offtopic » Joe Pavelski scored two of San Jose’s four first-period goals

PHILADELPHIA (AP) —Dougie Hamilton Jersey Womens , and Evander Kane also scored twice to spark the Sharks to an 8-2 win over the Philadelphia Flyers on Tuesday night.Flyers fans were still buzzing from the pregame festivities for the home opener, which included rookie mascot Gritty rappelling from the rafters to the ice, when the Sharks pounced.The Flyers turned over the puck at the point, and Couture beat the odd-man rush and fired his first goal of the season past Brian Elliott. Pavelski made it 2-0 just 11 seconds later when he knocked in a rebound for his first goal of the season.The Sharks, a Stanley Cup favorite, were just warming up. They had five goals in their first three games and then scored five goals through two periods.Kane added his second of the game and fourth of the season in the second to make it 5-1. Tomas Hertl, Timo Meier and Barclay Goodrow also scored in the third for an 8-1 lead. Aaron Dell stopped 31 shots.Shayne Gostisbehere and Wayne Simmonds scored for the Flyers.JETS 2, KINGS 1WINNIPEG, Manitoba (AP) — Kyle Connor scored for a third straight game and Winnipeg overcame Ilya Kovalchuk’s first NHL goal in five years to beat Los Angeles.Mark Scheifele also scored and Connor Hellebuyck made 16 saves for the Jets, who outshot the Kings 39-17.Kovalchuk got his first goal since returning from Russia with the Kings this season on a three-year deal. It was the 418th of his career.Jack Campbell, replacing injured starter Jonathan Quick, stopped 37 shots in his ninth career game.FLAMES 3, PREDATORS 0NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — Mike Smith made 43 saves and Sean Monahan scored twice as Calgary blanked Nashville.Elias Lindholm scored and Johnny Gaudreau had three assists for Calgary, winners of two of three.Smith was stellar, especially in the second period when he turned aside 21 shots. Nashville had a two-man advantage for a full 2 minutes in the period.The loss was Nashville’s first after a pair of road wins to open the season. Nashville’s Pekka Rinne finished with 24 saves.HURRICANES 5, CANUCKS 3RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — Sebastian Aho had a goal and an assist, and Carolina beat Vancouver for its third straight win.Warren Foegele scored an insurance goal in the third period, Andrei Svechnikov, Jordan Staal and Brett Pesce also scored and Teuvo Teravainen had two assists.They helped the Eastern Conference-leading Hurricanes improve to 3-0-1 — their best start since the move from Hartford in 1997 — under new coach and former team captain Rod Brind’Amour.Sven Baertschi had two goals and an assist, and Bo Horvat scored on the power play for rebuilding Vancouver, which has lost the first two games of its six-game trip.Curtis McElhinney made 22 saves for the Hurricanes while Jacob Markstrom stopped 28 shots for the Canucks.BLUE JACKETS 5, AVALANCHE 2COLUMBUS http://www.officialsharks.com/authentic-adidas-brent-burns-jersey , Ohio (AP) — Nick Foligno had two goals and an assist and Sergei Bobrovsky made 25 saves to get his first win of the season as Columbus beat Colorado.Pierre-Luc Dubois, Artemi Panarin and Josh Anderson also scored for the Blue Jackets, who dealt the Avs their first loss.Philipp Grubauer, making his Colorado debut after being acquired from Washington in June, had 30 saves. Nathan MacKinnon and Carl Soderberg scored in the second period, but Colorado was shut out in the third as Columbus broke a 2-2 tie and added a couple more.MAPLE LEAFS 7, STARS 4DALLAS (AP) — Auston Matthews and John Tavares each had two goals, and high-scoring Toronto beat Dallas.Toronto defenseman Morgan Rielly had a career-high four assists after he scored the winning goal in Sunday night’s 7-6 overtime win at Chicago. Mitchell Marner had a goal and three assists as the Maple Leafs improved to 2-0 on a four-game trip.Led by Matthews and Tavares, Toronto has won three of its first four games.Tyler Seguin had a goal and three assists for Dallas, and Alexander Radulov finished with a goal and two assists.Ben Bishop, who had stopped 62 of 63 shots to help the Stars to a 2-0 start, made 23 saves.Frederik Andersen had 30 stops for the Maple Leafs. PHILADELPHIA (AP) — In a crowded hallway at Scanlon Ice Rink, Logan Johnson slid into his pads as his brother Malakye and sister Wylla skittered around sticks and bags bulging with hockey equipment.Their mother, April, tried to keep order and Wylla asked whether a board game of Candy Land might help fill the time until Malakye’s practice, which didn’t start until a half-hour after Logan wraps up. Snacks and homework were handy since the family knew they would be spending several hours here on a school night.It was a standard visit to the rink for the Johnsons, who are familiar with the 20-minute drive from their Germantown neighborhood to Kensington in north Philadelphia. Four years after knowing nothing about hockey, the sport now consumes their lives for nine months out of the year between travel, practices and games, as it does for countless families of young players across North America.The Johnsons, however, are African-American and the participation of people of color in a sport that has for decades been predominantly played by whites still stands out 61 years after Willie O’Ree broke the color barrier in the National Hockey League. Minority players in the NHL remain a relative rarity but the effort to increase diversity in the sport — some of it funded by the league — has never been more robust than it is now. The results can be seen in neighborhoods where basketball, baseball and football are still the top choices for many.Hockey was a tough sell for the Johnson family with football the sport of choice in Germantown. April Johnson said she didn’t want to switch her children, now 13 Julien Gauthier Jersey Womens , 10 and 8, to the ice even when she found out it could be free through the Snider Hockey program that runs programs at five city rinks, including Scanlon. She now tells everyone she can about her experience, though she encounters plenty of reluctance — almost always that their child already plays football or basketball.“Some people are just kind of gun shy,” she said. “They don’t know what to expect, so they just don’t even want to try it out.”The challenge for youth hockey programs trying to add minority players are cultural, socio-economic and logistical. The sport, unlike others, has to feel more welcoming and inclusive than others in communities that have shunned or ignored it.The Scanlon rink, in the heart of a neighborhood that has struggled with drugs and crime, is both a refuge and a showcase of what the future of the sport could look like. Far from the reputation of hockey being a white sport, children and families of all races and from all corners of the city reflect the population far more than the NHL today.While just 5 percent of the 778 NHL players are minorities, that number is 70 percent within Snider Hockey, a program the late Flyers owner Ed Snider started in 2005 and provides free equipment, ice time and academic support for more than 3,000 students. Ice Hockey in Harlem, Detroit Ice Dreams and other organizations are also trying to bring the sport to people who never thought it was for them.“The first barrier is just letting folks know about this opportunity that’s in their neighborhood,” Snider Hockey executive vice president Jan Koziara said. “The biggest barrier is convincing families who aren’t hockey fans, haven’t ever really been exposed to hockey to give it a shot. From there, people become hockey fans and hockey families very quickly.”USA Hockey counted 382,514 youth players last season, up from 339,610 eight years earlier, but has only just begun tracking participation numbers by race and doesn’t yet have any data to share publicly. Kim Davis Womens Evander Kane Jersey , hired in 2017 as the NHL’s first executive vice president of social impact, growth and legislative affairs, said she believes diversity of hockey at the youth level is underestimated.“You look across the country, you can’t help but know that given the demographics that we’re seeing regionally and state by state that the pipeline of talent, particularly for kids that are starting our sport as early as age 3 or 4, is shifting,” she said.William Frey of the Brookings Institute, who has consulted the NHL on demographic shifts, expects the 2020 census to show the population under age 18 is less than half white, which makes the outreach to nontraditional hockey communities critical to the future of the sport.“We don’t want to leave anybody behind,” said Capitals owner Ted Leonsis, who aided an effort to keep Washington’s Fort Dupont Ice Arena open amid a funding crisis. “It’s within everyone’s best interest to make sure that we build organizations, businesses, communities that are reflective to the people that you serve.”It remains a challenge to lure children to an unfamiliar sport. Kids in Kensington who know LeBron James and Steph Curry are less likely to know about black hockey players like P.K. Subban or even Wayne Simmonds, who was recently traded by Philadelphia to Nashville.“A lot of kids don’t see it, so they don’t think it’s OK,” said Jason McCrimmon, the Detroit Ice Dreams president and founder. “That’s what we still deal with in this day and age when we go out to recruit. It’s still like: ‘I don’t really want to play hockey. My friends don’t play it or what would they think of me if I played it?’ It’s an easier situation for a kid to kind of adapt and going the route of playing basketball or football because it’s so normal and it’s seen on a regular basis for kids that look like them.”The NHL said the league and the NHL Players’ Association have invested roughly $100 million since 2015 in programs to grow the game, from the joint Industry Growth Fund to Hockey is for Everyone, Future Goals and Learn to Play. Subban, Simmonds, Columbus’ Seth Jones and O’Ree serve as inspirations in black communities across North America just as players like Scott Gomez, Richard Park, Jonathan Cheechoo and Craig Berube did for Hispanic Authentic Joe Pavelski Jersey , Asian and Native American and First Nations communities.“When I was younger, if I didn’t see people who look like me playing hockey, that’s probably something that I wouldn’t have (gotten into),” Simmonds said.Snider Hockey exemplifies that in Philadelphia, which is more than 40 percent black. Director of programs Dan Rudd said it was difficult to find black and Latino coaches to reflect the community at first but over the past decade alumni have come back to coach.There is Virlen Reyes, who went from the streets of Kensington to captain West Chester University to a club hockey national title, became Snider Hockey’s first college graduate and now co-owns an art studio. There is Kaseir Archie, another Kensington kid who chose hockey over basketball and is now a junior at Drexel.Reyes used to get strange looks carrying her bag and stick on the train and saw drug dealers and syringes not far from Scanlon. Now she sees all kinds of kids rolling their gear into the building.“I’ve seen an immense decrease in drug influence and violence within that community,” Reyes said. “You have people from outside the community, they are coming in and bringing their families. To see other families be comfortable with coming into a community that’s known to be one of America’s most violent and drug-influenced areas, that is a signal to know that great change is happening here.”When he’s not watching NHL Network to learn about a sport he was entirely unfamiliar with, Chip Finney comes from West Philadelphia for his 9-year-old son Miles’ practices. A conversation with another father in the schoolyard took Finney’s family to hockey, and now Miles is the goalie for a team that also has a Muslim girl who wears a hijab on the ice.“This unusual is his normal,” Finney said.O’Ree, who broke the NHL color barrier with the Boston Bruins in 1958, has spent 22 years as the league’s diversity ambassador. He said he has noticed significant progress.“Hockey’s a white sport? That’s ridiculous,” O’Ree said. “You can play any sport you want regardless of what color you are if you have the will and the desire.”Rudd and Snider Hockey coaches have honed their message at schools and churches to try to reach more kids like Malakye Johnson, whose friends still don’t play hockey. Kids and parents, after all, make up the real sales force.“It just takes word of mouth,” April Johnson said.