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LOS ANGELES -- A central theme in the opening weeks of the NHL season has been the rash of significant injuries that have sidelined marquee players. Its no different for the New Jersey Devils and the Los Angeles Kings when they meet on Saturday afternoon at Staples Center.The Devils (9-4-3) continue their Life Without Taylor saga on the third stop in their five-game road trip. New Jersey lost their most explosive offense threat, left winger Taylor Hall to a left knee injury suffered in its 4-2 win over Buffalo last Saturday and his absence will reinforce the Devils reliance on their tight-checking defensive style that ranks them second in the NHL in goals against average.While its no surprise that starting goaltender Corey Schneider has posted quality numbers in net (7-4-2 record, 2.21 goals-against average, .926 save percentage), the work of backup Keith Kincaid has been as strong (2-0-1 record, 1.66 GAA, .944 save percentage). With the tandems performance between the pipes, the Devils are off to a surprising start despite being tied for last in the Metropolitan Division in goals scored.Also impacting the offense is the absence of Mike Cammalleri who is dealing with an undisclosed personal issue and hasnt played since November 8.Without two of their best offensive weapons, its no surprise the Devils have played a defensive game on the four-game road trip. They beat Dallas 2-1 in overtime on Tuesday and dropped a 3-2 decision to the Anaheim Ducks Thursday but Coach John Hynes refuses to use the absences as an excuse for the loss.The guys we had on the ice can score and are good players, Hynes said after the loss. After we went up 2-0 we got a little bit soft. We could have been harder on the puck in certain areas.Coach John Hynes has been pleased with the teams overall play as he tries to get a more consistent effort from his power-play unit that went 0-for-3 against Anaheim and failed to convert its last 24 chances over seven games.Thats a fair assessment, Hynes said. Theres parts of it that are really good and there are times when the power play is doing a lot of good things. But its not consistent enough and I think to score you have to be more consistent. You can say you hope one goes in but were not in the hope business. We have to be more consistent in certain areas.The Kings (8-9-1) are trying to stay in the mix for playoff contention while dealing with multiple injuries that are a major reason for its sub-.500 record through 18 games. Every facet of the roster has been impacted, and serious injuries to goaltender Jonathan Quick, left winger Marian Gaborik and defenseman Brayden McNabb have forced coach Darryl Sutter to lean heavily on role players to pick up the slack.The better news for Los Angeles is that another of the walking wounded, center Anze Kopitar is hopeful to return to the lineup against on Saturday after a three-game absence as his injured wrist continues to improve.With pivotal players out its up to the Kings depth players like Devin Setoguchi to provide support. Setoguchi scored his third goal of the season in Thursdays 4-2 win over Edmonton and realizes it is incumbent upon to produce if the Kings are going to break out of their inconsistent play.We have to find a way to be more consistent, its tough. Every team on any given night has a legitimate chance to win, Setoguchi said. We just have to find a consistent way to put together 60-minutes and stick to our game plan.With the Pacific Division appearing to be far weaker than in previous seasons, coach Darryl Sutter knows that every point will be valuable in a division race that could go down to Game 82. He admits that the injuries has weakened his team significantly and is hoping their continued solid play at home will carry them.We arent the same team that we were, Sutter said We have one of the best home records in the National Hockey League and were in a fight for the division.NMD Outlet . -- There were a lot of firsts for the Edmonton Oilers on Tuesday night. NMD Wholesale .com) - The Montreal Canadiens embark on their first road trip of the season as they head out west to battle the Calgary Flames on Wednesday night. https://www.cheapnmdoutlet.com/ . Capitals head coach Adam Oates said Ovechkin was injured in the first period against the Vancouver Canucks on Monday and clarified it was not a head injury. NMD On Sale . Nigeria beat surprise package Ethiopia 2-0 in the second leg of their playoff for a comfortable 4-1 aggregate victory. Victor Moses converted a 20th-minute penalty after an Ethiopian handball, and Victor Obinna made certain of Nigerias place in Brazil with his powerful free kick in the 82nd at UJ Esuene Stadium. NMD Online . Klitschkos management company says the bout will be the Ukrainian fighters 25th world championship fight. The 1.83-meter (6-foot) Leapai defeated the previously unbeaten Denis Boytsov in November to become the WBOs mandatory challenger.On September 29, 2007, in Mexico City, India conquered the world.Seventeen days earlier, eight elite chess players had gathered there to play a gruelling double round-robin tournament. Each player would play all the others twice, once each with white and black. Fourteen rounds against elite opposition. Such super-grandmaster tournaments were common, but this one was special, not just because of the strength of the field assembled but because the winner would be crowned the undisputed world champion of Chess. Therefore, unlike in other tournaments, only first place mattered. There would be blood on this dance floor.At the end of 14 rounds, one man remained unbeaten. Viswanathan Anand of India had ten draws and four wins to his credit, and with nine points out of 14, won the tournament by a full point. Anand, at 37 years of age, was among the older world champions in what was increasingly becoming a young mans game. He was no journeyman, though, but one of the greatest talents in the history of chess, who, as a young prodigy in the late 80s and early 90s, had threatened to be the first man after Bobby Fischer to challenge the Soviet School of Chess. It is impossible to overstate what a monumental achievement this was.***Vladimir Lenin enjoyed playing chess, but institutional support for chess in the Soviet Union had less to do with love of the game and more to do with ideology and geopolitics. Nikolai Krylenko, a senior functionary and the head of the Soviet chess association (until he was purged by Stalin in 1938), once said: We must finish once and for all with the neutrality of chess. We must condemn once and for all the formula chess for the sake of chess, like the formula art for arts sake. We must organize shockbrigades of chess-players, and begin immediate realization of a Five-Year Plan for chess.Chess was taught in schools, and chess players received special dispensation from the regime. In 1927 they even had a world champion in Alexander Alekhine. But Alekhine turned against the Bolsheviks and left for France, whom he represented in the 1930s. It was after World War II that the Soviet School of Chess really took off.One of the imperatives of the Cold War was that the Soviets had to find ways to demonstrate that their vision of the world was superior to that of the capitalist, decadent West. Chess was an obvious domain. Alekhine had died in 1946, but around half of the best players in the world were Soviet. A five-man quintuple round-robin tournament was held in 1948 to decide the World Championship; three of the participants were Soviet. Their chosen man, Mikhail Botvinnik, won easily. Botvinnik became a central figure in the decades-long Soviet domination of chess that followed. Indeed, his work ethic and his values formed the template for the Soviet School.The School placed an emphasis on preparation, both mental and physical. In 1926, the scrawny 15-year-old Botvinnik found himself running out of energy during games, and on his mothers advice, began a daily exercise routine to raise his fitness levels. (Intense concentration at a chess board can take up a surprising amount of energy, and stamina matters.) Physical fitness became a credo for the Soviet School. Far more impressive, though, was the work they put into theoretical preparation.The key skill in chess is not calculation but pattern recognition. A famous study by Adriaan de Groot in 1946 found that grandmasters dont actually calculate more moves ahead than novice players. They just calculate the right ones. This is because what they see on the chessboard is not just a collection of pieces but a collection of existing patterns and possible patterns, all with their own characteristics and weaknesses. The more they study and play the game, the more patterns they understand, with greater depth and subtlety.The Soviet School began training schoolkids in the basic principles of chess, exposing them systematically to an increasing number of patterns, and teaching them basic heuristics to help them deal with common situations. This gave Soviet players an enormous edge over others who did not have this training. Insights that others had to labour to achieve were intuitive for them.?Others such as a kid growing up in India in the 1980s, before the advent of computers, with no access to the kind of information and training that the Soviets had.Devangshu Datta, a writer who played serious chess in the 1980s, and knows Anand well, once told me: When I started playing East Europeans [in the 80s], the difference in chess culture was stark. We knew so much less, it wasnt funny. To take an analogy, it was like putting a bunch of talented kids with a basic knowledge of, say, self-taught HSC level maths into direct competition with people who had post-grad math degrees.Wed struggle through the opening and hit the middle game and start wondering what to do, then in the post-mortem, the opponent would say, Oh, my trainer AN Other taught us that with this structure you have to play this way, and youd be like, Shit.For Anand to come out of this environment and establish himself as an elite player was mind-boggling. He did not have the mental toolkit that Soviet players did, and had to figure it out on the fly. Think of it as playing Wimbledon today with the kind of wooden racket they used 30 years ago; or, as I like to say, taking a Maruti 800 into a Formula One championship and actually competing for the title. What manner of special talent does it take to do that?***Appearances can be deceptive in chess. If you look at Anand, you see a polite, sedately dressed conventional Tamilian gentleman - but his chess style was something apart from this. Think of him as the Viv Richards of chess - flamboyant, attacking, pulling off moves that would leave his opponents in awe. Anand was known in his early days for his creative, attacking play, and he also played quickly, often taking minutes on the clock where others would take more than an hour. He didnt only have attacking strokes in his arsenal, though. He was what is known as a universal player: comfortable in all kinds of positions, with no weaknesses in his game.The chess world that Anand set foot into as a teenager in the late 1980s was a bipolar one - and both the poles were Soviet. Anatoly Karpov, the blue-eyed boy of the Soviet establishment, had become woorld champion in 1975 by default after Bobby Fischer refused to defend his title against him.dddddddddddd (Some say Fischer was scared he would lose to this phenomenal young talent.) Karpov was a positional genius, and his style was likened to that of a boa constrictor, squeezing with precise, quiet moves till there was no life left in his opponent. Garry Kasparov, who beat him for the World Championship in 1985, and in a series of epic matches after that, was an unreal talent. He combined the strong points of every world champion before him, and unlike Anand, his personality matched his playing style: relentlessly attacking, uncompromising, fearless. (He would later battle Vladimir Putin with the same ferocity with which he took down Karpov.) Kasparov was the rebel to Karpovs establishment man persona - but both were solid products of the Soviet school, and both had been personally trained by Botvinnik.Anand won the World Junior Championship in 1987, but his big breakthrough to the elite level came in 1991, when he won a strong super-grandmaster round-robin tournament in Reggio Emilia. He finished ahead of Kasparov (whom he beat with black), Karpov, and upcoming superstars Boris Gelfand and Vassily Ivanchuk. For the first time since Fischer, the domination of the Soviet School of Chess was threatened by an outsider.***Anands quest to be world champion was complicated by a split in the chess world in 1993. Garry Kasparov fought with FIDE, the world chess body, over terms for his World Championship match against Nigel Short, and Kasparov and Short quit to set up a rival association, PCA, with its own World Championship matches. FIDE continued holding World Championships without Kasparov. Anand qualified through a rigorous process to play Kasparov for the PCA world title in 1995. They met in New York, and after eight draws, Anand won the ninth game with a sparkling exchange sacrifice. But Kasparov rebounded ferociously to win four of the next five games to put the match away.Anands next shot was at the FIDE World Championship in 1997-98. Its format was absurd: 97 players would play in a month-long knockout tournament in Groningen in the Netherlands, ending on December 30. And the winner would immediately travel to Lausanne in Switzerland to play a match against a fresh Karpov, who was seeded directly into the final, on January 2. Anand won the knockout tournament, beating Michael Adams in the final match, but was naturally drained by the effort. He later said that he was brought in a coffin to play Karpov, and chess enthusiast Sreenivas Lakkineni was quoted as saying that Anands condition was similar to a runner being asked to immediately start a 100-metre race from the marathon finishing line. To his credit, Anand drew the match 3-3, but lost the Rapid playoff.A couple of years later, in 2000, Anand finally won the FIDE World Championship, triumphing over another 100-man field in a knockout tournament. (Large-field knockout tournaments are very high-variance, so winning two of them within three years was remarkable in itself.) He wasnt the undisputed world champion, though, and craved a shot at that title. The PCA had no qualification system in place, and Kasparov basically picked who he wanted to play. That same year, he overlooked the World No. 2, Anand, and picked fellow Russian Vladimir Kramnik for a World Championship match. To everyones surprise, Kramnik beat Kasparov.The early 2000s were a frustrating time for Anand. He had won one half of the world title, but the other half was held by Kramnik, and Kasparov was still World No. 1. (Anand was No. 2.) Anand won the World Rapid and Blitz titles (players get around 30 minutes each in Rapid and around five minutes each in Blitz) and also won a series of super-GM tournaments. But the chess world was disorganised, and there were no signs of a unified world championship. Kasparov retired in 2005, opting to take on Putin on a larger chessboard. FIDE then got its act together and organised a reunification match between Kramnik and the FIDE world champion at the time, Veselin Topalov. Kramnik won, and was thereby the undisputed champion. And the next year, for the first time since a 37-year-old Mikhail Botvinnik won in 1948, a tournament (instead of a series of knockout matches) was held to decide the new undisputed world champion.***For about four years starting in 2007, Anand played chess as well as anyone has in the games history. He was World No. 1 now, and after winning the title with a solid performance in 2007, he defended it in matches against Kramnik (2008), Topalov (2010) and Gelfand (2012). His play in the matches against Kramnik and Topalov, in particular, was as close to perfection as you can get, according to Datta.He ticked all the boxes during this period, says Datta, and he showed his versatility as well, adapting to his opponents styles. Anand embraced tactical complexity against Kramnik but played with positional finesse against Topalov, practically toying with both men. After all these years of being almost there, he was now regarded as one of the greatest players to have ever played the game. Where does one place Anand in the pantheon of Indian sport? Chess is played in many more countries and by many more people than any other sport that Indians have excelled in, and Anand has been at the pinnacle of the game for two and a half decades. By this reckoning, he is incomparable. And his 2007 world title has special meaning.Had the world championships never been unified, indeed had they not been held at all, Anand would still have been a dominant player and perhaps played games of the same quality. But sporting greatness is not just about how well you play the game in a vacuum, but how well you play it under pressure. Context matters. With his lifetimes dream within his grasp, to display the solidity he showed in 2007, and then the versatility (and mastery of his opponents) he did in the subsequent matches against Kramnik and Topalov, was extraordinary - and so very unlikely. A soft-spoken Tamilian boy from India taking down the Soviet School of Chess? Whod have thunk it?Amit Varma is a writer based in Mumbai. He writes the blog India Uncut. Twitter: @amitvarma. ' ' '