1 yr 2 mil for Richards almost seems to good to be true, especially considering the crazy money being spent on other guys.

Surely Richards could have gotten more somewhere else?

Maybe he wantes to really be a hawk

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"He is a loathsome, offensive brute
--yet I can't look away."

Best shot to win in his mind I guess? Or he has buds on team or Toews brings guys in? I dunno.

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If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.

His tour of the UC with GarPAx really made an impression.

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Proud member of the white guy grievance committee

It aint the six minutes. Its what happens in those six minutes.

Richards is coming off an enormous buyout. He's betting on himself that by taking one year to pad his stats on a Cup contender, he can dupe some team into giving him one last payday.

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He is better than Handzus by a mile of dumbass Score is Doomed posts.

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If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.

Bowman is sly like a fox

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Offensively, no question. I don't know how much work he does shorthanded. Granted, Handzus was even faltering on the kill by the end. We'll have to lean very heavily on Kruger and Smith for that second unit.

As we survey the great leaps that all the Central teams made, I want to sort of walk back a stance of mine. I've been registering my disgust with the NHL's new schedule matrix quite a bit, namely that it's silly to play 32 of 82 games against teams you're not competing for playoff spots with. I still think it's silly, of course, but man, am I now grateful that we have all those games against Not-Central teams. Gotta run that table! And with how bad all those non-Tampa teams got, we might!

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I remember my 1st beer.

Would be nice to not be in cap hell and have some brass balls. Hey, Ryan O'Reilly, here's 6.5 million for 5 years.

Like it or not (I don't), there's a gentleman's agreement among general managers not to horn in on RFAs. Kevin Lowe signed Dustin Penner in restricted free agency and Brian Burke threatened to rent a barn so they could fight in it. Doug Wilson breached the agreement to offer-sheet Niklas Hjalmarsson because we fired Dale Tallon. It just doesn't happen. Part of it is about making sure Brian Burke doesn't try to beat you up, but more than anything, it's about suppressing RFAs' value. Remember coming out of the lockout when there was somehow no interest whatsoever in signing Ryan O'Reilly, PK Subban, or Jamie Benn? Hey, look, O'Reilly and Subban are up for renewal again and no one's biting again.

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Bad news for Nashville, Mike Fisher is out six months with a ruptured Achilles. They're down to Olli Jokinen and who the fuck knows what else down the middle, so they're finished before they even start.

Also, buttsore Kenny Holland finally lobbied the league to give teams compensation for losing their personnel. Now if you sign another team's scout/assistant coach/assistant GM, it will cost you a third-round pick in a three-year window. Personally, I think this is bullshit, because it's not fair to stand in the way of someone's upward mobility like this. Sure, if it's a lateral move, there should be compensation involved (I count GM --> this phony-baloney "team president" fad as a lateral move), but to hire an assistant coach to be your head coach? That's just the way of the world. This is great news for the Red Wings, who lose all their Holland/Babcock foot soldiers and can now use the draft picks to discover unheralded Slovaks, and for shitty also-rans like Ron Wilson and Marc Crawford, who will get jobs when teams don't want to part with draft picks.

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Blues pay 5.2 over 2 for Steve Ott. Pesky Hawkslayer Vladimir Sobotka went to Russia.

Allow me to walk back a little of that talk about how much better the Blues got. Don't mind me here.

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Cleary was good for 8 and 8 in 52 last year and the Wings were all like "yeah gimme more of that sweet sweet expensive 13th forward" and gave him another year at 2.5.

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It just always works out CH. Take a breath. We can still make conf finals minimum. And the east is shit.

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If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.

Yeah, you're probably right. Crossing my fingers now for anything and everything going wrong for the Avs. I have this funny feeling it might.

The Dan Cleary contract is a $1.5MM base with a $1MM performance bonus. The performance in question is dressing for ten games. Matt Niskanen turning down the Red Wings really made them go daffy.

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Nashville shored up at center with other people's garbage: Derek Roy for a million, Mike Ribeiro for $1.05MM. The same Mike Ribeiro, you'll remember, who has such a coke problem that a team with no money and no scoring will pay him for six years not to play for them anymore, such a coke problem that this is his fourth team in four seasons despite decent production in Dallas, Washington, and Phoenix. And now he's going to a town that is little more than a road of bars with a mayor.

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The Panthers extended our old pal Brandon Pirri and moved him to left wing. I guess he's not even defensively responsible enough to center a bad team. No word on Jimmy Hayes; he's still in arbitration. The Hayes brothers are turning out to be kinda dickish, filing for arbitration and refusing to sign a contract having accomplished fuck-all in this league.

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Minnesota goalie Josh Harding out two months with a broken foot from kicking a wall in frustration. Get a load of Goalie Farnsworth over here.

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Brodeur is back. Signs with Blues.

http://espn.go.com/nhl/story/_/id/11968 ... in-brodeur