Kukla's Korner Hockey

Kukla's Korner Hockey

Tuesday's Hockey Thoughts On Wednesday

03/03/2021 at 11:59am EST

from Elliotte Friedman of Sportsnet,

- It’s a buyer’s market out there. With five weeks until the trade deadline, how many teams are really willing to take on money? Never mind “can” take on money under the cap, but would be willing to do so? The list is not long, and there are many more sellers than buyers.

Boston and Philadelphia are eyeing defencemen, although both teams must monitor expansion-draft issues. You don’t want to make that situation worse, unless of course you are trading something that nullifies the problem. Toronto is checking out forwards. Colorado is looking at some options, but I don’t know how high-salaried they would be. One interesting possibility: Minnesota. Unafraid GM and challenging for top spot in the West.

- A week ago, the message to the Flames was, “We’ve got to solve our problems ourselves.” GM Brad Treliving is not afraid to look around, but there hasn’t been anything that made sense. Following Monday’s 5–1 defeat in Ottawa, Milan Lucic was spitting fire in defence of head coach Geoff Ward on the Sportsnet 960 post-game radio show with Pat Steinberg.

“You hear a lot of outside noise talking about coaching, style of play and all this bullshit,” he said. “But that has nothing to do with the coaches. That has everything to do with the guys that are playing…. We just want it easy on a night-to-night basis. We don’t want to work hard like we did when this coaching staff took over last year.”

The simple solution in these situations is to fire the coach — but Ward was given the full-time job on Sept. 14. That’s less than six months ago, and it would be such a rough look.

- nother KHL player to keep an eye on: Magnitogorsk defenceman Grigori Dronov. Just turned 23 and may need some AHL time, but there are NHL clubs watching him.

much more

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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.

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