There were nine NHL games on Tuesday night in the NHL, five more on Wednesday and 10 more on Thursday night. After 14 days at the Olympics, the NHL has a lot of catching up to do. It will be difficult to keep up.

In the meantime, from new rules regarding hits to the head, possible new shootout rules and a lawsuit against the former owner of the Phoenix Coyotes, this is just about the busiest March of the decade.

Let’s look a little deeper inside the NHL…

1) On Sunday, the 92-CITI-Sports Machine was in St. Paul, Minn., to watch the suddenly strong Calgary Flames drill the Minnesota Wild 5-2. So what suddenly changed in Calgary?

Simple, as we told you on Sunday, Flames head coach Brent Sutter put Jarome Iginla on a line with Rene Bourque And Matt Stajan and on Sunday, the line combined for 10 points as Iginla had his 10^th career hat-trick.

Not bad, for only the second game together and they were pretty darn good on Tuesday night in their third game together. Bourque and Iginla each scored once and added an assist and the Flames won (4-2)  a rare one in Detroit.

2) If there was one team that would frighten me if I were the San Jose Sharks or Chicago Blackhawks, it would be the Detroit Red Wings.

The Wings have been banged up all season long. For months, they had at least three of their best players out of the lineup. They were half a hockey team for much of the season. But now they’re healthy, the playoffs are beckoning and if Jimmy Howard gets the job done, the Wings could be the sleeper of the playoffs.

But first, they have to play better than they did against Calgary on Tuesday night.

3) This weekend while I was in St. Paul, a number of hockey experts watched the newly formed Iginla-Stajan-Bourque line and wondered aloud which line was the best in the game today.

A couple suggested Alexander Ovechkin-Alexander Semin and anyone on the other side, but the consensus seemed to be that the best line in the NHL was New Jersey’s No. 1 line of Zach Parise, Jamie Langenbrunner and Winnipeg’s own Travis Zajac.

If nothing else, it’s one of the few lines in the NHL that has been together for most of the season and it provide salmost all of New Jersey’s scoring.

ST. PAUL, Minn. – As the Calgary Flames whipped the Minnesota Wild 5-2 on Sunday afternoon, the NHL started its run to the playoffs.

Most NHL teams now have 16-18 games left this season. We’re solidly past the three-quarter-pole and there are just five weeks left in this rather odd season.

After a 14-day break for the Olympics, the NHL is loading up on games and there will be some tired superstars once the playoffs roll around. Until then, let’s take a quick look around The League.

1) Monday night (actually Tuesday morning at 12:10 a.m.), I’m Eric Nelson’s guest on the Eric Nelson Show on 8-3-0 WCCO radio in Minneapolis and we taped the segment on Sunday at the Xcel Energy Center.

Eric asked me to set the NHL’s final four. I told him, Chicago and San Jose in the West and Pittsburgh and Washington in the East. He then asked, “Which teams are the darkhorses?” I told him that question was more fun.

In the West, Detroit is finally healthy and they could be scary when it counts if Jimmy Howard can get the job done in goal. I like Vancouver, too, if Roberto Luongo doesn’t choke like a dog as he did last year.

In the East, I like Buffalo and New Jersey because they both have great goaltenders (Ryan Miller and Martin Brodeur). As Brian Burke always said, “We call it the Stanley Cup playoffs because we can’t call it goalie.” He may not have been right about Ian White, Alexei Ponikarovsky or Matt Stajan, but he’s right about that.

2) There was a time in the late 1990s and early 2000s when a Canadian player in the NHL’s Top 10 in scoring was a rarity. A decade ago, the stats were dominated by Europeans.

However, while Euros such as Alex Ovechkin and Henrik Sedin are at the top of the NHL’s scoring stats today, there are now five Canadians and one American in the Top 10. What is even more interesting is that Pittsburgh’s Sidney Crosby took over the goal-scoring lead on Saturday with his 43^rd and 44^th and young Steven Stamkos scored his 40^th of the year on Saturday. Youth is also being served.

Maybe that Canada-U.S. Olympic final will be a trend, not a fluke.

3) Metis star Rene Bourque hadn’t scored a goal in 15 games until Calgary Flames head coach Brent Sutter put him on a line with Jarome Iginla and Matt Stajan. You’d think it was the return of the Hot Line.

Sunday night at the Xcel Energy Center in St. Paul, Minn., the Bourque-Stajan-Iginla line combined for 10 points as the Flames drilled the Wild 5-2. Iginla had three goals and an assist, Stajan had two assists and Bourque, suddenly playing the best hockey in more than a month, had a goal and three assists.

The Flames have been struggling, but since Sutter created this line, Calgary has won two straight solidified their hold on ninth and are now only one point out of eighth and two points out of seventh.

At this stage of the season, a simple move like a line change can positively alter a team’s fortune. Sutter’s decision to create the Bourque-Stajan-Iginla line might have been the move that gets Calgary into the playoffs.

It was trade deadline day in the NHL Wednesday and it was a good day for… the American Hockey League’s Manitoba Moose. Amazing.

Moves by the Moose’s parent club, the Vancouver Canucks, meant that Vancouver’s AHL affiliate got to add centre Yan Stastny and veteran defenseman Brad Lukowich. That just about summed up the 2010 NHL trade deadline day. It didn’t do much at the NHL level, but quite a lot at the AHL level.

It also meant that the Ottawa Sun’s 300 rumours were all wrong. Or made up.

There were a record 30 trades made on deadline day involving 55 players and 27 draft picks and not one of them could be called a blockbuster. In fact, here was the trade deadline in one, single word: Dull.

Of course, that’s what a salary cap will do.

Because of the cap, instead of taking a big plunge in a search for stars that could lead teams to a Stanley Cup – oh, yeah, and cost a lot of money, too — the buyers made a lot of small deals that didn’t change their cap levels much. That’s why, after making seven small deals and being well under the cap, the Phoenix Coyotes were Wednesday’s big winners.

That didn’t make the other NHL owners happy, but by adding a bit to their own payroll, the Coyotes got considerably better. They acquired Derek Morris from Boston, Wojtek Wolski from Colorado, Mathieu Schneider from Vancouver and Lee Stempniak from Toronto. Sure, when a team the league bought for $140 million is likely going to lose between $50 million and $70 million this year, it would definitely piss off the some of the owners of other NHL teams because they not only have to foot the bill for the losses, but also to improve the club.

Of course, if the Coyotes don’t make the playoffs, they’ll lose the $70 million end, not the $50 million end. With only six weeks left in the season, the players acquired at the deadline won’t really cost that much.

Meanwhile, deadline day was a perfect time to illustrate the wait-until-next-decade attitude of the Toronto Maple Leafs. On Tuesday the Leafs dealt Alexei Ponikarovsky to Pittsburgh for defenseman Martin Skoula and middling prospect Luca Caputi.

The Leafs then sent Skoula to New Jersey for a fifth-round draft pick. In other words, the Leafs sent a big forward who will play on a line with Sidney Crosby – and was probably their best player — to Pittsburgh in exchange for a fifth-round pick and the slow, journeyman Caputi.

Now isn’t that an illustration of the state of the Toronto Maple Leafs?

Deadline day was good for something.