Oops. Chalk this one up to not knowing any audience. The CBC announced the invasion of their ladies' themed podcast "While the Men Watch" on Hockey Night In Canada broadcasts. The assumption that women watch hockey differently than men ticked people off (just read Twitter) because the sport has a very large group of knowledgeable female fans -- fans that most guys in my experience look at no differently. If women were like the two ladies on WTMW, I'm pretty sure guys would be walking around with earplugs in.

We’re a week away from the beginning of the Stanley Cup Finals. The puck will drop in a NYC Metro area arena still to be determined. But one thing we do know is that within two weeks after that and possibly as soon as one, the NHL will crown a new champion and Gary Bettman will walk out onto the ice and hand Lord Stanley’s Cup to the captain of the winning squad.

This must be the last time such an event happens.

Forgive my bold assertion. Pardon my insistence. The job of awarding the trophy to the champion of a sports league is often eagerly undertaken by the league’s commissioner, whether David Stern or Bud Selig or Roger Goodell. 

But hockey in general and the NHL in particular isn’t like those other leagues. No other league can boast more tradition than a revival of “Fiddler on the Roof” like the NHL can. And that’s why the job of handing out hardware needs to go to a more worthy standard bearer.

Below the fold, I’ll break down this plan and explain why it must be so.

Game 5 between the Phoenix Coyotes and the Los Angeles Kings was exciting and controversial. We're not here to talk about Dustin Brown's knee and whether or not it clean or dirty. Instead, we're here to analyze an incident involving Brown and Phoenix goaltender Mike Smith. As Smith was reaching to cover a puck with his glove, Brown used his stick to pry the puck loose, dislodging Smith's glove and leaving him barehanded. Play continued with LA threatening outside Smith's crease, leaving the goaltender exposed without his catching glove.

Should play have been blown dead? What do the official NHL rules have to say about such an incident and do we need to change the rules moving forward? no comments

The Phoenix Coyotes were eliminated last night in game five of the Western Conference Finals by the Los Angeles Kings, bringing their season to a close. In a year where they won the first Pacific Division title in team history and made it to the conference finals for the first time in team history, negativity should not be the focus here. Unfortunately, the press during this round generally hasn't been good for the 'Yotes, with allegations of Mike Smith diving to draw calls and two players being suspended for hits. There was still a lot to like about their postseason, but they might've eliminated some good will with NHL fans after this handshake display:

EDIT -- the video is being stubborn and not embedding. For now, go here.

In case you hadn't already noticed, the Kings are in fact the real deal. Sure it is easy to say this now that they have quaified for the Stanley Cup Finals and proven so many doubters wrong, but had you looked at the team on paper at the outset of the postseason, you could have come to this very same conclusion. 

Led by the big ball of joy that is Darryl Sutter, the Kings made easy work of everyone that dared get in their way since the regular season came to an end. Vancouver? No match. St. Louis? Too upstart. Phoenix? Lucky to be there. But how has a team that squeaked into the playoffs, just five points ahead of the dreary Flames, made so much noise in the second season? Well, the question should really be how did they not make more noise earlier. no comments

Have you ever wondered which hockey page on Wikipedia sees the most traffic? Thanks to a group of individuals under the WikiProject Ice Hockey label, the answers are now revealed. 

The full list, which can be seen here, is loaded with surprises and rather odd findings. Which NHL player has the most popular page? What odd findings are revealed in the list of most popular pages? Find out below. no comments

No one has ever questioned Drew Doughty skill level. Only Steve Stamkos was drafted higher in 2008, and even questioned that move. But the one knock against him since his days in junior has been his compete and conditioning level. The nickname "Doughnuts" is not exactly flattering to a player with out of this world talent. 

But when he broke into the league as an 18-year old, we quickly forgot about the relaxed character and what he tipped in at. Doughty was marketed as a franchise blueliner, and he got off on the right foot by playing every game of his rookie season save one. He did not quite shatter the thirty point barrier as a rook, but his low shooting percentage and poise on the ice made it clear that he was here to stay.

The Los Angeles Kings have made plenty of noise with their new rambunctious social media strategy. They have given the LA Twitter account a distinctive, controversial voice that has brought in waves of new followers and waves of new critics. 

Thanks to a post over at Reddit Hockey, we can see that LA's controversial marketing strategy has spilt over into the real world. As you can see in the photo above, the Kings are using their edgy voice on a small poster/billboard located at what appears to be a bus stop.  no comments

No more chuckling at the British hockey teams, hockey "purists." They might just have more hockey cred than even Canada, based on some new evidence dug up by two Swedish researchers. Carl Giden and Patrick Houda uncovered a picture in a book dating from 1797, featuring a British youth skating on the frozen bank of the Thames River during a cold snap. The picture pretty much shows the kid skating with a hockey stick and a puck -- it's hard to mistake him doing anything else.

From the duo's research:

"In 1797, the word 'hockey' had been used in London and its surroundings for about 50 years, replacing the medieval term 'bandy ball,' " the researchers write in an article recently added to their ever-expanding online compendium of hockey history. "The artist's intention must have been to picture a pair of skating hockey-players. Later similar paintings are not known until the 1850s."

The first known image of any sort of hockey was a woodcutting of field hockey dating from 1776 that Giden and Houda also discovered. The organized game is a precursor to hockey, but the first organized match with rules and the like happened in Montreal in 1875, nearly 85 years after the picture of the youth on the Thames.

For some odd reason, the thing that strikes me, the actual historian, the most about this article is that the puck called a "bung." We could be making jokes about Ilya Bryzgalov's "bung hole," people. Think about the missed opportunities.

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In April you may recall that we featured an article discussing how the Colorado Avalanche would have a busy summer ahead due to their strategy of not negotiating contracts during the regular season. One of the biggest questions surrounded the future of veteran Milan Hejduk and whether or not he would return for another year in the NHL or hang up his skates for good.

Today Hejduk, 36, decided that he wasn't ready to call it a career yet by signing a one-year with the Avalanche believed to be worth $2 million.  no comments