On the surface, mixing lines all up works. That might have been Anaheim Coach Dallas Eakins’ lesson on Monday night with the Kings in town. His line mixing and mingling continued as it has over the past weeks, and his team won a strong 4-2 game. Look closer. The...
Most nights, hockey makes sense. The better team gets the better chances, because they generate them. The weaker team hopes to pull off a miracle. Sometimes they do it. Fans go home happy when their team is the one who does the latter. That was the LA Kings peeps on...
While everyone else was shopping, hockey fans were gathering at 1pm at Honda Center on Friday. But what’s to say about the Anaheim Ducks, who lost 3-0 during a game that’s become a local tradition? The overall message from the players and coach after? We need to...
If the Ducks were looking to respond to a three-game winless streak and an admission from their Captain, Ryan Getzlaf, that his team had quit on the game when playing the Lightning in Tampa Bay on Saturday, they didn’t do much to show it starting out their game with...
Why are the Arizona as good as they are? They’re sitting second in the Pacific Division, and they’ve got 14 more goals than they’ve given up. Their offensive total coming out of Saturday is 68 goals for. They are only middling in both PK and PP, but they have 30...
Overheard on the elevator on the way to the dressing rooms after the Kings beat the Edmonton Oilers 5-1 Thursday night at Staples Center: “I knew they [the Oilers] were sleepy on the second shift.” This from a hockey insider, and he was right. From the get-go, the...
Kyle Clifford in a cowboy hat. That’s what greeted fans on the LA Kings website Saturday, along with the announcement that it was “country Music Day.” Anything to sell tickets, I guess, but to whom? Honestly, I don't even know if there is a country music station in...
The Ducks lost to San Jose, who have now won five in a row. If you like the Ducks, that’s disappointing. But it’s not all bad. What the Ducks did right, period one: they scored early, on a pure skill goal by Rickard Rakell. He took the puck on the right side with a...
“Nobody comes to the rink to stay close or to have moral victories.” That was Todd McLellan’s pronouncement after the Kings won Tuesday night, and a good one. But that leaves a question: What’s a bad hockey team? Let’s venture some answers. One that doesn’t score...
Sloppy, sloppy, sloppy. That seemed to be the mantra of the night at the Ducks home arena on Sunday night with Edmonton in town. One indication—the number of penalties taken by both teams. The Ducks had four and the Oilers five. None were for more than two minutes. An...
If nothing-nothing can be interesting, then period one in Anaheim on Tuesday night with the Wild in town was fascinating. The Ducks have said they want to start faster. They said that Friday. They did it Sunday. They still found themselves down 2-0 to Chicago and had...
The Anaheim Ducks have played 2,000 games as a franchise. Ryan Getzlaf has appeared in exactly half of those, a record he achieved on Sunday night at home against Chicago. Memorable moments: raising the Stanley Cup after the 2006-07 season, his first full campaign. A...
As a misread metaphor, Day of the Dead (Dia de los Muertos) might have been better used for the LA Kings than the Anaheim Ducks as each team used the motif to promote its weekend games. The festival honors and celebrates the dead with “offrendas”—altars decorated to...
You might almost not recognize the Anaheim Ducks, if you dropped in from anytime around 2017 and saw them play the Vancouver Canucks Friday night at Honda Center. This in a game which came on the Mexican Day of the Dead, duly celebrated with, amongst other things, a...
Guys, guys, guys, you’ve gotta try harder, sooner. That’s the message Saint Mary’s men’s hockey coach Trevor Stienburg should have been giving his team after their 4-2 loss against Acadia on Wednesday night. His team worked the shots to 38-30, with some dangerous...
Metal pillars obstruct the views of fans. The paint peels off the back wall. The nets look like they’ve been scored upon a thousand times, so dirty is the twine. The benches are on opposite sides of the ice. That’s the Halifax Forum, a building that dates to 1927 and...
Mark it down: the first official goal scored by a Saint Mary’s University women’s hockey player at the Dauphinee Centre arena came off the stick of Kaitlin Howarth. Taylor Gravelle and Mary McDonald assisted. It happened just past two minutes into the Huskies game...
She’s used to being out front of trends. Cammi Granato was playing hockey with boys when she was a teenager back in the 1980s, because that’s where the good competition was. She was a member of the US Women’s National team which went to the first IIHF Ice Hockey...
It was a bit of a scrappy affair, a good game for John Gibson, and a more offensive game for the Ducks than the one on the night prior as they beat San Jose 4-1 on Tuesday night. There was one fight, early, but also a nasty play when Dalton Prout, one of the only two...
It was Kings-Ducks Monday night in the first Freeway Faceoff of the year at Staples Center. Well, the unofficial first. It’s not a Faceoff, official-like, until the regular season. The fans turned up in OK numbers, especially those in the upper bowl. The press box was...
Ultimately, it doesn’t matter who wins these NHL rookie tournaments. Heck, it doesn’t even matter who wins the individual games. The Ducks, for instance, went 2-0-1 in the three games of the nine-game set they played while hosting the Sharks, Kings, Avalanche, Golden...
Six teams’ worth of rookies, around 150 altogether, gathered near Anaheim the weekend of September 7-10 to contest the 2019 Anaheim Rookie Faceoff tournament at the brand new Great Park Ice and Fivepoint Arena in Irvine. The facility has four ice pads, two of which...
Not many North American fans ever saw Vaclav Nedomansky play. His career over here concluded over 35 years ago. Perhaps none saw him play in his prime, because his best days as a hockey player came under Communist rule as a citizen of Czechoslovakia, for whose...
The English Elite Ice Hockey League championship game began precisely at 4pm Nottingham time on Sunday, with the national anthem of Wales. And not “God Save the Queen” for the Northern Ireland team.What? A hockey insider I talked to said that the Giants never play an...
Championship Sunday dawned cold in Nottingham, and probably early for many fans, who had filled the pubs and clubs of the city centre the night prior. Even what looked like traditional British pubs were often turned into thumpa-thumpa noise boxes with people standing...
In the prior story, I told you about some happy and excited Nottingham and Guildford fans who talked to me Saturday morning in advance of the two semi-final games in the weekend PredictorBet EIHL Playoff Finals. Each group was charged up about their team’s prospects....
The first folks I spied when I arrived at the Motorpoint Arena in Nottingham were exactly the sort I wanted to find: passionate fans all decked out in costume, and looking unlike anything I’ve found in an NHL arena Six people, six stories. As you look at the photo...
Up at the crack of dawn, down to the Oxford train station, through Birmingham to Derby. Change of trains for the express to Nottingham. Walk to the Motorpoint Arena, a twenty-year-old facility that seats about 6500 people. Time to figure out what the heck British...
Since the 1930s, people have been playing professional ice hockey in England. It took Inside Hockey until now to decide to post someone to cover the finals of the current league, the Elite Ice Hockey League, formed in 2003. Actually, the fact that I am going to be...
Let’s not get weepy, but I’m gonna say this: had I been able to look ahead from my Montreal childhood and see myself in an NHL press box covering the game on a nightly basis, I would have thought it a dream. If only . . . . I worshipped the Canadiens, and I got to...
