When Peko Hosoi competes against her 12-year-old nieces in fantasy football, she abides by a firm rule: never play for money. In a family of self-proclaimed "excellent smack talkers," bragging rights alone constitute a worthy prize. And she’d rather not veer too close to fraught ethical territory; as the founder of the MIT Sports Lab in Boston, she has firsthand access to a trove of data about the results of games played through the daily fantasy provider FanDuel.

Based on the insights Hosoi has gleaned from that data, even the staunchest fantasy football players among us - the diehards who mine draft rankings to find potential steals and monitor the waiver wire all week to optimize their shot at dominating Sunday - will realize they can't prepare for every twist of fate.

In U.S. and Canadian daily fantasy sports, football is the toughest game in which to make an easy buck, given how influential random chance can be in determining the outcomes of its matchups. Deep knowledge of NFL depth charts, or proficient navigation of the weekly transactional churn, is often not sufficient to guarantee victory, at least compared to the experience of expert players in fantasy baseball, basketball, and hockey.

This quirk is a major takeaway from a 2018 research paper co-authored by Hosoi. She and her colleagues devised a metric to quantify the extent to which luck and skill decide winners and losers in different daily fantasy sports - a mathematical answer to the initial policy question of whether these games were skill-based enough to convince state legislatures that they should be legalized.

Hosoi's findings seem particularly relevant in October, the only time of year that the MLB, NBA, NFL, and NHL calendars - and, with them, each league's parallel fantasy universe - all intersect. For the millions of fans across those sports who manage a team of their own, one glance at the above spectrum should be enough to process another lesson.

"If you're somebody who's trying to make a bunch of money out of this," Hosoi said, "play fantasy basketball."

In order to situate each fantasy sport on the spectrum, Hosoi and her fellow researchers set out a few years ago to study the results of salary-capped baseball, basketball, football, and hockey games played on FanDuel during the 2013-14 and 2014-15 seasons. If skill tended to trump luck in those competitions, a straightforward comparison - a player's average performance in the first half of a season versus their average performance in the second half - would illuminate its impact.

"One of the hallmarks of skill is persistence," Hosoi said. If a game is mostly based on skill, a player who wins more often than not remains likely to keep winning all season. If you lose in a blowout every week, it would be reasonable to expect that dispiriting trend to continue.

"Whereas if I'm flipping coins," Hosoi said, referencing an activity that appears on the spectrum for context, "and I happen to do well (at) flipping coins in February, that's in no way predictive of what I'm going to do in March."

By delving into win splits, Hosoi and her team found that victory in all four fantasy sports - and in their real-world versions - depends mainly on skill, though to varying degrees. The actual NBA, where teams play 82 games and hoist nearly a hundred shots per night, rewards aptitude more than any other competition. The actual NHL, where teams play 82 games but generate far fewer quality scoring chances, hews closer to the midpoint of the scale - closer to flipping a coin.

Devoted hockey fans already know that a single fortunate bounce can mean a lot on any given night. The spectrum's innovation is showcasing the rapport between the balance of luck and skill in a real sport and the balance of luck and skill in most corresponding fantasy variants. In both types of basketball, talent is overwhelmingly likely to prevail, since it's a more predictable game. Hockey, in whichever form, is comparatively chaotic.

Two points initially struck Hosoi as odd, she said: "One of them I can explain and one of them I can't."

The first of those surprises is that fantasy baseball scored higher on the skill spectrum than the sport itself. Her theory? The proliferation of advanced stats in baseball has created a gulf between the best fantasy players and the rest of the field that exceeds the distance between MLB championship contenders and cellar-dwellers. Equipped with their detailed spreadsheets, these fantasy managers are better positioned to exploit a skill gap than they would be in other games.

It's harder to explain the NFL's close proximity to the pure-skill end of the spectrum. The gap between luck's hold on fantasy football and on actual football is greater than in other sports, even though logic suggests that random chance should be consequential in a league whose teams play only 16 games and don't score all that much.

"I'm going to speculate wildly," Hosoi said, putting forth two ideas as to why skill carries the day on the field. Maybe, like in fantasy baseball, there is a vast talent imbalance between NFL rosters, and it doesn't take many games for the proper pecking order to take hold. Maybe, as one of her students has hypothesized, it doesn't matter that scoring plays are infrequent because every down is a scoring opportunity, increasing the likelihood that the best teams will win out over time.

Individual skill doesn't carry the same sway in fantasy football, which many players who compete in leagues against their friends may intuitively understand. Despite that, football is the favorite fantasy sport of two-thirds of the 59.3 million people who play all manner of such games in the U.S. and Canada, according to 2017 data from the Fantasy Sports Trade Association.

To Hosoi, fantasy football's popularity goes hand in hand with its accessibility. When even diehard players need a little intangible help to win, odds are better that parity will reign.

"It's a game where a lot of people can participate regardless of their ability," she said. "You don't want to walk into a game where you're just going to get trounced every time. The way you make that fun for that population is you have to add an element of chance."

Nick Faris is a features writer at theScore.

Copyright © 2019 Score Media Ventures Inc. All rights reserved. Certain content reproduced under license.

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.

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."

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.

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 improve the 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)."

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.'"

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."

Nick Faris is a features writer at theScore.

Copyright © 2019 Score Media Ventures Inc. All rights reserved. Certain content reproduced under license.

TORONTO - Midway through the second period of an elite women's hockey game last Saturday, two defensemen converged at their blue line to haul Natalie Spooner to the ice, earning a tripping penalty. When Spooner was deployed on the ensuing power play, she snuck into a vacant gap in the slot, took a pass, and wired a one-timer off the goaltender's arm.

The rebound fell to the side of the crease, where Spooner's teammate Carolyne Prevost poked the puck into the net.

The sequence and its end result were happily familiar to Spooner, an influential power forward on Canadian teams that medaled at the past seven world championships and at the 2014 and 2018 Olympics. More familiar, certainly, than the position in which she'd found herself at another rink a couple of nights earlier: backflipping onto the shoulder of a champion ice dancer, where she stretched her arms aloft as the two of them glided to the chorus of a country song.

Such is life this autumn for a 28-year-old star with a resume to envy and time to fill. As the 2019-20 professional hockey season gets set to begin, many of the women's game's brightest talents are embarking instead on their own barnstorming tour, staging a series of showcase events across the U.S. and Canada to amplify their call for the creation of a league that can pay all of them a living wage.

Separately and simultaneously, two of those women - Spooner and American forward Amanda Kessel - signed up for a crash course in figure skating that plays out live on Thursday nights on Canadian national TV. They are among the protagonists of this season's "Battle of the Blades," the CBC show that pits seven pairs of prominent hockey players and figure skaters against one another in competition.

"When you play hockey, it doesn't really matter what you look like if you get the job done - you get from point A to B and score," Spooner said in an interview Saturday, two days after her first performance with veteran Canadian Olympic ice dancer Andrew Poje.

"In 'Battle of the Blades,' it's keeping your shoulders down, and smiling, and looking pretty," she said. "It's definitely way different. But I'm having a blast with it, and just trying to take it all in and learn lots."

Poje was one of thousands of fans who passed through the stands of a suburban Toronto arena over the weekend to watch the first slate of games of the Dream Gap Tour. The nascent Professional Women's Hockey Players Association so named the series of events to highlight the chasm between what boys and girls who play hockey can aspire to accomplish in the game - mainly, getting paid enough money in a pro league to make hockey their full-time job.

The National Women's Hockey League, whose five teams will operate with a salary cap of $150,000 this season, begins play Oct. 5 as the only remaining women's pro league. The Canadian Women's Hockey League ceased operations last spring and more than 150 players who compose the PWHPA have chosen to band together in search of a permanent, sustainable solution. The magnitude of the moment is unmistakable. No one is certain what the future holds.

In the meantime, as the Dream Gap Tour prepares to visit two American cities - Hudson, New Hampshire, an hour north of Boston, on Oct. 5-6, and Chicago on Oct. 19-20 - several of the movement's most recognizable names have stocked their calendars with other interesting commitments.

Kendall Coyne Schofield, the American winger whose showing in the fastest skater event commanded the spotlight at last season's NHL All-Star weekend, joined the San Jose Sharks' TV broadcast as a part-time color analyst. Her teammate Brianna Decker is an assistant coach with the U.S. women's under-18 team. U.S. defenseman Kacey Bellamy is taking a business class in which she's researching the leadership legacy of tennis icon and women's equality advocate Billie Jean King. U.S. forward Hilary Knight recently walked the runway at a New York Fashion Week gala whose proceeds went toward a children's sport nonprofit. The PWHPA has organized regional training hubs so that its players can practice regularly throughout the season.

Through weeks of training with their "Battle of the Blades" partners, Spooner and Kessel - who is paired with 2018 Olympic pairs bronze medalist Eric Radford - are coming to understand the divergence between what is required to excel at hockey and at figure skating. Newcomers to the latter sport have to learn to stay upright on a toe pick; they feel the edges of their blades more acutely than do hockey players. At the Dream Gap Tour's Toronto stop, Canadian center Marie-Philip Poulin explained why it wasn't too hard for her to keep pace in her first competitive game in months: she didn't have to rapidly transition back from "white skates."

"It's picking up a brand new sport and doing it at the highest level," said Tessa Bonhomme, the retired Canadian defenseman who won "Battle of the Blades" eight years ago with 2002 Olympic pairs gold medalist David Pelletier.

"You come into this sport where you think already know how to skate - and quite frankly, I usually got pretty good reviews on my skating reports. You get out on these figure skates and you're watching Dave or any of the other competitors go through their warmup, and meanwhile you're dripping sweat, just trying to figure out, 'Left goes first or right goes first?'"

For Bonhomme, the key to victory involved refusing to shy away from tricks that might reasonably induce fear, such as the handstand that segued into a face-first swing in which her head came within inches of the ice. She thinks Spooner - her former teammate on the Canadian national team and the CWHL's Toronto Furies - possesses that kind of nerve and drive, as well as a personality that will endear her to the audience.

"I think what's going to work in her favor is that she is fearless, and she isn't embarrassed to laugh at herself," Bonhomme said in an interview the week before Spooner's "Battle of the Blades" debut. "I've seen her dance moves in the locker room and off the ice. It'll be interesting to see if that can translate with skates up."

The early returns suggest that Spooner should be just fine. As she and Poje skated to Dean Brody's "Canadian Girls" in Hamilton, Ontario, last Thursday, she pointed and grinned at host Ron MacLean when one lyric mentioned the renowned sportscaster's name. Later, she dropped to a knee and spun 360 degrees before Poje flipped her backward in the routine's conclusive flourish. The show's judges awarded them three scores of 9.3.

Spooner said she hopes her "Battle of the Blades" experience will make her a stronger hockey skater, perhaps by elongating her stride. She's also competing to drum up awareness and funds for Fast and Female, a small charity that works with athlete role models to encourage girls to play sports.

"A lot of girls drop out of sports when they're around 13, 14, hitting puberty, and a lot of it has to do with body image," Spooner said. She notes that at 5-foot-10, she's much bigger than the typical female figure skater.

It's easy to discern how Fast and Female's animating purpose mirrors that of the PWHPA. Even if Spooner and Kessel's cohort of stars never gets the chance to play in the sustainable league that it envisions, the generation that succeeds that cohort might.

That possibility was front of mind all weekend in Toronto, where Spooner built on her power-play assist from Saturday by scoring on a nifty backhand move the following morning. At the end of that game, a Dream Gap Tour official handed her a Budweiser-sponsored goal light, which flashed red as she circled center ice and the crowd cheered.

"The biggest thing is for little girls to still watch women play hockey (this season)," Spooner said. "There is a future for women's hockey that we're fighting for - for them."

Nick Faris is a features writer at theScore.

Copyright © 2019 Score Media Ventures Inc. All rights reserved. Certain content reproduced under license.

After he slalomed between two defenders and one-timed a bouncing stretch pass to the inside corner of the left post, Peter Stone turned toward a teammate, smiled, and celebrated the dazzling sequence with a shrug.

Stone's showing on an indoor soccer pitch in Sydney, Australia, earlier this summer was dominant by any standard, even though the specifics of the match were unconventional. Outfitted in dress shirts, he and four fellow scientists were coasting past a team of wheeled robots, exploiting holes in their defense with shrewd link-up play and timely saunters down the wing.

Even as he scored four goals in the 4-1 win, Stone - the president of the RoboCup Federation, an international collective of academics that arranges this yearly tussle between man and machine - came away impressed by his opponents' teamwork and smarts. The patterns in which the robots shared possession and moved into open spaces were familiar; they resembled the kinds of decisions that underlie any cohesive lineup's attack.

The robots, standing just waist-high against the humans, managed to make this much clear: They knew what they were doing.

"People are still much better than the robots. We can still pass the ball around them," said Stone, an artificial-intelligence researcher at the University of Texas. "(But) every year, it gets a little bit more difficult. We always joke that we're not sure if it's because we're getting older or the robots are getting better."

RoboCup is a scientific entity. It stages soccer tournaments between teams of robots because its members, first and foremost, want to advance the state of robotics research. However, the goal around which the federation orients its work is rooted in sports. By 2050, the scientists want to build a roster of autonomous humanoids that is capable of competing against the most formidable opponent imaginable: the champion of that year's World Cup.

The 2050 benchmark is an objective, but not a prediction. "We learned long ago in artificial intelligence that if you put a date on a challenge like that, you should do it for a date after you're going to retire, because they're very uncertain," Stone said.

Still, there's no time like the present to wonder when this ambition might be realized - and, once it is, how it will affect each and every one of our games.

In 2019, the makings of a future in which humanoids displace professional athletes and technology renders both coaches and referees obsolete is starting to become discernible. Toyota engineers have developed a stationary basketball robot that sinks set shots with unrivaled accuracy. And not long after he departed Arsenal last year, Arsene Wenger speculated that robots could manage soccer clubs within two decades.

Radar technology is already responsible for calling balls and strikes in the independent Atlantic baseball league, which MLB tapped as its testing ground for a slate of experimental rules. Human umpires still relay the calls to the players and the crowd, but their deference to the automated system means that for the first time, a non-human entity occupies a full-time role in a live sports competition.

"(Players) want to have a consistent strike zone," Atlantic League president Rick White said. "They have consistently in the past said to us, 'Tell us what the strike zone is, enforce the strike zone, but don't change that umpire to umpire, day to day, inning by inning,' and so forth. (The automated system) gives them an answer to that."

Given the novelty of the Atlantic League's trial run, we're a ways off from MLB deciding to computerize its own strike zone. Even further away is the prospect of a robot keeping pace with Kylian Mbappe or outshooting Stephen Curry against the added burden of a defender. Present-day humanoids generally struggle to stand upright, which is why it's far more entertaining for RoboCup to pit wheeled competitors against Stone and his colleagues at the federation's annual gathering.

Those RoboCup competitions, which are broken down into several divisions based on the robots' design, illustrate the core challenge of taking aim at the World Cup champs: Robot athletes must be hardwired to not only think like humans, but to move like them, too.

For now, robots are significantly more intelligent than they are mobile. When Stone's team faced the winners of RoboCup's wheeled "middle size" league, which factors physicality out of the equation, the robots scored their lone goal off a perceptive downfield pass from a defender to a striker.

A second robot goal was nullified, somewhat ironically, when replay overruled a human decision because the ball didn't fully cross the line.

Meanwhile, RoboCup's humanoid event brings to life an old soccer witticism - the one about possession-happy teams preferring to walk the ball into the net. It's the surest way to score in a game where the players, limited in their ability to move freely, lumber down the pitch with a minder in tow, kicking only from a standstill to avoid falling over.

The chasm between the humanoid body and mind helps explain the value that researchers see in RoboCup and other similar projects. If the end goal is scientific progress, then sports - with their quantifiable standards of success - are a useful setting through which to pursue that result, and to test boundaries.

Each year, the Federation of International Robot-Sport Association (FIRA) invites roboticists to enter humanoids they've developed into the HuroCup - the decathlon of the robot world. In the sprint event, participants are made to walk 3 meters forward and then backpedal the same distance. They also weight lift, scale ladders and ropes in a spartan race, and compete in a marathon that spans 421.95 meters, one hundred times smaller than a human course.

One event in which humanoids could threaten human preeminence rather soon is archery. Jacky Baltes, the president of FIRA and a robotics researcher at National Taiwan Normal University, said that he and several colleagues from around the world are working to enter a robot archer into next year's Taiwanese national competition in hopes that it will later be able to vie for medals at the World University Games, and then at the Olympics.

In contests that require agility and speed, Baltes thinks robots are bound to make exponential strides, similar to other seminal technologies that took time to flourish. He pointed to cellphones, which were once stodgy and heavy but are now small supercomputers. A more extreme example? In 1903, Orville and Wilbur Wright kept a plane aloft for 260 meters of flight; by 1947, aviation had progressed to the point where test pilot Chuck Yeager could soar faster than the speed of sound.

We might be 40 years out from a humanoid topping a child in a race of any length, Baltes added, but once the basic framework is in place, it's possible no man-made record will be safe.

"From beating a 5-year-old to beating the world champion is only going to be a relatively short time," Baltes said. "Maybe another five years, maybe another 10 years."

Whenever that time comes, British futurist Ian Pearson figures fans won't take much of an interest in watching those humanoids make precision sports, such as archery and shooting, entirely predictable. "Of course a machine can hit the target," he said.

Pearson applies the same logic to golf. It would be dull, after all, if every round consisted of 18 holes-in-one.

Other sports have greater crossover potential. Robot jockeys could supplant the human element in horse racing, allowing the Triple Crown to be decided solely on the horses' merits. Pearson says he'd be surprised if the next 20 years elapsed without humanoids facing tennis pros in showcase matches. (He noted that this brand of exhibition could be short-lived if the robots reach superhuman physical capacity, enabling them to win all the time.)

As for the people tasked with enforcing the rules? The advent of automated home plate umpires in baseball might be a harbinger of what's to come elsewhere. Pearson has written that robot umps could be practical in tennis, where technology has already replaced humans in calling net cords, and Hawk-Eye is used as a backup resource for line calls. He predicted that drone robots could feasibly take over all officiating duties in soccer by as soon as next year, with humanoid referees to follow around 2030.

If that prognosis seems grim for human officiating, it at least comes equipped with a silver lining: the chance that spectators will revolt at the sight of robots getting every single call correct. "Half of the fun of watching a game is arguing with the referee and calling the guy an idiot," Pearson said.

When the robo-athlete breakthrough arrives, many executives who oversee sports will face a moment of reckoning. How will they act in response?

One option would be to bar robots from our established competitions, which is where Baltes' effort to get a humanoid archer admitted to the Olympics may hit a snag. A spokesperson for World Archery, the sport's governing body, said the federation's rulebook doesn't specify that archers must be human, but does include many prohibitions on the use of electronic equipment.

"I would guess this covers robots," the spokesperson, Chris Wells, wrote in an email.

In the opposite scenario, if marketing potential or the desire to innovate leads sports authorities to welcome robots into the fold, limits on their physical capabilities would have to be enacted to prevent them from making a mockery of the games. Disregard, for a moment, the image of primitive humanoids tottering down a soccer pitch; envision in its place a descendant that's programmed to run with abandon and kick a ball several hundred miles per hour.

"You wouldn't be able to follow the play," Pearson said. "Every shot would be a goal, and it just wouldn't be fun watching it."

About a decade ago, this dilemma led Stone and two fellow roboticists to propose, in a chapter of a book called "Soccer and Philosophy," a set of robot-curtailing rule modifications that would ensure fairness and preserve the essence of the sport, which they described as two teams working to beat each other within the confines of limitations that every player on the field shares.

Their suggested rules stipulate that robot soccer players would need to look like humans, with two arms, two legs, and no more than two forward-facing cameras to serve as their eyes. No robot could be bigger than the biggest human player; none could run faster or kick harder than the upper human limit in each category. Nor could any robo-team's combined size, speed, and kick strength and accuracy exceed the best pro team's total dispersion of those qualities.

"If there comes a time when a team of robots defeats a team of humans under these rules, then no spectator will be able to cry 'foul!'" Stone and his colleagues, Michael Quinlan and Todd Hester, wrote in the chapter.

No spectator, that is, except for those who'd protest the validity of the result on philosophical grounds. When a robot athlete engages in a sport such as soccer, these fans might wonder if they're truly playing the game, or if they're merely mimicking a necessarily human activity.

Stone, Quinlan, and Hester sided with the first response to this question. In their chapter, they argued that if a match in which robots oppose a "serious human team" - be it the World Cup champion or five decently fit scientists - is recognizable as soccer, the robots have sufficiently proven their ability to play.

In 2016, sports philosophers Francisco Javier Lopez Frias and Jose Luis Perez Trivino advocated for a more rigorous standard, opining, in a paper, that participating in a sport is not the same as playing it. In sports, they contend, people - unlike any other being - decide to enter the realm of play to learn something about themselves, such as seeing how close they can get, within natural limits, to attaining physical excellence.

"It's not just about following the rules. It's not about exercising some skills," Lopez Frias said in an interview. "(Playing sports is) about adopting a specific attitude toward the game."

For robots to play sports, Lopez Frias added, more about them would need to be human than simply their outward appearance. If they don't share human vulnerabilities, fans won't be able to relate to them, or admire or care about the wondrousness of any physical feats they conjure.

Future robots may beat us on the scoreboard, or ensure that no pitch off the plate is ever mistaken for a strike again. But under this line of thinking, we'd still be the protagonists of our own games.

"Sport is a human phenomenon," Lopez Frias said. "If you eliminate the human component, then you don't have a sport anymore."

- With a file from Jonah Birenbaum

Nick Faris is a features writer at theScore.

Copyright © 2019 Score Media Ventures Inc. All rights reserved. Certain content reproduced under license.

Last month, on Independence Day, the Portland Pickles hosted a one-off exhibition game dubbed Future of Baseball Night - a radical reimagining of the sport. Every bunt hit was ruled a double, and batters ran the bases clockwise during odd-numbered innings. If needed, a home run derby would have been staged to break a tie.

Of the 12 clubs that comprise the collegiate summer West Coast League, only the Pickles have ever thought to organize a D.B. Cooper Night. On a Sunday in June, fans were encouraged to arrive with theories about the fate of the skyjacker whose parachute escape has mystified U.S. authorities for the past five decades.

And on every game night at Portland's home park, Walker Stadium, players and spectators rise to their feet whenever the Pickles plate a run. Together they hoist their stools and lawn chairs toward the sky, an enduring nod to a relief pitcher who once surrendered to spontaneity and celebrated that way in the bullpen.

"If we score a lot of runs, it's a real workout," said Pickles owner Alan Miller. "It's really fun to watch people who haven't been there before look around, like, 'What is going on?'"

It's safe to say they do baseball differently in Portland, where an anthropomorphic vegetable mascot named Dillon the Pickle paces the sidelines with a perpetual smile, and where offbeat ideas tend to prevail.

Miller, 47, is a California-raised baseball obsessive who has spent most of his adult life working as an entertainment marketer. Along with his fellow Pickles owner, former NFL punter Jon Ryan, he's on a self-described "quest" to be transformative in a staid sport. Portland doesn't have another baseball team, and Miller is convinced that every Pickles homestand should double as "the best party in town."

Such are the conditions under which the Pickles recently distinguished themselves from the rest of North America's sports landscape. This season, they became the first team in baseball to strike a sponsorship deal with a CBD brand - a novel kind of partnership that, if attitudes change, could soon permeate the biggest leagues around.

A rapid-fire primer on CBD, or cannabidiol: It's the compound found in cannabis plants that doesn't get users high. (THC, or tetrahydrocannabinol, is the psychoactive component.) Anecdotal accounts and some clinical trials suggest that CBD oil extracted from hemp can help manage pain and other medical conditions without the deleterious effects of opioids. Consumer demand is skyrocketing.

The Brightfield Group, a Chicago research firm that studies cannabis markets, has predicted that the value of the hemp-derived CBD industry will balloon to $22 billion by 2022, up from a mere $591 million in 2018. In pure financial terms, it stands to reason that leagues that have long cozied up to beer companies might want a piece of that advertising money.

To date, though, interest in aligning with the CBD movement has mostly been limited to the fringes of American sports, such as the relatively obscure West Coast League. While 90 WCL alumni were selected in this year's MLB draft, including No. 1 overall pick Adley Rutschman, it isn't even the country's most prominent summer baseball competition. (That distinction belongs to the much older Cape Cod League.)

Yet even far removed from the shining lights of the majors, the Pickles' pact with Lazarus Naturals, a CBD manufacturer based in Seattle, marks a significant step.

At every Pickles home game during the regular season, which concludes this weekend, Lazarus employees have positioned themselves in an area near right field to sell select company wares - such as CBD tinctures and balm - and to answer any questions about the substance. Banners bearing the Lazarus logo hang around the park. The team has invited military veterans to watch games from a Lazarus-branded box, situated in prime viewing territory between home plate and the opposing dugout.

Some fans have been apprehensive about Lazarus' presence at the park; others mistakenly thought the company's comparatively understated sales booth would resemble a head shop. Miller, though, has found the vast majority to be receptive - open either to purchasing a CBD product or, at least, to learning more about it.

"As a sports team, or as any business, I think we have an obligation to be progressive," Miller said. "There's a negative stigma around CBD because of the confusion with cannabis and how all the different elements work, and this is a hemp-derived product and some are not. But it was important to me to help open that door and make it a bit more accessible to people.

"At the end of the day," he continued, "this is a product that is helping people."

Increasingly, this conviction is gaining purchase across a number of sports, well beyond the snug confines of Walker Stadium.

Take auto racing's IndyCar Series, where James Hinchcliffe and Marcus Ericsson drive with the logo of a CBD-infused sports beverage, Defy, on their cars. Tennis player John Isner endorses Defy, which Pro Football Hall of Famer Terrell Davis helped create. PGA Tour veteran Bubba Watson is sponsored by cbdMD, a North Carolina-based brand that's also the official jersey patch provider of the BIG3 basketball league.

"Sports are really the perfect way to begin preaching and educating a diverse audience on how CBD, holistically, represents a more natural approach to wellness," said Ken Cohn, cbdMD's chief marketing officer. "With major partners like Bubba and the BIG3, we think we're getting the CBD brand and our story in front of millions of people in ways that otherwise we wouldn't be able to accomplish."

Jeff Kwatinetz, the entertainment executive who co-founded the BIG3 with Ice Cube in 2017, says his league's deal with cbdMD falls in line with its overarching desire to take care of players. The three-on-three basketball circuit, which barnstorms across U.S. cities on summer weekends, has become a landing spot for dozens of former NBAers at the tail end of their careers, from Gilbert Arenas to Amar'e Stoudemire to current per-game scoring leader Joe Johnson.

These players have subjected their bodies to a whole lot of pain over the years, which prompted the BIG3 to permit the use of CBD in 2018. Several companies subsequently approached the league about a partnership. As of this season, the cbdMD logo adorns every BIG3 uniform.

"For us to make the decision, I had to look at: What's the right messaging toward our fans?" Kwatinetz said. "I have a 20-month-old daughter. Would I would want her taking CBD or Oxycontin (someday) if she needed pain (relief)? The answer is simple. I would want to avoid opioids at all costs, seeing how they're ravaging society.

"Our world needs to be improved. Any way that we can help, we want to help. And certainly with athletes, we feel a responsibility to them," he added. "It's doing things we believe are better for society. CBD, frankly, was an easy one."

The tradition of athletes trumpeting the benefits of various pain remedies long predates CBD's ascent into the mainstream. Shaquille O'Neal made Icy Hot patches famous. Joe Namath used to shoot commercials for aloe vera gel. In May, Namath told Fox Business that he thinks athletes should be allowed to treat pain with marijuana, so long as they don't drive while high.

On the same day as Namath's comments were published, the UFC announced that it planned to partner with Aurora Cannabis to facilitate clinical research into the link between CBD and athlete wellness and recovery. The NHL Alumni Association has a similar arrangement in place with another cannabis producer, Canopy Growth, to test whether CBD could help treat post-concussion neurological diseases.

As these studies get underway, the advertising space represents another barometer with which pro sports' tolerance for CBD can be gauged. At the moment, all of the United States' four major leagues - the NBA, NFL, NHL, and MLB - prohibit their franchises from signing CBD companies as sponsors.

No discussion has taken place at the NFL about the possibility of partnering with CBD brands, Brian McCarthy, the league's vice president of communications, told theScore via email.

An NBA spokesperson said in an email that the league is discussing CBD with its teams and the players' association and is "continuing to stay abreast of the latest developments in the science and related legal and regulatory frameworks.”

Meanwhile, the shape of CBD legalization across the U.S. is a hodgepodge. Laws governing its sale and possession vary by city and state. The cultivation and sale of hemp has been legal at the federal level since late 2018, but the national Food and Drug Administration has so far approved just one CBD product, a prescription drug that treats rare forms of epilepsy.

Timothy Dewhirst, a marketing professor at Guelph University in Ontario, Canada, said it's understandable that high-profile leagues may want to wait for the FDA to introduce comprehensive regulations before considering CBD brands as sponsors. Yet even if the biggest fish remain wary, the deals that already exist in Portland, the PGA Tour, and elsewhere could have a potent effect on public opinion.

"That kind of visibility (CBD companies) can gain by these partnerships, and especially a partnership with someone like Bubba Watson, a two-time Masters champion - if he's touting the great benefits of these products and their safety and so on, that can go a long way to making them deemed far more socially acceptable," Dewhirst said.

If the major leagues come to view CBD lines as appropriate partners, the inroads that the product makes into sports advertising circles could compare to those of the gambling industry, Syracuse University sports management professor Patrick Walsh suggested in an interview. The NBA, NFL, NHL, and MLB have all inked official casino or gaming partnerships within the past 13 months, a sea change made possible by the May 2018 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that allowed states to legalize sports betting.

Major League Soccer didn't respond to requests for comment about its stance on CBD partnerships, but it, too, has displayed a willingness to venture into markets once considered taboo. In June, three months after MLS struck its own gaming partnership with MGM Resorts, the league authorized its clubs to pursue stadium-naming and jersey-sponsorships deals with sports betting and liquor companies, a first in U.S. team sports.

"We want to be viewed as a progressive league," MLS senior vice president of business development Carter Ladd told Fortune at the time. "We don't want to be restrictive. We want to enable (our clubs) in a positive way, and that's why we're taking this action."

Miller, the Pickles owner, traces his desire to push the boundaries of baseball entertainment back to August 1994, when a players' strike halted the MLB season and later prompted the cancellation of the World Series.

At 22 years old, single, and living in Los Angeles, he set out with friends on idle days throughout the rest of that summer to discover nearby minor-league experiences, starting with the High-A Lake Elsinore Storm, where a bunny mascot bounded from the outfield wall to perform a little jig every time the home side scored a run.

"That was too good," Miller said.

Ahead of the advent of the internet, Miller knew little about the minor-league scene in different pockets of the U.S., but in the following years he journeyed to ballparks as far away as Staten Island and Durham, N.C., observing, appreciating, and memorizing the quirks and customs that made each place different. The promotions that stuck in his mind were those that seemed authentic, having amplified something cool about the team's city.

Before he recounted this personal history one recent afternoon, Miller mentioned that the Pickles were hours away from holding the franchise's first Tattoo Tuesday, where anyone aged 21 or older could have a mark of their fandom etched into their skin free of charge. It was, as he put it, just another day in Portland.

The deal with Lazarus Naturals is one more way in which Miller's merry band of chair-raisers stand apart from the pack - for now. The Pickles are committed to the partnership for the next couple of years, by which point, if more state legislatures begin to adopt Oregon's lenient approach, they could have plenty of company in the market.

To Miller, it's less a matter of if than when.

"In three-to-five years, it's just going to be like buying a beer or buying a hot dog at any other park," he said. "There's no way it isn't going to be, 'I have a Budweiser deal and I have this CBD company deal.'"

Nick Faris is a features writer at theScore.

Copyright © 2019 Score Media Ventures Inc. All rights reserved. Certain content reproduced under license.

With apologies to Artemi Panarin and Matt Duchene, the NHL's 2019 unrestricted free-agent class isn't teeming with star power - especially compared to the electric assortment of restricted free agents who are due new contracts this summer.

Mitch Marner, Mikko Rantanen, Brayden Point, and Patrik Laine headline the surge of young stars who are on the precipice of signing rich deals. Add Sebastian Aho, Brock Boeser, Kyle Connor, Timo Meier, Matthew Tkachuk, Charlie McAvoy, and Zach Werenski to the list, and it becomes apparent that the money they stand to command is bound to become a defining storyline of this offseason.

For the first time since 2013, when the Calgary Flames tried to nab Ryan O'Reilly from the Colorado Avalanche, it seems more likely that at least one enterprising franchise could attempt to acquire another team's RFA with an offer sheet.

Even if no general manager wants to cede up to four first-round draft picks, the highest compensation tier for signing another club's RFA, in pursuit of a top scorer such as Marner, ripe targets might be found in skaters of secondary stature - think Kevin Labanc of the San Jose Sharks or the Washington Capitals' Jakub Vrana - whose clubs are constrained by the salary cap.

As we wait to see if that scenario comes to pass, the history of offer sheets in hockey merits a refresher on entertainment value alone. NHL lore is littered with anecdotes of GMs expressing their contempt for the practice in strong terms: by alleging tampering, by griping that these transactions inflate salaries, and, in one infamous case, by challenging a rival executive to a fistfight in a barn.

Here's a rundown of five offer-sheet episodes that ruffled feathers and altered the face of the league.

2012: Flyers go in for Shea Weber

Weber was a 26-year-old perennial All-Star and the Nashville Predators' captain when Philadelphia made a play to sign him in July 2012. The colossal deal - $110 million over 14 years - more than doubled the value of any previous NHL offer sheet.

The Flyers' offer seemed specifically tailored to price Nashville out of the picture. It was structured to pay Weber $52 million in signing bonuses over the first four years, including a 2012-13 season that looked threatened by a looming lockout.

However, the Predators had lost another No. 1-caliber defenseman in Ryan Suter just weeks earlier to the Minnesota Wild as a UFA. Unwilling to let his blue line be ravaged any further, Nashville GM David Poile matched the Flyers' offer instead of accepting four of Philly's future first-round picks.

The implications of the megadeal were sweeping.

Contracts exceeding eight years were outlawed in the CBA that resolved the subsequent lockout. The Flyers haven't won a playoff series since they missed out on Weber. Nashville traded Weber to the Montreal Canadiens in 2016 for P.K. Subban, with whom they reached the 2017 Stanley Cup Final - only to flip Subban to the New Jersey Devils last week to free up cap space in hopes of signing Duchene or another top forward.

Weber, now 33 years old and Montreal's captain, still has seven years remaining on his deal at an annual cap hit just shy of $8 million.

2007: Kevin Lowe provokes Brian Burke

Lowe, then the GM of the Edmonton Oilers, didn't endear himself to his managerial counterparts when, in July 2007, he signed Buffalo Sabres forward Thomas Vanek to a seven-year, $50-million offer sheet, the most lucrative such deal in NHL history prior to Weber's.

Sabres GM Darcy Regier - who'd personally told Lowe that he didn't plan to let go of Vanek and then matched the offer within minutes - said afterward that Lowe must have thought he was bluffing and called Edmonton's gambit "an exercise in futility." Lowe retorted by saying Regier's reaction was "rather juvenile."

The exchange set the stage for Burke, GM of the newly minted Stanley Cup champion Anaheim Ducks, to lash out at Lowe a few weeks later when the Oilers tendered a five-year, $21.5-million offer sheet to Ducks forward Dustin Penner, who'd earned a league-minimum salary of $450,000 the previous season. (Anaheim didn't match the offer and received Edmonton's selections in the first three rounds of the 2008 draft.)

Annoyed by what he considered an overpayment that elevated the going rate for young players, Burke said Lowe's offer was "gutless" and "an act of desperation for a general manager who is fighting to keep his job." That criticism sparked a rancorous feud that, a year later, prompted Lowe to call Burke a "moron" and an "underachieving wannabe" whose single Cup victory paled next to the six championships Lowe won during his playing days.

In 2011, a few years after the NHL warned Burke and Lowe they'd be fined if they didn't stop quarreling, Burke revealed that he'd tried to arrange a fight with Lowe through an intermediary, New York Rangers GM Glen Sather, even telling Sather that he'd rent a barn where the bout could be staged.

It all amounted to a great deal of hubbub over Penner, who scored more than 20 goals in three of his four seasons with the Oilers before his statistical output started to tail off.

1998: Hurricanes target Sergei Fedorov

In 1997, Fedorov compiled a point-per-game playoff campaign that helped the Detroit Red Wings to the franchise's first Stanley Cup title in 42 years. In search of a new contract to start the 1997-98 season, he was prepared to dig in for a prolonged holdout.

The dispute stretched into that winter's Olympic hockey tournament in Nagano, Japan, at which point Fedorov signed a record six-year, $38-million offer sheet with Carolina.

The Hurricanes, a weak team that had just relocated from Hartford, front-loaded their offer with a $14-million signing bonus and an additional $12 million that Fedorov would be paid in a lump sum if his club made that season's conference final. The latter clause led the NHL to reject the deal, but an arbitrator overruled the league and deemed the contract valid.

The Hurricanes - owned by Peter Karmanos, a Detroit-area businessman who shared a bitter, longtime rivalry with Red Wings owner Mike Ilitch - would never have been on the line for the second bonus, as they wound up missing the 1997-98 playoffs by nine points.

Meanwhile, Illitch's Red Wings were left to foot the whole bill when they matched the offer, reintegrated Fedorov into the lineup after his return from Japan, and - in a feat that did wonders to soften the financial blow - stormed to a second straight championship.

Fedorov, immediately $26 million richer as a result of his holdout, decided to kick-start a charity for children in the Detroit area by donating his $2-million base salary for the following season. In 2002, he won the third and final title of his career when the Red Wings rolled to victory in the Cup Final against a surprising opponent: Carolina.

1992: Flames try to poach Teemu Selanne

After drafting Selanne 10th overall in 1988, the Winnipeg Jets had to wait four seasons - a span that included a mandatory military stint in his native Finland - for him to cross the ocean to debut in the NHL.

But before Winnipeg could lock him into a contract at the end of that interlude, Calgary took advantage of Selanne's RFA status and signed him to a three-year, $2.7-million offer sheet - about $1.5 million more than the Jets wanted to shell out.

"There was a lot of angst in Winnipeg about, 'Was any player worth this kind of money?'" Selanne's agent, Don Baizley, told NHL.com in 2013. "I think he was really determined coming over under that sort of pressure. He was going to prove to people that he was a good player. It wasn't the offer sheet so much as the reaction to the offer sheet."

In the end, the price didn't deter Winnipeg GM Mike Smith from matching Calgary's offer, enabling Selanne to cement his place in the NHL record books as a member of the Jets. His 76 goals and 132 points in 1992-93 are still by far the most a rookie has ever produced.

Would Selanne have stayed in Calgary for longer than he lasted in Winnipeg? After a severed Achilles tendon and the 1994-95 NHL lockout cut short his second and third seasons, the Jets traded Selanne to Anaheim in February 1996, a few unhappy months before the franchise relocated to Phoenix.

1990-94: St. Louis' fixation on Scott Stevens

In the first half of the 1990s, the Blues were locked on acquiring Stevens, a hard-nosed veteran who'd risen to stardom over eight seasons with the Capitals. St. Louis persuaded him to sign as an RFA in July 1990 with a four-year, $5.1-million offer sheet, which the Capitals declined to match.

For the right to make Stevens hockey's highest-paid defenseman, the Blues owed Washington five first-round draft selections, a debt that proved problematic the following offseason when St. Louis GM Ron Caron successfully offer-sheeted 22-year-old Devils forward Brendan Shanahan.

With so many of their first-rounders already bound for D.C., the Blues offered to send two promising young players, goalie Curtis Joseph and forward Rod Brind'Amour, to New Jersey along with two draft picks. The arbitrator assigned to the case sided with the Devils, who wanted - and ultimately received - Stevens as compensation.

In July 1994, days after the contract to which they'd originally signed him expired, the Blues again inked Stevens to an offer sheet, this time for $17 million over four years. Had this second attempt to acquire him concluded differently, he would never have captained the Devils to three Stanley Cups.

New Jersey, though, matched the offer and upped the ante by accusing St. Louis management of tampering. An NHL investigation later uncovered an overnight air receipt that proved Blues president Jack Quinn had sent the offer sheet to Stevens' agent, Richard Bennett, that May while the defenseman was still under contract with the Devils.

The probe, which took until 1999 to complete, resulted in NHL commissioner Gary Bettman forcing the Blues to yield a first-round pick to New Jersey and to pay the Devils $1.4 million.

"I don't look at something of this nature as a triumph," New Jersey GM Lou Lamoriello told reporters at the time. "I don't think the compensation could be severe enough. My request was five first-round picks, plus damages."

Nick Faris is a features writer at theScore.

Copyright © 2019 Score Media Ventures Inc. All rights reserved. Certain content reproduced under license.

In the run-up to this year's NFL draft, Rich Calabrese and his team of social-media auditors discovered a curious piece of intel about a possible high pick: The player had once "liked" tweets that criticized an NBA star.

The finding wasn't necessarily a red flag, but something Calabrese, the executive vice-president of social research at Turnkey Intelligence, would term a "yellow light." To put it finely, it might disturb front-office execs in the city where the NBA star plied his trade, including the NFL franchise that had asked Calabrese's firm to scrutinize the prospect's online past.

"If that team's fan base saw that your No. 1 draft pick had liked negative, hating comments on the city's basketball team and their star player, that's not how you want to start the first interview after you draft this guy," Calabrese said.

The episode is a striking indicator of just how much time, energy, and brainpower sports organizations now devote to combing the annals of social media.

Had a software program, rather than a human, been trained to spot incriminating keywords deep in the prospect's timeline, the likes wouldn't have provoked any alarm. Until recently, the activity might have seemed innocuous - the basketball player would never be a future opponent or teammate, after all - or gone unseen for the duration of his pro career.

Instead, teams now hire independent advisers to probe every inch of a prospect's Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram accounts. Agents try to scrub any post that could be considered offensive. Experts warn student-athletes about the financial and reputational consequences of writing something derogatory or thoughtless on a public profile.

All of this legwork is done to avoid what befell Buffalo Bills quarterback Josh Allen on the eve of the 2018 NFL Draft.

"I was like, 'And, this is never happening to us,'" said Alyssa Romano, vice-president of communications at the Octagon sports agency, describing how the discovery of tweets in which Allen used the N-word as a high schooler convinced her that social-media review should be a paramount element of draft prep.

"I think I shared that story across our agency," Romano said, "just reminding people this could happen to anybody."

Plenty of athletes have indeed been in Allen's shoes in the past year. Thrust into the spotlight when they won the Heisman Trophy, clinched a national title, appeared in an all-star game, or powered an unlikely playoff run, Kyler Murray, Donte DiVincenzo, Josh Hader, and Jordan Binnington were all denounced on the occasion of their star turn because someone found the homophobic, racist, or culturally insensitive messages they tweeted as teenagers.

The array of posts that prospects have belatedly walked back runs the gamut from embarrassing to plainly unacceptable. When the Chicago Bulls drafted Bobby Portis in 2015, he offered to buy doughnuts for Derrick Rose and Pau Gasol, new teammates he'd slammed in tweets at age 16. At the opposite extreme is Colorado Rockies prospect Ryan Rolison, who was 15 when he suggested in a tweet that Barack Obama should be shot.

As athletes are called to account for all sorts of youthful utterances, they and their handlers are taking stock of their social-media history with greater urgency.

By analyzing the profiles of 100 of this year's best NFL prospects, Turnkey Intelligence found that 23 percent had deleted at least 100 posts, including one projected second-rounder who got rid of more than 11,000. The No. 2 overall pick, San Francisco 49ers defensive end Nick Bosa, deleted pro-Donald Trump and anti-Colin Kaepernick tweets before - as he suspected might happen - he was selected by Kaepernick's former team.

With this year's NBA and NHL drafts freshly in the books, theScore spoke to several people who work at the intersection of sports and social media about the behind-the-scenes efforts to chronicle or cleanse past online behavior, stretching all the way back to a prospect's early adolescence.

"To be able to leverage (social media), you have to make sure that it aligns with who you are," said Lauren Walsh, a publicist who works in image control with football and baseball players.

"People will have a skewed view of you even if you said one thing 10 years ago."

How the review process works

Romano, whose agency is among the biggest in sports, often turns to social media to familiarize herself with new clients before they ever speak in person. Some, she learns, like to tweet about their pets or favorite music. If a player professes his love for Sour Patch Kids, she'll have a pack on hand at their introductory meeting to break the ice.

Studying a client's social accounts serves another purpose, too: Players and their camps can figure out which posts they'd be smart to delete.

Equipped with a player's login credentials, someone - be it the agent, an agency communications staffer, or a consultant such as Walsh - will scroll back years to the player's first posts on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, and spend the next several hours painstakingly reading every word, searching for content, either original or shared, that doesn't reflect his present-day character.

"A lot of the clients that we work with are 21, 22 years old. When they got a Facebook account, they were 13 or 14 years old," said Walsh, the founder of the Chicago-based firm LW Branding.

"We all mature over the years. The person who are we when we're 13 and who we are today is different. In order to have a level playing ground, and to have it be fair, it makes sense to go back through and say, 'Oh, wow, maybe I was just young and dumb. Let me see if I can go ahead and take that down so that people don't want to use that against me.'"

To Romano, this exercise is especially pressing for NFL and NBA prospects, since they're usually older when they're drafted - meaning their digital footprint is more extensive - and they become prominent pros sooner than their baseball and hockey counterparts.

Regardless of which sport a client plays, this review work must be done manually, Romano and Walsh maintain, no matter the tedium and time commitment. Technology designed to flag profanity and other objectionable phrases can miss messages that look bad in contexts only humans would understand.

Portis' anti-Bulls tweet from 2011 - "Fxck D-Rose and tha bulls! #teamHeat over here" - is a prime example. Prospects often enter their draft year as fans of a particular team, and any rival they deprecate publicly may wind up employing them.

"If you're a diehard Bruins fan and you're shit-talking the Blues this whole series, how does that look if now you're a member of the Blues?" Romano said, citing a hypothetical inspired by this year's Stanley Cup Final.

"That stuff's not going to get picked up by a robot," she said. "(Social media review is) also (done) to protect your soon-to-be fan base, or the organization that's drafting you."

On the other side of the draft table, some franchises solicit help to glean insights of their own from social-media behavior. Calabrese said Turnkey Intelligence provided prospect reports to five teams this year and has spoken with half the NFL and NBA about possible future collaborations.

Human judgment is as essential to Turnkey's auditing practices as it is to Romano's and Walsh's. Operating out of Los Angeles, Nashville, and Indianapolis, the company's analysts study a prospect's social media activity by reviewing all of the athlete's posts and documenting any they think a team might care to see. That includes market-specific references that an algorithm would overlook.

"There might just be a picture of a Crying Jordan and a Buffalo Sabres logo, and there could be no keyword," Calabrese said.

As Turnkey analyzed the accounts of scores of prospects eligible for this year's NFL and NBA drafts, Calabrese said it found the basketball cohort was generally more polished than the football players, possibly because NBA prospects tend to garner national attention at a younger age.

Many more NFLers start out as unheralded recruits; Allen, for instance, didn't even get a Division I scholarship offer out of high school. By the time their stock swells, it may be too late to conceal past indiscretions.

"Between being a two-star freshman or sophomore in high school to being an NFL draft pick, you might have seven years of social posts where you were trashing teams, because you're a Browns fan. You might have liked some inappropriate photos of women," Calabrese said.

"They're unaware or maybe they've forgotten about this stuff," he added. "There are guys like Josh Allen all over the place."

In rare cases, players' draft ambitions have been undone by content that didn't originate from them. The go-to cautionary tale in this genre belongs to Laremy Tunsil, the Miami Dolphins lineman who fell to 13th overall in the 2016 NFL Draft - reducing the value of his rookie contract by millions - after someone hacked his Twitter account and posted a video of him smoking a bong through a gas mask.

Kevin DeShazo, an Oklahoma City-based social media educator who has spoken to collegiate athletes at close to 200 U.S. schools, often brings up Tunsil's monetary loss to impress upon them that social media "isn't a game." He said many of his listeners think the Tunsil story and other anecdotes he relates are funny until they understand the ramifications.

In these meetings, DeShazo tells audience members that the material they publicize on their accounts should exhibit the values for which they want to be known. He said athletes typically depart the session with a better grasp of how far their social platforms reach - and, consequently, the resolve to stop retweeting obscene lyrics and inane videos.

"Nobody's ever had that conversation with them: 'Hey, our culture, for better or worse, overvalues sports, so there are a significant amount of eyeballs on you,'" DeShazo said. "That doesn't have to be a negative. That can be a really good thing, if you use that to your advantage."

Turnkey Intelligence's experience working with teams at the pro level seems to validate this sentiment. In conversations Calabrese has with front-office executives, he'll often hear that the vast amount of research at their disposal is never sufficient; they're always looking for one more metric to gauge a player's potential fit.

If two prospects are deadlocked on a draft board, a team seeking to ward off future headaches might consider social-media use a worthwhile tiebreaker.

"More and more in today's world," Calabrese said, "someone who is well-behaved, someone who understands the power of social media and uses it to their benefit, is going to be an attractive prospect over someone who uses it maybe immaturely."

Any prospect who hasn't internalized that lesson late into their draft season may be best off investing faith in the review process - if they think to undertake it in time. In the past couple of years, Walsh said her company has managed to sanitize the accounts of some high-profile NFL first-rounders, but only because the players' agents contacted her prior to the combine.

Calabrese echoes the conviction that forethought is crucial. Remember the projected NFL second-rounder who removed more than 11,000 posts from his accounts? He did so about a month ahead of draft day - too late to evade the notice of Calabrese's auditors, who had started digging already and were able to measure the scope of his cleanup effort.

"We were capturing things before people got a chance to say, 'Oh, the season's over. Time to go do this,'" Calabrese said.

Should players be held accountable?

No look at the ins and outs of the practice of reviewing social media content would be complete without addressing the trend that has helped make it prevalent.

Allen, Murray, DiVincenzo, Hader, Binnington, and many other athletes who posted offensive messages as teenagers were only shown to have written those messages when internet users unearthed them several years later and alerted a mass audience.

It raises an important question: To what extent should athletes be held accountable for the loathsome words of their youth?

We asked three people for their opinions: DeShazo; Jimmy Sanderson, a Texas Tech sport management professor who studies social media's influence on sports; and Cyd Zeigler, co-founder of the LGBTQ sports website Outsports.

Kevin DeShazo

"I think (the phenomenon of unearthing old posts is) pretty ridiculous. Almost all of these situations, it's been things they said when they were 13 or 14. Now they're 21, 22 on draft night. Look, people change. That's not to excuse what they did, but talking about what they did as 13-year-olds, that's not relevant to who they are now, unless they're tweeting the same type of things," DeShazo said.

"If they've shown that their character hasn't changed, then sure, let's have a conversation. But if they show up to class, they show up to practice, they're a great friend, great teammate, great student - if we're going to judge them, let's judge them off of who they are today, not something they did seven years ago, when they had no supervision, didn't realize the internet was public, all these different things. We have to give people permission to grow and evolve and mature, especially at that age."

Jimmy Sanderson

"How ethical is it for us to be going back into these athletes' histories, looking for things to try to expose them? I'm not really sure about the ethics of it being done in the first place, but that is also the reality of the world we live in," Sanderson said.

The issue, as Sanderson sees it, is that young teenagers with a limited social media following can't foresee a future moment when they reach an MLB All-Star Game (like Hader) or shine in the Final Four (a la DiVincenzo) and someone spotlights the distasteful post they're about to type.

"It's something I'm actually still wrestling with and trying to really think through," Sanderson said. "It's a public forum, so anything any of us puts out there, it's fair, I think, to be called to account for it. But I'm still not sure that's the right thing for us to be doing - going back and saying, 'Well, gee, when this guy was 14, look at what he said.'

"If we're kind of being candid, a lot of 14- or 15-year-olds talk like that. It doesn't make it right, but I'm just saying, that's not abnormal behavior."

Cyd Zeigler

In stories he has written for Outsports about draft prospects and pro athletes who tweeted gay slurs when they were younger, Zeigler has argued that these players have a duty to own up to the language they used and to act to ameliorate the situation.

"Even though we can dismiss these things as the foolish words of a teenager, once they get into the public eye, their words have greater power and meaning. While I don't think athletes should be tarred and feathered for things they did while they were in high school, I also think it is their responsibility to make amends," Zeigler said.

Rather than ignoring or dismissing these past offenses, Zeigler wishes more athletes would engage in conversations about why the use of gay slurs is so harmful - perhaps by talking to high schoolers, working with LGBTQ charities, or customizing their shoes (as NFL players, for example, are allowed to do once per season) to show support for an LGBTQ cause.

"The language athletes use - including, maybe most importantly, the words 'f-----' and 'sissy,' or 'no homo' was very popular years ago - it carries a lot of weight in the locker room," Zeigler said.

"This is a big problem. This kind of language eats at the heart of LGBTQ athletes. This language forces many of them out of sports. It demeans them. I wish more of these athletes would do more than just dismiss it as, 'Oh, that was when I was a teenager, and I don't feel that way anymore.'"

Nick Faris is a features writer at theScore.

Copyright © 2019 Score Media Ventures Inc. All rights reserved. Certain content reproduced under license.

One afternoon this past December, a child clad in a Canada toque and an Esso-branded hockey jersey stepped onto a carpeted patch of ice in Bonnyville, Alberta to conduct the first ceremonial faceoff of the World Junior A Challenge.

Vasili Podkolzin, Russia's captain at the under-20 showcase, glided over to meet the boy and to greet Cade Townend, his leadership counterpart from the Canada East team. Russia was the visiting team in the tournament opener, and as Podkolzin and Townend bent forward for the draw, convention dictated that Podkolzin should let the Canadian win possession.

Indifferent to this unspoken accord, Podkolzin pulled the puck toward himself before tapping it to Townend, who arched his eyebrows, pursed his lips, and gave his head a slight shake.

The stakes could not have been lower, yet this much was clear: Podkolzin didn't intend to be one-upped.

"This kid doesn't want anyone to get the better of him," said NHL Central Scouting director Dan Marr, who saw the scene unfold from the stands.

Analysts and Podkolzin's coaches say the 6-foot-1, 190-pound right-winger from Moscow, who will turn 18 on the Monday following the NHL draft, is a relentless competitor who can create scoring chances from nothing.

In the game action following the ceremonial faceoff flap, Marr watched the Canadian team try to punish Podkolzin physically. Energized by the attention, Podkolzin scored twice in a two-minute span to key a 5-3 win.

"It's the old story: Don't poke the bear," Marr said. "It just motivated him, and he went out and dominated."

As the draft nears, though, Podkolzin finds himself in a very different situation from that day in Bonnyville: one he can't personally control, and one that embodies the volatility of this year's selection process.

Calling him a projected high pick is the safest characterization ahead of the first round on June 21, given that practically anything could happen after Jack Hughes and Kaapo Kakko are the first two names off the board.

Podkolzin's drive, quickness, and intelligence could convince a team to nab him as high as third. But it wouldn't come as a shock if he slipped out of the top 10, undone by concerns about his point production and the two years that remain on his KHL contract with SKA St. Petersburg.

Speaking via a translator at the NHL Scouting Combine in Buffalo earlier in June, Podkolzin said his sole hope for the draft is for his name to be called in the first round: "Whatever that number is, that'll be the number."

Podkolzin had an eventful 2018-19 season. He played at three levels in the Russian domestic system - junior, minor pro, and sparingly with SKA's powerhouse KHL team - and in several international tournaments, including the world juniors and last summer's under-18 Hlinka Gretzky Cup. At the latter, his 11 points tied him atop the scoring leaderboard with Canada's Alexis Lafreniere, who is currently the consensus top prospect for the 2020 NHL draft.

The flipside of Podkolzin's star turn at the Hlinka tournament, where he netted a hat trick in the bronze-medal game as Russia beat the United States 5-4, was his frustrating performance at the under-18 world championship in April. He captained Russia to the silver medal, but he didn't manage to score until the final and only recorded four points across seven games.

*Tied for tournament lead

Prospect rankings compiled by scouting services and media outlets reflect varying, and evolving, perceptions of Podkolzin's stock. They generally place him anywhere from third to 12th, often with the caveat that the so-called "Russian factor" - the risk that he, like any of his countrymen, could opt to stay home to play in the KHL for numerous seasons - could deter clubs with a pick in that range from selecting him.

At the combine, Podkolzin acknowledged that his KHL contract could scare off some teams. But he also said he hopes to come to North America in time for the 2021-22 season after his deal with SKA expires.

"If NHL teams want to be stupid, they'll put a lot of weight into (Podkolzin's KHL deal)," Craig Button, TSN director of scouting, said in an interview before the combine.

"If you want to scout based on a passport or a tape measure, you're going to make a lot of mistakes, because there isn't this bounty of good players all around the world. The Russian players want to play in the NHL just as much as the Canadian players."

After slotting Podkolzin fifth in the first iteration of his 2019 draft rankings last summer and elevating him to third following the world juniors, Button eventually downgraded him to ninth in the class last week. Still, he admiringly calls Podkolzin a "bulldog" who cares dearly about the outcome of every puck battle and finds a way to contribute either offensively or defensively in every game he plays.

Here's one spectacular example Button cited to extol Podkolzin's impact: the tying goal he scored against Sweden late in the Hlinka Gretzky Cup semifinal.

Marr said Podkolzin has the capacity to command a viewer's attention on any given shift.

"It becomes pretty obvious that he's the best player on the team by the time you get through the first period every game," said Marr, who had a hand in NHL Central Scouting's decision to rate Podkolzin the second-best international skater in the draft (after Kakko).

"Scouts love it when you don't have to look for a player," Marr said. "There's a lot of times that you go to a game and have to look for a first-rounder, because it's not happening. You never have to look for this guy."

Effusive as he is in praising the young winger's competitiveness, Button notes that Podkolzin is prone to forcing plays that aren't there. He also thinks Podkolzin is a good but not great skater, a shortcoming that could keep him from racking up points at an elite rate in the NHL.

Instead, he foresees Podkolzin assuming a valuable complementary role, like the Chicago Blackhawks' Dylan Strome - a top-six forward with the ability to score 60-70 points per season.

"Vasili is not going to be Nathan MacKinnon. He's not going to be that level of player. He's not going to be Mitch Marner," Button said. "But he can be the player who can play with those guys."

Podkolzin's first opportunity to skate alongside high-end pros came when he made his KHL debut with SKA last November. After idling on the bench well into the third period of a blowout win against HC Avtomobilist, the head coach sent him out for a shift with two of SKA's leading scorers: Nikita Gusev, who left Russia in April to sign with the Vegas Golden Knights, and former Detroit Red Wings legend Pavel Datsyuk.

Podkolzin - who told the KHL's website at the time that his legs were shaking as he left the bench - wound up taking 14 shifts across three games with SKA this season, averaging 3:30 of ice time per contest. Between those call-ups and his international obligations, he only got to play 14 games with SKA-Neva, the franchise's farm team, and 12 with SKA-1946, its major junior affiliate.

Shuttling between three domestic teams was made easier by the fact they're all based in St. Petersburg, Podkolzin said at the NHL combine. However, he had to adjust to a different role in each lineup and admitted to getting "a little fatigued" toward the end of the season, which may help explain why he struggled to generate results offensively at the under-18 worlds.

Jumping from level to level did give Podkolzin the chance to impress a lot of coaches. With his potential leap to North America two years away, they are among the people best suited to break down his game.

Vladimir Filatov was Russia's bench boss at the Hlinka Gretzky Cup, the World Junior A Challenge, and the under-18 worlds. He said in an email that Podkolzin is a smart player, a skilled puck-handler, and a potent and willing shooter - and, more importantly, "the heart and the leader" of his squad.

"Leadership is one of his strongest qualities," Filatov wrote via a translator. "He is an example for his teammates and deserves to be captain."

Alexander Savchenkov, Podkolzin's junior coach, said in his own translated email that Podkolzin is a natural leader who is unafraid to dish out and accept constructive criticism. After a subpar debut game with SKA-1946, he recalled, Podkolzin went to the coaches' room to apologize to Savchenkov and to discuss what he needed to improve.

Broadly, Savchenkov said, Podkolzin could stand to be a little more patient on the ice: "He wants it all at once, he wants to be everywhere during the game - but he needs to be in his place." Yet the coach figures it won't be long before he's ready to play full-time in a top pro league.

"Perhaps in the nearest future," Savchenkov said. "Everything is in his hands."

- With files from theScore's John Matisz

Nick Faris is a features writer at theScore.

Copyright © 2019 Score Media Ventures Inc. All rights reserved. Certain content reproduced under license.

The club that swept the Tampa Bay Lightning is out. So is the team that beat the Pittsburgh Penguins in four games. So, will it be the Boston Bruins or the Carolina Hurricanes representing the Eastern Conference in the Stanley Cup Final?

It hasn't been an easy playoff run for the Bruins. The Toronto Maple Leafs forced them to Game 7 in the first round and the Columbus Blue Jackets were hardly pushovers after entering Round 2 with the luxury of some added rest. Adversity has afforded the Bruins the opportunity to prove their mettle: They've gone down in a series on four occasions already, but won the next game each time.

The Hurricanes, meanwhile, are rounding into form at the ideal moment. They haven't lost since the Washington Capitals pummeled them 6-0 in Game 5 of the first round; six straight victories against the Caps and the New York Islanders should have them brimming with confidence entering the franchise's first trip to the conference finals in a decade.

All told, the stage appears to be set for a stellar matchup. Let's break it down ahead of Game 1 on Thursday night.

Forwards

Bruins: Boston has gotten offense from a multitude of sources. Seven Bruins forwards have scored at least twice at five-on-five in the postseason, and none of them are named Patrice Bergeron, who has done most of his sniping (four of five goals) on the power play.

David Pastrnak has vacillated between Boston's second line and his usual perch on Bergeron's right wing, but no matter where he plays, he's found the net (team-high six goals). David Krejci leads the Bruins with nine points at even strength, while Brad Marchand has paced the club with 13 points amid his spats with Columbus defenseman Scott Harrington and Sportsnet reporter Kyle Bukauskas.

One player whose fortune is probably due to improve is Jake DeBrusk, who has scored only twice on 40 shots (a 5 percent success rate) after potting 27 goals on a 17.3 shooting percentage during the regular season.

Hurricanes: Sebastian Aho, Teuvo Teravainen, and Jordan Staal are all producing like stars - together they've scored 14 of Carolina's 34 goals - and rookie winger Warren Foegele has thrived in third-line minutes with five goals and nine points of his own.

Like Boston, Carolina is hoping to get more out of a typically dependable second-liner whose woeful shooting rate has him stuck in a slump. Nino Niederreiter has scored just once on 23 shots (4.3 percent) despite creating 15 quality scoring chances, which is second on the team behind Teravainen.

Micheal Ferland, Carolina's fourth-leading scorer this season, is expected to return from the upper-body injury he sustained in the first round, and rookie Andrei Svechnikov, who's healthy again after Alex Ovechkin concussed him in a fight, should finally get the chance to showcase his considerable skill over a full series.

Edge: Bruins. Both teams have star power and depth, but Marchand, Bergeron, and Pastrnak are peerless when they're clicking. They all finished in the top 10 in points per game this year and are capable of winning Boston a game or two practically on their own during any series.

Defensemen

Bruins: With a back end that blends size, skill, youth, and experience, Boston - a perennially strong Corsi team, just like Carolina - can rely on its defense to move the puck and help drive the offense. Zdeno Chara and Brandon Carlo log tough minutes, Torey Krug and Matt Grzelcyk each have four points on the power play, and Charlie McAvoy has evolved into a No. 1 defenseman at just 21 years old.

A sample of McAvoy's stats against Columbus - he played 25:36 per game and contributed three assists, and Boston had 57.39 percent of scoring chances when he was on the ice at five-on-five - demonstrates how much he'll be missed in Game 1 as he serves a suspension for shouldering Blue Jackets forward Josh Anderson in the head.

Hurricanes: Jaccob Slavin has emerged as a star in his fourth NHL season and first taste of the playoffs. Playing a team-high 26:36 per game, his 11 points (all of them assists) tie him with St. Louis blue-liner Alex Pietrangelo for third most among defensemen in the postseason, trailing only San Jose's Brent Burns and Erik Karlsson.

Every Canes defenseman has been a positive Corsi player in the playoffs. Dougie Hamilton has scored three goals, two of which came on the power play, and Justin Faulk has looked impressive in his 25:54 of average ice time.

Haydn Fleury, Carolina's No. 6 blue-liner, embodies one minor concern. With Trevor van Riemsdyk sidelined after shoulder surgery, Canes head coach Rod Brind'Amour has been willing to play Fleury only around seven minutes per game, fewer than every other defenseman in the playoffs. Can the rest of the unit continue to handle the increased load?

Edge: Hurricanes. Slavin could easily distinguish himself as the top defenseman in the series even after McAvoy returns from his banishment.

Goaltenders

Bruins: It would be more than fair to consider Tuukka Rask the best netminder left in the playoffs. He's authored a remarkable turnaround from what, by his standards, was a so-so regular season.

Shorthanded goals were his Achilles' heel this year, but he's let in only one through 13 games while posting a .944 save percentage at even strength (and .938 across all situations). Goals saved above average (GSAA), a metric that melds average save percentage across the league with the number of shots a goalie faces, rates Rask leaps and bounds higher than the rest of his class: His playoff GSAA figure is 8.09, with Dallas' Ben Bishop next at 6.14.

Hurricanes: Rask's Carolina counterparts, Petr Mrazek and Curtis McElhinney, have combined to post a combined 0.6 GSAA, but that number is skewed by Mrazek's poor showing against the Capitals in Round 1. Mrazek had allowed just one goal (a power-play tally) to the Islanders when he hurt his lower body in Game 2 and relinquished the crease to McElhinney, who turned aside 71 of the 75 shots fired his way during the rest of the series.

It's still unclear if Mrazek will be healthy enough to dress for Game 1. Even if he does, Brind'Amour might opt to let McElhinney try to prolong his hot streak. Twenty-two of the Islanders' shots against McElhinney were quality chances and he saved all but one - a mark that could be seen as either extremely promising or sure to regress.

Edge: Bruins. Setting aside the question of whether Mrazek or McElhinney gets the nod to start, neither has shown he can consistently perform at the level Rask has achieved in the past month.

Special teams

Bruins: Marchand and Bergeron haven't played like world-beaters at even strength, but they've been lethal on the power play with a combined five goals (four from Bergeron). Boston has scored 10 power-play markers on 35 tries (an NHL-best 28.6 percent) and killed 31 of 37 penalties (83.8 percent).

Hurricanes: The bad news is that Carolina's penalty kill is operating at a feeble 75 percent (nine goals allowed). The worse news is the Hurricanes' power play has scored all of four goals on 38 opportunities (10.5 percent), including a seven-game goalless drought they finally snapped in Game 4 against the Islanders.

Edge: Bruins. The numbers don't lie, and they should be a major worry for Brind'Amour and Co.

X-Factors

Bruins: First-line scoring. Marchand, Bergeron, and Pastrnak could make matters simple and hasten the arrival of Carolina's offseason by producing to their potential.

Hurricanes: Goaltending. It's a big if, but if either Mrazek or McElhinney can outperform Rask, the conference title could be Carolina's for the taking.

Prediction

Bruins in six. What a story it would be if this "bunch of jerks" surge all the way to the Stanley Cup Final. They'll keep the series close and could even send it back to Boston tied at two games apiece, but it seems smarter to bank on Marchand, Bergeron, Pastrnak, and Rask uniting to lead the Bruins to their third final in nine years.

Nick Faris is a features writer at theScore.

Copyright © 2019 Score Media Ventures Inc. All rights reserved. Certain content reproduced under license.

It's fair to wonder how differently Game 4 might have gone for the Blue Jackets in a parallel universe, one in which the NHL saw fit to suspend Brad Marchand for punching an unsuspecting Columbus defenseman in the back of the head.

Granted, Tuukka Rask was brilliant, and the Jackets' only goal on 40 shots was the direct result of an egregious officiating error. But the Bruins' 4-1 win made clear that in a series where each goalie — Rask and Sergei Bobrovsky — has starred, their greatest advantage is the capability of their best forwards to take over at a moment's notice.

With Marchand let off unscathed, Boston head coach Bruce Cassidy reunited him, Patrice Bergeron, and David Pastrnak on Thursday after deploying that trio sparingly at even strength in Games 1, 2, and 3. Neither Marchand nor Bergeron had registered a point in this series alongside fill-in linemate Danton Heinen, and it didn't take them long at all to atone for that shortfall.

By combining to score three goals, two of which rippled the twine behind Bobrovsky before the game was eight minutes old, Marchand, Bergeron, and Pastrnak finally mustered a sufficient response to Artemi Panarin, Matt Duchene, and Cam Atkinson, whose cumulative offensive production — four goals and five assists entering the night — had helped power Columbus to a 2-1 series lead.

Each of those goals developed through tidy combination play. On the first, Pastrnak buried a cross-ice pass from Charlie McAvoy from the left faceoff circle as Marchand and Bergeron occupied attention on the weak side. Marchand set up Bergeron for his first power-play tally; Bergeron's second came courtesy of a rebound Pastrnak created with a lethal one-timer.

Keep your stars together and let them go to work. It's a simple formula that can work wonders, especially when the goalie behind them is operating on a higher plane. Eleven of the 40 shots Rask faced were high-danger, and he turned each and every one of them aside, upping his save percentage in the series to a sparkling .942 (and .952 at even-strength).

In one way, Game 4 lent credence to the thought that Rask's improved play in the postseason shouldn't come as too much of a surprise. Though his .912 save percentage in the regular season was a career low, he was a .925 netminder at even strength, a number worthy of a great deal more respect.

The area where Rask faltered was on shorthanded opportunities the Bruins' aggressive power play tended to concede. After allowing a league-high 12 goals this season when his team had a man advantage, he reversed that trend in Game 4 by stonewalling the Blue Jackets on five shorthanded scoring chances, including a crucial blocker save on Boone Jenner's penalty shot in the first period.

Bobrovsky has been no slouch himself, recording a .933 save percentage (.951 at even-strength) to this point in the series. He'll be an early Conn Smythe Trophy candidate if the Jackets wind up advancing to the third round.

Now that these series are deadlocked after four games, it's interesting to contrast Boston-Columbus with the St. Louis Blues' ongoing showdown with the Dallas Stars. That matchup features two goaltenders — Jordan Binnington and Ben Bishop — who were expected to excel after looking unbeatable for much of the season.

Instead, each of them has been pedestrian, while Rask and Bobrovsky duel out east. If the Carolina Hurricanes finish off the New York Islanders sometime in the next week, their opponent in the Eastern Conference Final will likely be the team whose goalie doesn't regress first.

What else is worth watching for in Game 5 and beyond? The special-teams battle may finally be tilting in the Bruins' favor. Their power play was the NHL's third-strongest this season, but after clicking on seven of 16 opportunities in Round 1 against the Toronto Maple Leafs, it had managed just one goal in its first 10 tries against Columbus.

Credit the Jackets on that front: their penalty kill was tops in the league this year. It took Bergeron's resounding entrance into the series to solve Bobrovsky and that fearsome unit. Such is the benefit of having great offensive players.

Nick Faris is a features writer at theScore.

Copyright © 2019 Score Media Ventures Inc. All rights reserved. Certain content reproduced under license.