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New York Times
12-05-2025
- Sport
- New York Times
How Logan Thompson is dominating the NHL playoffs with smart reads and ‘nth degree' competitiveness
A long time ago, 12-year-old Logan Thompson was battling shooters inside the East Calgary Twin Arenas ice rink. Even at a young age, the competitive streak in the Washington Capitals' star goaltender was evident. Because of that, Thompson was a huge fan of the game of 'rebound,' which pits the goalie against anywhere between five and seven shooters. Advertisement The shooters take turns firing pucks from the top of the slot while the others circle the crease hunting for rebounds. If the goalie can make the save and freeze the puck or deflect it beyond the goal line, he earns a point. If the army of shooters can get the puck into the net, they earn a point. It can be a brutally taxing game for the goalie, who is always outnumbered, but Thompson loved it. He would play it all night if the rink didn't have to turn the lights off eventually. Years later, Thompson is still battling shooters with every ounce of energy he has. Now, of course, he's doing it in the Stanley Cup playoffs, where he has been perhaps the best goalie in the NHL this postseason. 'The most impressive thing that sticks out when you get to know Logan Thompson is his competitiveness,' Capitals coach Spencer Carbery said. 'He's just an ultra, ultra-competitive guy that when the puck drops and the game starts, he wants to win so desperately and will do anything to keep that black rubber thing out of our net.' Thompson dazzles the crowd with spectacular acrobatic saves. His blend of athleticism and commitment to never giving up on a puck makes for one of the most entertaining styles of goaltending, and at the moment, it's one of the most effective. He leads the NHL playoffs with 9.3 goals saved above expected, has a .922 save percentage for Washington and should be one of the early favorites for the Conn Smythe Trophy. And he's doing it with an unorthodox style built around his strengths. It all started back in Calgary. 'He has always had the ability to make every routine save, but also steal a whole bunch more,' said goalie coach Justin Cardinal, who has worked with Thompson since he was 10 years old. 'So instead of training to a cosmetic standard, let's play to your strengths.' Thompson plays from a low, crouching stance. He leans forward, sticking his head and hands way out in front of his body to crowd the puck, eliminate shooting angles and, most importantly, maximize his elite reaction time and athleticism. 'If you're more forward, you're meeting that puck way closer than if your chest was upright,' Cardinal explained. 'He understands reading shot release. He has very, very good hands and feet. His athleticism is one of his biggest strengths, so let's play with that strength rather than limit it.' Advertisement Many of Thompson's tendencies go against the grain of some traditional methods. He certainly doesn't make himself 'look big' in the net — at least not from the camera angles high above the rink. 'In the early 2000s, everybody was big into the idea of being big and filling space,' Cardinal said. 'Well, you can fill 99 percent of the net, but if the shooter hits the one percent then you're not doing your job. 'I think that's one of the biggest things that has changed in the game in the last 10 years. Guys are shooting the puck a lot faster and a lot harder. What does that mean for us goaltenders? It doesn't mean that the pucks are going to hit us more. It means that we need to make more saves.' Thompson rarely enters blocking positions and hopes the puck hits him. Instead, he relies on his reads and puck tracking, reacts to shots and uses his lightning-quick hands and feet. Logan Thompson's been pretty, pretty good this season. 🤩 Take a look at these two stops. 👇 📺: @Sportsnet or stream on Sportsnet+ ➡️ — NHL (@NHL) November 22, 2024 'It was a completely new style for me to coach,' said Tyler Plante, longtime goalie coach for the Western Hockey League's Brandon Wheat Kings, who coached Thompson as a junior from 2016-18. 'I was more of a big, blocking goaltender, so he was kind of an anomaly to me. I was always jealous of guys who played like him because it looked like more fun.' When Plante first started working with Thompson, he immediately recognized Thompson possessed a trait that was difficult to teach. 'He won't quit on a puck,' Plante said. 'I never had to work on that with him. He just naturally wanted to not let his teammates score on him, which was pretty fun and entertaining. It was quite a treat.' That hasn't changed. During Thompson's four seasons with the Vegas Golden Knights, his practice battles with Jonathan Marchessault were legendary. The games of rebound were loud, boisterous and fiercely competitive. At the end of the contest, one would be hooting and hollering in celebration while the other was pulling their wallet out. Advertisement Now in Washington, Thompson has a new practice combatant: a formidable shooter who has spent his entire career getting under his opponents' skin. 'I've been on him all year to try and get him flustered, get him off his game and keep him on his toes,' Washington forward Tom Wilson said. 'Maybe it's just practice makes perfect, and now he's just finding that rhythm where he's just in his happy place and he's just feeling good.' It's no surprise that when the playoffs arrive, and competitiveness on the ice reaches its peak, Thompson thrives. Over the last two postseasons, he has saved 15.1 goals above expected, good for second in the NHL despite making only 12 starts during that span. He's already living up to the six-year, $35.1 million contract extension he signed with the Capitals in January. 'I always had a belief in myself and just needed a team to take a chance on me,' Thompson said. 'I'm really thankful that Washington did and like I said, I'm not gonna take it for granted. I'm going to keep working hard and pushing myself to be better every day.' Perhaps where Thompson's reactionary style is most evident is in his post-integrations. He uses the reverse vertical horizontal (RVH) position quite often, but his approach differs from most. Rather than simply dropping into the position as a blocking technique, he is active from it. He's constantly reaching his gloves at pucks, reading releases and making saves. He will even leap into the air from his knees to get his shoulders on high shots from the position — something you'll almost never see from another NHL goalie. 'The answer is not less RVH, the answer is better RVH,' Cardinal explained. 'We have to understand that RVH isn't necessarily a save, it's a stance. So what is our stance responsible for? Being able to move and make saves.' Thompson also positions himself well to explode out of the RVH at any moment. He keeps his hips high (rather than slumping into a lazy, seated position, which is one of the easiest faults of the stance) and his weight light and balanced, rather than leaning too heavily into the post. This gives him unique mobility in the event a lateral pass is made in front, like on this incredible save he made in the first-round series against the Montreal Canadiens. The way Thompson leaps out of the RVH and gets his right skate so far up the ice is impressive from a leg strength and weight standpoint. That move sets him up perfectly to explode across and rob Nick Suzuki. 'He's a great goalie, and he's confident with his abilities,' Capitals forward Andrew Mangiapane said. 'Obviously I think him coming in this year and just doing what he's doing gives everyone kind of belief on our bench that he's a great player. He just gives us, I think, some calmness back there, even when we do give up a Grade-A (chance), we always have him back there backing us up.' Advertisement Thompson isn't just an athlete. He has great hockey sense, which helps him read and anticipate plays. Perhaps just as important: He understands his own physical capabilities and how to maximize them in each situation. For example, while Thompson isn't afraid to challenge shooters well outside of his crease, he typically plays pretty deep. Depth management — how far a goalie plays from his goal line as the play develops — is one of the easiest ways to actually see a goalie reading the play visually. This save in Game 5 of the first round against Montreal is an excellent example of Thompson using great depth management to make a difficult save look easy. Near the beginning of this three-on-one rush, Thompson came way out of his crease. Initially Canadiens forward Jake Evans was skating toward him as a shot threat, but then he flipped his hips to set up for a cross-ice pass. The moment Evans gave away this clue, and removed himself as a shot threat, Thompson immediately retreated back into his crease with a swift c-cut backward. He remained square to Evans, just in case he tried a shot, but he was already preparing for the pass by giving himself far less distance to travel to get over. At its core, this is simple geometry, shown by the graphic below. But it's all instinct in the moment on Thompson's part. The result is Thompson exploding across for a huge blocker save to deny Kaiden Guhle's one-timer and keep Montreal off the board. 'He's a rock,' Capitals forward Dylan Strome said. 'He kind of did what he did all year. We feel really confident with him back there.' Thompson has made a career out of proving people wrong. He went undrafted — largely because he was stuck behind WHL champion Jordan Papirny on the depth chart in Brandon and didn't start until he was 19 — but fought his way through a long, windy road to the NHL anyway. Advertisement Now he's proving his style works at the highest level, in the biggest moments. If not for a late-season injury, he was on track to be in conversation for the Vezina Trophy this season. In the playoffs, he's given Washington a chance to win every night. His secret weapon is his competitiveness, which has carried him from a small rink in Calgary to the NHL playoffs. 'Not that other guys don't have that, he just has it to the nth degree,' Carbery said. 'It's why, in my opinion, one of the main reasons why he's been able to be so successful in his career and why he's been able to achieve things that a lot of people didn't think he was going to achieve. He's overcome obstacles and adversity, and proven a lot of people wrong because of that competitive fire in his belly.'
USA Today
10-05-2025
- Politics
- USA Today
Opinion: Trump and proposed commission on college sports can't change reality
Opinion: Trump and proposed commission on college sports can't change reality Show Caption Hide Caption Trump praises Washington Capitals' Alex Ovechkin during Carney presser During a meeting with Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, President Donald Trump appeared to mistake ice hockey player Alex Ovechkin as Canadian. If you can put yourself into the mind space of President Trump, it's pretty easy to understand why he wants to insert himself into the cauldron of college sports. With his approval rating taking on water, wars across the globe expanding rather than concluding and a year that portends economic uncertainty heading into the 2026 midterms, being able to say, 'I'm the guy who saved college sports' — whether he actually does it or not — seems politically enticing. He's even got the GOAT, Nick Saban, signed up to be the face of it. You can already imagine the Oval Office ceremony where Saban stands behind the Resolute desk, giving a thumbs-up and a, 'Sir, we couldn't have done it without you' when Trump puts pen to paper on something that will no doubt end up in a courtroom — just like every other attempt to restore order to college sports by short-cutting laws that a multitude of courts have said the NCAA was violating in its old business model. That's why, even though some administrators across college sports will welcome Trump's involvement because nothing else seems to move the needle, many others are rolling their eyes. After all, what is a presidential commission on college sports really going to accomplish when the solutions have already been well-established? Without pre-judging the proposed commission's intentions or which voices it plans to include — so far, the only names connected to it are Saban, Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) and billionaire Texas Tech booster Cody Campbell — neither they nor Trump have the ability to change reality. And the fundamental truth every attempt to 'fix' college sports runs up against is that its future can only go down one of two paths. The first: Congress will pass a law, and Trump will sign it, that gives the NCAA the ability to enforce its rule book without the fear of getting sued every time it denies an NIL deal or an extra year of eligibility. The second: A group of large revenue schools will have to band together and come up with a new system that allows them to collectively bargain with athletes, jointly setting the rules of the road and bringing order that will benefit both sides. That's it. There's no third option. Even if Trump took a highlight reel of everything Nick Saban has publicly complained about regarding NIL and the transfer portal, turned it into an executive order and signed it, the overall net effect would be … not much. If you think the lawyers have been the biggest winners in all of this up until now, just wait until they get ahold of an executive order that arbitrarily limits someone's earning potential or freedom of movement. The economic news these days may be shaky, but there's never a recession on billable hours in college sports. Again, all due respect to Saban for what he's contributed to the game and what he believes is best for college sports. Much of his criticism of the current environment is correct. But the goal of this commission, and by extension Trump's involvement, cannot be primarily to erase what's happened the last four years and go back to the way things were. That's not going to happen, and any attempt to roll things back too much might unintentionally lead to what universities are most afraid of: An organized college athlete revolt that disrupts a college football weekend or an NCAA basketball tournament where hundreds of millions of dollars are at stake. And that's where yet another college sports commission gives folks some heartburn. First of all, the track record of blue-ribbon panels sufficiently addressing these issues is extremely poor. Just look at the Condoleezza Rice-led Commission on College Basketball, the remnants of which wouldn't sustain warmth for more than 30 seconds if you threw them into a fireplace. Second, anything the committee comes up with or that Trump puts into an executive order won't be worth much unless Congress passes some kind of law that protects the NCAA. There are a couple of big problems with that, too. The obvious one is that the NCAA has lobbied for a bill for nearly six years, and nothing is particularly close to being voted on. There have been a bunch of hearings and bluster, but there are few indications that college sports chaos is truly high up on the list of Congressional priorities these days. The other impediment, quite bluntly, is Trump. If you're a Democrat in the House or Senate, and you're measuring the winds heading into 2026, what is the incentive to soften a mountain of problematic headlines on the economy or international affairs by handing him the opportunity to show up at the Final Four next year and brag about how he 'fixed' college sports? In an ideal world, would we want better of our leaders coming together to solve a problem? Sure. But we're not talking about a national emergency here. It's just college sports, and when you put an issue like college sports in the middle of the political arena, politics are going to happen. That's just the way the game is played. And that brings us back to where we've likely always been. Only college sports can fix what's wrong with college sports — as it should be. Will it be difficult to get the right people on the same page? Of course. Will there be pain for some people when the system gets blown up and becomes fully professionalized? No question. But a lightning rod president who hasn't demonstrated much knowledge of the actual issues here putting Saban and Tuberville in charge because of a perceived political benefit is an inevitable last gasp of ineffectual college presidents who refuse to deal with the reality of where their enterprise is heading. They can either wait for Congress to save them, or they can get on with the business of saving themselves. If anything, adding Trump to the mix only delays the inevitable.
Time of India
09-05-2025
- Politics
- Time of India
Donald Trump sparks online stir by mistakenly calling Russian NHL star Canadian in awkward moment with Canada's Prime Minister
During a recent White House meeting with Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney , sparked buzz online after seemingly implying that NHL star Alex Ovechkin is Canadian—despite the hockey legend hailing from Russia—prompting both confusion and humor across social media. Tired of too many ads? go ad free now A light moment turns viral as Trump's hockey reference raises eyebrows During a White House meeting with Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney on May 6, President Donald Trump stirred conversation online by seemingly suggesting that NHL star Alex Ovechkin is Canadian. Although Trump never mentioned Ovechkin by name, his remarks appeared to refer directly to the Washington Capitals' captain — who is, in fact, Russian. 'I love Canada. I have a lot of respect for the Canadians − Wayne Gretzky , The Great One,' Trump said. 'You happen to have a very, very good hockey player right here on the Capitals, he is a big tough cookie too, just broke the record, and he's a great guy." Ovechkin, one of the NHL's most prolific scorers, recently shattered Wayne Gretzky's long-standing record for career goals — a feat many believed unbreakable. While Trump praised Gretzky, a Canadian legend from Ontario, his follow-up line referencing a Capitals player 'who just broke the record' led many to assume he was alluding to Ovechkin. Social media reacts with both humor and correction The comment quickly ignited online chatter, with many interpreting it as a geographical mix-up. 'Trump just mistakenly called Alex Ovechkin a Canadian. SOLD, we'll take him!' one user quipped on social media, highlighting both the humorous tone and the pride many Canadians feel for hockey greatness — regardless of origin. Others speculated that Trump may have simply been juxtaposing two greats — Gretzky and Ovechkin — without necessarily confusing their nationalities. Tired of too many ads? go ad free now Still, the implication didn't go unnoticed in the hockey world, where Ovechkin's Russian heritage is a major part of his identity and international career. Though the former president's comment was likely meant as a lighthearted shoutout to a fan-favorite player, it adds to the long list of Trump's unscripted moments that have drawn media attention. USA TODAY reached out to the White House for clarification, but no official response has been issued. Also Read: Whether it was a slip or an innocent generalization, the internet has once again proven that sports fans — and political observers — are always listening closely.
USA Today
08-05-2025
- Politics
- USA Today
'Real Housewives' alum Siggy Flicker appointed to Holocaust museum board by Donald Trump
'Real Housewives' alum Siggy Flicker appointed to Holocaust museum board by Donald Trump Show Caption Hide Caption Trump praises Washington Capitals' Alex Ovechkin during Carney presser During a meeting with Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, President Donald Trump appeared to mistake ice hockey player Alex Ovechkin as Canadian. Reality-television personality Siggy Flicker, whose stepson was arrested for his alleged involvement in the Jan. 6 Capitol riots, has been appointed by President Donald Trump to oversee the nation's Holocaust memorial. Flicker, who previously starred on Bravo's "The Real Housewives of New Jersey," was handpicked by President Trump alongside 11 other individuals to serve on the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum's board of trustees, the museum announced on May 5. "President Trump… Thank you for the privilege (and) honor to represent and NEVER FORGET," Flicker wrote in a May 5 Instagram post following the announcement. Recognized as the official U.S. memorial to the Holocaust, the Washington, D.C., museum aims to combat antisemitism through a series of exhibitions, leadership training programs, educational outreach and Holocaust commemorations, according to its official website. The United States Holocaust Memorial Council, which consists of 55 members appointed by the president, was established by Congress in 1980 to raise private funds for the museum, per the organization's website. In addition to the presidential appointees, five members from both the Senate and House of Representatives as well as three ex-officio members from the Departments of Education, Interior, and State serve. According to the museum, council members appointed by the president serve for a five-year term, with 11 members' terms expiring each year. Trump shared his satisfaction with the new council members in a May 6 post on Truth Social, writing, "They are all strong supporters of Israel, and will ensure we, NEVER FORGET. Congratulations to all!" Flicker, 57, was born in Israel to Jewish parents. Her father, Mordecai Paldiel, escaped Nazi-occupied Belgium when he was 3 years old. The TV personality has been vocal in her support of Israel on social media. 'Real Housewives' comeback: 'Rhode Island' spinoff returning to Bravo Siggy Flicker's son arrested following Jan. 6 Capitol riots Flicker's stepson Tyler Campanella, whom she shares with husband Michael Campanella, was arrested in April 2024 on five misdemeanor charges in connection to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, according to NBC News and News12 Long Island. In a now-deleted social media post, Flicker shared photos that appeared to be taken from inside the Capitol along with the caption, "I love patriots so much. Stay safe Tyler. We love you," per NBC. Additionally, court documents stated Tyler's phone was traced to the Capitol's interior the day of the attack. 'Real Housewives' star Teddi Mellencamp has stage 4 melanoma. What's next? According to Law & Crime, Tyler pleaded not guilty to charges of trespassing, disorderly conduct and demonstrating in a Capitol building. As of July 2024, the man remained released on his personal recognizance. Flicker is an ardent supporter of President Trump. In December 2024, the "Real Housewives" alum shared a photo of herself and Trump posing at an event on Instagram. "Happy new year from the greatest president in the history of America," she wrote.
USA Today
07-05-2025
- Health
- USA Today
Trump changes mind on surgeon general pick, tapping wellness influencer close to RFK Jr.
Trump changes mind on surgeon general pick, tapping wellness influencer close to RFK Jr. Show Caption Hide Caption Trump praises Washington Capitals' Alex Ovechkin during Carney presser During a meeting with Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, President Donald Trump appeared to mistake ice hockey player Alex Ovechkin as Canadian. President Donald Trump is reversing himself on who should be the next U.S. surgeon general, tapping a wellness influencer who is close to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for the role just one day before the scheduled Senate confirmation hearing for his first pick, Dr. Janette Nesheiwat. In a May 7 post on Truth Social, Trump touted Dr. Casey Means' credentials as a functional medicines physician while also announcing he was pulling Nesheiwat's nomination. "Casey has impeccable 'MAHA' credentials, and will work closely with our wonderful Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., to ensure a successful implementation of our Agenda in order to reverse the Chronic Disease Epidemic, and ensure Great Health, in the future, for ALL Americans," Trump said in a Truth Social post, referring to the "Make America Healthy Again" slogan. Trump said Nesheiwat - the sister-in-law to former national security adviser Michael Waltz - would instead be working in "another capacity" at the Department of Health and Human Services Means is the sibling of Calley Means, who works as an advisor to Kennedy.
