AJgoal

I was joking about taking the C from Giroux and giving it to Coots. Also:

He won't. He's going to Minny.

6-2. Hope the Hawks can keep this up in the short series.

Sorry. I forget.

Strip G of the C and give it to Couturier.

Huh. Jagr captain of the Pens, and Fat Balloon was on the Pens...

SO I put on the 5OT game. First thing I notice: Pens are wearing whites AT HOME! Why did that go away? Second thing: Why does the Flyers' 10 best games DVD have the national broadcast as the audio? The best part of this game is Dornhoeffer yelling "Thank God it's over!" at the end.

Somehow there is not a single game with Lindros in it from the DVD set (It does include the 5OT game, but he was still out at that point).

I have the "greatest games" DVD set. Might toss one of those on later.

I'm in the same boat. I was afraid that the "bias for action" mandate would have resulted in some early moves that didn't happen. That's resulted in some of those youngsters having positive impacts on the team.

Watching this right now:

I disagree with this here. Hextall wan't a buyer in trades given the team circumstances, but off the top of my head he shipped out Grossman and Pronger's contract for a pick and Gagner; Lecavalier and Schenn for Weal and a pick; Hartnell for Umberger; Coburn for a first and Gudas; Timonen for two seconds; Schenn for two firsts and Lehterrible... There are some great moves in there, which doesn't really point to teams not wanting to work with him.

Still hard to say. The Hayes signing could look great if they win the Cup in the next few years, or bad if they don't and it causes cap issues down the line. With a stagnant cap, that's still a concern. As @Podein25 said, though, it's hard to argue with the on-ice result so far. That said, the health issues for Patrick and Lindblom seriously impacted what they're going to have to spend this offseason to keep them, and they might have been in cap trouble already had they not cropped up. I was critical of the Niskanen move, but it seems to have worked out well. He rebounded quite well this season, and helped Provorov elevate his game. They did run up against some in-season cap issues though, where that retained money on Gudas might have been useful. The Braun trade is fairly meh to me, Braun's been fine, but I think you could have done the same with a couple of the low-priced FAs out there. One nice thing about Fletcher is that he hasn't taken too long to address his own mistakes. Like his signing Stewart, it didn't take too long to get rid of him. He was very willing to rotate LV guys in and out until he found the right fits. I still don't like the Simmonds move, even though Hartman netted us Pitlick, who has been useful on the 4th line. Fletcher had offers with better draft capital on the table by his own admission, but went for the package with a player in it because he wanted a player back. I also have to say that the culture around the team seems improved, and that's reflective of Fletcher, and can't be dismissed. Part of that has to do with the coach - AV has been excellent, but it all starts at the top. He deserves credit for that.

Yes. I also felt the same about the Price contract. When it comes to it, if that's what it takes to get Hart under contract, I'd be more inclined to let him go. Goalies can absolutely have the biggest impact game to game of any player on your team. The problem is that goes both ways. You can overcome a skater having a bad game or a bad series. A goalie is much, much tougher.

If Gallant is available, I think he's the pick. Babcock doesn't seem like he'd be a fit for that front office. They're heavily analytics-driven, I just can't see him going there.

My biggest issue is that Grant and Thompson in particular look slow. There's not much "bring it" you can bring to make up for that. And you're killing the potential contributions of guys like Farabee and NAK. I feel like as constructed, they built two fourth lines. Were it me, and the final 12 guys were coming out of the 13 that played on Tuesday, I'd roll: G - Coots - Jake Farabee - Hayes - Konecny JVR - Laughton - NAK Raffl - Grant - Pitlick

He did have two knee surgeries (One in-season, one during the pause), might have had something to do with it. The bottom six worries me if they roll with Grant, Raffl, Pitlick, and Thompson. Those two lines really didn't look good to me last night. The main good plays I saw came from the two youngsters playing on the 4th. The top two lines though, looked ready to go, and even the 3 guys rotating on the 3rd pair looked better than fine. I do think AV is planning on rotating guys around at the bottom of the depth chart during the RR, so some changes may be coming, though.

The thing about that second play though, was that Zamula recognized his error and went right to work minimizing the damage. If I remember that play correctly, the cycle died shortly after he threw that check.

I thought he had a couple of good forecheck shifts, particularly late in the 2nd. But it seemed like he and Farabee were swapping for eachother all game, meaning they each had ~7 shifts off between each on ice shift. Tough to get anything going that way.

But him being a first round pick makes it more important for the Flyers to concentrate on him. Losing Kalnyuk sucks, because he was progressing nicely and he definitely might have a decent NHL career, but the Flyers hadn't invested a ton of asset value into him. Losing York would be monumental. The Flyers will work much harder to ensure that doesn't happen than they likely did for Kalnyuk. They also have three more years, which would put Ghost in his 30s and likely gone, even if he isn't an offseason casualty this year or at the expansion draft, the old vets will be gone, so there's a much more plausible route to the NHL for York in a couple years than there was for Kalnyuk this year.

The fact that it's the Pittsburgh local telecast

Also, I have no idea how Laughton got that puck up that far that tight.