In this week's episode of the Puck Soup podcast:
- We react to the first few nights of NHL season
- It was a bad week for TV play-by-play guys
- The Maple Leafs name their new captain
- Which coach will be the first to be fired?
- An interview with Mike McKenna
- A "what do these three names have in common" quiz
- And lots more...
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In the Friday Grab Bag:
- There's another one of those insane NBC portraits, and it doesn't disappoint
- I have an idea for those NHL twitter hashtags
- An obscure player who shares a record with Paul Coffey and Ray Bourque
- The week's three comedy stars, featuring a callback to one of the great hockey tweets of all time
- And a YouTube breakdown of Dave Tippett trading his tools for Mike Liut's infant
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As the days until the season openers counted down, everyone who talks or writes about hockey for a living has spent the last week making their predictions. You can find a big batch of them from The Athletic’s hockey writers going up later today. A more in-depth look that’s based on the numbers is here. My attempt to make sense of everything is here. And every other site you read, podcast you listen to or insider you follow is doing the same thing. So many predictions.
Spoiler alert: They’re all wrong.
OK, almost all of them. The sheer volume of predictions that have been put out into the world over the past few days all but guarantees that at least one or two will be bang on. Blind squirrels and all that. But for the most part, we’ll all be wrong, because the modern NHL is just a Thunderdome of parity and chaos and randomness. Nobody knows anything.
Well, as longtime readers know, I have a personal philosophy that I stand by: If you’re going to be wrong, be really wrong. So every year, I make a list of predictions for the coming season that are way too specific. I’m not just going to be wrong, I’m going to be wrong down to a specific number or date or moment. Let’s really steer into the skid here.
Have any of these predictions ever turned out to be right over the years? Yeah, actually, a few times – check out last year’s picks for the Leafs, Canadiens and Blue Jackets. That’s always cool, and I try very hard not to look surprised when it happens. But the miss rate is running somewhere north of 95 percent. Which is to say, pretty much the same as everyone else. Let’s do this.
New Jersey Devils – There’s so much hype about Jack Hughes that you might think he’s the next Mario Lemieux. But that’s obviously ridiculous; Lemieux was dominant from his very first shift in the NHL, when he famously scored against the Bruins. Hughes should be great, but he’s not in that tier. So instead, let’s predict that he scores his first goal on his second shift.
Buffalo Sabres – By the end of October, the Sabres will have played 13 games. The NFL’s Bills will have played seven. Which team will have more wins? Trick question, they’ll both have five.
Colorado Avalanche – If we pencil in Jack Hughes and Kaapo Kakko as the two obvious Calder finalists, who gets the last slot? Voters might find the brother vs. brother storyline irresistible and give the nod to Quinn Hughes or it could be a dark horse like Nick Suzuki or Dante Fabbro. But the fact that I’m mentioning this in the Avs section might tip my hand that I’m calling it for Cale Makar. And I’ll go one further: He finishes second, not third.
Florida Panthers – We tiptoed around it in yesterday’s post, but let’s go there: The Panthers beat the Lightning in back-to-back games to open the season, sending a message to the league that they may or may not actually deliver on.
Calgary Flames – Last year, I picked Mike Smith to score the second goal of his career. He let me down, and the Flames ran him out of town because of it. (Shut up, that was totally the reason.) I’m still not over it, though, so here’s this year’s Flames pick: They get scored on by a goaltender, for the first time in franchise history.
Washington Capitals – Can Tom Wilson make it through an entire year without getting suspended? He sure can! A calendar year, that is, as Wilson manages to escape 2019 unscathed before picking up his first suspension of this season in January.
Ottawa Senators – The Senators had the fewest shootouts in the league last year, with just one. The Leafs had the second fewest, with two. Neither team managed a shootout win all year. You know where this is headed: Tonight’s Leafs/Sens game goes to a shootout.
Vegas Golden Knights – The schedule serves up a home-and-home with the Sharks to start the season. The hockey gods love to twist the knife, so let’s say the Knights take a five-minute major in one of those games. (And it goes without saying that they kill it off.)
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It’s going to be a big week for the “it’s still early” crowd. The regular season is here, we’re getting our first look at games that actually matter, and by the end of the weekend we’ll have seen every team at least a few times. And that means we can expect constant reminders that we shouldn’t overreact to anything that happens this week.
On the one hand, it’s good advice. Last year, the season’s first few nights included the Ducks beating the Sharks, the Canucks rolling over the Flames, the Jets blowing out the Blues, and oh yeah, the Bruins losing their opener 7-0 and then complaining about how the other team had too much fun and it hurt their feelings. In hindsight, none of it mattered, and we didn’t learn anything. The rational thing to do would have been to just ignore all of it.
On the other hand, being rational is no fun, so let’s ignore the “it’s too early” scolds and get ready to flip out over every little thing that happens this week. After all, we didn’t sit through an entire offseason and an interminable exhibition schedule just so we could be all measured and patient now. Let’s get crazy.
But let’s get crazy with a plan. Here are a half-dozen scenarios that could realistically play out over the next few days that could cause us all to freak out and how we should approach them.
What could happen: The schedule offers an easy layup for the Leafs’ opener, with last-place Ottawa and their thread-bare roster in town. But whoops, a bounce here, a missed assignment there, some hot goaltending and the young Sens are celebrating a confidence-building road win against a rival.
What it would mean: Pick your narrative. The Leafs are distracted by the Auston Matthews situation. Mitch Marner and the rest of the big contracts have made it impossible to build a contending roster. The remade blueline is a dud. They never shook off last year’s playoff loss, the captaincy saga took more of a toll than we thought, they miss Nazem Kadri’s grit and Ron Hainsey’s presence and Patrick Marleau’s dad-like leadership. Fire Babcock!
It will be ridiculous, but this is Toronto. And after a legitimately rough offseason highlighted by the Marner negotiations and Matthews’ off-ice embarrassment, the early schedule isn’t really doing the Leafs any favors. They open with the rebuilding Sens followed by the decimated Blue Jackets, two opponents they won’t get any credit for beating but had better not lose to. Then it’s the Canadiens on a Saturday night showcase, a home game in which the Leafs will have played on the road the night before while the Habs will be rested. And if those three games don’t go well, look out, because the next two bring the defending Cup champs and the reigning Presidents’ Trophy winners.
If the Leafs are five games into the season and sitting with one or two wins, Marner and/or Matthews are off to slow starts, and the Lightning just spanked them on home ice, Toronto fans and media will be chill about it, right? Sure they will.
Or maybe not: The thing about this Maple Leafs season is that whatever happens between now and April doesn’t really matter all that much. As long as they make the playoffs – and they should – then we’ll judge the year based almost entirely on what happens when they get there. Sure, home ice would be nice. Avoiding the Bruins in the first round feels important. And it would be great to see everything click into one of those monster seasons where a young team takes a big leap forward and challenges for first overall. But none of it will matter if they don’t win at least a round or two.
There will be time for freaking out in April (or May or June), and by then a few games in October will have been long forgotten. Overreacting is what Maple Leafs fans do, but they should keep their powder dry until the spring.
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The hockey world has spent the last few weeks on a familiar topic for NHL fans: work stoppages. And for once, the news was mostly positive, as the NHL and NHLPA have decided not to end the current CBA early. That means we won’t have a lockout in 2020, although one could still happen two years later when the CBA expires as scheduled.
A 2022 work stoppage, if it came to that, would be the fourth of the Gary Bettman era. Just about all of us still have fresh memories of the 2012 lockout, which wiped out half a season. And we all know the story of the 2004 version, the most divisive and protracted in North American pro sports history. That lockout saw the owners win their ultimate goal of a hard salary cap while becoming the only league to cancel an entire season in the process.
But while the impact of those fights, both good and bad, are still being felt around the league to this day, the original NHL lockout seems to have largely been forgotten. That one came way back in 1994 when Bettman was in just the second year of his new job. It dragged into January 1995 and ultimately cost the league half a season. And in hindsight, it didn’t achieve all that much, with an eventual agreement that mostly retained the status quo. At the time, that deal was seen as a win for the owners, but it quickly became apparent that they hadn’t gained enough. As trilogies go, Part 1 of the NHL’s lockout series didn’t pack in much in the way of drama or major plot twists, but it did introduce the important themes and characters while setting the stage for the bigger productions come.
Next week will mark the 25th anniversary of the official start of the NHL’s first lockout. To celebrate, let’s look back on what happened a quarter-century ago, and how the league might look if things had played out differently. Here are five “what if” scenarios to ponder.
Let’s start with the big one. The owners headed into the 1994 negotiations looking to remake the league’s economic system. Bettman was hesitant to use the words “salary cap,” but he’d been hired two years earlier at least in part due to his role in helping the NBA create a cap system. It wasn’t hard to read the writing on the wall.
But any talk of a hard cap seemed to fade early in the negotiations, with the two sides instead focusing on a payroll tax. The league’s reported proposal was punitive enough – more than a dollar taxed for every dollar spent over a set limit – that Bob Goodenow and the NHLPA viewed it as all but a de facto hard cap, a scenario they weren’t interested in accepting. So the players sat back and waited for the owners to fold. Eventually, they did.
That came as a surprise to Bettman, who’d gone into the battle with assurances from his owners that they had his back and were prepared to strap in for a long fight. He’d certainly acted like a guy who was willing to play the villain, firing the first shot in August by unilaterally withdrawing some player benefits. The animosity between the sides got so bad that at one point, Chris Chelios even appeared to threaten Bettman’s safety, a moment for which he later apologized.
As the lockout dragged on and games were canceled for the first time in league history, the owners continued to put on a united front, even authorizing Bettman to cancel the entire season. But behind the scenes, that solidarity was crumbling. (For a more in-depth look at the politics of the 1994 lockout, I highly recommend “The Instigator,” Jonathon Gatehouse’s must-read look at Bettman’s tenure.) It eventually became clear that Goodenow and the players weren’t going to cave, and the league’s richer teams began to wonder if losing an entire season was really worth it. The players had offered a handful of concessions, including a rookie salary cap. With the deadline to cancel the season looming, the owners decided that those small wins were enough.
What if they hadn’t? What if the owners had remained united behind Bettman? Or maybe more realistically, what if Bettman had done a better job of making sure that his owners had no choice? The commissioner learned a tough lesson from the 1994 lockout, and made sure that he went into the 2004 version with more power and less vulnerability to his owners getting cold feet. What would have happened if he’d been able to get his charges to hold the line in 1994 instead?
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