Bruins Rebuild?

In an article posted on NBCSports.com today, it seems as if the Boston Bruins are going through a transition period in the upcoming season. Now this doesn't mean that they will be a cellar team, however, because of the recent roster movement, and ages of some remaining top players, the big bad Bruins may not be so big and bad this coming up season.

After missing the playoffs last season, the Bruins faithful will start to get restless if their team misses the playoffs yet again. Being in a town known for championship titles in its four major sports, even though some may or may not have cheated to win them (cough Patriots cough), these fans expect nothing but to win and win now.

Two seasons since their last Stanley Cup Final run, lets take a look at who remains on this Bruins roster from that team of two seasons ago. Just six players remain from that team. Of those six, Torey Krug, Brad Marchand, and Tuukka Rask will be the only players under the age of 30 by the end of the upcoming season. Tenured Captain, Zdeno Chara, is now 38 this year and his time in the league is running out.

That being said, this is still a talented core group of veteran players who can still get the job done and should not be taken lightly. Time will tell if the aging Bruins still can compete with the youth movement in the NHL, but for now, we will see if they can squeak back into the playoff picture once again this season.

NHL Realignment Solves A Lot Of Logistic Issues

After much speculation, the NHL has finalized a plan for realignment that will go into effect next season. While nothing can be absolutely perfect, the new setup of the league will benefit a lot of teams when it comes to travel and developing natural rivals.

Two of the biggest winners will be the Detroit Red Wings and Columbus Blue Jackets, who will move into the Eastern Conference. For teams in the state of Michigan and Ohio, it made very little logistical sense to spend so much time on the other side of the country.

The Winnipeg Jets, Minnesota Wild and Dallas Stars will also benefit from being able to stay closer to home in their new division. Those three teams will now be competing against teams in St. Louis, Nashville, Denver and Chicago.

Perhaps the only two teams that really seem to lose out on the realignment are the Florida Panthers and Tampa Bay Lightning. They will be in a division with three Canadian teams along with Buffalo, Boston and Detroit. It is hard to make everyone happy, and no matter who the Florida teams play, they would have to travel to make things work.

Besides saving on travel, the benefits of realignment will help not only strengthen current rivalries, but build new ones as well. Detroit is back in the Eastern Conference, and they will square off against old rivals such as Toronto, Boston and Montreal throughout the year. New teams such as Columbus will also get to build rivalries with teams close by, such as the Pittsburgh Penguins.

With negativity still surrounding the NHL after the lockout, the realignment plan is welcomed good news. Fans, players, fantasy hockey players and owners all are mostly satisfied with the results. If the NHL does in fact expand to 32 teams in the future, the two conferences can be evened out again as well.

Don't be that guy - Torts unloads on reporter for having cell phone on

The ongoing joke during the Stanley Cup Playoffs has been the Rangers head coach John Tortorella and how short his press conferences have been. As a person that been to a few post-game press conferences – sometimes the coaches just don’t want to talk to the media nor are they in any mood to answer questions from the media jackals.

Don’t be that guy – you also don’t want to be the person that has forgotten to turn off his cell phone. You might do it once but you probably won’t ever do it again.

Dave Stubbs, National Post --- “Typical New York,” veteran New York journalist Stan Fischler said Sunday with a laugh.

Next to this lunacy, Tortorella is just a cloudburst whose 15-second, syllable-short news conferences add to this season’s delicious drama on Broadway.

Torts’s act is well known in hockey, fittingly showbiz in the world’s headquarters of the theatre as his team prepares to face the New Jersey Devils Monday in Game 1 of the Eastern Conference final.

The coach’s shtick probably is carefully crafted to take heat off his team, give the opponent as little information as possible and keep the media off balance. It quickly wears thin with many and is viewed as disrespectful not just of reporters, but of the many great communicative coaches who have gone before him.

Predictably, Torts’s players will tell you they respect their leader who will go to the wall for them. And his results —the Rangers now eight victories from a Stanley Cup championship — speak for themselves.

I have to give Torts credit, he is very entertaining and a lot of fun to watch in the post game press conferences that they show on NBCSN and a lot of what he says can’t be said on TV without being bleeped out, but It makes for good theater. I also think it might be a tactic and maybe his antics do take the heat off of his team when they lose.

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Leave the game alone – Part Deux

There seems to be a lot of discussion on what would open up the game of hockey. Some want to get rid of shot blocking; others want to limit the number of players that can line up in front of their goal. Some have suggested that the size of the goalie equipment is making goal scoring hard. Now Rangers head coach John Tortorella has chimed in, Torts would like to see the return of the “red line.” I think that is a horrible idea and would really slow down the game of hockey.

Mark Everson and Brett Cyrgalis --- “To me, I think they need to put the red line back in,” Tortorella said yesterday as his team prepares for Game 1 of its Eastern Conference final matchup against the Devils tonight at Madison Square Garden.

“Look at the puck possession teams,” Tortorella said, “they’re out.”

Coming out of the lockout in 2005, the NHL made it legal to make a two-line pass, meaning coming from out of one’s zone, behind the blue line, a pass could be made to a player beyond the center-ice line, the so-called red line. It was a pass that used to be illegal, immediately blowing the play dead.

The new rule was designed to open up the game, and if it did for a while, the way teams have adapted is by playing tighter in their own zone.

“Because it’s a game of ping-pong,” Tortorella said. “The game is a long pass, forecheck, defend. Another long pass, forecheck, defend.”

With a history of fines for criticizing the league, Tortorella then looked at the NHL representative in the room and added, “I better just leave it at that.”

I like the way the NHL is currently run, albeit the officiating would be a little more consistent during the playoffs but the NHL is comprised of the best players in the game of hockey and you’re not always going to have a 8-7 game, some games are going to be 2-1, 1-0, 0-0… I have no idea what bringing back the red line is going to do but slow the game down more and give us more unnecessary whistles and stoppages. Please leave the game of hockey alone.

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