💙 La Máquina gearing up in full for the Concachampions final
Cruz Azul needs to lift the Concachampions title and forget the bitter taste they experienced in the semifinals against América in the Liga MX.
🚂🚨 Cruz Azul cerró su semana entrenando en CUEste sábado tuvieron interescuadras y así cerraron su semana.📌 Rotondi empezó a correr en estos días, pero aún no se integró con el equipo, ni el ni el 'Toro' Fernández. #CruzAzul pic.twitter.com/f4fO86qnMs
— Gerardo González (@gerardoo_gh) May 24, 2025
More than a week away from the Grand Final in CU, La Máquina continues to fine-tune the details and with the doubt of whether Rotondi will be at 100% for next Sunday. Cruz Azul lives with doubts about who will be their new strategist, but they must have a clear objective: to become champions against Vancouver Whitecaps, will they achieve it?
📸 Manuel Velasquez - 2025 Getty Images
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New York Times
3 hours ago
- New York Times
Canucks offseason notebook: Pius Suter's departure and mid-summer values
As the dust begins to settle in the wake of an oddly un-frenzied July 1 in the NHL, there's still a lot of work remaining for the Vancouver Canucks to accomplish. As the offseason unfolded fitfully with surplus cap space — as opposed to it's absence — defining the posture of NHL member clubs, teams proved unusually unwilling to part with established NHL-level talent in exchange for cap neutral futures. Pending unrestricted free agents, meanwhile, largely decided to extend with their current teams, as opposed to chasing the bag on the open market. Advertisement These forces created a sense of overall entropy in the offseason marketplace. Trades were few and far between, and unless the deal was a cap dump — like the deal that brought Evander Kane to Vancouver for a fourth-round draft selection — almost exclusively centred around NHL talent both in and out. As for the free agent market, almost nobody of star-level consequence changed teams, outside of Nikolaj Ehlers and Mitch Marner. The Canucks had hoped to be ambitious, but proved unable to execute on their vision of fundamentally reimagining their forward group. Stuck, the club scaled back their ambitions, and pivoted to locking up their existing players — retaining Brock Boeser at the 11th hour, and extending Conor Garland and Thatcher Demko. They used their draft picks to select prospects, for once. They effectively replaced Pius Suter, who signed with the St. Louis Blues on Wednesday, with Kane. As a result of their activity, Vancouver is largely poised to run it back with a similar roster to the one that ended the season. The club, however, believes that this is a very different team than the one we saw last season. That the notion of the club running back a 90-point team that has missed the playoffs in four of the last five seasons, except while subtracting their third most effective forward from last season, is flawed and lacks context. There's an argument to be made for that, especially given that Quinn Hughes sustained the initial oblique injury which limited him somewhat for the final 30 games or so of last season on the same evening that Vancouver dealt J.T. Miller and then acquired Marcus Pettersson from Pittsburgh. The club believes, effectively, that we never really got an opportunity to see how all of the puzzle pieces acquired from the New York Rangers and Pittsburgh Penguins in the two-step Miller deal actually fit together. Let's open the notebook and discuss Suter's departure, and what comes next for Vancouver as this offseason rolls on. On Vancouver sports talk radio and in various other online spaces on Wednesday and Thursday, Canucks fans were furiously debating whether or not Kane represents an actual upgrade on Suter. It's a topic that, truly, is debatable. What's clear, however, is that Kane and Suter couldn't be more different in terms of how they impact the game. Advertisement Suter is the no-traits All-Star. He's a player who manages to have a consistent high-end defensive impact and produces five-on-five goals like a low-end first liner despite being undersized and among the slowest skaters in the NHL. The way Suter impacts the game is subtle. He just stacks up won puck battles battles, with smart positional play and has the savvy to find quiet ice from which to finish. There are no big hits, no highlight reel goals and although he's a capable middle-six centreman, he doesn't win draws. The way Kane impacts the game, in contrast, is impossible to miss. He's big, he's fast, he's a pugnacious winger who excels as a rush goal scorer. His hits are highlight reel hits. His wrist shot finishes off the rush are highlight reel goals. Even the way he mixes it up after the whistle usually makes it onto the postgame highlight reel. Kane has the rarer profile — his ability to police the game while playing at the top of the lineup puts him in the company of only about five or six other NHL players — while Suter's defensive ability and versatility make him pretty special in his own right. Where this topic gets really interesting, however, is when you break down the specific skill sets that Suter and Kane bring and try to project how it fits into this Canucks lineup. In particular, while Suter has been a consistent top-line rate goal scorer — his goals per hour rate at five-on-five ranks 93rd among NHL skaters over the past four years (minimum 2000 minutes played), which is higher than that managed by Miller or Elias Pettersson over the same span — Kane is a high-end five-on-five goal scorer (he ranks 34th). Moreover, Kane ranks seventh among all NHL skaters in shot rate per hour over the past four years at five-on-five, a skill set that this Canucks team, which struggled so mightily to generate looks last season, is absolute screaming out for. Advertisement For a team that needs goals and offense as desperately as Vancouver does, Kane is a clear upgrade on Suter as an attacking threat. Of course, there's more to winning hockey games in the NHL than just the stats that show up on the back of a hockey card. Kane has a clear edge over Suter offensively, but his defensive play is far less consistent or impactful. Actually that's putting it a bit too kindly. Kane's teams have consistently surrendered far more and far higher quality scoring chances against in his five-on-fie minutes than they have in other minutes at five-on-five, whereas Suter has had the opposite impact on his teams. The defensive gap between the two is significant, and that's before we factor in the high rate at which Kane takes penalties, which is in sharp contrast with Suter's characteristic discipline. Ultimately it probably comes down to a matter of flavour preference, as opposed to objective truth. I'd probably lean Suter if forced to answer the question of which of the two forwards is more impactful in terms of contributing to the act of helping their team win NHL games, but in saying that, there are situations — trailing in the third period of a heavy playoff game, for example — in which you'd clearly rather have Kane out there than Suter. Beyond his defensive impact, where Suter's departure may really be felt by Vancouver next season is by lowering the club's floor at the centre ice position. Now, in my view, Suter is better on the wing than he is when utilized down the middle, and the Canucks always largely agreed. He's able to line up anywhere and do the job well, but, I view him as a player capable of having a first-line impact on a good team when playing on the wing, as we saw when he was easily Miller and Boeser's most effective running mate on Vancouver's top line during the 2023-24 campaign, whereas he's a middle-six option on a good team when he's utilized at centre. Advertisement Still, one area that Suter provided significant if subtle value during his two year stint in Vancouver was with his floor-raising versatility. No matter what injuries hit, no matter what the matchup called for, Suter had that uncanny ability to be put out in any number of situations, help you win (or at least keep your head above water) in that assignment and effectively harden the soft underbelly of your lineup. This is where Suter will be missed, especially if Vancouver can't find an upgrade at centre over the balance of this offseason. The Canucks have real outs in the middle of their forward group. It's well within the range of realistic outcomes for Elias Pettersson to bounce back, Filip Chytil to stay healthy and breakout, and Aatu Räty and Max Sasson to cement themselves as full-time options at the NHL level. The issue isn't so much the ceiling case for Vancouver's pivots, it's the floor case. Between Pettersson's concerning form over the past 18 months, Chytil's season-ending head injury and concussion history, and Sasson and Räty's relative inexperience (not to mention, in Räty's case, the late season injury he sustained in the AHL playoffs), the Canucks' centre depth is chalk full of question marks. If the down side case hits for Vancouver in one or two of these instances, their ability to control play five-on-five could easily be compromised. At the very least Suter would've been a useful insurance policy, especially at a relatively efficient, low-risk $8 million commitment over two years ($4 million annual average value). More than anything else, his departure removes the safety net for the Canucks at centre. Suter originally joined the Canucks in August of 2023, signing a two-year deal off of the unrestricted free agent bargain bin in mid-Summer. Last year it was Daniel Sprong, who the club signed on July 20th to a one-year deal that was a worthwhile bet but didn't work out. This is a hockey operations group that will scour the free agent bargain bin, and will pull the trigger on a player who has fallen through the cracks in unrestricted free agency but can still help at an affordable clip. Advertisement Among the available options that could potentially help at centre, there's some interesting names that remain available on the open market. In the unlikely event that the price were to drop sufficiently on Jack Roslovic, for example, he'd be a genuinely intriguing fit as a productive, fast, right-handed winger with the ability to play centre (and contribute on the left flank five-on-four), especially if he was on a rebuild-his-value type one-year contract. More realistically Robby Fabbri is an offensive forward who can play centre and can still absolutely rip the puck as a shooter, even if his lengthy injury history has zapped some of his skating juice. Finally there's a pair of forwards in Jeff Skinner, who was sneaky effective in those rare moments that he played for Edmonton in the playoffs this past spring, and Brock McGinn, who both have history with Canucks president of hockey operations Jim Rutherford dating back to his time with the Carolina Hurricanes that are worth eyeing too. Skinner is still legitimately productive and creative, although he's more of a pure winger. McGinn has spent more time at centre in the NHL in the past. He sustained an ACL tear in January of last season, so he'd be more of a medium-term bet, but he has the sort of heavy skill profile that the Canucks generally prize. (Top photo of Pius Suter: Jerome Miron / Imagn Images)
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Brayan Rocchio's diving catch
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