Utah’s new NHL franchise has launched a second round of fan voting to help pick the name of the new team, asking fans to choose from six possible options.
The Arizona Coyotes are relocating to Salt Lake City next season after failing to find a new home in the Phoenix area. The team will play its first season with “Utah” on the front of its jerseys while the franchise develops a brand identity, but the team intends to play under its new name immediately. (The Utah franchise will technically be an expansion franchise, with the Coyotes franchise being declared inactive. Arizona owner Alex Meruelo can reactivate the franchise if he is able to secure a new arena within five years.)
The six options fans are being asked to choose from are as follows:
This is the second round of fan voting that the franchise has conducted. The first round was conducted last month, with 20 options to choose from. The franchise says that it received 520,000 responses in the initial round of voting and that the six options in the second round of voting accounted for 60% of the initial votes. Voting will be open until June 20.
The Maple Leafs announced that the team and general manager Kyle Dubas have parted ways after 10 years.“Kyle fostered a great culture within our dressing room and staff, and consistently pushed to...
An old hockey cliché says if you get pucks on net, you’ll give yourself a chance to win. Well, the Edmonton Oilers struggled mightily to get pucks on net in Game 6 of their series against the Dallas Stars on Sunday night, but they still came away with the victory and advanced to the Stanley Cup Final.
The Oilers managed just 10 shots on goal, while the Stars recorded 35. But Edmonton won 2–1, becoming just the third team in NHL history to win a playoff game while recording 10 or fewer shots on goal.
When scoring chances are in short supply, it helps to have a player who’s capable of turning nothing into something—and Edmonton’s Connor McDavid does just that. McDavid scored the first goal of the game with an incredible display of individual skill, dancing through the Dallas defense with some spectacular stickhandling before burying a backhand shot. (McDavid also assisted on the Oilers’ second goal, scored by Zach Hyman.)
“Hockey’s hard, you know? You need a lot of things to go right,” Stars center Tyler Seguin said after the game. “You need to have the opportunity. We had the opportunity. We went through a gauntlet and beat some really good teams and knew we had something special.
“We lost to a team we thought we could beat, and sometimes that’s [the] playoffs. Sometimes it’s that one bounce, one goal, one save. It’s why we all love it and it’s why this is the hardest damn trophy in the world to win.”
The Stars had been carried during these playoffs by star goalie Jake Oettinger. Over the first 16 games of the postseason (through Game 3 of the Edmonton series), Oettinger had a 2.09 goals-against average and .920 save percentage. But he allowed four goals on 28 shots in Game 4 and three goals on 26 shots in Game 5 before getting beaten twice in 10 tries in the series-clinching game Sunday.
Oettinger’s counterpart, meanwhile, was fantastic in the final three games of the series. Oilers goalie Stuart Skinner allowed just four goals in the last three games (all of which Edmonton won) and had an impressive .948 save percentage.
With the win, the Oilers advanced to their first Stanley Cup Final since 2006. Despite employing the best player in the world in McDavid, Edmonton had repeatedly fallen short in the playoffs, only advancing past the second round once in McDavid’s first eight seasons. And at the beginning of this season, it looked like the Oilers were destined for more disappointment. They won just two of their first 10 games, leading to the firing of coach Jay Woodcroft. But then they got hot—really hot. They went 26–6 in their first 32 games under new coach Kris Knoblauch, a stretch that included a 16-game winning streak, one game shy of the all-time NHL record.
The Oilers are great, but they’ll have their hands full in a Final matchup against the Florida Panthers, who finished the regular season tied for the second most wins in the NHL. Game 1 of that series will be in Florida on Saturday.
Osaka was one of the standouts in the first week at the French Open. / Susan Mullane-USA TODAY Sports
The NHL's Florida Panthers and NFL's Carolina Panthers came into existence around the same time—the teams began play in 1993 and 1995, respectively—but they sit at opposite ends of the success spectrum in 2024.
The hockey Panthers, after Saturday’s Game 1 victory, are three wins away from their first Stanley Cup title. The football Panthers are licking their wounds after a 2–15 season, their worst since going 1–15 in 2001.
However, differences in fortunes have never stopped some sports fans from mistaking the two teams for each other. It happened again Saturday in Los Angeles, when KABC-TV put up a graphic depicting the Edmonton Oilers and Carolina Panthers meeting in the Stanley Cup finals.
KABC in Los Angeles was getting viewers ready for Game 1 of the Stanley Cup Final between the Edmonton Oilers and -- Carolina Panthers? pic.twitter.com/asevhg8ZmC
— Awful Announcing (@awfulannouncing) June 9, 2024
Credit to the anchor here for proceeding as if nothing was amiss—gamely avoiding the urge to throw whoever handled the graphic under the bus.
Interestingly, the Oilers' last trip to the Stanley Cup finals saw them meet the Carolina Hurricanes, to whom they lost the 2006 championship series four games to three.
