On this week's episode of the Puck Soup podcast:
- We try to make sense of the Bally RSN bankruptcy story
- Breaking down the Tarasenko trade
- Where things stand with the other big trade targets
- ESPN's list of the best goaltenders
- Dustin Brown gets a weird statue, 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.
I forgot to do a January mailbag. Does that mean you’ll get two in February? It does not. Look, if the Habs can take an entire month off then I can too.
Note: Submitted questions have been edited for clarity and style.
My question is one that has been furiously debated amongst my friends for years. If an average beer league hockey player (skater, not a goalie) were to suit up as a goalie in an NHL game, what would be a reasonable estimate of that person’s save percentage?
The only caveats to the hypothetical would be that the other players on the ice wouldn’t be “aware” of the person’s lack of goaltending skill, and the person wouldn’t get pulled from the net despite the clear underperformance in goal (they could finish the entire game). Most of us believe that our save percentage would be infinitesimally small, however we do have one friend that ardently posts his own over/under at 50%.
As the internet’s foremost authority on hockey hypotheticals, help us settle this debate once and for all. Has history shown that a 0.500 save percentage is doable for a run-of-the-mill men’s leaguer? Has goalie equipment gotten big enough for even the average skater to step in the way of a majority of NHL shots? Have players gotten so skilled at defensive play they’d be able to reasonably offset this obvious detriment in net? Would attempting to stop an Alex Ovechkin one-timer send the average person to the hospital? Appreciate your input. – Bryan C.
I read this submission, stared at it for a while, and then had to email Bryan back with a follow-up question: Do the other players on the ice not realize the goalie is just a regular guy at first, or can they somehow not figure it out through the entire game? Bryan clarified that it’s the latter – nobody else changes anything about their game, meaning your team can’t go all-out on defense and the other team isn’t bombing shots from the red line. It’s a normal NHL game in every way except for you, an average beer leaguer who’s never played net until right now.
My verdict: Bryan’s friend who thinks he could finish a game over .500 is out of his mind.
I mean, come on. Yes, you’d make some saves, just by virtue of the puck hitting you. (And that’s all it would be; you would absolutely not be able to move in time to do anything to an NHL player’s slapshot.) But if you’re going to play a full game and face, let’s say, 30 shots, there’s virtually zero chance you’re lucky enough to have half of them go into your chest.
Remember: David Ayres, who had a few decades of experience as a goaltender and will live in history forever as the gold standard for miracle “regular guy” performances, only had an .800 save percentage in that game. You think somebody who doesn’t even know which leg the pads go on is going to get anywhere close to that? Madness.
The only caveat I’ll allow for is that Bryan doesn’t say anything about injuries, and there’s an excellent chance that any NHL shot you faced would destroy you. If your first play is an Ovechkin one-timer that turns your collarbone into powder and you leave on a stretcher having made one save on one shot, I guess that would count. But that’s your only hope.
Is it too soon to say Kakko and Lafreniere are busts? Because I’m starting to worry. What does history say about players their age with their expectations/hype? – Skinny Peet
Oh good, I’m sure all the Rangers fans who complain I don’t talk about their team enough will be thrilled now.
>> Read the full post at The Athletic
(Want to read this post on The Athletic for free? Sign up for a free trial.)
div class="bodytext1 article-scroll-body">
I’m going to warn you up front that this post is going to be heavy on the questions. It’s going to be a lot of smaller questions, all piling up toward one bigger question. And the answer is going to be unsatisfying, because the answer is going to be: I don’t know.
Maybe I should, because I’ve been struggling with this for years. Maybe you have too. And if so, I wish I could wrap it up for you with a nice easy answer we could all agree on. That’s where I wanted this to end. I didn’t get there.
But I still think there’s value in the questions because for too long most of us didn’t ask them at all. Or at least, we didn’t ask them out loud, even as they might have been lingering somewhere in the background.
I have questions about concussions, the players who are still feeling their effects, and the shared experience of being a hockey fan and what that should mean. I find myself asking those questions a lot these days. But to get to right now, first I need to go back almost three decades.
It’s 1989, and I just finished opening up my Christmas presents. I don’t remember exactly what I got that year, but I’m sure there was a nice pile of clothes, books and computer games. I do know which gift I want to turn to first: a VHS copy of “Don Cherry’s Rock’em Sock’em Hockey.” I’ve been getting hockey tapes for years now, but this one is different. It’s the first in the series, before we even knew there would be a series, and it isn’t just the usual bloopers and silly sketches. This is Grapes. This is going to be good.
And it is good. All the hockey fans in the house quickly gather around the TV to watch the hits and goals and other highlights. Then comes a segment of big hits, after which Cherry thanks us for watching and gives a big thumbs up as the screen fades to black. There are probably a few puzzled looks for a second or two, but then Cherry is back and he chuckles at the fake out. “Hey you, folks, I know what you’re thinking out there. What’s a Don Cherry video without the odd tussle?”
But before we get to that, we arrive at what Cherry would eventually start calling “tea time.” That’s where he gives all the “sweethearts” out there who don’t like fighting a chance to turn off the TV. At my house, nobody even thinks of turning it off.
First up is a scrum involving a clearly uninterested Wayne Gretzky that’s played up for laughs, complete with rag-timey piano music. Then comes “two guys that aren’t fooling”: Bob Probert and Craig Coxe. The fight is from early in the 1987-88 season, more than two years before this time, but in the days before YouTube or 24-hour sports highlights, most fans have never seen the whole thing start-to-finish.
Coxe and Probert go toe-to-toe for nearly a full minute, and it’s all bombs. Cherry says there are 71 punches thrown; it seems like more. A lot of them don’t land. A lot of them do. “Way to go, Craig, and way to go, Bobby,” Cherry exclaims when it’s over. I’m sure I was nodding along.
Next up is another super heavyweight bout, this one featuring John Kordic and Jay Miller. Then another non-fight that’s played for laughs, and the video ends. I can remember feeling vaguely disappointed. Only two real fights? I thought there’d be more. Ah well, let’s rewind and watch Coxe and Probert again.
That scene became an annual tradition at my house. Christmas day was about stockings, family and a nice turkey dinner. But it was also the day to tear open the latest “Rock’em Sock’em” and gather around the TV to watch Grapes walk us through another season of goals, saves, crushing hits and, at the end, the odd tussle. I’m willing to bet there were plenty of families across Canada that did the same.
Bob Probert died in 2010. The cause was heart failure, but he donated his brain to researchers who found evidence of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, the degenerative brain disease that’s been linked to blows to the head. His wife described him as experiencing memory loss and uncharacteristic behavior in his final years in an article in the New York Times. Click that article today, and you’ll be greeted by a photo of Probert in mid-fight, blood pouring out of his forehead, while a young fan beams just a few feet away.
John Kordic died in 1992 after a drug-fueled altercation with eight police officers in a motel room; the official cause of death was listed as heart and lung failure. He’d abused steroids during his career and had long battled drugs and alcohol. He’d attributed his struggles in part to his father, who never approved of his role as an enforcer because he wanted his son to be a real player. Sports Illustrated wrote about Kordic’s passing in the weeks after it happened. They ran the article under the headline “Death of a Goon”.
Should we have turned it off?
Even then, even as a kid, I can remember feeling just the slightest twinge of guilt over watching players absorb haymakers. Or maybe I didn’t, and I’m just wishing that part into existence. But if it was there, it was easy enough to extinguish. This was hockey, after all. These guys knew what they signed up for. As Coxe and Probert are pummeling each other, Cherry bellows what we’re all thinking: “Two tough guys going at it. They want to go, let ’em go!”
And then, the fight fans’ mantra: “They’re not hurting anybody but themselves.”
>> Read the full post at The Athletic
(Want to read this post on The Athletic for free? Sign up for a free seven-day trial.)
In the Friday Grab Bag:
- Should fans believe the annual Forbes report on NHL franchise values?
- The only way to save the 2018 Olympic hockey tournament
- An obscure player who went even longer than Pokey Reddick without a shutout
- The week's three comedy stars
- And a classic YouTube clip breakdown of a 25-year-old fight that seems vaguely familiar somehow...
In the Friday Grab Bag:
- Breaking down that whole mess with Jonathan Quick and the phantom concussion
- A word to NHL GMs about making panic moves
- A novel approach to the obscure player of the week
- The three comedy stars
- And a look back at the NHL's earliest efforts to introduce a coherent replay review policy
In the Friday Grab Bag:
- Leon Draisaitl's new deal is bad. Unless it's good. We're not really sure yet.
- Should the NHL follow USA Hockey's lead on a rule change?
- The week's three comedy stars are really no contest
- An obscure player who could really nurse an injury
- And the 1989 New Jersey Devils show up on General Hospital, and it's every bit as awkward as you'd expect...
You hear the term “franchise player” thrown around a lot these days, typically as a slightly fancier way of saying a player is very good. But actually playing out your entire career with one NHL franchise isn’t easy. Mario Lemieux managed to do it, but Wayne Gretzky and Gordie Howe didn’t. Nicklas Lidstrom did, but not Bobby Orr or Ray Bourque. Rocket Richard, Joe Sakic and Steve Yzerman made it, but not Mark Messier, Phil Esposito or Marcel Dionne.
And so far, it’s been an especially rough summer for modern-day players looking to join the club. Among the active leaders in games played with one team, as many as four players could have new homes in October. Patrick Marleau has already said goodbye to San Jose after 20 years. Shane Doan has been told that his services won’t be required in Arizona after 22 years with the organization, while Chris Neil got the same message from the Senators after 16. And as of right now, Andrei Markov’s 17-year tenure with the Canadiens appears to be in serious jeopardy.
Some of those players might still get to claim one-franchise status — Markov could re-sign in Montreal, and Doan and Neil could retire rather than sign elsewhere. But this summer has made it clear that playing out a decade or more with one organization doesn’t guarantee anything, and you never know when a player or team will decide that it’s time to sever a long-term relationship.
So today, let’s take a look at the 10 players with the most games played for a single team that they’re still on the roster of, and try to figure out which ones have the best odds of ending their career as a member of the one-franchise club.
The tenure: 1,248 games for Henrik and 1,225 for Daniel, dating back to 2000
Why they’ll make it: Both sides in this one have been clear: The Sedins will finish their career in Vancouver. The twins have gone on the record to say they don’t want to leave. And the Canucks seem happy to hold onto them, resisting calls to think about moving their two veteran stars to help kickstart a rebuild.
On top of that, there’s another issue in play here: It’s just not easy to take on a pair of high salaries in the same deal. Assuming the twins will want to stay together wherever they play, there just aren’t many teams out there that could add that sort of cap hit. Sticking it out in Vancouver and then retiring as Canucks isn’t just the sentimental choice, it’s the practical one.
Why they won’t: The brothers have just one year left on their contracts, and the Canucks are expected to be a bad team this year and probably a few after that. Trading them today would be all but impossible, but getting a retained-salary deal done at the deadline might be realistic. And even assuming they finish the season as Canucks, the Sedins could head into unrestricted free agency next summer. Maybe they’d want to take a swing at a Stanley Cup somewhere before calling it quits.
Chance of making the one-franchise club: 75%. This will seem low to Canucks fans, many of whom seem to assume that the Sedins playing out their career in Vancouver is a sure thing. Maybe it is. But if Doan and the Coyotes taught us anything, it’s that loyalty has its limits, especially when a rebuilding team wants to go young. Is it really that hard to imagine the twins at least thinking about a discount deal with a contender next summer?
The tenure: 1,000 games on the nose, dating back to 2002
Why they’ll make it: A lot of what we just wrote about the Sedins would apply here, too. It’s a veteran player on a rebuilding team that probably won’t have a shot at a Stanley Cup anytime soon.
But there are two key differences. First, Zetterberg already has a Cup ring. And second (and more importantly), he’s signed for four more years at a cap hit north of $6 million. Free agency isn’t on the radar, and even if the Red Wings wanted to trade him, they’d have trouble finding anyone willing to take on that deal.
On top of that, this is the Red Wings; no team holds onto its stars like Detroit. They made sure to do it for everyone from Yzerman to Lidstrom to Alex Delvecchio to Pavel Datsyuk. Well, kind of.
Why they won’t: Datsyuk never played anywhere else, but the Red Wings did trade his rights. That was a unique situation, of course, but it shows that Ken Holland is willing to get creative when it comes to dumping bad contracts. Zetterberg’s deal isn’t awful yet, but it’s headed there fast, and dumping it on a floor team down the line could be the sort of painful decision the rebuilding Wings have no choice but to make.
Chance of making the one-franchise club: 90%. In today’s NHL, I’m not sure you ever go higher than 90 until the player is actually making their way to the podium to announce their retirement. But of everyone on our list, Zetterberg is the most likely to retire with his team.
The tenure: 964 games dating back to 2003
Why they’ll make it: He’s been a warrior for the franchise, lifting two Stanley Cups as their captain. But let’s face it, the real reason Brown will retire as a King is his contract. With five years left at a nearly $6-million cap hit, and given Brown’s recent performance, it’s one of the worst contracts in the league. Even if the Kings wanted to trade him, no other team is going anywhere near that deal.
Why they won’t: The contract may be untradeable, but that doesn’t mean the Kings are stuck with it. Brown’s deal isn’t weighted down with bonuses, making it relatively straightforward to buy out. New management will no doubt give him a chance to find his game again before going that route, but this team already stripped him of his captaincy. The writing is on the wall here.
Chance of making the one-franchise club: 30%. Brown is a buyout waiting to happen.
Well, that game certainly took a turn.
Last night’s showdown between the Penguins and Capitals already felt like a big deal going in. The two teams are very good, and Washington’s nine-game win streak had moved them past Pittsburgh and into first place overall. It was also a matchup between longtime rivals, not to mention a rematch of last year’s division final. What more could you want?
Well, how about 15 goals?
After a fairly ordinary first period that saw the Caps take a 2–0 lead into intermission, the two teams held down the turbo buttons for pretty much the entire second period, erupting for nine goals. They added three more in the third to send the game to overtime, where Pittsburgh’s Conor Sheary ended it just 34 seconds in.
That's a lot to take in. So let's break it down, with a look at 10 of the more interesting facts from an interesting game.
Washington became just the third team in the last two decades to score seven goals and lose.
That actually used to be a relatively common occurrence. During the high-flying ’80s, it happened 49 times, including three games in which the losing team scored nine times. (No NHL team has ever reached the 10-goal mark and still taken the loss.)
Seven-goal losses continued to be reasonably common through the early ’90s, right up until the arrival of the Dead Puck Era, when a 10–8 loss by the Penguins to the Sharks in 1996 marked the last time it would happen for well over a decade.
That streak came to an end in 2010, when Philadelphia dropped an 8–7 decision to Tampa Bay. And those same Flyers were back at it a year later, losing a memorable 9–8 shootout to the Jets.
(You may remember that game as the one that inspired Ilya Bryzgalov's immortal "I am lost in the woods" soliloquy.)
The good news is that Murray picked up the win. The bad news is that he gave up seven goals while doing it.
That makes him the first goaltender to give up that many in a win since Ondrej Pavelec, who surrendered seven in that Jets win over the Flyers. But Pavelec at least got a short break in that game, making way for Chris Mason to come in and give up one of the Flyer goals.
To find the last goaltender who played an entire game and won despite giving up seven goals, you have to go all the way back to 1994 and a game involving, who else, the Flyers. On Feb. 21, they beat the Canadiens 8–7 behind the goaltending of Dominic Roussel.
The funny thing about that game is that Roussel almost didn't make it to the end, because he nearly got ejected. After the Flyers' sixth goal, Montreal starter Patrick Roy decided to take a swing at Eric Lindros. That turned out to be a very bad idea, especially for Roy's unfortunate teammate, Eric Desjardins. Roussel skated the length of the ice to even the odds, but for one of the only times in Roy's career, cooler heads prevailed and the goalie fight didn't happen.
Last week’s GM meetings brought plenty of talk about expansion, with the league presenting an early plan for what an expansion draft might look like. If and when we do get a draft, it will be the first one the league has held since 2000, and the NHL’s new plan looks an awful lot like what we had back then.
Let’s take a moment to remember what the NHL was like in 2000. There was no salary cap. Games could end in a tie, but not a shootout, and the standings had four columns. Gary Bettman only had one lockout under his belt. The Thrashers were in Atlanta, the Jets were on hiatus, and the Anaheim Ducks were still Mighty. The Los Angeles Kings, Boston Bruins and Chicago Blackhawks were all suffering through long Stanley Cup droughts, as was Ray Bourque. Sidney Crosby was weeks away from becoming a teenager, Connor McDavid hadn’t started kindergarten yet, and Jaromir Jagr was merely old.
All of which is to say that the NHL of 2000 has little to do with the today’s league. So why should our next expansion draft be based on what was done back then? Many of today’s fans don’t even remember how teams like the Columbus Blue Jackets, Minnesota Wild or Nashville Predators came into existence, so there’s no reason to feel bound by tradition.
No, it's time for the NHL to get creative. And we've got some idea to help them out. Here are three big new wrinkles the NHL should throw into their expansion draft plans.
But the reality is that it's not hard to see what's going to happen here: The established teams are going to be exposing a ton of players with terrible contracts. And they'll be praying that those players will get picked, clearing the bad deals off the books. That's fine. It will probably even spur some fun trades, with teams sending assets to expansion newcomers in exchange for a promise to take a terrible contract off their hands.
But what if we went a step further? We already allow teams to retain salary in trades. Let's do the same for the expansion draft.
Here's how it would work. As each team submits their protected list, they'd have the option of also offering to retain salary on any player made available. You list the player, then you list the salary you're offering him at – knowing that you'd be responsible making up for the difference, in both cap hit and real dollars. And to really make it fun, we're not even going to the limit retained salary to 50 per cent. Sky's the limit, gentlemen.
You'd be adding a whole new element of strategy, for both the old and new teams. We know that nobody in their right mind is taking David Clarkson's $5.25 million albatross of a contract off of the Blue Jackets' hands, at least not without a first round pick or two attached to it. But what if he was on the list at $2 million? Wouldn't the Las Vegas Aces be awfully tempted to take a 32-year-old Dion Phaneuf at, say, $4.5 million, with the Senators paying the rest? Wouldn't they have to think about making Dustin Brown their first captain if the Kings were offering to eat half of his deal?
Would a team be interested in taking David Clarkson at a reduced salary? (Jamie Sabau/Getty)
This isn't all that much different than what we have now in terms of trades, but the wrinkle is that teams aren't hammering out the retained salary as part of a specific negotiation with another team. Instead, everyone would have to come up with their numbers in advance. So how far do you go? How much it too much? How big of a discount sticker are you willing to slap on your worst deals to try to tempt an expansion team to take the bait?
There's only one way to find out. Many of these GMs signed those awful deals, so let's see how far they'll go to unload them.
The Kings will parade the Stanley Cup through Los Angeles today, after earning the title by beating the Rangers on Friday night. You’ve seen the highlight by now — defenseman Alec Martinez jumping into the rush, then burying a rebound to end the game and make the Kings the first team in 34 years to win the Cup in overtime on their home ice. The goal ended the series in five remarkably close games, marking the third time in the final that the Kings beat New York in sudden death.
The win didn’t come as much of a surprise; just two years removed from a championship in 2012, the Kings weren’t exactly a long-shot pick heading into this year’s postseason, and by the time they reached the final they’d established themselves as the favorite.
But while the end result was predictable, the path the Kings followed to get there was not. In fact, the team spent much of the season defying conventional wisdom about how championship teams are supposed to be built. And in doing so, the Los Angeles Kings became the not-supposed-to Stanley Cup champs.
You’re not supposed to come back from down 3-0 in a series. Let’s start there, because it’s where the Kings themselves started, almost eight weeks ago. They opened the playoffs against the San Jose Sharks, a regular-season powerhouse who’d finished 11 points ahead of them in the standings. The Sharks won the first two games in San Jose, pummeling the Kings by scores of 6-3 and 7-2, and then took Game 3 in Los Angeles on a Patrick Marleau overtime winner that should have ended the Kings’ run before it ever really began.
Here’s one of those dirty little secrets of playoff hockey: When a series gets to 3-0, we all close the book. It’s over. We can’t say that out loud, because hey, anything can happen, right? Well, no, it’s can’t, we think to ourselves, and history has shown that we’re almost always right. When the horn sounds on Game 3 and it’s the same team celebrating for the third time in a row, we lift up the losing team by the scruff of its neck and gently place it into a pile labeled “Done.”
But the Kings crawled out of the pile and kept on, staving off elimination with a Game 4 win. There was talk last week of players later telling people that they left the ice after that game already knowing they had the series won, and Drew Doughty came right out said that they could see the panic in the Sharks players’ eyes. There’s probably more than a little bit of revisionist history going on here, but you know what they say about the winners and the history books.
The biggest news in hockey this week was Mike Fisher getting attacked by a chipmunk.
Well, OK, maybe it wasn't the biggest news. But it's a marginally interesting thing that happened, and since training camp hasn't opened yet we will damn well take what we can get. So this week it's animal jokes.
Where was I? Right, Mike Fisher getting attacked by a chipmunk. As it turns out, the tiny creature invaded the home Fisher shares with wife Carrie Underwood, and while heroically trying to protect his family, the Predators center sustained two tiny bite marks on his hand.
As it turns out, that puts Fisher in good company. For some reason, NHL players and personalities just seem to have trouble when it comes to interacting with animals. Here are some recent examples of the hockey world's more dangerous encounters with the animal kingdom:
Gary Bettman - Was badly injured during a recent trip to the zoo after instinctively jumping into the wild canine exhibit in a desperate attempt to prevent the coyotes from moving.
Dustin Brown - Has been tormented his entire career by an invisible wolf who chases him around the ice and repeatedly makes him fall down even though no other players touched him.
Corey Crawford - Was distracted during recent extension negotiations by a giant seabird, I'm pretty sure, since when you type "Corey Crawford contract" into Google it immediately auto-fills "huge albatross".
This happened:
The Friday Funnies is a semi-regular feature that highlights hockey humor from around the web.
It's Friday. Why are you working? Shouldn't you be wasting company time reading hockey jokes? Yes, of course you should. Let me help...
A few Hockey Day in Canada thoughts...
- The Leafs beat the Wings in overtime, thanks to their European forward tipping in a low point shot from the pinching defenceman. I could swear this reminds me of something, but I can't quite put my finger on it.
Any Red Wing fans want to help jog my memory?
- Linesman Pat Dapuzzo getting kicked in the face, suffering a broken jaw and 60-stitch cut, and then shoving the ref out of his way to go break up a fight was the most badass thing I've seen all year. The NHL should use that clip in their advertising.
 |
 |  |
The Athletic Hockey Show runs four days a week during the season, and will feature me with Other Sean Gentille on Wednesdays.
Puck Soup is a podcast featuring me and Ryan Lambert. We release one free episode each week during the season, plus mailbags and other bonus episodes for Patreon subscribers.
"Biscuits" was the Vice Sports hockey podcast, hosted by DGB and Dave Lozo. It ran for two seasons; the final episode was in July, 2018. You can find the archives below:
As of the 2018-19 season, my work will appear exclusively at The Athletic.
Don't have a subscription? You can sign up today by clicking the offer link at the bottom of my posts, or read for free with a one-week trial.
My archives from other sites can be found here:
