Monday, October 31, 2022

Weekend rankings: Wait, are the Devils a powerhouse?

Two weeks ago, in the first edition of these rankings, I had the Devils in the bottom five. It didn’t feel like an off-the-board pick, given they were coming off a 63-point season, they hadn’t made any truly significant moves in the offseason, and had started the year 0-2-0 while losing by identical 5-2 scores to a pair of non-playoff teams in the Flyers and Red Wings.

Hey, remember when I prefaced that column with a half-dozen caveats about it being too early? That Devils ranking may have been too early.

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Friday, October 28, 2022

Welcoming Mullett Arena with a history of NHL teams playing in weird places

Coyotes fans — it’s here. The first home game of the season has finally arrived, meaning it’s time for the first NHL game ever played at Mullett Arena.

Are you sick of the jokes from other fan bases yet?

I’m guessing you are. You probably got there, oh, roughly three seconds after the whole plan became public. You certainly got there once we found out the place was going to be called Mullett. Business up front, party out back, am I right? (Tumbleweed blows by.) Thanks, don’t forget to tip your server.

And sure, you knew it was coming. It’s not an ideal situation, to put it politely. Mullett Arena seats 5,000, which feels ridiculous for what’s supposed to be a big-league venue. After decades of arena drama that this franchise just can’t shake, this feels like the saddest chapter of them all. Even if it’s only temporary, isn’t this kind of embarrassing?

Maybe. But here’s a secret that some of those chortling fan bases don’t want to talk about: You’re not alone. The Arizona Coyotes are far from the only franchise to play NHL hockey in an unusual venue. Sure, old-school hockey fans love to preach about the majesty of the Forum or the Gardens or wherever, and those buildings really were great. But they’re not the whole story, and the NHL has a long history of playing hockey in unusual places under less-than-ideal circumstances.

Luckily, weird arena stuff is kind of my thing. So today, let’s remember some of those buildings that have hosted NHL hockey, and maybe even see how they stack up to the mighty Mullett.

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Thursday, October 27, 2022

The Athletic Hockey Show: Leaf jersey, jean shorts, knee brace

On this week's episode of The Athletic Hockey Show:
- Ian asks me about Halloween costumes and immediately regrets it
- Phil Kessel, ironman
- The Canucks already on the brink
- Betting trends with Jesse Granger
- A listener makes the cases for an underrated goalie
- Two 20-year-old records that may be unbreakable, and more...

The Athletic Hockey Show runs most days of the week during the season, with Ian and I hosting every Thursday. There are two versions of each episode available:
- An ad-free version for subscribers that you can find here
- An ad-supported version you can get for free wherever you normally find your podcasts (like Apple or Spotify)




Wednesday, October 26, 2022

Puck Soup: The Canucks turn into a pumpkin

On this week's episode of the Puck Soup podcast:
- It's really bad in Vancouver, and we talk about it for a long time
- JT Miller in a pumpkin patch, Mike Yeo in the wings, and whether its too early for changes
- Phil Kessel is the NHL's new ironman and we love him
- The Sabres are good but it might not be real
- The Flames, Knights and Bruins are good and it probably is real
- Plus Shane Wright barely playing and lots more...

>> Listen on The Athletic >> Subscribe on iTunes.

>> Listen on Spotify

>> Get weekly mailbags and special bonus episodes by supporting Puck Soup on Patreon for $5.




Monday, October 24, 2022

Alexander Mogilny’s brilliance and his curious absence from the Hall of Fame

In the century-plus history of the NHL, only six players have ever scored more than 75 goals in a season. It’s an almost incomprehensible feat, especially in today’s era when a player even nudging 60 is seen as a stunning achievement. To get there, a player needs to score nearly a goal per game over the course of a full season, a level of production that even legendary scorers like Mike Bossy, Alexander Ovechkin, Pavel Bure and Jaromir Jagr never reached.

Of the six players to top 75 goals, five are in the Hockey Hall of Fame. Three of them — Phil Esposito, Teemu Selanne and Brett Hull — made it in as soon as they became eligible. Two more, Wayne Gretzky and Mario Lemieux, made it even sooner, with the Hall waiving its three-year waiting period to induct them early.

The sixth member of the 75-goal club isn’t in the Hall of Fame at all. Not yet, anyway, despite over a decade of eligibility. It stands as one of the Hall’s most inexcusable oversights, and we need to talk about it. But to tell the story of Alexander Mogilny — who comes it at No. 89 on our list of the top 100 players in modern NHL history — we have to go back further than that monster 1992-93 season. We need to go back to the beginning, to the story of how a 20-year-old phenom changed the NHL forever.

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Five early success stories I'm not buying yet, plus a disastrous start in Vancouver

Welcome to week two of the still-way-too-early rankings, in which we try to sort through all the noise of the first few games to figure out if they’re telling us anything at all that’s useful.

First things first, if you somehow missed it then go check out the Friday power rankings, which dropped their first edition last week. It’s a nice counterpart to these rankings – we’re the long-term view, focused on figuring out who’ll finish first and who’ll come dead last, while Dom and Other Sean are more of a snapshot of right now. We’ll disagree sometimes, and when we do I’ll be right, but for the most parts it’s two distinct views of one unpredictable league.

Speaking of predictions, in last week’s column I listed five teams off to slow starts that I wasn’t all that worried about. Four of those five teams ran off multiple wins this week, and even Minnesota at least got their first victory of the season, so I think the list held up well. But there was one team that I conspicuously didn’t list, because I kind of was already worried even after two games, and that was the 0-and-2 Canucks.

One week later, they’re now the 0-and-6 Canucks, and oh boy, we are officially at a full-blown crisis in Vancouver. A couple of loser points aside, it’s been six straight losses featuring blown leads, missed assignments, bad goaltending, and simmering panic. What it hadn’t featured until this weekend was a home game, and the Canucks finally got that on Saturday against Sabres. You probably heard how it went. Not great!

>> Read the full post at The Athletic

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Friday, October 21, 2022

What can we learn when 2,100 hockey fans try to predict the future?

Every year, right before the season starts, I run a prediction contest. There’s a list of simple questions, and you give me your easy answers, and at the end we realize that we’re all dumb. It’s fun, and this year there were 2,109 entries. If you missed it, you can read about how the contest works here.

This post isn’t about the actual contest. It’s too soon to know much about how that will play out, and we’ll have plenty of time to check in on how everyone is doing down the road. But it occurred to me that I’ve got something interesting here: A detailed survey of hockey fans with a pretty decent sample size, all pointing to what we actually think is going to happen this year.

>> Read the full post at The Athletic

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Thursday, October 20, 2022

The Athletic Hockey Show: Should Leaf fans be panicking?

On this week's episode of The Athletic Hockey Show:
- A listener wants to know why Leaf fans are such bummers right now
- Which team is in more trouble, Vancouver or Minnesota?
- We talk about one of the most underappreciated stars in the league
- A look back at one of the wildest games you've never heard of
- And more...

The Athletic Hockey Show runs most days of the week during the season, with Ian and I hosting every Thursday. There are two versions of each episode available:
- An ad-free version for subscribers that you can find here
- An ad-supported version you can get for free wherever you normally find your podcasts (like Apple or Spotify)




Puck Soup: One week in

On this week's episode of the Puck Soup podcast:
- We talk about the five but really four undefeated teams
- Panic levels rising in Toronto and elsewhere
- Who's already on the hot seat?
- The Kuzentsov suspension, board of governors meeting and more

>> Listen on The Athletic >> Subscribe on iTunes.

>> Listen on Spotify

>> Get weekly mailbags and special bonus episodes by supporting Puck Soup on Patreon for $5.




Tuesday, October 18, 2022

A brief NHL history of newly-acquired goalies being awful (and it turning out OK)

One of the big stories of the offseason was the goaltending carousel, with nearly half the league’s teams adding at least one new goaltender and several adding two. We saw big names on the move, guys you’d never heard of, and plenty of in-betweens. Four legitimate contenders brought in a new starter, including the defending champions. It was chaos.



At the time, we tried to sort through the potential impact, but that was just guesswork. But now we’re one whole week into the season, and it goes without saying that we already know which of these moves have worked and which haven’t.


OK, maybe not. It’s possible that first impressions aren’t everything, especially when we’re talking about just a few games of the most unpredictable position in sports.


Still, some of the early returns haven’t been great. Jack Campbell has had two rought starts for the Oilers, and lasted just ten minutes in his first Battle of Alberta action on Saturday. Vitek Vanecek gave up five goals on just 22 shots in his debut for the Devils. Matt Murray had a shaky first start in Toronto and is already on the LTIR, Cam Talbot didn’t even make it to opening night for the Senators, and we’ve also seen tough first weeks from Martin Jones in Seattle and Petr Mrazek in Chicago.


Should that worry teams like Edmonton or New Jersey? Not necessarily, at least if history is any indication, because there have been plenty of goaltending switches that got off to a rocky start but then turned out great.


Today, we’re going to look back at some of that history, and we’re going to do it using one of my favorite sportswriting tropes: The one where I give you some stats, badger you into admitting that they’re bad, and then pull a switcheroo by revealing that I was referring to a good player all along. Will you be able to see the ruse coming? Yes, obviously, because this sort of thing has never fooled anyone. The point is I get to act like you were wrong about something, and that’s fun for me.


Let’s remember a half-dozen times that a team acquired a new goaltender, and then watched in horror as that guy turned out to be terrible… for a little while.

>> Read the full post at The Athletic

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Monday, October 17, 2022

Five struggling teams I’m not worried about (yet), plus way-too-early power rankings

The weekend rankings are back, and it’s too early.

That’s the caveat we throw out every year, and will have to remember for at least the first few weeks. If I don’t mention it right up front, I know some of you will make sure to do it for me. It gets late early in the NHL, but not this early. We get it.

For the record, I strongly considered starting the rankings last Monday, when the season had technically started but only two games had been played across the entire league. I was talked out of it, and that was probably the right call. Just remember, if you think it’s too early this week, it could have been worse.

The other thing we always do in the first column of a season is to remind you what this is all about. We’ll be doing a top and bottom five every week, but they’re a little bit different from other rankings you might see. We’re looking long-term here – trying to predict the five teams that are most likely to win a Stanley Cup, and the five that are most likely to finish dead last. We are not just trying to capture a snapshot of who’s playing well right now, or who had the best or worst week, or who beat who last night. That means we try very hard not to overreact to short-term trends, and we lean on preseason expectations at least as much as results in the very early going. It’s a different vibe, and if you’re into the instant gratification of seeing your favorite team shoot to the top of the rankings after a good week, it may not be for you.

I’m adding a new twist to this year’s column: A bonus top five ranking that will be on any topic I feel like. This week, we’re going to try to calm some nerves.

Top five teams I’m not panicking about just yet

Sometimes a bad first week is just that – one week, the kind of short slump even the best teams go through a few times a year. Sometimes it ends up meaning much more.

Remember last year, when the Habs went from the Cup final to starting 0-3-0 and we weren’t completely sure what to make of it? That turned out to be a surprisingly bad team revealing itself early. While it does happen that way sometimes, I don’t think any of these five teams have to be worried yet. We’ll start with the easiest team to believe in and get tougher as we go.

5. Tampa Bay Lightning – Should losses to the Rangers and Penguins have us counting out the 2020 and 2021 champs? Put it this way, this won’t be the last time they show up in this column.

4. Ottawa Senators – With a ton of well-deserved optimism in the fan base and a recent history of miserable starts, the Sens may be one of the teams that can least afford to stumble out of the gate. Dropping their first two is disappointing for sure, and the schedule is nasty for the next few weeks. But let’s at least give them a home game before we start any “here we go again” narratives.

3. Washington Capitals – A loss to the Habs on Saturday would have caused concern, but they got the job done, even if it wasn’t an especially emphatic win. The Caps are everyone’s pick to be the Eastern playoff team that holds the door open for one of the rebuilds to make a run, and maybe they do play that role. For now, one out of three isn't bad.

>> Read the full post at The Athletic

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Thursday, October 13, 2022

The Athletic Hockey Show: Leafs lose, crisis mode activated

On this week's episode of The Athletic Hockey Show:
- The Leafs will not go 82-0-0, so let's panic
- That dude with the green jacket
- Also, what was up with the ice changing colors?
- Connor McDavid cannot be stopped
- The Avs (and one awkward Hawk) raise their banner
- Granger Things, this week in history, and more...

The Athletic Hockey Show runs most days of the week during the season, with Ian and I hosting every Thursday. There are two versions of each episode available:
- An ad-free version for subscribers that you can find here
- An ad-supported version you can get for free wherever you normally find your podcasts (like Apple or Spotify)




Mailbag: An Auston Matthews trade, play-in rounds, a team chaos rooting guide and more

Are you ready for NHL opening night, part six or whatever we’re up to now? Me too. But in the meantime, let’s get in a quick mailbag before some teams play their third game and we all start forming conclusions that we’ll cling to all season long.

Note: Submitted questions have been edited for clarity and style.

MLB’s wild card weekend was fun and the NBA play-in tournament has been a winner. Shouldn’t the NHL follow suit? – Andy B.

Absolutely. The NBA and MLB now both have play-in rounds, and the NFL kind of does too if you count the wildcard weekend. The NHL is the only one of the big four leagues that still has every postseason team start on equal footing.

I’ve made the case for the play-in before, most recently on the podcast with Ian a few weeks back. The NHL should steal the NBA’s format, where the #7 and #8 seeds play each other in a single game with the winner advancing and the loser facing the winner of a showdown between #9 and #10. That means the two higher seeds get two chances to win their way in and only miss if they go 0-for-2, while the task is tougher but not impossible for the lower two teams who each need back-to-back wins.

Today, all that really matters is making the playoffs, since home ice barely has an impact in the playoffs any more and seeding doesn’t matter at all. Sometimes that means we get a “race” like last year’s East, where we knew all eight teams by Christmas and could basically tune out the entire conference until April. Under a play-in format, you’d have more teams in the mix, plus pressure points at eighth (to get the double chance at advancing), sixth (to avoid the play-in altogether), and first and second (to get to play a team that just survived the play-in rather than a rested opponent). I know that some fans don’t want to “expand” the playoffs, so don’t – we can do like the NBA and just say that the play-in as determine who makes the official playoffs, which will still have the same 16 teams it’s had for decades.

It will apparently never happen because Gary Bettman is weird about this. So once again, the NHL will dawdle behind everyone else, and hockey fans will watch all the other sports have more fun than we do while we mumble about tradition.

>> Read the full post at The Athletic

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Wednesday, October 12, 2022

Puck Soup: And here we go...

On this week's episode of the Puck Soup podcast:
- The season started! Several times!
- Multiple teams come within dollars of the cap ceiling
- Ryan has NHL 23 thoughts
- Breaking news of a pair of extensions in Buffalo
- Our picks for the big awards, plus the Cup champions
- Our entries in the prediction contest
- Hockey Canada, Ian Cole and more...

>> Listen on The Athletic >> Subscribe on iTunes.

>> Listen on Spotify

>> Get weekly mailbags and special bonus episodes by supporting Puck Soup on Patreon for $5.




Tuesday, October 11, 2022

Oddly specific 2022-23 predictions for all 32 teams

One of the things we’ve learned during hockey’s analytics revolution is that shooting percentage can be deceiving. When a player has a season in which the shots are going in at a higher rate than his established career number, we should be suspicious that the year will turn out to be a fluke, or at least an outlier, and not a new long-term norm. In other words, just because somebody gets lucky one year doesn’t mean we should expect them to repeat that in the future.

This is my way of managing expectations for this year’s oddly specific predictions.

>> Read the full post at The Athletic

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Thursday, October 6, 2022

The Athletic Hockey Show: Can Matt Murray be the answer in Toronto?

On this week's episode of The Athletic Hockey Show:
- Jonas Siegel joins is as we revisit and debate the Matt Murray trade
- Jason Robertson gets a deal done with Dallas
- We place some over/under bets for this season's top scorers
- I am vindicated on the PIM thing
- Plus this week in hockey history and lots more...

The Athletic Hockey Show runs most days of the week during the season, with Ian and I hosting every Thursday. There are two versions of each episode available:
- An ad-free version for subscribers that you can find here
- An ad-supported version you can get for free wherever you normally find your podcasts (like Apple or Spotify)




Do you believe in miracles? Finding hope for the ten most hopeless teams

Every year, at the very start of a season, I like to take the ten most hopeless teams in the NHL and try to figure out if there’s any chance that we could all be wrong and they could actually be good. That’s “good”, not just “not terrible”, because even an awful team can have a goalie go on a heater for a few months and drag them into the fringe of the playoff race. I wanted to figure out which team is going to be the 2018-19 Islanders or 2017-18 Golden Knights, the underdog expected to finish dead last who instead becomes a Cup contender.

It’s kind of a weird season to be doing this, for two reasons.

First, it’s been a while since we’ve really seen one these hopeless teams break through. That Islanders turnaround was four years ago now, but you could argue that it’s still the most recent example. The Habs’ run in the 2021 playoffs was unexpected, and last year’s collapse made it feel miraculous, but they went into that season with decent expectations. We’re looking for teams that are already being written off, but could be legitimate contenders. Last year’s list did have two playoff teams, the Predators and Kings, but neither won a round, so your contender mileage may vary.

That leads us to our second problem: With the top of the 2023 draft looming, a lot of teams sure seem to want to be hopeless this year. The whole point here is to offer some optimism to hopeless fan bases, but right now Connor Bedard is the optimism for more than a few teams. Am I even helping here? I’m not sure I am.

I’ll still do my best, As always, we’re taking the ten worst teams for this season, based on the season previews from Dom’s model. We’ll start with the tenth most hopeless team and work our way to the very depths of despair.

Four teams – Vancouver, Nashville, Los Angeles and Ottawa – have graduated from last year’s list. Let’s try to figure out who might join them, and maybe go even further than that. Hopefully.

Seattle Kraken

The projections say: 87 points, and a 27% chance of making the playoffs

Why they’re probably right: The Kraken were bad last year, which we probably should have expected. The Golden Knights were Cup contenders right from the start, which shocked everyone and messed up our ability to project the Kraken, but the roster never looked especially strong. In addition to the expected lack of offense, the goaltending was a weakness, and all that’s changed there since is the addition of Martin Jones. I’m guessing that’s not going to solve anything.

But hear me out … : Jones isn’t likely to be the answer, but regression might be. There’s a reason that nobody saw Philipp Grubauer’s season coming: he’d been a consistently good goaltender for his entire career before arriving in Seattle. Maybe he’s bad now – you never know with goalies, which will be a theme of this piece – but it seems more likely that we can bet on him being better, and maybe even significantly closer to the .920 guy he’d always been.

The roster is already improved with the additions of Andre Burakovsky, Justin Schultz, Oliver Bjorkstrand and (maybe) Shane Wright, and Matty Beniers is a legitimate Calder favorite. If Grubauer is better, there’s a very clear path to the playoffs here. And with cap room and at least a little local pressure on Ron Francis to deliver a better season, who knows where that could lead. Remember, the history of NHL expansion teams that aren’t the Golden Knights is filled with awful first seasons, but teams like the Panthers, Wild and Sharks were all winning playoff rounds pretty quickly after that. It could absolutely happen in Seattle too.

Convincing, right? I hope so, because the numbers say that was the easy one. Those playoff odds take a big dip as we move to our next team.

Detroit Red Wings

The projections say: 82 points and an 11% of making the playoffs

Why they’re probably right: The Red Wings spent big in the offseason, finally signalling that the Steve Yzerman’s rebuild was shifting out of the patient tear-down phase. In fact, nobody improved more than the Red Wings did this summer, according to Dom. But even a big improvement doesn’t get this team into the playoff mix, especially in the Atlantic. It will happen eventually, but they’re not there yet.

But hear me out … : Or are they? The nice thing about adding so many players is that you have to figure that at least a few of them will overachieve. If it’s more than a few and Wings start stacking an extra win here and there, it adds up.

Would that be enough in the Atlantic? It could be, since it’s not impossible to imagine things going off the rails in Florida or Toronto, and we don’t know what those early injuries will do to the Bruins. And remember, even if the division’s big four all stay strong, there’s still the other wildcard.

Even more encouragingly, almost every team that makes a big, unexpected leap does it with a new coach or a new goalie, and the Wings have both. Again, it’s all about the volume of change. It’s very possible that it goes the other way and there are more disappointments and overpays and it adds up to another lost season, or even a step back. But if the coin keeps landing on the right side, this team could be good. And if Mo Seider has his Cale Maker-style breakout this year, they could be even more than that.

>> Read the full post at The Athletic

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Wednesday, October 5, 2022

Puck Soup: Almost there

On this week's episode of the Puck Soup podcast:
- One last tour around the league before the season begins on (checks notes) Friday?
- Mathew Barzal signs, Jason Robertson doesn't, Alex DeBrincat maybe does?
- The ads on the boards are animated now
- The Leafs experiment with Marner on defense
- Which 2022 draft picks might make opening night rosters?
- Over/unders on this year's top goal-scorers
- More nonsense from Hockey Canada, Cam Talbot is hurt, Who He Play For? and more...

>> Listen on The Athletic >> Subscribe on iTunes.

>> Listen on Spotify

>> Get weekly mailbags and special bonus episodes by supporting Puck Soup on Patreon for $5.




Tuesday, October 4, 2022

The prediction contest returns, with a new question and an even tougher bonus

Two years ago, I introduce what I thought would be a fun prediction contest with a simple concept: I ask you some easy questions about the upcoming season, you give me the easy answers, and then we sit back and realize that the prediction business isn’t all that easy after all. It ended up being a lot of fun, with roughly 800 entries and a close race down to the wire.

Last year, we doubled up to nearly 1,600 entries, added a new all-or-nothing bonus question, and saw even more chaos thanks to curveballs from Joe Sakic, Joel Quenneville, Barry Trotz and an injured Nathan MacKinnon, among others. Many of you followed the results all season long. Many more were basically eliminated by November.

It goes without saying that we’re doing this again this year, with essentially the same set of rules, plus a new question and a tweak to the bonus. As always, read the rules carefully and please follow the formatting guidelines. Good luck, and remember, this should be easy because the NHL is super predictable.

>> Enter the contest at The Athletic

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