Greetings from the backseat of my Uber ride home from the airport.
It’s a Friday night, you probably have better things to do, but I’m killing time and wanted to drop in some quick notes here while they were fresh in mind after spending the past two days in Chicago covering the USHL Fall Classic.
On a USHL front, I spoke with USHL President Glenn Hefferan today about the state of the league and other various things. The league announced expansion to the West Coast back in the spring, with six new markets. At this point Hefferan said it’s “too soon to tell,” if those markets will be ready for the 2027-28 season, but they are working on those details every day.
The USHL is also working on expansion in its current midwest footprint, Hefferan said. That includes a locked in plan, he said, in Middletown, Ohio and another market he wouldn’t unveil. He also said they are the drawing board for two other locations.
This was my first trip to the upgraded facility the Blackhawks practice out of, which added the USHL’s Chicago Steel has a tenant after Blackhawks ownership bought the USHL franchise. If you are the type of person that likes hockey trips, a trip to Chicago for a back-to-back between the NHL and USHL team seems like it could be a good time.
I ran into Connor Carrick in the lobby in the rink in Chicago. I covered Carrick during his time with Dallas and he’s had the definition of a journeyman career. He’s currently looking for a spot to play this season after playing in Switzerland last season. He also recently had his second kid last week, so that’s been his main focus the past week or so.
One NHL assistant GM, who was in attendance scouting the Fall Classic, was curios on whether I thought Dylan Larkin would end the season in Detroit or not. It’s funny talking to people around the hockey world, because there is some real curiosity, almost soap-opera esque, for others when it comes to observing what’s happening in Detroit.
Larkin refused to say on Thursday whether he rescinded his trade request or not. Other NHL executives I spoke to in Chicago said they are still acting in their respective organizations like that request is still on the table.
I had one person bring up Larkin and the Quinn Hughes situation in Minnesota in our conversations, and their feeling on it was that both would end the season with their respective clubs, albeit one situation would be much more awkward than the other.
I also had a couple hockey people ask about the comments Glen Gulutzan made this week in Dallas where the Stars did a deep dive on their own analytics and realized they weren’t an elite, contending offensive team. (You should read Robert Tiffin here on that.) One NHL executive opined that the Stars really lived, and died, on the power play last season, and it was something that went into their team’s prep against the Stars. Another said they bet the Stars deep dive revealed they needed to be much better at getting to high-leverage areas, like the inner slot, at even strength.
Not confirmed, but it appears that Gulutzan brought up the analytics deep dive in his press availability as a reason to hold the Stars, and himself, accountable this season. I spoke to someone who’s worked closely with Gulutzan in the past and they brought up that the coach sometimes like pointing out his own challenges/shortcomings from the past publicly because it forces him to address them.
On the ice, I really liked the foundation I saw with Tri-City storm goalie Quinn Beumer. He let up four goals on 30 shots, but I really like the foundation and he seems like a goalie to watch for the 2028 NHL Draft.
And that should do it for the brain dump. Here’s a photo I took from behind the net while watching one of the USHL games with my phone that I thought came out pretty cool.
