“Fix The NHL” draft: Franchise tags, fun uniforms, 3-point games, and… relegation?

Today, four of us are going to fix the NHL. Or at least, we’re going to try. And then you’re going to tell us who did the best job.

Oh, you don’t think the NHL needs any fixing? The league, as currently run, is just about perfect? Cool, always fun to meet a satisfied customer. This post isn’t for you, feel free to click back and find something else Gary er, random reader.

For the rest of us, who believe there’s always room for improvement… welcome to the Fix the NHL Draft.

 

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Let's build the worst possible roster of contracts that's still somehow cap compliant

Six years ago, I wrote a post based on a premise that I thought was stupid, bordering on pointlessly absurd. If you know my work, that’s really saying something.

A few days earlier, I’d tried to build a roster using the best players and contracts that I could fit under the salary cap, which is not as especially dumb idea and was actually kind of fun. But then, somebody asked me to flip the script, and build a cap-compliant roster of the league’s worst contracts. At first, that seems fine. But then you get into it and realize that “bad contracts” and “cap compliant” don’t work together at all, as you find yourself being priced out of some of the very worst deals because you don’t have room for them. The whole thing didn’t make one bit of sense.

Needless to say, I did it anyway, the readers made it one of my most popular posts of the season, and lately some of you have been bugging me to do it again. Fine, why not, it’s August and nobody will remember this ever happened.

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Do Elias Pettersson and Jusse Saros have bad contracts? NHL Cap Court returns

Let’s do another round of Cap Court. You know the drill by now: Five players, five dicey contracts (from a team perspective), and five arguments over whether the deal is actually bad enough to be “bad”.

Today, we’ll cover a perplexing goaltender, a one-time sure thing who may have peaked as a rookie, and two players recently traded away by the Senators. But we’ll start with what I believe may be the single biggest contract in terms of total dollars that we’ve ever tackled in this column…

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A brief history of the Thornton Award, a fake trophy for best debut with a new team

It’s summer and nothing’s happening. Let’s make up another fake award.

We did this last summer, when we introduced the Pollock Trophy for a season’s best trade. Prior to that, we’ve also done the Carson Trophy for best sophomore season, as well as the Bourque Trophy for best final season. None of these actually exist, but they should, and that’s enough for our purposes.

For today’s award, we’re going to create the Joe Thornton Award for the best debut with a new team.

A couple of quick rules: Rookie debuts have their own award, so they don’t count – a player has to have previously played for another NHL team before joining a new one. Unlike most awards, we're taking the playoffs into consideration. And finally, a player has to have played at least half the season with his new team, because I don’t feel like figuring out how to rate deadline pickups. Other that that, the field is open – we can be looking at trades, free agent signings, waiver pickups or whatever else.

We’ll cover the cap era, starting with a 2006 recipient. It’s Slow News Summer, let’s argue about an award that doesn’t exist.

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Getting a new CBA without a lockout is bad, actually: The Contrarian returns

It’s late-July, we’re two months away from games that matter, and NHL GMs have apparently taken the rest of the summer off. Let’s get Contrarian.

This is the feature where you send in your most obvious takes, and I tell you that you’re wrong, whether I believe it or not. In the past, we’ve made the case that Mark Messier was a great Canuck, Ray Bourque’s Cup win was bad but Brett Hull’s crease goal was good, and Bobby Orr’s flying goal photo is overrated. Last time, we made the case for Alexander Ovechkin being an overrated bum, and also for Alexander Ovechkin being an underrated legend, because we’re flexible like that.

This time, we’ve got a new CBA, an old legend, and everything in between. Let’s dive in.

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