Getty Images

Trending Topics is a column that looks at the week in hockey, occasionally according to Twitter. If you're only going to comment to say how stupid Twitter is, why not just go have a good cry for the slow, sad death of your dear internet instead?

It seems like every year there's a good number of coaches whose job security happens to come up for discussion because their teams are dramatically under-performing, or things just aren't working out.

Last year alone, seven coaches were shown the door, and for the most part, the reasons why seemed obvious. Davis Payne got out to a 6-7-0 start with a team that ended up nearly having the best record in hockey under Ken Hitchcock. Paul Maurice got canned for going 8-13-4 in his first 25 games. The same day, Bruce Boudreau was shown the door because the room got sick of his voice, or something. Randy Carlyle was fired a few days after that because the Ducks started the year 7-13-4. Terry Murray couldn't coax more than a 13-12-4 record out of an insanely talented team that couldn't put the puck in the net. Jacques Martin had one of the worst teams in the league last year. Ditto for Scott Arniel.

Pretty good reasons across the board, as is usually the case with coach firings and even rumors that some of them are playing every game like Damocles.

You could say the same thing about Lindy Ruff, who got canned after 17 years in Buffalo. The Sabres are an awful, nouveau riche team and have been for two years now, and someone had to go before the axe fell on Darcy Regier, who doesn't deserve the right to clean up his own mess but will probably get it because that's how poorly-run that organization is. Ron Rolston has fared little better in the near-institutional Ruff's place, which tells you all you need to know.

Of course, some coaches who have also been mentioned as facing the firing line with due cause include Colorado's Joe Sacco, Winnipeg's Claude Noel, and San Jose's Todd McLellan, whose teams are playing poorly to some extent or another, and for various reasons.

Getty ImagesHello, this is a feature that will run through the entire season and aims to recap the weekend’s events and boils those events down to one admittedly superficial fact or stupid opinion about each team. Feel free to complain about it.

Lost in all the justifiable hullabaloo about the NHL and NHLPA's new and improved and surprisingly reasonable conference realignment plans last night was a report from The Fourth Period that made me want to scream.

To summarize: The NHL will hold this season's canceled Winter Classic between Toronto and Detroit next year, but is also interested in adding games at Yankee and Dodger Stadiums, seemingly to be played over the course of a few weeks following the game in Ann Arbor. Further, the League might also bring back the Heritage Classic for next season as well, perhaps played in either Vancouver or Edmonton, and presumably serving as the dessert for the main course of the Wings/Leafs game.

Now, this should come as absolutely no surprise to anyone who has been paying even the slightest bit of attention. Financial experts' estimates show the NHL cost itself $328.2 million in "brand value" because of the lockout. One great way to recoup those losses is to have a whole bunch of outdoor games that make the league a real lot of money in what are, not coincidentally I'm sure, the two biggest U.S. media markets.

Obviously Yankee Stadium and Dodger Stadium don't seat nearly as many people as the Big House, but games involving, say, the Rangers and Penguins or Kings and Sharks on those stages will make the league a silly amount of money. Same goes for Vancouver hosting Montreal, or whomever, up in Canada.

Gary Bettman can spend that entire few weeks rolling around in the giant piles of money the NHL will make from ticket sales, sponsorships, TV ad revenue, and merchandise sales, and no one could blame him even a little bit. It would be a huge deal for the league, and not just monetarily. In theory, all those markets would be absolutely tickled to get outdoor games of their own, and because of their size of those markets and the relative novelty of outdoor games being played there, it could charge whatever it wanted for tickets, and people would pay it.

On the other hand, this plan is awful and shouldn't be allowed to happen.

Getty Images

Trending Topics is a column that looks at the week in hockey, occasionally according to Twitter. If you're only going to comment to say how stupid Twitter is, why not just go have a good cry for the slow, sad death of your dear internet instead?

Hockey is one hell of a dangerous sport.

You have giant men moving really quickly around on rock-hard ice with little knives on their feet and weapons in their hand, surrounded by hard glass and even harder boards. While they do that, other huge guys, also with knived feet and sticks with blades on them are trying to knock them into the ice and the boards and the glass, also at high speeds, as hard as they possibly can.

Sometimes, those other huge guys also punch the first huge guys in the face. Wow. That's really dangerous, and it doesn't even count when accidents happen, as they so often do.

The latest of these incidents was Matt Cooke stepping on Erik Karlsson's Achilles tendon a little more than a week ago, putting the defending Norris Trophy winner on the shelf for the season and sparking an absurd amount of outrage because Cooke clearly obviously plainly meant to do it.

But another thing it sparked: Everyone noting how this particularly gruesome injury was also particularly avoidable, had Karlsson just been wearing a pair of kevlar socks. If he had been, his Achilles tendon might still have gotten a bit nicked up — that's what happens when a 200-pound man accidentally steps on your ankle with a knife strapped to his foot — but he sure as hell wouldn't be done for the season and facing a tough rehab.

As a consequence of the hockey world all of a sudden realizing there's an easy way to prevent this kind of injury from happening — namely, picking up a phone and ordering some socks from the company that makes them and then putting them on when you play hockey — it seems the entire NHL is now trying the socks out. And we've had to suffer through the requisite trend-pieces about these players marveling at how much these socks will help keep them off the long-term injured reserve as though this should come as news to anyone. I wonder if, when the NHL made helmets mandatory for 1979-80, guys like Mike Bossy sat around telling reporters, "Jeepers, this big thing of plastic and foam on my head really makes my head feel safe!"

The Detroit Red Wings, for example, now have more than a few players adopting them, and also wearing kevlar shirts. George McPhee dropped off a whole crate of them at a Capitals' practice. Most of the Anaheim Ducks were already on board, but the few holdouts are making the switch as well. Since Karlsson got hurt, 10 more Predators have also started wearing them. Yesterday, the Jets' Zach Redmond got a cut on the back of his leg just above where the kevlar socks he wears ended, which is a tough break.

"[T]here's no real point in not wearing them," Ryan Getzlaf told the Orange County Register.

And yet, it took a superstar player having an Achilles tendon nearly severed for everyone to say, "Wow, hey, maybe we should start wearing these things that could save our asses big-time if the unexpected happens!" I'll never understand it, I guess.

Trending Topics is a column that looks at the week in hockey, occasionally according to Twitter. If you're only going to comment to say how stupid Twitter is, why not just go have a good cry for the slow, sad death of your dear internet instead?

One of the major problems with the NHL is how often you can predict things that will happen long before they do.

The Red Wings being great was something to which you could set your watch every August, and you could always bank on phenomenal performances from Sidney Crosby. There's very little fun in it, so when something unexpected happens, like the Coyotes quickly becoming a top-notch team when they hired Dave Tippett, or the Blues coming out of nowhere last season, or the Blackhawks returning to power a few years back before winning a Stanley Cup, it's always genuinely great to see.

And that's how I feel about the Blue Jackets hiring Jarmo Kekalainen as their general manager.

Scott Howson, for all the talk about how hard he tried and how his firing was more about going in a "different direction" than his personal job performance, was simply not a good NHL general manager. That much was obvious to anyone who saw how pathetically bungled the Rick Nash saga was, or his draft record, or most of his other trades, and the vast majority of his free agent signings.

But you have to give Howson this: He just set his successor up for an hilariously successful future.

Howson's drafting and trading over the last few years has accumulated a decent number of prospects that range from "good" to "very good," though to be fair maybe only one can be considered "great." They're mainly defensemen, like Ryan Murray (the benefit of picking second, one supposes), David Savard and Tim Erixon, as well as goaltender Oskar Dansk. No overwhelming prospects, but a good group nonetheless. Grabbing guys like Cam Atkinson hasn't hurt either. But overall there's a reason Hockey Prospectus and Hockey's Future have the Blue Jackets in the bottom half of the league when it comes to prospects.

Which is where Kekalainen comes in.

On Monday night, the Flames went down pretty quietly in a home game against the Minnesota Wild that pretty much all observers agreed was in every way a dreadful, unwatchable hockey game.

That description fairly accurately covers most Flames games this season, as the team struggles to put together wins or even particularly convincing losses (shootout disappointment against Chicago a few weeks back aside). Watching them, as they skate around and outchance most of the teams they play but never actually do much to convince you that they're any particular threat to score, it goes a long way to explaining their minus-9 goal differential in 10 games, as well as their goals per game standing at a paltry 2.6.

I'm not sure what the term would be, except maybe that they just seem somewhat absent from all the proceedings. Like, mentally. And you could sit there and say that this phenomenon is just a consequence of the Flames having a thoroughly mediocre roster. Alex Tanguay and Jiri Hudler have been the team's two best forwards by a pretty wide margin, and there's a pretty credible case to be made for Lee Stempniak being No. 3.

The thing is, any reasonable person would have looked at this Flames roster at the beginning of the season and said it was a team for which goals would be hard to come by, so the fact that such a prediction turned out to be true should come as no great surprise.

However, not too many in Calgary probably had the team at three wins through their first 10 games, and without goaltending to blame for that latest 2-1 shootout loss to Minnesota, given Miikka Kiprusoff — a great early-season scapegoat with ghastly stats — was hurt and Leland Irving was, for the second game in a row, at least credible in the loss.

That was the third shootout loss suffered by the Flames in as many tries this year; they also won just 3 of 12 last season, so that's a probably an area that has to be more than a little concerning for these guys.

The facts are pretty clear at this point, not that they haven't been for a while: Either this was never a well-constructed team to begin with, or the team hasn't done enough to ensure that it's winning the skills competition that last year spelled the difference between their earning that long-sought playoff spot and, you know, not doing that.

Maybe the problem is that those two best Flames forwards mentioned above were grouped with Blair Jones of all people for the loss to Minnesota.

But that thing everyone has been saying for months, if not years at this point, is now no longer just being whispered by outsiders, and having their comments dismissed as hogwash by those within the Saddledome. Even those in the city, those who know the team best, are now openly questioning, albeit without actually doing so, what in the hell Jay Feaster was thinking not trading Jarome Iginla and Miikka Kiprusoff when he had the chance.

Hello, this is a feature that will run through the entire season and aims to recap the weekend’s events and boils those events down to one admittedly superficial fact or stupid opinion about each team. Feel free to complain about it.

Over the summer, most teams in the Northeast Division took part in the very odd trend of trying to muscle up as a means of competing with the Boston Bruins.

The Sabres signed slugger-not-a-skater John Scott and traded big ol' softie Derek Roy for rough and ready Steve Ott. Montreal backed a dump truck full of money and years into Brandon Prust's driveway for somewhat mystifying reasons. The Maple Leafs added borderline guys with lots of penalty minutes like Mark Fraser and Frazer McLaren (though the latter was claimed on waivers a few weeks ago). The Senators didn't do any of that, and good for them.

But isn't it funny that the most embarrassing period of any game this season came as a direct result of trying to keep up with Boston's toughness, but did not in any way involve the Bruins? It came, instead, in a game involving Montreal, which is odd considering that apart from Prust, the number of Canadiens you'd expect to get involved in any sort of rough stuff can more or less be counted on zero fingers.

But on a team of roughnecks built — not altogether successfully — with "truculence" and "being tough to play against" in mind, who would have thought that Nazem Kadri, of all people, would be the one that ended up sparking the whole mess? It was Kadri who railroaded Alexei Emelin with a good, hard, clean hit as the Habs defenseman, who was wearing a full cage after being hit in the face with a puck last month, tried to clear the zone.

As the puck went down the ice, and created a scoring opportunity for the Habs, Dion Phaneuf came back and committed a penalty, which would have given Montreal a power play.

Instead, Prust, in an attempt to get back at the team whose player had just crushed his teammate, threw a gloved punch and negated the opportunity before it even started. Things devolved from there, in no way helped by the fact that Toronto was also creaming Montreal on their home ice. As the lead grew from 3 goals to 4 to 5 to 6, it got uglier and uglier, and the final 20 minutes in particular stood as being particularly pathetic and unflattering for all involved.

Trending Topics is a column that looks at the week in hockey, occasionally according to Twitter. If you're only going to comment to say how stupid Twitter is, why not just go have a good cry for the slow, sad death of your dear internet instead?

On Wednesday night, the Colorado Avalanche lost, rather badly in fact, to the Anaheim Ducks. Despite the fact that they outshot Anaheim 31-20, the final score read 3-0, and the Avs dropped to just 4-6-0 on the season.

There's a pretty good reason for that: they're missing an entire top line. Steve Downie, who was very good for Colorado after being traded there last season, played just two games before he went down for the season with an injury to his right knee. Gabriel Landeskog is likewise on the IR, but with an "upper body injury" that is definitely a concussion, so your guess as to when he'll be fit to come back is as good as just about anyone else's right now.

Those are two pretty good forwards, on whom the Avs were set to rely heavily this season. And I don't think it's too much of coincidence that in the six games the Avs have played without those guys, they're 2-4, with just 12 goals to show for their efforts. That shutout at home against Anaheim seemed to be something of a breaking point, as Matt Duchene, who led all forwards with icetime at 20:59 ahead of PA Parenteau (19:07) and Jamie McGinn (18:15), let his feelings on the offensive futility be known.

"It's painful right now," he said. "It's the same story every night. We're playing well 5-on-5, but we can't seem to find a win in those games. We've got to figure out a way to score a goal. It's the bottom line. We've been shut out three times in 10 games. That's unacceptable. That's almost 50 percent of the games we're getting shut out in. That's a joke."

He went on like that. CHL-level math aside, it's hard to find fault with what he's saying, except to note that if you continually play well at 5-on-5 you're going to end up winning games at some point.

The Avs' chances of reasonably contending for a playoff spot are very quickly slipping away. Following Wednesday night's games, they sat tied for 12th in the West, three points back of eighth-place Dallas. You might think three points isn't a whole hell of a lot of ground to make up, but when everyone is only playing intra-conference games, those points all have to come from somewhere. And more to the point, the Avs also had more games played than the three teams immediately ahead of them in the standings.

It's a shame. Paul Stastny and David Jones can't carry the heavy minutes all by themselves. Well, I mean, they can. But they can't do it successfully. Will Greg Sherman have to wade waist-deep into the dark and dangerous waters of the NHL's trade market? Lindy Ruff recently said there's just not a lot of activity out there because teams aren't looking to sell yet. If only there was some sort of answer to which the Avs could turn to correct their scoring problems.

We're now just a year out from the start of the Olympic hockey tournament, and as such, now is as good a time as any to begin projecting who exactly will be lucky enough to represent the United States of America, greatest hockey nation on Earth, in Sochi.

Don't let that mediocre 2010 roster that still beat Canada on aggregate fool you -- the Americans will be sending a very good team halfway around the world to beat the absolute brains out of everyone they face, as well as crack open the skulls of the Canadian team and find to their dismay that there are no brains to be found.

In just the last four years, a lot of detritus has been flushed from the pool of Olympic contention — guys like Chris Drury, Erik Johnson, and Ryan Malone, for example, won't have to wait by their phones — and been replaced by a crop of very good young players who are all but assured to win gold, as the Americans did in Ufa at the World Juniors just a few months ago.

Don't recall how Canada did in that tournament, as Wikipedia will only tell me who won medals. Too bad.

Here are my picks for the 2014 U.S. men's Olympic team.