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| Toulouse climbed up to fourth
spot in Ligue 1 on Sunday thanks to a Romain Danze own-goal
which earned them a 1-0 victory at Stade Rennes.
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| Everton
resume the priority of securing a tangible memento for manager
David Moyes's decade of service when they host Sunderland on
Saturday (1245 GMT) in the FA Cup quarter-finals.
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Chill out, J.J. Redick. I know that sometimes people's sweaty, flailing arms get tangled up during basketball games, and that can be frustrating, but if you blow your stack about it, you are going to get T'd up, throw off your game and imbalance yourself. Remember: A bro divided against himself cannot stand.
You should try to be more like your bro Lou Amundson. Peaceful, easy feelings. Solid ponytails. Deep breaths. Great vibes. Very Californian. Namaste.
Best caption wins a trip to the chillout tent . Good luck.
In our last adventure : Vince Carter kicks the flavor like Stephen King kicks horror .
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| Hello, this is a feature that will run through the entire season and aims to recap the weekend's events and boils those events down to one admittedly superficial fact or stupid opinion about each team. Feel free to complain about it.
Prior to this week's GM meetings, word started to trickle out that the 30 general managers of the NHL were doing the unthinkable: considering the reinstatement of perhaps the single worst, most pointless, counterproductive, and counterintuitive rule the sport of hockey has seen in last 30 years at least.
That's right, it's the return of the red line.
Nick Costonika talked about such a change at length the other day , getting some very choice quotes from guys on both sides of the issue.
The reason for this proposed change, according to advocates of building a wall in the middle of the neutral zone, is that it will slow the game down and make it safer. Concussions are bad!!!!, after all, and anything the league can do to protect players from getting them is of the utmost importance — except, Jake Voracek and Kris Letang recently learned, when it's not.
So the solution is to outlaw stretch passes that, in theory, make the game faster and allow guys to sail through the neutral zone at Mach 3 and get clobbered into next Sunday by 230-pound defensemen.
And yes, by all means, let's do that. When and if that were to ever actually happen. In much the same way that outlawing fighting isn't going to prevent guys from getting these terrible brain injuries because so few guys actually get concussed during them, reinstating the two-line pass won't prevent concussions because two-line passes, as far as I've been able to figure out, have never actually caused one.
You can say allowing stretch plays encourages players to create a faster and therefore more dangerous game, but that's like outlawing steak because a guy choked on it in a restaurant where no one knew the Heimlich.
(Coming Up: Will Columbus trade top pick?; Kings are in trouble; dissecting Brian Burke; Tuukka time will wait for six weeks; Johnny Oduya is working out; Jeff Skinner's nasty snipe; Bruce Boudreau vs. refs; Chris Stewart scored a beauty; fun with Folignos; what's wrong with Alex Ovechkin?; Giroux does the Datsyuk; Grant Besse's awesome night; and a way to get Antti Niemi back to Chicago.)
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| As Kent Wilson pointed out this week on Puck Daddy, the NHL is constantly looking for "winners"; an intangible quality that turns the very good into the great and the potentially great into the unfulfilled potential by career's end.
Obviously, the greatest measure of being a "winner" is actually winning, and in the National Hockey League that means winning in the playoffs. It's the single most transformative process for a team or a player — like a director who won an Oscar, a player is forever known as a guy who "has a ring."
It's in the playoffs when we truly understand the mental mettle and the considerable drive of a player who thrives in the clutch. But the regular season also reveals its own clutch players as the months pass and the important goals add up.
Coming up, 12 of the most clutch players in the NHL based on our targeted metric of what "clutch" entails in the regular season. Who do you consider to be money in the first 82 games?
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Via Chris Gansen: "Jeff Carter, right after Joey MacDonald made a super ugly but athletic save. Priceless LA feed screenshot."
No. 1 Star: Alex Tanguay, Calgary Flames
The Flames winger had a 4-point night in Calgary's 5-3 win over the Winnipeg Jets. He picked up secondary helpers on goals by Mark Giordano and Matt Stajan (!); a primary assist on Curtis Glenncross's third-period goal; and scored a huge insurance goal in the second period, his 11th of the season. Tanguay now has 13 points in his last 8 games.
No. 2 Star: Johnny Oduya, Chicago Blackhawks
The Blackhawks defenseman helped lead a Chicago rally to a 4-3 victory over the New York Rangers. Oduya assisted on Andrew Shaw's second-period goal, using a nasty deke on Artem Anisimov at the blue line to open a shooting lane for a tip-in. In the third, his slapper beat Henrik Lundqvist 1:02 after Patrick Sharp scored to tie the game.
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The mess that is the New York Jets is either one step closer to being cleaned up or getting a whole lot more tangled. On Friday night, the Jets announced a three-year contract extension with quarterback Mark Sanchez, waving a white flag in their pursuit of Peyton Manning on the free agent market.
The long-term deal for Sanchez, who led the Jets to two AFC Championship Games in his first two NFL seasons, comes after a rocky 8-8 campaign where the young quarterback struggled. It got so bad that midway through the season, star wide receiver Santonio Holmes called Sanchez and his offensive teammates out after lackluster offensive performance in Baltimore against the Ravens. The acrimony between the two seemed to continue as Holmes was benched in the regular season finale after getting into an on the field fight with his teammates . Holmes has often been suspected as being one of the anonymous sources within the Jets' locker room who has been speaking of dissension in the ranks.
Sanchez said that the air has been cleared between the two.
"We've been in contact really this whole offseason. A bigger deal was made out of that then was needed to be, but that's OK. With neither of us commenting on that it got bigger — we've kind of laughed that off at this point now, weeks ago. I've been down to see him," Sanchez said.
"We've been in contact. I know he's in Africa doing charity work now but I know he's excited about next season."
The reports of player discontent with Sanchez began to leak out several days after the Jets season ended, with the anonymous source calling Sanchez "coddled" and saying that the young quarterback was "lazy." Recently, the source told the media that the Jets offense would welcome a potential Manning arrival.
Sanchez, who usually tiptoes around sticky issues, was quite clear about what he thought about those comments.
"If you're an unnamed source, you don't speak for yourself, and therefore you don't really speak for your team," Sanchez said.
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| Manager Arsene Wenger faces
one of the toughest challenges of his 15-year reign after
Arsenal crashed to their worst ever defeat in European
competition on Wednesday and now face an uphill task of
salvaging some tangible success this season.
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Liverpool striker Luis Suarez was banned eight games for racially abusing Manchester United's Patrice Evra in October.
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| Mustangs hope challenging early season schedule will lead to post-season success, as the program builds on last year's quarterfinal finish. |
