NHL weekend rankings: The top 16, Gold Plan standings, and my five worst calls

We made it. This is the final Weekend Rankings of the season. There’s still a couple of games left, and a few things still left to figure out over the next few days, but we’ll leave the final cleanup to the Friday guys. For our purposes, we’ve reached the finish line.

And if you’ve followed this feature over the years, you know what that means: Today’s the day you get an expanded Top 16, plus the Gold Plan standings down in the bottom five section.

But first, I’m going to be honest with you – I thought it would be a fun gimmick to use the Bonus Five section to go back and find my five dumbest rankings of the year. Nobody’s perfect, and you have to be able to laugh at yourself, or so I’ve been told. And sure enough, a quick look at the archives turns up more than a few weird calls. But when I dug a little deeper, I’m not sure I can really blame myself for some of those misfires. This season was just really, really weird.

Or at least, that’s the story I’m going to tell myself. You can decide if it sounds reasonable, as we did through the five rankings from the season that stand out with the full benefit of hindsight as being, um, not completely accurate.

>> Read the full post at The Athletic

The Utah Mammoth are just five games away from making modern NHL history

I want to write this post, but I’m not sure I should.

More specifically, I’m not sure I should hit “publish” after I’m done. As I’m writing it, I’m not sure that I will. But since you’re reading this, apparently I talked myself into it. That might have been a terrible mistake.

I want to write about this, because I think it’s interesting, and finding interesting stuff in the hockey world and then sharing it with you is pretty much my entire job. But I feel like I shouldn’t, because I don’t want to jinx it. The psychological scars of my youth, spent watching way too many Dave Stieb near-miss no-hitters, still loom large.

Screw it, let’s do this.

>> Read the full post at The Athletic

The best season a player on your favorite team ever had while missing the playoffs

If you’re team misses the playoffs, the season was a failure and there’s nothing to celebrate.

Or at least, that’s typically what fans are told, especially at this time of year. And often, it’s true enough. But not always, because even a season that doesn’t lead to a playoff run can still have its highlights. Like, for example, a player who puts together a season for the ages, despite all the losing.

That sort of success seems worth recognizing. So today’s assignment is simple: Let’s go through all 32 teams and highlight the single best season any player has ever had in a year where they still didn’t make the playoffs.

>> Read the full post at The Athletic

NHL weekend rankings: Another coaching shocker rocks the East's pillow fight

The big news, for the second week in a row, is a shock coaching change. This time it’s the Islanders, with Patrick Roy being shown the door and Pete BeBoer taking over.

This kind of move needs its own section, so we’ll cover the Islanders in more depth down below. But first, three quick thoughts, which might be the same three thoughts you had when you first heard the news:

- Damn, Mathieu Darche is not messing around.

- This was tough news to hear for a whole lot of teams that thought DeBoer would be on their radar in a few weeks.

- Matthew Schaeffer, COACH KILLER?

- The latest “next coach fired odds” list sent to the media came out on Wednesday, and it had 13 names ahead of Roy. In other words, lots of coaches probably don’t want their phone to ring right now.

Way more on this to come down below. But first…

>> Read the full post at The Athletic

How to make sense of a nonsensical NHL season? Just follow the chain of blowouts

How do you know if one NHL team is better than another?

We used to thank that that was a relatively simple question. You could just look at the standings, and they’d tell you who was good and who wasn’t. That was kind of the standings page’s whole job. But that was before the league started handing out points for losing (or did they?), encouraging everyone to play for overtime during the regular season and basically making a team’s won-loss record all but useless on its own.

And that’s in a good year. This one? It’s chaos. One division is terrible, another how arguably the three best teams in the league, and a bunch of teams are going to get screwed by the playoff format. We’ve got teams we thought would be bad winning divisions, and teams we thought would win their division who are completely unwatchable, the two-time defending Cup champs are terrible, the reigning Presidents’ Trophy winner is even worse, and a contender just fired their coach with eight games left. The Blue Jackets are good, the Blues might still make the playoffs, and the Sabres are doing whatever it is they’re doing. And we’re supposed to be able to figure out which teams are better than others?

Well, yeah. And I think it’s simpler than we’re making it out to be.

We’re overthinking this. Because while the standings page might lie, the results on the ice don’t. Or at least, they don’t as long as you know where to look.

Here’s my proposal: Forget about the won-loss records, and just ask your self what happens when two teams take the ice.

>> Read the full post at The Athletic