Puck Wire: Top Hockey News Of The Day: January 3rd

Welcome to 2019! The calendar has flipped and we are well on our way to the stretch drive and crazy season in the NHL. Teams are starting to find out where they stand when it comes to playoff positioning, and soon we will start to see teams declare themselves buyers or sellers approaching the trade deadline.

It’s also All-Star season! Last night, the NHL’s 2019 All-Star rosters were announced, along with the players up for the ‘Last Man In’ vote that starts at noontime today.

We’ll take a look at all of that and more in today’s spin around the hockey world.

• Ready to vote? Good, because starting at noontime today you can vote for the last player in on each of the four NHL All-Star teams. Every team has one player up for vote, and there are a lot of very worthy candidates for the honor to head to San Jose.
• With every All-Star game in every sport comes the snubs. The NHL is no different, as a number of worthy players were not selected for the event. ESPN’s Emily Kaplan takes a look at the biggest ASG snubs.
• Here are the rosters for each division heading into the ASG, announced last night on NBCSN’s Wednesday Night Hockey pregame show.
• The Dallas Stars will host the NHL’s annual Winter Classic next January at the Cotton Bowl, but an opponent has yet to be determined. ESPN’s slate of analysts takes a stab at who the visiting team could be.
• Some storylines to watch in the new year in the NHL.
• Oiler fans are ticked off right now, not just at what has become of their team under Peter Chiarelli but also because of what could have been.
• Tyler Seguin and Jamie Benn both scored last night as Dallas knocked off the Devils, giving them five out of a possible six points since the comments made by Jim Lites last week.

Photo Credit: By Lisa Gansky (Flickr: IMG_3214) [CC BY-SA 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons