in April 2013 in Carolina, when Joni Pitkanen suffered a broken heel after going hard into the boards on an ugly icing play. The injury ended his season and, with the exception of a few games in Finland years later, his career. Calls to change the rule were immediate, and by the start of the following season we had hybrid icing in place.

New Jersey Devils

Thank them for: The trapezoid

Really, the guy to thank here is Martin Brodeur, who was apparently the inspiration for the much-maligned and vaguely confusing shape behind the net.

Brodeur wasn’t the only goalie who was good at handling the puck. Depending on who you ask, he may not even have been the best. But it’s probably fair to say that he was the most famous goalie to be really good at it, and his ability to act as a third defenseman made it all but impossible for teams to dump-and-chase against the defensively sound Devils. When the league decided to restrict goaltender puckhandling, it wasn’t hard to see who the change might be aimed at. And yes, he took it personally.
 
Pittsburgh Penguins

Thank them for: Rule 48

The NHL’s lack of action on concussions and headshots is one of the great scandals of the Bettman era, and fans and media had been calling for some sort of ban on high hits for years. But it was Matt Cooke’s blatant blindside hit on Marc Savard in 2010 that finally pushed the league into taking action.

The ugly hit essentially ended Savard’s career (he had a brief comeback attempt the following season), but it didn’t violate any rules at the time, forcing the league to reluctantly let Cooke off the hook. The GMs had already been discussing a headshot rule, but Cooke forced their hand, and they unanimously approved a change to the rulebook just weeks later. That resulted in the introduction of Rule 48, “Illegal check to the head,” and while the rule has changed over the years and still falls short of what many fans would like to see, it’s an improvement over where we were.

Washington Capitals

Thank them for: Having to expose an actual NHL goalie in the expansion draft

I’m sorry, I know this one isn’t all that important, and I know I’ve told the story plenty of times before, but it’s one of my favorites and some of you will be seeing it for the first time.

It’s 1992 and the Senators and Lightning are about to join the league. The expansion rules of the time say that each team can protect two goalies. But there’s a catch – they have to leave one goalie with NHL experience exposed. The Capitals want to keep Don Beaupre and Jim Hrivnak and expose veteran Mike Liut, but Liut catches them off-guard by retiring, and the only other goalie they have with NHL experience is prospect Olaf Kolzig. If they want to keep Beaupre, Hrivnak and Kolzig, they need to find another goalie to expose, and quickly.

So they sign a guy. Bernie Wolfe, to be specific. Wolfe had four years of NHL experience, so the Capitals signed him as their expansion offering to the two new teams.

One problem: Wolfe was retired. And had been for over a decade. He hadn’t played since the 1970s, was in his 40s, and working as a financial planner.

You see, the rule didn’t say anything about when the goalie’s NHL experience had to have happened. He just needed to have played. And Wolfe had indeed played, so the Caps argued he was a valid option.

Sadly, the NHL disagreed, ruling Wolfe ineligible and tightening up the rules. So this year, as your favorite team is obsessing over who they’ll lose to Seattle and you’re wondering if there’s any way to work around the expansion rules, thank Bernie Wolfe and the Capitals for making life more difficult.

Buffalo Sabres

Thank them for: The jersey tie-down rule

Specifically, thank Rob Ray. He wasn’t the only 1990s tough guy who figured out that wriggling out of his jersey could be an advantage in a fight. He was just the guy who perfected it, and spent way too much of his career skating around awkwardly naked from the waist up.

As weird as it will seem to modern fans, there was a time where the art of jerseying an opponent – that is, yanking their jersey over their head mid-fight – was considered part of the enforcer’s art. But guys like Ray figured out that if they didn’t wear anything underneath the jersey, their opponent would have nothing to hold onto. From there, things got kind of silly, and the league eventually mandated that everyone who fights must be wearing a tie-down, starting in 1994.

Every now and then, you’ll see a guy who doesn’t normally fight drop the gloves, get his jersey yanked over his head, and get kicked out of the game for it. Maybe you were confused by what was going on. Now you know which team, and player, you can thank.
 
Toronto Maple Leafs

Thank them for: The All-Star game

The All-Star game has been a (mostly) annual tradition since 1947. But the first one in NHL history actually came years earlier, back in 1934. The circumstances were tragic, as Maple Leafs star Ace Bailey had recently suffered a career-ending (and life-threatening) head injury on a hit by Boston’s Eddie Shore. The game between the Maple Leafs and a selection of stars from the other eight teams was held as a benefit to help pay for Bailey’s medical bills.

The game took place in front of 14,000 fans at Maple Leaf Gardens, with the Leafs winning 7-3, and raised over $20,000. One of the all-stars selected for the game was Shore himself, and he and Bailey shook hands before the game began. The NHL would hold two more benefit games, for the families of Howie Morenz in 1937 and Babe Siebert in 1939, before making the game a regular part of the league calendar.

By the way, that 1934 benefit game also marked the start of another cool tradition. It featured Bailey’s No. 6 becoming the first in NHL history to be formally retired.

New York Islanders

Thank them for: Playoff beards

There’s some dispute over which player can claim the first official playoff beard, with some saying we should credit Butch Goring, but Stan Fischler says it was Ken Morrow, so that’s good enough for me. But in terms of teams, the Islanders seem to be the undisputed trendsetter. Nobody’s been able to copy Al Arbour’s team by winning four-straight Cups, but the facial hair thing definitely stuck.
Philadelphia Flyers

Thank them for: The end of bench-clearing brawls

These days, bench-clearing brawls have essentially been eliminated from the NHL, but there was a time when they were fairly common. Then the Flyers took things too far, and the NHL had to step in.

Somewhat surprisingly, it wasn’t the 1970s Broad Street Bullies who forced the league’s hand. Instead, it was the 1987 Flyers, who teamed up with the Canadiens for one of the ugliest – and most ridiculous – brawls in modern history.

The fight came before the game had even started, touched off by Claude Lemieux’s post-warmup superstition of shooting a puck into his opponent’s empty net. It wasn’t helped by the fact that Flyers coach Mike Keenan had dressed extra players for the warmup just to make sure they’d have an advantage if trouble started. Things got so out of control that the NHL finally had to lay down the law, introducing an automatic 10-game suspension for any player who leaves the bench to join a fight. And almost overnight, the classic bench-clearer was done for.

Tampa Bay Lightning

Thank them for: Formal trade calls

Most fans know about trade calls these days. We hear about them all the time, especially at the deadline, and occasionally we even get to see one. If two teams make a trade, there’s a formal process to go through to register it with the league and make it official.

So it might surprise you to know that formal trade calls are a relatively new rule. Just a few decades ago, things were much more casual. You had to let the league know you’d made a deal, but there were different ways to make that happen, and nobody got too caught up in the details.

Two things changed that. One was the salary cap, which made it important to make sure all the numbers lined up before anything went forward. But before that, there was the Chris Gratton trade.

That came in 1997, when Gratton was a 22-year-old RFA with the Lightning. With rumors swirling of an incoming offer sheet arriving any hour, Tampa GM Phil Esposito decided to trade Gratton first. He found a partner in the Blackhawks and worked out a deal. Racing against the clock, the two teams reached out to inform the league. And that’s when it all fell apart.

According to the Hawks side of the story, GM Bob Murray called Gary Bettman. But the commissioner was on his way into a meeting, and told them to call a relatively unknown league official named Bill Daly. But Daly wasn’t answering his phone, so a frustrated Murray eventually left a message with his wife. As all this was going on, the Flyers swooped in and got Gratton’s signature on an offer sheet.

(I highly recommend this report from the Chicago Tribune that lays it all out, including the hilarious detail of spelling Daly’s name wrong throughout the entire article.)

The whole thing ended in arbitration – you history book readers might remember that this whole mess also involved Esposito claiming the offer sheet was invalid because the fax was smudged – which the Flyers eventually won. And the NHL probably decided that there should be a better process for reporting trades than leaving messages with random employee’s wives.
 
Si il joue sur le 2ieme trio et qu'il a du temps de jeu ça pourrait devenir une méchante bonne occasion d'avoir du succès a nouveau
 
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