Buffalo Sabres forward Evander Kane is the subject of an investigation into an alleged sex offense.
The allegation comes more than a month after an Erie County district attorney announced that Chicago Blackhawks star forward Patrick Kane, a Buffalo native, wouldn’t facecriminal charges following a three-month sexual assault investigation.
The Sabres, the National Hockey League, and law enforcement officials didn’t say much about the latest investigation Monday. Kane spoke about it briefly with reporters in Buffalo.
The Sabres issued a statement Sunday, saying “We take the allegation made today against Evander Kane very seriously.”
“We are gathering facts and have been in touch with the NHL and Evander’s representatives,” the organization said.
Even though little has been said officially, much has already been written about the investigation, including calls not to rush to judgment about those involved in the Evander Kane matter.
The Outdoor Women’s Classicpresented by Scotiabank is part of the 2016 Bridgestone NHL Winter Classic festivities that will culminate on New Year’s day with an Original Six outdoor match between the BostonBruins and Montreal Canadiens at Gillette Stadium in Foxboro, Massachusetts, home of the National Football League New EnglandPatriots.
“A new year signifies a new chapter and we look forward to sharing the ice for the first time with two professional women’s team’s on the (NHL’s) biggest stage,” NHL Deputy Commissioner Bill Daly said.
The women’s game features teams from the first-year, four-team NWHL, which pays its players, and the more-established, five-team, CWHL, which doesn’t offer salaries to its players.
“We are humbled and honored to be part of the 2016 Bridgestone NHL Winter Classic festivities at Gillette Stadium,” NWHL Commissioner DaniRylan said. “This wonderful stage for women’s hockey wouldn’t be possible without the tireless dedication of (NHL Commissioner) GaryBettman, Bill Daly and many others behind the scenes at the National Hockey League.”
Rylan also thanked CWHL Commissioner Brenda Andress and her lieutenants who’ve “been part of this collaborative process since the beginning.”
The women’s game in the Patriots’ stadium has been somewhat of a football involving the NWHL, CWHL and USA Hockey, the governing body for the sport in the United States.
USA Hockey said U.S. women’s national team program members, like Pride players Hilary Knight and Brianna Decker, won’t be available for the Women’s Classic because they will be attending the last day of training for the World Championships.
Still, Pride defenseman Blake Bolden, the first African-American to play in the WNHL and CWHL, said the outdoor showcase is another milestone for women’s professional hockey.
Boston Pride defenseman Blake Bolden, left, calls the Women’s Classic outdoor game between NWHL and CWHL teams a boost for women’s hockey (Photo/NWHL).
“I think it’s really cool that the Boston Bruins and the Canadiens are playing and we’re playing Les Canadiennes,” she told me. “People are starting to respect the women’s game more and more. I just hope that it’s televised on Thursday and the nation can see how much effort we put into this sport that we love to play.”
Shannon Szabados isn’t a member of an NWHL or CWHL team, but she’s a pro hockey player who is ending 2015 in style.
Szabodos, an Edmonton native, is in her second season with SPHL. She was a member of Canada’s gold medal-winning Winter Olympics women’s hockey teams in 2010 and 2014.
It’s in a picture frame hanging on a wall in Blake Bolden’s Boston apartment, the historic and happy reminder that she is indeed a professional hockey player.
Boston Pride’s Blake Bolden (Photo/Meg Linehan courtesy Blake Bolden)
Elite female hockey players with professional aspirations finally have a North American league of their own in which they play and get paid. The league consists of four teams – the Pride, Connecticut Whale, Buffalo Beauts, and the New York Riveters.
“It’s still kind of like a pinch me-type feeling,” Bolden said of her paycheck and the league’s inaugural season. “It’s an awesome little reminder of how far we’ve come and the dreams you have when you’re a little girl. It’s surreal.”
At 24, Bolden is a perpetual hockey history-maker. The defenseman was the first African-American player in the Canadian Women’s Hockey League– which doesn’t pay salaries to its players – as a member of the Boston Bladesin the 2013-14 season.
After two seasons with the Blades, Bolden became the NWHL’s first black player when she signed on with the the Pride as a free agent.
“My family likes to kid around, they say ‘Blake, you like to do a lot of firsts.’ I say ‘I’m trying over here,'” she said. “I love when younger black girls come up to me and talk to me. I always give them my contact information because it is a responsibility. I strongly encourage black girls to pick up a stick because hockey consumes me. It’s my favorite thing to do, it’s my home, essentially.”
A native of Cleveland, Ohio, Bolden starred for Boston College from 2009-10 to 2012-13 and wore the captain’s “C” for the Eagles women’s hockey team in her senior year. She tallied 27 goals and 56 assists in 138 NCAA hockey contests, ranking her third all-time in scoring among Boston College’s women defensemen.
Bolden said one of the joys of being at BC was playing with Kaliya Johnson, an African-American defenseman who grew up in Los Angeles and Arizona. Johnson is a senior at BC this season and will be eligible for the 2016 NWHL Draft.
Boston Pride defenseman Blake Bolden in action (Photo/Kaitlin S. Cimini).
“People used to say ‘Oh, the twins,’ not in a disrespectful, racist way,” Bolden said. “It was just funny that we both decided to go to the same school. I love that she went to BC and I was able to play with her for a couple of years.”
Bolden said she never would have become a hockey player had it not been for her mother’s boyfriend, a man she considers a father. He was a hockey enthusiast who worked part-time for the Cleveland Lumberjacks of the old International Hockey League.
“I used to go to all the IHL games in Cleveland,” she recalled. “Because he worked for the team, I used to get to go into the locker room, they (Lumberjacks players) would come to my birthday parties, the mascot would show up everywhere, and I was just totally enthralled. Hockey became my life ever since.”
Forward Jessica Koizumi is another hockey-lifer and NWHL player who framed her first pro paycheck as a keepsake. Probably the best professional hockey player born in Honolulu, she captains the currently undefeated Connecticut Whale.
“I never thought a paid professional hockey league for women would happen in my lifetime and I feel blessed every day I get to put on our jersey,” said Koizumi, who picked up the sport when her family moved to Minnesota and later to California. “Being a part of history in the making is special and I am having a blast.”
Koizumi, aka “Tsunami,” has a prominent place in the NWHL record book as the player who scored the league’s first goal, a power play tally against the Riveters in October.
“Knowing what it stood for was very emotional for me,” she told me. “The Hockey Hall of Fame in Toronto just asked me to send my stick that I used to score the first goal a few weeks ago. It makes for a very fun trivia question and a neat memory to have.”
Not that Koizumi, 30, is short on hockey memories. She was a member of the United States team that won the Gold Medal at the 2008 InternationalIce Hockey Federation World Women’s Championship in China.
She helped power the UMD Bulldogs to the NCAA Women’s Frozen Four championship game in 2006-07, a 4-1 loss to the rival Wisconsin Badgers.
Like Bolden, Koizumi gravitated to the CWHL after college, playing part-time for the then-called Montreal Stars and the Boston Blades. She helped lead the Blades to Clarkson Cupchampionships in 2012-13 and 2014-15.
When not leading the Connecticut Whale, forward Jessica Koizumi is an assistant women’s hockey coach at Yale University.
Still, Koizumi views the NWHL as the perfect vehicle to take professional women’s hockey to the next level, especially if the league raises its $270,000 team salary capto better enable players to devote all their time and energy to the game.
With practice twice a week and one game a weekend, NWHL players juggle hockey with full-time jobs to make ends meet. Koizumi works as an assistant coach for Yale University’s women’s hockey team.
Bolden is employed by Inner City Weightlifting, a non-profit program that provides education and job training in the physical fitness field for Boston’s at-risk residents.
“I would like to see more investors and sponsors supporting our league and keep growing the fan base to make sure it’s sustainable,” Koizumi told me. “I don’t need to get too greedy, but it would be nice to have our salary cap grow so that in due time we can be paid full time and not have to supplement our income with another job.”
Koizumi represented the U.S. at the 2008 IIHF World Women’s Championship in China.
And with success on the ice and at the gate, Koizumi envisions the NWHL expanding to other cities in the not-too-distant future.
“I see franchises growing in Minnesota, Chicago, and possibly Vermont,” she said. “I hope one day we can merge with the CWHL because that would make the most sense having a few Canadian cities in our league.”
The league already embarked on an international adventure when the Riveters traveled to Japan earlier this month to play games against Smile Japan, the country’s national women’s team that competed in the 2014 Winter Olympics and the 2015 IIHF Women’s WorldChampionship in Malmo, Sweden.
Smile Japan goaltender Nana Fujimoto, who was named top goaltender at the IIHF tournament, is on the Riveters’ roster.
“This league has built a platform for young girls to aspire to,” Koizumi told me. “It certainly is fun for us players to have fans and young girls aspiring to be like us.”
You’re sitting at home getting ready to relax and watch a National HockeyLeague game when the phone rings. It’s an NHL team on the line begging you to get your butt off the couch, get your gear, get to the arena, and get ready to be an emergency backup goaltender for Henrik Lundqvist.
Click on to this great story about Santino Vasquez’s wild night at a Minnesota Wild-New York Rangers game from thePioneer Pressof Minnesota.
Miami’s Randy Hernandez, the son of Cuban immigrants, has been named to a USA Hockey Under-17 team that will compete in a four-nation, round-robin tournament in Slovakia this week.
Hernandez, 16, who is in his first season skating for the U.S. National Team Development Program squad competing in the United States Hockey League, was named to the tournament team by USA Hockey Monday.
Miami’s Randy Hernandez will represent the U.S. this week in a four-nation hockey tournament in Slovakia (Photo/Rena Laverty).
Beginning Thursday, Hernandezwill represent the United States in a tournament in Puchov, Slovakia, that includes teams from the host country, Russia, and Switzerland.
Thus far in the 2015-16 hockey season, Hernandez has no goals and 3 assists in 11 USHL games with the national team. The right wing has 4 goals and 5 assists in 18 non-USHL games.
After being a scoring sensation in Florida, Randy Hernandez plays for USA Hockey’s National Team Development Program (Photo/Rena Laverty).
ReggieLeach won a Stanley Cup and a Conn Smythe trophy, notched 381 goals in 13 National Hockey League seasons, and shares scoring records with legends like Maurice “Rocket” Richard, Wayne Gretzky and Mario Lemieux.
But the man known as the “Riverton Rifle” declares that “I’m more proud of what I’ve done after hockey than during my hockey days.”
Flyers forward Reggie Leach with the Stanley Cup.
Hockey brought Leach fame for his regular season scoring prowess and post-season lamp-lighting heroics with the Philadelphia Flyers during the team’s “Broad Street Bullies” haymaker heydays in the 1970s and early 80s.
His post-hockey life has brought something more – sobriety, clarity, sense of purpose, and a renewed family closeness.
Leach, who’s Ojibwe, First Nation, candidly recounts his life on and off the ice in his autobiography “The Riverton Rifle My Story – Straight Shooting on Hockey and on Life.”
It’s a story that spans Leach’s impoverished beginnings in Riverton, Manatoba, to junior hockey stardom in Flin Flon, Manitoba, with a young teammate named Bobby Clarke, to an NHL career marked with records on the ice and recklessness off it.
“It wasn’t that hard to do if you’re honest with everything and go ahead and write it, ” Leach, 65, said of penning the book. “It’s more of a learning book based on the Seven Grandfather Teachingsof the Ojibwe nation. It was dedicated to my grandkids and kids that need help.”
Reggie Leach and his wife, Dawn, recently taking in a hockey game in Winnipeg.
People who watched a young Reggie Leach play hockey in Manitoba considered him a natural – a swift skater blessed with a hard and deadly accurate shot.
What they might not have known that his skating skills were honed by figure skating lessons and the shot developed from countless hours in the offseason shooting on the hard concrete of thawed-out rinks.
The hard work paid off in success in major junior hockey. Playing alongside Clarke, Leach 255 goals and 146 assists in 183 games for the Flin FlonBombers of the Western Hockey League and the Manitoba Junior HockeyLeague.
Although he was a star player in juniors, he wasn’t immune to racist taunts of opposing players and so-called “fans” in the stands.
“There’d be a bunch of name-calling and everything else,” he said. “My junior coach, Pat Ginnell, said ‘Reg, the only reason these people are calling you names is you’re being noticed out there.'”
The Boston Bruins noticed Leach and took the right wing with the third overall pick in the first round of the 1970 NHL Draft. He appeared in 78 games over two seasons with the Bruins playing with the likes of Bobby Orr, Phil Esposito, Gerry Cheevers andDerek Sanderson.
His stint in Boston ended when he was traded to the lowly California Golden Seals in the 1971-72 season in a blockbuster deal that sent prized Seals defenseman Carol Vadnais to the Bruins.
Leach endured three seasons in Oakland with the white skates-wearing Seals before being dealt to the Flyers and reunited with Flin Flon linemate Clarke, the gap-toothed, diabetic center who blossomed into the ringleader of the Broad Street Bullies and one of the best players in the NHL.
Leach would often say that “Clarkie makes the bombs and I drop ’em.” He proved to be quite the bombardier throughout his NHL career, notching 381 goals and 285 assists in 934 games.
While Leach was piling up goals, he was also compiling records, many of which stand today: goals in consecutive playoff games (10 in 1976); most goals in one playoff game (5 in 1976), shared with the Montreal Canadiens legend Rocket Richard,Toronto MapleLeafs forward Darryl Sittler , and Pittsburgh Penguins’Mario Lemieux; most goals in one period of a playoff game (4 in 1976), shared with Flyers forward Tim Kerr and Lemieux; most goals in one playoff season (19 in 1976), shared with EdmontonOilers winger Jari Kurri.
Leach put fear in the hearts of NHL defensemen and goalies with his hard, accurate shot (Photo/ Denis Brodeur/NHLI via Getty Images)
Success for Leach came as fast and hard as the shots he fired at terrified goalies. Perhaps too fast.
He drank, heavily. He wasn’t an everyday drunk. Sometimes he wouldn’t imbibe for weeks. But when he did, he went all-in.
“Years of binge drinking had taken a toll on my (first) marriage and it was hanging on by a thread,” Leach writes in his book. “By that time, I would go on a bender every week or two – run out for a loaf of bread on Friday and return on Sunday.”
After a doctor told him “Either you stop drinking now or you keep drinking and die,” Leach checked into the Maryville Addiction Treatment Center in Williamstown, N.J., where he confronted the demons that drove him to booze.
“It was very difficult to look at my past,” he writes. “In just a few short years, I had left behind my life as a carefree kid to become a married father of two. I had gone from relative obscurity to hockey stardom – and life in the fast lane. The change had been overwhelming and I turned to alcohol to help me cope.”
Leach left rehab in 1985 and felt good enough to consider resuming his hockey career – either as a player or a coach. Former teammates Clarke and Bill Barber suggested that he lace up the skates and give hockey a go again.
“It slowly dawned on me that I was about to return not just to the game I loved but also to the life of a professional hockey player, a life that involved spending time in bars and other places where beer taps were open,” Leach writes. “I knew I had to avoid situations that would trigger a relapse in my drinking – so after a lot of thought about what I had just fought through and careful reflection on what I had learned, I decided not to make a comeback.”
And he hasn’t looked back. Sobriety rekindled Leach’s relationship with his son, former Penguins right wing Jamie Leach, and his daughter, Brandie, a chiropractor in Austin, Texas, and a former Canadian national team lacrosse player.
He moved from South New Jersey, where many of his Flyers teammates retired, to Manitoulin, Ontario with his wife, Dawn. The “Riverton Rifle’ may be retired, but he hasn’t stopped working.
Reggie Leach (right to left) reunites with Bob Clarke and Bill Barber for an alumni game before the 2012 NHL Bridgestone Winter Classic in Philadelphia (Photo/ by Len Redkoles/NHLI via Getty Images)
He helps teach aboriginal kids the value of making positive choices through the Shoot to Score hockey school he runs with his son. And he’s an in-demand motivational speaker who shares his story and his phone number with troubled teens.
“I’ve done this for a number of years. I’ve probably had 50 to 60 calls at night,” Leach told CBC News in November. “Even if you talk to these kids one or two minutes and give them the acknowledgement they deserve, I think for me it’s a big relief just to see smiles on their faces.”
Philadelphia Flyers fans haven’t forgotten the “Riverton Rifle.” Is he Hockey Hall of Fame-worthy? (Photo/Noah Graham/NHLI via Getty Images)
While Leach speaks with pride about his post-hockey life and his Ojibwe heritage, he talks modestly about whether he should be honored for his playing career.
There was a 2013 drive to have Leach inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame, where his “LCB” linemates Clarke and Barber are already enshrined, that spurred a petition and even a song.
“To me, it really doesn’t matter,” Leach told me. “All these people that want me in the Hall of Fame, I say they are my hall of famers.”
Leach thinks former Flyers John LeClair, above, and Brian Propp should be in the Hockey Hall of Fame (Photo/Denis Brodeur/NHLI via Getty Images)
But he isn’t shy about saying who he thinks should be enshrined in Toronto – former Flyers left wings John LeClairand Brian Propp.
Propp produced 425 goals and 579 helpers in 1,016 NHL games over 16 years.
“He’s got nearly 1,100 points, no different than some of the other players that are put in there,” Leach said.
LeClair, part of the Flyers’ famous “Legion of Doom” line with center Eric Lindros and right wing Mikael Renberg, tallied 406 goals and 413 assists in 967 NHL games over 17 years.
“I’m happy that Billy and Clarkie got in there,” he told me. “I’m happy for all the guys from the Flyers who got in the Hall of Fame, that’s great. There should be more players in the Hall of Fame who played for the Flyers who are not.”