The NHL has made a mess out of its postseason awards thanks to the lockout. There’s no Las Vegas extravaganza (hence, no Nickelback), as the awards will instead be handed out on two television specials on Friday and Saturday night.

One imagines every nominee will not be present at this awards presentation, which will likely have the pomp and circumstance of the draft lottery selection. The winner, however, might be there or appear via remote feed to give a pithy acceptance speech for their half-an-award. (#asterisk)

Hence, one assumes leaks will happen leading up the NHL Awards being announced.

Hence, Nick Kypreos of Sportsnet has learned that P.K. Subban of the Montreal Canadiens has bested Kris Letang and Ryan Suter to win the 2012-13 Norris Trophy at the NHL’s top defenseman.

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It's a Monday edition of Marek vs. Wyshynski beginning at 2 p.m. ET/11 a.m. PT, and we're talking about the following and more:

Special Guest Star: Philip Pritchard (@keeperofthecup) joins us to talk about handling Stanley with his nice white gloves.

• First look at Blackhawks vs. Bruins.

• Fire or not fire Dan Bylsma?

• Edmonton Oilers make a coaching change; Dallas looks at Tortorella.

• Sergei Gonchar gets paid, yo.

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Getty ImagesPittsburgh Penguins Head Coach Dan Bylsma has a Costco-sized container of goodwill stored up, collected over the last few years from media and fans.

While many of his peers are inarticulate oafs, Bylsma is a personable and intelligent interview. He’s seen as being in control of his team but not in a tyrannical way – hired as the anti-Michel Therrien in 2009, this persona was reinforced by the favorable editing on “HBO 24/7” two years ago. His journey from being a interim coach to a Stanley Cup and Jack Adams winner is still a hockey fable many revisit.

He’s gotten results, too: 183 wins in 293 regular-season games, many of them played without both Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin in the lineup, as well as a dozen other significant injuries that have befallen this team. Bylsma is the rare coach who gets respect for both leading a frontrunner – the Penguins have not finished below second place in the Atlantic under his watch – and coaching an "underdog" when his team is decimated by injuries (see: MacLean, Paul).

Where he hasn’t gotten results: When it counts the most.

Since the Penguins captured the Cup in 2009, Bylsma’s teams have won three playoff series. There was a six-game win over the Ottawa Senators in 2010, before the upstart Montreal Canadiens ousted them in seven games in the next round, in a series in which Bylsma was outcoached by Jacques Martin.

In 2011, Bylsma was outcoached by Guy Boucher and the Tampa Bay Lightning eliminated the Penguins in seven games.

In 2012, Bylsma’s Penguins lost to the Philadelphia Flyers in six chaotic games.

In 2013, Bylsma’s Penguins won their two other playoff series – a 1-vs.-8 battle with the New York Islanders and then another win over the Senators – before getting swept out of the postseason by the Boston Bruins in humbling fashion.

Before the Boston sweep, Bylsma was 20-17 in the playoffs since winning the Cup as a freshman coach. Now he's under .500.

But the reason his job is in jeopardy is not the number of postseason losses, but how the Penguins have lost them.

Getty ImagesTo put things in the proper perspective: Glen Sather was a general manager in the NHL the year before Brad Richards was born – a 34-year career that saw him build a dynasty with the Edmonton Oilers before running the New York Rangers beginning in 2000.

The 69-year-old Sather has been in this game for decades. He also had surgery to treat prostate cancer in March, leaving assistant GM Jeff Gorton to handle the team’s duties leading up to the trade deadline.

All of this is to say that it would be understandable if Sather decided to dial back his workload in the Rangers braintrust. Jimmy Murphy, who writes for ESPN Boston, hears this might be exactly what happens this summer. From his blog:

Don’t be surprised if Sather, 69, decides to step down from his GM post and places another in charge of running the player personnel decisions. An NHL source as well as a Rangers team source have told MurphysHockeyLaw.com that Sather is considering such a move as he prepares to meet with his hockey operations staff in La Quinta, California this week to discuss the coaching situation, the roster going forward and prepare for the 2013 NHL Entry Draft in Newark on June 30.

Keep in mind that Sather is on record as saying he plans on remaining general manager through next season.

But if he steps down as GM, Murphy hears that Jim Schoenfeld, the GM of the Rangers AHL affiliate the Connecticut Whale, and former Wild GM Doug Risebrough, a team consultant, would be prime candidates to take over as GM.

But Gorton has been viewed as the heir to Sather for some time, especially when it comes to Sather handing the reins over for players personnel while remaining the team’s president.

Or perhaps the Rangers will fulfill every puckhead fever dream and name Mark Messier their GM with Wayne Gretzky as their new head coach. Because who wouldn’t want to see that other than every Rangers fan ever?

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.

A galaxy of Pittsburgh Penguins stars blinked out, just like that; the only light remaining was from black dwarves Brandon Sutter and Chris Kunitz. At the center of it all, the pillar upon which Claude Julien has constructed his defense and his team and his approach to the game itself, was the NHL's resident Galactus, a towering world-eater who has been the best at his job in the entire world for a period of several years.

The fact that we aren't falling down in with sheer joy at the idea of being able to watch Zdeno Chara play smothering, punishing, enveloping defense every time he climbs over the boards like a giant is a little sickening.

Men of his size have moved with grace and skill and speed in other sports, but never in the full armor of an NHL player. Others approach his size, of course. Tyler Myers and John Scott and the late Derek Boogaard, all just an inch shorter. Hal Gill and Brian Boyle check in at 6-foot-7. But none have played the game at a level even approaching that of Chara's, who now moves on to his second Stanley Cup Final in three years.

Just how unappreciated is Chara in his own time, even with the acknowledgement that he is indeed a former Norris Trophy winner and six-time All-Star? There were certain elements of the Boston media who, as recently as the Maple Leafs series, were advocating that he be stripped of the Bruins' captaincy. All that, though, has gone as silent as Sidney Crosby, Evgeni Malkin, James Neal, Kris Letang, Jarome Iginla, and all but five Penguins did in their terrible dud of an Eastern Conference Finals sweep.

That Chara wasn't nominated for the Norris again this season -- or indeed, in any season since about 2007 -- seems like borderline criminal oversight by the people who vote on this sort of thing, and whose ballots typically run more or less in accordance with Nos. 1-3 in scoring by defensemen for any given season.

Letang (who utterly embarrassed himself in every zone during this Eastern Conference Final), PK Subban and Ryan Suter were among the nominees who finished ahead of Chara, and there they go at Nos. 2, 1, and 3, respectively, in points this season.

Chara? Well shoot, you gotta click over to the second page to find him in a tie for 38th with Patrick Wiercioch and Marek Zidlicky, among others, at 19 points this season.

What a bum, right?

Obviously he has a little bit of help on the defensive side of things, what with another terribly underrated defenseman in Dennis Seidenberg capable of parachuting into any matchup, alongside Chara or apart from him, as well as Patrice Bergeron, the premier defensive center in the world, in front of him. All have combined to put Tuukka Rask, as with Tim Thomas before him, in line to become a very, very rich goaltender.

Maybe, too, it's the ordinariness of Chara's excellence that makes it so difficult to appreciate.

A night in which he's a minus player, as he was just 11 times in 62 games across this year's regular season and playoffs, and gets beaten for a few points from his opposition, is exceedingly rare. It's too bad, I guess, that he doesn't rush the puck with the fluidity of a Nicklas Lidstrom, widely considered the second-best defenseman of all time and, to Chara's detriment, very much of the same generation.

He doesn't rack up power play points like Subban, who had 26 this year, because the Bruins' man advantage generally stinks.

He doesn't lay anyone out in open ice like Dion Phaneuf.

If anything, the attribute for which he is most famous isn't

The second period of Game 2 in the AHL Calder Cup Final was like a parfait of officiating incompetence, each layer revealing a bigger blunder.

It began with a shot by J.T. Brown of the Syracuse Crunch, which appeared to fly wide of Grand Rapids Griffins goalie Petr Mrazek. Well, at least to everyone but the players on the Crunch bench, who pounded their sticks to get the referee’s attention because they saw the net ripple:

Turns out Brown had actually Shea Weber’d it.

No, he didn’t sign an elephantine offer sheet with the Flyers.

No, he didn’t take a Griffins player’s head and slam it into the glass like it was a WWE turnbuckle.

We’re talking Weber’d like in the 2010 Winter Olympics: Brown shot the puck through the net, as was confirmed by video review. The Crunch had suddenly tied the game late in the second period.

Oh, but here comes the next layer of incompetence: Fun With Official Game Clocks.

The Pittsburgh Penguins were always going to be speaking to the media Sunday, but most assumed it would be in advance of Game 5 of the Eastern Conference Final. Instead, after a stunning sweep at the hands of the Boston Bruins, game day became locker cleanout day, as the club faced tough questions about their postseason failure, and their future.

Marc-Andre Fleury, who lost his starting job in Round 1 and never gained it back, was asked if he felt like the coaching staff still had faith in him.

"I don't know. I haven't talked with Dan yet," he responded. "You should ask him. Not me."

Simply doing as they were told, the media put the question to Dan Bylsma. The Penguins' coach was asked to define what a franchise goaltender should do, as well as whether he felt Marc-Andre Fleury was that for the Penguins.

"I'm not sure the definition of franchise guy," Bylsma said. "He's our number one goalie. He's the number one goalie for this franchise and he will be going forward. We were in a

Getty ImagesDallas Eakins is the pretty girl at the dance this offseason; the minor league coach with great accomplishments and good potential that teams with vacancies covet.

That the Edmonton Oilers won his hand speaks either speaks to their willingness to give him what he’s asking for, or Eakins’ belief that a team with low expectations and high upside is a better fit for him than a current Stanley Cup contender in Vancouver or Madison Square Garden.

Darren Dreger of TSN reported on Sunday that Eakins will be named the new head coach of the Oilers on Monday, two days after GM Craig MacTavish’s surprise announcement that Ralph Krueger was out after just one 48-game season.

It was MacTavish’s philosophical differences with Krueger’s approach that led to his dismissal, with Eakins being more what the GM has in mind for the Oilers’ head coach. He’s expected to preach a more aggressive style than Krueger, and has an unimpeachable record of developing young players with the AHL Toronto Marlies.