FanHouse Fabian Brunnstrom

The success of coaches in professional sports is difficult to predict. Bill Belichick was an abject failure in Cleveland, but is now considered one of the top coaches in all of sports. Flip Saunders did pretty well for himself in Minnesota, but could not bring a championship to Detroit. In the NHL, Claude Julien and Paul Maurice are two examples of coaches who got the proverbial walking papers and found great success at later jobs.

Since coaches are essentially hired to be fired, veteran NHL coach Marc Crawford has been fired. He's actually about to begin his fourth stop in the league, as the Dallas Stars hired him Thursday to replace the fired Dave Tippett.

I don't know what's been happening across the NHL the past two nights, but it's almost as if everyone jumped into a time machine (perhaps a DeLorean) and traveled back to 1985. Have you seen some of these scores? I'm talking 9-2, 8-5, 6-5, 7-3. It's crazy, like somebody went into the locker rooms across the league and shrunk down the goalie pads, or something.

One night after the Penguins steamrolled the Islanders to the tune of 9-2, and four different players across the league registered hat tricks, the goal-scoring barrage continued on Friday. Let's start in Newark, where the Devils outscored the Rangers, 8-5, in a game that had to be played with empty nets.

Midway through the second period, New Jersey was sitting with a seemingly comfortable 5-1 lead, before the Rangers roared back to tie the game at the 11:18 mark of the third period, thanks to Ryan Callahan's eighth goal of the season. The Rangers actually outshot the Devils by a 16-4 margin in the third period, though, New Jersey made the best of its few opportunities, scoring on three of them. Just 11 seconds after Callahan's equalizer, Patrick Elias scored the game-winner, before Brian Gionta and Jamie Langenbrunner sealed the win.

On Monday, we told you about former Lightning head coach Barry Melrose who openly admitted that he is taking great delight in the struggles of the organization that fired him, not to mention the fact he's openly rooting for them to lose every game they play. Well, Melrose has to be loving this current nine-game losing streak Tampa Bay is on, as it dropped another one on Wednesday night in Buffalo, 4-2.

The Lightning actually jumped out to an early 2-0 lead in the first period, thanks to goals by Mark Recchi and Martin St. Louis.

With less than a minute to play in the opening period, Buffalo's Drew Stafford picked up a power play goal, which set the stage for Thomas Vanek to tie the game and, ultimately, give the Sabres the lead in the second period with a pair of goals, giving him a league-best 22 on the season. Vanek has four goals in his past three games, all Buffalo victories.

Jason Pominville picked up an empty net goal late in the third, while Ryan Miller stopped 26 shots in the win.

Just days after the Dallas Stars landed the much-hyped Swedish talent Fabian Brunnstrom, the Detroit Red Wings have made a European signing of their own: 24-year-old Finnish Elite League star Ville Leino. Evidently, the signing was made without Red Wings GM Ken Holland having seen Leino play. Hit the YouTube video above for footage of Leino in action as #89.

Leino put up 28 goals and 49 assists in 55 games in the FEL this season, winning the Oskanen Award as the league's best player in the process. Hockey writer Risto Pakarinen, a Finn working in Sweden, told FanHouse colleague James Mirtle, "Brunnstrom is not the hottest player around here. This guy is."

Leino's own coach sounds a little less certain about his now former player's ability. He told Matt Wuest of Red Wings Central, "It will be interesting to see how he adapts to the skating of the NHL and the smaller rink. I don't know if it will help him or hurt him. It's not that he's a bad skater, it's just that he's not overly fast."

Ken Holland told Dave Waddell of the Windsor Star that the plan is to bring Leino over to North America next season to give him a chance to make the Wings. If he's not able to make the team, it looks like they'll send him back to Finland. Holland did not rule out a possible stint in Grand Rapids, however.

This looks like a strong signing by the Wings. They generally don't talk about recently-signed prospects making the leap to the NHL, so you know they think highly of this guy. If he's that good, Wings fans should not be upset about the team striking out on Brunnstrom.

It is a little strange to see the Stars sign a Swede and the Wings sign a Finn a couple days apart, though. Only time will tell which team got the better player.

Every day from Monday to Saturday, The Ice Sheet will take a look at the biggest stories in the league that happened on the ice and elsewhere the night before.

After seeing the second round of the Stanley Cup Playoffs speed by us at Mach 2, it seems as if we're in for something of a re-run in the Conference Finals, as the higher seeds both held serve on home ice to take a 2-0 series lead -- something our roundtable participants seemed to think was sure to be something of a death sentence for the lower seeds.

After Game One in Pittsburgh, Flyers head coach John Stevens said he wanted his team to cut down on the turnovers and bring a more physical game to the ice for Game Two against the Penguins, but it hardly mattered as the Pens prevailed, 4-2. So while the Flyers did tighten things up a bit and raised the bar physically, it wasn't as if the Pens weren't able to answer. If anything, it couldn't help but remind me of the line plenty of folks got fed about the Lemieux/Jagr-led Pens of the 1990s -- that simply because the Pittsburgh was so potent offensively that they might have a difficult time playing against more physical and tight checking squads.

Well, it wasn't true then, and it isn't true now -- not when you've got a slab of beef like Evgeni Makin who's willing to take your best shot, get off the ice and punish you with his skill (his Game One slapper shorthanded will be on playoff highlight films forever) and then stick his forearm into the earflap of your most skilled player, knocking him into next week (Daniel Briere). Throw in a goal from a player like Maxime Talbot, and well, it's hard not to think that all hope is lost in Philadelphia.