Puck Soup: Final countdown

On this week's episode of the Puck Soup podcast:
- The final matchup is set, and it's legitimately great
- Thoughts on the Avs and Lightning, plus our picks
- Is Tampa already the best team of the cap era?
- Ryan has crunched the numbers and will tell us how many Cups this season is worth
- We say goodbye to the Rangers, wonder what's next, and debate the Kakko scratch
- The Knights get Bruce Cassidy, the Flyers get John Tortorella (we think), but where's Barry Trotz?
- Trade talk around Alex DeBrincat and John Gibson
- The weird new MLS TV contract and what the NHL could learn from it, Ryan's Jurrasic World review, 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.

Mailbag: Who’d win a fight between every NHL coach? Plus history’s greatest Mark Donk and more

The trade deadline has passed, it’s still another month before the playoffs, I’m bored and the mailbag is overflowing. Let’s get weird.

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

Which current coach would win in a 32-man fight held today? – A lot of you, as it turns out.

OK, I guess we have to do this.

If you’re not on Twitter, first of all congratulations on your life choices, and also you would have missed me tweeting this a few days ago:

I try very very hard not to get baited by silly infographics from marketing companies that are clearly based on nothing, but this one is an all-timer. pic.twitter.com/AJfVhKHSGh

— Down Goes Brown (@DownGoesBrown) March 24, 2022

The list came from one of those weird pages where some marketing firm churns out a few low-calorie infographics in hope of getting some free web site traffic, and I guess this one worked. But now people want to know what a real list of fight-worthy NHL coaches would look like, and apparently they think I’m the one to provide it.

I can’t claim to know the answer here, because I have never fought a real NHL coach and I’m pretty sure I’d have about as much success as Harvey the Hound if I ever tried. If one of these guys ever swung at me, my chin would make early-90s Doug Gilmour look like Chris Rock. I like a good laugh as much as anyone, but I’m not getting put through a table by Bruce Boudreau at the draft just you can have some internet giggles.

Luckily, I don’t have to, because you all gave me the answers in your replies to my tweet. So based on your feedback, and with just a little of my own sprinkled in, here’s how this would play out. In tribute to Craig Custance, we’ll do it in tiers.

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Puck Soup: Canada joins the party

On this week's episode of the Puck Soup podcast:
- We preview the two North Division series
- Where the other six series are at
- The Canucks get set to make changes, maybe
- Jeff Blashill keeps his job, and what that means for the Wings
- Rick Tocchet and Gerard Gallant interviewing for vacancies
- Filling out Greg's awards ballot
- A new quiz and more...

>> Stream it now:

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

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

Every midseason coaching change of the cap era, ranked

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

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

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

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

The worst of the worst

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

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

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

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

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

>> Read the full post at The Athletic

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Puck Soup: Cap court, perfect movies, and should the draft happen before the playoffs?

In this week's episode of the Puck Soup podcast:
- The NHL mulls having a June draft before the playoffs
- The latest on the empty arena plans
- Thoughts on the 2011 Bruins reunion
- Should the Devils hire Gerard Gallant?
- Perfect movies
- Ranking wrestling theme songs
- And we bring Salary Cap Court to the podcast, with Mitch Marner, Shea Weber, Brent Burns and more on the docket
- Seriously, Lambert has to defend the Drew Doughty deal and it's the best

>> 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.

Grab Bag: Brad Marchand excuses, my terrible predictions and old school Battle of Alberta

In the Friday Grab Bag:
- What was up with that Brad Machand shootout attempt? My spies found out.
- A look back at my predictions about which coaches and GMs were 100% safe
- An obscure player who was the last NHL player to ever do something
- The week's three comedy stars
- And an old school Battle of Alberta brawl

>> Read the full post at The Athletic

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Puck Soup: Goofus and Gallant

In this week's episode of the Puck Soup podcast:
- We react to surprising firings in New Jersey and Vegas
- The Battle of Alberta reignites
- A spirited debate on the role of rats in the game
- Brad Marchand's epic shootout fail
- How should NHL teams approach goaltending?
- All-star weekend gets a shakeup
- Nicklas Backstrom gets a new deal
- Oscar talk, somehow including a movie I've seen but Greg hasn't

>> 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.

Five coaches and five GMs who absolutely won’t get fired this year, maybe

The NHL season is almost here, which means it won’t be long before we start hearing about all the hot seats around the league. Is Mike Babcock in trouble in Toronto? Does John Chayka need to make the playoffs in Arizona? Would Minnesota’s Bill Guerin prefer his own guy to Bruce Boudreau? Can Jason Botterill afford another miserable season in Buffalo?

But while the hot seat conversation is standard issue in pro sports, it always feels a bit awkward. We’re talking about people’s livelihoods here. We have to cover this stuff, but it’s not a pleasant topic.

So let’s turn it around and stay positive: Who’s on the cold seat? In other words, which NHL coaches and GMs are all but assured of still being on the job one full year from now?

It’s a tougher question than you might think. Everyone in the NHL is hired to be fired eventually, and just about everyone’s job security is one bad losing streak from coming into question. I wanted to come up with 10 names, and honestly, that might be too many. But we’ll do it anyway, because half the fun of doing this sort of list is so that when one (or more) of these guys inevitably gets fired in a few months, you can all come back here to point and laugh at me. It’s OK, I’m used to it by now.

Before we start, there’s one important ground rule: No picking any recent hires who’ve been on the job for less than one full year. That’s too easy. With apologies to Paul Fenton, even the worst coaches and GM usually get at least a year or two on the job in the NHL, so picking a brand-new hire is cheating. You won’t be seeing slam dunk names like Joel Quenneville or Steve Yzerman on the list, which increase the degree of difficulty.

We’ll try to come up with five coaches and five GMs. And we’ll start in the front office, where the job tends to be a little bit more secure.

General managers

Doug Armstrong

We might as well lead off with the one name on the list that feels like a genuine sure thing. Armstrong is the reigning Cup winner, and getting fired after a championship is just about impossible. (Sorry, Al MacNeil.) And even if the Blues got off to an absolutely terrible start, well, they did that last year too and things worked out OK.

Armstrong is a well-respected GM with plenty of experience and doesn’t seem like he’d want to leave on his own anytime soon, so barring some sort of scandal or falling out with ownership, he’s just about as safe as anyone could possibly be. Which isn’t completely safe, because this is still the NHL. But it’s pretty safe.

Doug Wilson

We’re two names in, and this one already feels at least a little risky. But only a little. I think Wilson is the very best GM in the league today, and the Sharks should be a very good team. It’s hard to imagine them having a bad year unless they run into major injury problems, which GMs usually escape the blame for. With 16 years on the job and counting, this is Wilson’ team, and it’s a very good one.

That doesn’t mean it couldn’t all blow up in his face. We thought it already had a few years ago, when the Sharks were missing the playoffs and the franchise player was telling Wilson to shut his mouth. The GM survived that, so he should be able to weather any unexpected hurdles this year throws at him. If the aging Sharks hit a wall and miss the playoffs, could ownership decide that it’s time for a new direction and a fresh set of eyes? Nothing’s impossible, but it would take a total disaster.

>> Read the full post at The Athletic

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Explaining the Vegas Golden Knights

So what just happened? 
On Sunday, the Vegas Golden Knights defeated the Winnipeg Jets to advance to the Stanley Cup Final. 

The win is the latest in what’s been a stunning campaign – they were 500-1 to win the championship at the start of the season – one that’s seen the Golden Knights stake their claim as the best expansion team in the history of North American sports. There’s a very good chance that they’ll win the next round too, becoming Stanley Cup champions in their very first season.  Nobody saw this coming – as a new team, the Knights weren’t expected to contend for anything aside from last place. But they’ve defied all the odds, and are now just four wins away from the most unlikely championship the sport has ever seen.

That sounds like an amazing underdog story. 
It sure is!

So how did the Golden Knights do it? 
No idea!

Ha ha. But seriously, how did they do it? 
Seriously … no idea. I don’t know. Nobody does. The entire hockey world is completely perplexed by this. There’s no logical explanation.

Um, aren’t you supposed to be some sort of expert? 
Look, I could try to make something up, and pretend that anyone could have seen any of this coming. But I’d be lying. None of this makes any sense.

>> Read the full post at The Guardian

Handing out some awards at the NHL's quarter pole

We’re almost at the quarter-mark of the NHL schedule, which means it’s time to do a few things. First, and most importantly: Start wildly panicking if your team isn’t doing as well as they should be. You guys on that, Montreal and Edmonton? You are? Great, nice work as always.

For the rest of us, we may as well hand out some quarter-season awards. Sure, most of these will turn out to be regrettable in hindsight by the end of the year, and some of them will look bad within weeks. But that’s part of the fun.

So let’s do it. You can vote for your own picks right here with results revealed this week on Wednesday Night Hockey. In the meantime, here’s who we’d be handing out the tiny quarter-sized trophies to, based on the season’s first six weeks.

Most valuable player

Every sport that features an MVP award has the same debate over how exactly we should define “valuable.” Some see it as simply a fancy way of saying the best player, while others look for some deeper meaning related to a player’s relative importance to his teammates in terms of his team’s playoff chances.

Some years, one player emerges as the favourite under either definition and we can skip the semantic debate. This year, we may not be so lucky. Because based on the first quarter of the season, Hart Trophy voters could end up facing a dilemma: What do you do when the season’s two best performers are on the same team?

With Nikita Kucherov and Steven Stamkos racking up big numbers while helping the Lightning to top spot in the standings, some will try to argue that they can’t be considered more valuable than someone like Connor McDavid or Johnny Gaudreau, who are the clear offensive leaders on their team. Others would point out that points aren’t everything, and that a two-way force like Anze Kopitar should get some consideration.

Of course, if we’re not going to just look at the top of the scoring race (like Hart voters usually do), we could make the case for a goalie or defenceman. That would bring guys like Sergei Bobrovsky, Alex Pietrangelo and Corey Crawford into the conversation. And then you’ve got guys who’ve missed time to injury, but are clearly their team’s most valuable players when healthy — that group would include Erik Karlsson and Auston Matthews.

Luckily, we fall into the category of voters who keep it simple. The league’s most valuable player is the one that’s having the best season, period. That means Kucherov gets the nod, edging out Stamkos. And we’ll toss Bobrovsky a third-place vote, if only because non-forwards rarely get enough Hart love.

>> Read the full post at Sportsnet

The five dumbest controversies of 2016

A few days ago, I was clicking through Wikipedia and stumbled on what may be my new favorite page on the site. Titled "List of National Hockey League controversies" and promising "a list of controversies which have occurred in the National Hockey League over its history,” at the time I found it the page listed a grand total of… three things.

Yeah, you know what Wikipedia, I'm going to go ahead and say this is not a complete and comprehensive list. pic.twitter.com/zZ3D1AYWvd

— Down Goes Brown (@DownGoesBrown) December 22, 2016

That seemed low.

Let's be honest — on a good night, the NHL will give us three new controversies before most of the game have hit intermission. And in 2016, as always, the NHL provided plenty of new entries to the ongoing list. Much of that was firmly in the no-laughing-matter category, as issues like the concussion lawsuit, Dennis Wideman's hit on Don Henderson and a steady stream of offside replay reviews had fans fuming. 

But other controversies of 2016 were just, well, dumb. They were the kind that had you shaking your head, rolling your eyes, and wondering "What are we even doing here?" Those are the kind of controversies that the league probably wishes would go away quickly, never to be mentioned again.

Well, the Wikipedia editors may forget, but I don't. So before we flip the calendars ahead to 2017, let's take one last look back at the five dumbest controversies of 2016.

5. Gerald Gallant and the cab

Coaching in the NHL isn't easy. You work countless hours, you're measured on results that are largely out of your control and you have to deal with the media at every turn. And, inevitably, you get fired.

That last part happened to a few coaches in 2016, most recently Gerald Gallant. He was canned by the Panthers just months after being a Jack Adams finalist, raising more than a few eyebrows around the league.

But the firing itself wasn't the controversy. The big story here was the Gallant ended up taking a cab.

Yes, apparently losing your job is just part of the game, but having to take a taxi to the airport is some sort of mortal insult. The Panthers' organization had already somehow become ground zero for every hockey hot take, but this was simply going too far. Those dastardly computer boys had probably outsourced their transportation policy to some new-fangled abacus!

Later, we found out the whole thing had just been a misunderstanding, with Gallant himself telling everyone to knock it off. But the damage had been done, the cab had been called and a horrified hockey world is still recovering.

>> Read the full post at The Hockey News

Podcast: What are the Panthers doing?

In this week's episode of Biscuits, the Vice Sports hockey podcast:
- What the hell is going on with the Panthers front office? (I'm pretty sure I've figured it out.)
- Where will Jarome Iginla be traded, and which scenario would cause the most chaos?
- Are the Bruins actually this year's sneaky good team?
- Why Dave hates the current playoff format
- The choice the Islanders are about make that will tell us whether they're serious about winning or not
- More sad defeated sighs delivered in a Canadian accent
- And lots more

>> Stream it now on Vice Sports

>> Or, subscribe on iTunes.

Podcast: Death to the loser point

In this week's episode of Biscuits, the Vice Sports hockey podcast:
- Gerald Gallant's firing, and the whole weird cab thing
- Brian Burke's defense of the (indefensible) loser point
- The lack of scoring, bigger nets, and hockey hipsters who won't shut up about 1-0 games
- Why the expansion draft is going to be so much worse than you think
- Probably some other stuff that I forgot.

>> Stream it now on Vice Sports

>> Or, subscribe on iTunes.

Weekend wrap: Who's the NHL's most mediocre team?

Opening faceoff: Stuck in the middle with you

Most Mondays, we spend a chunk of this column trying to figure out who the league’s best and worst teams are. That makes sense – even beyond the importance of playoff seeding and lottery odds, the teams at either end of the standings are the fun ones. These days in the NHL, if you’re not truly good or truly bad, you’re nowhere.

But every now and then, it’s worth stopping to recognize the league’s mushy middle. After all, in the age of parity, that might be the most crowded category of all. So today, before we move on to the best and the worst of the NHL, let’s ask the question: Who’s the league’s most average team right now?

It’s a tougher question than you might think. Sports fans have come to equate mediocrity with being .500, but that term has become meaningless in today’s NHL. So instead, we’ll need to toss the loser point aside and focus on old school wins and losses, with some help from goal differentials and other stats.

For example, the Bruins would have been our best contender heading into yesterday's action; they had 11 wins and 10 losses and a minus-1 goals differential. But they pulled off an impressive 4-1 win over the Lightning to nudge themselves out of the running.

The entire state of California could make a case; the Kings and Sharks both have 12 wins and 10 losses, while the Ducks are 10 and 12. In terms of goals differentials, the Sharks and Ducks are both at plus-4 while the Kings are plus-3. That's pretty average all around, and helps explain how the Oilers are still holding down top spot in the Pacific.

You could also make a case for the Devils. Thanks to a recent cold streak, they've now won 10 and lost 11 while posting a minus-3 goals differential. Then there's a team you might not expect to see here: the St. Louis Blues, who have 12 wins, 10 losses and a minus-2 differential. Thanks to three loser points and league-wide parity, the Blues are sitting seventh overall in the standings, but they've been a decidedly average team so far.

One of the Blues' fellow Central Division teams nearly takes the title, as the Nashville Predators have won 10 and lost 11. They're great at home and terrible on the road. They've yet to have either a winning or losing streak longer than three games. And even their possession numbers are right around dead even. Only their goals differential – they've scored eight more than they've allowed – keep them from claiming the crown.

Instead, the honour of the NHL's Most Average Team goes to the Florida Panthers, who've been close to the Platonic ideal of "just OK." After last night's loss to the Hurricanes, they're the only team in the league that's dead even in terms of wins and losses, with 11 of each. They're almost dead even in terms of goals differential, at minus-2. And their mediocrity has been a season-long pursuit; they haven't been more than two games above or below the break-even mark at any point all year.

Congratulations, Florida. You win a warm glass of milk and a slice of unbuttered toast. And also, a new head coach. Apparently, mediocrity has its price.

Road to the Cup

The five teams that look like they're headed towards Stanley Cup favourite status.

5. Pittsburgh Penguins (13-6-3, even true goals differential*) – It's hard to say what's more surprising, that Sidney Crosby is pulling away with the goal-scoring lead or that it hasn't happened more often during his career.

4. Washington Capitals (13-6-2, +10) – They return to the top five with a two-for-three week, despite Saturday's loss to the Maple Leafs. Five of their next seven are against the Islanders, Sabres or Canucks.

>> Read the full post at Sportsnet