Top Line: Rafalski a Hall of Famer; violence in girls' hockey; more news

An annotated guide to this morning's must-read hockey stories: • The 2014 class for the U.S. Hockey Hall of Fame has been announced. The honorees, who will be

Mark Beech | Aug 7, 2014

Top Line: Rafalski a Hall of Famer; violence in girls' hockey; more news /

An annotated guide to this morning's must-read hockey stories:

• The 2014 class for the U.S. Hockey Hall of Fame has been announced. The honorees, who will be inducted in December, are former NHL defenseman Brian Rafalski, former Wisconsin coach Jeff Sauer, women's hockey pioneer Karen Bye Dietz and 1984 U.S. Olympic coach Lou Vairo. It's a good class. Rafalski won three Stanley Cups and two Olympic silver medals in his career, and Sauer won two national titles with the Badgers. Dietz, who's already a member of the IIHF Hall of Fame was one of the dominant players on the great U.S. women's teams of the 1990s. Vairo, who hails from Brooklyn, rose through the coaching ranks despite never having played organized hockey.

• Connor McDavid led Canada to a 5–2 victory over Russia in a world junior exhibition game on Wednesday in Sherbrooke, Que., and the presumptive No. 1 pick in the 2015 draft looked very good doing it. Unlike at last year's world junior summer camp, the 17-year-old phenom, was untroubled when things got physical. One step at a time, the kid is getting ready.

• Meanwhile, Aaron Ekblad, the top pick in this year's draft, suffered a concussion while playing for Canada on Monday against the Czech Republic.

• Hall of Fame blueliner Rod Langway, who spent 11 years with the Capitals, thinks that Washington is finally solving its problems on defense.

• Former Senators and Jets coach John Paddock has been hired as the new bench boss of the Western Hockey League's Regina Pats.

• A 16-year-old girl from Russia named Svetlana Starovoytova plays with an, uh, edge to her game. To say the least. She was sent to the showers early at the World Selects Invitational in Budapest after breaking her stick over the helmet of American defenseman Hannah Bates.

• Some junior players spend their down time training, others spend it studying. Still others spend it recreating movie posters and stills to the extraordinary enjoyment of the world.

• And finally, the estimable Adam Gretz takes a look back at the Seattle Metropolitans, America's first Stanly Cup champions.

Published Aug 7, 2014

MARK BEECH

Staff writer Mark Beech, who has written extensively on college football, horse racing and NASCAR, among other subjects, cites his 2007 profile of Olympic gold medal-winning freestyle wrestler Henry Cejudo as his most memorable SI assignment. "I was at a NASCAR race in Charlotte on a Sunday afternoon and got a call from an editor asking me if I could fly straight to Colorado Springs to start work on a story about Cejudo for the next week's issue," says Beech. "I knew nothing about him at all but spent the next six days learning everything I could mostly through interviews, since there was no real record of him in the press at the time. The story was much bigger and more deeply affecting than I could have ever imagined, and I thought it came off very well considering the amount of time I had to write and report." During his tenure at SI Beech has also written on the NHL, soccer and college basketball. He writes a weekly auto racing column (Racing Fan) for SI.com, and also provides coverage of major horse racing stakes for the website. He says college football is his favorite sport to cover "for all the tradition and regional passions." Beech has been with Sports Illustrated since 1997. Before joining SI he spent five years in the U.S. Army, reaching the rank of captain, and serving primarily with the 84th Engineer Battalion (Combat) (Heavy) at Schofield Barracks, Hawaii. Beech received a B.S. in civil engineering from the United States Military Academy in 1991 and an M.S. in journalism from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1997. He and his wife, Allison Keane, have an infant son, Nathaniel, and reside in Westchester County, NY.