In this week's episode of Biscuits, the Vice Sports hockey podcast:
- Dave and I try to fix the Kings, but can't, because they may not be fixable
- The Rangers can't win at home
- The Olympics debates drags on, and on, and on...
- Fond memories of the Avalanche/Red Wings brawl
- And Dave tries to get me to admit that the Maple Leafs are going to the playoffs
- Plus lots more...
>> Stream it now on Vice Sports
>> Or, subscribe on iTunes.
In this week's episode of Biscuits, the Vice Sports hockey podcast:
- Dave and I are briefly happy but don't worry, it doesn't last
- How to fix the standings and playoff system
- Did Steve Yzerman jedi mind-trick the deadline, or just get lucky?
- Dave compares the Kings to Eli Manning and the New York Giants
- That stupid Leafs fishing trip controversy
- And lots, lots more...
>> Stream it now on Vice Sports
>> Or, subscribe on iTunes.
With two days left until the trade deadline, welcome to the calm before the storm.
Or, depending on who you ask, to the calm before even more calm. Stupid, boring calm.
A first half of the season that featured virtually no significant trades has given way to a deadline countdown that's seemed unusually quiet. In terms of the actual number of moves made, the month before this year's deadline has actually been about average. But while past seasons have included at least one big mid-season deal involving names like Seth Jones and Ryan Johansen last year or Evander Kane the year before, this time we made it to February with the biggest name on the move being a Nikita Nesterov or Nail Yakupov.
It's quiet. Maybe too quiet.
That’s one school of thought, at least. With league-wide parity leaving the buyer/seller picture hazy until the last few days, all the moves we'd normally expect to see during a season are being held back as long as possible. But we're out of time now, and it will take only one or two deals to establish the market and send all the dominoes toppling. We may even have seen those deals last night.
That's the theory, at least. It may be wishful thinking. It's possible we've hit the logical endpoint of the decade-long decline in big-name deadline dealing, and this is the season when most teams decide to sit out altogether. Maybe all this parity causes leaguewide paralysis. Maybe the sellers are just asking too much. Maybe a modern GM's job really is just too hard.
Or maybe we'll get some deals. Hopes were raised over the weekend, with a pair of contenders making moves on Friday. The Ducks landed Patrick Eaves from the Stars, while the Blackhawks picked up Tomas Jurco from Detroit. Neither move would qualify as anything approaching a blockbuster, but they felt like a start.
With apologies to Jeremy Morin, no other deals of any significance happened until Sunday night, when we got the two biggest trades of the season so far: Ben Bishop to the Kings, and Martin Hanzal to the Wild. Both deals raised eyebrows, although for different reasons. Bishop seems to fill a need that the Kings don't actually have, at least unless Jonathan Quick's health is still a bigger question mark than we think. And Hanzal came at a higher price than most of us figured the Coyotes would be able to get, which should make the league's other sellers happy.
All that leaves us with a little over 48 hours until the deadline clock strikes zero. So do Bishop and Hanzal signal that the league's GMs are finally, mercifully ready to get to work? Or did we just see the two biggest names who'll be dealt go off the board with days still left to go?
The five teams that look like they're headed towards Stanley Cup–favourite status.
5. New York Rangers (40-20-2, +41 true goals differential*): Whew, that was close — they moved up to third (and out of the much easier Atlantic Division playoff path) for a minute there.
4. Pittsburgh Penguins (38-14-8, +43): Mark my words, Ron Hainsey will play the best playoff hockey of his career in Pittsburgh.
I've always liked Jarome Iginla. I'm not sure I know anyone who doesn't. Even if he never played for your favorite team, he's one of those guys that you have to at the very least respect, if not outright admire. He'd be on pretty much any list of my favorite players of the last few decades.
And so, it goes without saying, Saturday night made me sad.
That was the night that Iginla celebrated his 1,500th regular season game. It's a major milestone, one that only 15 other players have reached. And Iginla got to spend that historic game getting pummeled in a 10-1 loss to the Canadiens.
The Avalanche are awful this year, and while a struggling Iginla hasn't helped much, he deserves better. So let's figure out a way to set him free. It seems like a good day for it — Iginla and the Avs are in action tonight, and two of his former teams, the Penguins and Bruins, are facing each other. And the team he started his NHL career with is even in action too, as the Flames face the Lightning. Maybe they'll even count all the goals this time.
So it's pretty much Jarome Iginla night in the NHL. In his honor, let's run down the five best destinations for when he inevitably waives his no-trade clause in the leadup to this year's trade deadline.
To be fair, these aren't necessarily the best destinations for Iginla himself, but rather the ones that would be the most entertaining for us, the fans. Still, he'd go into this year's playoffs as perhaps the best Old Guy Without A Cup story since Ray Bourque, so it's important that we get this right.
Let's begin, fittingly, where it all began.
The irresistible narrative: The team that drafted Iginla and then traded him away before his first game all those years ago brings him back into the fold just in time to win a Cup.
Could it happen? OK, there's a glaring problem with this idea that I'm sure you're already muttering about: The Stars don't need offense. They're struggling this year because their goaltending is shaky and their blueline misses Alex Goligoski more than anyone thought. The forwards are banged up, sure, but once everyone is healthy the Stars will be fine when it comes to scoring. It's keeping the puck out that's been the problem.
And yet… hockey is a game of outscoring your opponent, right? Sure, ideally Jim Nill would be able to go out and get a Ben Bishop or a Kevin Shattenkirk instead. But if those deals don't materialize, there's always plan B. A 6-5 win is still a win, after all, even in the playoffs. And it's not like Iginla is some flashy perimeter guy who'll wilt from the post-season grind.
The last time the Dallas Stars made a Jarome Iginla trade, it led to a Stanley Cup. It could happen again.
We're down to four in the World Cup of Hockey. After yesterday's action, the round-robin portion of the proceedings is officially in the books and half of the tournament's teams have been sent to the sidelines.
The semifinals take place over the weekend, with Russia facing Canada on Saturday night and Sweden up against Team Europe on Sunday afternoon. We'll have a full wrapup on Monday, which will give us a chance to break down those four teams, how they got there, and preview the best-of-three final.
So today, let's focus on the four who didn't make it that far. Here's a look at each of the teams that were knocked out in the round robin, and where they go from here.
We may as well start with the team that has everyone talking. Well, "talking" may not be the right word. "Criticizing?" "Brutalizing"? "Ruthlessly burying on Twitter?"
Take your pick. And just about all of it is deserved, because Team USA stands as easily the tournament's biggest disappointment. They weren't necessarily expected to win it all, but they did seem to have a clear path to the playoff round at a minimum (one made all the more easy by a format that just happened to leave them and Canada in a group with two of the tournament's weakest teams). At the very least, you figured they'd work in a win somewhere.
Instead, they immediately burned through any margin for error by dropping a stunner to Team Europe in the opener. In the process, they turned their matchup with Canada into a literal must-win, one they had to have to stay in the playoff hunt.
In theory, that should have been fine. This is a team, after all, that made it very clear that they'd designed the roster specifically to beat their northern neighbors. They loaded up on heart and grit, with a healthy dose of agitators to pester Canada's stars. They even brought along Brandon Dubinsky, whose main claim to fame has been suckering Sidney Crosby. And the roster featured so much leadership that they felt the usual captain and two alternates couldn't hope to contain it.
And overseeing it all was John Tortorella, a choice for coach who made it clear that this was going to be a sandpaper squad. When he's not barking at the media or trying to fight the other team, Tortorella is known for demanding a hard-nosed style with plenty of blocked shots and bloodied noses. Sure, he was chosen as coach at least partially because he wasn't working in the NHL, then almost immediately took the Columbus job. No matter. Tortorella's hiring left no doubt about what this team wanted to be.
Reigning NHL MVP Patrick Kane was held scoreless in three games. Photo by John E. Sokolowski-USA TODAY Sports
And for a brief moment, it looked like it all might just work. Team USA earned a win in its first exhibition game against Canada, taking a 4-2 decision in a game that featured plenty of scrums and at least one cheap shot. Canada won the rematch one night later, but the message had been delivered. The players bought in, promising that they would beat Canada just as long as the contest was decided by grit.
All of which made it all the more depressing to watch Tuesday's showdown, in which the Canadians largely toyed with their rivals on the way to a 4-2 win that eliminated Team USA from playoff contention. Dubinsky didn't even play, despite facing the one player he was brought aboard to neutralize. And maybe that was just as well, since it was almost embarrassing to watch guys like Justin Abdelkader being completely ignored while trying desperately to get under the skin of somebody, anybody, in red and white.
By the end, the whole thing just felt kind of sad. As Joe Thornton later pointed out, Canada had plenty of toughness of its own—it just happens to also double as skill. Trying to beat Canada at playing hard-nosed hockey is like challenging the whole country to a poutine-eating contest. It's not going to end well for you.
(Editor's note: The following is from an email exchange Sunday night between Dave Lozo and Sean McIndoe, aka Down Goes Brown.)
Lozo: OK, so now that we've both made bad jokes on Twitter about Green Day canceling shows at the World Cup, I thought I'd email you to see how your Sunday is going. Me? Two fantasy football losses, 2-1 in my picks pool with two games pending, and I want to believe Alex Ovechkin touched that puck at the end of the Sweden game.
Here are my three thoughts about the World Cup so far:
1) Team USA will lose to Canada and their tournament will be over after two games, which cracks me up because the NHL did everything it could to get USA and Canada into the semis.
2) Team Europe is great because they are old, like me, and really stuck it to Torts, another thing I enjoy.
3) This isn't World Cup-related, but I've been crapping like an untrained dog during a thunderstorm, so some of these emails may come from the toilet.
Ps: You know Canada has gold in the bag, right?
---
DGB: Hi Dave...
Both of my fantasy teams are 0-2, and I don't actually mind because I made a conscious decision at the beginning of the season to just accept that the entire hobby is just dumb, stupid luck and no rational person should care about it. Check back with me next week at 0-3 and find out how that's going.
Oh hey, speaking of dumb and stupid, let's start with Team USA. I haven't understood most of what they're doing all along in this tournament, from hiring Tortorella to the roster selection to benching Dustin Byfuglien on Saturday. They were never going to be the favorites, but they've got enough talent to at least have a shot. But they seem to want to do it with one hand behind their back, all in the name of grit and heart and compete and all of the other buzzwords that badly run hockey teams seem to love.
But all of that said, there's a part of me that could still see them pulling off the upset tomorrow night. They have the goaltending to make it happen, and if they get a bounce or two maybe they can make it happen. It's also possible that they already all hate Tortorella and can't wait to quit as soon as things go bad, but I can see the US winning this one. And besides, the best possible result would be a USA team that bragged about being built to beat Canada doing that, then finishing 1-2 and missing the playoffs anyway.
Am I crazy?
---
Lozo: Are you crazy? Absolutely. Fantasy football is the greatest thing ever created, as it allows us to fill gaping voids in our lives with legal gambling. This email is sponsored by DraftKings.
I know that as a Canadian, your default setting is to be all, "Oh geez, USA can do this and anything can happen because we Canadians are a humble people and want to take it one game at a time." I call bullshit! Bullshit, I say!
Do we have the goaltending to steal this one? Yes. Will that goaltending be in net? No. Jonathan Quick has squeezed a career out of two great months in 2012 playing behind a dominant 5-on-5 team in the postseason and now because of that and a fluky showing in a 1-0 loss to Canada in Sochi, Americans have deluded themselves into thinking Quick can steal a gold medal. And by Americans, I mean Dean Lombardi, the Kings GM who put together this deficient team.
And beyond that, this USA team isn't good. And yeah, we're not dressing Byfuglien, perhaps our best defenseman, and yeah, we left Phil Kessel, Tyler Johnson, Kevin Shattenkirk and other great players home in the name of grit and Abdelkadering, but how about Patrick Kane only getting 4 minutes in the first period against Europe? Or Max Pacioretty on a third line? Or Max Pacioretty on a fourth line in practice Sunday? Torts is really the crazy one. Jack Johnson is on this team!
The ideal ending to this tournament is Team North America beating Canada in the final on a Jack Eichel penalty shot in overtime, allowing me to claim that as a USA gold.
I did not write this on the toilet.
---
In the Friday Grab Bag:
- A word about Dan Boyle, Cal Clutterbuck, and when players yell at the media
- The award finalists are being announced, and they're all wrong
- The three comedy stars, including the Blues' newest fan
- An obscure lottery winner
- And a YouTube clip that's light and fun and features the darkest ending in the section's history
Only one team ever truly “wins” trade deadline day, and it’s the team that goes on to capture the Stanley Cup.
That’s what they say, anyway. It seems like a pretty simplistic way of looking at things, if we’re being honest, since all a GM can ever be realistically asked to do is to put his team in the best possible position to win. Nothing is ever guaranteed in life, and the idea that you’re retroactively wrong to have even tried unless everything works out perfectly seems a little fatalistic.
But either way, there is something special to be said for the GM who swings for the fences at the deadline and then sees it all pay off in a Stanley Cup parade a few months later. So today, let’s give the spotlight over to the few who’ve managed to pull it off. Here are the five best trade deadline week hauls by teams that went on to win the Stanley Cup that same season.
The Red Wings have a fascinating trade deadline history. They’ve been good for so long that no team has had more opportunity to load up for deep playoff runs. And since GM Ken Holland virtually never makes deals during the first four months of the season, that leaves the Wings with lots of work to do most years at the deadline.
And they’ve had some big ones, although with mixed results. They landed Matthieu Schneider in 2003 and Robert Lang in 2004, plus Todd Bertuzzi in 2007 and Brad Stuart in 2008. In more recent years they’ve gone after guys like Kyle Quincey, David Legwand, Eric Cole and Marek Zidlicky. And they had one of the greatest “load up and go for it” deadlines of all-time back in 1999, when they pulled off the Chris Chelios blockbuster while also adding a who’s who of grizzled veterans, including Bill Ranford, Ulf Samuelsson and Wendel Clark. But that team didn’t win it all.
Instead, we’ll point back to far simpler deadline. Back in 1997, the Wings (then under the guidance of co-GMs Jimmy Devellano and Scotty Bowman) acquired future Hall of Famer Larry Murphy from the Maple Leafs. That’s it. That was the whole trade. The Leafs were embarking on a youth movement and wanted to unload the 36-year-old Murphy’s hefty salary, so they didn’t bother to ask for anything in return.
They say you can’t get something for nothing, but the Wings proved that wrong. In this case, that “something” turned out to be five more seasons of solid play from Murphy, including back-to-back Stanley Cup runs. It’s hard to do much better than that.
Two of the NHL's top superstars have hit major milestones in recent days, with both Jarome Iginla and Alexander Ovechkin joining exclusive clubs. Iginla scored the 600th goal of his career last week, and Ovechkin followed him with his 500th on Sunday night.
The two players have more than their milestone timing in common. After all, they're both physical wingers who score a ton, have plenty on international experience, and have earned legions of fans around the world.
But they're not identical. In fact, a closer look at their careers and accomplishments reveals some subtle differences between two of the NHL's best known stars.
Jarome Iginla: At the end of the 2008-09 regular season, was named the recipient of the Mark Messier Award for team leadership, on-ice performance and community activities.
Alexander Ovechkin: At the end of the 2010 Winter Olympics, was named the recipient of the Mark Messier Award for everyone agreeing to just pretend the whole Vancouver thing never happened.
Alexander Ovechkin: Infuriated Penguins fans in 2005 by instantly developing fierce rivalries with Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin.
Jarome Iginla: Infuriated Penguins fans in 2013 by agreeing to go along with the Bruins' whole "Operation Double Agent" ploy at the trade deadline.
Jarome Iginla: In a classy gesture, once led his entire team onto the ice to shake hands with Trevor Linden to congratulate him on the occasion of the final game of the longtime Canucks' career.
Alexander Ovechkin: In a classy gesture, once led his entire team onto the ice to shake hands with Alexander Semin to congratulate him on the occasion of that one time he kind of vaguely tried to backcheck.
Confusion reigned Monday night, as the Pittsburgh Penguins and Chicago Blackhawks announced that Trevor Daley and Rob Scuderi would switch teams. Thanks to the handful of remaining fans who are old enough to remember such things, it was eventually explained that this was an obscure type of player transaction known as a "midseason trade."
OK, that's laying it on a little thick, but fans could be forgiven for needing a refresher on how these deals work, given that we'd had only one all season, and that one didn't involve any actual NHL players. But now that general managers Stan Bowman and Jim Rutherford have broken the seal for the rest of the league, why stop at one? We got a minor deal between the Habs and Coyotes Tuesday night. Maybe Scuderi-for-Daley can be the domino that finally, mercifully gets the trade market moving.
That's probably a pipe dream, but just in case: Who's up for an old-fashioned ranking post? Let's take all 30 teams and try to figure out which ones are the most likely to make a trade or two (or more) between today and the week leading up to the trade deadline, when everyone tends to wake up and start dealing.
I'll be looking at each team's position in the standings and how much cap room it has available. More importantly, we'll be looking at the track record of each of the 30 GMs, which ones tend to be the most risk-adverse, and which ones are willing to get aggressive.
Remember, this isn't a ranking of the best GMs -- it's a ranking of the ones who are most like to make a deal over the next six to eight weeks or so. And sure, sometimes the best trade is the one you don't make, as the cliché goes, but for this exercise we're looking for quantity over quality.
Is this all an exercise in guesswork? Mostly. Does it virtually guarantee that two GMs I've ranked low will hook up on a blockbuster by the end of the week? Almost certainly. Will I attempt to take credit for that by claiming the whole thing was an elaborate reverse jinx? Cannot confirm or deny.
Current standings: 16-9-6, second place in the Atlantic
Estimated cap room: $5.2 million
As the longest tenured GM in the league, nobody gives us more of a track record to look at than Holland. And that track record is fairly clear: Don't expect the Red Wings to do much until the deadline nears. That's when Holland typically does all of his trading work; he hasn't made an offseason deal involving players since 2012, and hasn't made one between opening night and the end of January since 2002. (That was the big "Jason Woolley from Buffalo for future considerations" blockbuster, in case you were wondering.) History says he'll probably do something around the deadline, but if he makes a deal before then, it will be the first time in the history of the cap era.
Current standings: 21-6-2, first place in the Metro
Estimated cap room: $40,000
MacLellan has only been on the job since last offseason. Last season, he didn't make any midseason deals until the deadline, and his only move that approaches "big deal" status was last summer's T.J. Oshie trade. That doesn't give us much to work with, but we might not need it. As currently constructed, the Caps are already very good and very close to being capped out, so we're unlikely to see much action in Washington until closer to the deadline.
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The Athletic Hockey Show runs four days a week during the season, and will feature me with Other Sean Gentille on Wednesdays.
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"Biscuits" was the Vice Sports hockey podcast, hosted by DGB and Dave Lozo. It ran for two seasons; the final episode was in July, 2018. You can find the archives below:
As of the 2018-19 season, my work will appear exclusively at The Athletic.
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