I know there is a lot of posters from Canada/northern USA/Scandinavia so are you interested in hockey ? Me it's my favorite sport, on par with football if not more.

NHL 2018/2019 season starts in less than a month ! Can't wait to see the defensive prodigy Dahlin, can't wait for the Habs to finish in the bottoms and get that #1 draft pick

We're getting legit at it here, and I've played it once. Haven't really watched a lot.

Watched some Penguins games because I love that everyone hates Crosby

We had a danish players for 5-6 years, Lars Eller, i always thought he was a huge fraud for us.

Then he joined the Washington Capitals, who surround him with better teammates and he became a clutch player there in playoffs. He won the Stanley Cup last june, the first from Denmark as far as i remember.

Love Crosby but currently the best player is arguably Connor McDavid

Scoring leaders the past two seasons

82 Ovetchkin
80 Laine
79 Kucherov
75 Malkin

Can't wait to see 20 year old Laine in action, maybe even in first line duty.  

Laine puts 5 past Blues, the first one to do so since 2011.  After a slow start suddenly leads NHL in goal scoring with 19, and the past 3 seasons with 99. Oh yeah and he's still 20 years old.

Three finns and a dane.

Our new stud, also from Finland

Elite hockey IQ, will be so good in 2 years, only needs to muscle up and get used to smaller ice rinks

Yeah, he should hire the same physique coach that Laine and Rantanen has. Rantanen's physique has absolutely exploded.

One of the NHL records Laine set last night, that probably wont ever be matched: three hat-tricks in three different countries, in a month.

Laine (20.222) became the 4th youngest ever to reach 100 NHL goals, after Gretzky (20.40), Jimmy Carson (20.116) and Brian Bellows (20.179). Adjusting the era he was the fastest.

Leads scoring since entering the league as 18 year old.



And if you want one statistic that shows how good he's scoring goals, here's era adjusted first three seasons. Laine was 4 months younger, and still has 58 games in hand.

We all know McDavid is the top phenom in that age group but Laine is just by far the best natural goalscorer I have seen since Ovechkin.

He will regress soon of course but develop a lot more in his arsenal, respectively.

McDavid is the fastest skater i've ever seen. He also got all the skills of a generational player. Sadly the Oilers will ruin his career at this rate, trash organization led by dumb persons.

Agreed about the Laine-Ovechkin comparison. In fact the McDavid-Laine debate reminds me a lot of the early Crosby-Ovechkin rivalry from a decade ago. It's very similar, the sole difference is that Laine got a serious chance of winning the Stanley Cup within the next 3 years. Jets have a solid team in all aspects.

Oilers are quite simply a loser team. Will lose on purpose just to win the draft round pick and of course played their cards well. They need to be dissolved and are dead as the city they are based in.

Laine is the best goalscorer but in terms of raw talent and ceiling McDavid is so far above the rest its not even funny.

Personally rate Matthews as the 2nd best talent.

McDavid is electric to watch in person. When I saw him play live last year, I was in awe.

He's rapid. He has that ability where the second he's on the puck you know something is gonna happen. Mind you, he's doing all of this with a crappy team headed by management who traded Hall for Larsson LOL.

Hall vs Larsson
Eberle vs Strome
signing that *bleep* Lucic on a 7 year contract/42 M$
meanwhile they can't find a proper 1st goalie

Chiarelli is easily the worst GM in the league, the real-life example of a cpu-GM that you can scam in your career mode on PlayStation

even traded Tyler Seguin and got some 3rd liners in return
even traded Blake Wheeler and got Rich Peverley in return

I don't follow the Red Wings all that close (I'm more a Blackhawks fan, but I don't follow them much either), but what I do know is that our crown jewel is Dylan Larkin, who isn't a top 100 player. I used to live in his hometown of Waterford when I first moved to Metro Detroit.

The Red Wings are far from what they used to be though. They've been putrid these last few seasons.

Larkin is a top 6 forward in any team across the league. Mantha is legit but he lacks grit. I'd also take Athanasiou in my team, i like fast skaters in a bottom line role.

Red Wings decline is due to being complacent, they thought their top guys would play forever. Now they all retired and there's not much left. At least you had 2-3 dynasties in a row that lasted 25 years and a couple of Cups on the side, not bad.

Yeah the coach that took them all the way to the top is now doing it in Toronto with that kid Matthews who is looking like the next big thing alongside McDavid. Not even mad though. The Maple Leafs are long overdue for an upward trend.

https://www.nhl.com/news/seattle-nhl-expansion-approved-to-be-32nd-team-play-in-2021-22/c-302581450

Next new team is coming from Seattle.

Good news, Seattle is a very good market for sports and it will establish a rivalry with Vancouver. Should have been done earlier. What could be a good name for them ? Those suggestions i read were mehhh

32 is the perfect amount of teams for this league. Now with 16 teams in both conference, Bettman is happy, maybe he'll consider making relocalization instead of expansion. It's time to move shit franchises to other places with more potential of success: Carolina -> Quebec and Arizona -> Houston

Movie about Bob Probert releases this weekend which should be interesting.

Freeza wrote:We're getting legit at it here

Yesterday's game in junior World Cup

14
0

And our team isn't that stacked compared to previous editions

Probably the score would be the other way around in a football match tho

That was some game, Finland ties last minute from behind the net, in overtime Canada misses a penalty shot and have an empty net but the player's stick breaks on the shot, and then Finland eliminates Canada on the counterattack.

1
2

I believe that's the first time Canada is out before semi-finals on their home soil.

Literally the only time i feel patriotic about my country is during the world juniors or the hockey tournament in olympics. What a way to end a match !

They sell those damn high-performance sticks 200$-300$ only to shit in your hands when you need it the least

Thanks to our GK we could reach the overtime but in the end we couldn't escape our faith. To be honest, i didn't have so high expectations for this team. Probably our worst squad on paper in last decade or so. Finland were just better overall, congrats and good luck.

My biggest interest this year was scouting on Habs prospects Josh Brook and Ylonen, both doing fine.

Warrior wrote:They sell those damn high-performance sticks 200$-300$ only to shit in your hands when you need it the least

Yeah I've one too, although haven't been able to break it yet. There's unbreakable stick Colt or something but don't know if it's used in NHL.

Never heard of it. If truly unbreakable the stick must lack some flex tho and just big defenders would use it. But i mean, what are the chances that this happen in such situation in OT

Some would say it's bad luck but i'd say we dig our own grave. The 14-0 got us overconfident and the coach was terribly disconnected and stubborn. Definitely rooting for now, you guys are the last rampart vs evil.