The Oilers only need to look at the Panthers to realize the best could be yet to come. Adam Proteau discusses that, whether Sergei Bobrovsky is a Hall of Famer and the future of the world's largest hockey stick.
Welcome once again to Screen Shots, an ongoing THN.com feature in which we discuss a few hockey topics and break them down into some short paragraphs. Let’s get straight to business:
It will come as small consolation to currently dejected Edmonton Oilers fans, but the question of whether or not superstar Connor McDavid will ever win a Cup in Edmonton has cropped up.
The good news for Oilers fans is that there’s a solid recent history of teams that have lost big games in the playoffs coming back to win it all in subsequent seasons.
Of course, the most recent example is the Panthers themselves. They fell in five games in the 2023 Cup final before finally putting it all together this year.
Sure, it took significant tweaks to their lineup to get the Panthers over the finish line, including bringing in Vladimir Tarasenko and Kyle Okposo at the trade deadline, but the Oilers will have a new GM to steer the team in the right direction. They also have the bulk of their core talents coming back for the 2024-25 campaign.
Edmonton will have plenty of competition next year (and as long as McDavid plays there), but when you have the top player on the planet on your side, you will get the chance to win the hardest trophy to win in all of sport. It may be tough for Edmonton's fans to see that now after the Oilers’ Cup final defeat, but the best could well be yet to come.
In the wake of the Florida Panthers’ Stanley Cup victory, there have been suggestions that goaltender Sergei Bobrovsky has built enough of a case to be considered for the Hockey Hall of Fame. He has two Vezina Trophy wins to his name and was a finalist this year as well.
To this writer, that isn’t realistic – at least, not to this point in Bobrovsky’s career.
It's not like Bobrovsky won the Conn Smythe Trophy as the most valuable player of the post-season. Have we already forgotten that Bobrovsky was not the star of Games 4, 5 and 6 of the Cup final? He surrendered 12 goals in those three games.
Even if he’d played well in that span, Bobrovsky still wasn’t the best player on his own team from this writer's perspective. That honor goes to captain Aleksander Barkov. So, let’s put the brakes on this notion of Bobrovsky being some next-level netminding force.
This isn’t to say he was bad – he gave his team a chance to win more often than not – but there's still the rest of his career to go. He has earned laurels for coming through in the clutch this spring and in the past, but carving out a space for him in the HHOF is more than a little premature. He’s been paid like a superstar, and he hasn’t always performed like one. That’s reason enough to hold off on Hall of Fame speculation.
Here's what Michael Traikos and Jacob Stoller think about that:
Finally, earlier this season, we looked at the world’s largest hockey stick based out of Duncan, B.C., and speculated on the future of the stick.
This week, we got an answer – the massive stick will be cut up into thousands of small, collector-sized sticks that will be sold to the public.
The stick – measuring 62.5 meters long and weighing 28 tonnes – earned the Guinness World Records title in 2008 as the world’s largest hockey stick. But efforts to find an owner who would keep the stick intact have not panned out, and this new solution is making the best of an untenable situation.
The businessperson who has come up with the new notion deserves credit for trying to salvage the stick and keep it alive in some form, but clearly, this was a stunt asset whose best days were at an end. Keep an eye out for your opportunity to buy one of the newly made sticks, as it’s likely to come sooner rather than later.
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