The Season starts Saturday!!!

This year's season of the NHL 2007-2008 starts on the other side of the pond. The league is trying to broaden their horizons and will start the season in London. The Stanley Cup Champions Anaheim Ducks will take on the Los Angeles Kings. The first west coast Cup champion. since Seattle, will open it's defense this Saturday on our Canadian Television station.

I thought to get you ready, I'd fill you in on some of the things that happened in the NHL over the summer. Jim's Calgary Flames reassigned their coach and hired Mike Keenan. I'm going to spend a minute and talk about this move. Flames fans, I don't know if I'm concerned if I'm the rest of the league or laughing. Keenan is with his eighth team, that is an NHL record. Keenan made a star out of NHL current NHL stars like Scott Pronger (Ducks), Joe Thorton (Sharks), and Olli Jokinen (Panthers). Keenan is sixth all-time in wins and fifth all-time in Playoff wins. For these reasons he should make the rest of the league cringe. However, perhaps Keenan has lost his touch. He has 0.450 winning percentage since 95-96 season. His greatest coaching accomplishment was with the Rangers when he won the cup. He is a coach who likes to get into player's head and will support them the next minute. Keenan is definately a question mark and he will certainly make this underachieving Flames team a bit better this year around. Look for Jerome Iginla to have a big season.

The Free Agent Market has made some teams contenders and others pretender. Teams that improved: The team that made the biggest splash in the pool was the NY Rangers. The Rangers picked up Anchorage, AK native Scott Gomez. It also picked up Chris Drury. Both these players will give Jagr support and Jagr is a star when he doesn't have to be the leader on the team. Look at the Pittsburgh Penguins in the 90's. The Flyers could also be another contender. After a terrible year, they made a trade deadline pick up for a goalie and paid Daniel Briere and Kimmo Timonen to upgrade their offense and defense. Pretenders: The Canucks didn't help their cause by getting some offensive support. We'll see how far the team can travel on Roberto Luongo this season. The Predators are in danger of losing their team to another city; The Sabres are also a team that will be seriously tested with their star centers going to division rivals in the Rangers and Flyers. Time will tell.

I'm not ready to make predictions, that perhaps will be for another weeks post. The last thing for this post: The NHL is looking to changing the schedule next year. Sidney Crosby has never been to Edmonton or Calgary. Starting next year, all the teams will play at least once, but I think they need to have a home and home with everyone and adjust the schedule from there. I do think the divisions play themselves too much but we'll see.

TV Games this week:
9/29 Ducks vs Kings on CBC 9 am
9/30 Kings vs Ducks on VS 9 am

I think these teams will split their trip to the east side of the Atlantic pond.

Local shoutout...
The T-Birds start their last year at Key Arena with a couple of NHL draft picks including Thomas Hickey. Birds lost their opener to Kamloops. Everett is 0-2 early on in the year as well.

The Rest of the Hockey League kicks off a week from Wednesday.