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Hockey Canada has named Roberto Luongo its general manager for the 2021 IIHF World Championship.
The future Hall of Fame goaltender with the Vancouver Canucks, Florida Panthers, and New York Islanders, will be in charge of constructing the team that will compete in Riga, Latvia, May 21 to June 6.
“As general manager, Luongo will oversee and lead all hockey operations, including staff and player selection and evaluation as Canada looks to win its first gold medal since 2016,” Hockey Canada said in a media release.
Joining Luongo on the management group will be former Arizona Coyotes forward Shane Doan, and Scott Salmond, Hockey Canada’s senior vice president of national teams.
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Coyotes host Blues in key West Division matchup
The battle for the fourth West Division playoff spot will intensify Saturday when the Arizona Coyotes play host to the St. Louis Blues at Glendale, Ariz.
The Blues sit in fourth place, one point ahead of the Coyotes, and they have played two fewer games. Huge game, four-point swing against St. Louis, Coyotes coach Rick Tocchet said, leading into the final regular-season game between the teams.
It has been a tightly contested series: The Coyotes are 4-2-1, the Blues 3-3-1, and each team has scored 20 goals.
Overall, though, the Coyotes have lost five straight games, falling to fifth place in the division.
Just because the NHL can’t release the Kraken until October doesn’t mean Seattle wasn’t in the mix at the trade deadline.
General manager Ron Francis can’t finalize any transactions until ownership makes its final expansion payment to the league, but there’s precedent for him making a handshake deal or two. That’s what George McPhee did at the deadline four years ago with Pittsburgh, setting the table for goaltender Marc-Andre Fleury to be the face of the Vegas Golden Knights franchise.
If Francis made an arrangement with another team, he’s not saying, though Seattle was tuned in to the moving and shaking at the deadline and the rest of the league had the Kraken in mind with the expansion draft coming up in July.
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The Canucks COVID outbreak is a big deal beyond Vancouver, Canada, and even North America.
Believe it or not, news of it made it all the way to Qatar, where Al Jazeera English was contacting Canucks reporters this morning to be interviewed for a story.
The Canucks certainly aren’t the first pro franchise in the world to deal with an outbreak of the virus, but the way in which a COVID variant has ripped through the team does seem to make this situation unique.
“Quinn had one of the roughest goes with COVID”
Quinn Hughes and Jay Beagle were removed from the NHL’s COVID list on Tuesday, leaving 16 Canucks players on the team’s active roster still in protocol. More are expected to come off the list this afternoon, but certainly not all.
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