For roughing Vancouver Canucks winger Sam Lafferty on Thursday night, Arizona Coyotes forward Liam O’Brien was fined $2,018.23, the maximum amount permitted under the NHL’s collective bargaining agreement with the NHLPA.
O’Brien was given seven minutes of extra time during the Coyotes’ 2-1 loss to the Canucks at Vancouver’s Rogers Arena. The first two came at 5:26 of the first quarter, when O’Brien, seeking revenge for a hit Lafferty had delivered earlier in the game, stepped off the Arizona bench to face Lafferty.
When O’Brien took off his gloves and began repeatedly striking the Canucks forward before the referees restrained him, Lafferty refrained from fighting. O’Brien roughed up the play and received a minor two-minute penalty.
A real fight broke out between Canucks defenseman Nikita Zadorov and O’Brien at 12:19 in the first period of Thursday’s game as tensions continued to rise.
With 105 minutes played this season, O’Brien now leads the NHL in penalty minutes. He now has the lowest penalty differential in the National Hockey League in 2023–24 after taking 18 more penalties than he has drawn.
When asked about the Thursday incident involving O’Brien and Lafferty, Coyotes head coach André Tourigny chose to focus on what he considered to be the more positive aspects of the game rather than address it directly.
O’Brien, 29, signed an unrestricted contract with the Coyotes and is currently in his third season there.
O’Brien has played in 167 NHL games for the Coyotes, Colorado Avalanche, and Washington Capitals. During that time, he has accrued 393 penalty minutes, 26 points, and nine goals. He has a contract that pays a $775,000 cap hit through the end of the 2023–2024 season.
The preparations are already on for the 2024 NHL All-Star Weekend, set for February 1-3 in Toronto. The player draft has been reinstated as part of the modified structure for the 3-on-3 competition, and it will happen on February 1. The teams will be chosen by four captains and two celebrity co-captains. Two of the team captains have been confirmed thus far: superstars Auston Matthews of the Toronto Maple Leafs and Connor McDavid of the Edmonton Oilers. It has also been reported that pop music icon Justin Bieber is a celebrity captain.
In the upcoming days, another group of captains ought to be announced. Quinn Hughes, a 2023–24 Norris Trophy front-runner for the Vancouver Canucks, will be named captain and join the team to help him as a celebrity.
As the most well-known crooner in Canada and a five-time Grammy Award winner, Buble has a well-established reputation for being an avid hockey fan. He was raised in Burnaby, British Columbia, and has been a lifelong Canucks fan. He also owns a portion of the Vancouver Giants in the WHL.
The redesigned NHL All-Star Skills Competition will take place on Friday, February 2, and other All-Star events scheduled for February 1 include the draft and the PWHL 3-on-3 showcase. There will only be 12 players that compete in all eight events, with $1 million going to the victor. Matthews, McDavid, Nathan MacKinnon, Cale Makar, William Nylander, David Pastrnak, Nikita Kucherov, Elias Pettersson, and Leon Draisaitl are among the 12 players in the field; the status of the injured Jack Hughes is being monitored, and two more players will be announced via
Daily (Monday through Saturday) updates are made to the charts, however they are often not accessible until approximately 3:00 PM ET, when all NHL lineups are verified. This year’s charts will be available in three different formats: OwnersBox, DraftKings, and FanDuel. The pricing on the website varies, but the information remains the same. You’ll need to obtain the most recent links from the DFS Chart post of the day because the URLs to these charts will be updated every day.
