from Larry Brooks of the New York Post,

Whoa boy, what a blow. No games between Buffalo and Florida, or Edmonton and Winnipeg, or Ottawa and Washington, or for that matter, no games at all involving the Original 30 who pick up their sticks in September right around when the NFL is a week or two into its season, and then play, and play, and play, and play, one night after another, one numbing same game after another, until finally finishing up when Major League Baseball is almost halfway through its schedule.

No games of homogeneous style for about three weeks in a schedule in which every game is billed as so important that none truly is, not with the losers’ point that turns math and common sense on their heads by producing more than two-thirds of the NHL’s teams into “above-.500” outfits.

No games while the greatest hockey players in the world participate in The Games, in what has become the sport’s quadrennial Mount Everest of competition and in which hockey sets itself apart on the grander scale that, in fact, is Olympian.

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