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December 4, 2017
Get ready for our Blueline Blowout edition! We’re featuring the best D-men from around the NHL, from Erik Karlsson to Brent Burns to Victor Hedman to Kris Letang to Ivan Provorov to Jones & Werenski to the entire Hurricanes corps. Plus, on the 25th anniversary of the film, we have an oral history of The Mighty Ducks!
SKY HIGH
JAKE DOTCHIN DESCRIBES THE incident as follows: It’s a practice day for the Tampa Bay Lightning in late October, one that always ends with a shootout when it’s the day before a game. It’s Victor Hedman’s turn for a breakaway, but his teammates decide, nah, he doesn’t get to shoot this time. They block him from trying, exclude him from the game and tell him, “You’re done. You’re not going today.” Hedman throws a little fit. He starts sabotaging the other players’ breakaways. He blasts pucks at Braydon Coburn during his attempt. Then Hedman hurls his stick into the boards and skates away. Hey, NHL? We have a problem to report. There’s a 6-foot-6, 223-pound bullying victim playing defense for the Tampa Bay Lightning. His name is Victor Hedman. Please send…
THE MIGHTY DUCKS
TWENTY-FIVE YEARS AGO, IN October 1992, The Mighty Ducks flew into movie theaters and changed hockey forever. The film hatched two sequels and had an NHL team named after it, all in a five-year span. Terms from The Mighty Ducks like the “Flying V” and the “Triple Deke” became part of the game’s cultural lexicon. A few years before all of that happened, though, it was just an idea, flapping around the mind of an unemployed screenwriter. In the late 1980s, Steven Brill started working on a script for a hockey movie. He combined his memories of playing hockey as a child, his renewed interest in the game after Wayne Gretzky was traded to the Los Angeles Kings, and his love for the film The Bad News Bears. STEVEN BRILL, SCREENWRITER (AND…
MIND OVER MATTER
ALAN HEPPLE HAS A joke about Cale Makar: “Can he play defense?” said Colorado’s director of amateur scouting. “I don’t know – he always has the puck.” Makar was drafted fourth overall by the Avalanche in 2017 and, as Hepple explains, it was a no-hesitation pick for his franchise. Now a freshman at UMass-Amherst, Makar made a name for himself in the Alberta Jr. A League last year with the Brooks Bandits, then saw his stock shoot up after a record-setting performance at the World Jr. A Challenge. The blueliner is a great skater who moves the puck fast and thinks the game quickly. Makar is 5-foot-11 and 180 pounds, playing a position that traditionally was the domain of 6-foot-4 beasts who easily eclipsed the 200-pound mark. What if Makar had…
BLOOD BROTHERS
THE PUCK SNAPPED OFF the stick, rose from the ice, and struck hard under the visor. As he crumpled in a heap, swallowed by a pain unlike any he had ever known, the young phenom thought… what, exactly? This, even Zach Werenski isn’t sure. It was Game 3 of the Columbus Blue Jackets’ first-round series against the Pittsburgh Penguins last spring, and Werenski had reached to challenge a Phil Kessel shot from the slot. As Werenski’s blade met Kessel’s at the point of release, the puck leapt upward and rocketed along the shaft of Werenski’s stick, its forward momentum halted only by his right orbital bone and eye socket. For Werenski, darkness. His world went black, his ears grew deaf with ringing. There was no shock, no brief reprieve from agony. Only pain,…
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