The Athletic Hockey Show: Muzzin vs. Tkachuk

In this week's episode of The Athletic Hockey Show:
- Ian and I try to figure out what just happened in Pittsburgh
- My thoughts on Muzzin vs. Tkachuk
- The NFL has a marquee fin al matchup, why are they so rare in the NHL?
- Could any NHL team be a feel-good Buffalo Bills story everyone roots for?
- Granger Things checks in with betting talk
- This week in history, listener questions 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)

Mailbag: Hockey trades, rivalry overkill and expansion near misses

Welcome back to the mailbag. The last time we were here, the season was a month away from starting and we were just figuring out what it might look like. Now we’re two weeks in, which is apparently more than enough time to have already given up on a few teams. Hockey is fun. Let’s get to this week’s batch of questions.

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

You touched on the subject of “hockey trades” in your power rankings article. It could be entertaining to impose on the hockey world a definition for what qualifies as a hockey trade. What’s allowed to be a motivation or a piece in a hockey trade? Prospects? Draft picks? Disgruntlement? Trading old for young in a rebuild? Surely not cash and cap concerns? — Pekka L.

I like this question because it’s simple, but a lot harder than it seems. “Hockey trade” is one of those phrases that gets thrown around a lot, and my guess is everyone has a different view of what it actually means. Let’s see if we can figure this out.

First up, I think a true hockey trade can’t be about two teams working with different timelines. Trading a veteran on an expiring deal for a prospect in a deadline rental situation isn’t a hockey trade. It’s worth doing, and it’s a perfectly valid way for two teams to improve their outlook, but it’s not the same category. A hockey trade is veteran for veteran, or prospect for prospect, or top-three picks in the 2016 draft for top-three pick in the 2016 draft.

The second key criteria is that the teams have to make the deal because they want to, not because they’ve been forced into it. A trade demand or a holdout doesn’t count. A trade request is a little trickier, which is where the Laine/Dubois thing gets into a grey area. Laine wanted out, but he was still showing up and playing hard. Dubois didn’t go home, but his effort level was questioned, and after he was benched you could argue that he couldn’t play for the Blue Jackets again. Maybe it could have been ironed out, but we’ll never know.

I think there’s a third checkbox that’s a more recent addition to the list, which is that the deal can’t be primarily about cap space. Every transaction made these days is at least a little bit about dollars, and even in the pre-cap days the bottom line was always in the picture. But if a team is clearly making a deal just to shed cap, that’s a financial decision, not a hockey trade.

To sum it all up: A true “hockey trade” is one that both teams are making because they think it makes them better on roughly the same timeline. They’re not being forced into a deal, by finances or circumstance. They’re doing it because they think the guys they’re getting get them closer to winning than the guys they’re giving up, period.

That rules out most trades these days, but not all of them. Seth Jones for Ryan Johansen was a hockey trade. Taylor Hall for Adam Larsson was too, even if it was a lopsided one. Smaller trades like the Tyson Barrie/Nazem Kadri deal would qualify, as would Eric Staal for Marcus Johansson. They’re certainly not unheard of, but they’re becoming increasingly rare. Most hockey trades aren’t hockey trades, if that makes sense.

All games this year are in the division. So when we get to the semifinals, no one will have played each other yet, and we won’t know which divisions are better than others. So wouldn’t betting on the underdogs at least in theory be easy money? — Tom K.

I don’t know about easy money — I’ll leave the betting advice to Granger Things. But it’s going to be interesting, because we haven’t had a situation quite like this before.

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Does the Hockey Hall of Fame need to change?

It’s Hall of Fame time in the world or pro sports, with baseball announcing who’ll head to Cooperstown today and pro football following with its own announcement in early February. It’s a cool time to be a sports fan, with plenty of debate over who should make it, who got snubbed, and who should never have been inducted in the first place.

Hockey fans won’t get to do that this year, since the Hockey Hall of Fame has already announced that there won’t be a class of 2021. But when it comes to the sport’s highest honor, maybe hockey fans can take this time to have a different debate: Are we even doing this right?

The Hockey Hall of Fame process is, to put it mildly, an opaque one. It’s also not especially well understood by most hockey fans, although we here at The Athletic did our best to shine some light on how it all works last summer. The hockey hall has a committee of 18 members who meet in private once per year, and each member can nominate one name in each of four categories. (There’s also a process for members of the public to submit a nomination.) The committee discusses and debates each candidate, then holds one or more rounds of secret ballot votes. It takes support from 14 of the 18 members for a candidate to earn induction, and neither the vote totals, the discussions surrounding them, or even the names of the nominees being considered are ever revealed to the public.

Is that the right way to do it? Maybe. But it’s certainly not the only way, as we’ll be reminded in the coming days by our baseball and football colleagues. So today, let’s take a look at some other ways that the Hockey Hall of Fame could make its selections, and see if we think any of them would be an improvement over what we have now.

The baseball method

The process: Ballots go out to selected members of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America, and the voting pool is a big one; last year, just under 400 votes were cast. A player needs 75% to make the Hall. Players who don’t make the 75% threshold but get more than 5% of the vote can stay on the ballot for up to ten years. (There’s also a path through a veteran’s committee for players who aren’t voted in by writers.)

Writers are allowed to make their ballots public, and many do, although it’s not mandatory. The full vote totals for all players are released publicly at the end of the process.

The case for: The key here is the release of the voting totals, which gives fans a sense for how candidates are tracking over time. There’s a big difference between Bobby Abreu barely staying on last year’s ballot with 5.5% and Curt Schilling falling just short of induction with 70%, and those numbers can change over time as candidates come and go and the writers reconsider individual cases.

At its best, you can get situations like Larry Walker or Tim Raines, who see their support grow over the years until they’re left with a dramatic final few chances to make the Hall. Fans always know who’s close and who’s not, and which players are tracking towards induction. There’s suspense, but rarely anything truly shocking. Compare that to hockey, where the induction of long-time candidates like Kevin Lowe or Mark Howe can catch fans off guard, and there’s no way to know whether somebody like Alexander Mogilny or Daniel Alfredsson is narrowly missing out, or even being discussed at all.

As an added bonus, having hundreds of voters means that no one voice is especially powerful, and no longstanding friendships (or grudges) are going to decide who gets in and who doesn’t.

The case against: The first objection here might be that it’s writers doing the voting, and hockey fans might not want that. I think the PHWA does a pretty good job on the annual awards, but we’re certainly not perfect, and maybe you’d prefer to have someone else doing the voting. There’s also the related question of whether journalists should have a role in creating the news they’re going to report on, and the risk that some attention-starved hack will decide to cast a bad ballot just to get a few hate-clicks out of it.

But the bigger objection would be that all the focus on precise vote totals can lose the forest for the trees. Maybe a player is either a Hall-of-Famer or they’re not. If you’re a candidate and you don’t get the call, do you really want to know exactly where you rank compared to everyone else, or just how bleak your odds might be for the future? And if someone does get in, do we really need to argue over whether they were left off some stray ballot somewhere? Just give us the name of the successful candidates so we can celebrate them without obsessing on exact totals.

(Also, while this wouldn’t be as much of a concern in the hockey world at this point, it’s worth mentioning that the baseball hall has really struggled with reckoning with the steroid era, and there’s been plenty of drama around that.)

Would it be better?: I think it would be, for all its flaws. While baseball doesn’t have total transparency – remember, writers can refuse to reveal their ballots – it comes far closer than hockey does, and that matters. And it’s just more fun for fans to debate this stuff when they have some idea of who’s trending where, as opposed to being shocked by announcements that sometimes feel almost random.

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Weekend rankings: We have a trade to announce

We’ll get to the games in a bit, but this was one of those weekends where the wins and losses weren’t the big story. Instead, we had a trade to announce. And not just any trade, but a legitimate blockbuster that was also an old-fashioned hockey trade.

Sort of. We’ll get to that.

First, the details, just in case you somehow missed them:

#CBJ acquire:
Patrick Laine
Jack Roslovic#Jets acquire:
Pierre-Luc Dubois
3rd round pick

— Aaron Portzline (@Aportzline) January 23, 2021

It’s not quite a one-for-one, but with apologies to a good young player in Jack Roslovic and whoever gets drafted with that pick, it will probably be perceived that way, at least initially. And that’s where it gets a little bit tricky, because Laine had expressed a desire to move on from Winnipeg and Dubois had made it very clear that he was done in Columbus. Even Roslovic didn’t want to sign with the Jets. Is it really a hockey trade if the main pieces wanted out?

Maybe not, but that’s where the “old-fashioned” part comes in, because the NHL used to have trades like this all the time. Mark Messier went home on the eve of a season to force his exit from Edmonton. Doug Gilmour walked out on the Flames days before the moved him to Toronto. Pavel Bure sat out half a season to get out of Vancouver. Eric Lindros went even further to get out of Philadelphia.

One pattern you may notice in those trades: The team whose hand was forced rarely makes out well in the long run. That’s bad news for Columbus and good news for the Jets, who managed to take a Laine situation that seemed to be on shaky ground and turn it into a deal where they were working from a position of strength. It’s no sure thing that this turns into a steal for Winnipeg, because Laine is no Gary Leeman or Pavel Brendl, but two-way centers are hard to find and they just landed one with a chip on his shoulder.

As for Laine in Columbus, well, it will certainly be interesting to see how he fits in with John Tortorella. You have to be a certain type of guy to succeed in a Tortorella world, and first impressions are that Laine doesn’t exactly give off that vibe. But that’s probably too simplistic. Tortorella has coached plenty of stars who’d have success under him, including offensive wingers like Martin St. Louis, Marian Gaborik and Artemi Panarin. If Laine does his job, however that’s defined for him, he should be fine.

Which leads to the next question: What does his next contract look like? He’ll be an RFA this offseason, so there’s plenty of time and the Blue Jackets control his rights. But long-time readers will know where I’m going with this: The dreaded “shiny new toy” syndrome, in which a team makes a big trade for a pending free agent and then has to figure out what kind of contract to give him. It’s a tough spot for a team to be in, since you can’t exactly play hardball with a guy you just gave up major assets to acquire. And it almost never works out well. Jarmo Kekalainen will have his work cut out for him on this one.

But that’s for down the line. For now, we’ve got two young stars in their prime with new homes and something to prove, and two fan bases who’ll spend the next few years arguing over who got the better of the deal. That’s going to be all sorts of old-fashioned fun.

On to the weekend’s games, which included the Dubois-less Blue Jackets beating the Lightning and the Laine-less Jets taking yet another from the Senators before coughing up last night’s stunner against the Oilers. Yes, it’s still way too early for this, but if NHL GMs can do their jobs then we can too.

Road to the Cup

The five teams that with the best chances of becoming the first team in history to win a Stanley Cup in July.

One team I have no idea what to do with this week: Dallas. They didn’t make their season debut until Friday, and looked scary good in beating the Predators 7-0, a win that gave them the division’s best goals differential despite only playing one game. Last night’s win in the rematch wasn’t as impressive, but they still took the two points.

Last week, we talked about how hard it is to rank teams when everyone has only played two or three games. What do you do with a team that’s played twice while everyone else is four games ahead? I have no idea, which is why the Stars (and 2-0-0 Panthers) aren’t in the top five mix this week. We’ll see where things stand a week from now.

5. Boston Bruins (3-1-1, +3 true goals differential*) – It was feeling pretty dicey through three games, as the Bruins struggled to create anything offensively. That changed against the Flyers, and 11 goals and two wins later, the Bruins feel like contenders again. The Flyers, meanwhile, do not, which opens up a spot from last week’s list.

4. Washington Capitals (3-0-3, +2) – We’ll give that extra spot to the Caps, who are holding down first in the East and have points in every game, including yesterday’s loss to the Sabres. The big story this week was the whole COVID mess that cost them four key players, but that’s a temporary situation that shouldn’t have a long-term impact. It’s still tempting to slip the Islanders into this slot, and maybe we would have if they’d handled the Devils last night. Instead we’ll wait and see how this week goes, as the shorthanded Caps face the Isles twice

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Grab Bag: We're back it's weird

In the return of the Friday Grab Bag:
- Wait how does this work again?
- The one COVID-related change we should "forget" to undo
- An obscure player who still holds a surprising record
- Comedy stars
- And a YouTube look back at a Leafs trade that contains a major twist ending...

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