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...
Just when you think there’s nothing much to see at the LA Kings’ game, pow! They pop two power play goals in the first four-plus minutes against Chicago. Chicago. One of the reasons fans braved the weather and turned up (OK, it’s not a blizzard, but the rain does tend...
It never really hit me how much hockey has changed until seeing the Golden Knights, and their fans, at Honda Center in Anaheim for a Friday night contest. Now, don’t mistake this: I’ve been to Vegas to see a game. It was a spectacle. Frankly, a ridiculous one. Perhaps...
Everyone in the southern part of the state knew he was going to do it. Sunday night, and then again Monday. Who? What? Ovechkin, whose one-timer from the left dot on the power play simply can’t be stopped. Sunday in Anaheim, he blasted one that literally went through...
The real story of Sunday night in Anaheim had nothing to do with the future Hall of Famer on the ice, playing with Washington, and everything to do with a four-time Cup winner on defense whose #27 was being retired by the Ducks. Scott Niedermayer’s sweater will now...
The LA Kings held in tough against the Boston Bruins on Saturday night as the Kings celebrated Chinese Heritage Night. The guys from Beantown were fresh off a win against the Ducks a day prior. The Kings had faced Vancouver on Thursday and salvaged a point for a...
Boston doesn’t do warmups like most clubs. Two features stood out before their game against the Ducks Friday night: Brad Marchand, at one point, directed traffic as to who could shoot and when. At another point, the Bruins lined up on either side of the zone and...
A shakeup never hurts, right? (Unless it’s the Northridge Quake. Oh, that was bad. But I’m talking about hockey here in LA. The Kings, in particular.) With Vancouver coming in off a 1-0 loss to the Ducks a night ago, the Kings, who last lost to Washington but played...
The Vancouver Canucks came into Anaheim Wednesday night with not-unreasonable hopes for the playoffs. They were two points behind Minnesota in the wildcard race, though they were a mediocre 4-4-2 in their last ten contests. They had also lost their prior game, 7-2 to...
The last time the masses assembled in Anaheim for an NHL game, the Ducks stunk up the arena with a 13-shot debacle which was the second game of a seven-game losing streak extending to the present. What? You’ve heard that they’re lost something like 20 games, right?...
Bob Murray is in deep, and he knows it. The tone—hesitant—and the answers—inconsistent—of his conference call Sunday afternoon said as much. Here’s a sample of some of his answers, offered as a mix of transcribed quotes and paraphrases. The main themes seemed to be...
Having survived an almost epic losing streak, a run so bad that the GM had to publically say that the coach would not be fired as a result, the Ducks picked up a couple of victories before losing one to the Islanders on the weekend. But they were a chastened bunch, a...
The Kings have to win twenty-five more games to wind up with 94 points. They have only thirty-two games to do that in. That’s the math. Now, you probably don’t want to hear about that for one of two reasons. First, you’re from away and don’t care how this team is...
Back-to-back. You’re supposed to be tired, especially if your arms are weak from raising them on seven goal celebrations. But the Penguins were anything but that way in the early going on Saturday night. They came out in Los Angeles pretty much as they’d left Anaheim...
This was going to be a happy story. It was going to start out this way: “The Ducks were never as bad as their recent record showed,” and then go on to talk about how a big win against the Penguins changed everything for the team, who can now go on the road with...
Exactly the same lineup, save for one defenseman. Even the same goalie. How cheeky is that of Ottawa coming off the first half of a back-to-back? Maybe they figured what worked down the road in Anaheim would work in downtown LA. Maybe they were making a comment on...
