FanHouse Lightning

If I spent 10 years brainstorming every conceivable story that could have given hockey fans a little relief from yesterday's brutal Richard Zednik throat-slashing incident, I'm fairly certain "Montreal defenseman gets charged with felony grand theft after stealing a woman's purse" would rank somewhere on the probability scale between "Stanley Cup Finals wins ratings battle with Super Bowl" and "the ghost of Jacques Plante wins Vezina." And yet here we are: Canadiens defenseman Ryan O'Byrne and forward Tom Kostopoulos spent last night in a Tampa holding cell after O'Byrne was charged with grand theft and Kostopoulos was charged with resisting an officer without violence. From Pat Hickey of the Gazette:

They were arrested around 3 a.m. outside Whiskey Park, a popular watering hole in South Tampa. The incident started when a woman set her purse on the counter top, according to the police report. She noticed it was missing and allerted the bouncers. They saw O'Byrne outside with the woman's purse in one hand and her cellphone in the other.

O'Byrne told police it was his girlfriend's purse, but police determined it was the woman's, according to the report. He was detained and placed in the back of a police car. According to police, $20 was missing from the woman's purse.

"Her cellphone in the other?" Checking her saved photos? Calling back home to Victoria, British Columbia? Reconfiguring her ringtones? Makes you wonder. Hickey reports that both players were freed this morning after posting bail. Montreal is in Tampa to play the Lightning on Tuesday night. I'm sure more news about this will emerge from the Habs' practice this afternoon; in the meantime, we should all ponder how, based on the varying degrees of good fortune between the teams, something like this hasn't already happened to the Leafs this season.

UPDATE: Tampa Tribune has mug shots of O'Byrne and Kostopoulos, along with word that a former local hoops star was arrested at the same club in an unconnected incident.

Bob McKenzie reported this morning that the NHL will play four games in Europe to start the 2008-09 season: The Ottawa Senators will play the Pittsburgh Penguins in Stockholm and the New York Rangers will play the Tampa Bay Lightning in Prague, each playing twice on the weekend preceding the domestic opening of the regular season. This follows the mixed results from the League's foray to London to kick off this season.

If the League is on a mission to become a global sports entity like the NBA -- once a David Stern disciple, always a David Stern disciple -- playing regular season games to hockey-mad crowds in Prague and Stockholm is a great idea. I think, overall, the pluses outnumber the minuses in a big way here. If there's a short list of reasons to not play overseas, I'm pretty sure HNIC's Scott Morrison's logic ranks somewhere below "because EuroTrip sucked." Morrison opines that the rights of Senators fans to see Sidney Crosby in Ottawa outweighs the League gaining a stronger foothold in potentially very lucrative foreign markets:

All teams are compensated for losing one home gate, so there is no revenue loss. But in the case of the Senators, for instance, there is a greater cost involved. They lose the buzz of having Sidney Crosby and the Penguins come to town. They lose that excitement that is attached to a visit from The Kid. And Senators fans lose the opportunity of seeing Crosby in person. It means one fewer visit next season.

Boo-hoo. I'm no Mr. Spock, but I'm pretty sure the needs of the many outweight the needs of 20,500 fans in Ottawa that will still get to watch Crosby come to town again later in the season. I'd like to see the hard economic data that suggests taking one Crosby visit away from Ottawa will adversely affect anything except the media's time spent star gazing in the Penguins' locker room.

After last year's unmitigated disaster -- which moved at the pace of a beer league game -- the NHL has dramatically re-imagined its YoungStars All-Star Weekend event, making it less of a game than a puckhead version of Streetball (which matches well with the rumored "slam dunk competition" later in the evening, and should fuel those "Bettman is an NBA sleeper agent" conspiracy theories). According to NHL.com, the two YoungStars teams "will play two six-minute periods of running time. One faceoff will start each period. If the puck leaves the ice, another will get thrown on. If a team scores, the three players have to retreat to their defensive side of center ice before attacking again. For a team to be declared the victor, it will have to win each period."

Eh, whatever. Sounds fun, especially with Patrick Kane, Sam Gagner and Peter Mueller operating in the West and no big lumbering mope named Malkin in the East this time around. Mirtle correctly points out that most of these players might as well be rookies from the Martian League for the general populace of hockey fans in Atlanta, but I think this format works well to defuse that problem: A few dazzling goals by these players in a 3-on-3 format and the fans will come around. Where the League has made an enormous mistake is between the pipes. Eric Duhatschek reports that due to the lack of rookie talent in goal these days -- Carey Price, we hardly knew ye -- the regular all-star goalie will also play the rookie game.

Great. As a Devils fan, the last thing I want to see is an overworked Marty Brodeur stretching to stop Kane/Mueller 2-on-1's followed by a few Western Conference trick-shots later in the skills competitions. But more importantly: Who the hell wants to see quality defense in either the YoungStars game or the "slam dunk" competition? Forget the cream of the crop; the NHL should draft the four biggest slices of Swiss in the League at the break and punish them by turning them into All-Star skills competition prop sieves.

Finally, a reason to get Atlanta's Johan Hedberg (3.18 GAA, .899 save percentage), Tampa Bay's Johan Holmqvist (3.09, .886), Edmonton's Dwayne Roloson (3.12, .901) and Los Angeles King and television personality Jean-Sebastien Aubin (3.20, .889) into this year's all-star festivities.

Drop the balloons, strike up the band and raise a glass: The countdown is over, and Jacques Martin is the all-time winningest coach in Florida Panthers team history after the 'Cats defeated the Caps in a painfully boring shootout on Wednesday night. Yes, indeed, Martin has set the benchmark for success behind the Florida bench ... with just 84 regular season wins.

This is a franchise that's been in the NHL since 1993, right? Anaheim came in during the same season, and Ron Wilson won 120 games for the Ducks. Nashville and Minnesota have both only had one head coach, so they're well over 100 victories. The San Jose Sharks, Tampa Bay Lightning, and Ottawa Senators each have two head coaches who have won over 100 games with the franchises. Here's some perspective: The Columbus Blue Jackets -- the personification of futility until Ken Hitchcock came to town -- also have a franchise coaching record of 84 wins, held by the esteemed Gerard Gallant. Hell, Glen Hanlon managed to scare up 78 wins during his tenure with the Capitals.

It's not like the Panthers haven't had some significant names behind the bench through the years, yet Martin told the Miami Herald that setting the coaching mark was "irrelevant" to him. Can you blame him? This record is the ultimate reminder that the Panthers are less the franchise that stunned the hockey world with a run to the Stanley Cup Finals and more the franchise that's averaged only 78.75 points per season (minus the 1994-95 lockout campaign) since its first year. Perhaps the inability to keep the same coach in town for more than three seasons is a big reason for that pathetic lack of success. Florida makes Phoenix look like a model of stability by comparison.

Back in 1999, when I was writing about and monitoring prospects for the Florida Panthers, a smallish offensive-minded defenseman by the name of Dan Boyle was signed as a free agent after a fine career with Miami University (Ohio). At 5'11" and 190lbs, Boyle was certainly not considered a top prospect, given how smallish offense-first defensemen usually weren't given the time of day.

Still, I read a lot about Boyle and saw him play during his first call up to the Panthers. He looked like a natural offensive dynamo, running the Power Play with confidence, and rushing up the ice like a fourth forward. I figured he would have a good chance at an NHL career and would replace Jason Woolley as the Panthers PP specialist. My peers? They thought I was nutso. How could a puny Sandis Ozolinsh wannabe survive the brutal NHL jungle?

The road to success wasn't easy for Boyle, as he bounced up and down from the AHL, and got into a few fights with coaches over his risky playing style. It wasn't until Dan landed in Tampa Bay that his game was nurtured and his overall game matured.

Looking at him now, It's hard to believe that one of the league's most skilled offensive defensemen was never even drafted by an NHL club. How could every NHL team not think Boyle was worth a late round pick?

It's this rejection that fuels Boyle, as he confessed during a recent interview with ESPN.com