NHL weekend rankings: A top 16, Gold Plan results and oddly specific predictions

We made it. We’re done.

Well, not all of you have made it, assuming “we” is referring to the teams, and players, and fans. We haven’t made it, because there’s still a few days left in the regular season. Depending on which team you’re focused on, those days range in importance from ho-hum all the way to already-in-playoff-mode. Nobody’s done until the last whistle blows on Thursday night.

But this column, the weekend rankings? We’re done. We made it to the finish line of another season.

After all, this is the last Monday of the season, and a week from now we’ll already be arguing about something that happened in a Game 1. It’s only a few days, but it might as well be forever in hockey fan terms.

To go out on top, let’s bring back the format that you seemed to like last year: Five bonus predictions that will be way-too-specific, a full Top 16 to replace the usual Top 5, and a Gold Plan update in place of the Bottom 5.

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Mailbag: The Gold Plan debate, Hall-of-Fame immortals, and all-old-guy teams

We’re just two days away from a trade deadline in which all hell will break loose, or maybe nothing all that interesting will happen. As we count down the hours, let’s see what’s on your mind…

You keep talking about how great the Gold Plan is because it would eliminate tanking. But doesn’t the whole thing fall apart because teams would just tank earlier, to make sure they were eliminated from playoff contention as soon as possible? – A whole lot of you.

Now that we officially have a pro league using the Gold Plan, the old debates about whether the NHL should adopt it are back. Some are on board, others are just wrong, and that’s OK. But this seems to have emerged as the main objection, so let’s cover it here.

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An idea for determing the draft order that’s so ridiculous it might be brilliant

One of the things I like to do in my columns is to occasionally throw a new idea out into the world. Helpful suggestions, if you will. Sometimes, it’s because I really think I have a genuinely better way of doing things. Other times, I’m trying to make a larger point.

Not today. I’m under no illusions that today’s suggestion would ever happen, because I acknowledge that on a certain level, it’s just dumb. It has zero chance of becoming reality, and even writing about it is a total waste of my time and yours.

Also, it’s completely brilliant. Stay with me.

While I wish I could claim all the credit here, that honor goes to reader Drew, who sent me an outline of the idea. It’s a topic that’s I’ve railed about before: The draft order, how best to determine it, and the related issues of tanking and fan bases checking out on the season. As it stands now, we encourage bad teams to lose as much as possible, assign some odds based on the final standings, and then let a barrel full of ping pong balls sort it out. Surely, there has to be a better way.

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Puck Soup: Playoff preview

In this week's episode of the Puck Soup podcast:
- Greg, Ryan and I make out first-round picks
- I defend the Leafs' chances while still picking the Bruins
- We react to a busy weekend of coaching changes
- I try to sell the guys on the merits of the Gold Plan
- A discussion about Connor McDavid's future gets heated until Bobby Ryan arrives to shut it down
- And lots more...

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

Weekend report: The dust settles

Faceoff: The dust settles

The final weekend of the regular season didn't bring quite as much drama as we'd have hoped for, with only one playoff race still left to be settled. But that race was a good one, with the Bruins, Flyers and Red Wings all heading into action with a chance at one of the East's two remaining spots.

Thanks to some scheduling karma, we got to sit back and watch it all play out on Saturday afternoon. Unfortunately, so did Tuukka Rask, who was a surprise scratch for the Bruins due to illness. That forced backup Jonas Gustavsson into action, and it went just about as well as you'd expect. Gustavsson was shelled, the Bruins dropped a 6-1 blowout to the Senators, and the Red Wings were in the playoffs despite losing to the Rangers. The streak lives, and the Wings will get a first-round rematch with the Lightning.

That loss left the Bruins on life support, and the Flyers pulled the plug a few hours later with a win over the depleted Penguins. That completes an impressive late-season run for a team that seemed all but out of the race in January. The Flyers will get the top-seeded Capitals in the opening round.

As for the Bruins, it's hard to see missing the playoffs as anything but a disaster for the franchise, especially after rookie GM Don Sweeney traded away four draft picks at the deadline for veteran reinforcements and is now likely to lose UFA Loui Eriksson for nothing. The bottom line is that the Bruins just aren't good enough, and changes of some kind are coming in Boston. We'll get to what seems like the most obvious of those a few sections down.

The other big news from the weekend were the two Western division titles up for grabs. The Stars grabbed the Central crown with a win over the Predators on Saturday; the Kings had a chance to do the same against the Jets, but blew a 3-0 lead and dropped a shootout decision to leave the door open for the Ducks. They strolled through it, beating the Capitals last night to win the division and set up a first-round matchup with the Predators. The Kings are stuck with a much tougher matchup with the Sharks, and have also squandered home ice in any second-round meeting with the Ducks. Hockey fans know better than to get ahead of ourselves, but that Kings loss to the Jets feels huge.

The full playoff bracket and schedule is now set, and can be found here.

Race to the Cup

The five teams with the best shot at winning the Stanley Cup.

5. Los Angeles Kings (48-28-6, +31 true goals differential)—Yes, still ahead of the Ducks, if only barely. Yes, I can see myself really regretting this about two weeks from now.

4. St. louis Blues (49-24-9, +22)—You always knew their path out of the West would go through Chicago. But in the first round? Ouch.

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The many objections to the Gold Plan, and why they're wrong

Welcome to the bandwagon, Shane Doan.

This week, the Coyotes’ captain made some headlines by suggesting a radical solution to the NHL’s late-season problem of teams tanking and fans rooting for losses.

Many fans will recognize Doan’s suggestion as The Gold Plan that’s been floating around for years. Many more are seeing it for the first time.

The idea goes like this: Instead of a draft lottery system that encourages losing by awarding the best odds to the league’s worst teams, you’d determine the draft order based on the number of points each team earned after being eliminated from the playoffs. Once you’re mathematically out of the playoff hunt, you start the clock on banking points towards your spot in the draft order. The team with the most post-elimination points get the top pick, and so on down through the rest of the non-playoff teams.

The beauty of the plan is that it still weights the odds of getting the first pick heavily towards the league's worst teams, because they'll be eliminated first. In a typical season, the league's worst teams will get about ten games or so to rack up their points, while teams that come close to the playoffs will only get a couple (and sometimes none at all). We're still offering a hand up to the teams that need it most. It's just that now, they have to earn that prize on the ice. And their fans would be able to feel good about wins again.

Doan didn't invent the concept – the idea became widely known back in 20012 when a then-student named Adam Gold presented it at the Sloan Analytics conference, which is why it's typically referred to as the Gold Plan and not the Doan Plan.

Others have made similar proposals over the years, and the basic idea has been gaining converts ever since. Who invented what isn't all that important, since nobody's stealing anything here. Sometimes, multiple people just happen to come up with a similar idea, especially when it's a very good one. Which the Gold Plan is.

Sadly, not everyone agrees. Whenever the idea is mentioned, there's an inevitable pushback, as hockey fans do that hockey fan thing where they try to come up with as many reasons as possible to resist change. And some of those reasons are legitimate. After all, the Gold Plan is clever, but it's certainly not perfect.

So today, let's walk through some of the most common objections to the idea – and why you should jump on the bandwagon with Shane Doan and the rest of us anyway.

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Weekend report: The Pacific's big three

Faceoff: Pumping the Shark

Last week, I wrote about the top to (almost) bottom dominance of the Central Division, with a focus on the division's Big Three of Chicago, St. Louis and Dallas. Among the responses to that post came a pushback that would have seemed unthinkable just a few months ago: Hey, what about the Pacific?

Now to be clear, nobody is arguing that the Pacific has any sort of claim on the "best division" status—it may even be the worst, given how awful its bottom four teams are. But some readers wanted to know if its top three of the Kings, Ducks and Sharks are right up there with the Central's—and maybe even better?

The short answer: Huh. Yeah, they just might be.

The long answer starts over the Christmas holidays, when the division looked like a trainwreck. The Kings were good—so good, in fact, that they'd all but been handed the division crown. The second-place Sharks were fine, but were just one point up on Colorado, the Central's sixth-best team. The Canucks, Flames, Coyotes and Oilers were all scraping along, each losing more than they'd won. And all the way at the bottom of the conference sat the Ducks, the unmitigated disaster of the season's first half.

We already know what happened with Anaheim, whose refusal to panic and serve up the head of coach Bruce Boudreau paid off with a second-half surge back into the league's top tier. That changed the tone of the division, even as the four bad teams continued to plummet. By early March, the Ducks had pulled even with Los Angeles atop the division, and that seemed to light a fire under the Kings, who spent most of March heating up enough to regain the lead.

So sure, the Kings look great, as they almost always have during the Darryl Sutter era. And for the past few months, the Ducks have been just as good or better. We know all that. But the interesting team here is San Jose.

By now, the Sharks' narrative is well-established. They were a great team for a long time, but just couldn't get it done in the playoffs. Everyone has their theories as to why that was. Character? Heart? Joe Thornton, somehow, even though he's their best player? Or maybe just a good team whose only real flaw was that it didn't get the bounces at the right time. Whatever it was, everyone could agree that the Sharks' window had slammed shut with their 2014 collapse against the Kings followed by last year's playoff miss.

Well, almost everyone—GM Doug Wilson never seemed quite sure whether or not he was rebuilding. The team wanted to trade Thornton and Patrick Marleau, but didn't. Wilson said the rebuild was on, then kept bringing in veterans. You never really knew what to expect from these new-but-old Sharks, except that their days among the league's elite were done.

As the Sharks are proving, the Thornton/Marleau era isn't done just yet. –Photo by Neville E. Guard-USA TODAY Sports

But so far this year, they're... well, we're still not quite sure what they are. They've lost three straight, leaving them sitting third in the Pacific at 41-28-6, four points back of the Ducks and seven behind the Kings. That's still good enough to have them hovering right around the league's top ten overall, in a log jam with other good-but-not-great teams like the Islanders and Bruins. But if you prefer your numbers to come in the fancy stats variety, the Sharks start to look very good. And the rest of the league seems to be warming up to their chances; there's been a decided increase in "don't sleep on the Sharks" chatter lately.

But the biggest question still looms: Can they beat one of their California rivals in round one? And can they do it with enough left in the tank to beat the other one in round two? They'll probably have to in order to reach the conference final. And this is where all those past playoff ghosts start to haunt the conversation again, because the Sharks have never been the team you want to pick to exceed postseason expectations.

But maybe that's the whole point. We've always expected too much of the Sharks. What better way for the Thornton/Marleau era to end than to go into the playoffs as a clear underdog for the first time in over a decade, and shock the world?

Or maybe not. Either way, the top three in the Pacific can look scary good. And yes, maybe even Central-scary good.

Race to the Cup

The five teams with the best shot at winning the Stanley Cup.

5. Chicago Blackhawks (44-25-7, +25 true goals differential)—Every time I say nice things about the Blackhawks, smart hockey people want to whisper in my ear that this year's team isn't as good as we all think it is. Just thought I'd get that on the record. And while we're at it, Corey Crawford is no sure thing to be back in time for the playoffs.

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