Kukla's Korner Hockey

Kukla's Korner Hockey

Saturday Night Hockey Notes

04/30/2016 at 10:49pm EDT

from Steve Simmons of the Toronto Sun,

- The easy part was firing Boudreau. The hard part for Anaheim will be finding a better coach. Boudreau’s regular-season winning percentage is .659 in the NHL, best in history. Behind him, a guy named Scotty Bowman at .657 ... Boudreau is 1-7 career in Game 7s, which got him the axe. The best Game 7 coach in hockey, Darryl Sutter of the Kings: His record is 7-2. For the record, Mike Babcock is 4-4 in Game 7s.

- I like the way Larry Brooks does his job. And for most of his career, I like the way Dan Boyle played in the NHL. But the blowup the other day between the two was understandable, but not excusable for a player in decline. I’ve watched other athletes unable to deal with their own career mortality. It isn’t comfortable. By nature, athletes tend to be dishonest about their own abilities. Boyle wore that in his season ending interview in New York.

- Just to settle my own curiosity, I did a 20-year look back at first picks in the draft and came up with this number: Only eight times in the past 20 years has the first pick definitively turned out to be the runaway best player selected: Those eight players — McDavid, Aaron Ekblad, John Tavares, Patrick Kane, Sidney Crosby, Alex Ovechkin, Ilya Kovalchuk and Joe Thornton.

more on the last note plus other hockey topics...

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About Kukla's Korner Hockey

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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