NHL weekend rankings: 5 post-Olympic break overreactions (unless they're not)

Welcome back to the NHL weekend rankings, returning after a three-week Olympic break. Aw, I missed you too.

Of course, those three weeks only contained a handful of NHL games for each team, so in theory our outlook on the league shouldn’t have changed too much. In theory, sure. But this is the real world, where half our job as fans is to overreact to anything and everything.

So today, before we get to the Top Five and Bottom Five, let’s first take a moment to pick a few teams and go way overboard based on their first few games back from the Olympic break.

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Deadline week mailbag?

Hey folks...

The trade deadline is this week, so let's try a mailbag.

I'm looking for your questions, comments, rants and hypotheticals. Trade talk/speculation/proposals are fun, although remember this won't run until deadline day.

Clever is good. Straight down the middle is good too, so don't feel like you have to steal the show if you'd rather ask something simple. Anything can work.

Send your stuff via email at dgbmailbag@gmail.com.

Thanks,
Sean

After Olympic gold, where does Connor Hellebuyck rank among history's best?

Connor Hellebuyck has had a good month. You might have heard about it.

The three-time Vezina winner and defending Hart Trophy winner as NHL MVP was the story of the story of Team USA’s gold medal win over Canada on Sunday, making 41 saves in a 2-1 OT win. It was the sort of signature game that a goaltender’s reputation can built on. After years of hearing about how he couldn’t win the big one, Hellebuyck went out and almost single-handedly won one of the biggest ones that there’s ever been. Then he became the first hockey player to earn the Presidential Medal of Freedom. And also, one of Frankie’s dudes.

Not bad. So now what?

That’s the question that comes up when a hockey history buff and a goaltending guru get together. So today, Sean McIndoe and Jesse Granger are teaming up to try to figure out where Hellebuyck stands in modern NHL history.

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Should the NHL learn from the Olympics and switch to a 3-2-1-0 standings format?

With the Olympics in the rearview mirror, we’re back to… what was it again? That league with all the teams and the six-month season? Right, the NHL, that was it. The NHL is back. Feel the excitement.

But while the Olympic tournament is over and some of us might be eager to move on, now might be a good time to wonder about whether the NHL could learn something from how the tournament was structured.

No, I don’t mean using 3-on-3 overtime to settle championships – fans around the world seem to agree that that part was bad. And I don’t mean the smaller rules that we debated last week in Rules Court. I’m thinking of an element you may have already forgotten about, since it was only in place for the round robin: Should the NHL borrow a page from the Olympics and move to a 3-2-1-0 points system?

That’s where teams receive three points for a regulation win, two points for an overtime/shootout win, one point for an overtime/shootout loss, and zero points for a regulation loss. Is that better than what we have now?

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A brief history of the Selanne Trophy, a fake award for best combined NHL/Olympics year

It’s been a while since we added anything to our fake trophy case. That’s where we store the Carson (for best sophomore season), the Bourque (for best final season), the Pollock (for best trade) and the Thornton (for best debut with a new team).

Today, we’re unveiling a new fake trophy, for the best combination NHL and Olympic performance in the same season. Please ooh and awe at the shiny new Teemu Selanne Trophy.

Selanne was a relatively easy choice for the honor of having the award named after him. After all, he’s the all-time leading scorer in Olympic hockey among NHLers, and it’s not all that close. He’d also been tied for the most points in any NHL-attended tournament until Connor McDavid broke the record this year. Oh, and when Selanne wasn’t dominating best-on-best, he found time to score nearly 700 NHL goals. He was good.

So our trophy for the best combination NHL/Olympic year will be the Selanne. We used the combo concept to build some all-time all-star teams a few weeks ago, but now we’re looking for single seasons.

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