It’s playoff time, almost. The time of year when the best of the best rise to the top and prove that they have what it takes to win it all. The rest? They lose, sometimes dramatically and sometimes meekly, but either way they end up wondering what might have been.
I’m referring to you guys.
Yes, it’s time for our annual playoff contest, in which I ask you one simple question, and you send in your one-line answer. Then we wait. Then almost all of you get it wrong. Then I make fun of you.
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.
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.
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.
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…
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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.
Puck Soup is a podcast featuring me and Ryan Lambert. We release one free episode each week during the season, plus mailbags and other bonus episodes for Patreon subscribers.
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