This Frickin’ Guy

He racked up 90 points in a breakout campaign last year, and this time around he scored a new career high of 36 goals as the Lightning made their ninth straight playoffs. Hagel's development since he was traded from Chicago symbolizes how Tampa has maintained its winning ways in the age of salary cap crunches. He's a downright bargain on a long-term deal while putting up superstar numbers. But the 27-year-old from Saskatchewan still carries himself like a third-line grinder stung by all the teams that passed on him when he was younger. “I’ve been kicked in the head a lot,” he told The Athletic this week. It's not clear if that's entirely metaphorical. Hagel already made an international name for himself when he squared off with his Panther foil Matthew Tkachuk at the very beginning of USA-Canada during the 4 Nations last year. But if you still didn't know who he was at the start of this Canadiens-Lightning first-round series, he's made himself impossible to ignore. In Game 1, he contributed a pair of goals, including the one that sent the teams to overtime in an eventual Lightning loss. In Game 2, Hagel found the net first with a kind of screw-it-why-not shot from distance, then picked up an assist in the third period with a critical play to keep the puck from leaving the zone ahead of Nikita Kucherov's equalizer. In between those two standout moments in Tampa's 3-2 overtime win, Hagel got extremely rowdy, notching a Gordie Howe hat trick while further establishing himself as the guy whose smirk every Canadiens player wants to erase.