FanHouse Daniel Briere

FanHouse begins its four-part preview of the upcoming NHL season. Check back every Thursday from now until opening night for the rest.

The calendar has flipped past Labor Day in the States, and that means the start of the NHL's regular season is fast approaching. We're going to take one last look back at the summer and discuss the best and worst moves -- in some cases, non-moves -- of the offseason. Who took a step in the right direction and who took a step back?

The real NHL awards will be handed out Thursday night in Las Vegas, so FanHouse decided to hand out its own special awards for the 2008-09 season.

It's designed to maintain competitive balance and parity across the league, but if you waste valuable salary cap space on free agents that don't pan out or contribute the way you expected, you're pretty much stuck without a paddle because nobody is going to bail you out and take that albatross contract off your hands.

Introducing the FanHouse nominees for the Wade Redden Award for Wasted Cap Space.

During Pittsburgh's 4-3 win over the New York Rangers this past Saturday, Colton Orr received a five-minute major and a game misconduct for interference on Penguins defenseman Mark Eaton. The call sparked some harsh reactions from the Rangers blogosphere and fan base, while head coach John Tortorella and goalie Henrik Lundqvist spoke out regarding the officiating in general following the game.

It's common to complain about the officiating in any professional sport, but the NHL in particular deals with a confusing and inconsistent disciplinary structure (where a sex joke might get you shelved longer than a hard elbow to the head).

It all prompted us to take a look at the power play/penalty kill differential for every team across the league. But we needed more; we needed some perspective from the league. Luckily, Stephen Walkom, NHL director of officiating, was more than willing to talk it out.

In hindsight, the Philadelphia Flyers decision to sign Daniel Briere to an eight-year, $52 million contract is looking to be a rather poor investment. That is, if you ignore the original insanity of giving a player that type of contract when he's topped 75 points only once in his career. And that's when he's actually on the ice.

After missing 51 games this season with a groin injury, Briere returned to the Flyers lineup on March 1, and lasted just two full games. In his third game back, Thursday's 5-1 loss to Calgary, the 31-year-old forward left the contest after aggravating the same groin injury, and general manager Paul Holmgren didn't exactly sound optimistic when talking about his status.

Ever since Bruce Boudreau took over as head coach of the Washington Capitals on the day after Thanksgiving 2007, the hockey news out of Washington, D.C. has been uniformly positive. There was the last year's late-season drive to make the playoffs, followed by an offseason filled with awards, a key to the city for Alex Ovechkin and elevated expectations going into the 2008-09 NHL season -- expectations that, thus far, have been fulfilled as the team surged to second place in the Eastern Conference.

But through it all there's been one minor, yet discordant note: the speedy attacking team was skating on one of the worst home ice surfaces in the NHL.

On Saturday night, TSN hockey analyst Gord Miller became the latest person to jump on the Pittsburgh is doomed because it has too much cap money tied up in too few players(!) bandwagon.

According to Miller, the Penguins can't compete with Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin making as much money as they do, because it forces the Penguins to surround them with bargain basement players. This is apparently because Ray Shero couldn't get his star players to sign cap friendly contracts like Ken Holland did in Detroit. Because of this, the Penguins must (his opinion, not mine) trade Malkin.

A quick recap of yesterday's action from around the National Hockey League.

Today's post will be primarily dedicated to that epic Stanley Cup Finals rematch in Motown because, well, that's the type of game the NHL should be dreaming about. The Penguins overcame third period deficits of 5-2 and 6-4 as they won their fourth in a row, 7-6. It won't make up for a Stanley Cup Finals defeat, obviously, but man, it still feels good.

For the first 45 minutes or so, the Red Wings were doing to the Penguins what they did during last season's Finals ... frustrating them and, at times, dominating play with a relentless puck-possession game, refusing to give the Penguins an inch of space. When Henrik Zetterberg floated that shot behind Marc-Andre Fleury to make it 5-2 with just over ten minutes to play, it seemed as if there was no chance for the Penguins to mount any sort of come back.

Then, all of a sudden, out of nowhere, something clicked for the Penguins as they out-shot the Red Wings 13-5 over the final ten minutes of regulation, and 4-0 in overtime.

This afternoon WGR out of Buffalo reported that the Sabres had signed RW sniper Jason Pominville to a 5 year extension, less than a day before the deadline imposed by Pominville himself on negotiations earlier this week. The 26 year old former 2nd round pick signed a 5 year, $26.5 million contract, in four of which he would ahve been an Unrestricted Free Agent. Given that he's been putting up nearly a point per game making a little over $1million per season, he might have been the best deal in the league.

His interview from this afternoon with Schopp and the Bulldog is here.

Again, as with the recent signings of Ryan Miller, Paul Gaustad and Daniel Paille, GM Darth Regier has stuck to his plan of locking up the talent that this team has grown from within, especially that core of guys who were so succesful together when they played at Rochester of the AHL.

It's been a just under a year since the first day of training camp for last season, where it was discovered that Sabres defenseman Teppo Numminen could no longer wait to have his heart condition (valve replacement) corrected. That, in itself, was shocking enough, but to compound matters was the subsequent 'suspension' of Numminen by the Sabres later that same day.

For a management that had already had heaped upon it the scorn of an entire league for their (mis)handling of their high-profile Free Agents, this seemed the final straw in their credibility and respectability. How could they be so heartless (all puns intended, of course) as to suspend and refuse to pay a man who was going through such a thing? It seemed no one had anything nice to say about the situation, and, predictably GM Darth Regier was anything but verbose about their decision, knowing full well that no matter what he said the political fall-out was pre-cast.

Last week on WGR, Regier made it known that negotiations were in progress with Numminen about his returning to the club. Now, the Sith Lord of Western New York doesn't talk about these things unless it's a near certainty, and with today's article in the Buffalo News, it seems even more likely that Teppo will be back wearing a Slug and I'll still be able to refer to him as the Last of the Marx Brothers.

"We've had discussions with the Sabres and we've certainly made progress but there's nothing done yet," Baizley said Tuesday by phone from his Winnipeg office. "We've heard from other teams and we're plugging along at it but 'Tep' likes it very much up there and Buffalo is his first choice, no question."

And now it's time for Tom to gloat just a little bit.