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.