“Happy Thanksgiving Canada!” tweeped Colorado’s Matt Duchene this week — today, actually. “Miss being up there this time of year.”

Scotty Bowman, who doesn’t tweet a lot, doesn’t call himself Scotty on Twitter: it’s Scott Bowman, @coachwsb. If his last message, from the NHL’s opening week, was a little cryptic, the gist of it was clear enough. “I support views of Steve Yzerman Ray Shero and Jim Rutherford on their opinions for Addressing most Fighting Issues Poll all Players.”

Whoooeeeh, Mikhail Grabovski of the Washington Capitals said last week, and I quote. Grabovski has been living with Alex Ovechkin this month, and driving with him to the rink. Dan Steinberg from The Washington Post was wondering about Ovechkin’s driving, and that’s what Grabovski said, whoosh. “Like in the game, you know? Always machine. I put seatbelt all the time.”

Steve Yzerman had called for game misconducts to be called on players who fought. “We’re stuck in the middle and need to decide what kind of sport do we want to be,” he’d said. “Either anything goes and we accept the consequences or take the next step and eliminate fighting.”

“He’s like the Pied Piper,” Anaheim coach Bruce Boudreau said of Teemu Selanne. Insofar as … like the rat-catcher who hasn’t been paid, he steals people’s children with music? No. Boudreau’s reading of the old German folktale is a different one. “Everywhere you go,” he was saying, “people love him.”

Keith Acton told John Tortorella to shut his fucking mouth. Acton (assistant coach in Edmonton) was mad about something Tortorella (Vancouver’s coach) had yelled in the heat of the Canucks win this week over the Oilers, so that’s what he yelled.

Told later that the CBC’s Glenn Healy thought Tortorella should calm down, the coach said, “I don’t care what CBC says, anybody has to say, quite honestly. They don’t know what’s happening.”

Ottawa coach Paul MacLean was peeved by the winning goal that Toronto’s Mason Raymond scored in the shoot-out this week against the Senators. He’d stopped, spun, scored; it was a good goal, officials deemed, because the puck remained in motion.

“I think it’s a very unfair play for the guy to come in and blow snow on the goaltender,” MacLean said. “To me, he came to a full stop, the puck went backwards and then forwards.

“But that’s me, I’m only a fisherman from Nova Scotia. So I don’t know nothin’ about nothin’.” Continue reading →