What is The Daily Clutter?
It’s pretty simple. The Clutter is us but it’s also the news about Minnesota hockey & hockey in general and we want to Bring The Clutter to you, our fans AKA The ClutterPuckers, daily! We have to live up to our slogan Bring The Clutter Every Day in Every Way!
We might sprinkle in some other fun things, too.
What do we have today? Who Won GOLD, a big NHL injury will likely affect who wins the Best Rookie trophy, can the Minnesota Wild survive through all of these injuries?, & the Minnesota women’s professional hockey team shattered the attendance record for women’s hockey!
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Who Won GOLD?
Team USA & Team Sweden battled for World Junior supremacy yesterday in Sweden. Let’s see who came out on top!
If, for some reason, you weren’t able to see the game & still don’t know who won, you can watch the entire game here!
Quick recap coming soon!!!
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Conner Bedard hit Hard!
Big injury as Calder Trophy* favorite F Connor Bedard was hit by New Jersey Devils D Brendan Smith and he immediately left the ice and didn’t return.
*That’s the trophy for Rookie of the Year if you didn’t know.
This is the best video we could find on it but we recommend muting the audio & there’s no need to watch any further than when Bedard walks down the tunnel.
Chicago Blackhawks & rookie phenom F Connor Bedard was carrying the puck into the offensive zone with some speed. He had to make a move to get around New Jersey Devils F Dawson Mercer but that move caused the puck to roll off of his stick so he had to take his eye off of the defense to find the puck &, specifically, Devils D Brendan Smith who had intentions to play the body. Dawson Mercer’s stick check went between Bedard’s legs and caused him to lose his balance too so Bedard losing the puck & his balance didn’t allow him time to prepare for the oncoming body check even if that was just to make a slight move to evade most of the contact. Because of that, Brendan Smith’s shoulder ended up hitting Bedard’s head causing him to go down to the ice and he immediately grabbed at his face.
One scary thing to look at is how close Bedard’s skate comes to Brendan Smith’s face. It’s probably more than a foot away but did Smith think, “RELIGIOUS POOP!!! That was close!!!”
More on the Bedard Hit & a discussion on what the NHL should do about these hits if they won’t be called
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These Injuries are Wild, maybe too Wild!
“If you include the $14.7 million of dead space they entered the season with, the Wild will be icing a team Thursday against the Tampa Bay Lightning minus $50.9 million worth of players. According to PuckPedia, the Wild have so many call-ups that they only have $1.28 million left of the $6 million cushion they received to exceed the cap ceiling by placing Brodin on LTIR.”
How many NHL teams could sustain losing their top 2 forwards (Kirill Kaprizov & Mats Zuccarello), top 2 defensemen (Jared Spurgeon & Jonas Brodin), and their starting goaltender (Filip Gustavsson) in a matter of days and all of those injuries ending up week-to-week if not longer? And we didn’t even mention Marcus Foligno. Well… now we have.
“See? No monster in here… well… now there is.!”
That would be…
Edmonton Oilers:
McDavid & Draisaitl, Bouchard & Ekholm, & Skinner
Toronto Maple Leafs:
Matthews & Nylander, Rielly & McCabe
Vegas Golden Knights:
Eichel & Stone, Theodore & Pietrangelo, & Thompson
Pittsburgh Penguins:
Crosby & Malkin &/or Guentzel, Letang & Pettersson, & Jarry
Colorado Avalanche:
MacKinnon & Rantanen, Makar & Toews, & Georgiev
Winnipeg Jets
Scheifele & Ehlers (or a healthy Conner), Morrissey & Pionk, & Hellebuyck
Boston Bruins:
Pastrnak & Marchand, McAvoy & Lindholm & Ullmark
Vancouver Canucks:
Miller & Pettersson/Boeser, Hughes & Hronek, & Demko
Just to name a few!
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The State of Hockey Showed Up & Set an Attendance Record for Women’s Pro Hockey
The previous record of 8,318 was set 4 days ago in Ottawa! Sorry, Canada! If it helps Minnesota is the closest you can get to Canada, so there is that!
Most hockey fans, especially male hockey fans, scoffed at the women averaging 4,000 fans per game in Minnesota. That is still yet to be determined but one thing they’ve done that will help them is they avoided having their home games on nights when there are a lot of Minnesota girls high school hockey games. They also have no games on Fridays and all weekend games are afternoon games to avoid most state college hockey games so we’ll see if they can average 4,000 for the season. They covered 3+ with 13,000+ in game 1!
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