from Larry Brooks of the New York Post,

Puffs of white smoke do all of the talking for the Hockey Hall of Fame selection committee, so we never quite know why certain candidates are perennially overlooked, and I’m looking primarily at Doug Wilson and Kevin Lowe — dominant defenseman of their shared era of the late ’70s through mid-’90s.

Their omission from the HHOF seems crazy. Lowe did not put up big offensive numbers through those offense-inflated days — which created a passel of 50-goal scorers including Guy Chouinard, Mike Bullard and Dennis Maruk — but he was a rock on the blue line for six Stanley Cup champions.

Wilson, meanwhile, was the era’s prototypical two-way defenseman who did it all at both ends of the ice, winning one Norris Trophy off a 39-goal season in 1991-92 with three other top-four finishes in the balloting over the course of a 16-year career....

continued plus topics including this..

Carolina owner Tom Dundon has made it clear to anyone willing to listen that he intends to exercise his Group II no-arbitration leverage by playing hardball with brilliant 21-year-old Finnish center Sebastian Aho. The Canes, to my best knowledge, have not said they would not match on an offer sheet, but boy, it would be so tempting to find out.