better.” “There are games,” he continued, “where you th

Alex Ovechkin will play for Russia at the upcoming Worlds. According to Yahoo Sports writer Dmitry Chesnokov, Dynamo Moscow President confirmed to the Russian Hockey Federations official site the Washington Capitals superstar will play at the World Hockey Championship. Ovechkin currently leads the NHL with 51 goals and is tied for seventh in points with 79. The 28-year-old former first overall draft pick will be looking to help Russia rebound from their poor showing at the Olympics in Sochi earlier this year. Air Max 97 Plus Black Orange . According to TSN Hockey Insider Darren Dreger, the Maple Leafs have trade offers on the table for the 26-year-old, but none have been deemed acceptable by the team. Air Max 97 Ultra 17 Red . Reimer told TSNs Mark Masters on Tuesday that he doesnt know if he will be moved leading up to the March 5 trade deadline but added he wasnt interested in discussing it. "Who knows whats going to happen on the horizon here and right now I dont know if I want to talk about it too much. http://www.outletairmax97.com/air-max-97-plus-cheap.html . It was my fifth straight year attending and, as always, there are many interesting matters discussed as it pertains to the use of statistics in sports. Air Max 97 Off White Wolf Grey Menta . The closer wasnt available. The road trip, a disaster to that point. Air Max 97 Vapormax For Sale . LeBron James and Chris Bosh didnt need any more. Williams scored 11 points in 10 minutes, Alan Anderson scored 17 points, and the Brooklyn Nets finished the exhibition season with a 108-87 win over the Miami Heat on Friday night.ST. PAUL, Minn. – Life just got a lot harder for the suddenly banged up Toronto Maple Leafs. Already struggling to produce a consistent product on the ice and facing a whole whack of games on the road this month, Toronto learned Friday that it will be without two of its top three centres and third-highest scoring winger, all for a good chunk of January. Joffrey Lupul will miss the next month with a lower body injury. Nazem Kadri, also out with a lower body injury, will be sidelined for 7-10 days. And Peter Holland will sit week to week with an upper body issue. All three stem from a Wednesday night win in Boston and will ultimately test the depth that defined the club’s offseason. “It’s been a strength of our team all year,” Lupul said of the club’s depth last month. “You never want to anticipate injuries or anything, but at some point in time there’s going to be guys that go down and this year it certainly looks like we have the depth throughout our lineup of guys that can step up and play in those situations and get offence and play in critical situations.” Though they fell in Minnesota, Friday’s effort was actually a reasonable start. “We cannot complain with the effort,” said head coach, Randy Carlyle, after a 3-1 loss to the Wild. “We’re not happy with the result, but I think that the effort was there. If we continue along those lines and we play that brand of hockey we’ll give ourselves a chance to win some games.” The Leafs actually won a rare possession battle, spending large amounts of the night in the Minnesota end while holding their opponents to just 29 shots. It was just the 11th time all season that they’ve held an opponent under 30 shots and second in as many games. Much of that, players said afterward, was due to improved exits from the defensive zone, a facet of the game the club has been pushing to improve in recent days (more on that below). They also didn’t allow near as many quality opportunities from those areas of the ice deemed dangerous. “Hopefully this is the style of play that we adopt and we feel that we can execute at that level and it all just starts in our own end in our puck recoveries and defensive zone coverage,” Carlyle said. “We weren’t as porous. They didn’t hold us in the offensive zone. They had a few flurries, but they weren’t dominating us on the possession time in our zone.” The highest scoring team in hockey, it was rare to see the Leafs held in check as they were by Darcy Kuemper and the Wild and it will be indeed curious to see how this group manages offensively in the coming weeks without Lupul and Kadri. Lupul led the club with 12 even-strength points in December, trailed closely behind by Kadri, who had six such goals and 11 points in 15 games. They are also the team’s two best possession players by some margin and form a dangerous secondary threat beyond Phil Kessel and James van Riemsdyk. That will mean more pressure on that top line to produce, specifically at even-strength where they’ve often failed to muster any consistent magic. It will also likely mean more ice-time for the likes of Kessel, van Riemsdyk and Tyler Bozak. Kessel and Bozak, in fact, pushed nearly 26 minutes on Friday, van Riemsdyk just a tad behind despite requiring repairs in the third period for the damage of a puck to the face. Toronto faced a similar challenge last season with injuries; a year ago last month they played 12 games without Bozak and the since departed Dave Bolland. The club went 5-5-2 in that stretch, surviving some without two of their top three centres. Centre ice will again be tested and likely exposed with Kadri and Holland on the shelf. Beyond Bozak, Toronto had Daniel Winnik, Trevor Smith and Greg McKegg line up in the other three spots down the middle against the Wild, a very limited trio offensively. What the Leafs have now that they didnt under similar circumstance last year is versatile depth across the roster. The likes of Winnik, Mike Santorelli, Leo Komarov, David Booth and later, Richard Panik, were added to help bolster what had been a three-line hockey team, one that was weak on options in case of injury. In this case, the Leafs will need those like Panik to produce with an increase in opportunity. Unexpectedly productive offensively in the early months the club will also require further contributions from Winnik, Santorelli and Komarov and something more from Booth, who has just one goal in 18 games. More generally they’ll require more of the structured acts that Friday brought. And they’ll have to do away from their Toronto confines, playing nine of the next 11 on the road. Five Points 1. Breakouts One point for improvement during a five-game trip that concludes Saturday for the Leafs in Winnipeg is how they break the puck out of the defensive zone. There’d been a tendency, as Cody Franson observed earlier in the week, for the five players on the ice to become too spread out. “I think it’s more puck support,” Carlyle said before Friday’’s game.dddddddddddd “I think we’ve been guilty far too often of leaving people high and dry. I think everybody’s got the same mantra in the league now that you have to have four or five guys around the puck. You make those short little passes, release passes away from pressure. “We know everybody’s forechecking with three guys and then the fourth guy is their defenceman usually pushing the walls. That hasn’t changed. That’s been probably a staple in the NHL here for the last four or five years. I think that’s one of the issues that we’ve had to deal with and we’re continually trying to improve in that area.” They did so against the Wild. Key to outshooting Minnesota – just the 10th time that’s happened for the Leafs this season – was improvement in those exits from the defensive zone. “I thought we had a lot of clean breakouts and we seemed to skate the puck in a lot from our end to their end,” Winnik said. “You have cleaner breakouts and quick breakouts and you’re obviously going to spend less time in your end.” 2. Discipline & Officials Discussed in the visiting dressing room after defeat was the club’s lacking discipline. Winnik’s third period slash on Ryan Suter sprung the Wild to their third and final goal, a one-time power-play blast from Mikko Koivu. “I’ve got to keep my cool in that situation, especially the time of the game and how we were kind of coming on there,” Winnik said. “It’s just a dumb play by me.” Phil Kessel was later whistled for unsportsmanlike conduct, chirping the officials after a slash from Matt Cooke went unpunished. The Leafs were none too pleased though earlier in the evening with the officiating. Mike Santorelli appeared to score the game’s first goal on a power-play, but the marker was called back shortly thereafter. It was ruled that David Clarkson interfered with Kuemper in front. Carlyle contends that he was pushed by Wild defender Jared Spurgeon. “They deemed that he interfered with the goaltender,” Carlyle said. “Obviously from our standpoint and watching the video he was pushed from behind by Jared Spurgeon. Obviously they saw it different. You don’t win those ones.” 3. Life in the New Year It’s a well-known theory among coaches that the league tightens up after the New Year. Why? “I just think that’s the nature in an 80-game schedule,” Carlyle said Thursday. “I think there’s only so many more points made available and that the intensity ramps up. Everybody’s going to preach it. We’re preaching it so every other team is going to be doing the same thing.” 4. Video Session Like any team around the league, the Leafs commonly look to video to prescribe fixes to troubled spots of their game. They’ve had some particularly painstaking sessions of late, the team sliding with five losses in the previous seven games. “The coaches aren’t trying to blame anybody or point players out or anything like that,” Morgan Rielly said, “they’re just trying to help the team and just trying to make the team better. You can’t take it personally, you’ve just got to worry about getting better and try to help out your teammates.” Rielly says what often looks like the right play on ice doesn’t end up being the case in review on video. “I think when you watch it on tape it looks a lot easier than it actually is playing,” he said. “There might be a play where on tape it looks kind of stupid, but during the game but you might think it’s the right play…you’ve just got to learn from your mistakes.” 5. Video Session II “It’s definitely teaching,” Korbinian Holzer said of the video work. “You have to show the bad things to ensure that everybody gets the message. It’s more like a teaching lesson; you sit in there, you listen. We got shown all the things that we’ve got to do differently, the stuff we didn’t do right in the game and how we can make it better.” “There are games,” he continued, “where you think it was a bad game and then you watch the video and it’s like oh it wasn’t that bad. And there are games where it didn’t feel so bad and you watch the video and it’s disgusting. There are definitely some games where you watch it on the video and it’s tough to watch. I bet that’s how the coaches feel too.” In addition to group sessions, Toronto’s coaching staff also holds individual video meetings with players on the regular. Stats-Pack 25:48 – Ice-time for Phil Kessel against the Wild, a season-high. 6-2-2 – Leafs record when outshooting the opponent. 11- Number of times the Leafs have held an opponent under 30 shots this season. 46-42 – Possession advantage for the Leafs on Friday. 8-4-1 – Leafs record versus the Western Conference. Special Teams Capsule PP: 1-4 Season: 20.7% (9th) PK: 2-3 Season: 82.3% (12th) Quote of the Night “It’s just a dumb play by me.” -Daniel Winnik, on the third period penalty that led to Minnesota’s third goal. Up Next The Leafs conclude their five-game road trip in Winnipeg on Saturday. ' ' '