Running NHL 2023-24 regular season thread

I'm good with this as a Kings fan. The team has bottomed out after a great start.
GM Rob Blake may be next, especially after making what looks like a disastrous trade and extension for Pierre-Luc Dubois and his failure to get a No. 1 goalie (although that hasn't been the issue this season as Cam Talbot and David Rittich have held their own).
I don't know anything about Hiller. They need a coach to come in and kick their asses like Darryl Sutter did in 2012 when they won their first Cup.

 

NHL back in Olympics for 2026, 2030.

 

I'm sure this has nothing to do that we're done with Winter Olympics on the wrong side of the International Date Line for probably at least 15 years. (2026 is in Italy, it looks like 2030 is in France, 2034 in SLC and maybe back to Europe again in 2038).

 

If you had told me that the Caps could win the Stanley Cup in 2018 but they'd not win another playoff series after that for a decade, I would have taken the deal. Good thing, because the team is in shambles and I can't see them making the playoffs this year or next. Oh, and Ovechkin's not breaking the record. I didn't expect him to crumble this like so quickly, but it's happening. Still 64 goals away. Too many. That was the only allure of this iteration of the Caps, watching him chase the record. And that's pretty much dead.

 

I saw he got his tenth last night and as someone who thought he’d get the record, it seems he may have hit the wall.

They were discussing the Caps on the radio this morning and Darren Dreger said they won’t tear it down and rebuild “out of respect for the veterans there” which doesn’t sound like the best approach.

Kuemper’s at .892 for the season. I always liked Charlie Lindgren, maybe he will see more starts.

 

That's silly talk from Dreger. Oshie is playing well but he's 37 and only has one year left after this until he's a UFA. I assume he retires then. The only tradeable assets are Mantha, Kuznetsov (if he can keep his nose clean) and maybe (if you squint) Edmundson. No one is trading for Pacioretty. Dowd is probably gone because he's on a very friendly deal. If they can't get rid of those guys, you're building around a rapidly deteriorating Ovechkin, Tom Wilson, Dylan Strome, a soon-to-be 35-year-old John Carlson and Aliaksei Protas. And the Kuemper deal increasingly is looking like a bust. In no way, shape or form are the Caps "a move or two away" from contention. They're broken.

But you can never take 2018 away from me.

 

Rielly is about the miss some games with a suspension.

Ridly Greig buries the empty-netter with a slapshot and Morgan Rielly takes exception

https://x.com/sportsnet/status/1756508755561181642?s=46&t

 

I really miss that stuff.

 

A part of me completely gets what happened, and had Rielly just shoved him into the boards, or tried to get him to fight, I wouldn't see it as a problem. I've been around hockey my whole life and totally understand how some sort of response is part of the game's accepted culture.

But a larger part of me sees the shaft of his stick against Grieg's head, which looks a lot like what sidetracked Paul Kariya's career, and wonders how such a disproportionate response to nothing more than getting their feelings hurt by something that didn't put anyone at physical risk can somehow be part of a "code" that we should want to have.