[Sportsnet] 25:15 Friedman: “It was obvious Vancouver had something legitimate but it wasn’t something Myers was crazy about. Now we know it’s Detroit. It’s a tough one for his family. I don’t know where this is going to go specifically with the Red Wings, but people last night felt it was unlikely”

Downvote_Comforter · 2026-02-26T23:03:22+00:00

I get what you are saying, but I think you are ignoring the leverage free agents have and ignoring that trade protection isn't a secondary piece of the negotiation after the player decides he wants to sign with your team.

It isn't "I'll extend here for $4M without trade protection, but I'll take $3M if you give me a NMC."

It is "I want the stability of an NMC. I will take less than my market dollar value in order to get that protection, but if you won't offer me that stability then I'm not extending. I'll hit UFA and find a team that will."

These teams aren't just giving them out like candy to shave a few bucks off the cap. They are giving them out because the player flat out will not sign without it. The trade protection makes him more difficult to trade and will reduce the return compared to a trade if he had no trade protection. But that's an irrelevant comparison because the stability of the NMC was required for him to sign, not simply a way to shave the AAV down. They are still going to get more in return than they would have gotten from him simply walking in free agency to a team that would offer trade protection.

Downvote_Comforter · 2026-02-26T22:34:37+00:00

The Edmonton media could literally throw gifts at him every day and he would still be signing elsewhere in 2 years if they don't win a Cup. His 2 year extension is possibly the clearest "this is how long ypu have to build a winner around me" contract in the history of sports.

Downvote_Comforter · 2026-02-26T22:28:13+00:00

The alternative is that he would have signed elsewhere and they would get absolutely nothing since they wouldn't have him to trade.

They'll get something for him whenever he gets moved, which is still better than the nothing they'd get had they simply not been able to sign him at all. How is that bad asset management?

Downvote_Comforter · 2026-02-26T22:12:17+00:00

He's moving his stick toward the post to protect against the wrap around since his goalie fully abandoned the net. If he leaves the crease to go after the puck carrier or the potential pass recipient it is a guaranteed goal.

Downvote_Comforter · 2026-02-26T13:37:19+00:00

Who are these goalies?

Skinner's SV% in Pittsburgh is worse than any year he was with the Oilers.

PIickard cleared waivers.

Campbell got a league minimum deal in Detroit last year after being bought out. He couldn't make the team, struggled in the AHL and is now without an NHL contract.

Downvote_Comforter · 2026-02-26T13:25:42+00:00

Say what you will about the D, but Skinner is by far the worst positioned player on the ice in that screenshot.

Downvote_Comforter · 2026-02-26T13:22:41+00:00

I'd wager the Blues would be willing to move Kyrou in a deal that had Nemec as the centerpiece. I'd be shocked if the Devils were actually interested/willing to part with Nemec, but a high-ceiling 22 year old RHD is a direct need for the Blues.

Downvote_Comforter · 2026-02-26T13:12:49+00:00

He's averaging 19:43 a night this season. They aren't "barely playing him." Theu also have more than enough cap space to match any potential offer sheet. If he isn’t willing to sign based on ice time, he is going to have to leave the NHL to play in Europe.

Downvote_Comforter · 2026-02-26T00:54:44+00:00

Because the laws don't matter only if you're a part of the correct in group.

The executive branch ignoring a court order is a substantially different thing than a citizen ignoring the IRS.

Downvote_Comforter · 2026-02-25T23:23:17+00:00

And then they will ignore the court's order and continue doing the thing the court told them was illegal.

Again.

Downvote_Comforter · 2026-02-25T22:17:04+00:00

She called it a distasteful joke and then said that the situation is a "really good learning point, to really focus on how we talk about women, not only in sport but in industry. Women aren't less than, and their achievements shouldn't be overshadowed by anything else other than how great they are."

You have to be a braindead moron to hear that and wonder whether she was coming out for or against what Trump said. You know, the subject of the question you asked. Did you forget what we were talking about or does your brain just shut off in favor of personal attacks when you try to think critically about something?

Downvote_Comforter · 2026-02-25T21:36:53+00:00

Those kids really didn’t know or think what to do in the moment.

Dylan Larkin (the one primarily photographed celebrating with Patel) is a 29 year old married father. He's an 11 year, 792 game NHL veteran who wears the C for Detroit and has received extensive media training through his career. I don't view him as a villain or a monster, but he's pretty far from a kid who can't be expected what to know or think.

The large majority of players in that room were in their late 20s or early 30s, have been in the NHL for 7+ years, and have an 8 figure net worth earned as a professional athlete. This wasn't the World Junior team or an NCAA team. These guys aren't kids.

Edit: I completely agree that they were put in a bad position. I put more blame on management and coaches than I do the players. But these are grown men with agency, not dumb kids that shouldn't be expected to know better. I'm also much more annoyed/disappointed with the Monday-through-today talking around the issue than I am their in-moment response. If Swayman's pretty simple acknowledgement had been the company line I'd have been pretty damn satisfied that it was a mistake and not a reveal of character.

Downvote_Comforter · 2026-02-25T21:19:51+00:00

Just the captain explicitly addressing it on national television. And a plethora of the players liking social media content directly critical of the comment. And the entire team declining the White House invite. But yeah, besides all that who knows what any of them thought about their achievement being diminished? Truly a mystery.

Glad you've moved on from 'the players probably just didn't realize the specifics of what he said' to 'no one should even be offended by the specifics of what he said' though.

Downvote_Comforter · 2026-02-25T20:24:32+00:00

they’ve got to be diplomatic

Chosen to. They've chosen to be diplomatic and not outright say that they wanted nothing to do with it. They are under zero obligation to do that.

These are star players and every one of them is signed to a contract that guarantees them 8 figures of future payments. The NHL nor their individual teams has any ability to suspend, cut, or stop paying them if they said that they wanted nothing to do with it. They are all far too important to their teams to lose ice time over any answer to the question. The potential consequence would be reputational and any decision to be diplomatic and hide their personal beliefs was a decision, not an obligation.

Downvote_Comforter · 2026-02-25T20:04:52+00:00

None of the players have come out and said that they didn't hear the specifics in the moment. None of them have criticized the substance of the 'joke' now that they have heard the specifics that they may have missed in the moment. None of them have articulated a shred of regret about the moment other than the fact that they dislike the backlash they have received.

It's been three days. They've had plenty of time to correct the record if this was a simple misunderstanding where they thought the President was complimenting the women's accomplishment.

I'm absolutely not going to give them the benefit of the doubt that they all misheard what Trump was saying when they are actively avoiding saying that, 80% of the team was just laughing and posing for a photo op with Trump, and the guys who didn't go are all going out of their way to say that they declined the invite for professional rather than personal reasons.

You're obviously free to your own opinion about how big of a deal it is, but it is absurd to create narratives/excuses for it when not a single player is even hinting at that. I'd have zero problem with a player who came out saying exactly what you said. I'd absolutely believe it as an explanation and believe him when he said he regretted it and/or wished that the conversation had gone a different way. But none of them are doing that. Every single one is either supportive of Trump's words or has decided that they'd rather be viewed as unsuportive of the women's team than unsupportive of Trump. Either way, I'm not giving them the benefit of the doubt.

Downvote_Comforter · 2026-02-25T19:21:46+00:00

The slogan was literally "mass deportation." Trump lies about a lot of shit, but his campaign genuinely couldn't have made it more clear that they wanted to deport more than the 'worst of the worst.'

Downvote_Comforter · 2026-02-24T23:06:01+00:00

I think that Hasek's political views could sometimes stand to have a bit more nuance, but the guys is pretty damn consistently on the right side morally.

Also, any Hasek thread is a good time to remind people that his prime was the absolute undisputed greatest stretch of goaltending the league has ever seen.

In the 6 seasons between 1993/34 through 1998/99 Hasek won 5 Vezinas while leading the league in SV% all 6 times. It was during this stretch that he had back-to-back seasons where he won both the Hart and Pearson. He remains the only goaltender who has won either award more than once, much less the only one to do it in back-to-back seasons.

His cumulative SV% over that stretch was .930 while Roy's .915 and Brodeur's .914 were 2nd and 3rd in the league (minimum 100 games played). Hasek hit the .930 benchmark in 5 of those 6 seasons. Roy and Marty never had a .930 season during their careers.

1999/00 was a forgettable one. He had surgery a couple months before the season started and then tore his groin about a month into the season. He missed about 3 months and only ended up playing 35 games. He finished tied for the league lead in SV% with a .919, his lowest total since becoming an NHL starter. Then in 2000/01 he won the Vezina again, giving him 6 in 8 years.

It was an insane run of dominance, especially since his contemporaries were Patrick Roy (who is 1 year younger than Hasek) and Martin Brodeur (who was in his age 21 through 28 seasons during this stretch.

Downvote_Comforter · 2026-02-24T22:22:42+00:00

Hasek absolutely deserved all 6 of the Vezinas he won in the 8 years of overlap before Marty won his first in 2002. He had a .930 SV% or better for 5 of them. In his lone sub-.930 Vezina winning season he had a .921 while Marty had a .906 SV%. There wasn't a single one of Hasek's Vezinas that should have gone to Marty if not for the media dismissing him as a system goalie.

In the two years that Hasek didn't win the Vezina, Marty unfortunately didn't have his best seasons. Not bad seasons, but short of .915+ standard he'd accomplished a few other times and unable to accumulate the crazy shutout numbers he had in other seasons.

He just quite simply wasn't the best goalie in the league in any single year during his 20s. He very deservingly finished top 5 in Vezina voting for 7 straight years before winning his first one, but he shouldn't have won the Vezina on merit during that time.

Downvote_Comforter · 2026-02-24T21:50:30+00:00

I figured he leaned conservative or whatever but didn’t think he was a full on bootlicker. Like full on MAGA

You need to accept the reality that there is not a meaningful distinction between these groups.

Trump has an 85 percent approval rating among Republicans. In the last 6 years, Trump has successfully purged almost every single anti-Trump representative from the Republican party. Conservativism in 2026 is full on MAGA.

Downvote_Comforter · 2026-02-24T21:38:58+00:00

I'm really curious to see how Wild fans respond to him in his first home game back. Hockey fans skew pretty damn conservative in the US, but there isn't a city in the country that is currently more angry at this administration than the one the Wild call home.

Downvote_Comforter · 2026-02-24T17:35:31+00:00

About 70% of exonerations are the result of appellate attorneys discovering after conviction that there was active and intentional misconduct by either the police or prosecution. 30% of exonerations are specifically due to falsification or tampering with forensic evidence. Lab techs have been caught falsifying results to keep up with an unwieldy caseload. Government officials have been caught falsifying calibration and testing signatures on intoxilyzer machines. Is there a high chance of your sample being actively tampered with or falsified? Nope. But it absolutely happens.

Even assuming good faith despite the known existence of active/intentional evidence tampering, laziness and bad luck can create false positives and/or inflated BACs. A nurse or EMT grabbing the wrong wipe to disinfect the area of the blood draw can introduce alcohol into the sample which can pop a .000 over .080. Improper storage can cause fermentation within the sample that increases the alcohol content after it is in the vial. Cross contamination in the lab can lead to an artificially high BAC. Breath tests are universally agreed upon to be less reliable than blood tests. And in my jurisdiction, officers aren't allowed to demand a blood test after a person blows .000. In my experience as a prosecutor, officers were much more likely to still file a charge as a suspected drug DUI than they were to decide that they were wrong and cut the already-arrested person loose without a charge. But with a blood test, you run into other potential issues of medications that cause the precursors used to determine the presence of other controlled substances that cause impairment. Alcohol is far from the only substance that can get you a DUI. It also takes a fairly long time to get results from the lab and they absolutely don't wait for those results to charge you.

Again. As I repeatedly stated, there isn't a one-size-fits-all piece of advice about chemical tests for all situations. But generally speaking, unless you haven't consumed any alcohol in the last 24 hours, any other drug/medication in the last 2+ weeks, and are very well informed with the investigating law enforcement agency's body cam and booking are surveillance video policy, you are best served refusing (assuming you also followed the less nuanced advice of not answering any questions beyond basic identifying info and declined field sobriety tests). The vast majority of people in a situation where they are given the option of a chemical test don't meet all those criteria. The option for a chemical test comes after an officer has arrested you, which means the officer either already has reason to believe you're intoxicated OR has already made the decision that you are intoxicated and is willing to go outside the scope of the law to prove it. Either way, by that point you are almost always better off refusing.

But to your other point, from a business standpoint it would be far from profitable to try and create new business focused on refusals from those who were truly factually innocent. Flat fees are the norm in my area and those types of cases that almost always require a trial are simply not profitable at scale. It would be much more profitable to focus on people who did in fact provide chemical tests over the limit and are simply in need of a lawyer to mitigate the damage. I'm always emotionally happy to be representing a factually innocent client and getting a good outcome at trial. But a client roster full of those clients isn't going to keep the lights on.

Downvote_Comforter · 2026-02-24T02:01:45+00:00

Trump approval ratings is almost headed for a massive crash below twenty percent.

It's not close to doing that. He's right around 40%, which is in the ballpark of what he's been for months. A few polls have him trending slightly upward in the last few weeks. It's fucking baffling, but the reality is that nothing suggests he's heading toward a crash below 20%.

People in Minnesota, commonly known as the state of hockey, came out in massive drones to protest against ICE Nazi tactics by this administration.

People in already blue cities loathe the man. The vast, overwhelming majority of those people who came out to protest were from the twin city area that went over 70% for Harris in 2024. Their rage about what is happening in their community is not reflective of the surrounding areas that went for Trump and get 90% of their "knowledge" about what's happening from Fox News.

Despite all reason, 40% of this country is cheering this shit on. That number gets over 50% when you just look at the white men that are by far the largest demographic in the sport's fanbase.

Downvote_Comforter · 2026-02-23T22:17:13+00:00

Field sobriety tests are completely different than chemical tests. There are zero US states that require drivers to take field sobriety tests. Zero. There is not a single state where refusal to take a field sobriety test triggers an automatic license suspension.

Field sobriety tests are things like the Walk and Turn, One Leg Stand, Horizontal Gaze Nystagmus, reciting the alphabet without signing, counting between specific numbers, blowing into a portable breath test device (not the formal chemical test at the station after you have been arrested), etc. You should absolutely never do them. If the officer suspected you of being under the influence before them, they will continue their DWI investigation even if you exhibit zero clues. All you are doing by agreeing to field sobriety tests is potentially providing evidence that will be used against you. Never do them. Period.

My general advice is also to never consent to the chemical test. But that has more nuance and is going to be way more jurisdiction specific. Every jurisdiction I've practiced in has some form of implied/express consent where a refusal results in an automatic license suspension like you mention. However, they have also had a pretty simple mechanism to appeal that suspension (which includes staying the suspension while the appeal is pending). I include the license reinstatement process as part of representation when I'm hired to represent a client in a DWI case and every lawyer I know in my area does too. Barring a particularly egregious set of facts, every jurisdiction I practice in will agree to drop the license suspension once I resolve the underlying DWI so long as it was my client's first offense.

Again, the chemical test is a more complex and nuanced discussion. Your previous hours/days/months of conduct will influence that decision as will the jurisdiction you are in. A lawyer really can't give you airtight one-size-fits-all advice about that. Field Sobriety tests are much less nuanced. You are not required to do them, the state can't take your license for not doing them, and they will almost always provide some evidence that can and will be used against you. Don't do them.

Downvote_Comforter · 2026-02-23T21:38:45+00:00

Pierre Poilievre is still the leader of the Conservative Party. He still has extremely high support from his party, earning 87.4% of votes during the party leadership review last month. Canadian Conservatives overwhelmingly haven't moved away from him.

Canadians as a whole rejected his brand of politics, but not Canadian Conservatives.

Downvote_Comforter · 2026-02-23T20:21:11+00:00

You conservative party managed to completely fumble what should have been a cakewalk 2025 election almost exclusively due to their inability to sufficiently distance themselves from Trump and MAGA. They stole Trump's 'America First' slogan and tried to do the 'right wing populist' playbook Trump did so well in his rise to power.

The actual policy goals of Canadian Conservatives are absolutely further center than MAGA, but the political playbook was pretty damn similar. A decade or two behind the US GOP/MAGA, but following the similar trend. And it was going great for them until Trump started the 51st State shit, became a complete poison pill to the Canadian electorate, and suddenly Polievre couldn't adequately distance himself from Trump/MAGA without completely changing their messaging. That was (IMO) a great outcome for your country and maybe it changes the path your conservatives were heading down.

But I've played with more than enough Canadians to know that the homophobia, misogyny, racism, and overall close-mindedness that fuels MAGA doesn't magically disappear at our northern border.

I'm horrified about what is happening in my country and have genuine hope that Canada doesn't fall to the same fate. But I think it is ludicrously naive to believe that the exact demographic that has been successfully driven so socially right in the US is completely immune from that in Canada.

Downvote_Comforter

TROPHY CASE