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Playoff Special 2024
The Hockey News has been providing the most comprehensive coverage of the world of hockey since 1947. In each issue, you'll find news, features and opinions about the NHL and leagues across North America and the world.
ON THE PROWL
SAM REINHART HAS HISTORICALLY been more tortoise than hare. And before anyone takes umbrage with the comparison, let it be said this is not a comment on his ability to get up and down the ice. Sure, he’s not going to be throwing his hat in the ring to compete for the fastest-skater crown anytime soon, and his 21.9 miles-per-hour top speed is listed in the inauspicious “Below 50th” percentile in the league’s newfangled player-tracking data, but that’s only because Reinhart prefers, ahem, economy of movement. Yeah. Let’s go with that. In all seriousness, Reinhart is self-aware enough to know he’s not the quickest straight-line skater. He’s also conscious enough about his own output to know that hitting the ground running has never quite been his thing. Nine seasons into his…
BEHIND THE MASK
SURE, YOU DON’T WIN friends with salad, but what about with goalie masks? Because with Malcolm Subban’s brilliant bucket for a Springfield Thunderbirds theme night, he definitely won himself a load of new fans. As the Thunderbirds again paid homage to The Simpsons – complete with a rebranding as the Springfield Ice-O-Topes, a gag the organization began in 2019 – Subban partnered with Erich Ferguson of Resurrection Custom Painting on a mask designed around the fictional Springfield Nuclear Power Plant, featuring a yelping Homer and a mid-electrocution Bart. What sets the design apart, however, is the full nuclear-green theme throughout the mask, including the integration of a green-glowing cage and, of course, Blinky, the three-eyed and definitely-not-mutated fish. Not only did Blinky appear on the back of Subban’s helmet, but…
THE COUNTDOWN
NOTHING GOLD CAN STAY, or so it’s been said. And that’s as true as ever in the NHL’s salary-cap era. What organizations and fan bases have had to become accustomed to are the natural ebbs and flows of competitiveness. That’s what occurs when player retention is a salary-cap balancing act and pipeline building is equal parts development and – frankly – crapshoot. And if the past two decades have not entirely given birth to the concept of the Stanley Cup window, then they have, at the very least, solidified the idea that there is a limited period in which an organization will have its best opportunity at glory. That’s not to say there isn’t the odd interloper – the surprising low seed who makes a Cinderella run – but that, in…
‘GOALERS’ ARE KEY
ALTHOUGH THERE ARE ANY number of factors which enter into making a team that will be successful in the playoffs, the one that looms as the most essential is the ability of one team to keep the other off the scoreboard. In most playoff series, it is the team with the tightest defense or the hottest goaltender that emerges the victor. What about last year, you ask? Yvan Cournoyer won the Conn Smythe Trophy and was the guy that led the Canadiens to their victory. There is no way that anything can be taken away from Cournoyer’s performance, but it was goaltending that got his Montreal Canadiens into the final in the first place. It was also the inspired play of Tony Esposito that enabled the Chicago Black Hawks to defeat an aroused New…
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