05/17/2021
ESPN continues to fill out its NHL broadcasting team for next season and beyond, with their latest hire there being Leah Hextall. Hextall has done some previous work for ESPN, including interviews at the 2016 World Cup of Hockey and play-by-play at the NCAA men’s hockey championships (including this year; the above photo is from the five-overtime game she called between Minnesota-Duluth and North Dakota in March, the longest game in NCAA men’s playoff hockey history). Last year, with Rogers Sportsnet, Hextall became the first woman to call a cross-Canada game in English last year on International Women’s Day, the same day where Kate Scott became the first woman to call a U.S. national game for NBCSN. (The previous all-female national game was a RDS French cross-Canada broadcast in 2008, called by Claudine Douville and Daniele Sauvageau.) Hextall’s other media work includes time with CTV Winnipeg, NESN, the CWHL, the Brandon Wheat Kings, and CJOB. Here’s more on
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Welcome to the end of the 2021 regular season for the East Division. For three teams, their seasons ended on Saturday. However, Coronavirus impacting has forced the league’s hand to re-schedule games and so there are a handful happening in the next few days. As it turned out, most of those games have meaning beyond the regular season. Where in past seasons, I would end the weekly snapshots with the final full week of the season. But as there were potentially real tantalizing stakes in all but one of these extra games, I decided on this one last post and stated so in last week’s snapshot. After a week of playoff teams playing non-playoff teams in the East and a whole lot of news involving the New York Rangers, the potential stakes mostly went up in smoke, but there is something to watch on Monday and Tuesday.
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There weren’t any surprises at the AHL Board of Governors meeting today, and that’s a good thing for local hockey fans.
The Vancouver Canucks were given the approval to move its AHL affiliate from Utica to Abbotsford, beginning with the 2021-22 season.
“One step closer,” the Canucks tweeted in response to the news, though nobody expects the deal to fall through.
Good news for Abbotsford isn’t bad news for Utica, as the Comets will still be in operation next season. The AHL confirmed that the New Jersey Devils’ AHL team would be moving from Binghamton to Utica. That team will still be known as the Utica Comets, despite Comets president Robert Esche previously registering “Utica Devils” as a trademark.
The 2021 NHL draft may be the strangest one yet. It will be difficult to top the weirdness of the 2020 virtual draft, but the 2021 draft will likely be virtual as well.