The Athletic Hockey Show: It's over

On this week's episode of The Athletic Hockey Show:
- Jesse Granger on the Knights' win
- Is this going to be the most iconic Cup celebration ever? - Our Conned Smythe picks
- Next years' odds are already out, and there are some surprises
- Ian has the latest on the Senators' sale
- Hat trick ettiquette, the best final of the cap era, and lots more...

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

Puck Soup: Good knight, Panthers

On this week's episode of the Puck Soup podcast:
- The Golden Knights win
- What might be next for Florida
- Conn Smythe and other playoff thoughts
- The offseason begins; the latest rumors, signings and hires
- The Senators are finally sold
- And lots 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.

Puck Soup: Are the Panthers done?

On this week's episode of the Puck Soup podcast:
- We react to the first two games of the final
- Matt Tkachuk gets a whole lot of penalties
- The goalies have been the story
- Thoughts on the Jack Eichel hit
- A busy week for Kyle Dubas, Mike Babcock and Greg Gronin
- A big three-team trade
- Plus Cole Caufield, Chris Chelios 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.

Every series that led us to the 2023 Stanley Cup final, ranked

We're two games into what looks like it could be a very good Stanley Cup final. At the very least it's an intriguing matchup, one featuring two teams who've never won a Cup. It's one conference's top seed against the other's eighth, but there's plenty of star power on either side. Both teams have been aggressive when it comes to building their rosters, and we've already seen some highlight reel plays and more than a little nastiness.

It could be a classic. Or maybe it won't be. You never really know with the Stanley Cup playoffs, where a can't-miss series can turn into a dud while one you were barely paying attention to ends up reeling you in. With some extra time before Game 3, let's look back on the road that brought us here with a ranking of all 14 series up to now, from worst to best.

What makes a great series? Pretty much whatever I say, since it's my list, but I'm looking for the same things you probaby are: Lots of drama, as much overtime as possible, some controversy that doesn't make me want to quit the sport forever, and at least one defining moment that we'll remember for years to come. And of course, the more games the better, although the other stuff is more important. Let's see where that takes us.

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The Panthers prove the playoffs are broken. Or they don’t. A debate with myself

I have no idea what to make of the Florida Panthers. Let’s start there, if only to set expectations.

I’m pretty sure they’re the year’s best story – a legitimately great team coming off a Presidents’ Trophy that made big moves to get to an even higher level, took some time to see those changes gel, almost missed the playoffs, and then went on a postseason run that almost nobody saw coming even though we should have. They’re everything that’s great about the Stanley Cup playoffs. This rules.

Unless it doesn’t. Maybe they’re just the latest in a worrying long list of playoff flukes – bad teams that luck their way into a few series wins before inevitably losing in the final. Put them there with the 2021 Habs, the 2017 Predators, the 2010 Flyers, the 2006 Oilers… we see this every few years in the cap era. Hell, a brand-new expansion team made it all the way to the final a few years ago. The NHL playoffs are just random chaos that doesn’t tell us anything at all, and the Panthers are the latest proof. This sucks.

Unless it doesn’t. And around and around I go.

I’m tired of it. So today, I want to figure it out. And like every other annoying internet dweeb, I’m going to get to the bottom of things with two simple words: Debate me. Specifically, I’m going to debate… me.

What can we learn from the Florida Panthers, if anything at all? Let’s see if I can figure this out by arguing with myself.

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The Athletic Hockey Show: Breaking news

On this week's episode of The Athletic Hockey Show:
- Ian breaks the Kyle Dubas news to me in real time
- Previewing Knighs/Panthers
- Thoughts on Brad Treliving
- A Senators sale update
- Lots of listener mail, this week in history, and lots more...

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

Panthers or Knights? A Stanley Cup Final rooting guide for 30 other fan bases

The Stanley Cup final matchup has been set, and with hockey’s greatest prize up for grabs, only two teams are left standing.

Spoiler alert: Not yours.

I’m playing the odds a bit here, since 30 teams are on the sidelines. Plus I’m assuming that fans of the Panthers and Golden Knights have other things to worry about right now. Does that happen when your team is in the final? Let’s just say I wouldn’t know, but it sounds reasonable.

Great. What about everyone else? We’ve got what should be a great matchup ready to go, and maybe sitting back and enjoying the show without a rooting interest sounds good to you. But some of us aren’t wired that way, and we need to have a team to root for – or root against – to really get into a series.

If that’s you, I’m here to help. I’ve got a suggestion of which team to cheer for, for fans of all 30 of the loser teams valiant nonparticipants. Let’s do this.

Anaheim Ducks

Sorry Shea Theodore, but expansion cousins need to stick together. That’s especially true when your shared origin story is some random midweek announcement that came literally a few months before your first season would start.

Pick: Panthers

Arizona Coyotes

Has that desert-based rivalry with the Golden Knights ever turned into anything? Not really, but we can pretend. And besides, the Panthers may be the only other market that’s had to deal with more snotty remarks from old-timers about being better off in Quebec City.

Pick: Panthers

Boston Bruins

It’s tempting to pick the Panthers here, since that would retcon that first round from “all-time stunning upset” to “at least kind of understandable”. But if Florida wins, especially as easily as they did over Toronto and Carolina, it will just reinforce what a missed opportunity that loss really was. Do we want Brad Marchand to spend the rest of his life knowing one missed breakaway cost his team an easy Stanley Cup? Everyone else does, yes, absolutely, but not Bruins fans. Instead, go ahead and root for Bruce Cassidy to get the ring he couldn’t get in Boston.

Pick: Golden Knights

Buffalo Sabres

Hey, remember when the Sabres openly tanked for a few years and ended up with a pair of second overall picks, then figured the future was bright because Jack Eichel and Sam Reinhart were the sort of players who could get you to a final? Turns out they were right, kind of.

Now it’s a question of which guy you resent more. Let’s just say I don’t think this is a tough call.

Pick: Panthers

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Filling in the roster for the 2023 playoffs all-disappointment team

It’s the third round of the NHL playoffs, still, thanks to a Dallas Stars team that doesn’t seem to want to quit. With the Golden Knights wobbling and the Panthers resting up, we’re almost at the finish line.

Are you feeling disappointed yet?

Probably. Only three teams remain, which means 29 fan bases are experiencing mandatory misery. Certainly, fans of the 13 playoff teams on the sidelines will be looking for someone to blame.

That’s where we come in. Every year, right around this time, we like to assemble an all-star roster of playoff letdowns. It’s our chance to shine a spotlight on some of those players who were curiously absent from the highlight reels when they were needed most.

As always, we’re not mad, just disappointed. We'll be taking at least one player per playoff team. And we’ll build from the net out, the way all great sad teams do.

---

Goaltenders

Andrei Vasilevskiy, Lightning

Goaltending is weird, man. After spending the better part of a decade as the NHL’s most bankable big-game goalie (including three straight years with long playoff runs where he put up a .920 save percentage or better), Vasilevskiy posted the worst numbers of any playoff goalie with at least five starts. I guess that’s just what happens when you’re facing an offensive juggernaut like the playoff Maple Leafs.

Linus Ullmark, Bruins

From the sounds of things, they’ve already engraved his name on the Vezina. Luckily for him, that award is based entirely on the regular season, because Ullmark became the story of the Bruins’ shocking first-round loss. That’s not entirely him – he was hurting, and fatigue was clearly an issue, so Jim Montgomery probably should have swapped in Jeremy Swayman for a game earlier in the series. Instead, the Bruins rode Ullmark until he started to sputter in Game 5, then let him get shelled in Game 6 before benching him with the season on the line.

It didn’t work, and combined with last year’s performance that saw him lose the starter’s job after just two games, it has to create at least a few questions about how reliable Ullmark can be in the postseason.

Stuart Skinner, Oilers

We always have a third goalie on this team, if only because we’ll probably need one. The Oilers may have wished they had a third option too. Skinner was a great story this year, winning the starter’s job as a rookie and even making the all-star team. But he stumbled in the playoffs, especially against the Golden Knights; it got so bad that some Oiler fans were even asking for Jack Campbell to take over. Goaltending wasn’t the only reason they lost, but it was sure one of them, so we'll give him this spot in a narrow decision over Vitek Vanecek.

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Is Sergei Bobrovsky having the most amazing Old Guy Goalie playoff run ever?

Sergei Bobrovsky is the story of the NHL playoffs, and it may not be all that close. At 34 and coming off a season that saw him post substandard numbers across the board, the most expensive active goalie in the league has suddenly transformed from punchline to brick wall. A player who wasn’t even considered good enough to be the starter on an underdog eight-seed when the playoffs began might be about to have his name engraved on the Conn Smythe.

It’s been a pretty wild story. Have we ever seen anything like it?

I’m not sure we have. Oh, we’ve seen goalies get hot in the playoffs before. But most of those stories weren’t all that unexpected – nobody was shocked to see a legend like Marty Brodeur, Dominik Hasek or Patrick Roy look unbeatable, and Tim Thomas had just won his second Vezina the year he had arguably the greatest postseason a goalie has ever had at 36.

Other times, we see younger goalies go on a tear, like J.S. Giguere, Kirk McLean or Ron Hextall. That’s cool too, but in a different way, because you wonder if you’re seeing a guy reach a new tier that they’ll stay at for years. It doesn’t always work out that way, but you never know.

But this? A goalie who’s been around forever, and has a recent track record of mediocrity? Those guys are supposed to be known quantities. They’re not supposed to suddenly morph into Jacques Plante. And yet here we are. Bobrovsky is three-quarters of the way to almost single-handedly winning a Stanley Cup.

I’m not sure there’s a precedent for this. So I figured I’d go back through the history books and find out. I pulled up a list of the best postseasons ever had by a 30+ goalie, based on hockey-reference’s Goals Saved Above Average stat. That’s a flawed number – expected goals are better – but it has the advantage of being available for all of history and not just the analytics era, so it’s a decent starting point.

I picked out eight goalies, including Bobrovsky. Let’s start the list with the man himself, as we look back on some all-time old goalie heaters and ask: Was this run more unexpected than what Bobrovsky is doing in 2023?

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The Athletic Hockey Show: One down, one to go

On this week's episode of The Athletic Hockey Show:
- The Panthers sweep the Hurricanes
- Did Matthew Tkachuk just have the best "clutch" week in NHL history
- Jesse Granger on the Knights being one game away
- Ian fires back over his Sens ownsership reporting
- Lots of listener email
- Gilbert Gotfried for some reason?
- Mark Messier's infamous guarantee and lots more...

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

Puck Soup: Swept away

On this week's episode of the Puck Soup podcast:
- Thoughts on both conference finals being duds
- A chaotic week in Toronto
- The Flames find their new GM
- Lots of teams still need coaches
- Arizona arena drama affecting player decisions
- Survivor finale preview, and more...

>> Listen on The Athletic
>> Subscribe on iTunes
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>> Get weekly mailbags and special bonus episodes by supporting Puck Soup on Patreon for $5.

The copycat’s guide to what to learn (and to avoid) from the NHL’s final four

We’re down to four teams left in the playoffs, which means 28 teams standing around trying to figure out what went wrong and what to do next. This being the NHL, most of the those teams will settle on the obvious answer: Pick one or more of the teams that’s still alive, and copy what they did.

But which team? And what do you copy? That’s where we come in. It’s time for the annual copycat’s guide to the final four.

Every year, I like to find three lessons from each of the conference finalists that I’d like to see other teams copy. The emphasis here is on what’s fun for fans, since that’s the supposed to be whole point of this league. I’ll also find one lesson that isn’t fun but that I’m worried will be the one that teams choose, and try to talk them out of it.

Let's see which lessons the final four teams are offering up this year.

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The Athletic Hockey Show: Migrating Coyotes

On this week's episode of The Athletic Hockey Show:
- Ian is back from his Europe trip with an update on the Senators sale
- The Coyotes seem to be on the move - but where?
- Teeing up the conference finals
- Jesse Granger on the Golden Knights
- Conn Smythe favorites and darkhorses
- Listener mail, this week in hockey 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)

Puck Soup: Leafs lose

On this week's episode of the Puck Soup podcast:
- A look ahead at Stars/Knights and Panthers/Hurricanes
- My thoughts on another Leafs loss
- What's next for the Oilers, Devils and Kraken
- Is this finally the end for Arizona?
- New leadership for the Flyers, more twists in the Sens sale, and lots 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.

The Panthers offer a lesson for the Leafs, just not the one they've ever wanted to hear

Let me know if any of this sounds familiar.

There’s a team that’s very skilled, especially up front, and they’re coming off an excellent regular season. The blueline can be shaky and the goaltending is a question mark, but when things are going well they can outscore those problems. Still, they’re fighting the ghosts of an almost impossibly long playoff drought without so much as a series win. Last season they lost to the Lightning in the first round, despite having home ice. But this year, things are different. They finally break through and win a round for the first time in forever, capping it off with a dramatic overtime win on the road in Game 6. The drought is over. It’s different this time.

And then they get knocked aside with ease in round two, losing a short series they were barely ever in. Right back to square one, or worse.

That’s the 2022-23 Maple Leafs, obviously. But it’s also the 2021-22 Panthers.

All of it matches up – every word of it. The similarities are almost eerie. And maybe that’s good news for miserable Maple Leaf fans right now. Because as painful as last year’s exit ended up being for the Panthers, now they’re on to the conference final. Hell, they might even be the Stanley Cup favorites. What a difference a year can make. There is hope. The Panthers are the proof.

So how do you do it?

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Did the Maple Leafs get screwed on a controversial no-goal? Explaining the call

As you’ll see from the replay, the initial celebration turns out to be in vain, after a replay review to determine whether the puck ever actually crossed the goal line.

So was it in? It sure seems like it.

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The Athletic Hockey Show: Staying alive

On this week's episode of The Athletic Hockey Show:
- Ian is in Europe so I'm joined by Shayna Goldman
- The Leafs show up and stay alive
- The Oilers even the series
- The Alex Pietrangelo slash
- It's a new old start for the Flyers
- Lots of listener mail, especially on initials
- Why I'd trade Connor Hellebuyck
- A young person learns the legend of Yellow Sunday, 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)

Puck Soup: Do or die

On this week's episode of the Puck Soup podcast:
- Thoughts on all four series, including that one
- The Blackhawks win the lottery
- The Rangers make a coaching change
- Gabriel Landeskog will miss another year
- 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.

It's the end of an era for this stupid Leafs team, so we might as well enjoy it

It’s over. Finally.

The seven-year journey that saw Brendan Shanahan and Kyle Dubas and Auston Matthews and Mitch Marner combine to create a Leafs team that was somehow both the best of the modern era but also the biggest failure – that story ends tonight. Or maybe Friday. Or maybe a few days after that. But definitely soon.

It ends in one of two ways. Either with one of the greatest comebacks in playoff history, as a team that can’t win when it matters finds a way to do it four straight times and finally, mercifully, permanently slays its own well-earned reputation for always playing down to the moment. Or it ends in defeat, maybe even a humiliating sweep, at which point the process of tearing it all down finally begins.

Two pathways, headed in opposite directions, but only one destination: One way or another, it’s the end of an era. This is finally over.

If you’re a Maple Leafs fan, you’re probably thinking: Praise Wendel. We can’t take any more of this. Just let it end.

And that’s why today, as we count down the hours to Game 4, shouldn’t feel like a funeral. If anything, this is a celebration. Embrace it. We’re getting out, whichever way this goes. This prison is either going to throw open the front doors or it’s going to crumble down around us, but either way, we’ll finally see the sun. It may be just hours away. And it’s a good thing.

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The Athletic Hockey Show: The next episode

On this week's episode of The Athletic Hockey Show:
- Ian takes us behind the scenes of his conversation with Snoop Dogg
- How this could change the Senators' bidding
- Two four-goal games, two losses
- Thoughts on the Leafs in round two
- A look back at the Sharks/Wings series of 1994
- Listener mail and lots more...

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