With an outbreak delaying the Dallas Stars opener, Rick Bowness got to watch a lot of hockey in the first couple of nights of the NHL season.
It wasn't a coach's dream. “It was entertaining hockey, but it was a little sloppy,” Bowness said. “And that’s to be expected.” Sloppy is the term being used all over the league to describe play in the first two weeks of the season.
After no exhibition games — and no action at all for seven teams in the past 10 months — there have been plenty of odd-man rushes and mistakes, with six goals a game being scored on average.
Only strong goaltending has kept it from looking like the high-scoring, wide-open 1980s. “Guys are a little rusty for sure,” Tampa Bay's Stanley Cup-winning captain Steven Stamkos