Hype for April 14, 2010

Steve Tambellini didn't have a rabbit's foot or a lucky charm or anything like that going for him last night.

“So many people were suggesting things I could bring, but all I brought was a positive mindset,” he said in a cell phone interview moments after winning the first pick in the ‘Taylor Or Tyler’ NHL Draft Lottery.

Where the heck the Edmonton Oilers general manager managed to find the positive mindset to take with him is difficult to envision, considering the way it went with the Oilers' worst-ever season, 865 games lost due to injury in his two years as GM, and Sheldon Souray proclaiming he wanted traded, pointing fingers at Tambellini and Oilers management.

Who actually expected the Oilers to get lucky and win this thing? This team hasn't had a lick of luck of any sort since Game 6 of the Stanley Cup final four years ago.

Less than 48 hours after one of their worst seasons in franchise history ended, the Edmonton Oilers came up with one of their biggest road victories in years.

The Oilers, who finished last in the NHL standings with 62 points during the 2009-10 season and missed the playoffs for the fourth straight year, got the right combination Tuesday night in New York in the league's annual draft lottery and earned the No. 1 overall pick in the league's entry draft in June in Los Angeles.

Holding the best odds, a 48.2-percent chance of securing the first pick going into the lottery, Edmonton won the big one and will now have the option of selecting either winger Taylor Hall, a bullish forward who many scouts say plays like a young Jarome Iginla, or centre Tyler Seguin, who could be another Steve Stamkos.

The St. Louis Blues will hold a news conference Wednesday, at which time they are expected to remove the interim tag from Davis Payne and name him the team's permanent head coach.

The St. Louis-Dispatch reported that the team will make Payne the 23rd head coach in team history, at 1 p.m. (et) press conference.

Payne replaced Andy Murray on January 2 and helped the Blues to a 23-15-4 record to end the season. The 39-year-old would become the youngest NHL coach.

Underdogs in a playoff series look for glimpses of daylight wherever they can. The Ottawa Senators have a lot of young, inexperienced players?

So what, says their young head coach, Cory Clouston. Sometimes it helps not to know how hard the road ahead might be.

Here's another curiosity as the Senators prepare to face the heavily favoured Penguins in Game 1 of this best-of-seven Eastern Conference quarterfinal here tonight: Defending Stanley Cup champions have not had an easy time of it in the season after their triumph. Look it up in the NHL Official Guide and Record Book.

Five of the past 10 Cup winners were either bounced in the first playoff round or missed the playoffs altogether (hello, Carolina) a year later.

Three of the champs (the 2008 Detroit Red Wings, 1999 Dallas Stars and '98 Wings) returned to the final the next year. The rest had a mediocre playoff, at best.

It's been three years so maybe you need a refresher when it comes to injuries during the Stanley Cup Playoffs.

This is the time of the year when what's billed as a sprained ankle is really a separated shoulder, when players quickly defer to the coaches rather than reveal much of anything about their maladies and when Lindy Ruff gives tiny, tiny answers to that genre of questions. If he gives any answers at all.

That leaves the media looking for any furrowed brow, any raised eyebrow, any wink to figure out what's going on. On Tuesday, the smoke signals coming out of HSBC Arena were good ones: It looks like the Buffalo Sabres are getting center Tim Connolly back for Thursday's playoff opener against the Boston Bruins.

The Bruins weren’t winners in last night’s bounce of the Ping-Pong balls, but they held serve, which means they’ll pick second in the NHL’s June 25 draft.

Welcome to Boston, Tyler Seguin or Taylor Hall. Can’t wait to see what you have.

“We are going to get an impactful offensive forward,’’ said an elated Peter Chiarelli, the Bruins general manager, less than an hour after the lottery was conducted at the league’s Manhattan headquarters. “We’re undecided. We’re still assessing.

Jay Bouwmeester is a shy, non-assuming type who never says much.

On the rare occasions he does talk, the Calgary Flames defencemen speaks in hushed tones. An orator is he not.

All that is fine and dandy. A hockey team is a collection of 23 individuals with varied personality types. They can’t all be rah-rah leaders.

But Bouwmeester’s meek and mild ways spilled onto ice in his first season as a Calgary Flame. Gone was the smooth-skating defenceman who carried the puck up the ice with authority.

Simply put, Bouwmeester lacked assertiveness in any area of the ice and the proof showed up in the stats.

The "new season" starts tomorrow in Washington for the Canadiens, so why am I still thinking about the final game and particularly the final minute of your team's 2009-10 regular season?

What I'm remembering about the game is the three times the Canadiens held one-goal leads - and lost them before turning over the puck in overtime for the 4-3 loss to the Toronto Maple Leafs, the second-worst team in the Eastern Conference.

What I'm still seeing was most of yet another sellout crowd at the Bell Centre rising to its feet with only 60 seconds remaining and hearing a salute to the Canadiens that grew and grew in volume to the point where there was no longer a crowd in the arena, but a noise engulfing it. The reason: it was apparent the Canadiens were about to salvage the point they needed to assure themselves of a playoff spot in a league that rewards losers.

"Get the hell out."

Leave it to Pat Quinn to boil the Sheldon Souray situation down to four salient words, as he did on Tuesday when asked about Souray's Sunday sermon on Sportsnet.ca.

"I'm one of those guys that (believes)," Quinn began, "if you don't want to play here, don't screw around. Get the hell out."

Ah, the ambiguous Irishman.

"I've always believed you should be able to look in your teammates' eyes and … build trust," he said. "But if you've got one guy sitting over there who doesn't want to bloody well play here, how do you build trust? How do you have a team?"

The bywords from John Tortorella during the head coach's press briefing on breakup day were "character" and "core," as in, the Rangers needing more character players in the 2010-11 locker room but having a good young core on which to build.

"I wasn't crazy about the room," Tortorella said after the franchise's first playoffs miss in five seasons. "I'm not indicting [captain] Chris Drury or [alternate captain] Ryan Callahan or the leadership group, but I think some people need to be weeded out.

"I'm not talking about the core players, [but] I didn't think we had a strong room and I still don't," Tortorella said. "We have work to do there. When we traded for Jody Shelley, everybody told me he had good character. We don't have enough.

"It can't be the coaches being in there all the time. The last thing I want to do is indict Chris Drury because I love the guy, but I think some guys need to be bumped out."