The Athletic Hockey Show: A real expansion draft

On this week's episode of The Athletic Hockey Show:
- The ongoing Matthew Tkachuk saga
- Has any team ever had a worse offseason than this year's Flames?
- Jesse Granger joins us to talk about today's expansion draft post
- Lots of listener mail
- I get a little too fired up about arena nachos
- This week in history and lots more...

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

Imagining the Kraken vs. the Golden Knights in a real expansion draft

One year ago today, the NHL welcomed the Seattle Kraken with an expansion draft. It was the second draft in five years, with the previous one having been held in 2017 when the Vegas Golden Knights joined the league.

I just lied to you. Did you spot it?

If not, don’t feel bad. It’s a lie that the NHL itself tells, and most of the media repeats. It’s the part about their being an expansion draft in 2021, or in 2017.

There wasn’t. There were no drafts either year, because a draft by definition involves more than one team. It’s two or more teams taking turns selecting eligible players. If there’s only one team involved, they’re not drafting – they’re just submitting a list.

That’s what we had in 2017 and 2021. The NHL hasn’t had a real expansion draft since 2000, when the Wild and Blue Jackets took turns picking (terrible) players. In the cap era? It’s never happened.

Until today. We’re going to redo 2017 and 2021, but we’re going to do it right. Vegas vs. Seattle, in an actual head-to-head draft.

To make this happen, we’re calling in a team meeting of the Thursday edition of The Athletic Hockey Show podcast. Representing the Golden Knights is Jesse Granger, while Ian Mendes handles the Kraken. Sean McIndoe will moderate, and also write the intro. He’s the handsome one.

Here’s how it will work:

• We’ll be using the eligibility lists from both 2017 and 2021. Ian and Jesse are drafting those players at that moment in time, with full benefit of hindsight. So if they use a pick on 2017 Josh Anderson from Columbus, they’ll be getting a 23-year-old RFA who’ll sign a three-year bridge deal and is about to blossom into a consistent 20-goal scorer.
• Vegas and Seattle will each draft 23 players, which must consist of three goalies, seven defensemen and 13 forwards (which should include a reasonable mix of centers and wingers, but we’ll leave that to the two GMs to sort out). Unlike the 2000 draft, we aren’t going in order of position, because it’s just way more fun this way.
• No NHL team can lose more than two players. Once a team loses two, all their other players from both years are no longer eligible.
• No side deals are allowed, and no side deals that were made in real life will be honored. If a guy is on the eligible list, he can be drafted. If he’s not, he’s not available to us.
• The same player can’t be drafted from both 2017 and 2021, because gosh, that would be unrealistic.
• Both rosters must fit under this coming season’s cap of $82.5 million, again based on cap hits that those players had at the time of the draft. In the case of free agents, their cap hit will be whatever they signed for that summer. Both RFAs and UFAs are allowed. (We did make one exception by agreeing not to take Washington’s Alex Ovechkin, who was technically left unprotected in 2021 but who had a roughly 0% of ever signing with an expansion team.)
• At the end of the draft, we’ll lay out both teams and readers will vote on who’d win a seven-game series. The losing GM will be fired from the podcast. Or maybe just shamed, we’re still figuring that part out.

And with that, it’s time for something modern fans haven’t seen in decades: A real expansion draft, the way the hockey gods intended it. Jess won the coin toss, so Vegas is on the clock.

The draft

1.1. Vegas takes Marc-Andre Fleury (2017) from the Penguins

Granger: You’re telling me I can pick a future first-ballot Hall of Famer with the hindsight of knowing he will have two of the best seasons of his career over the next five seasons? Sign me up. Not only is Fleury the best pick on the ice, he’s the perfect cornerstone to build a team around off the ice.

1.2. Seattle takes Matt Duchene (2021) from the Predators

Mendes: Now, I am going to do something a little shocking here. I’m taking Duchene with my first pick. Is he overpriced? Probably. But he’s coming off a 43-goal season. And there aren’t too many good centers available, so I’m starting with him.

2.1. Vegas takes Vladimir Tarasenko (2021) from the Blues

Granger: There were worries his shoulder could be a longer-term problem, but 82 points in 75 games this season says otherwise. Tarasenko gives me a perennial 30-goal scorer to build my top line around.

2.2. Seattle takes Jonathan Marchessault (2017) from the Panthers

Mendes: I’m going to continue with my pattern of drafting centers here with Jonathan Marchessault from the 2017 Panthers. And I get him at his 2017-18 salary of $750,000.

3.1. Vegas takes David Perron (2017) from the Blues

Granger: I’ll take Blues snipers with back-to-back picks to fill out the wings on the top line. Taking Perron from back in 2017, knowing he racked up 110 goals and 287 points over the next five seasons, is an easy pick.

McIndoe: And with that, just five picks in, the Blues are the first team off the board. You can turn off the draft, Vince Dunn. So can a young Jordan Binnington, who was available in 2017.

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Six things we were all very wrong about so far in the 2021-22 season (except, were we really?)

I’m wrong about the NHL. Kind of a lot. Honestly, it’s a little bit embarrassing for somebody who’s whole job is to know things about this league.

But here’s the thing: You’re wrong too. All of us are. And that’s especially true when we let ourselves drift into groupthink mode, where most of us are all saying the same thing. Hockey fans barely agree on anything, so you’d think that it would take a stone cold lock to get us all on the same page. Instead, we often end up looking dumb.

So today, let’s take a look at six opinions that I think it’s fair to say were pretty widely held heading into the season. Not universally – settle down, huffy dude who’s scrolling down to the comments to post “I never thought that” – but at least reasonably common. A month in, they’ve all turned out to be absolutely and indisputably wrong. Only… have they? Let’s see if we can figure that out.

The Pacific would be the worst division in hockey

What we thought: Heading into the season, it was pretty widely understood that the Pacific had one good team and seven question marks. The good team was the Golden Knights, of course, and we could just pencil them in as the top seed before we even dropped a puck. But from there, it was a turtle derby.

Even with Arizona moving to the Central, there were still three bottom-feeders in the Ducks, Kings and Sharks. Maybe one of those teams would surprise us, but that was about the best we could hope for. The Canucks and Flames had both missed the playoffs last year, and the most charitable view of either was that they might be marginally better heading into this season. The Oilers had some regular season potential, but were coming off a disastrous postseason run so you weren’t really sure how far they could go. And the Kraken were the big question mark, looking iffy on paper after an underwhelming expansion draft.

So basically Vegas, and then seven teams trying to earn the right to get swept by Vegas.

But then… : The Kraken and the Canucks are bad. But the Alberta teams look great, with the Oilers mostly rolling and the Flames surprising everyone while shutting out every team they play. And the California teams have been stunningly good at times, with the Kings posting a seven-game win streak, the Ducks topping that with eight, and the Sharks starting 4-0-0.

Oh yeah, and Vegas hasn’t been all that great, so the whole division is up for grabs.

We were so wrong: Seriously, this division might get both Western wildcards.

But were we really?: Are you really betting on the Ducks and Kings to keep this up all season long? That seems like a longshot, and the Sharks are already fading. Edmonton looks like a legitimate contender, but that goaltending is still hard to trust. The Flames are the other side of that coin, as we need to see what happens when Jakob Markstrom isn’t running red hot.

Meanwhile, Vegas has been racked by injuries but are getting their guys back and looking better. With Jack Eichel looming in the future, they’ve still got the best roster in the division on paper, and it’s not all that close. So yeah, it’s very possible that a few of the feel-good story bubbles burst over the next few months, Eichel shows up just in time for the playoffs, and the Pacific does end up being the Knights rolling through everyone.

Hey, speaking of which…

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Working through a week of expansion moves, blockbuster trades and draft surprises

Well that was a week.

Seven days ago, we were mulling over the just-released protected lists for an upcoming expansion draft, and trying to figure out how many teams had already cut side deals with the Kraken. One week later, we’ve seen what Seattle did (and didn’t do), watched an entry draft, and seen about a half-dozen legitimately big trades. It was not a boring week.

Are you surprised? That’s always a fun question at this time of year, because while big moves always happen, they’re often expected. But every now and then, something catches us completely off guard, and those are often the moves that end up being the most memorably.

So today, let’s break out a gimmick we used a few years ago, back in the before times: the Surprise Scale, where we go through some of the biggest stories of the last few days and try to figure out how shocking each one actually was. As the hockey world takes a breath and gets ready for more action in the week to come, here are the stories from the last week that may or may not have caught you off guard.

The Kraken (mostly) avoid the big names

There was plenty of star power available to Seattle, at least in terms of name value. They had a shot at Carey Price, Vladimir Tarasenko, Mark Giordano, plus early access to unrestricted free agents like Gabriel Landeskog and Dougie Hamilton. The Flyers dangled James van Riemsdyk and Jakub Voracek, while the Predators offered Ryan Johansen or Matt Duchene. Jonathan Quick, Matt Murray and Braden Holtby were options in net, and Max Domi or even P.K. Subban were possibilities. If you wanted to, you could have put together a dream roster of big names.

Ron Francis apparently didn’t want to, because he didn’t take any of those players except for Giordano. Other than plucking the Flames’ captain, the biggest names from Wednesday’s draft were probably Jordan Eberle and maybe Yanni Gourde. Several players taken were guys some of us had never heard of.

Was that a surprise? A little bit, sure – our final mock draft had Seattle rolling the dice on Landeskog and van Riemsdyk. But the Kraken were never going to go crazy on big names, especially when most of them are long past their peak. Recreating the 2016 all-star team doesn’t help you much in 2021 and the Kraken were too smart for that plan, even if it would have been all sorts of fun for the rest of us to watch them try

Surprise scale: 30/100. And besides, we all knew that the real value in the expansion draft would come from all the teams Seattle would squeeze in their side deals…

The Kraken don’t make any side deals

Oh.

Yeah, I just don’t get this. I’ve ranted a bit on Twitter about it, and I’ve heard the counterarguments. The rest of the league was always going to learn some lessons from Vegas, and wouldn’t want to overpay like they did in 2017. The timid teams were going to be so scared that they wouldn’t even pick up the phone when Francis called. And with years to prepare, smart teams had already positioned themselves well, so they weren’t scared of losing a player.

All of that is true enough, and it was a good reason to expect that the Kraken weren’t going to be able to reap the kind of harvest that the Golden Knights did. There wasn’t going to be a Shea Theodore available. They weren’t going to swing side deals with ten different teams.

But… zero? Not one? That just doesn’t make sense. And when you mix in just one minor post-draft deal – Tyler Pitlick to Calgary for a fourth – it all feels like a major missed opportunity for Seattle. The expansion draft is literally a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for your franchise, and working the trade front is a big part of that. It sounds like Francis misread the initial market, then couldn’t (or wouldn’t) adjust.

Surprise scale: 90/100. It’s too early to pass judgment on the Kraken overall, because they still have a ton of cap space and we need to see how they use it. If we get to Wednesday and they’re announcing the signing of guys like Hamilton or Landeskog (or both), or weaponizing their cap room to land big picks or prospects from teams that are desperate for space, great. Nobody will care that they didn’t get midround picks on expansion day. Let’s give them some credit and see how it plays out, but for now the lack of trade action is surprising.

Oh, one more expansion point…

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Puck Soup: Let's get Kraken

On this week's episode of the Puck Soup podcast:
- The Kraken pick 30 players and make... zero side deals?
- Seriously we're not sure what Ron Francis is doing
- NHL draft preview
- Luke Prokop comes out
- Logan Mailloux drops out
- Big names that could be about to move in a trade
- OUFL pets that aren't dogs or cats, 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.

The Athletic Hockey Show: Expansion day

On this week's episode of The Athletic Hockey Show:
- Some expansion stuff that's already out of date
- Whether the Kraken will make the playoffs in year one
- Our dream doubleheaders to open the NHL schedule
- My devious plan for it I had a day with the Stanley Cup
- We try to figure out if there's any beverage that nobody has ever drank out of the Stanley Cup
- Chris Osgood's Hall of Fame case, Lou Lamoriello's Leafs legacy 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)

31 protected lists and 31 picks in the NHL’s all-time expansion draft

It’s expansion draft week, which is great because expansion drafts rock. Hockey fans had to wait a generation between NHL drafts, and we might have a long wait before we see another one. This week, I want as much expansion nonsense as I can get.

Luckily, nonsense is what I do best. So today, I want to revisit something I wrote four years ago: The all-time expansion draft.

Back then, as the league was getting set to welcome a Vegas Golden Knights team we all agreed would be terrible, I decided to come up with an all-time protected list for each NHL franchise. I used the modern rules, which is to say each team could protect one goalie and either seven forwards and three defenseman, or eight skaters. I made a list for each team, argued with a few fan bases, and a good time was had by all.

Four years later, I’d like to take another shot at it, if only because I want to correct a few picks that look like mistakes, and consider a few players who weren’t on the radar back then but might be today. But I’m also going to up the ante – once I have a protected list for each team, I’m also going to make a pick from everyone else. At the end of this, we’ll have a 31-man expansion team pulled from all of NHL history. Will it be any good? I have no idea, which is half the fun.

But first, a few ground rules:

– Each team is protecting players based on what they did with that franchise, using “height of their powers” criteria. For active players, we’re also factoring in what we think they’ll do in the future, although we won’t go overboard with projecting every current player to be a Hall-of-Fame lock. As with this year’s draft, players who are first or second-year pros are exempt.

– No player will be protected twice, so if the Oilers protect Wayne Gretzky (spoiler alert, they will) then the Kings, Rangers and Blues don’t have to.

– Entire franchise history counts, meaning for example that the Avalanche also have to cover off the Nordiques. That means we’ll have to veer from our typical “the Jets are the Jets” rules, because otherwise the Thrashers get left out. Defunct franchises don’t count, so any players who only played for them will be ineligible.

– We have no salary cap, no side deals, and don’t have to worry about any no-movement clauses. Apart from that, we have to pick a team with the same criteria as the Kraken, meaning we need to take at least 14 forwards, nine defensemen and three goalies.

Make sense? No, of course not, this whole concept is ludicrous. But it’s fun, and we might not get to do it again for a long time, so let’s get weird.

Original Six teams

I’m going to start with the big six, if only because once we’ve done them we’ll have a good sense of where our all-time expansion roster is headed.

Montreal Canadiens

Forwards: Rocket Richard, Jean Beliveau, Howie Morenz, Guy Lafleur, Bernie Geoffrion, Yvan Cournoyer, Joe Malone
Defensemen: Larry Robinson, Doug Harvey, Serge Savard
Goalie: Jacques Plante

Who’s available: With over a century of history and more talent than any other franchise, we know we’ll get a great player from Montreal. But who?

I made a few changes from my 2017 list here, including swapping in Malone at the expense of Elmer Lach, and Serge Savard for Guy Lapointe on the blueline. Those are borderline calls, and there’s still names like Henri Richard, Steve Shutt and Aurele Joliat to consider. But it doesn’t really matter, because the real action here is in goal. Last time I went with Ken Dryden, but this time I’m leaning towards Plante, and we also have Bill Durnan and Georges Vezina (but not Patrick Roy, who can be protected by Colorda). Oh, and Carey Price, who of course would never be exposed in a real-world expansion draft.

Our pick: We really can’t go wrong with any pick here, but let’s build from the net out with one of the all-time greats in Ken Dryden.

Chicago Blackhawks

Forwards: Stan Mikita, Bobby Hull, Jonathan Toews, Patrick Kane, Denis Savard, Jeremy Roenick, Steve Larmer
Defensemen: Pierre Pilote, Chris Chelios, Duncan Keith
Goalie: Tony Esposito

Who’s available: The Hawks are a fairly straightforward team to fill in, although we run into a tough call on the blueline. I left off Doug Wilson in 2017, but since then he’s become a Hall-of-Famer, which feels like it should get him on the list. But at the expense of who? I’m not sure, which is why I’m keeping the same three picks. Tony Esposito over Glenn Hall is the other tough choice.

Our pick: Hall is tempting, but I think the goalie position will be deep and don’t want to load up too quickly. Instead, I’ll take Doug Wilson.

Toronto Maple Leafs

Forwards: Darryl Sittler, Dave Keon, Frank Mahovlich, Mats Sundin, Darryl Sittler, Syl Apps, Auston Matthews
Defensemen: Borje Salming, Tim Horton, King Clancy
Goalie: Johnny Bower

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Seattle Kraken mock expansion draft: Why we’re taking Gabriel Landeskog but not Carey Price

In the next 48 hours or so, the hockey world at large will learn exactly which players the Seattle Kraken selected to stock the NHL’s newest franchise.

The NHL unveiled the protected lists of 30 teams Sunday (the Vegas Golden Knights are exempt) and predictably, there were some intriguing names left up for grabs.

Carey Price in Montreal was one. Price’s former teammate in Montreal, P.K. Subban, was another. The Predators left both their $8 million men, Ryan Johansen and Matt Duchene, available. The Flames couldn’t find a way to protect captain Mark Giordano

The one quality they share: They would all be pricey adds, maybe too pricey in the NHL’s flat-cap world.

Here at The Athletic, we’ve been doing mock drafts since before Seattle’s expansion bid even became official and what follows is our final attempt to sort out what Kraken general manager Ron Francis and his staff might come up with.

Procedurally, we’ve added one tweak to the exercise this time around and convened a “war room” designed to mimic the conversations the Seattle hockey operations staff is having internally right now. Our war room consisted of Eric Duhatschek, Ryan S. Clark, Sean McIndoe, Dom Luszczyszyn and Michael Russo.

Collectively, we’ve spent the weeks and months (and some of us, years), trying to work through all the expansion-draft scenarios that could possibly come up.

Then Canadiens GM Marc Bergevin threw us all a curveball over the weekend, successfully persuading Price to waive his no-move clause so Montreal could protect Jake Allen.

By rule, Seattle is obliged to select three goaltenders, nine defensemen and 14 forwards. The other four openings are “at large,” meaning they could be at any position. Seattle is also required to select players that meet a minimum salary-cap threshold ($48.9 million, or 60 percent of last year’s $81.5 million salary cap). They cannot exceed the cap.

Price’s availability forces you to start with him for reasons that are pretty apparent. If the Kraken were to take Price (and his $10.5 million cap hit for five additional years), then it would affect the remaining 29 decisions.

On the one hand, Price could be the Kraken’s 2021 answer to Marc-Andre Fleury, the cornerstone goaltending piece that helped Vegas get (and stay) so competitive in its first four years of operation.

On the other hand, if you took Price, you would immediately gobble up about an eighth of your available salary-cap space — and leveraging that cap room will ultimately be the key to whatever success Seattle has in the short-, medium- and long-term. Moreover, Price hasn’t been physically sound for years and the expectation is that at 34, he might not be able to summon up the sort of goaltending heroics he did in this past year’s playoffs.

A further complication: Price wasn’t the only battle-tested goaltender made available. The Kraken can choose from among Ben Bishop (Dallas), Braden Holtby (Vancouver) or Jonathan Quick (Los Angeles). Then there are younger, cheaper net-minding options as well: Vitek Vanecek (Washington), Kaapo Kahkonen (Minnesota) and Florida’s pending UFA Chris Driedger who, if you follow hockey Twitter, is almost certainly signed, sealed and delivered for the Kraken already.

Philosophically, NHL teams will tell you they are built from goaltending out, so that’s where we began too. Spoiler alert: After a vigorous debate, we elected NOT to take Price. The explanation is below.

In his previous life as an NHL GM, Kraken GM Ron Francis was known for his ultra-conservative managerial style, but he has a chance to swing for the fences a few times here and we’re recommending he do so with Colorado’s pending UFA captain Gabriel Landeskog. No other team is positioned as well as Seattle to overpay Landeskog and if you could ever coax him to an expansion team, he’d be the perfect captain — a foundational piece, in the prime of his career, who would help set the organizational culture going forward.

Generally speaking, hockey front offices are not democracies, but ours was.

The majority ruled.

In the end, we made a list, we checked it twice (to ensure we met both the positional and financial stipulations associated with the expansion draft), and we present it here for your critiques and comments:

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What if the Senators and Lightning had the same expansion draft rules as Seattle and Vegas?

The Ottawa Senators’ missteps at the 1992 expansion draft are well documented in hockey lore.

In their first big moment on the NHL stage, the expansion club made multiple selections that were deemed ineligible.

With the 33rd selection, they tried to draft forward Todd Ewen from the Montreal Canadiens. The Senators, however, didn’t realize that Montreal had already lost the maximum of two players, making Ewen ineligible for selection.

Seven picks later, the Senators made the same mistake again by trying to take Todd Hawkins from the Maple Leafs after Toronto had already lost two players in the draft.

Somewhat flustered, Ottawa general manager Mel Bridgman returned to the podium and announced they would be selecting C.J. Young from the Calgary Flames. The only problem was that Young was a second-year pro and thus exempt from the draft proceedings.

The Senators’ draft prep work was done on a laptop, but when club officials rolled into the ballroom of the Gouverneur Hotel in Montreal on June 18, 1992, they discovered the battery on the computer was dead. They could not find a plug to charge their computer, leaving all of their research stuck on a useless laptop. Bridgman and his team were forced to work off memory and a few pieces of paper, resulting in some chaotic moments.

But truth be told, it’s not like the Senators missed out on some talented players because of their technical glitch. The 1992 expansion draft class was thin, stocked only with fringe NHLers and minor leaguers. And because Ottawa was drafting at the same time as the Tampa Bay Lightning, it further diluted the pool.

So it got us thinking: What if we applied the current expansion draft rules — the ones that the Seattle Kraken will use on Wednesday night — to the 1992 proceedings? Would the Senators and Lightning have vastly superior teams to the ones they iced in their inaugural seasons?

Remember, the 1992-93 Senators were one of the worst teams in modern NHL history. They managed to win only 10 games in their 84-game season, for a woeful .143 winning percentage. The Lightning were significantly better, but they still finished in last place in the Norris Division with 53 points — exactly half the total of the division champion Chicago Blackhawks.

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Quiz: Expand your mind or at least your league with our NHL expansion draft history quiz

We’ll finally get to meet the Seattle Kraken next week, as the NHL holds an expansion draft on Wednesday. It will be the 13th expansion draft in league history, or maybe the 12th, and quite possibly the last for a while. And if you know this league, you can probably guess that the history here gets weird.

We’ve had the 1967 draft that doubled the size of the league, three more expansions in the early 70s, a 1979 merger that may or may not count, six different expansion drafts in a decade starting in 1991, and of course the 2017 draft that welcomed the Golden Knights. I hear they turned out OK. Maybe Seattle will too.

What about you? You’re probably not getting drafted on Wednesday, although once the side deals start flying you never know. But you can show off your knowledge by taking this 20-question quiz about the history of NHL expansion.

Can you ace it? Or will you put the “mock” in mock draft? Take your best shot at answering the multiple-choice questions, then scroll back up and check the table to see how you did.

0 correct: You are the 1974 Capitals, and it shouldn’t be possible to be this bad.

1 – 3 correct: You are the 1992 Senators, and owe everyone an apology.

4 – 6 correct: You are the 1999 Thrashers, and did you best with what you had, which is to say nothing.

7 – 9 correct: You are the 1972 Islanders, and it’s OK because you’re building for the future.

10 – 12 correct: You are the 1991 North Stars, and we’re not even sure you should be here.

13 – 16 correct: You are the 1993 Panthers, and your success will no doubt be completely sustainable.

17 – 19 correct: You are the 1967 Blues, and got put in an easy division.

20 correct: You are Ron Francis and should probably stop screwing around with online quizzes and get back to work.

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Mailbag: Hockey trades, rivalry overkill and expansion near misses

Welcome back to the mailbag. The last time we were here, the season was a month away from starting and we were just figuring out what it might look like. Now we’re two weeks in, which is apparently more than enough time to have already given up on a few teams. Hockey is fun. Let’s get to this week’s batch of questions.

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

You touched on the subject of “hockey trades” in your power rankings article. It could be entertaining to impose on the hockey world a definition for what qualifies as a hockey trade. What’s allowed to be a motivation or a piece in a hockey trade? Prospects? Draft picks? Disgruntlement? Trading old for young in a rebuild? Surely not cash and cap concerns? — Pekka L.

I like this question because it’s simple, but a lot harder than it seems. “Hockey trade” is one of those phrases that gets thrown around a lot, and my guess is everyone has a different view of what it actually means. Let’s see if we can figure this out.

First up, I think a true hockey trade can’t be about two teams working with different timelines. Trading a veteran on an expiring deal for a prospect in a deadline rental situation isn’t a hockey trade. It’s worth doing, and it’s a perfectly valid way for two teams to improve their outlook, but it’s not the same category. A hockey trade is veteran for veteran, or prospect for prospect, or top-three picks in the 2016 draft for top-three pick in the 2016 draft.

The second key criteria is that the teams have to make the deal because they want to, not because they’ve been forced into it. A trade demand or a holdout doesn’t count. A trade request is a little trickier, which is where the Laine/Dubois thing gets into a grey area. Laine wanted out, but he was still showing up and playing hard. Dubois didn’t go home, but his effort level was questioned, and after he was benched you could argue that he couldn’t play for the Blue Jackets again. Maybe it could have been ironed out, but we’ll never know.

I think there’s a third checkbox that’s a more recent addition to the list, which is that the deal can’t be primarily about cap space. Every transaction made these days is at least a little bit about dollars, and even in the pre-cap days the bottom line was always in the picture. But if a team is clearly making a deal just to shed cap, that’s a financial decision, not a hockey trade.

To sum it all up: A true “hockey trade” is one that both teams are making because they think it makes them better on roughly the same timeline. They’re not being forced into a deal, by finances or circumstance. They’re doing it because they think the guys they’re getting get them closer to winning than the guys they’re giving up, period.

That rules out most trades these days, but not all of them. Seth Jones for Ryan Johansen was a hockey trade. Taylor Hall for Adam Larsson was too, even if it was a lopsided one. Smaller trades like the Tyson Barrie/Nazem Kadri deal would qualify, as would Eric Staal for Marcus Johansson. They’re certainly not unheard of, but they’re becoming increasingly rare. Most hockey trades aren’t hockey trades, if that makes sense.

All games this year are in the division. So when we get to the semifinals, no one will have played each other yet, and we won’t know which divisions are better than others. So wouldn’t betting on the underdogs at least in theory be easy money? — Tom K.

I don’t know about easy money — I’ll leave the betting advice to Granger Things. But it’s going to be interesting, because we haven’t had a situation quite like this before.

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Puck Soup: Release the Kraken

In this week's episode of the Puck Soup podcast:
- We react to Seattle's big reveal
- The best and worst team names in NHL history
- Rounding up the NHL awards snubs
- Another NHL.com list raises eyebrows
- What life in the bubble might look like for players
- And a new quiz format debuts...

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Ranking all 59 team names in NHL history, including the Seattle Kraken

So now we know: It’s the Seattle Kraken. After months of rumors, speculation, fakeouts and fan feedback, the NHL’s newest team officially has a name. Let’s welcome them to the league by figuring out where the Seattle Kraken lands in a ranking of NHL team names.

As in, all of them.

Through NHL history, there have been 59 different team names, and we’re ranking all of them. That list includes Seattle and the other 31 current teams, plus several defunct franchises from the league’s earliest days, many more teams that changed names after moving cities and a few that evolved while staying put. (It does not include teams that changed just their city name but not the team name, which we’ll make a note of but won’t count separately.)

Let’s be clear what we’re doing here. This is a ranking of team names, and team names only. We don’t care if the name lends itself to a cool logo. We don’t care if it looked good on a uniform. And we certainly don’t care about all the history and memories that have become attached to it over the years, decades or even a century. Instead, imagine you’re brand new to the sport, or a little kid, or an alien from another planet. Would you think this was a cool name for a hockey team? That’s all we’re worried about.

And to go one step further, we’re just interested in the name itself, without any fancy backstory about how it came to be. If your team is called The Rainbow Unicorns, then that’s how it will be judged, regardless of whether Jedediah “The Rainbow Unicorn” Brickenback was actually the name of some local war hero or the owner’s great grandfather or whatever. You are what your name says you are. (And for the record, Rainbow Unicorns would be a fantastic team name. Top five for sure.)

Tradition would say we go from worst-to-best on this sort of thing, counting our way down to No. 1. But I’m going to flip the script on this one because I know my readers, and you all just want to see which names I’m going to dump on. Also, you’re going to be cranky at me for not picking your favorite team as the very bestest name ever, and I want to get that out of the way early because if that’s the way you feel after this is all over, you’ll hit the “meh” button and then Mirtle drives up to Ottawa and kicks my dog. So we’ll begin at the beginning, starting with the best name ever and working down to the worst.

Is all of this just one guy’s opinion? Yes, of course. Is it some sort of objectively correct ranking that’s exactly right in every single spot from one all the way through to 59? Also yes. Here we go.

1. Quebec Nordiques
This is just a phenomenal team name. They basically named the team the Northmen, which makes sense geographically and sounds intimidating without being too over-the-top. Then they went with the French version, which is a rare case of being true to your roots rather than your marketing department.

But the key here is that you don’t need to know French or to even know what the name means for it to work. It just sounds great. Que-BEC Nor-DIQUES. It sounds like somebody is punching you in the face. Which for a 1970s hockey team is pretty much perfect.

Yeah, I know, you’re already mad at me. Pace yourself, we’ve got 58 more of these to go.

2. Minnesota North Stars
Maybe I’m leaning too heavily on the northern-based names or my nostalgia for the clubs we lost in the ’90s. But “North Stars” is just a fantastic name, and so much better than what the watered-down names we got from the move to Dallas or the resurrected team in Minnesota.

3. San Jose Sharks
This is just an excellent sports name. Even Al Pacino agrees. He claws with his fingernails for that inch! OK, Sharks don’t have fingernails. I didn’t say it was a perfect metaphor. Still, Sharks are cool. Do you know what would have been cooler? North Sharks, but nobody asked me, so here we are.

4. Pittsburgh Pirates
Simple, intimidating, and brimming with fun possibilities for fans. The Pittsburgh Pirates only lasted five seasons in the NHL’s early days, and they have the misfortune of sharing the name with a baseball team that’s largely become a joke. Still, this is a cool name and we should find a way to bring it back. Somebody get on that. I recommend Yaaaaaar-mo Kekalainen.

5. Quebec Bulldogs
There’s a reason half the high schools and colleges out there seem to go by “Bulldogs,” it’s a great name. And we can’t even complain about the lack of originality, because this team dates back to the 1800s. The WHA stalwart and (kind of) charter member of the fledgling NHL lasted until 1920 before moving to Hamilton. Say this about Quebec, they’re not very good at keeping their teams but they damn sure know how to name them.

>> Read the full post at The Athletic

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Mailbag: Relegation, Toronto expansion and my ideal hockey broadcast

Thanks to the assorted lockouts, every couple of years I try to get into European football when there are no NHL games to watch. Mostly, it doesn’t really last but I am kind of fascinated by the concept of relegation and occasionally wonder what that would look like in hockey. For all of the crazy ideas that you have thrown out there over the years, as far as I am aware, you have never written about relegation and I’d love to get your take on how that might work (or not work!) in the NHL.

– Mitch J.

Any time I do anything about ideas I’d like to steal from other sports – and I do that often – somebody will bring up relegation. I’m not a soccer fan, so I don’t have a strong grasp on how it all works, but based on my limited understanding, I’m fascinated by the concept. Every year, a team or teams at the bottom of the standings get banished to the equivalent of the minor leagues, while other teams are elevated to take their place. It adds an entire new level of drama to the race to stay out of last place. In hockey, if your team is terrible you might get rewarded with a new superstar in the draft. In soccer, you might get kicked out of the league.

Would I want to see that in the NHL? Are you insane? Of course not, I’m a Maple Leafs fan. Asking a Leafs fan if they support relegation is like asking a snowman if they support saunas. I’m not even going to pretend that I don’t know with absolute certainty how that would end up.

What is your all-time NHL commentary crew? Let’s go with PxP, color, between the glass, studio host and two or three studio analysts.

– Tyler A.

Hoo boy. OK, let’s stipulate that this is all based on my personal experience as a fan – I’m not trying to do some sort of objective leaguewide survey here. That said, my team is obviously going to start with Bob Cole and Harry Neale in the booth. Cole’s voice is the soundtrack to my hockey story, and I’m not sure he ever paired as well with anyone as he did with Neale’s dry wit.

Between the glass, I’ll take current-day Ray Ferraro. My host will be James Duthie, although I’d be happy with Ron MacLean too. And my analysts would be any of Bob McKenzie, Elliotte Friedman or Chris Johnston as the insider, Kevin Weekes or Mike Johnson as the former player/Xs and Os guy, and Brian Burke as the crusty old guy with stories. Mix in Jim Ralph doing the occasional comedy bit and every broadcast starting with a Tim Thompson montage and I’m a happy viewer.

>> Read the full post at The Athletic

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Grab Bag: Want to be the NHL's next commissioner? Apply now!

In the Friday Grab Bag:
- I got a hold of the NHL's job posting for the next commissioner
- The Hurricanes and Ducks are doing something very cool tonight
- An obscure player who beat Ron Hextall to history by three days
- The week's three comedy stars feature the Habs being very mean to the Senators
- And we welcome Seattle to the NHL by looking back at how the league did expansion 20 years ago in a wild YouTube breakdown

>> Read the full post at The Athletic

The pros and cons of the Golden Knights winning the Stanley Cup

The Vegas Golden Knights are the talk of hockey right now, and are becoming one of the rare NHL stories that breaks through into the larger sports world. They’ll open the Western Conference Final Saturday in Winnipeg, the latest chapter in a season-long story that’s seen them go from presumed bottom-feeder to Pacific Division champion and legitimate Stanley Cup contender. They’re already the greatest expansion team in pro sports history; now the question is whether they can actually do the unthinkable and win it all.

Well, that’s one question. Here’s another: Should we want them to win? Would seeing an expansion team win the Stanley Cup be a good thing?

Plenty of fans seem to think so; the Golden Knights bandwagon filled up quickly, attracting everyone from veteran fans to little kids to folks who’d never watched hockey before. But there’s a growing sense among others that this has all gone a little too far, and that seeing the Cup paraded down the The Strip might be the wrong ending to the story.

If you’ve been a hockey fan, you already know how this will go. We’ve already got the backlash. Next will come the backlash to the backlash. Then we’ll have a backlash to that backlash, and on and on, and by the time the Knights take the ice on Saturday we’ll all be fighting in the parking lot with tridents while stepping over pieces of the smashed conch.

But maybe it doesn’t have to be that way. Maybe we can clear the air right now, with a good old-fashioned weighing of the pros and cons. Would that actually change anyone’s mind? The odds are against it. But then again, the odds don’t seem to mean much when it comes to the Golden Knights, so let’s give it a try.

Pro: This is an all-time underdog story that anyone should be able to enjoy

Everybody loves an underdog. There’s a reason that Hollywood doesn’t make sports movies about the best player or team just steamrolling over everyone on the way to an easy championship. Nobody would want to watch that. Instead, we want to see the also-ran or the never-was, who doesn’t have a chance right up until they prove everyone wrong.

Sound familiar? The Golden Knights aren’t just a team that was supposed to be bad. They’re a team made up from the outcasts of all the other, better teams. They’re a collection of misfit toys who were all told they were expendable. And now they might win the Stanley Cup. This is a clichéd Hollywood movie, only it’s playing out in real life right in front of us.

We’re watching the real-world version of Rudy. It’s the hockey world’s retelling of Rocky. You loved those stories for a reason. It’s the same reason you should love the Golden Knights.

Con: This is not how underdog stories are supposed to work

The original Rocky was a great movie. It won Best Picture, launched careers, and set the template for every underdog story that was to come.

Do you remember how it ends? Not with Rocky winning.

That’s because even though the underdog story was inspiring, having the no-name boxer win the championship would have been too much. It would have felt silly. They didn’t get to that until the sequels, because even the ultimate underdog with a room full of Hollywood scriptwriters behind him shouldn’t win it all right away.

We all loved Rudy. But that move ends with our underdog hero getting into the game for one play. He doesn’t become a star, get picked first overall in the draft and win NFL MVP in his first year. If he had, people would have left the theatre mumbling about how stupid the whole thing was.

Underdog stories are great – up to a point. We’ve reached that point with the Golden Knights. Save something for the sequel, boys.

>> Read the full post at Sportsnet

Could the Golden Knights beat an all-star team from every other expansion draft in NHL history?

The Vegas Golden Knights are the greatest expansion team we’ve ever seen. That point isn’t really up for debate anymore — by earning 109 points during the season and then sweeping their way to the second round of the playoffs, the Knights have already surpassed anything any other newcomer had ever accomplished. Forget the NHL — they’re the best expansion story in pro-sports history.

So today, as the Knights prepare to open their second-round series against the Sharks, let’s see how they stack up against the rest of the NHL’s expansion teams. As in, all of them.

We’re going to put this year’s Golden Knights up against a roster made up of the best picks of all the other NHL expansion teams of the modern era combined. That’s 25 teams, if you’re keeping track, assembled through a dozen different drafts dating back to 1967.

First, a few ground rules. We’ll count the four WHA teams from the convoluted 1979 process as part of our pool, but only the players who were part of the actual expansion draft, not the dispersal or reclamation portions — sorry, Wayne Gretzky and his personal-services contract can’t suit up for our team. We’re also looking at only the first year after the player was picked (since that’s all we have to go on for the Knights), so players like Bernie Parent and Billy Smith that blossomed into stars years later won’t help us. And we’re only counting players who were chosen in the expansion draft, not any first-year draft picks or trade acquisitions.

That last bit gives the Knights a slight advantage, since they had the benefit of adding players like Reilly Smith and Shea Theodore from trades, but we’ll allow it given they’re otherwise outnumbered 25-to-1 here. The Knights may be the most successful expansion team ever, but surely the best of the rest of the league’s history can unite to take them down.

Or can they? Let’s figure it out.

Goaltenders

Starter: John Vanbiesbrouck (Panthers)

This one isn’t an especially tough call. Vanbiesbrouck had already won a Vezina in New York, but with only one spot to protect a goalie and a younger Mike Richter on the roster the Rangers couldn’t keep both. He was phenomenal in the Panthers’ first season, finishing as a finalist for both the Hart and Vezina while leading the team to within a point of the playoffs.

Backups: Glenn Hall (Blues) and Guy Hebert (Ducks)

Goaltender is historically the deepest position for expansion teams to choose from, so there’s no surprise that we have plenty of strong choices available. Heck, arguably the greatest goalie of all time was once exposed in the same expansion draft that saw Vanbiesbrouck and Hebert snapped up — but Dominik Hasek went unclaimed, one year before winning his first Vezina.

Still, we could have also gone with names like Terry Sawchuk, Doug Favell or Tomas Vokoun, among others. (But not Darren Puppa — he didn’t join the Lightning until their second season.)

The Knights: Marc-Andre Fleury‘s season rivals Vanbiesbrouck’s as the best ever recorded by an expansion goaltender. But while the rest of the Knight’s goalies filled in admirably early in the year when Fleury was hurt, they don’t match up to Hall and Hebert.

Edge: The all-expansion squad wins on the basis of depth, although it’s closer than it should be.

>> Read the full post at Sportsnet

Grab bag: I for one welcome our new lacrosse overlords

In the Friday Grab Bag:
- Sorry, old school, the era of the lacrosse move has arrived
- We need to stop twisting ourselves into knots over what an expansion team is
- An Easter-themed obscure player
- The week's three comedy stars
- And we got back 28 years to watch Dave Taylor go back 13 more years in an April Fools' YouTube clip

>> Read the full post at Sportsnet

Grab bag: Survey says

In the Friday Grab Bag:
- Going through the results of the NHLPA player survey
- Seattle expansion, and what it means for Quebec City
- An obscure player who helped turn around an even worse Chicago team than this one
- The week's three comedy stars, including a math debate
- And in a week where everyone says Canucks fans are too negative, our YouTube breakdown features a nice man from New York who has nice things to say about them

>> Read the full post at Vice Sports

Ranking the expansion draft screw-ups

So the Vegas Golden Knights are having themselves a bit of a season.

With everyone assuming they’d struggle to stay in sight of the playoff race, if not finish dead last, they came out of the gates 8-1-0. Soon they’d established themselves as legitimate contenders for the Pacific crown. Then the Western Conference. Then the Presidents’ Trophy. They climbed all the way to first place overall. They’ve already been crowned the greatest expansion team ever in any sport. At this rate, we may be days away from the rest of the NHL just conceding the next few Stanley Cups and begging for mercy.

So how did we get here?

Wait, let’s rephrase that: So what the hell was the rest of the league thinking?

Sure, the Knights were gifted with friendlier expansion-draft rules than previous newcomers. For $500 million, they’d better have. But they were still left choosing from players who were each, at best, considered their team’s 10-most-valuable asset. (And that’s not even counting all the prospects and younger players who were ineligible.) You shouldn’t be able to build a contender out of those kinds of spare parts.

Well, unless some of the other teams screw up.

So today, with Vegas riding high and Seattle kicking down the door to get in on this action, let’s look back at the expansion draft and the trades that came around it with the benefit of a half-season’s worth of hindsight. We’ll do this in tiers, starting with the teams that came out OK and working our way up to the worst of the regrets.

Tier 1: Teams that somehow improved

As it turns out, an expansion draft doesn’t represent an opportunity for only one team.

Carolina Hurricanes

Their trades: They traded a fifth-round pick to Vegas to get them to lay off veterans like Cam Ward and Lee Stempniak. Then they traded a second for Trevor van Riemsdyk, who the Knights had plucked from the Blackhawks, and later added Marcus Kruger for a fifth.

They lost: Connor Brickley

No team apart from the Knights themselves did more wheeling and dealing. Kruger hasn’t done much, but the Hurricanes managed to avoid losing anyone of consequence – Brickley was a pending UFA who ended up signing in Florida – and added yet another good young defenceman to an already strong blue line.

Colorado Avalanche

Their trades: None

They lost: Calvin Pickard

At the time, this seemed like yet another misplay by Joe Sakic, who let a reasonably well-regarded young goalie slip away despite Semyon Varlamov‘s struggles. Instead, the move freed up a roster spot for Jonathan Bernier, who’s been fantastic, and Pickard was on waivers (and eventually traded) by week one.

Tier 2: No harm, no foul

Oh, was there some sort of draft? We already forgot.

Winnipeg Jets

Their trades: Flipped first-round picks with Vegas, dropping from 13th to 24th, and threw in a 2019 third-round pick to steer the Knights away from everyone they wanted to keep.

They lost: Chris Thorburn

Dropping 11 spots in the draft isn’t nothing, but given the prices some other teams paid, the Jets seemed to get off easy. The Knights didn’t even bother to sign Thorburn.

Calgary Flames

Their trades: None

They lost: Deryk Engelland

Engelland’s a Vegas local who’s been a nice fit, but he probably wasn’t coming back to Calgary, meaning the Flames basically escaped untouched.

>> Read the full post at Sportsnet