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Philadelphia Flyers Cannot Regret Trading Mike Richards and Jeff Carter: Fan's Reaction (Yahoo! Contributor Network)

The day of June 23, 2011 seemed like any other relatively normal early-summer day. It was sunny. It was warm. It was welcoming. It wasn't for Mike Richards and Jeff Carter, whom the Philadelphia Flyers dealt to the Los Angeles Kings and Columbus Blue Jackets respectively, and reshaped their entire franchise in one fell swoop. Now come the complaints from many Flyers fans who say the team made the wrong moves at the wrong times, as Richards and Carter find themselves four games away from doing something they couldn't do in Philadelphia: hoist a Stanley Cup.

 

Marek Vs. Wyshynski Radio: Ron Hextall, Luke Richardson and Rangers/Devils (Puck Daddy)

It's a Thursday edition of Marek vs. Wyshynski beginning at 2 p.m. ET/11 a.m. PT , and we're talking about the following and more: Special Guest Stars: Los Angeles Kings assistant GM and former Philadelphia Flyers great Ron Hextall joins us, as well as former NHL defenseman and new B-Sens coach Luke Richardson. • In which Marek and Wysh break down Game 5 of the Devils/Rangers series, • The politics of viewing parties. • Conn Smythe Watch. • Puck Headlines and Talking Points Question of the Day: Who on your team could you see foolishly issuing a 'playoff guarantee'? Email your answers to puckdaddyblog@yahoo.com or tweet them with the hashtag #MvsW to either @jeffmarek or @wyshynski . Click here for the Sportsnet live stream or click the play button above! Click here to download podcasts from the show each day Subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or Feedburner .

 

In which Dustin Penner, Jeff Carter and Mike Richards edit their NHL narratives (Puck Daddy)

Why are the Los Angeles Kings in the 2012 Stanley Cup Final? Because the two drunk, locker room cancers helped set up a lazy fat-ass for the game-winning goal. At least that's how it would have been framed about eight months ago, when the narratives about Mike Richards, Jeff Carter and Dustin Penner had defined them as players. The first two were banished from the Philadelphia Flyers, ostensibly for cap relief in the pursuit of a No. 1 goaltender (or, failing that, Ilya Bryzgalov) but mostly for a culture change in the dressing room. Penner, meanwhile, was (a) a waste of salary compared to production and (b) out of shape and (c) lazy to the point where his general manager suggested he might be better off playing for the El Cid Lounge in a men's softball league . In overtime of Game 5 in the Western Conference Final on Tuesday night, Richards won the faceoff near the defensive zone. Slava Voynov moved it up the boards, and Penner kept the puck alive in the attacking zone on the forecheck, sending a nifty backhand pass to a streaking Carter. He fired the puck off of Phoenix Coyotes goalie Mike Smith with Richards causing chaos on front of the net, helping to clear the slot for Penner to fire home the rebound over Smith's glove. With that, the Kings were headed to the Cup Final. This trio was maligned and decried for the better part of 2011-12. Yet it was this Dry Island of Misfit Toys that has the Kings four wins away from the first Stanley Cup.

 

Stanley Cup Playoff overtimes: Historically, when are goals most likely to be scored? (Puck Daddy)

The Los Angeles Kings did some unpredictable things, statistically speaking, en route to making the Stanley Cup Final: Like going 8-0 on the road, nearly having as many shorthanded goals (5) as power-play goals (6) and beating the top three seeds in the conference. Dustin Penner's Western Conference Final-winning goal was no exception. Pancakes scored at 17:42 of the first and only overtime, and according to the history of Stanley Cup Playoff overtime, that's an exception to the expected. Chris Winchester, a Detroit Red Wings for 35 years and a PD reader, put together a spreadsheet that looked at when goals were scored in playoff overtimes going back to expansion in 1968. From Winchester: I always had the feeling that most overtimes ended in the first 5 minutes or so of overtime.  After compiling the data for every playoff overtime game it turns out that over 40 percent of overtime games ended in the first five minutes of the extra period. I did not calculate the fact that the game may have ended in the 2nd or 3rd overtime, just the time the goal was scored during the extra period. In other words, the following chart doesn't account for in which overtime the goal was scored, but rather when in that overtime it was scored. Via Winchester, the numbers; click here for the much larger, clearer image. Again, take a gander at the full chart here . A few thoughts on this chart …

 

Zach Parise finally rewarded for offensive efforts as Devils knock off Rangers (Yahoo! Sports)

New Jersey's captain had been frustrated by New York goalie Henrik Lundqvist, but broke out with a big game to tie the East final series 2-2.

 

What We Learned: Embarrassing LA sports media moments while covering Kings playoff run (Puck Daddy)

Hello, this is a feature that will run through the entire season and aims to recap the weekend's events and boils those events down to one admittedly superficial fact or stupid opinion about each team. Feel free to complain about it. It's possibly the greatest bit of investigative journalism conducted since Woodward and Bernstein brought down Richard Nixon. This exemplary, collective effort of sleuth work is currently ongoing in Los Angeles, Calif., where an entire media market has unearthed the NHL's shocking secret: The city has a professional hockey team. Over the past week or so here at Puck Daddy, we've tried to document every startling discovery made by the intrepid Los Angeles media, like how to properly pronounce Anze Kopitar's name (it's hard because he's from Bosnia or something), the real name of this Drew Doughty character ( it's actually Brad !) and that hockey is in fact not played with a ball, but rather a little piece of rubber known as a "puck." That last one makes me pretty uncomfortable because of the word it rhymes with. ("Duck" — sorry, I just don't trust 'em; they have weird beaks). Just how villainous is this team, operating as a sort of sporting sleeper cell? They got all the way to the Western Conference Finals without one local noticing. That takes real criminal talent. And not only that, but, the NHL had the diabolical idea to hide it right under the Los Angelinos' noses, by having their home games played at the Staples Center. You know, where the Lakers play. Further, they named the team the Kings to intentionally confuse even the savviest media organization into thinking they are the NBA's Sacramento Kings. Astonishingly devious stuff. More twists and turns than the Da Vinci Code, which I've read three times just to make sure I understood it all. The best bit of this journalism on this pressing issue comes, of course, from the city's paper of record, the Los Angeles Times, winner of 44 Pulitzer Prizes since 1942, including three in 2012. It was for that towering beacon of journalistic excellence that columnist Chris Erskine successfully scruted several of the team and sport's most inscrutable mysteries . For instance, that thing I said earlier about the puck (again, yuck… oh and that's another gross word it rhymes with), I learned it from Erskine. Apparently they even freeze the thing. And that's a huge point of concern, because, "The hardest shots can reach 110 mph and tear flesh, crush bone, even kill you if you're not careful." Yikes, you guys! ( Coming Up: Rick Nash to Boston?; Tororella defends Prust; Ryan Suter faces his future; Evegni Malkin is having a pretty good season; why Lundqvist is King; why the Capitals can't win with Ovechkin; the Islanders know how to party; Canucks might keep Luongo; Ryan Miller on the CBA; Flames and Oilers coaching news; and are the Kings in trouble?)

 

Coyotes live to fight another day in NHL series (AFP)

The Phoenix Coyotes weren't about to go quietly into the night as long as captain Shane Doan had a say in the matter.

 

Brandon Prust of Rangers suspended for Game 4 after elbow on Devils’ Anton Volchenkov (Puck Daddy)

New Jersey Devils Coach Pete DeBoer called Rangers forward Brandon Prust's Game 3 elbow against defenseman Anton Volchenkov "headhunting … plain and simple." New York Rangers Coach John Tortorella called Prust an "honest player" and inferred that Volchenkov sold the incident. Prust himself said "it wasn't vicious at all," while Volchenkov said it was "pretty dirty." The NHL Department of Player Safety? It determined it was worth a one-game suspension for Prust, who will miss Monday's Game 4 of the Eastern Conference final in Newark: The incident occurred at 2:31 of the second period. There was no penalty called on the play. As the video shows, Prust flailed out his arm to clip Volchenkov in the head after the Devils defenseman spun away from a check. That fact that there was no injury on the play and that Prust has no prior interaction with Brendan Shanahan and the Department of Player Safety might make a one-game suspension in the Eastern Conference final seem severe. But Shanahan and the NHL have sent a message twice about this kind of hit, with this type of result.

 

NHL Coyotes avoid elimination by beating Kings (AFP)

Shane Doan scored twice and Mike Smith posted this third shutout of the post-season as the Phoenix Coyotes staved off elimination from the Stanley Cup playoffs by beating Los Angeles 2-0 on Sunday.

 

All-Star Giroux headlines 5 Flyers needing surgery (The Associated Press)

PHILADELPHIA (AP) All-Star forward Claude Giroux headlines a list of five Philadelphia Flyers who needed offseason surgery.