neil (Neil Paine, senior sportswriter): It wouldn’t be the Stanley Cup playoffs without some wild results, and the semifinal round has certainly delivered in that department. On Wednesday night, the New York Islanders overcame a 2-0 deficit (and an 8-0 loss the game before) to force Game 7 against the defending-champion Tampa Bay Lightning before […]
First, we check in with Round 3 of the NHL playoffs. The New York Islanders and the Tampa Bay Lightning are pretty evenly matched: While the Islanders came into the series as the lower-rated team, they’ve been able to play as more than the sum of their parts and surprise the Lightning. Of course, some […]
While the opening round of the NBA playoffs so far could have been blindly simulated, chaos is governing the ice. Ranked dead last in early January, the St. Louis Blues completed arguably the greatest midseason U-turn in NHL history by advancing to the conference semifinals. And that’s probably just the third-most-surprising storyline of this young […]
It’s been a long time since the New York Islanders were any good. Despite a few playoff berths here and there, the Islanders’ past decade has been defined more by venue changes, managerial shakeups, another venue change, and losing John Tavares, its franchise player and captain to free agency. From the middle of the 1970s […]
It was one of the best logos in all of sports. A green “W,” and a blue whale’s tail, neatly using the negative space to form an “H,” as in “Hartford Whalers.” Unfortunately, they don’t give out Stanley Cups for graphic design. The Whalers didn’t have a lot of success on the ice, winning just […]