(Ed. Note: As the Stanley Cup Playoffs continue, we're bound to lose some friends along the journey. We've asked for these losers, gone but not forgotten, to be eulogized by the people who knew the teams best: The bloggers who hated them the most. Here is New York Rangers blogger Scotty Hockey, fondly recalling the New York Islanders. Again, this was not written by us. Also: This is a roast and you will be offended by it, so don't take it so seriously.)

By Scotty Hockey

We come here today to mourn the lost on Long Island. Don't worry -- Rick DiPietro was still just joking.

No, we congregate to appreciate the passing of the 2013 New York Islanders.

Oh, it was quite the run -- one that will be remembered for the 15 minutes it takes all of their new fans to put their still-tagged sweaters back in storage.

And perhaps they'll reminisce fondly in the future, a few years down the line, when they sell those blue and orange atrocities at Goodwill stores to Brooklyn hipsters who find them ironic.

"Dude, there was really someone named Okposo!"

One of these eight players will be the cover model for EA Sports’ NHL 14:

From EA Sports:

The Round of 16 featured some extraordinarily close matchups and included some notable upsets:

The Battle of Pennsylvania: For the second year in a row, Evgeni Malkin has been defeated by a Philadelphia Flyers player. Last year, Malkin lost to NHL 13 Cover Athlete Claude Giroux in the semifinals. This year, Flyers forward Wayne Simmonds unseeded Malkin.

As Close as they Come: At final tally, less than 100 votes separated winner Taylor Hall and his opponent Matt Duchene in this round.

Two Maple Leafs Advance: against Original SixTM Rivals: A strong Game Six performance may have helped Joffrey Lupul and James van Riemsdyk overcome their opponents, P.K. Subban and Tyler Seguin, respectively.

Voting for this round is now live and fans can vote an unlimited number of times at NHL.com/CoverVote. The round closes on May 19 at 11:59pm ET.

A disconsolate and soon-to-be-incredibly-hungry Bruins team leaves the ice after Game 6.

As if the Boston Bruins didn't have enough problems Sunday after dropping their second straight elimination game and allowing the Toronto Maple Leafs to force a Game 7 the following evening, a malfunction with their charter plane left them stranded in Toronto overnight.

It was a stressful situation, so the Bruins opted to do what pretty much anybody does when they're feeling stressed: eat a lot of food.

But finding a restaurant that would accommodate 50 men at about 11 p.m. on a Sunday night is no easy feat, and when Mississauga's Canyon Creek Chophouse agreed to stay open late the feed the bear, the club was understandably appreciative: two hours after opening their doors and hearts to the enemy club, four employees of the restaurant found themselves with tickets to Monday night's Game 7 in Boston.

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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: Scott Morrison of Sportsnet joins us to talk about the Stanley Cup Playoffs and tonight's Game 7s.

• The ridiculous GM of the Year award.

• Recapping the Stanley Cup Playoffs from the weekend.

• Previewing the Game 7s.

• Marc Bergevin vs. P.K. Subban.

Question of the Day: Who has the most to prove in tonight's Game 7s? Email puckdaddyblog@yahoo.com or hit us on Twitter with the hashtag #MvsW to @wyshynski and @jeffmarek.

Click here for the Sportsnet live stream or click the play button above! Click here to download podcasts from the show each day. Subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or Feedburner.

This youth hockey (players born in 2002) fight from a tournament in Novokuznetsk, Russia, is remarkable for several reasons, none the least being that it’s set to some kind of Eastern European Everlast song. Watch the chaos:

Among the lowlights:

• Fifty seconds into this mess, a player from the blue team comes flying at a pile of players and does a full flip onto his head. Then, for his trouble, he gets pounded on by an opponent while he’s lifting himself off the ice.

• At the 1:08 mark, check the middle of the screen, as a white player goes all Ralphie on Scut Farkus, as he sits on his opponent and levels him with punches to the head.

• Twice in the video, a gang of white jersey players swarm a blue jersey player and beat the stuffing out of him like they’re in a prison yard. (OK, Gulag yard). The final time, in the clip’s final moments, is insane.

• Finally, after nearly two minutes of unencumbered chaos … hey, look, adults! Nice to see you. Finally.

The NHL announced the finalists for the General Manager of the Year Award, as Marc Bergevin of the Montreal Canadiens, Bob Murray of the Anaheim Ducks and Ray Shero of the Pittsburgh Penguins will battle for the award given to … well, they never really established the criteria for this thing, did they?

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Were it not for the Lady Byng and the Mark Messier Leadership Award, this would be the NHL’s dumbest postseason accolade. From the NHL, the skinny on the voting:

Voting for this award was conducted among the 30 Club General Managers and a panel of NHL executives, print and broadcast media. The winner will be announced during the 2013 Stanley Cup Final, with more detail on format to be released at a later date.

“Hold tight everyone, we’ll explain exactly how Bob Murray became a finalist for GM of the year at some point …”

As we’ve griped before, it’s impossible to judge a general manager’s accomplishments based on (a) one season and (b) one regular season, as the winner of the award is established before the Stanley Cup Playoffs.

Two of the three GMs nominated built teams that were good enough to lose in Round 1. Pop the champagne.

Third gripe: Why doesn’t this award have a namesake? And why isn’t that namesake Bill Torrey?

Who wins GM of the year?

Legendary NHL coach Mike Keenan has signed a 2-year contract to coach Metallurg Magnitogorsk of the KHL. We’ll just go ahead and assume it’s to launch a thousand “Iron Curtain Mike” jokes.

From Metallurg’s press release, about the “Canadian Specialist”:

May 13 an agreement was signed between Magnitogorsk "Metallurg" and the Canadian specialist Mike Keenan. The agreement is for two years.

Mike Keenan was born in October 21, 1949 in Baumanvill, Ontario, Canada.

A professional hockey player. From season 1979/80 years starting coaching.

Since the season 1984/85 started working as a head coach in the National Hockey League, coached eight teams: Philadelphia Flyers, Chicago Blackhawks, New York Rangers, St. Louis Blues, Vancouver Canucks, Boston Bruins, Florida Panthers and Calgary Flames.

In 1987 and 1991, the position of head coach national team Canada wins Canada Cup. With the club New York Rangers Mike Keenan won the Stanley Cup in 1993/94, in addition, three went to the finals of the NHL playoffs.

The team announced Keenan’s hiring with the single greatest introduction video we’ve ever seen:

OK, second-greatest, behind this one.

Keenan isn’t the first North American coach to take over Metallurg. Dave King coached them from 2005-06, and Paul Maurice was the team’s coach last season.

Now comes the most difficult part for the KHL team: Hiring a translator that can capture Keenan’s unique brand of whimsy, and meeting Jeremy Roenick’s asking price when he comes out of retirement to play for Keenan again (we assume).

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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.

One of the things people said constantly throughout the Pittsburgh Penguins' six-game series victory over the New York Islanders was that their play was well below the expected level of quality.

In fact, the most common refrain was that this particular brand of awful play -- rife with defensive irresponsibility and baffling lack of execution for a team that was pretty much incredible from start to finish this year -- was probably only good enough to get them past a try-hard pretender like the Islanders.

Against a real team, it was generally agreed, this kind of play would result in them losing the series in short order, probably pretty badly.

But that kind of talk ignores two things. First, we were told repeatedly by just about everyone that if there was any team the Penguins, not exactly fleet-of-foot, didn't want to take on in the playoffs, it was these New York Islanders. And yeah, they had their hands full throughout, but still never really looked to be in all that much trouble; the scores were close, yes, but they still only needed six games to put these guys out of their misery.

Second, and more important, is that — lo and behold — the second they took Marc-Andre Fleury out of the crease, they won both games. That's not to say that Tomas Vokoun really won them either game, because he didn't. He posted a shutout in Game 5 because almost any goaltender in the world (with at least one notable exception) would have, but he was also victimized on occasion by the bad defensive work that didn't help Fleury much either.

But the fact of the matter is that if you have pretensions of winning a Stanley Cup, your goaltender has to at least be league-average. The Penguins, with their galaxy of stars and excellent coach and top-quality GM, have that goal. They do not have that goaltender. People will argue that Fleury is a winner, insofar as he won a Stanley Cup. Four years ago. Since that postseason, when he posted just a .908 save percentage and a not-good 2.61 GAA, his save percentage has crept above .899 precisely zero times. This year, when he gave up 14 goals on 128 shots in four games before Bylsma dead-bolted the door to the doghouse from the outside.

Or at least, he should; there's only so many times an entire team can roll its eyes and think, "Oh no, not again," like a pot of petunias, before it's the only reasonable course of action.

I don't know how much longer we need to suffer through the narrative that Fleury is any good at all before it crumbles to sand and is scattered by the wind. That is, if it hasn't done so already behind save attempts like this and this and most notably this.

I mean, look, the fact of the matter is that apart from one good playoff run five years ago in which he fell a game short of winning the Stanley Cup for that not-quite-ready Penguins team, he has always been sub-average, and now things are getting markedly worse.