Morning Skate: Rankings - Yahoo Sports

Welcome to another summer edition of the Morning Skate, folks!

As we move through the first week of August, we know that hockey is the foremost thing on your mind, so thanks for stopping by.

We’re a month and 16 days away from the B’s first preseason game, so we’ll do our best to fill that space accordingly.

The second-best wing in the league?

The NHL Network’s annual offseason rankings of the best centers, wings, defensemen, goalies, hot dog toppings, pizza styles, and paint colors always generate plenty of discussion/argument, mainly because we have nothing better to do in August.

The network recently released its list of the best wings in the league, with our very own David Pastrnak coming in at the #2 spot.

The only player ranked ahead of Pastrnak? Nikita Kucherov, which…yeah, fair enough.

It’s become so routine by this point that it’s easy to take for granted just how good Pastrnak has been for the Bruins for the past several years.

He’s produced at a more than a point per game pace for the past eight seasons and has recorded 100+ points four seasons in a row, no small feat when you consider the debacle of a season we all sat through two years ago.

I’m not sure what the point of all of this is other than to make it a Pastrnak appreciation post, which we can all get on board with — except that guy we all know who insists that actually Pastrnak isn’t good and the Bruins should trade him for someone with more grit.

(I’m sure he’ll show up in the comments.)

If you want to argue some more, NHL Network will release its defensemen, goalies, and centers lists over the next three Sundays.

Radio waves

Aaron Portzline, who does a terrific job covering the Columbus Blue Jackets for The Athletic, had an interesting piece this week on the slow death of NHL radio broadcasts.

The piece may be behind a paywall, but the impetus for it was the Blue Jackets’ recent decision to scrap their radio broadcast and replace it with the audio from the TV broadcast — something four other NHL teams have also done in recent years.

Hockey is one of the harder sports to listen to on the radio, and calling a game for a radio audience is a tough task.

Baseball, for example, lends itself well to radio with the pace of play, relatively contained action, etc.

Hockey and basketball, to name a couple of sports, are different in that there is near-constant motion, limited reset opportunities (unlike the breaks between each batter in baseball or each down in football), and a lot of relevant stuff that happens away from the main action.

To me, it seems like you’re doing radio listeners a disservice by handing them audio of a TV feed.

TV play-by-play people are describing the action with the awareness that the viewer can see what they’re talking about, which is very different from someone who only has access to audio.

Bruins fans have been blessed with good to great radio teams for the better part of three decades, so hopefully there’s no change in that regard.

But a question for those who consume a lot of their hockey on the radio: do you notice a difference in the dedicated broadcast vs. simulcast setup?

Other than that, we have the Red Sox suddenly going for it, upheaval at FIFA (good), and the sudden realization in Boston that the sun is starting to set before 8 PM again.

What else is on tap for today?

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