from Larry Brooks of the New York Post,

- If the Penguins hadn’t been able to make a dent with both Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin joining their squad within a year of each other in the early 2000s, would that equate to the white noise coming from the Oilers, with both Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl at the mutual heights of their powers?

You’d say that the Oilers are the NHL’s version of MLB’s Angels, except that Mike Trout and Shohei Ohtani have never really played a full season together and that almost every time I see McDavid speaking in any type of public setting it seems as if he has just been force-fed a pint of lemon juice.

Though if you were sent out there to answer hypotheticals about adding Evander Kane without the accompaniment of owner Daryl Katz and general manager Kenny Holland, the people actually responsible for making the decision, you probably would be a bit sour about it, too.

- Someone is going to have to explain how the Avalanche can be taken seriously as Stanley Cup contenders while they rank 29th overall in save percentage at .892, surrounded in that category by teams from Seattle, New Jersey, Arizona, Ottawa and Montreal, not one of which is even in the hunt for the playoffs.

- It always catches me off guard when I see a Red Wings player wearing No. 14. It seems odd that Detroit management has not retired the number in honor of Brendan Shanahan, the player most singularly responsible for ending the franchise’s 42-year Cup drought in 1997.

They’d had Steve Yzerman, they’d had Sergei Fedorov, they’d had Nicklas Lidstrom … and in 1994, the 100-point Red Wings were knocked out of the playoffs in the first round by the 82-point Sharks. In 1995, the 70-point Red Wings were swept in the Cup final by the 52-point Devils, and in 1996, 131-point Detroit was taken out in conference finals by 104-point Colorado.

The next year, along came Shanahan, the quintessential power forward of his era, to change the culture and point the Red Wings to consecutive Cups and three in six years.

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