On this week's episode of the Puck Soup podcast:
- Free agency winners and losers
- Small trades that have been made
- Big ones that haven't (yet/)
- Changes in the women's pro game
- And more...
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On this week's episode of the Puck Soup podcast:
- Ryan and I discuss who should get the HHOF call, then reconvene and react after the announcement is made
- The OEL buyout, Bratt signing, Karlsson trade maybe coming
- What's the deal with Matvei Michkov?
- We try the Immaculate Grid game, NHL style
- 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.
No bonus top five this week because I’m cranky. Instead, I’m going to ask you to let me vent for a bit.
I’m a bit of an NHL history buff. You may have picked up on that based on roughly half the columns I post here. I also wrote a book on the subject. I’m not an expert, but I feel like I know my stuff.
I’ve never seen anything like this Bruce Boudreau story.
Never. And I lived through the era of Harold Ballard, an owner so mean and awful that he once asked Roger Neilson to wear a paper bag over his head. Neilson told him to get stuffed, and Ballard backed down, because even the worst of the worst are still capable of realizing when they've gone too far.
The Canucks went too far. Way too far. Their treatment of Boudreau over the last few months went from comical to bizarre to outright cruel, which is where it’s been for weeks now. Yesterday’s announcement of the inevitable was just one last act in a bad farce. The way this was handled makes Gerard Gallant’s infamous taxi look like a stretch limo.
Look, coaches get fired. It’s never pleasant, but it happens, to almost everyone, and it’s part of the game. You could absolutely make the case that Boudreau deserved a pink slip based on how this season went, or at least that the coach taking the fall for a flawed roster would be standard operating procedure in plenty of places around the league. That’s fine. Maybe Rick Tocchet will be the better fit.
But there’s no reason to do it like this. None. We’ve known the coaching change was coming. We knew who’d be replacing him. The exact date it would happen leaked out a while ago. And yet the team still sent Boudreau out there, night after night, as dead coach walking. Just fire him! If Tocchet can’t take the job right away because of TV commitments or whatever, then let Mike Yeo run the bench for a few games on an interim basis. There’s no reason to let a respected coach with over 600 career wins who almost saved your season last year twist in the wind like this. No reason to have Jim Rutherford periodically show up to kick him when he’s down. No reason to send him out there for what everyone knew would be his final games, then watch him have to clarify to the media that he hadn’t actually been fired yet.
>> Read the full post at The Athletic
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On this week's episode of the Puck Soup podcast:
- We go through various surprising trends around the league and wonder if they can last
- The market for defensemen heats up
- The Shane Wright situation nears an end
- Evgeni Malkin's milestone, and debating his place in history
- Which numbers should the Hawks retire?
- Some soccer talk because there's a tournament or something
- 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.
On this week's episode of The Athletic Hockey Show:
- We discuss the first edition of the tank index
- Why an Erik Karlsson return in Ottawa would be unprecedented
- The GM meetings discuss a rule change I somehow don't hate
- Jesse Granger on Vezina props, including one star with surprisingly long odds
- A listener had a problem with the Borje Salming ceremony
- Plus this week in history 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)
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.
>> Read the full post at The Athletic
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On this week's episode of The Athletic Hockey Show:
- Connor McDavid throws and elbow and Nathan MacKinnon flips his lid
- A brief history of gentlemanly stars getting in trouble
- The Sabres... win?
- The Flyers steal the crown of the league's biggest trainwreck
- A discussion about Erik Karlsson's apple goes off the rails
- We talk about some of those weird NHL rules
- April Fools, EBUG history, Civ's burner account writes in 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)
There was a time when fans could get away with not caring about player salaries. Except in an indirect way, it wasn’t their money, so who really cared if some rich owner was paying a bit too much for a third-line center? Maybe he missed a payment on one of his yachts, but otherwise, no harm no foul.
Then the NHL became a hard cap league. Today, salaries – or more specifically, cap hits – are absolutely crucial. Squeezing as much value as possible into an artificially limited salary structure is the key to building and maintaining a contender, and even one big mistake can derail a roster. In today’s NHL, as I’ve phrased it before, a good player with a bad contract isn’t a good player.
We’ve had some fun over the years with some of the league’s worst signings, even building an entire cap-compliant roster out of them. But for the most part, those were the contracts nobody argues about. We all know that Brent Seabrook’s deal is bad. Nobody’s calling Bobby Ryan a value contract these days. We’ve beaten Milan Lucic’s deal into the ground, picked it up and dusted it off, then beaten it down again. With very few exceptions, even the most diehard fans aren’t defending those kind of deals anymore.
Other contracts aren’t as simple, and those are the ones we’re going to focus on here. Welcome to Salary Cap Court, where we’ll weigh the pros and cons of five contracts that might be bad, but maybe might not.
To be clear, every contract that makes its way to cap court will be questionable; there won’t be any good deals here. But we want to know if they’re outright bad, or merely not great. We’ll make the case for both sides of the argument, and then we’ll render a verdict, passing judgment on whatever’s left of a deal and deciding once and for all whether it really deserves to have the dreaded “bad contract” label slapped on it.
Make sense? Then be seated, because Salary Cap Court is in session. Let’s bring out our first defendant.
The details: Eight years and a cap hit of $11.5 million, thanks to an extension signed days before he would have become an unrestricted free agent last summer.
The case that it’s a bad contract: Karlsson has two Norris Trophies, should maybe have more, and might have been the very best defenseman of the 2010s. But everything in that sentence is in the past tense, and with his new contract only kicking in this year, the present and future are all that matters. The reality is that he didn’t play at a truly elite level in his last year in Ottawa, he didn’t live up to the hype in his first year in San Jose, and he hasn’t been especially great this year.
If you’re trying to figure out why, it’s not hard to round up the usual suspects: injury and age. He had a groin injury last year that resulted in surgery, and a heel problem before that. Mix in the fact that he turns 30 at the end of this season, and it’s not hard to wonder if his recent decline is permanent. That doesn’t mean he can’t still be a solid player, or even a very good one. But he’s being paid like he’s the very best defenseman in the league, and it sure looks like he isn’t that player anymore.
The case that it might be OK: Injuries heal, and we’ve already seen Karlsson overcome a more serious scare in 2013, when he missed most of the season with a sliced Achilles. He came back from that just fine, posting three straight first-team all-star seasons. As for age, we’ve seen plenty of superstar blueliners play into their late-30s and beyond, including Ray Bourque, Al MacInnis, Chris Chelios and Nicklas Lidstrom. Karlsson’s always been a great skater, but his most important talent is his vision and instinct, and that won’t fade even if he loses a half-step.
Sure, he’s been disappointing this season. So has everyone on the Sharks. The year has been a disaster. We can’t just throw out the whole season, but we shouldn’t lean on it too much either. Last year might be a better example of what Karlsson’s floor could be, and it’s worth remembering that even in an off-year his underlying numbers were decent and he still played well enough to show up on a handful of Norris ballots. If that’s the worst-case, it’s not bad. And his best-case looks a lot like his 2017 playoff run, when he almost managed to drag a very average Senators team all the way to the final. That wasn’t that long ago, and he was fighting through injuries then too.
The bottom line is that Karlsson is a generational talent, and when he’s fully healthy he’s basically been unstoppable. Every long-term deal is a gamble in some sense, but if you’re going to roll the dice, this is exactly the sort of player you do it on.
Key comparisons: Drew Doughty is the obvious one, with a similar eight-year deal that carries an $11 million hit. We’d also want to look at Roman Josi (8 x $9 million) and teammate Brent Burns (8 x $8 million). There’s also John Carlson, who signed his 8-year, $8 million cap hit deal at a similar age and is delivering the sort of dynamic Norris-caliber season Karlsson used to, but for a lot less money.
The verdict: The case against the Karlsson deal is a strong one, but I’m not sure it goes beyond a reasonable doubt. The Sharks are in cap hell, and we’ll watch Karlsson closely over the next season or so, but for now we’ll tentatively say: not a bad contract. Yet.
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In this week's episode of the Puck Soup podcast:
- Greg and I are in Vancouver for the draft
- Reviewing the NHL awards, both the show and the ballots
- My take on the new replay and challenge rules, and why they're not great but could have been worse
- Erik Karlsson gets a big new deal
- Thoughts on Mitch Marner, Corey Perry, Jacob Trouba, Kevin Hayes and lots more...
>> Stream it now:
>> Or, subscribe on iTunes.
>> Get weekly mailbags and special bonus episodes by supporting Puck Soup on Patreon for $5.
Hey, remember when the Blues and Bruins were playing hockey? Me neither. The summer is here, we’ve already had a big trade and a major re-signing and it’s all systems go on the offseason. Let’s get wild.
But what kind of wild? The good kind? The bad kind? The hopeless kind? That’s what remains to be seen. Every offseason has its own flavor and we’re not sure what this one will look like quite yet. Maybe we’ll see a ton of trades. Maybe GMs will focus on free agency instead. Maybe we’ll see offer sheets and holdouts and blockbusters or maybe we’ll get none of those things.
Time will tell. But while every offseason is different, that doesn’t mean we should just ignore what’s happened in the past. Recent history can offer some important lessons on what to expect and how best to handle the scenarios we may see develop. Today, let’s look back at five key lessons from the 2018 offseason and how they might apply to what’s going to happen over the next few weeks and months.
It’s become conventional wisdom in the hockey world that the days around the NHL draft make for the best time for blockbuster trades. The rest of the year, we constantly hear about how trading is too hard for these poor GMs, who have to deal with a salary cap and analytics and no-trade clauses that they handed out. The deadline isn’t what it used to be, you can’t do anything at all earlier in the season and nobody wants to make a move at training camp. But the draft? That’s the one place you can get things done because all the league’s GMs are together in one building and they almost all have cap room to work with.
And for years, that was all pretty much true. Pick a big offseason trade – Hall for Larsson, Subban for Weber, Kessel to the Penguins, Drouin for Sergachev – and chances are it happened either at the draft or in the days immediately after. By the time we got into July, the window for big deals had closed.
But last year, that didn’t happen. Draft week was actually remarkably quiet on the trading front, with only the Max Domi/Alex Galchenyuk deal on June 15 making any real waves in the days leading up to the draft and the five-player Flames/Hurricanes deal going down on the draft floor. There were a handful of smaller deals, including Philipp Grubauer and Mike Hoffman (twice), but that was about it.
That left several big names still on the block, including Ryan O’Reilly, Jeff Skinner, Max Pacioretty and Erik Karlsson. All four would be dealt, but those trades were spread out over the course of the summer. O’Reilly went first, on July 1, largely because that was the last day the Sabres could move him before having to pay a $7.5 million bonus. Skinner waited until August. And Pacioretty and Karlsson made it all the way to September before their teams finally pulled the trigger.
The results were mixed. The returns on Karlsson and Skinner were viewed as underwhelming at the time. The O’Reilly deal seemed OK for both teams, although it hasn’t aged well for Buffalo. And many of us thought the Habs did surprisingly well on a player they all but had to move. The lesson here isn’t that waiting is the best play, at least in all cases. But it’s an option and maybe a better one than we usually think.
Who could learn it: Any GM with a big-name player who could be moved. That list could include David Poile (Subban again, or Kyle Turris), Kyle Dubas (Nazem Kadri) and Jim Rutherford (pretty much everyone). Ideally, they might prefer to make those sorts of moves before the draft, like Kevin Cheveldayoff just did with Jacob Trouba, since that allows you to nail down your cap situation ahead of free agency and you don’t have to wait a year to use any picks you acquire. But if the offers aren’t there, or the situation still feels unsettled, then waiting is a valid option. It might even work out for the better.
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The offseason is here. Let’s bring the chaos.
Longtime readers know that I’ve long been a diehard fan of Team Chaos. If there are multiple possible outcomes, I like to pick the one that will cause the most anarchy and root for that. I want as many people screaming at each other as possible. Let’s get crazy.
The offseason is prime time for Team Chaos. At least a few weird things happen every summer, and if we’re lucky, enough of them will overlap that pandemonium breaks out. The greatest day in Team Chaos history came in 2016, when we had that wonderful hour where the hockey world lost its mind. We may never see anything like it again, but we can hope.
Today, let’s work through what the perfect Team Chaos offseason might look like. We’re going to try to stay within the realm of plausible realism here; Connor McDavid being traded straight-up for Sidney Crosby would certainly bring the chaos, but it has no chance of happening. We’re aiming for something north of zero here, so while all of the options on our list are unlikely, there’s at least a slim chance we’ll see one or two.
With that in mind, here are some of the stories we’ll be rooting for in the weeks to come. Bring the chaos, hockey gods. We’re here for it.
It sounds like it’s still possible that Karlsson will re-sign with the Sharks. Maybe he should – he could get that extra year and San Jose seems like a great place to settle down. Locking in a max-length deal to finish his career with the Sharks would make plenty of sense for Karlsson. For Team Chaos? Not so much.
Instead, we want to see a full bidding war, one where Karlsson talks to several teams and none of us know where he’s headed. In a sense, we’ve never had that before with a truly elite player in the cap era. Steven Stamkos made it to the interview period in 2016, but he didn’t switch teams. And while John Tavares did find a new home, many of us had assumed he was inevitably headed back to the Islanders right up until the calendar flipped over to July 1. That turned out to be wrong, but in hindsight, we probably didn’t appreciate the Tavares sweepstakes enough as they were happening.
This time, we could enjoy it from the start. We need Karlsson to declare himself open for bidding, even if the list of potential suitors still included the Sharks. We’d want to see as many teams as possible in the running, with all of them getting a chance to make their case in person. Tavares talked to six teams. Let’s aim for double digits, Erik.
As for where he winds up, well, there are some intriguing options. Watching the Lightning find room to try to assemble a super-team would be fun. A dramatic return to Ottawa would work because anything involving Eugene Melnyk’s money is always a chaos candidate. The Knights could work. And of course, we’d want a few mystery teams thrown into the mix.
But there’s one option here that feels like the best fit for Team Chaos and that’s the Montreal Canadiens. Karlsson and his family coming “home” without actually coming home would be a nice slap in the face for Ottawa fans. We could play up him snubbing his pal Victor Hedman and the Lightning. And adding another highly paid Hall-of-Famer with a history of greatness but also injury to a Montreal roster that already has two would make for a fascinating story.
The fans and media are already talking themselves into it. Team Chaos should too.
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In this week's episode of the Puck Soup podcast:
- Where we're at after four games of a pretty darn good Cup final
- What's next for Taylor Hall?
- Figuring out what the Leafs do with Mitch Marner, Paatrick Marleau aand Nikita Zaitsev
- Apparently Erik Karlsson is going back to the Senators
- That crazy ECHL stolen trophy story
- Pop culture talk about The Office, Star Wars vs. MCU, Bill Goldberg and more
- Sean Avery is a hockey insider now
- And we open up the mailbag for listeners to ask us anything
>> Stream it now:
>> Or, subscribe on iTunes.
>> Get weekly mailbags and special bonus episodes by supporting Puck Soup on Patreon for $5.
In this week's episode of the Puck Soup podcast:
- We preview the Stanley Cup final, including our picks for the Cup and Conn Smythe
- Where do the Sharks go from here?
- The Senators hire a coach as we're recording
- A conversation about spoilers and the people who complain about them
- And lots more...
>> Stream it now:
>> Or, subscribe on iTunes.
>> Get weekly mailbags and special bonus episodes by supporting Puck Soup on Patreon for $5.
We often hear about how the NHL is a copycat league. A few teams do well and everyone else decides to try to be just like them. Then somebody new comes along, has success with a different approach and the entire league pivots and goes chasing after that. NHL GMs who’ve been tasked with building a Cup contender often end up reminding you of the flustered student in the back row desperately trying to copy off of the smart kid’s paper.
Now that we’re down to four teams left in this year’s playoffs, can we figure out what the league might be about to learn? Maybe, because when you look at the final four as a group, there are some similarities that stand out. Today, let’s look through a half-dozen lessons you might learn from this year’s conference finalists – you know, if you happened to be the copycat type.
Making a coaching change can’t be fun for a GM. You never like to see anyone lose their job, especially when they’ve worked hard for your organization over the years. Mix in an owner who might not appreciate paying somebody not to work and you can understand why a GM might prefer the status quo.
But as this year’s final four has shown, sometimes it pays to pull the trigger. The most obvious example was in St. Louis, where making the change from Mike Yeo to Craig Berube may have saved their season. At the time the move was made, you could understand why Doug Armstrong may have hesitated. After all, Yeo had only been given one full season behind the bench and it’s not like Berube’s resume made him an obvious upgrade. Armstrong probably could have talked himself into waiting another month or two, or maybe even the whole season. But he didn’t and the Blues were eventually rewarded.
The Hurricanes also have a first-year head coach and the change came under odd circumstances. Technically, they didn’t fire Bill Peters; he exercised an out clause in his contract. But the team didn’t exactly seem like they were all that eager to keep him, with owner Tom Dundon expressing disappointment at the team’s record, acknowledging that he was willing to be “pretty flexible” in regards to whatever decision Peters made. When Peters left for Calgary, the promotion of rookie head coach Rod Brind’Amour turned out to be a near-perfect fit for a young team looking to find the next level.
Boston and San Jose have had more recent stability behind the bench, but both have seen good results after making changes that took some courage. The Sharks moved on from Todd McLellan in 2015 after the first playoff miss of his career and then watched him get snapped up by a division rival within weeks, but Peter DeBoer has done well in four seasons since. And the Bruins took plenty of heat for firing Claude Julien midway through the 2016-17 season and replacing him with little-known assistant Bruce Cassidy, especially when the Habs hired him just one week later. But Cassidy has done a fantastic job ever since.
Who could learn from them: I know you all want me to say Toronto here, but it seems like it’s one season too early to really dig into that possibility. Rather than call for any specific coach’s job, I’ll just point out that there are seven teams in the league who’ve had the same coach since the 2015 offseason, and only one – the Sharks – made it out of the first round. Tampa, Winnipeg, Nashville and Toronto all went out early, while New Jersey and Detroit didn’t even make it in.
One of the early themes of the 2019 playoffs was the positive impact that a team could gain from being active at the trade deadline, as big movers like the Golden Knights and Blue Jackets started strong. But with those teams out, that narrative has faded. Instead, maybe we should be talking about summer blockbusters, since three of these teams made big trades in the 2018 offseason.
The biggest was the Sharks acquiring Erik Karlsson in a move that’s paid off nicely now that he’s healthy enough to play. The Hurricanes pulled off the Dougie Hamilton blockbuster with the Flames and also sent Jeff Skinner to the Sabres, while the Blues pulled off the Ryan O’Reilly deal (not to mention Brayden Schenn the summer before). Those were four very different types of deals, but they all took some guts to pull off and all of them are big parts of why these teams are where they are today.
The outlier here is Don Sweeney and the Bruins. He’s not much of a trader – he’s been on the job for four years and his NHL Trade Tracker entry still doesn’t have a second page. And after a busy first offseason in which he made deals featuring names like Dougie Hamilton, Milan Lucic and Martin Jones, he’s basically taken summers off. He’s more of a deadline guy, but that’s paid off for Boston, as the additions of Charlie Coyle and Marcus Johansson have helped.
Who could learn from them: Any GM who prefers to sit on their hands and mumble about how making big trades is just too hard, which is to say most of today’s GMs. That could even include David Poile in Nashville, an aggressive trader who somewhat surprisingly hasn’t made a big summer move since the P.K. Subban trade almost three years ago.
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The NHL revealed the three finalists for the Hart Trophy for league MVP on Sunday, and there were no major surprises. The honors went to Nikita Kucherov, Connor McDavid and Sidney Crosby, with everyone expecting that Kucherov will end up as the winner.
Given how voters typically treat the award, those finalists seem about right. It’s a bit of a surprise to see McDavid in the final three since his team didn’t make the playoffs, which seems to be a deal-breaker for many voters. But I had all three on my ballot, along with Johnny Gaudreau and Patrick Kane. So sure, Kucherov, Crosby and McDavid are worthy picks.
But they have something else in common: None of them won a playoff round this year. In fact, none of them even won a game.
That’s apparently the first time that’s ever happened, but it’s not far off from last year, when the top three were Nathan MacKinnon, Anze Kopitar and eventual winner Taylor Hall. None of them made it out of the first round either, as they combined for a grand total of three playoff wins. Go back through the history of the award, and this sort of thing isn’t rare. That’s because the voting is done immediately after the regular season ends, before we know how the playoffs turn out. And often, they don’t turn out very well for the Hart finalists.
Is that a problem? Maybe not, but it highlights an oddity about how we vote for the Hart. Modern voters have apparently decided that only players who make the postseason can ever be the league’s move valuable player; Mario Lemieux in 1988 was the last non-playoff participant to take home the trophy, and even being a finalist is exceedingly rare. That’s because, as it’s been explained to me, the postseason is what matters. You can rack up all the numbers you want, but if they don’t get your team into the playoffs, it was all meaningless.
But then we do the voting before the first round starts, when we have no idea if that all-important playoff berth will amount to anything. It’s a weird place to draw the line. Kucherov didn’t just have a quiet playoffs, after all, with no goals and only two points – he actively hurt his team by taking a suspension for a must-win game. And yet he’s almost certainly going to run away with the Hart voting, while guys like Kane and McDavid get left off many ballots entirely because we’re told that the playoffs are all that matter.
It’s not wrong, necessarily. Just strange. Pick a lane, you know?
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It’s another year without a Stanley Cup for Canada but at least the hockey gods didn’t toy with us for too long this time. Four of the country’s seven teams didn’t make the playoffs at all and the three that did all made first-round exits. When the Maple Leafs are your longest surviving team, it hasn’t been a great year.
And if we’re being honest, most Canadian fans are probably fine with that. The whole national Cup drought thing has always been the sort of narrative that seems to be more important to the media than to most of the fans. Let’s face it, most of the country’s fans don’t want to see any Canadian team other than their own win a Cup. When our team is out, we don’t jump on the bandwagon of the Leafs or Jets or whoever. We want everyone else in the country to be miserable too.
But now everyone is miserable and we’ve still got three rounds to get through. And that’s had some fans wondering what comes next:
Would love to see a guide from @DownGoesBrown for which remaining team Canadians should adopt for the rest of the playoffs.
— Dan Greenberg (@dmgreenberg340) April 24, 2019
That’s a great question. We’ve already done the annual guide for bandwagon-hopping, but that was a league-wide initiative. Today, we’re looking for the best remaining bandwagon for fans of each Canadian team. We’ll consider a few factors, like rivalries and history, hometown players on the roster and any popular former figures who might show up in another team’s story.
And since Canadian fans don’t do unity, let’s make sure that each fan base gets a team of its own, with no duplicates. We’ll go through all seven teams, starting with the easiest pairing we’re going to find …
The Senators give us a couple of obvious options to consider. The first is in Columbus, which is writing the kind of underdog success story that Ottawa will be shooting for over the next few years. More importantly, they’re doing it with a pair of former Sens in Matt Duchene and Ryan Dzingel. Granted, there may be some mixed feelings towards Duchene given how his tenure in Ottawa played out. But if he’s happy in Columbus, he’s more likely to re-sign there, which would deliver another first-round pick to the Senators. That makes the Blue Jackets a decent choice.
But there’s an even better one and it’s one of Pierre Dorion’s other key trading partners. That would be San Jose, where former captain Erik Karlsson is chasing the Cup he never managed to bring to Ottawa. Karlsson remains universally beloved among Senator fans, so it shouldn’t be tough to convince them to cheer him on. Let’s face it, most of them already are.
Mix in Logan Couture being a former 67s star and we’re all set. And if you’re a Sens fan who still somehow needs just a little extra incentive, remember that Ottawa can get the Sharks’ 2021 first-round pick if they make the final.
That covers Ottawa and it takes the Sharks off the board. That’s the easiest pick we’re going to able to find, but let’s see if we can pair up a few more Canadian fans with a temporary team that makes sense.
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It’s been a bad two years for the Ottawa Senators. Ever since they lost a heartbreaking Game 7 showdown with the Penguins in the 2017 conference final, the franchise has endured a seemingly endless series of setbacks both on and off the ice. The misery has been well-documented – you may have seen this epic Twitter thread – and the worst part is that some days it doesn’t feel like there’s any end in sight.
And, at some point, beaten-down Senators fans have probably wondered: From ownership to coaching to off-ice scandals to the steady stream of star players bolting for the exit, has any fan base ever had it this bad?
At which point Maple Leafs fans of a certain age might hobble over, waving their canes and mumbling ominously: You kids don’t realize just how bad it can get.
You see, some of us had to deal with the Harold Ballard era back in the 1980s. And while we can sympathize with what Senators fans are going through right now, we might object to the suggestion that Ottawa has it any worse than we did. We’ve seen some stuff, man.
So since the playoff version of the Battle of Ontario has been on pause for over a decade and doesn’t seem like it will be resuming anytime soon, let’s take the rivalry in a different direction. Who’s had it worse, modern-day Senators fans or 1980s Maple Leafs fans?
This is going to get depressing. Let’s go through 10 key categories and figure out which of Ontario’s teams can claim the suffering hockey fans’ crown.
Let’s start with the basics. When you’re building a solid foundation of misery, you want to start from rock bottom.
Today’s Senators: While it’s still a work in progress, it’s fair to say that this year will go down as the worst in the Senators’ post-expansion history. They’re on pace for a point total in the low 60s and will likely finish last in the league for the first time since the Sparky Allison days.
The 1980s Maple Leafs: Despite finishing under the 60-point mark five times, the Maple Leafs somewhat amazingly only came in dead last once during the ’80s. That was in 1984-85, when they won just 20 games on the way to a pathetic 48-point season. The good news: They at least had their own draft pick, unlike some teams we could mention, and the guy they used it on turned out to be pretty fun.
Who had it worse? Based on points, it’s the Maple Leafs by a fair margin. But their worst season came during an era where horrible teams were commonplace, while the Senators are having theirs in what’s supposed to be the parity era. They’re also finishing last in a league with 10 more teams than the one the 1980s Leafs faced. I think you have to adjust for era here, and when we do this one comes out fairly even.
The flip side of the last category. Even a blind squirrel finds a nut every now and then, right?
Today’s Senators: It seems more amazing with every day that goes by, but it’s really true: The Senators really were one goal away from the Stanley Cup final just 21 months ago. Sure, in hindsight their three-round run was powered by some lucky matchups and good bounces, and it probably did more harm than good by convincing the front office that they were legitimate contenders. But it did happen, and it was all sorts of fun for Senators fans in the moment.
The 1980s Maple Leafs: The Leafs made the playoffs six times during the 1980s because they played in the Norris Division and somebody had to go. But they only won two rounds in the decade and never made it out of the division final.
Who had it worse? The Leafs get the edge here.
Even when things are bad, at least you’ve got a franchise player to cheer for. Right up until you don’t.
Today’s Senators: They watched Daniel Alfredsson walk away as a player in 2013 and then again as an executive in 2017.
Then they went through the same sort of situation with Erik Karlsson with some added off-ice drama, culminating in him being traded last fall. And then it happened yet again with both Matt Duchene and Mark Stone at the 2019 deadline. (And we haven’t even mentioned Jason Spezza or Dany Heatley.)
The 1980s Maple Leafs: The team’s relationship with Darryl Sittler went off the rails in the early ’80s. The front office wanted to move him, but he had no-trade protection, so they dealt his best friend Lanny MacDonald instead to send a message. That led to Sittler infamously cutting the captain’s “C” off his jersey, and he’d eventually walk out on the team citing doctor’s orders. He’d be traded to the Flyers a few weeks later.
Who had it worse? This one’s close. Nothing that’s happened in Ottawa can match the over-the-top ugliness of the Sittler situation. But I feel like you have to give the Senators a slight edge here just based on volume.
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The trade deadline was last week. It feels like last month.
That’s the thing about the deadline. It’s such a hugely important milestone in the season that it almost manages to warp our sense of time around it. The weeks leading up to it seem to drag on forever. The day itself flies by in a blink. And then it’s all over and it almost immediately feels like a lifetime ago. Looks at us, watching Mark Stone play for the Ottawa Senators. We were so young then.
While you might be ready to move on past the deadline, the weekend rankings can’t quite yet. That’s because last week, we were still in pre-deadline mode and trying to figure out how different these rankings might look once the dealing is done. We can’t just leave a question like that open. Let’s dig in and find out how much the deadline day changed the rankings?
Uh, not all that much, actually.
That’s because the deadline saw something unusual this year: The best teams didn’t actually do all that much. Instead, most of the biggest moves were made by teams closer to the mushy middle.
That’s not the way it’s supposed to work. You’re supposed to have your sellers, who are bad and trying to get worse. They do that by selling off assets to the buyers, who are supposed to be the good teams searching for the final piece of a Stanley Cup puzzle.
But this year, we didn’t really see that. In fact, last week’s top five teams – the Islanders, Bruins, Sharks, Flames and Lightning – didn’t do all that much in the days around the deadline. The Bruins got Marcus Johansson and Charlie Coyle and the Sharks got Gustav Nyquist. But with apologies to Oscar Fantenberg and the Flames, that was about it in terms of meaningful moves. The Islanders and Lightning didn’t do anything at all.
In theory, that should open up the door for other teams to storm in and take those spots. But that didn’t really happen either. The Golden Knights were the biggest winners of deadline day itself thanks to the Stone blockbuster, but they’re not catching the Sharks or Flames so their path out of the Pacific remains brutal. And while the biggest trade deadline week moves were made by the Blue Jackets, they’re barely in the playoffs right now, let alone the top five. After this weekend, if anything, it might be time to start worrying about them.
The teams that could make a deadline-based claim at a spot are two that have spent much of the season shifting in and out of the top five. The Jets landed Kevin Hayes and the Predators got Wayne Simmonds and Mikael Granlund. Spoiler alert: One of them does crack the top five this week but we’ll get to that in a minute.
As for the sellers, the big one was the Senators. But they’ve already been owning the No. 1 spot in the bottom five, and after consulting with The Athletics’ analytics experts, it’s been determined that that’s as bad as I can rank them. I thought about trying to slot them in somewhere like “zero” or “negative three” or “let’s never speak of this again,” but apparently those aren’t options. The Senators stay where they already were and the rest of the bottom five doesn’t see all that much deadline-related movement either.
And that’s it for the 2019 deadline. I promise, after today, there will be no more weekly power ranking columns framed around it.
(But tune in next week for the 2020 trade deadline preview.)
The five teams that look like they’re headed towards a summer of keg stands and fountain pool parties.
We all had a chance to learn a new rule yesterday: You can win a shootout without actually putting the puck into the net, thanks to the ultra-rare shootout HORN OF DOOM:
That win also moved the Capitals back into first place in the Metro, as the Islanders lost both weekend games and continue to struggle when they’re not pantsing John Tavares and the Maple Leafs. That leaves us without a Metro team in our top five again, at least temporarily, while making room for a Central team to nudge back in. But which one? Let’s end the suspense …
5. Winnipeg Jets (39-22-4, +28 true goals differential*) – Should this be the Predators? Maybe. But the Jets are still holding down a narrow lead in the Central and maybe more than narrow if you factor in their games in hand. They beat the Predators head-to-head on Friday. And they may have landed the bigger deadline day prize in Hayes, although that’s a close call and probably hinges on whether you think Simmonds has much left. It’s not much more than a coin flip, really. But we don’t do ties here, so the Jets get the spot this week.
4. Boston Bruins (39-17-9, +34) – Their win over Tampa snapped the Lightning’s 10-game win streak and was the sort of statement game that suggests that the Atlantic may not be quite the sure thing it looks like. The Bruins are riding a streak of 16 straight with at least a point, although they still haven’t opened up all that much of a lead over the Maple Leafs for home ice in their almost inevitable first-round matchup. Maybe that comes this week; Boston gets a tough matchup tomorrow with the Hurricanes, but then finishes off the week with home games against the Panthers and Senators.
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One of the biggest stories of the NHL season is what’s happening with the star-studded free agent class of 2019. And what’s happening is: not much.
That’s a big deal. Every summer, we look ahead to the following year’s potential free agents and get excited over all the big names. And every year, almost all of those big names end up signing extensions long before they get anywhere near free agency. By the time July 1 rolls around, there’s rarely much star power left.
But so far, that hasn’t happened for most of the class of 2019. A few big names have signed, including Max Pacioretty, Pekka Rinne, Blake Wheeler and Ryan Ellis. But that’s left several top stars who still need extensions, and who are now less than seven months away from hitting unrestricted free agency.
We can start with Erik Karlsson in San Jose, who could end up being one of the offseason’s biggest stories for the second straight year. The Blue Jackets have both Sergei Bobrovsky and Artemi Panarin. Buffalo’s Jeff Skinner is having a career year. And the Senators have both Matt Duchene and Mark Stone.
Those six players would all figure to hit the jackpot if they made it to the open market. But the list goes on, with names like Wayne Simmonds, Jake Gardiner, Joe Pavelski, Jordan Eberle and Cam Talbot all on expiring deals. And then there’s Anders Lee and Eric Staal and Tyler Myers and Mats Zuccarello and Semyon Varlamov and … you get the picture. The list is stacked.
Karlsson is expected to use Drew Doughty’s $11-million cap hit as a starting point. Bobrovsky and Panarin could both be looking at deals that would carry cap hits north of $9 or even $10 million. Skinner won’t be far behind, and Duchene was on track to get there too before his groin injury sidetracked a career year. Stone is in the same ballpark, although he can’t officially sign an extension until Jan. 1. And many of those other names figure to be looking at cap hits that would at least start with a six or seven on a multi-year deal. That’s a ton of talent, and a ton of potential money.
Hockey fans might be wondering whether it’s unusual for this many big-name pending UFAs to make it this far into the season without an extension. The short answer: Yes, it’s extremely unusual. For the longer answer, and what it might mean for 2019, let’s dive into the recent history.
Most star players sign extensions relatively early. Some do it right on July 1, the first day they’re eligible; we saw that this year with Doughty and Oliver Ekman-Larsson. Others take a few weeks, like Jonathan Toews and Patrick Kane in 2014, or even make it past opening night, like Brent Burns last year. But by the time the calendar flips over to December, most of the big names are already locked down.
When a pending UFA does make it this far into the season without an extension, there are basically three ways the situation can play out. The first is that they eventually sign during the season and stay with their team. If you’re a fan of a team that has one of those big names above, that’s the scenario you’re looking for.
The second possibility is that the player doesn’t sign during the season, but avoids free agency by agreeing to an extension during the offseason. In theory, that’s just as good. But these cases often involve the player being traded first, either as a deadline rental or in one of those June deals that sees his rights dealt in exchange for a middling draft pick. It doesn’t always work that way; as we’ll see, there are players who’ve made it through the season without an extension and then re-upped with their team weeks before free agency, and if you’re a contending team like the Sharks or Blue Jackets, maybe you’re willing to roll the dice while you chase a Cup right now. But if you’re the Senators or Flyers, can you take that chance?
And then there’s the third option: The player doesn’t sign during the season, they don’t sign during the offseason and they make it to the free agency period. At that point they’re free to shop their services to any team and the odds of them coming back are slim.
So how common is it for a star player to make it to December without an extension? And when it happens, how often do each of those three situations above play out?
It’s Halloween, so it’s time to think of something scary. You could go with zombies or vampires or werewolves, but that’s amateur hour. Let’s get really frightening. How about some big-name hockey stars who came into the year with high expectations but are off to disappointing starts?
OK, maybe my version of scary is different than yours. And some of these guys shouldn’t worry us too much. After all, there’s still five months to go, and even the scariest horror story usually wraps up with some sort of happy ending. But for now, let’s get into the Halloween spirit by putting together a full roster of scary starts and attempt to figure out which players should have us huddled in genuine fear.
Like a parent rationing out Halloween candy, we’ll limit our picks to one player per team so that nobody hogs all the good stuff. (Looking at you, kid dressed up as a King.) Also, with 21 roster sports available, some teams won’t be represented. If that’s your team, assume they’re either doing really well, or were already expected to be bad enough that failure doesn’t even rank as disappointment. It’s either a mortal insult or a compliment, you get to choose.
On to the house of early-season horrors …
The player: Patrik Laine, Jets
The start: Through 12 games, Laine is stuck at just three goals and five points. He’s been held pointless in his last five, and has only had one multi-point game on the season, which came on opening night. Even more concerning, his assist in that first game remains his only even-strength point all year.
Odds it ends well: Very good. The key thing you look for when a goal-scorer is slumping is his shot volume – if that’s dropping, there’s reason for concern. But Laine is actually outdoing his career average when it comes to getting pucks on net. Consistency is an issue for Laine — like it is for most young players — and this early slump could ultimately cost him the Rocket Richard Trophy we all had him penciled in for. But this still feels like more of a percentage thing that will even out over time.
Paul Maurice comes to defence of Patrik Laine, who has just one even-strength point so far:
“He’s 20. He’s going to keep getting better.”
Something you need to see more of?
“Not more. We need him to continue. He’s 20 & just learning the game.”https://t.co/QdJMIugC71
— Mark Masters (@markhmasters) October 27, 2018
The player: Steven Stamkos, Lightning
The start: While the Lightning have been winning, Stamkos is out of the gate with just two goals through eleven games.
Odds it ends well: His shots-per-game are steady with last year, although that was down from his career average. Stamkos is 28, and in today’s NHL that might mean his peak is already behind him; he’s looked more like a 30-goal guy over his last few full seasons more than the 50+ sniper we still think of him as.
All that said, let’s not oversell this like we did when we all decided Alexander Ovechkin was done a few years ago just because his coaches were making him play backup goalie. Besides, if the Lightning are already this good without their captain chipping in at his normal rate, maybe the story here is how scary they might be when everyone is rolling.
The player: Anze Kopitar, Kings
The start: Last year’s Hart Trophy finalist has struggled offensively, with just four points in ten games. He’s good enough in his own end that, unlike most of the forwards on this list, he doesn’t have to score to help his team win. But the Kings aren’t winning, and as their captain and highest-paid player, Kopitar has to wear some of that.
Odds it ends well: At 31 years old and with five more years left on a deal that carries a $10-million cap hit, we don’t even want to think about what it would mean if he’s already starting a decline. But Kopitar has been good enough for long enough that he’s earned some benefit of the doubt. Last year’s 92 points already seems out of reach, but the Kings have bigger worries right now.
The player: Sean Couturier, Flyers
The start: After last year’s breakout, this was supposed to be the year that the 25-year-old Couturier locked in his status as an elite, two-way forward. Instead, he’s managed just four points (all goals) while the Flyers can’t keep the puck out of their own net.
Odds it ends well: Couturier himself says it’s “not time to panic here.” But it sure is getting close in Philadelphia, where Couturier is far from the only one off to a slow start.
The player: Casey Mittelstadt, Sabres
The start: The 19-year-old rookie was pegged by some for the Calder Trophy, including myself. But he’s limped out of the gate with just a goal and three points in his first 12 games.
Odds it ends well: The Calder hype may have been asking too much from a teenager who’s never played a full NHL-style schedule. Still, his October was a disappointment, as even he admits. The good news is that the Sabres are off to a decent start, so he’ll get a chance to play out of it without dealing with all the doom and gloom that usually descends on Buffalo by November.
The player: Milan Lucic, Oilers
The start: One scary number: Just a single goal in 11 games. Another scary number: Four more years after this one at a $6-million cap hit.
Odds it ends well: The Lucic free agent deal has been criticized from pretty much the moment it was signed, and no doubt Oiler fans are sick of hearing about it. After seeing his production fall off a cliff in the second half last year, at some point we may have to accept that this is just what Lucic is now – a guy who can contribute physically and as a leader, but whose days as a 30 or even a 20-goal force are over.
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