Both the Stars and Flames are in for some serious evaluation -- in Dallas, it starts in the front office; in Calgary with a veteran roster that may require turning iconic captain Jarome Iginla into trade bait. (Ronald Martinez/Getty Images)

While everyone is talking playoff matchups and predicting the number of stitches that doctors will need to close the combined wounds of the Penguins and Flyers, there are 14 other clubs who are packing up for the summer and planning for next season. Here’s a roundup of the NHL’s also-rans and what might be in store for them during the offseason. We’ll start at the bottom of the league and work our way up.

Columbus – Yes, the Blue Jackets won seven of their last 11 games and ownership continues to back the hockey department, but the team’s dreadful start when so much was expected, its last place finish, the coaching change, the fan protest, and the Rick Nash mess all made for a dreadful season. The future of interim coach Todd Richards is uncertain, but the huge question mark is Nash’s fate. If he is traded — which is widely expected — what will embattled GM Scott Howson get in return? Will it be enough to reverse this club’s direction and win back the many discontented fans? Michael Arace of The Columbus Dispatch summed it all up over the weekend.

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Though he never played in the NHL, Herb Carnegie inspired such all-time greats as Frank Mahovlich and Jean Beliveau. (Darren Calabrese/AP)

Herb Carnegie passed away on Friday, a great hockey player who deserved a shot in the NHL. It was denied him because he was black. But while the institutional racism of all big league pro sports, including the NHL, in that era prevented him from reaching his goal, he spent his post-playing years mentoring youngsters and started one of the first hockey schools in Canada and a foundation.

As an 18-year-old, Carnegie began attracting attention in 1938 while playing for the Toronto Junior Rangers under coach Ed Wildey, and one who saw him play at Maple Leaf Gardens was Conn Smythe, the owner of the Maple Leafs. Wildey told Carnegie that Smythe would sign him the next day…if he were white. Later, Smythe was widely reported to also have said, “I’ll give any man $10,000 who can turn Herb Carnegie white.” It was a slight that upset Carnegie at the time.

“The Toronto Maple Leafs was the team I rooted for as a boy,” Carnegie said in a 2002 interview. “And to find out that was how the owner of the team I rooted for felt about me was shattering, just shattering.”

It still upset him decades later, as Elliotte Friedman found out when he profiled Carnegie over the CBC on the Hockey Night in Canada pregame show.

Carnegie became a star in the mining leagues of the 1940s, small semi-pro loops that played the mining towns of northern Quebec and Ontario. That’s where Hockey Hall of Famer Frank Mahovlich, who grew up in Timmons, Ontario, saw him play. Mahovlich said Carnegie’s slick moves and passing excellence inspired him, and the man who would later be called The Big M wanted to emulate him. Mahovlich told author Cecil Harris in Breaking The Ice, that he expected he’d soon see Carnegie and many other black players in the NHL. But that never happened.

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New coach Randy Carlyle put his Maple Leafs through a grueling practice and bag skate...after a victory. (Richard Wolowicz/Getty Images)

Will Brian Burke’s late-season gambit pay off? Replacing his coach and long-time friend Ron Wilson with Randy Carlyle — the same coaching hire that won their Anaheim Ducks the 2007 Stanley Cup — was a move for the moment to be sure. But it is also a move for the future, assuming that Burke has one in Toronto. In this league, you never know.

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Rick Nash, at the center of this year's deadline intrigue, will not be going anywhere until the summer. (Kathy Willens/AP)

5 PM: Well, let’s try to wrap this up. Not many trades. The biggest news might be who didn’t get moved and not just Nash. Also lots of guys rumored to be moving stayed up, which speaks to our general thinking about rumors. (Cue Marvin Gaye singing “People say believe half of what you see, son, and none of what you hear” From “I Heard It Through The Grapevine.”) But the Vancouver-Buffalo deal, Hodgson for Kassian was a big one, and because the players are so young, it may have reverberations for seasons to come.

We’ll let the dust settle here and take a look at this whole thing tomorrow here on Red Light and see what has changed, what hasn’t and what it might mean. Thanks for hanging with us, and lots of you did. It was fun.

4:46 PM: New NYR defenseman/forward/pugalist John Scott says (per Chris Kuc of the Chicago Tribune tweet). “I thought I’d be the last person to get traded. I’m excited to go to New York but also sad to leave Chicago. I just had a baby a couple of months ago. It will be tough to pack up and leave everything.”

4:44 PM: NHLN’s E.J. Hradek tweets, “Howson comment likely spurred by the Saturday remarks by Nash agent Joe Resnick, which was an effort 2 squeeze the team into making deal now”

4:42 PM: SI’s Sarah Kwak tweets, “Howson admitting Nash asked for trade opens up more options for trade later. Nash won’t nix very much to get outta there now.”

4:32 PM: Quite a statement by Scott Howson that Rick Nash asked to be traded. Never heard that before, in fact, the thinking was Nash would never make that request. Now Nash has to be captain of a team that he wanted to leave? Jeez, that’s not a good situation.

4:29 PM: For Red Wings fans, George Malik of Kukla’s Korner linked to GM Ken Holland interview http://dlvr.it/1FlmRy

4:25 PM: Howson won’t say how many teams made offers for Nash, only that he had “substantial” discussions today. “The price was high. I don’t apologize for that. It had to be high.”

4:21 PM: Blue Jackets GM Scott Howson addressing media says they made big steps this week. Regarding Nash, he had approached the CBJ to consider trading him. Howson said what was offered was not in team’s best interest. “We will continue to keep all our options open to improve our hockey club in the coming months.”

4:19 PM: Pittsburgh GM Shero: “We were not active today. Nobody going, nobody coming. Our roster is our roster going forward”

4:15 PM: Chicago GM Stan Bowman on Oduya: “His style really fits in with what we do here.”

4:14 PM: From Mike Farber: “The Winnipeg Jets took a piece off their roster in D-man Johnny Oduya, but he is able to walk as a UFA after the season. Great pick-up of a pair of draft choices. Winnipeg is in a unique position. The Jets are playing with house money. Maybe they make the playoffs. Maybe not. But in either case, they gave added nicely to their inventory. “

4:10 PM You can’t discount the fact that the deals that have been made earlier this month have had an impact. Nor can you dismiss the ongoing importance of the salary cap in keeping some teams from making deals, and the financial restrictions other teams have.

4:08 PM: Plus, some teams did make some very interesting moves that change their team going forward. And more will be done around the draft.

4:04 PM:  There are 14 trades confirmed so far today, certainly less than some of the crazier days in the last few years. Lots of talk that the day is overhyped (Jay Feaster just said that in his press conf. and Brian Burke has implied it as well), that there are too many teams asking for unrealisitic prices, over valuing players, which is why the deals don’t get made. But it’s also about parity in the league, GMs not wanting to break up the chemistry on their teams.

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Though the Winter Classic will be played in Ann Arbor, Comerica Park in Detroit will host a two-week festival and celebration of hockey that will draw thousands of fans and players. (Rick Osentoski-US PRESSWIRE)

With today’s announcement that the next Winter Classic will be in Ann Arbor, Michigan, accompanied by a large number of other events in downtown Detroit, the NHL and the Red Wings are poised to take this event to a new level. This won’t be just a very special hockey game that has been designed to broaden the sport’s appeal through TV exposure on New Year’s Day. This is going to be an unprecedented celebration of hockey in a place that is not only one of America’s foremost centers of the sport, but also one of America’s most troubled cities, one that is fighting quite hard to rebound against economic hardship and an awful reputation.

The most telling remarks made at today’s news conference were those of Detroit Mayor Dave Bing, a former NBA star, who acknowledged that he doesn’t always have a reason to smile in his current job. But he was smiling when he spoke at the Comerica Park event this morning because through the Red Wings and the NHL, this event can help address his city’s ongoing fiscal issues and its image.

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Air Canada Centre, home of the Maple Leafs and the NBA's Raptors, is just one piece of a $1.3 billion transaction, the largest in North American sports history. (Photo by Tom Szczerbowski/US PRESSWIRE)

With much talk about content and iconic brands, Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment (MLSE) was sold today by its longtime majority shareholder, the Ontario Teachers Pension Plan (or “Teachers,” as it is commonly called), to a partnership formed by two competing media conglomerates, Bell Canada/BCE Inc. and Rogers Communications, and the current minority owner, Larry Tanenbaum.

Just how this will impact the Maple Leafs, the NHL’s most profitable club and crown jewel of the empire, as well as the other MLSE clubs — the NBA’s Raptors, the MLS Toronto FC, and the AHL’s Marlies — is an open question.  There is much skepticism in Toronto that the new ownership of the Maple Leafs’ parent company will translate into a championship. More than one observer noted that there was hardly a mention of the Stanley Cup during today’s press conference announcing the billion dollar-plus transaction.

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Goaltender Brian Elliott has been a surprising part of the Blues' turnaround under coach Ken Hitchcock. (Jimmy Simmons/ZUMAPRESS.com)

Some thoughts from around the NHL:..

The Blues defeated the Panthers Thursday tonight in a matchup of  two of the NHL’s more interesting clubs — and who would have thought they’d describe them that way a couple of weeks ago? The Blues are improved since Ken Hitchcock took over as coach, winning four of five and in the fifth getting a point after losing the postgame skills competition to the Maple Leafs.

The Blues’ wins have all come at home, but now they play five of their next seven games are on the road. Their special teams play is better. Hitchcock has simplified the game for the players (Bernie Miklasz’s column today in The St. Louis Post-Dispatch has more on that) and, probably most importantly, the Blues are getting very good goaltending, especially from Brian Elliott, who was not even guaranteed a roster spot in training camp.
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The hot-starting Toronto Maple Leafs have gotten some surprisingly substantial contributions from players such as Mike Komisarek, David Steckel, Phil Kessel and Joffrey Lupul (19). (Photo by Rich Kane/Icon SMI)

The season is now a bit more than a month old, and while smart hockey guys still think it’s too early for big pronouncements, it is the right time for determining who has gotten off to an unexpected start. So here are some of the big early surprises, in no particular order.

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Time to go to work: Are Milan Lucic and the Bruins hungry for a Stanley Cup encore? (Elise Amendola/AP)

Every NHL season starts with expectations and conjures up predictions on where teams might finish. Longtime readers know we eschew such forecasts here at Red Light, taking cues from our patron saint Hector (Toe) Blake who famously said (seen in this video), “Predictions are for gypsies.” In fact, we were going to call this blog “Toe Blake’s Tavern,” but that’s a story for another day.

Anyway, instead, here’s one of our favorite preseason habits. Rather than exhaustively breaking down each team’s offense, defense, goaltending, special teams, coaching, intangibles and so forth (we’ll let Adrian Dater and Darren Eliot do that), let’s try to boil down each team’s success or failure to one or a few essential themes. Each club has them and the answers to these questions, theoretically at least, should go a long way to determining if teams plays up to their expectations and potential.

Anaheim – Can goalie Jonas Hiller, who missed a large chunk of last season with a mysterious case of vertigo, avoid a reoccurrence and bounce back to his excellent first-half form that had him close to Tim Thomas as the best goalie in the NHL?

Boston — Assuming Tim Thomas plays somewhere in the neighborhood of his remarkable performance last season, can the Bruins survive the short offseason? Can they continue to have the good fortune and good health every champion requires and beat back the diminished hunger that almost always accompanies winning it all? Can they become the first team to repeat as Stanley Cup champions since the Red Wings in 1998?
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His mysterious vertigo gone, Ducks goalie Jonas Hiller is back to his sterling form. (Mike Blake/Reuters)

It was a great night of baseball on Wednesday, historic even, and that interrupted some of our preseason NHL viewing. Truth be told, however, as all hockey fans know, the kind of twisting, turning plotlines and wonderful dramatic endings that unfolded on the diamonds to decide the AL and NL wild card races — while rare in other sports — happens almost every spring in the Stanley Cup playoffs.

But we’re a whole season away from that. The NHL action we caught last night updated us on a couple of pretty interesting sagas, those of Jonas Hiller and Fabian Brunnstrom (in addition to ongoing litany of potentially suspendable incidents, the newest being B. Smith on B. Smith, which is worthy of a match penalty — video here).
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