Morning Skate: Time for Sullivan to coach Pens up

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Here are all the links from around the hockey world, and what I’m reading, while giving two thumbs up to Guardians of the Galaxy 2. It doesn’t sneak up on you like the first movie did, but this one hits all the right notes once again with some great new characters added for good measure.

*The current play of the Pittsburgh Penguins is going to force Penguins coach Mike Sullivan into coaching them up and finding some strings to pull. The fact that they’re missing Kris Letang makes it all the tougher this time around.

*As the only Canadian team still left standing in the Stanley Cup playoffs, the Ottawa Senators are going to add Canadian flags to their helmets.

*Down Goes Brown debates the issues of the week in the world of hockey.

*This will be Stan Bowman’s most difficult summer with the Chicago Blackhawks as he needs to find a way to jolt the current mix and deal with a situation where he’s consistently up against the salary cap every season.

*Craig Custance takes a look at the Eastern Conference Finals, and what the Senators are doing to hold down Sidney Crosby in this series.

*Speaking of a very Ottawa Senators-heavy morning skate, Sens fans are bristling at the notion that they cheer for a boring team that plays a dreadful 1-3-1 trap when it comes to entertainment value.

*Team USA fell in the first elimination round of the IIHF World Championships on Thursday in an upset defeat to Finland, continuing a long string of disappointing performances for the Americans in the spring international tournament. They haven’t even been to the Gold Medal game at the world championships since 1960, which isn’t in line with USA Hockey’s finishes at the Olympics or the World Junior tournament over the past 10-20 years. So, what’s the reason behind it? Here’s an article that attempts to explain it, but it’s pretty simple to me.

This isn’t a tournament that sends over America’s best, obviously, and instead, submits a roster of the best leftover players from the teams no longer alive in the Stanley Cup playoffs. That doesn’t make them unique among the other countries, but I just don’t think the American players view this as a particularly important tournament. I just don’t see the competitiveness there like you see at the Olympics, or at the World Juniors. At least this spring’s roster was decent enough with guys like Jack Eichel and Dylan Larkin playing for Team USA and wasn’t the embarrassing no-show of US players that ended up on last spring’s bare-bones roster at the world championships. Auston Matthews and Frank Vatrano were the two best forwards on that team. That tells you how many American players declined to suit up in the Red, White and Blue.

Nevertheless, Team USA isn’t going to have more success at the world championships until they start to treat that tournament with just as much gravitas and import as the rest of the world clearly does. And a 2-0 loss to Finland after playing very well in the pool-play portion of the tournament feels like a pretty big choke job to me.

*For something completely different: In a study, it was found that journalist’s brains function at lower than the normal levels because of excessive alcohol and caffeine consumption. This doesn’t surprise me in the least, but I imagine it would have been much, much worse if this study had been taken 20 years ago.

 

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