Harman Dayal of The Athletic tweeted that Vancouver Canucks head coach Rick Tocchet downplayed Brock Boeser’s early exit from practice today. Boeser had left the ice after taking a shot up high on the wrist during a powerplay drill. Tocchet said that Boeser was fine as far as he knew and added that Boeser hadn’t said anything about a potential ailment.
The Canucks are already dealing with a significant injury with goaltender Thatcher Demko out of the lineup and can ill afford to lose more key pieces from their team. Boeser has just one assist through the first two games of round 1 but is coming off a career year having posted 40 goals and 33 assists in 81 regular season games.
In other Pacific Division notes:
- Speaking of Demko, the netminder travelled with the Canucks to Nashville (according to SportsNet’s Dan Murphy). Although he made the trip, there doesn’t appear to be any change to his status as he remains week-to-week. Patrick Johnston of Postmedia writes that his sources tell him that Demko wouldn’t be able to return from injury until the Conference Finals, while Donnie & Dhali of CHEK TV believe he could return late in round 2 if the Canucks can survive until then.
- The Seattle Kraken announced a new partnership today that will see their local broadcasts shift from ROOT Sports over to TEGNA-owned stations KONG as well as KING 5. KONG will broadcast all non-nationally televised Kraken games while KING 5 will simulcast 15 games as well. The deal effectively ends the Kraken’s relationship with ROOT Sports, who had broadcast Seattle games for their first three seasons. In addition to the new local television deal, the Kraken will also see all non-nationally televised games broadcast on Amazon Prime Video for people in Washington State, Oregon, and Alaska at no extra cost. Seattle becomes the first NHL team to strike a deal with Prime and could become a model for other franchises going forward.
The NHL is so ludicrously backwards when it comes to hockey broadcasting… They have ads on the boards, ads on players’ helmets, ads on commercial breaks, ads during the colour commentary.. And they still want me to pay like $300 a year to watch out of market games.
I watch livestreams on a Russian website.
Prime is an interesting option, but limiting it to local games is braindead. I’m a Sharks, Panthers and Blue Jackets fan. When I was a teenager in the 00s, I listened to digital radio streams of these teams. But for probably a good 15+ years now, HD streams have been freely available online. I am dead-centre between Toronto, Buffalo and Detroit, but I basically only reliably get Toronto games locally.
If I pay for the NHL’s ludicrously expensive streaming service, I can’t watch my teams if they’re playing on any channel in my area – even if it’s some BS no one has like TSN4. Their whole model is an absolute joke, and makes grey market streaming a better option in most use cases. Even if I have to watch the game in Swedish from Setanta Sports.
Why are you wasting a lot of time long posting on Pro Hockey Rumors when you should obviously be running a media company?
Shut-in silicon valley billionaire genius?
I’m gonna guess not.
“long posting” is now a couple hundred words.
Wait until you find out about books!
OK Boomer
Boomer? Boy, you really don’t know anything do you?
Demko being injured is worrisome for the Canucks. With Pettersson having some disappeared since the AllStar break I’m not heaped with confidence in these playoffs now 2 top players not contributing.
But it been a good ride this 23-24 season and looks to be more positive looking to the next verses the last.