The NHL viewing experience in 2022: You’re trying to follow the play, then this unwanted screensaver jolts away from the close-up and pans out to the whole sandwich. The word “IMPOSSIBLE” was painted in shouting capital letters in the rest of the available board space.

That’s as best I can describe one of the new virtual board ads, which are superimposed on the boards in each TV market’s broadcast. Those watching the Root Sports Seattle broadcast on Thursday, when the Kraken beat the Kings, might have seen the Impossible Burger ad; those watching the Los Angeles feed would have seen something else.

Watching NHL games these days, you think a little too much about a local-market power semiconductor company, which … sigh … is the point.

-Matt Porter of the Boston Globe where you can read more on this plus other topics like...

Mattias Samuelsson is the first NHLer to sign a seven-year, $30 million contract before scoring his first NHL goal. The pain-in-the-butt Sabres defenseman entered this season with all of 54 games on his ledger, but now will make some $4.3 million a year until he’s 30.

Quite a bet for Buffalo. If the cap really is going to rise by some $10 million in the next three years, as the league has estimated, and Samuelsson (son of Kjell Samuelsson) continues to hold down a top-four role next to Rasmus Dahlin, then that figure looks fine.

Other teams are making similar calls. The trend is for teams to sign their under-23 players — ones who aren’t at the Connor McDavid, Cale Makar, Adam Fox, or even Miro Heiskanen levels — to seven- and eight-year extensions as their rookie deals are expiring. In the last two seasons, Buffalo (Samuelsson, Tage Thompson), Carolina (Jesperi Kotkaniemi), Montreal (Nick Suzuki), New Jersey (Jack Hughes), Ottawa (Josh Norris, Tim Stutzle), and St. Louis (Jordan Kyrou, Robert Thomas) signed young talent through the bulk of their 20s.