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It's been 112 days since the St. Louis Blues raised the Stanley Cup, and while I'm sure your team's comeback win in your rec league last week was as memorable as you've hyped it up to be, it's a relief to have real, meaningful NHL hockey back in our lives.
The league has cooked up a banger for opening night, too. The last two Stanley Cup champions meet in The Lou, there's a pair of all-Canadian matchups, and the San Jose Sharks and Vegas Golden Knights renew what's quickly developed into the greatest rivalry in hockey (shame about that whole Evander Kane suspension, though). Now, let's make a great night even better by winning some money:
Game betting
The Toronto Maple Leafs open as heavy favorites over the basement-dwelling Ottawa Senators, with the two teams projected to be at opposite ends of the standings by the end of the season. There's little value in backing the Leafs at -290, while even the -1.5 puck line has you laying juice. Could there be value with the road underdog, though? The Sens won three of four in the Battle of Ontario last season. With expectations high for the Leafs this year and the team expected to reveal its new captain before the start of the game, it's hard to envision anything other than a home win here.
Toronto's captaincy decision won't hold a candle to the pregame ceremony in St. Louis, though, as the Blues are set to raise their Stanley Cup banner before taking on the Washington Capitals. The Caps were in this spot on opening night last season and went on to beat the Boston Bruins 7-0 after raising their banner. However, since the lockout in 2005, defending Stanley Cup champions are 4-9 on banner raising night. The Caps are also 39-19-3 over the last four seasons on the road against Western Conference teams. Perhaps a play on the road team is in order here.
The Edmonton Oilers are hoping to put a disappointing year behind them as they begin their campaign Wednesday at home to the Vancouver Canucks. They're 7-2 at home to the Canucks in the Connor McDavid era.
Meanwhile, in Vegas, the Golden Knights will be out for revenge after their improbable collapse in Game 7 against the Sharks last season. This should be a highly entertaining game to cap off the night - albeit slightly less so now that Kane and Ryan Reaves won't be going three rounds at center ice. Vegas is 9-4 in franchise history at home in October.
Game props
While the Leafs can rack up goals with the best of them, they have their problems with keeping pucks out of their own net. The Senators scored nine times in two games in Toronto last season and averaged 4.16 goals per game at Scotiabank Arena over the last three years. A bet on the Sens' team total over 2.5 goals sits at +110 and is worth a look, as is the over 3.5 at +285 if you're feeling especially frisky.
The first-period goal total prop is intriguing in Edmonton, as there have been 11 opening-frame tallies in the last four meetings between the Canucks and Oilers in Alberta. There have been at least two markers during the initial 20 minutes in each of those contests, making the over 1.5 first-period goals (-110) an attractive bet. The first-period over has also hit in three of four regular-season meetings between the Sharks and Golden Knights in Vegas.
Player props
Auston Matthews tends to pad his stats against the Senators, with 10 goals and seven assists in 12 contests against them since he entered the league. Backing him to score at any time in the game is appealing, but less so at the -120 price tag. Instead, take a look at him to be the game's first scorer at +850.
Another name to look at in this game is Ottawa's Thomas Chabot. He's the quarterback of the Senators' power play and should have ample opportunity to get on the scoresheet against a Leafs team that is without its top four penalty killers from last season (Nikita Zaitsev, Ron Hainsey, Zach Hyman, and Connor Brown). Chabot has four goals in six games against the Leafs and presents good value at +250 to find the back of the net. The over 0.5 assists prop is also definitely worth a stab at +105.
There's plenty of value in Vancouver's Brock Boeser to record an assist at +160, as he had four in as many games against the Oilers last season. Stay away from the McDavid and Leon Draisaitl goal props, though. The former hasn't scored in any of his last five home games against the Canucks, while Draisaitl has just five goals in 21 career games against Vancouver.
A much stronger bet in the scoring market would be William Karlsson to find the back of the net for Vegas, as he's scored seven goals in eight games as a Golden Knights player against the Sharks, including four in four at home. I'd much rather back him at +155 than someone like McDavid (-125) or Draisaitl (-125).
Alex Moretto is a sports betting writer for theScore. A journalism graduate from Guelph-Humber University, he has worked in sports media for over a decade. He will bet on anything from the Super Bowl to amateur soccer, is too impatient for futures, and will never trust a kicker. Find him on Twitter @alexjmoretto.
The 36-year-old forward is a healthy scratch for Wednesday's season opener at home against his former team, the Ottawa Senators.
"You definitely want to be part of these games," Spezza told the assembled media, including the Canadian Press. "They give you things to get excited about.
"I'd be lying if I said I wasn't disappointed, but I'm also a professional."
Offseason signing Nick Shore will center the fourth line as head coach Mike Babcock tries to find the right combination of players deeper in Toronto's lineup.
"I've talked to (Spezza) quite a bit about this and what we're doing and so we're on the same page moving ahead, and we're going to have a rotation with a few guys," Babcock said, according to TSN.
Babcock said Spezza will play in the team's next game and cited a need for more practice on the penalty kill as his reason for holding the veteran out Wednesday.
"He's the coach and he decides the lineup. I have to get to up to speed with what he wants," Spezza said, according to TSN's Kristen Shilton.
The Toronto native signed a one-year, $700,000 contract with the Leafs on July 1 after turning down more lucrative offers from other teams.
Keumper's agent, Ben Hankinson, confirmed that the deal carries an average annual value of $4.5 million.
The 29-year-old Kuemper is entering the final year of a contract that carries an annual cap hit of $1.85 million. He was set to become an unrestricted free agent next summer.
The Saskatchewan native is coming off his most productive NHL campaign, in which he posted a 27-20-8 record in a career-high 55 appearances.
Kuemper ranked sixth among all netminders (minimum 20 games played) in goals-against average (2.33), save percentage (.925), and shutouts (five) during the 2018-19 season.
Krug, 28, said in September that the sides had yet to begin negotiating an extension.
The 5-foot-9 rearguard is entering the final year of his current deal, which carries an annual cap hit of $5.25 million. He's set to become an unrestricted free agent after this season.
Krug has been a staple on the blue line for the Bruins, leading all defenseman on the club in games played (302), goals (32), and points (207) since the beginning of the 2015-16 campaign.
The Royal Oak, Michigan, native tallied six goals and a career-best 47 assists for 53 points in 2018-19 while logging the second-most ice time on the Bruins with 21:18 per game.
When it came time for Jocelyne Lamoureux-Davidson to seal her place in women's hockey history - to counter the golden overtime goal Marie-Philip Poulin scored in Sochi in 2014 and deliver an Olympic title to the United States - she didn't rush.
Before she bore down on net in the decisive round of the gold-medal shootout at Pyeongchang, Lamoureux-Davidson took looping strides to either side of the ice. Play-by-play announcer Mark Lee, calling the game on Canadian television, described her route as "meandering." Her patience was purposeful. Squaring her skates, Lamoureux-Davidson lifted her left foot and twitched her gloves to fake a wrist shot. Instead, she retained the puck, dragging it from forehand to backhand and back again.
The deke put the finishing touch on an indelible tableau: Canadian goalie Shannon Szabados lunging for her post, too far out to stymie the trickery that won the tournament.
AFP / Getty Images
Why revisit this sequence almost 20 months later? Because women's hockey occupies shaky ground in our sporting topography. The standard of play can be magnificent. The U.S. and Canada, giants of the game, have long tended to thrill audiences whenever and wherever they face off. Yet as the 2019-20 season begins, scores of the world's best players aren't signed to any professional team - a choice born out of their collective dissatisfaction with the available options.
These women - nearly all of them American or Canadian - formed the Professional Women's Hockey Players Association, uniting to transcend their sport's defining rivalry and advocate for a single strong pro league. About 200 players have joined the movement, including nine representatives who comprise the PWHPA board.
Two of those representatives? Lamoureux-Davidson and Szabados.
"We play for Team USA, Team Canada, Team Finland, but we don't play for them all year round," Lamoureux-Davidson said in a recent phone interview. "We want to play against the best players in the world during the season as well, whether that's with or against them.
"We need everyone at the table. It's an integral part of making this work," she said. "It's not just one country trying to figure this out. It's the best players in the world internationally."
In September, more than a dozen veterans of the U.S. and Canadian national programs convened in Toronto to participate in the first leg of the PWHPA's Dream Gap Tour, a traveling series of exhibition games scheduled to run parallel to the pro season. The tour heads to Hudson, New Hampshire, this weekend and to Chicago on Oct. 19-20, spotlighting the caliber of play in its ranks at an especially fraught moment for women's hockey.
Citing poor compensation and working conditions, the members of Sweden's women's team are boycotting their national federation, which recently responded by canceling the Four Nations Cup tournament it was scheduled to host in November. Closer to home, the Canadian Women's Hockey League folded abruptly last spring, leaving the U.S.-based National Women's Hockey League as the only pro circuit on the continent - and prompting the conversations that led to the creation of the PWHPA.
Jayna Hefford, the Hockey Hall of Famer who helped lead Canada to four Olympic gold medals and who now oversees the PWHPA, said that the Dream Gap Tour represents an unprecedented show of unity in women's sports. Many of the movement's biggest names have spent their adult lives entangled in their game's great rivalry, the bulk of their work with their country's national program oriented around the goal of beating, depending on their passport, either the U.S. or Canada.
Their encounters are usually hard-fought on the scoreboard, and occasionally between whistles. In all five Olympic finals featuring both nations, the margin of victory has been one or two goals. Between 1997 and 2017, seven of the 15 world championship finals in which they met went to overtime. Six years ago, the teams brawled twice in the lead-up to the Sochi Olympics. Those skirmishes involved several players who now headline the Dream Gap Tour together, including Lamoureux-Davidson, her twin sister Monique Lamoureux-Morando, fellow Americans Kacey Bellamy and Hilary Knight, and Canada's Melodie Daoust, Brianne Jenner, and Jocelyne Larocque.
If any hard feelings linger, they have been set aside for now in the name of solidarity.
"Obviously, we don't get along on the ice when we play against each other," American center Brianna Decker said. "But off the ice, we're striving for the same thing."
"It's always, 'Canada against U.S., Canada against U.S,'" Canadian forward Natalie Spooner said. "To show just how powerful this movement is, that we have come together with such a big rivalry between us - it must be something that is so important to all of us."
"We're all playing for the same team here," Jenner said. "We all stand for the same goal."
Kacey Bellamy (left) and Brianne Jenner. Harry How / Getty Images
Primarily, what these women seek is one pro league that can pay several teams' worth of players a living wage. Their ask, they are clear, is not NHL money, but salaries sufficient to make hockey their sole profession - and to prevent them from coming out of a season at a personal financial loss. That's happened in the past, Jenner says, when players have had to foot road-trip costs such as airport parking and meals.
(In the NWHL, which begins play this weekend, some high-end players will be paid $15,000 for the coming six-month season, plus an additional 26% raise that every player is due from a sponsorship and media revenue-split agreement with the league. For road games, they'll get a per diem of $25.)
"The way it's been set up in the past, it's been very, very difficult for girls to be motivated when they get to practice at 9 p.m. at night (after working another job) to push each other to get better," Canadian defenseman Renata Fast said. "The only way we can allow girls to focus on hockey is to provide them with a livable wage."
Lamoureux-Davidson said, "If you're going to call yourself a professional anything - whether that's a real 9-to-5 job or a professional athlete - to be a professional, you have to make a reasonable wage doing so."
The PWHPA's concerns aren't solely related to money. Its members are lobbying for a holistic conception of what constitutes a professional environment - specific elements that a league would guarantee, allowing the athletes to concentrate on playing.
Peter Kneffel / dpa / Getty Images
The little things, the players say, are what add up. Instead of cycling through a rotation of facilities, they'd like each team to operate out of one home arena where players could work out, store their equipment, get their skates sharpened, have their laundry done, and practice at a decent hour. They'd like franchises to employ proper support staff, such as strength coaches and trainers - "We train our butts off," Decker said, a commitment that necessitates regular medical attention - and game-day employees who can take care of miscellaneous tasks around the rink.
"We don't want our general manager behind a camera videotaping our games, rolling out the red carpet for the ceremonial puck drop," Canadian forward Sarah Nurse said.
"I don't want players to be running around the rink before games looking for stick tape," said Liz Knox, a retired CWHL goaltender who is on the PWHPA board. "When we talk about things we want in a sustainable league, we want them to show up and just play hockey."
In that sentiment, Americans and Canadians have found common cause. When tennis legend Billie Jean King, a pioneering voice for women's equality in sport, began advising the PWHPA earlier this year, Hefford said she impressed upon the players the importance of speaking with one voice. At the Dream Gap Tour's Toronto stop, Hefford and a few players expressed the same refrain: that in the throes of the U.S.-Canada rivalry, the women involved respect each other, and share a sense of responsibility to improvethe state of their game.
Tessa Bonhomme, who played for Canada with Hefford and is now a broadcaster for the Canadian network TSN, recalls an incident that evinced this dynamic during her early days with the national program. The summer before the 2006 Turin Olympics, the U.S. cut its longtime captain Cammi Granato, putting a curt end to her Hall of Fame career. The news "rocked" the Canadian dressing room, Bonhomme said. She remembers her captain, Cassie Campbell, summarizing the Canadian consensus: "This isn't right."
"Everyone felt the exact same way - mainly because, yes, we did believe it was wrong, but also because we wanted to face the best U.S. hockey team that could be out there," Bonhomme said. "For us to be backing a player who was, we felt, wrongfully cut, as Canadians against our biggest rival, I remember thinking, 'This is kind of crazy. But at the same time, I can't help but feel for this and be passionate about this movement.'
"It goes back a long way, and it started with both of those young ladies, Cassie and Cammi, really being at the forefront. Those are probably the two greatest leaders to have ever donned a jersey in the women's game. They really set the precedent there, and I think you can see it bleed through here (with the PWHPA)."
Renata Fast (left) and Kendall Coyne Schofield. Steve Russell / Toronto Star / Getty Images
More than a decade later, a new generation of stars has emerged to take up the mantle. Though kickstarting the Dream Gap Tour required contributions from people all over the sport, Decker identified Jenner and American forward Kendall Coyne Schofield as players whose initiative and leadership have been essential these last several months.
Acrimony at the international level hasn't stopped the Americans and Canadians from getting to know each other elsewhere. Decker and Jenner, along with a couple of other Olympians from each of their countries, won last season's CWHL championship together with the Calgary Inferno. The vast majority of Team Canada's national player pool attended U.S. colleges. The rivalry counts not one but two cross-border marriages: Meghan Duggan and Gillian Apps (of the U.S. and Canada, respectively), and Julie Chu and Caroline Ouellette.
On the ice, no other matchup has the capacity of U.S.-Canada to galvanize new viewers. In Toronto, Nurse recalled how Canada's dramatic 3-2 victory in the 2002 Olympic final introduced her to women's hockey at age 7 - "I was sold," she said - and kindled her dream of playing internationally. Later this season, her national team will face the U.S. in a touring five-game showcase series, starting in Hartford, Connecticut, on Dec. 14.
Meanwhile, the Dream Gap Tour continues (and is expected to add more dates), serving as a platform for the players to disseminate their call for lasting change.
"I think it's amazing they take that attitude: 'We're going to dream and we're going to push and we're going to make it happen,'" Granato said in a phone interview. "It does take a special group of people to actually have the guts to do that, to have the passion to do that, to understand the game's bigger than them."
"It was pretty special being in the locker room getting dressed, knowing that you're going out there making history, and you're doing it with people that you've played against and that you've been rivals with for years," U.S. defenseman Kacey Bellamy said after the tour's first games in Toronto.
"Fifty years from now, we're going to look back and say, 'Wow, we started this.'"
A goal is scored at the Dream Gap Tour. Anne-Marie Pellerin / Courtesy of PWHPA
The scale of individual sacrifice that will be required to even approach that point has already become apparent.For all of the Olympic veterans at the forefront of the PWHPA, the movement includes several times as many players who reside outside the spotlight, each of whom has forgone a season of their pro career in service to the larger mission.
To Lamoureux-Davidson, perspective is paramount. Even if many active players never sign a contract in the league the PWHPA envisions, she said, their selflessness will have laid the groundwork for that league's existence - and ensured that each player is remembered for much more than a tournament victory or a sublime, historic shootout goal.
"If you're able to step outside of living one season at a time and doing what's best for yourself, then you can see the big picture," Lamoureux-Davidson said.
"At this point, why I am still playing the sport? I just turned 30. I have a young son at home," she continued. "I guess if I had a young daughter, I would want her to have the ability to at least have the same dreams as my son." The same goes for her young nieces, and, for that matter, any girl who might find herself newly entranced by the game.
"It's unfortunate that right now, they simply can't have those same dreams," Lamoureux-Davidson said. "It's on us to make sure that that happens."
You can't discusswho the league's top defenseman is without almost immediately mentioning Hedman. The 6-foot-6 Swede is dominant at both ends of the ice and ranks third among NHL defensemen in points (236) over the past four seasons. Hedman hasfinished in the top three in Norris Trophy voting in three consecutive campaigns, including his win in 2018.
9. Evgeni Malkin, Penguins
Malkin can take over games like no other player in the NHL - when he wants to. The problem is that when he doesn't want to, he can hurt his team, which was the case for much of last season. The two-time Art Ross winner could easily bounce back this season if he's up for it. He at least sounds motivated, and that should scare opponents.
8. Erik Karlsson, Sharks
Brandon Magnus / National Hockey League / Getty
The highest-rated defenseman in our top 100, Karlsson was significantly hampered by injury last season and still managed to record 45 points in 53 games plus 16 more points in the playoffs. When healthy, the smooth-skating Shark is arguably the best offensive-minded blue-liner in the game and a perennial Norris Trophy contender.
7. Auston Matthews, Maple Leafs
Injuries have slowed Matthews over the last couple of seasons, but he's been ultra-productive when healthy, posting more than half a goal per game and over a point per contest in 2018-19. He's among the NHL's best snipers and brightest stars at 22 years old.
6. Patrick Kane, Blackhawks
One of the league's most electrifying players is geared up for another season of "Showtime" in Chicago. The 30-year-old Kane showed why he's one of the most elite players in the game with a career-best 44-goal, 110-point season in 2018-19. Sitting at 938 career points, Kane will become the youngest American-born player to join the 1,000-point club if he can do it this season.
5. Alex Ovechkin, Capitals
You know a player is special when his Hockey Reference page is covered in bold print, signaling a league leader. Ovechkin has won the "Rocket" Richard Trophy eight times and has led the NHL in shots 11 times. Even if he doesn't catch Wayne Gretzky for the all-time goals record, the Great Eight should be considered the best pure goal-scorer in hockey history based on era-adjusted stats.
4. Nathan MacKinnon, Avalanche
Dilip Vishwanat / National Hockey League / Getty
After four decent but not great seasons to begin his career, MacKinnon emerged at age 22 as one of the best players in hockey during the 2017-18 season. Since then, the former first overall pick has notched 196 points in 156 games and enters the season as a Hart Trophy favorite.
3. Nikita Kucherov, Lightning
Sure, he plays on a stacked team, but Kucherov was a worthy Hart winner in June after leading the NHL in points and assists. The dynamic Russian forward's production has increased in all five campaigns since his rookie year in 2013-14, and while it might be hard to top 128 points, he's one of only a handful of players in the league who could conceivably do it.
2. Sidney Crosby, Penguins
Crosby proved last season that he's got plenty left in the tank with his first 100-point campaign since 2013-14. He may no longer be the consensus top talent in the league, but he's still arguably the most important face of the game. It will be a privilege to watch him add to his legacy in the back half of his career as the Penguins look to stay near the top of a competitive Metropolitan Division.
1. Connor McDavid, Oilers
For the second straight season, McDavid is our consensus No. 1 overall player, and rightly so. Nobody's more dominant than 97. He's the most explosive skater the game has ever seen, and the things he can do with the puck on his stick while at top gear are simply remarkable. Watching McDavid play hockey is a treat, and we should never take it for granted.
