The 2019 OGWAC rankings

OK,​ kids. Hike up​ your​ pants​ around​ your​ armpits,​ hang an​ onion from your​ belt and park​ your​ walker over by​​ rotary phone, because it’s time for the annual OGWAC rankings.

For you newbies, an OGWAC is that beloved species of hockey player whose story everyone loves to hear during the playoffs: the Old Guy Without a Cup. He’s the grizzled veteran who’s been around forever and has probably come agonizingly close a time or two, but he doesn’t have a ring and he’s running out of time. Everyone’s rooting for him, and if his team does win it all, he usually gets the honor of being the first in line for the Cup handoff.

The greatest OGWAC story of all-time is Ray Bourque in 2001, one that still makes the toughest hockey fan you know cry a little. Others include Teemu Selanne in 2007, Lanny McDonald in 1989 and Kimmo Timonen in 2015. Last season’s OGWAC story was Alexander Ovechkin, who was a little young for the honor but has somehow had grey hair for five years, so we’ll allow it.

I’ve been breaking down the annual OGWAC rankings going back to the Grantland days and the format hasn’t changed much. It doesn’t need to, because the OGWAC is timeless. Or so I thought. Because this year, I’m starting to wonder if we don’t need something new.

I think we might need to introduce the OGWACWIT: The Old Guy With a Cup Who Isn’t Thornton.

After all, there isn’t really a ton of suspense about the top spot in these rankings. Joe Thornton has emerged as one of the league’s most lovable characters and will be a no-questions-asked Hall-of-Famer as soon as he’s eligible. But he’s about to turn 40 and has battled injuries in recent years. He’s almost at the end of the road and still doesn’t have his ring. He’s pretty much the archetypal OGWAC right now.

Even as wait to see if last night’s high hit on Tomas Nosek gets him suspended, Thornton is going to rank at the top of our list. Sorry for the spoiler. But there are plenty of other guys who are worth a mention too. Let’s count down the best stories of the Cupless guys who a.) are at least 33 years old; b.) have played at least ten seasons; c.) are in the playoffs and either playing or at least have a chance to at some point.

With the criteria set, let’s get to the rankings. We’re going to need a top 15 this time, because for reasons I’m not quite clear on, there are just a ton of great OGWAC candidates this year. And even a few OGWACWITs.

15. Dan Hamhuis, Predators

Hamhuis is a nice starting point because he’s basically the classic OGWAC story. He’s 36, has played 15 seasons and won’t have too many more shots at this. And of course, he had an agonizing near-miss in 2011 with the Canucks. That loss was especially tough for Hamhuis, since he was hurt in the first game of the final and didn’t play again. He hasn’t won a playoff round since.

This year’s Predators are an especially loaded OGWAC team, as we’ll see a little bit further down. That hurts Hamhuis’s standing just a bit, but he’s still worthy of a spot on our list.

14. Matt Hendricks, Jets

Hendricks is a bit of a tricky call. On the one hand, he’s a 37-year-old role player and his teammates love him. And unlike some of the other players on this list, this really does seem like his last shot at a Cup. On the other, there’s a good chance we won’t see him suit up for the Jets during this run – he barely played down the stretch and is really here to be a veteran leader as opposed to an on-ice contributor. In terms of the Jets who matter during this postseason, Hendricks doesn’t rank that high.

Still, it’s a long way to a Stanley Cup, and if the Jets can get past the Blues and go deep, you never know who they might need. And if Hendricks was in the lineup for a Cup win, he’d be close to a guaranteed first handoff. We’ll rank him here and hope against hope that his case gets stronger in the weeks to come.

13. Blake Comeau, Stars

Comeau’s the youngest player on our list, having just turned 33 in February. But he’s had the classic journeyman career that can make for a great OGWAC story, playing 13 seasons for six teams and never having seen the second round of the playoffs. In fact, he’s only ever been part of six playoff wins, including Game 1 against the Predators.

We can’t rank him too high since he’s presumably got more runway left than most of the other guys on this list. But let’s consider him an OGWAC prospect to keep an eye on.

>> Read the full post at The Athletic

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How this year's playoff performances are upending the offseason

The conference finals are always a bit of a weird time for hockey fans. On the one hand, three teams are still alive, fighting tooth and nail for the right to lift the Stanley Cup. There’s nothing more important in this sport than the do-or-die games we’re watching right now.

On the other hand, we’ve got 28 teams on the sidelines, and some of those teams have been there since early April. If we’re being honest, at least some fans are already thinking about the off-season. We’ve got a summer’s worth of trades, free-agency signings, and this year even an expansion draft waiting for us. It can be hard to keep focused on the playoffs without looking ahead.

So which is it, playoffs or off-season? Today, let’s do both. Let’s look at how this year’s playoffs may have changed what we should expect to see in the coming off-season. After all, an especially good or bad playoff run can influence or even completely upend the perception of a player (just ask Dave Bolland). Maybe it shouldn’t — a handful of games shouldn’t change how we view a guy who’s been around for years — but that doesn’t really matter. A few weeks in, the spring can rewrite everything that’s going to happen in the summer.

This year will be no different. Now we just need to figure out who’s changed what. We’ll look at a few key aspects of the off-season, starting with what some GM’s have called the biggest day of the year for off-season mistakes: July 1.

Free agency

There's nothing like a disappointing playoff run to send a player into unrestricted free agency with a dark cloud hanging over them. Fair or not, a player can cost themselves some serious money with a poorly timed post-season slump.

That may have been what we just saw happen to Kevin Shattenkirk. Widely considered to be the top player on this year's market, Shattenkirk doubled as the biggest name to move at the trade deadline. He seemed like an ideal fit for a Capitals team that was already the Stanley Cup favourite. But a disappointing playoffs saw Shattenkirk paired with Brooks Orpik, and the two veterans struggled to keep the puck out of their net.

After eight games, Shattenkirk was sitting at a minus-7 rating, a performance that his own coach publicly called "not good enough". He rebounded somewhat after that, including scoring the OT winner in game three against Pittsburgh. But heading towards July 1, teams will be asking themselves if Shattenkirk deserves to be paid like a top-pairing defenceman, and his playoff performance didn't give him much evidence to point to.

The Capitals' other pending UFAs were more of a mixed bag. T.J. Oshie had a productive post-season and probably boosted his value at least a little bit while Karl Azner struggled. Meanwhile, Justin Williams played well but lost his Mr. Game Seven aura against the Penguins.

The deadline's other top name didn't fare much better that Shattenkirk. Minnesota's Martin Hanzal heads into free agency after managing just a single point during the Wild's abbreviated run. He's a two-way player who wasn't brought in to light up the scoreboard, but when your own owner is publicly wishing his team hadn't traded for you, you may have cost yourself a few dollars.

>> Read the full post at Sportsnet

Trade deadline winners and losers

The NHL Trade Deadline was today. You may have heard about it. We posted a few articles about the topic over the last month, and there was even some TV coverage.

In all, we had 19 deals today and 35 in total over the last week. Now that the 3:00 ET deadline has come and gone and any trade-call stragglers have been wrapped up, we can get to the good part: Immediately slapping “winner” and “loser” labels on everything, even though we have no idea how any of it will turn out.

Let’s get started. We’ll lead off with the biggest deal of the week.

Winner: Washington Capitals

The league's best team landed the deadline's biggest addition. And they did it without giving up quite as much as we thought they might. That's a pretty clear win.

No, Kevin Shattenkirk didn't exactly come cheap, costing the Capitals this year's first, a decent young player in Zach Sanford and maybe a second. That's not nothing.

But it's also not an unbearable price for a Stanley Cup favourite. And that's especially true if, as rumoured, Metro rivals like the Penguins and Rangers had interest. Brian MacLellan has sent a clear signal that his team is all-in on a Cup this year.

That might feel like an uncomfortable position for nervous Caps fans who've been burned by hope before. But for a franchise that's still seeking their first title, swinging for the fences seems like the right play. And MacLellan didn’t even have to overpay to do it.

Loser: St. Louis Blues

The flip side of the Shattenkirk deal is the team that gave him up.

Armstrong has since hinted that the market for Shattenkirk just didn't materialize the way he hoped it would, and the fact that the deal went down two days before the deadline suggests that was the case. That's partly on him – this is where a GM needs to be actively shopping, not just listening – but at a certain point there's only so much you can do. If everyone knows a guy is available and only one team was willing to pay up, you take what you can get, right?

Well, maybe. The other option is to keep the player and hope you can go on a playoff run of your own. Instead, Armstrong basically folded his hand, making it clear that he doesn't view the Blues as real contenders (a stance that was backed up by the Blues not making any other moves). That's a tough call for a GM to make, and sometimes accepting reality is the smart play. But in this case, you'd like to think that any sort of concession-style trade of a star would have also included a bidding war somewhere along the line.

But before we close the book on Shattenkirk, let's look at one more angle.

Loser: Henrik Lundqvist's window

The Rangers had been linked to Shattenkirk, but ended up watching him head to a division rival while getting a cheaper blueliner in Brendan Smith. In the long term, that makes perfect sense. It's still widely assumed that Shattenkirk lands in New York as a free agent, so the Rangers will probably wind up with the player they want and hold onto their first-round pick in the process. Solid work.

And yet...

In 2005, the Rangers got a gift from the hockey gods when a sixth-round pick from five years earlier arrived and almost immediately established himself as one of the best goaltenders in the world. That's Lundqvist, of course, and he's done everything the Rangers could have asked over the last decade-plus. But he turns 35 tomorrow, last season was the first time in his career he finished outside the top six in Vezina voting, and he struggled through much of this year's first half.

He's been better since, posting a .928 save percentage in February to help the Rangers to a 9-4 month, one that firmly reestablished them as legitimate Cup contenders. Still, when the dust cleared, it was the Capitals who walked away with the deadline's biggest prize. We don't know if the Rangers were even bidding — to hear Armstrong tell it, not many teams were — but they had the picks and cap space to make the move. They chose not to, and a team that the Rangers may have to go through to get back to the Cup final stepped up instead.

And again, that probably makes sense, especially if they sign Shattenkirk in July. But Lundqvist only has so many playoff runs left him as an elite goaltender, and one more of them is likely to slip by while the Rangers refocus on the long game.

>> Read the full post at Sportsnet

A brief history of hockey's weirdest own goals

Welcome to the club, Patrik Laine.

On Sunday night, the rookie took a break from the monotony of scoring highlight-reel goals for the Jets to try something new: Scoring a highlight-reel goal against the Jets. It turns out he’s really good at that, too.

From a purely artistic perspective, that’s a pretty sweet goal. Stick on the ice, quick release, far corner, all done late in a tie game with the pressure on. It would have been nice to see him go bar down there, but he’s only a rookie.

He's also got plenty of company. NHL history is filled with players scoring into their own nets. So today, let's celebrate that history by taking a look at 10 of the more entertaining own goals from NHL history. This won’t be a comprehensive top-10 countdown, but a sampling of some of the more creative ways to put the puck into your own net. And we'll rate them using the following criteria.

Situation: Timing matters. An own goal in the preseason is just funny. One that comes in the playoffs might be career-defining.

Cringe factor: How bad did it look? Accidentally tipping a point shot or having a centering pass deflect off your skate isn't a big deal—that stuff happens all the time. We're looking for a goal that makes you scream "What was he doing?" at your TV.

Notoriety: Hindsight is funny thing. Some of these goals seem to stick in the hockey world's collective consciousness, while others fade as time goes on.

We're not sure yet how Laine will fare on that last category, although you'd imagine he'd do reasonably well in the first two. He'd certainly wind up with a decent overall score.

But you're not alone, Patrik. And a few guys have had it a lot worse than you did.

Paul Coffey, 1996

Situation: 6/10 – This one came in the opening round of a conference final. And not just any conference final—one between the two greatest rivals of a generation, the Red Wings and Avalanche. Everything that happened between these two teams was memorable, from the crazy brawls to the cheap shots to the embarrassing bloopers.

So why does barely anyone remember this one?

Well, here's the thing: It's from game one of the 1996 series between the two teams. In game six, this happened, and the rivalry was on. But at this exact moment in time, the Wings and Avs were just two teams.

Cringe factor: 7/10 – You can see exactly what he was trying to do, but it still ends up looking awful. And we'll award one bonus point for the Detroit crowd's reaction, and another for Bob Cole's fantastic call.

Notoriety: 4/10 – This one didn't resonate the way so many of the future moments between the two teams would. Still, this was a key goal in a game that went to overtime and that Colorado won. They took the series in six, so if this play never happens... well, who knows?

Overall: 5.7/10 – If only Coffey had been shown a cautionary example of the danger of defenseman own goals back in his formative years as an Oiler. Oh look, the "ironic foreshadowing" light on the dashboard just started blinking.

Bryan McCabe, 2007

Situation: 5/10 – On the one hand, this goal was from a mid-October game between two teams who'd miss the playoffs. On the other hand, it did come in the dying seconds of overtime. We'll split the difference.

Cringe factor: 7/10 – You can see what he's trying to do, and in a goal-mouth scramble it makes sense to try to get the puck out of the crease as quickly as possible, but it still looks bad. And the top-down camera view with the ticking clock in the corner doesn't help.

Notoriety: 8/10 – Considering this came in a game that ultimately didn't remotely matter, it's kind of strange that so many fans remember it to this day. A big part of that is the context here, which is that the Maple Leafs were bad and their fans were getting sick of it. Rightly or wrongly, McCabe was already becoming the lightning rod for that wrath, so everything he did was magnified. A few months later, the Muskoka Five were born, things got even worse, and this goal came to retroactive signal everything that was wrong with the JFJ era.

Overall: 6.7/10 – Like we said, hindsight is a funny thing. On the merits, this one probably shouldn't rank all that high. But some of these goals just stick, and this is one of them.

>> Read the full post at Sportsnet

Grab Bag: Late hits, lottery conspiracies, and the birth of Wendelmania

In the Friday Grab Bag:
- The big lie of "just finishing my check"
- Weird draft lottery conspiracies
- An obscure player that Matt Murray probably doesn't want to read about
- The week's three comedy stars
- And a YouTube look back at the last time the Maple Leafs picked first overall. Spoiler alert: It worked out OK.

>> Read the full post at Vice Sports

Friday Grab Bag: New fans, old feuds, and a YouTube clip that ends badly

In the Friday Grab Bag:
- A word about Dan Boyle, Cal Clutterbuck, and when players yell at the media
- The award finalists are being announced, and they're all wrong
- The three comedy stars, including the Blues' newest fan
- An obscure lottery winner
- And a YouTube clip that's light and fun and features the darkest ending in the section's history

>> Read the full post at Vice Sports

A brief history of NHL playoff goats

The Maple Leafs react to the announcement
of that night's starting goalies

The second round of the playoffs has already brought its share of surprises. And while that has some fans looking forward to the conference final matchups, others are dealing with bitter disappointment.

Many in Philadelphia are pointing fingers at the team's trio of underperforming goaltenders. Capital fans watched so-called superstars like Nicklas Backstrom and Alexander Semin disappear for much of the team's shocking sweep at the hands of the Lightning. And despite his team still leading the series, struggling Sharks' star Patrick Marleau has been labelled "gutless" by former teammate Jeremy Roenick.

Of course, assigning blame after a tough loss is nothing new, and the NHL has a long history of fitting players for goat horns. When the pressure is at its highest, it doesn't take much -- one bad game, one mistake, one momentary lapse can be all it takes to change a reputation forever.

Let's take a walk through the history books and spare a moment to mourn some of those in the hockey world who may never live down their moment of postseason shame.

April 21, 2003 - Philadelphia goalie Roman Cechmanek gives up an embarrassing goal while struggling to retrieve his trapper, leading the Flyers to vow to never again employ a goalie with a functioning glove hand.

June 7, 1994 - Pavel Bure fails to score against the Rangers on a critical penalty shot in the Stanley Cup finals, partly due to a great reaction by Mike Richter but mostly because Gary Bettman had snuck onto the ice and flipped the net over.

Read the rest of this post...

A defenceman's guide to handling the pressure

It's not easy to be a young defenceman in today's NHL. With round-the-clock coverage on TV and online, it seems as if even the smallest gaffe is magnified and then broken down endlessly. The pressure is constantly on, and mistakes just aren't tolerated. What's a young defenceman to do?

Luckily, there are dependable veterans like Chris Phillips and friends who are willing to serve as mentors to the next generation.

Find more funny hockey videos at blogesalming.com.