The Big Story

What Hockey Fights Cancer means to Mike Babcock | By CHRIS JOHNSTON, Sportsnet.ca

Cancer took Mike Babcock’s mom too soon.

I’m lucky that I have not had cancer take someone close to me. Rather than quote more parts of this article, I’m going to ask you to please click above and read the whole thing.

Because the story of someone lost due to cancer deserves to be told in full.

In Detroit Land

‘Attention to detail’ is Red Wings’ task against slick Oilers | by Gregg Krupa, The Detroit News

From the article:

The Red Wings feel they gave up about 10 scoring chances in the 5-3 loss to the Winnipeg Jets on Friday. Anything below 10 in the NHL is considered optimal.

Unfortunately, two of them were enormous opportunities, late in the game, for the 24-year-old rookie Brandon Tanev, who tied the game and scored the winning goal amid substantial breakdowns in the Wings defense.

“That’s a very acceptable number,” Blashill said. “We’re not giving up tons of chances.

“You know, I think in the Florida game (5-2 loss, Oct. 30) we gave up 20-some chances.

There’s a pretty big problem with this. First that out of 10 scoring chances, they gave up 5 goals.

Then, that us giving up more chances to Florida was OK.

If “anything below ten in the NHL is considered optimal,” then we gave up an optimal number of chances, and five goals.

In the Florida game, we gave up twice as many chances as are considered optimal, which seems….pretty…..not good…

No matter what, Connor McDavid is an amazing player. He’s easily one of the best players in the NHL. As the writer of the recap tonight, I really hope that I don’t spend most of it writing about how amazing he is. I hope to be writing about how amazing Detroit has been playing.

Bonus:

There couldn’t be a better place to ask my best friend and my soulmate to spend the rest of our lives together pic.twitter.com/NRh5moKpNJ

— Justin Abdelkader (@justinabss) November 5, 2016