What was the cap era's best team to not get a single Hart vote? The answer is weird

I’ll make you a deal: You indulge me in one of those Slow News Summer ideas I’ve had kicking around, and at the end I’ll surprise you with something weird that I found while researching it.

Do we have a deal? Sure we do. Let’s start with the Carolina Hurricanes.

As you may have heard, they won the Stanley Cup this year, the ultimate dream for every long-suffering hockey lifer and/or middle-schooler. And in doing so, they might have established themselves as the best team in the history of the NHL to not have a single Hall-of-Famer. We obviously can’t know that for sure yet, but I ran down the Carolina candidates a few weeks ago and included a reader poll, and the majority of you agreed that the Hurricanes might have a Hall, but don’t have anyone Hall-worthy.

But let’s take it one step further, with something we can quantify today: The Hurricanes also managed to win the Cup with a roster that didn’t receive so much as a single Hart Trophy vote. Surely they must also be the best team in that category too.

In theory, we’re lowering the bar here by more than a bit. Getting into the Hall of Fame is hard – you need to put up a career worthy of the sport’s ultimate honor, and then you also have to sufficiently impress the mysterious committee and meet whatever criteria they’re using that year. A few questionable picks aside, making the Hall of Fame means you were a legend, or at least spent multiple years looking the part.

But getting Hart votes? Like, any at all? That’s not all that hard. In the cap era, there were 129 ballots sent back for the 2006 awards, and that number has increased up to almost 200 in recent years. Winning the Hart is tough, sure. But getting even a single vote just means that one of those 200 or so voters thought you were worthy of a top-five mention. We’re talking about roughly 1,000 spots available on ballots around the league, and you only need to show up on one.

That’s not easy, but it’s not exactly a monumental challenge. After all, the list of players who’ve had cap-era Hart votes includes Pascal Dupuis, Cam Atkinson, Radim Vrbata, William Karlsson and Marek Svatoš. And that’s not even getting to the goalies who caught a stray vote, a list that includes Daniel Vladař, James Reimer and the immortal Andrew Hammond.

So yeah, this is going to be a lot tougher than the HHOF list, and clearly the Hurricanes doing it while winning the Cup will be a huge outlier. But let’s give it a try anyway. We’ll start at the dawn of the cap era in 2005 and work our way forward, flagging the best teams I could find that were completely shut out of the Hart love.

>> Read the full post at The Athletic

What's the deal with NHL GMs who go from genius to dunce after switching jobs?

Seven years ago, the Red Wings pulled off the near-impossible: They made a move that absolutely everyone loved.

Their own fans, who were thrilled. Other fan bases, who were grudgingly jealous. The media. The experts. The insiders. The nerds. All 200 hockey men.

Everyone agreed: Hiring Steve Yzerman as GM was a slam dunk.

The news landed one Friday morning, somehow both coming out of nowhere while also feeling like we’d known it all along. Of course the captain was coming home. After an apprenticeship in Tampa Bay that saw him build the Lightning into a powerhouse, Yzerman was returning to Detroit to do the same for the team he’d led to three Cups on the ice. The news received glowing reviews everywhere, with the possible exception of Tampa Bay, where a team already reeling from an historic playoff collapse in their first year without Yzerman worried about what might come next.

After all, this wasn’t just the typical NHL homecoming, where a struggling team trots out a former player to buy some time with a skeptical public. In 2019, Steve Yzerman was considered one of if not the very best GMs in the league. He’d worked magic Tampa, he’d led Team Canada to gold, he’s won GM of the Year. Now he was home, taking over a team ready to make the next step toward contention and beyond.

It was a new hope, because it couldn’t fail. And then it did.

>> Read the full post at The Athletic

Which draft year makes the best lineup of players traded for first-round picks?

Hidden away on my laptop is a list that’s simply labeled “ideas”. It’s where I keep all those potential columns that I haven’t got around to yet, or in some cases haven’t worked up the courage to try. A lot of them are weird. Some are probably just flat-out dumb. In some cases I’m waiting for some sort of news hook; in others I’m just holding off until Slow News Summer hits its peak. A lot of them just aren’t there yet in terms of supporting a whole piece, but might be some day if I get desperate enough circumstances change.

The point is, sometimes it just makes sense to wait on an idea. And yes, I’ll pause here so you can think about the stuff I have published and then wonder what isn't making the cut.

But there’s a downside to this approach: It turns out that if you wait too long on a given idea, the NHL might just decide to make it moot.

>> Read the full post at The Athletic

NHL offer sheet rules used to be wild. Here’s how history looks if that never changes

There’s a good chance that years from now, we’ll look back at these last few weeks as the dawn of the offer sheet era, with the Barret Hayton shot followed by a massive Leo Carlsson chaser. Things got crazy.

But it could have been crazier. So much crazier. Gather round, kids, grandpa’s got a quick story time.

The concepts of restricted free agents and offers sheets first appears in the NHL in 1988, and for the first few years they looked very different from what we know today. In certain circumstances, the player’s original team had no right to match. And if a team couldn’t or wouldn’t match the offer, there was no pre-made chart of draft pick compensation to refer to.

Instead, the compensation would be players – basically, the two teams would be forced to work out a trade. And if they couldn’t directly agree on what that trade should be, things got even wilder. Both teams would submit a proposal for what they thought a “fair” deal would look like, and an independent arbitrator would have to pick one or the other.

The most infamous example of this process came in 1991, when the Blues signed Brendan Shanahan to an offer sheet, prying him away from a Devils team that had no right to match. The Blues offered a compensation built around two young players, Rod Brind’Amour and Curtis Joseph. Not bad. But the Devils wanted more, and they asked for superstar blueliner Scott Stevens instead. Somewhat shockingly, the arbitrator sided with the Devils, sending a furious Stevens to New Jersey and altering the next decade-plus of NHL history.

That decision directly led to the NHL scrapping the forced-trade system in the 1994 CBA. Today, we’re bringing it back.

>> Read the full post at The Athletic

Which of these eight NHL fan bases should be most insulted by the offseason so far?

The NHL offseason has been in full swing for a few weeks now. Have you been mortally insulted yet?

Not necessarily. For plenty of teams and their fan bases, a modern NHL offseason is just a steady stream of being told how wonderful they are. Both Florida teams know the drill. So does Vegas. This summer, Minnesota is playing the role of the lifelong loner who finally gets invited to sit at the cool kids’ table. How long will that last? We’ll find out, but for now they’re living large.

And then there are those other teams. You know the ones. They’re the markets nobody seems to want to play for, which means they’re at a disadvantage from day one. While other teams seem to have the wind behind the backs at all times, these teams are constantly pushing a boulder up a mountain, wondering when it will veer off course and they’ll have to start all over again.

And yes, it’s all a little bit insulting. If you’re a fan of one of these teams, the act gets old. You can be all for player empowerment (and you should), but at a certain point a fan is going to look around and wonder: What’s wrong with us? What’s wrong with my team, or my city? And maybe worst of all: Is there hope?

>> Read the full post at The Athletic