Hockey Notes Of Interest
from Kevin Paul Dupont of the Boston Globe,
- Among my mother’s favorite old British sayings, delivered in her Manchester, United Kingdom, accent, was, “Careful, or that’ll be a pig’s foot in the morning.” Which came to mind this past week listening to the buffoonery of Blackhawks chairman Rocky Wirtz.
The Blackhawks boss didn’t even make it to the next sunrise before his tone-deaf words and actions Wednesday night at the club’s town meeting, intended to be a community healing exercise, turned into a pig’s foot the size of the United Center.
Ah, the arrogance of wealth....
- Dismissing the absurd notion he ever would skip a beat, Zdeno Chara will be in Boston Feb. 17 with the Islanders to face the Bruins. It would be career game No. 1,649 for Big Z, positioning the ex-Bruins captain one week later to surpass Chris Chelios’s mark (1,651) for most NHL games played by a defenseman.
Chara, before leaving here prior to last season for a Cup-chasing fling with the Capitals, became captain in Boston upon his arrival from Ottawa as a free agent in 2006. Now 44, he logged 14 seasons with the Spoked-B on his chest, and sometimes, we found out this past week during a Zoom session, with a teammate literally on his back for off-ice workouts.
According to current captain Patrice Bergeron, the 6-foot-9-inch Trencin Tower of Power sometimes would drape a teammate over his shoulders for power squats during dryland training....
continue for more on each of the above plus other notes like this...
GM Kelly McCrimmon, brother of late Bruins defenseman Brad McCrimmon, will have to do some cap room rope-a-dope to add Eichel’s $10 million to the roster. Ditto for defenseman Alec Martinez ($5.25 million), who has been out since mid-November, first with an upper-body injury and then a lingering bout of COVID-19.
How to add $15 million-plus to a playing roster that entered the All-Star break with only about $5.8 million in wiggle room against the $81.5 million cap? That’s the test for McCrimmon.
In rough numbers, the Knights must shed upward of $10 million, a figure that drops in half if McCrimmon were to choose the unlikely path of wheeling Martinez, believed to be high on the Bruins’ shopping list when he reached the UFA market last July and opted for Vegas (three years times $5.25 million). Martinez would be an outstanding fit in Boston at left defense, where GM Don Sweeney committed $3 million each to Derek Forbort and Mike Reilly last July.......
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