Coach, league clash over glowing puck
Posted: Tuesday June 02, 1998 01:36 PM
Detroit coach Scotty Bowman attacked the glowing Fox puck, and NHL senior vice-president Brian Burke is furious. Burke says the Fox puck, which is embedded with microchips, meets league specifications, but the players say it seems to bounce more because it isn't frozen in the same way.
Wings defenseman Jamie Macoun had never played in a Fox game until being sent to Detroit at the trading deadline, and on Sunday he leisurely skated back to touch a puck on an apparent icing. But the neon puck suddenly slowed, the icing was waved off and Dallas wound up scoring. Understandably, the league wants to stick up for a television partner, but if a high-profile coach like Bowman raises a stink, the NHL has a problem.
Expansion team mines European talent
The expansion Nashville Predators acquired their first player this week, a 20-year-old Slovakian winger named Marian Cisar, who came from Los Angeles for future considerations. Anyone who knows Nashville general manager David Poile wasn't surprised.
When Poile was in Washington, he and the late Jack Button, the superb player personnel director, kept digging up players from the Czech Republic and Slovakia. One of their biggest finds was Richard Zednik, the smallish but fast Capitals left wing who has been so effective in the playoffs. Zednik was the 249th player selected in the 1994 draft.
Panthers eye ex-Islander as coach
The front runner for the Florida Panthers coaching job appears to be Butch Goring, who has been called back for a second interview by president Bill Torrey. Goring, who has been coaching the New York Islanders' International Hockey League affiliates, played on the Islanders' great teams of the early 1980s when Torrey was the general manager. Goring had one previous shot at a head job, coaching the Boston Bruins for little more than a season in the mid-1980s.
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