Kukla's Korner Hockey

Kukla's Korner Hockey

Thoughts On Hockey

10/23/2019 at 2:40pm EDT

from Elliotte Friedman of Sportsnet,

- It is tense in Toronto. You could see the organization was curious how things would transpire without an injured John Tavares and his calming influence. They are 1-1-1, but it simply doesn’t look right. In last year’s playoff, during the three games in Toronto, Patrice Bergeron had 35 even-strength minutes and saw Tavares for 31 of them. Coach Mike Babcock gave us something fun last Saturday at home against the Bruins — a solid taste of the Mitch Marner/Auston Matthews combo, the second-most ice-time of Matthews’ career, and 11:24 against Bergeron at even-strength (in the re-match Tuesday in Boston, Bruins coach Bruce Cassidy showed he wasn’t afraid of keeping it that way)....

- Jack Hughes is going to be a great player, but he took a unique route to the top of the draft: right from the Under-18 US National Development team to the NHL. Go through the history — from Auston Matthews to Matthew Tkachuk to everyone in between, there was another stop between there and the big league. That was big-time culture shock for Hughes. He dominated the puck at that level, but is learning that’s not going to be so easy now. I counted 17 games against universities last season and 18 this year, but will Hughes be the last one to go this way?

- The NHL is fixing an issue with its stats system that was uncovered by the smart @evolvingwild Twitter account. Individual shot locations were off, creating mayhem of expected goal calculations. (An expected goal tries to determine the likelihood that someone scores on a particular attempt. It’s an interesting idea.) As you may know, the league will be adopting puck tracking at some point this season, and a new computer system is part of that. The screens are larger than they used to be, and the scale was off. So shots were being “recorded” farther than they really were. A “fix” was in place last Wednesday and all previous games are being corrected.

more on the first topic and 28 Thoughts too...

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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.

From breaking news to in-depth stories around the league, KK Hockey is updated with fresh stories all day long and will bring you the latest news as quickly as possible.

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