Old School vs. New School

from Mike Milbury at CBC, Please don’t wax poetic about Hull and Howe and Shore. Today’s players are bigger, stronger, faster, better conditioned, better coached and with better equipment. The players of the 50s couldn’t keep up. And there’s so many of them that you don’t need to consult the standings to name a bunch of them. Kopitar in LA. Bobby Ryan in Anaheim. Duchene and O’Reilly in Colorado. Toews and Kane in Chicago. Stamkos in Tampa. Kovalchuk in Atlanta. Gaborik in New York. Parise in New Jersey. Crosby and Malkin and Fleury in Pittsburgh. And on and on. But it is in Washington where the new generation’s poster boy resides. Hey, Alex Semin, Nick Backstrom and Mike Green are all stars in their own right, but the lightning rod is Alex Ovechkin. The attraction? He is the next Mr. Hockey, the newly-defined Mr. Hockey. The computerized, twittered, facebooked, instantly gratified and accessible Mr. Hockey. more