Hockey News In A Minute

• Glen Hanlon was fired as coach of the Washington Capitals on Thursday, with the team off to its slowest start in 26 years.
• Forward Patrick Eaves will be sidelined indefinitely with a shoulder injury, the Ottawa Senators revealed Thursday.
• Isn’t it amazing how quick things can change? When the Blues lost their third straight game two Fridays ago the sky was falling at warp speed. The defense sucked, the offense sucked and people were starting to question Andy Murray’s coaching for the first time since arriving in St. Louis.
• Hockey is a game of numbers. Goals. Assists. Penalty Minutes. Salaries, nowadays. But no numbers are more revered than a player’s sweater number. Sweater numbers not only identify players, but forever etch a player into our memory.
• It seems to me that Calgary and San Jose forgot they have more than one goaltender this season. Even Roberto Luongo’s been out of the net for 8 per cent of the minutes this year, but Evgeni Nabokov and Miikka Kiprusoff? Talk about workhorses.
• Rangers captain Jaromir Jagr ain’t happy with his twigs at the moment. And he believes that while much fuss has been made about his getting used to a new center, his modest start to the season is also due to unfamiliarity with his hockey sticks. But there appears to be little he can do about that, because Reebok doesn’t make his preferred model anymore.
• Don Waddell woke up Thursday and couldn’t help but crack a smile as he took a look at the NHL’s Eastern Conference standings.
• Princeton senior Landis Stankievech has been awarded a Rhodes Scholarship. Stankievech, a senior on the men’s hockey team from Trochu, Alb., is a mechanical and aerospace engineering major at Princeton, wants to study philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford, after which he hopes to work on environmental issues. “As an engineer I know how to approach technical and logistical problems,” he said.
• There is no neutral zone on the subject of Sean Avery, former boyfriend to actress Elisha Cuthbert, suitor to Paris Hilton (he was shut out), member of People magazine’s “Sexiest Man Alive” contingent, provocateur in Toronto Nov. 10 in a pregame dustup that left Avery denying a rumor that he had ragged Jason Blake for having leukemia.