PITTSBURGH -- The Pittsburgh Penguins, on the verge of missing the playoffs for the first time in 12 years, traded defenseman Darius Kasparaitis to the Colorado Avalanche on Tuesday for forward Ville Nieminen and defenseman Ricky Berry.
Kasparaitis
By landing Kasparaitis, the Avalanche got a high-profile defenseman at the trading deadline for the second straight year. Last year, they won the Stanley Cup after acquiring All-Star Rob Blake from the Los Angeles Kings at the deadline.
Colorado apparently was the only team willing to offer Penguins general manager Craig Patrick two NHL players -- and not just prospects -- for Kasparaitis, who will likely become a free agent this summer.
The Penguins had been expected to trade the 29-year-old Kasparaitis, who has talked of wanting to play again for the New York Islanders.
Kasparaitis is not an offensive defenseman, despite scoring the winning overtime goal in Game 7 of the Penguins' second-round playoff series with Buffalo last season. However, he is gritty and physical, and was one of the most coveted players at the deadline.
Nieminen has 10 goals and 14 assists in 53 games, but has fallen out of favor with Avalanche coach Bob Hartley at times. However, Nieminen has three goals and five assists in his past five games to surpass his rookie season total of 22 points in 51 games.
Berry has not scored, but was playing as a sixth defenseman for Colorado and adds depth to Pittsburgh's very thin defensive corps.
The Penguins went into Tuesday night's games trailing Montreal by six points for the final Eastern Conference playoff spot. The Penguins have not missed the playoffs since 1990, the year before they won the first of their consecutive Stanley Cups.
Kasparaitis is expected to qualify for free agency after this season as a 10-year veteran who earns less ($1.
Anxious to turn professional, but unable to join the NHL because of its age restrictions, Gretzky signed with the Indianapolis Racers of the developing World Hockey Association in the fall of 1978 (“Wayne Gretzky Biography”). Not long after Gretzky arrived the franchise closed its doors and sold its young asset to the NHL's Edmonton Oilers. “In the fall of 1979, Gretzky embarked on his first full NHL season As he had at every other level, he quickly started to dominate the competition, racking up an astonishing 51 goals and 86 assists, on his way to winning the league's Hart Memorial Trophy, an award recognizing its most valuable player,” (“Wayne Gretzky Biography”). It was the first time in history a first-year player had ever been honored with the award. Gretzky went on to win the Hart Memorial Trophy nine more times over the span of his career. To this day, he still holds the record for the most times that specific award has been given to an individual (Getz). Wayne Gretzky was a leader, and although his character as a person cannot be measured by mere statistics, he sure has some outstanding
Sidney Crosby has played in tournaments representing Canada in all of them. He has represented Canada in juniors and men’s teams. For the juniors team he represented Canada in the U-18 Junior World cup in 2003. Than he represented
Fortunately for the NHL, they had/ have the Chicago Blackhawks, the Franchise to bring hockey back. The Chicago Blackhawks started the 2012-2013 series with a 24 point streak, meaning that they went 24 games with at least 1 point gained in each game. As many people don’t pay attention until the season has hit 20 or so games, the Hawks, had come to break the lockout of that particular attention span causing more attention towards not only the NHL , but for the Blackhawks themselves. As fans joined the progressing bandwagon, the NHL was gratefully coming out of the “drought” with numourus sponsorships with companies, and gaining profit from their
With the thirty-third pick in the 1991 NFL Draft, the Atlanta Falcons choose Brett Favre. A little less than a year later, Atlanta traded Favre to Green Bay for a first round draft choice. Now in his 13th season in the NFL. Behind Favre, Green Bay has had nine playoff appearances including five division titles.
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Run! No, Sid I Said. Not this time. Palmer shows Murray would risk his life for Sid. He shows that it is
Before the 1980 Winter Olympics began, the US Olympic hockey team was not expected to do as well as they did. They had many powerhouse teams to beat and the team was just a bunch of college kids who wanted to play hockey. In the end, they had performed one of the greatest upsets in the history of hockey by defeating the USSR, the whom many thought of as the greatest hockey team in the world.
On January 18, 1958 a huge milestone occurred in the NHL. The first black player joined the NHL. His name was Willie O’Ree. He joined the Boston Bruins. He was a left wing and played for six years. He played 45 games and scored a total of six goals.
These penguins lived after the Castastrophic event “Cretaceuous” that demolished the dinosaurs and many other species. Based on the DNA analyses and avaiable evidence of modern birds, we think the modern bird- lineages, including penguins, some how managed to survive through the Cretaceuous. Also it’s not shocking these fossils were found in New Zeland. The South Pacific and Southern oceans were free of predatory mammals, had abundant food, and had space for Penguins to breed. But the Southern Pacific is not the only area where Penguins inhabit. Many of modern penguins “Aptrenodytes” are located in the Antarctic. Recenelty it was discovered that there was a over looked feature on the surface of the fossil penguins flipper bone. These grooves were easily missed because the look was similar to tendons and muscles in the same area. It was discovered that these grooves were blood vessels that make up a counter current heat exchanger called “humeral arterial plexus” which allows penguins to limit the heat loss through the flippers. Also it helped Penguins maintain their core body temperature in cold water allowing them to survive long journeys in the cold waters. Although Penguins have luckily been able develop these traits to survive the dramatic shifts in climate, the world population can not mistake their success as resilience towards global warming.
By age seven he was already known to local sports press for his hockey talent. At age ten he scored an incredible 159 goals in 55 games playing hockey in his hometown of Cole Harbour, Nova Scotia. He had a season point total of 280 points (Sidney-Crosby.info).
He played four years in goal for the Thief River Falls Lincoln Prowler hockey team, the first Lincoln High School team to ever play in the state tournament (Lundin). In his state tournament emergence as a freshman in 1945, when goalies wore no masks, he was hit between the eyes with a puck during warm-ups before the championship game, but went on to play an exceptional game, though losing 4-3 on two third period power play goals.
Wayne Simmonds is an African American NHL player – a sport that is most widely played by Caucasian or light-skinned Europeans. He is one of the few African Americans who play hockey professionally, and because of this he was a victim of racial discrimination. In the preseason of 2011, the Detroit Red Wings played the Philadelphia Flyers (the team Simmonds played and still plays for). The game went into overtime, and Simmonds was summoned for a shootout attempt. Just as he went on the ice to make his shot, a fan threw a banana at him while taunting and expressing racial remarks towards him. Though upset and caught off guard, he still managed to ignored the incident and continue with his shot. In a po...