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2025-26 NHL Miscellaneous Thread

Vancouver interviewed former Senators GM Pierre Dorian for their vacant GM position. Isn’t he the guy that bungled a trade and cost the Senators a fine and draft pick?
 
Vancouver interviewed former Senators GM Pierre Dorian for their vacant GM position. Isn’t he the guy that bungled a trade and cost the Senators a fine and draft pick?
Seriously. What does Kevyn Adams have to do? He built a division winning lineup while working for a psychotic ownership group who barely scraped together an AHL budget for front office staff. And yet every team seems to want to fill their GM openings with people who are proven idiots.
 
Almost forgot … congrats to Montreal for winning Game 7 and getting Tampa out of the playoffs. This is the third year in a row that Tampa has been bounced in the first round and it feels like their Cup window is pretty well shut. They’re still dangerous though, so it’s a big step for this young Montreal team to get the job done. It wasn’t easy either.

Oh, and winning a Game 7 with 9 freaking shots is the kind of thing that gives your fans the shakes.

For Tampa, they got a ton out of Raddysh this season but he was a non factor in the playoffs. Nothing in his career would make you think his season is repeatable, so maybe he just made their off season a lot easier. Hagel and Guentzel carried their weight in the series, but 1 goal from Kucherov and 1 freaking point from … ummm … Point ain’t gonna win them any series. Not the way this team is built. And yes, they missed Hedman but he was basically MIA for the entire season anyway.

Not sure where they go from here, but they got the bounce back Vezina season from Vasilevskiy and still didn’t win their Division or get out of the first round. They have a modest $13 mil or so in Cap space but have to find another budget option to back up Hedman on D, McDonagh will be 37 next year and none of their in-season tweaks made any difference at all. They’ve got Kucherov signed for one more season, so you’d assume that they’ll suck it up and figure out how to reset for another run at it with the core next season. But it gets more difficult to see the path every year at this point.
 
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DPOS has pretty much stuck in the 1-3 game range all season, for stuff that you’d expect to get 5 games or more. They CLEARLY have instructions from the league exec suite to do that, even though I guess nobody’s allowed to say it out loud.
 
Oh, also … something is going on with the linesmen. Anaheim got screwed by a ridiculous icing waive off last night and there were at least two in Canes/Flyers Game 2 that were waived off for no logical reason. Plus, at least two more were called that were clearly touched up by the offending team. One got waived off after Carolina loudly protested and I honestly can’t remember ever seeing that in the playoffs. Regular season, sure … but this stuff matters guys, so maybe start paying attention to your actual jobs.
 
I've completely given up trying to understand the current NHL icing rules. I mean, I understand the rules as written (at least I THINK I do), but then almost every game you see a scenario play out where clearly the rule as not correctly applied, likely due to the linesmen just not seeing things correctly.

I've chalked it all up to it being very hard to actually make that judgement call in real time at ice level. It's a lot easier to question icing calls (who won the race?, did he make the line?, was that actually deflected?) when you are sitting up higher and can really see everything.
 
I've completely given up trying to understand the current NHL icing rules. I mean, I understand the rules as written (at least I THINK I do), but then almost every game you see a scenario play out where clearly the rule as not correctly applied, likely due to the linesmen just not seeing things correctly.

I've chalked it all up to it being very hard to actually make that judgement call in real time at ice level. It's a lot easier to question icing calls (who won the race?, did he make the line?, was that actually deflected?) when you are sitting up higher and can really see everything.
Sure. I get that stuff though. Judgement calls are tough and a lot of this stuff is bang/bang. I’ve got a lot of grace for those. What I’m seeing though are egregious misses. Stray passes from way down near the defensive dots that don’t get touched by anybody are getting waived off if a defenseman makes a slightly awkward turn to go retrieve the thing. It’s like the league sent a memo to “make sure there’s effort to retrieve” to a bunch of guys who are too stupid not to take it too far. In fact, I suspect that’s EXACTLY what happened
 
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