Duddoo

After 26 seasons as an NHL head coach, including 11 trips to the playoffs and two Stanley Cup Finals losses, Paul Maurice is ready to hoist hockey’s greatest prize.

OAKLAND, Calif. — The Toronto Blue Jays began deviating from their plans in the middle of May, elevating Davis Schneider to the leadoff spot in place of George Springer while also dropping Bo Bichette. Last week, they cut a little deeper by optioning Erik Swanson to triple-A Buffalo and a few days later crossed a long-held no-go by twice starting Vladimir Guerrero Jr. at third base, so that Daniel Vogelbach could get some run. 

On Friday came the deepest and most jarring change yet when Cavan Biggio, the homegrown utilityman who graduated to the majors in 2019 with much of the current core, was designated for assignment. Up in his place is Spencer Horwitz, who’s raked at triple-A Buffalo all season long but finally forced the front office’s hand with an 11-game, 87-inning crash course at second base, a position he’d only played seven times in four pro seasons prior.

So, you wanted changes? You wanted the team to do something? Well, the changes are here. Let’s get weird.

“You know, you look up and you are where you are and you evaluate, OK, what have we been doing? Has it been working? Has it not? Is it time to try something else? That’s kind of where we were,” manager John Schneider said of the through line through the changes. “With Swanny, I wish everyone could have heard the conversation with him and how professional he was and him knowing he needed to get right in order to help us. Vladdy understanding that third base is doable for him and it’s a way to help the team. Everyone’s on the same page with that and everyone here just wants to win.”

The latest manoeuvring, coming right after the Blue Jays escaped some fierce headwinds by rallying to split a four-game series with the Baltimore Orioles by winning the final two games, did not produce a third straight victory Friday night. Instead, after Chris Bassitt delivered eight dominant innings of one-run ball, JJ Bleday homered on Chad Green’s first pitch of the ninth inning to give the Oakland Athletics a 2-1, walk-off win, capping another down day for the offence.

Horwitz, who woke up at 4:30 a.m. to catch a six-hour flight from Philadelphia, didn’t start with the Blue Jays stacking righties against lefty Hogan Harris, who allowed just one run on three hits and two walks over six innings, despite allowing seven hard-hit balls.

Their only damage came in the seventh, after Max Schuemann scored on a wild pitch in the sixth, when a Bichette laced a single to right to cash in a Guerrero double. Alejandro Kirk has hit by a pitch later in the frame to put two on with one out, but the rally then fizzled and the Blue Jays didn’t threaten again.

Harris threw 59 fastballs among his 91 pitches, his usage “nothing that we didn’t talk about,” said Schneider. “We hit some balls hard early. Bo to the wall. I thought we were taking better swings on this fastball early, as we did as the game went on. But didn’t do enough with guys on base.”

Horwitz is the latest change on the offensive side aimed at ensuring the Blue Jays, now 30-33, have fewer nights like this one.

The 26-year-old batted .335/.456/.514 in 57 games with Buffalo but with Guerrero at first, Justin Turner at DH and Vogelbach on the bench, he was about as blocked as a player could be. But Bisons manager Casey Candaele, seeking to create more pathways to the majors for the player, told Horwitz that “‘I really like you there and I want to see it more,’ and I said, OK,” the infielder recalled. “So we did some early work, just gradually more and more and we’re going to try to stick with it a little bit.”

An extended slump for Biggio, who was prevented from hitting during the off-season by a shoulder issue that never went away, opened a door for him. He played sparingly in the last 11 days, making only one start and was told of the move after Thursday’s 6-5 win over the Orioles. Schneider said he and GM Ross Atkins told Biggio the change was “just us trying to take a different route with our roster and how we’re constructed and the potential for a bit more offence with Spence.”

Still, as a fifth-round pick of the Blue Jays in 2016, Biggio’s history with the club runs deep, and his absence will be felt.

“It sucks. I love Cavan,” said Bassitt. “I think he’s still going to be a great player. Whoever he winds up playing with, he’s going to help them. But I was trying to push that aside and just focus on today.”

While Biggio had options remaining, as a player with five years of service time in the majors, he would have had to consent to a demotion, which players in his position rarely do. So he was designated for assignment, handing his reps at second base over to Horwitz, who will also see some play at first and perhaps the occasional DH day.

He has also spent time with the Toronto Maple Leafs and Winnipeg Jets and got a second stint with the Hurricanes.

But as far as his place in the all-time coaching ranks, Maurice said he has a pretty good idea of the job he’s done throughout his career, but adding a Stanley Cup win would certainly be welcome in his third trip to the final dance.

“I understand what it feels like to feel like it’s over and you didn’t win,” Maurice said, after acknowledging he reached a point where he thought his coaching career was over. “… I’m gonna know when this thing’s all over, either how good I got or how good I was. I won’t need someone else to tell me that or to value my career.”

“But yeah, I’d really like to win one.”

You can watch Game 1 of the Stanley Cup Final Saturday on Sportsnet or Sportsnet+, beginning at 8 p.m. ET / 5 p.m. PT from Sunrise, Fla.

The Florida Panthers were the most penalized team in the regular season and that’s also been true so far in the playoffs. Part of their success comes from playing on the edge, but against Edmonton will that style be effective or hurt their chances? Justin Bourne explores.

SUNRISE, Fla. — Sunny, with a chance of Foegele.

If Edmonton Oilers head coach Kris Knoblauch has taught us one thing during this Stanley Cup run, it is that it doesn’t matter how much depth you have if you never actually use it.

And so he spiced up his bottom six in the Oilers final full practice before Game 1 of this Stanley Cup Final, inserting left winger Warren Foegele on the fourth line. Foegele was a healthy scratch for the final three games of Round 3.

“Whether he comes in for Game 1 or whatever, we will see him sometime in the lineup,” said Knoblauch, who has become less forthcoming with his lineup changes as each round has passed, on Friday. “He provides us a little bit offence, scoring 20 goals this season and 41 points. Also, he’s just another guy who adds some more speed to our team.”

Foegele’s first-ever 20-goal season has not translated to the post-season, where he has just a goal and three points in 15 starts. He is one of the Oilers fastest forwards, however, and combined with good size (6-foot-2, 204 pounds) he can bring some bang to Edmonton’s forecheck.

Here are the Oilers lines at practice Friday:

RNH-McDavid-Hyman

Kane-Draisaitl-Holloway

Janmark-Henrique-Brown

Foegele-McLeod-Perry

Ekholm-Bouchard

Nurse-Ceci

Kulak-Broberg

The Foegele move would leave the Oilers with a lineup missing both Derek Ryan and Sam Carrick, a pair of interchangeable fourth-line centres, but more importantly two right-handed faceoff men.

“We took (Foegele) out of the lineup, which wasn’t easy for us to do after the year he had, but it’s nice to have the opportunity to put him back in,” Knoblauch said.

On defence, it appears the Oilers will reunite the Darnell Nurse-Cody Ceci pairing, and with an overload of left shots, they’ll ask young Philip Broberg to play the right side on a pairing with Brett Kulak.

Yes, in Florida Panthers stars Tkachuk and the differently nasty Sam Bennett, the Edmonton Oilers are about to get reacquainted with a couple of old enemies. A couple of old Flames will surely rekindle a spark. 

Connor McDavid vs. Aleksander Barkov.

Stuart Skinner vs. Sergei Bobrovsky.

Kris Knoblauch vs. Paul Maurice.

There are dozens of matchups in this year’s Stanley Cup Final that will be fascinating to watch, as they’ll all impact the final outcome one way or another, meaning you can’t boil the series down to any one thing.

But some things are more important than others, and as we’ve come to get to know these two teams over the 2023-24 season a few very specific items have regularly surfaced:

1. Florida is the most physical, combative team in the league.

2. The Oilers are uniquely equipped to destroy an opponent that wants to get into a special teams affair.

The facts are pretty simple. During the regular season, no team in the NHL took more penalties than the Panthers. In the playoffs, they’re again the team that’s spent the most time in the box. They also lead the playoffs in hits. We don’t track “time spent in scrums,” but I promise you they’re tops there too.

Our producer on Real Kyper and Bourne (Sam McKee) used a word about Florida and their playing style earlier this season that I love and now use a lot: they play offended. They look for any excuse to get into a post-whistle eff-you off, whether someone touched their goalie, or shot the puck after a whistle, or breathed in the general direction of one of their equipment managers, whatever. It literally doesn’t seem to matter what it is, but they’re ready to go to war over it.

The Edmonton Oilers are no shrinking violets, and they’ve got plenty of veteran experience on their team, so this isn’t going to blow their minds or anything. To go with that, they may hold the antidote. If Florida wants to take penalties, the Oilers have the number one power play in the post-season. For a bigger sample, over the past three seasons Edmonton is at 28.4 per cent on the power play while no other team in the league can claim 26 per cent, scoring 10 more goals than the next best power play (Tampa Bay) over that time.

McDavid, Leon Draisaitl, Evan Bouchard, Zach Hyman, Ryan Nugent-Hopkins, I mean … they’re perfectly constructed to produce, custom built in a lab for a 1-3-1 power play unit (that freestyles as it sees fit).

And so, Florida will do that thing they do, where they commit 1,000 infractions per game knowing the refs don’t want to — and can’t — call everything, so they put it in the officials’ hands to actually make some calls.

There’s some fun work that’s been done on penalties called in the post-season (namely by Dom Luszczyszyn) which, to summarize, shows officials call the most penalties in the first game or two of the first round, then it tails off as the series goes on. Then it picks up again for game one or two of the second round (though not as high as round one), before tailing off again. In the end we know that refs call the fewest penalties per game in the Stanley Cup Final, and the frequency drops as the games get bigger. In this series, the onus is going to fall on the refs to call what’s really there, rather than “just let the playoffs decide it,” when in fact choosing to not call penalties is taking the game into their own hands.

It will be a stark contrast of a series for the Oilers, who are coming off a matchup against a Dallas team that took the fewest penalties in the NHL this season — they’re going from playing the 32^nd-most penalized team to first here. Still, the Oilers showed they could handle the battle when Los Angeles, and more specifically Vancouver, tried to take it to them.

One of the ways this series will be different will be in the blue paint, where the Panthers led me to write this article, which noted that Florida had been involved in every goaltender interference challenge in the playoffs. Their skaters will go to the crease and get into the opposing goalie, while their own goalie will push out into traffic and hope to eliminate the damage from any potential tipped pucks. In all, it can be mayhem around the blue paint.

There’s a great debate to be had about “answering the bell” versus “playing your own game” for the Western Conference champs. I think back to the infamous rabbit punches Brad Marchand once gave one of the Sedin brothers in the 2011 Cup Final, or the fallout from Auston Matthews choosing not to engage Ben Chiarot in a series that the Canadiens eventually took from the Leafs. The point being, it doesn’t seem like a great plan in the playoffs where the refs “let players play” to simply turn the other cheek and hope for power plays to be called in your favour.

Yes, in Florida Panthers stars Tkachuk and the differently nasty Sam Bennett, the Edmonton Oilers are about to get reacquainted with a couple of old enemies. A couple of old Flames will surely rekindle a spark. 

Darnell Nurse fondly remembers Tkachuk’s Calgary days, when he laid “a couple of hits that ignited some scraps” and routinely elevated the game’s temperature when he stepped on the ice. 

“Probably the most fun the Battle of Alberta ever was,” says Nurse, speaking of his era. “The animosity and the heat that was going on in that series — he brought a lot of it in his style of play.”

That series, Edmonton’s wild second-round victory over the Flames in 2022, marked Tkachuk’s final days in Alberta.

Tkachuk took his talents to South Florida in a Bill Zito–directed summer blockbuster that reunited him with Bennett and altered the trajectory of two franchises. 

The Panthers haven’t missed a playoff round since; the Flames haven’t been back to the dance.

Panthers fourth-liner Ryan Lomberg, another ex-Flame, remembers lighting up when the trade broke. 

“I remember telling one of my buddies: ‘We might lose more regular season games, but we’re gonna win more playoff games.’ And that’s exactly how it’s played out,” Lomberg says. “Billy called him a unicorn when he first got him… I think he nailed it.”

Panthers veteran Kyle Okposo talks about Tkachuk the same way teammates talk about Perry.

“He will do