Who wins today, 2016’s Team North America or Team Everyone Else?

Five years ago this week, hockey fans got their first look at the roster for what would become one of the most unique teams in international sports history. In organizing the 2016 World Cup tournament, the NHL went off the board with their decision to include a Team North America, an unprecedented combo platter of Canadian and American stars who were 23 or under.

Did it make sense to have two counties combining for an entry in an international tournament, let alone when those two nations were rivals? Not really. Was it fair to weaken those countries’ main rosters by ruling out some of the game’s best young stars? Probably not. Was the whole thing a good idea? It’s fair to say that the initial reaction was mixed.

But then we got a look at the first draft of the roster, and even a traditionalist had to be intrigued. That initial March 2016 list featured 16 names, including established stars like Nathan MacKinnon, Connor McDavid and Jack Eichel. They’d eventually be joined by a group that included Auston Matthews (who’d yet to play an NHL game) and Mark Scheifele.

We weren’t sure if they’d be all that good, but we knew they’d be fun. It turned out they were both, stealing the show at the tournament with a run-and-gun style and all sorts of skill. They failed to medal, but beat Finland and Sweden. In terms of NHL star power, the future looked bright.

Five years later, the future is here. So today, I want to tackle a question sent in by Puck Soup listener Manny: Could a reunited Team North America beat an all-star squad made up of everyone else in a series played right now?

It’s a big ask. We’ve got a huge swath of the league to choose from, including stars who were too old for Team North America consideration, guys who hadn’t entered the league yet, and a handful of snubs. And we’ve got the benefit of hindsight, because while most of the 2016 team holds up well, a few haven’t seen their pro careers pan out as well as we all expected. Team Everyone Else should have a big advantage. But Team North America has Connor McDavid and Auston Matthews, so let’s do this.

One caveat: We’re doing North American players only. I originally thought about making it the kids against the world, but throwing names like Victor Hedman, David Pastrnak and Nikita Kucherov into the mix just tilts the scales too far in one direction. It’s Canadian and American stars only, and if you show up in the comments going “Uh, Leon Draisaitl?” then you have to do ten pushups and we all get to make fun of you. Let’s see where this takes us.

Forwards

Let’s start with the main course, because the Team North America forwards are ridiculous. McDavid, Matthews and MacKinnon may be the three best players in the league right now, so we’re absolutely loaded with top-end star power. But we’re not completely top heavy, with some excellent options for all four lines. Some of the names aren’t exactly Hart candidates, like Ryan Nugent-Hopkins. J.T. Miller or Vincent Trochek, but they’ve developed into very good players.

In fact, among the names on the final 2016 roster, there isn’t a single one that you’d describe as a bust five years down the road. And the only ones who’ve struggled to establish themselves as legitimate top-end players are Brandon Saad and maybe Jonathan Drouin.

Here’s how my Team North America lines would look in 2021:

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The Athletic Hockey Show: When stars get benched

On this week's episode of The Athletic Hockey Show:
- Zach Parise becomes the latest star to get benched
- Was this the right time for Dean Evason to play it tough?
- We both agree on the worst benching of all-time
- The Habs fire a coach during a game; did Carey Price know?
- The timing of a potential Jack Eichel trade
- The Leafs are running away with the North
- This week in history, featuring the night that Teemu's record-breaker was only the second best highlight
- Listener questions 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)

Puck Soup: Hot seats and trade boards

On this week's episode of the Puck Soup podcast:
- We do a temperature check on various coaches around the NHL, and some seats are hotter than others
- An early look at the trade deadline board
- Are the Leafs for real?
- The Wild are fun and it's weird
- An OUFL on Eddie Murphy movies
- Happy Gilmore, whether there's mini-golf in Canada, and more...

>> Stream it now:

>> Or, listen on The Athletic or subscribe on iTunes.

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

Every midseason coaching change of the cap era, ranked

The NHL had its first coaching change of the season last week, and it was big news for a couple of reasons. Most importantly, it was Montreal, and anything that happens in that market will reverberate around the league. But it also broke the seal on a year that had many of us wondering if there would be any midseason changes at all. With a pandemic still raging and a condensed schedule leaving little room to adjust, would teams be tempted to ride out the year and make their coaching decisions in the offseason?

Apparently not. Instead, we got what we almost always get – at least one team deciding that it had to make a change during the season, with more potentially on the way. Since the expansion era began in 1967, the 2017-18 season remains the only one which hasn’t had at least one midseason coaching change. Sometimes, the change works out brilliantly. Other times, a struggling team keeps spinning their wheels. Occasionally, a poorly thought-out switch makes a bad situation even worse.

So today, let’s look back at every midseason coaching change of the cap era. That’s a total of 67, by my count, not including brief interim stints or temporary absences. We can divide them into some familiar categories. And of course, we’ll rank them from the worst midseason change of the era to the very best, with the benefit of hindsight.

We’ll start at the bottom and work our way up. Anyone know the number for a cab?

The worst of the worst

I’m guessing there’s no big surprise with this pick…

#67. Nov. 27, 2016: Panthers replace Gerard Gallant with Tom Rowe

You at least can sort of see what the Panthers were going for. They’d recently transitioned the front office job from Dale Tallon to Rowe, and new GMs often want to bring in their own guy. Rowe was embracing a more analytics-based mindset – this was what would become derisively known in Florida as the era of the Computer Boys – and Gallant didn’t seem to be fully on board. So despite coming off a 103-point season in which Gallant was Jack Adams runner-up and a disappointing-but-not-awful 11-10-1 record through 22 games, Rowe pulled the trigger and named himself interim coach for the rest of the year.

Oh, and then they didn’t call Gallant a cab, which turned into a league-wide punch line and infuriated the old guard.

Presumably, the idea was for Rowe to make it through the season, see what his roster looked like up close, and then hire his own guy in the spring. Instead, the team missed the playoffs, Rowe lost a front office power struggle, and Tallon was put back in charge. Meanwhile, Gallant took the expansion Golden Knights job and won the Jack Adams in his first season in Vegas. Just a complete mess all around.

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Weekend rankings: Can the Canadiens season be saved?

How’s that for a dramatic headline? Look, it’s the Habs and they’re losing. Nobody’s going to do subtlety and nuance.

But I’ll blow the suspense by revealing the answer in the second paragraph. Can this season be saved? Yes, of course. They’re still holding down a playoff spot, we’ve already seen this lineup rack up wins early on, and they’re still one of the better possession teams at 5-on-5, which we’re told is a good predictor of future success. Nothing’s hopeless here.

Will it be saved? That gets dicier, because man, things are not good right now.

Let’s reset on a nightmare February. On Groundhog Day, the Habs beat the Canucks, ending a two-week stretch that saw them face Vancouver five times and take nine of 10 points, all while scoring at will. That ran their overall record to 7-1-2, and they were all but anointed the division’s best team. Marc Bergevin’s moves had all worked perfectly, and the relatively small number of skeptics had been proven wrong. (I was one of those offseason skeptics, but I bailed on it quickly, because even when I’m right I find a way to be wrong.) With four good lines and a smart system and nobody playing poorly, the team was so good it was getting boring.

Two nights after that win over the hapless Canucks, the Habs lost to the Senators. No big deal, it was a trap game against a bad team and they got their revenge in a rematch. But then came a loss to the Maple Leafs, and then another to the Oilers, and soon they’d lost seven of eight, including five straight. Last week, they fired coach Claude Julien, a move that would have seemed unthinkable just two weeks ago.

So now what?

New head coach Dominique Ducharme has already made some tweaks, but a pair of losses to the Jets means there won’t be an instant turnaround. Ducharme was Julien’s assistant, so he should be able to maintain that successful 5-on-5 system while concentrating on upgrading the lackluster special teams. But 5-on-5 possession only gets you so far if you can’t finish, and that’s where Bergevin’s decision to abandon his years-long pursuit of top-line talent in favor of a more balanced approach may not be the success it seemed like. The Canadiens can roll out three or four lines that can score, but who’s the go-to guy when you absolutely need a big goal? OK, Tyler Toffoli if it’s against the Canucks, but what about the rest of the time? Right now, the team’s leading scorer is 33-year-old defenseman Jeff Petry, which probably isn’t how Bergevin drew it up.

But maybe that doesn’t matter, because we haven’t mentioned the elephant in the room. Like so many other slumping teams, all the analysis in the world can just be boiled down to one short sentence: The goaltending is bad. That’s it. Bad goaltending sinks good teams, and that’s what Montreal’s been getting on too many nights.

In a weird way, that might be good news for Ducharme, because he has two established goaltenders and only one has been struggling. Jake Allen has played well, including in a Saturday loss in which Montreal was clearly the better team. Go with the hot hand for a little bit, and get the season back under control. Simple enough. But of course it isn’t, because the other goalie is Carey Price, a 33-year-old carrying the league’s highest cap hit for five more years after this one. The plan was that Allen wouldn’t just upgrade the backup slot, but that he’d give Price enough nights off that the starter would get back to the elite level of play that the league still insists he’s capable of, even if the last few years of numbers disagree. It hasn’t worked. Price is muddling through yet another shaky season.

Does Ducharme sit his star and go with the guy who’s playing better? That sounds like the obvious answer, and maybe it is, but where does that leave you next year and beyond? And does that even matter, when you’ve got one year to work with in a very winnable Canadian division before you presumably go back to sharing the Atlantic with the Bruins and Lightning? If this keeps going off the rails and the Habs miss the playoffs, it’s possible that neither Ducharme nor Bergevin are around to worry about the fallout. (And yes, the rest of us have our popcorn ready in case Patrick Roy’s music hits.)

Or maybe Price heats up, the special teams get a few bounces, the team plays like it did on Saturday but without the other team’s goalie stealing it, Montreal makes the playoffs and beats the Maple Leafs and everyone is happy. The turnaround would need to start soon, but they’ve got a winnable slate of games coming up, with the Senators tomorrow, two more against the Jets and then, like a shimmering oasis on the horizon, two more against the Washington Generals Canucks.

Can the season be saved? Yes, of course it can. Will it? We’ll find out, and maybe soon. And it’s Montreal, so whether you want to or not, you’ll hear all about it.

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NHL era-adjusted mock draft: Why Theo Fleury, Ron Hextall, Alex Mogilny and more would thrive today

The game has changed.

Hockey fans of a certain vintage will often find themselves looking back over fondly remembered highlights and controversial incidents of the past and thinking, boy, if that happened now that guy would’ve been suspended for life.

For younger hockey fans, meanwhile, it’s common to wonder how a Connor McDavid or an Auston Mathews would’ve fared in the 1980s — and to insist that in a world where goalies were 5-foot-9 and smoked half a pack between periods, that they might’ve re-written the NHL record book.

While hockey is a traditionalists game, the evolution of the sport at the NHL level over the last decade and a half has been swift and it has been remarkable.

The goaltenders have gotten larger, adding post-integration techniques that have made “soft” goals even rarer. The salary cap system has caused youth to be served earlier as the years go by, creating an arms race for team speed and relegating the classic, plodding “stay-at-home” defenseman player type all but extinct. Analytics have revolutionized player evaluation, both by the public and by teams themselves. And the way the game is called and legislated by on-ice officials and the Department of Player Safety (an Orwellian moniker if ever there was one) has caused “enforcers” to disappear along with, thankfully, the “keep your head up” type hits that used to punctuate the NHL game.

With a stick tap to our colleagues over on the NBA side of our shop, a crew of The Athletic’s hockey writers (Thomas Drance, Sean Gentille and Sean McIndoe) decided to formalize the “what if?” game with a mock draft that seeks to identify the players from yesteryear who would perform best if they were dropped on the ice, in their prime, in today’s game.

The ground rules:

•Six-round snake draft.

•Every team must feature a complete starting lineup of three forwards (regardless of position), two defenders and a goaltender.

•Eligibility: The player cannot be in the Hockey Hall of Fame and must have played at least 50 percent of their career NHL games after the 1980-81 season and prior to the advent of the Behind the Net era (which we’ve placed in 2008).

The point of the exercise is to identify players who were good in their own time, but who would be absolutely sensational today. If we’re being honest, it’s also about having some fun remembering some guys.

Round 1, pick 1. Team McIndoe selects: RW Alexander Mogilny

Drance: Consensus top pick, but also kind of a squirrel pick. Mogilny would be dominant in any area.

Gentille: Dude was made for 2021, down to the fact that he wore a vanity number. There is no other 89.

McIndoe: This Darren Turcotte erasure will not stand…

Once I lucked into the first overall pick, there wasn’t much debate over who I was going to take. It remains an embarrassment that Mogilny isn’t in the Hall of Fame, but since he somehow isn’t, he’s almost too perfect for this sort of exercise. He was a smart and monstrously skilled presence who could play at both ends and who posted one of the greatest goal-scoring seasons ever, banking a ridiculous 76 in the 1992-93 season. His peak didn’t last long, as injuries and the clutch-and-grab era robbed us of Mogilny’s best. In today’s more wide-open game, and without the pressure of being the first Soviet star to defect, his prime might look like a combination of Datsyuk-ian wizardry mixed with Ovechkin-like finishing.

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Mailbag: Is David Pastrnak now the NHL’s most marketable player?

We’re almost done with February, the first full month of this very weird season, and as the old saying goes, we’re living in interesting times. We learned that sunshine is our enemy, had a player clear waivers after getting kicked off his team for fighting his own goalie, crowned the Montreal Canadiens as inevitable Stanley Cup champions, found out that the Coyotes are a train wreck, laughed at the Leafs blowing a 5-1 lead, crowned the Montreal Canadiens as the worst team ever, and welcomed Brian Burke back to hockey operations. Other than that, pretty dull. Let’s see what was on your minds as we open up the monthly mailbag.

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

Combining his willingness to participate in advertising campaigns, his off-ice personality, and his on-ice performance, is David Pastrnak the most entertaining player in the NHL? The most marketable? – David R.

He has to be close, right? The whole Lake Tahoe thing was just so great, especially his postgame interview. He’s all sorts of fun to watch, and he even gets a nice boost from the contrast of having linemates like Patrice Bergeron (cool but boring) and Brad Marchand (interesting but chaotic-evil). David Pastrnak as the new face of the league? I could be talked into this.

On the other hand, his commercial work has been, um, uneven. Let’s have him take some acting workshops to improve on that. Preferably instead of participating in any potential Leafs/Bruins series.

You get to change the shape of the puck to create more chaos on the ice and confusion for goalies. How do you go about this and picking the shape? Change shapes between periods? – Sean

This is the first time in my adult life that I wish I’d paid attention in physics class.

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The Athletic Hockey Show: The season's first pink slip

On this week's episode of The Athletic Hockey Show:
- The Habs fire Claude Julien
- Were Ian and I wrong about Marc Bergevin?
- Our bets on which coach might be next
- Which team's success is the biggest surprise, Chicago or L.A.?
- Jesse Granger on this year's fantasy league-winners
- Neutral site games, the other Gretzky trade 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: Julien fired, Eichel trade talk and a Swedish game show

In this week's episode of the Puck Soup podcast:
- Claude Julien is fired minutes before we record
- Greg reports from Lake Tahoe
- The Artemi Panarin situation
- Is Sidney Crosby headed for all-time top 5 status
- Let's trade Jack Eichel
- And lots more, including a weird new quiz...

>> Stream it now:

>> Or, listen on The Athletic or subscribe on iTunes.

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

Weekend rankings: An outdoor debacle, a bottom 5 shakeup, and yes, the Leafs

Well, it looked good. For a while.

You have to give the NHL credit for that much. After weeks of hype over just how beautiful the Lake Tahoe games would look, the real thing somehow exceeded expectations. The whole thing was jaw-dropping.

Then the game started and, well… you know the rest.

The sun is causing some slight issues on the ice at Lake Tahoe today. 😬#NHLOutdoors | #NHLonSN pic.twitter.com/RgfTvY7slk

— Sportsnet (@Sportsnet) February 20, 2021

The Knights and Avalanche were able to finish the game later that night, and last night’s Bruins/Flyers game went fine, albeit in a new time slot. Still, there’s no point pretending that this weekend won’t be remembered as a failure. We’ll remember the sights of players tripping over divots and a frustrated Gary Bettman explaining that the clouds weren’t cooperating at least as much as the breathtaking pregame visuals.

The NHL is taking a lot of criticism over this, and criticizing how this league operations is pretty much half my schtick. But I don’t think I can join in here, at least to the same degree that so many fellow fans and media seem to be. I don’t see this weekend as being an example of incompetence, or Bettman forgetting that sometimes the sun shines during the day. Rather, I see a league that took a risk and got burned when they pushed a little too far. An outdoor game being waylaid by weather was always a possibility, and after over a decade, something close to the worst-case scenario finally played out. That’s bad, but I’d still rather have an NHL that takes the occasional big swing rather than the conservative, play-it-safe version we get with almost everything else.

On to this week’s rankings, where the top five looks familiar but the bottom five gets a makeover…

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Call for mailbag questions

Hey folks...

It's getting close to mailbag times again. Please send over some questions we can have some fun with, via email at dgbmailbag@gmail.com.

We could talk bigger nets, draft lottery, outdoor games or awards. What-ifs, would-you-rathers and all-time bests (and worsts) work well. Creative stuff is great, but the occasional straightforward question can often spark an interesting discussion too. Don't be shy about asking questions about the ongoing season.
Thanks,
Sean

Grab Bag: How to increase scoring without making the nets bigger, a draft lottery request, young Joe Thornton and friends, and more

In the Friday Grab Bag:
- So you want more scoring but won't make the nets bigger. Cool, I've got some idea...
- A simple request about the draft lottery debate
- An obscure player who may have gone to Alcatraz
- The three comedy stars
- And a YouTube look back at teenaged Joe Thornton, Patrick Marleau and Roberto Luongo

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The Athletic Hockey Show: Katie Strang on her Coyotes bombshell

On this week's episode of The Athletic Hockey Show:

Katie Strang joins us to talk about her blockbuster Coyotes report, including:
- How a story like this comes together
- What she's thinking the night before a big story drops
- Her thoughts on that Bill Armstrong threat
- What's the deal with those mysterious investigators lurking around?
- What the next chapter of this story could bring...

Plus:
- That Maple Leafs collapse
- Has Sidney Crosby reserved his spot in the all-time top five?
- The Hawks and Panthers surprise
- This day in history, listener questions 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: Coyote ugly

On this week's episode of the Puck Soup podcast:
- Reacting to Katie Strang's blockbuster report on the state of the Coyotes
- We sure hope Bill Armstrong doesn't call us up and scare us
- The Tony DeAngelo comeback PR tour begins
- The NHL makes changes to the COVID protocols
- Ken Dryden's essay on the state of modern goaltending
- Should the NHL postpone this year's draft
- A round of O/U/F/L on Maple Leafs collapses
- And lots more...

>> Stream it now:

>> Or, listen on The Athletic or subscribe on iTunes.

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

The 10 types of player/team reunions, and how often they work

Last week, we celebrated Valentines Day by encouraging you to break up. When things aren’t working out for a player on your favorite team, sometimes it’s best to just say goodbye, even if that means all sorts of ugly drama.

But there’s another side to that coin. Sometimes, two sides go their separate ways and then realize that they shouldn’t have. Often, that just leads to regret. But every now and then, everyone can swallow their pride and get back together.

That happens fairly often in the NHL. We saw it last week, when the Senators reacquired Ryan Dzingel. And we apparently came close to a much bigger example, with reports that the Penguins had given serious consideration to a reunion with Marc-Andre Fleury.

That one feels a little too perfect, and it might seem like it would inevitably work out great for everyone involved. But that’s now always how these things go, and getting back with an ex isn’t always the smartest move. Sometimes, it’s best to leave the memories alone.

So today, let’s sort through some complicated feelings about reconciliation by looking back through NHL history at some of the times that a star player has returned to familiar territory. We’ll divide them into 10 different categories, and see if some have better outcomes than others. (Spoiler alert: They do.)

The Final Bow

We’ll start with one of the most common reunions. In this case, a player spends a big chunk of their career establishing themselves as a star with a team. For whatever reason, they end up leaving, and maybe have success elsewhere. But then time catches up, and they find themselves at the tail end of their career, with maybe another season or two left in the tank.

They’re not a star like they once were, at least in any real sense beyond name value, but they can still contribute something. With the clock ticking on their career and (often) dwindling options for where to land next, they head back to the scene of their greatest success for what will probably be one last run. Not to win a Cup, since the team is bad, but just to close the door in a way that feels right.

Notable examples: Glenn Anderson in Edmonton, Curtis Joseph in Toronto, Rob Blake in Los Angeles, Kevin Lowe in Edmonton

If you’re not a fan of those teams, you might not even remember any of those comebacks. But that’s kind of the point – they’re for the player and the fan base, and nobody else even needs to know.

How it usually ends: They don’t put up great numbers, because they just can’t anymore, and the team isn’t very good. But nobody really cares, because sometimes it’s just nice to have a familiar face back in the fold.

Unfinished Business

A modified version of the The Final Bow, this category is another that sees a player return to a former team late in his career. But this time, while the player may not be the star he was in his prime, he’s returning to a contender. This isn’t about a bad team getting some sympathy PR by bringing back a familiar name. Instead, it’s a good team with Stanley Cup aspirations bringing back a name from the past as, they hope, one of the final pieces of a championship puzzle.

Notable examples: Doug Gilmour in Toronto, Dave Andreychuk in Buffalo, Justin Williams in Carolina, Sandis Ozolinsh in San Jose, Dominik Hasek in Detroit, Denis Savard in Chicago, Rick Tocchet in Phialdelphia

Also, Michal Handzus in Chicago at the 2013 deadline, although I’m not sure he really counts since he’d only played a few games there the first time.

How it usually ends: There are a wide range of outcomes here. Hasek and Handzus won Cups, albeit in diminished roles. Williams helped the Hurricanes get back to the playoffs, and they had a nice run. At the other end of the spectrum, Gilmour blew out in knee in his first game back with the Leafs and never played again. In between, you just hope the returning player will occasionally show you a few flashes of what they were in their prime, and maybe help you win a key game or two.

Unfinished Business, except it’s the Devils

Yeah, they get their own category.

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Weekend rankings: A season without surprises, fixing the lottery and more

question we might have to start pondering, because so far this season hasn’t been all that surprising. Sure, there have been individual results that caught us off guard, like the Senators beating the Habs, the Wings beating the Hurricanes or the Ducks shutting out the Golden Knights. And there have been plenty of individual stories that have shocked us, like the front office changes in Pittsburgh or how quickly the Pierre-Luc Dubois situation fell apart in Columbus.

But in the big picture, a look at the standings reveals … pretty much what we all expected?

Kind of remarkable how chalk the NHL has been so far. Top fours by point percentage …

1. TOR/MTL/WPG/CGY […EDM]
2. STL/VGK/COL/MIN
3. BOS/PHI/WSH/NYI
4. T.B/FLA/CAR/DAL

So Florida, maybe, is a surprise. And .. that's it?

— Travis Yost (@travisyost) February 13, 2021

Yost’s tweet is a few days old now so some of the standings have shifted a bit, but yeah, they’re still not far off from what most of us were expecting. Maybe you thought the Penguins would have a spot locked down, or that the Oilers would be running just a little bit better. But there aren’t any current playoff teams that would have felt shocking in December, and unless you had the Canucks as one of your contenders or were that one writer here who thought the Predators were winning the Cup, none of the consensus favorites are spiraling.

Yet. There’s still plenty of time for things to take a turn, and history tells us that it will for at least a few teams. And it’s not like a little bit of predictability is necessarily a bad thing, especially in a league where everything was starting to feel random in recent years. But for now, at least, the hockey gods are playing it straight.

Maybe we should have seen it coming; the most unpredictable way an NHL season could play out would be for everything to go according to expectations. Or maybe we’re just being lulled into a false sense of security before the really wild twists and turns.

We’ll see. For now, let’s get to the rankings, where there are new teams debuting in both the top and bottom five.

Road to the Cup

The five teams with the best chances of becoming the first team in history to win a Stanley Cup in July.

Last week’s decision to move the Habs into the top five didn’t age well, as they didn’t look good while dropping two of three. That opened a door for the Maple Leafs, who almost got last week’s spot and were the favorites heading into the weekend after beating Montreal on Wednesday. But the Leafs looked flat in losing Saturday’s rematch, so we’ll pencil them in as sixth for another week.

That means we’ve got a spot available for a team we haven’t mentioned much this year. Let’s fix that right now …

5. Carolina Hurricanes (9-3-0, +7 true goals differential*) – The Hurricanes are tricky, because they’ve spent the last few years having a good record while smart people insisted that they were a secret powerhouse. Dom’s model has them neck-and-neck with the Lightning; this one thinks they’re the best team in the league. I’m not quite as high on them, but I’m not smart, so Carolina fans can feel pretty good here. That includes you, Gilbert.

For now, I think they’re better than the Panthers, even as I’m a little worried about all those shootout wins inflating their record just a bit and the Petr Mrazek injury has season-derailing potential. He’s reportedly nearing a return, but any setbacks will move the needle. In the meantime, let’s see what they do with Alex Galchenyuk and Cedric Paquette.

4. Colorado Avalanche (7-4-1, +13) – We all had them near the top of our Cup contenders lists, they’ve been pretty good, and I’m certainly not going to panic over a loss to the Knights coming off a nearly two-week layoff. Still, can we acknowledge that the Avalanche season so far has been, let’s say, underwhelming? I’ve still got them in the top five because I think they’ve got as much talent as anyone in the league, but at some point you’d like to see a little bit more. Three more this week against Vegas will give them their chance to deliver it.

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The Athletic Hockey Show: Tuukka Rask's brain cramp, Ron Hextall becomes Penguins GM, drama in Columbus and more

In this week's episode of The Athletic Hockey Show:
- Tuukka Rask forgets the score
- What's the NHL's all time worst in-game brain cramp?
- Ron Hextall and Brian Burke arrive in Pittsburgh
- What should the Penguins do with Evgeni Malkin?
- More drama in Columbus
- Granger Things on the teams that are consistently landing one side of the over/under lines
- Remembering a record-breaking night for Theo Fleury and the Flames - Listener questions 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)

Revisiting some of the NHL's most painful breakups

It’s almost Valentine’s Day, and after the year we’ve all been through, it presents a nice chance to refocus on what really matters by asking ourselves important questions like “Am I currently going out with someone” and “What was going out like, I can’t remember” and “Wait, does this person live with me because that would explain who’s been eating all my food.”

Then you could break up with them. That part’s optional, and not necessarily recommended based on your personal circumstances. But it’s how a lot of relationships end, both in the world of romance and in the NHL. This is called tying your sports story into a current event. I am a professional writer.

Years ago, I put together a list of ten of NHL history’s ugliest player/team breakups. It wasn’t an exhaustive list, because it couldn’t be, because this sport is constantly tossing new examples onto the pile. Just recently, we’ve seen the Pierre-Luc Dubois drama play out in Columbus, and it may not be long before the Patrik Laine sequel gets good. We saw the end of long-term relationships like Zdeno Chara in Boston and Joe Thornton in San Jose. And we’re still not sure what exactly happened with John Chayka in Arizona. This league and its soap operas, am I right?

So today, let’s remember a few more bad breakups from NHL history. My first piece covered names like Patrick Roy, Dany Heatley, Eric Lindros and Pavel Bure, but we’ve got plenty more ground to cover. After all, it’s the NHL, where everything ends badly and nobody should ever get too attached.

Sergei Fedorov and the Red Wings, 2003

Happier times: Fedorov is one of the greatest players in Detroit history, a supremely skilled Russian star who won a Hart and two Selkes while providing the dominant two-way play that helped finally tip the Red Wings from regular season monsters to Stanley Cup champions.

But then: In 1998, after a lengthy RFA standoff that dragged well into the season, Fedorov signed an offer sheet with the Hurricanes that was ridiculously front-loaded with bonuses designed to make it unmatchable. The Wings matched anyway, and Fedorov stuck around for five more seasons, but a relationship that had been rocky from the start never fully recovered.

How it ended: Fedorov finally left for good in 2013, signing with the Ducks in free agency, and the bad feelings lingered for years. Even after his induction into the Hockey Hall of Fame, the team still hasn’t retired his number. But time heals some wounds, and there have been recent signs of a thaw in the relationship, especially with Steve Yzerman running the Wings now. There’s even been talk of Fedorov joining the organization in some capacity.

What kind of breakup it was: The couple that’s always on the verge of breaking up but ends up holding on a lot longer than everyone thought before the inevitable final straw.

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Puck Soup: The return of Brian Burke

In this week's episode of the Puck Soup podcast:
- The Penguins hire Ron Hextall and Brian Burke
- Lots of drama in Columbus, including a retirement, a benching and a brand new rule
- More COVID problems
- The Blackhawks aren't terrible
- Thoughts on a brutal week in Canadian sports media
- An O/U/F/LF on sports GOATs
- Ryan gets very mad about an M. Night Shyamalan movie, and more...

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Who makes Team Canada’s Olympic B-Team, and how many other teams could they beat?

Last week was 2022 Olympic roster preview week around these parts, with various writers offering their projections of who’ll make the cut when the games begin (we hope) a year from now. And as always, filling out the Team Canada roster was both the hardest job, and the easiest.

Easy, because there’s so much talent to choose from. But also hard, for the same reason. How do you narrow it down? Who do you cut? What do you do with all the worthy stars who won’t make it?

Luckily for us, we can bend the Olympic rules to answer that last question: You take those players and put them on Canada’s B-Team. And I’m just the writer to put that roster together, because when you think B-team talent, I should be the first guy who comes to mind. Let’s do this.

We had several writers take a crack at a traditional Team Canada roster, with Eric Duhatschek and Thomas Drance offering up competing versions while Pierre LeBrun came up with his own and Dom Luszczyszyn heckled from the cheap seats. As you’d expect, there was plenty of overlap between those rosters, although each had its variations. For the sake of simplicity, I’m going to defer to seniority and use Eric’s version as the one I’ll be working from.

Unfortunately, Eric has an annoying habit of picking good players, which makes my job tougher. He also took a 25-man roster, and I’d like to make it clear that I plan to try to steal those five taxi squad players away with promises of playing time. For now, though, we’ll assume they stick with Team Eric and work with the rest.

Can we still build a decent team? It’s Canada, so you know we can. But how decent, and how many of the other teams could we beat? Let’s find out…

Goaltenders

Eric’s team has Carey Price, Jordan Binnington and Carter Hart. That’s three good players gone from a position that’s become the weakest pool in Canadian hockey. The days of having to decide between Roy, Brodeur, Joseph and Belfour are long gone. We’re going to have to dig a bit.

My first pick, although not necessarily my starter, is going to be Marc-Andre Fleury. He’s a veteran who’s won Cups and was playing well before last year’s dip. He’s off to a decent start this year, and he even has international experience. OK, it’s not good experience, but there’s nowhere to go but up. He’ll be 37 by the Olympics, which is a concern, but so was Martin Brodeur when he helped win gold in 2010, and we don’t have a ton of options. Fleury’s on our team, as the veteran presence who can win the starter’s job if he gets hot.

As for who he’ll split time with, I think I’d feel OK with a healthy Darcy Kuemper back there. He’s not a big name, partly because he’s in Arizona and partly because he’s really only had one season as a full-time starter. But his numbers are excellent; since coming into the league in 2012, he’s got the second-best save percentage of any active Canadian goalie, just behind Price. Go back to 2016 instead, and he’s in first place all on his own, by several points. He’s never gone deep into the playoffs and his international resume is limited to a single World Championships, so the spotlight will be brighter than he’s used to, but we’re betting he can handle it.

For our third-string, we’ll follow the typical Olympic approach of giving it to a younger player who may be a bigger part of future teams. In our case, that guy’s pretty good, as we hand the taxi squad role over to Mackenzie Blackwood. We’ll save the Hart vs. Blackwood debate for elsewhere, since we only have one guy available to us, but if there’s any controversy here it might be over whether Blackwood is already good enough to nudge one of our two veterans out of playing time. I think he is.

Team C candidates: Cam Talbot, Braden Holtby, Jake Allen

That’s not a bad start. Of course, no goalie can help you much without a solid blueline ahead of him. Let’s see what we can do there…

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