Kukla's Korner Hockey

Kukla's Korner Hockey

Hockey Talk On A Sunday Morning

06/28/2015 at 8:21am EDT

from Fluto Shinzawa of the Boston Globe,

- The NHL did not do the teams’ hockey operations groups any good with its scheduling and locations of the GM meetings (Tuesday, Las Vegas) and the draft (Friday and Saturday, Sunrise). Bruins GM Don Sweeney, for example, took a red-eye from Las Vegas to South Florida after the meetings. The decision didn’t just place GMs on the other side of the country from their colleagues heading into the most important weekend of the year, it also taxed the GMs by forcing them to fly from one coast to the other. With draft boards, trades, and RFA/UFA interviews on their agendas, GMs needed to be at their freshest physically and clearest mentally. The travel schedule did not allow that to happen.

- Three GMs did not consider Carey Price worthy of their first-place Vezina votes. Pekka Rinne, Devan Dubnyk, and Henrik Lundqvist each nabbed one apiece, keeping Price from sweeping the voting. Price should have been a unanimous selection given his dominance (44-16-6, 1.96 goals-against average, .933 save percentage, nine shutouts) on a flawed Montreal team. Price saved 36.51 goals above a replacement-level goalie, according to www.war-on-ice. Cory Schneider was No. 2 in that category, saving 29.93 goals above replacement level. Schneider, meanwhile, did not even qualify among the top nine in the Vezina ranking. Andrew Hammond, Jonathan Quick, and Cam Talbot tied for seventh place. None of those three came close to approaching Schneider’s performance. Perhaps the GMs did not have enough time to study the results closely enough. For that reason alone, they did not do the voting justice.

- If your local fireworks seem a little weak on Saturday, you can blame the Bruins. They used them all up by trading Lucic and Dougie Hamilton.

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Paul Kukla founded Kukla’s Korner in 2005 and the site has since become the must-read site on the ‘net for all the latest happenings around the NHL.

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