AGRI Biz

Prior to the 2010 NHL entry draft Calgary Flames General Manager declared to the Calgary Herald that the Flames were one player away from being a top team. For anyone who watched the Flames play last year, this was a rather shocking announcement. The Flames scored the fewest goals in the league last year. Imagine any team you saw last year, any team that you believed was offensively challenged or just incapable of creating or ...

Jaroslav Halak had another save-choked year for the Montreal Canadiens. Playing under intense media and fan scrutiny in Montreal he excelled. Playing on a team that gave up one of the highest shot counts against per game in the league (32.1 SA/G —fifth worst in NHL) he made saves and won games for a team that often didn't deserve to win. He followed up a great regular season with an unbelievable ...

The International Ice Hockey Federation has released a lengthy article on their website lambasting players that turned down their national hockey federation's call to play at the World Championships.   Among the players singled out for abuse were Switzerland's Mark Streit, Sweden's Henrik Zetterburg, Niklas Kronwall, Niklas Backstrom, Tomas Holmstrom, and Johan Franzen and of course everyone's favourite whipping boy, Canada's Sidney Crosby.    Ironically enough, the World Ice Hockey Championships were ...

Doomed was too strong a word to use to describe the Montreal Canadien’s prospects in the first round against the President’s Trophy-winning Washington Capitals.   Les habitants staged an improbable comeback after falling behind three games to one. The last two games of the series were played almost exclusively in the Canadien’s end, yet luck, enough offense—especially on the power play—and some epic poem-generating goaltending from Jarolsav Halak allowed the Canadien’s to ...

Every year the Montreal Canadiens manage to make the playoffs the sacred spirits of Ken Dryden and Patrick Roy are invoked and some poor hapless goalie has the mantle of sainthood thrust upon them and they are expected to deliver a Stanley Cup to the fans of Montreal.  Dennis Heron, Steve Penney, Jocelyn Thibault, Jose Theodore, Jeff Hackett, Cristobel Huet and even young Carey Price have all been crushed by those unreasonable ...

The Washington Capitals have struggled at home against the outmatched Montreal Canadiens in their first round playoff series. The first two games in Washington featured a comedy of bad bounces, stumbling skaters, and what seemed to be not really playoff-quality play or ice. Montreal managed to get all the bounces sneaking away with an overtime victory in game one. Despite a complete collapse in the third period of game two they still had ...

The Montreal Canadiens snuck into the playoffs by losing their last game in a shootout to the Toronto Maple Leafs. That bodes ill for a team set the task of upsetting the No. 1 seed in the league, the Presidents' Trophy-winning Washington Capitals. The Capitals lead the league in scoring with 46 more goals than the second best Vancouver Canucks (272). The team features Alex Ovechkin, who has again scored 50. Nicklas Backstrom had ...

    Generally speaking, there are always upsets in the NHL playoffs. The biggest are those round-one series where the No. 8 seed summons the spirit of Ken Dryden and slays the unbeatable Presidents' Trophy winner.   Since the Presidents' Trophy was first handed out for regular season supremacy in 1985-86, only seven of those teams have gone on to win the Stanley Cup. Washington Capitals fans be warned, that’s only 30.4 percent of ...

The Philadelphia Flyers made it into the playoffs because they beat the Rangers in the last game of the season in a post game breakaway competition. Claude Giroux managed to score on New York goalie Henrik Lundqvist to put his team up 2-1 in the shootout. Olli Jokinen then failed to score on Flyer goalie Brian Boucher Boucher.   So a moment that has as little to do with winning a ...

The season has ended in Calgary. It was an ignominious finish as the missed the playoffs for the first time since Darryl Sutter's first year as general manager of the Flames; 2003-04.   Sutter got the Flames into the playoffs the next year and that team scratched and clawed their way through 26 playoff games, finally losing a seven game series in the Stanley Cup finals to the champion Tampa Bay Lightning.   That ...