Experience some buyer's remorse with our all "did we save the receipt?" team

The holidays are done, and right now there’s a good chance that you’re looking around your home and thinking: Man, I paid way too much for stuff I didn’t really need.

If so, welcome to life as an NHL GM.

In most of the front offices around the league, there’s probably been a similar feeling, one that’s been growing as the season went on. It’s the classic buyer’s remorse, where a move that seemed to make sense in the summer now feels like a mistake.

Today, we’re going to build out our all-buyer’s remorse team, based on players who were acquired over the offseason via trade and free agency and aren’t working out for their new teams. We’ll do 12 forwards, six defensemen and two goalies, with a limit of three players per team so that it’s not all your favorite team fair.

(As a side note, tradition tells us that most of the players I choose for this piece will immediately heat up and play like MVP candidates for the rest of the year. If this happens, you are not allowed to send me “this aged poorly” jabs. Instead, you have to thank me for personally motivating the player to turn things around. These are the rules and you’ve legally agreed to them by reading this article.)

Great teams are built from the net out. But so are regrettable ones, so we’ll start there…

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NHL weekend rankings: The good, the bad, and the teams I can't figure out

With three nights off last week, we didn’t have as many games as usual this week. That means that our rankings won’t move all that much from last time. And more importantly, it means fewer opportunities to learn anything new.

That’s bad news for me, because there are a handful of teams where I need all the information I can get, because I just can’t figure them out.

I’m not clueless about absolutely everyone. I know that the Avalanche are good, and that the Blackhawks are bad, and that all of this is futile because the Sabres will never lose again. But for more than a few teams, I can cram everything I think I know into my hockey fan brain and all that comes out is a shrug emoji.

I’ve narrowed the list down to five. Help me, readers, because I can’t figure these teams out.

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Wait, is it weird that it's so hard to name the Eastern Conference's best player?

Who’s the best player in the NHL right now? What about the top five?

Connor McDavid is the most talented player in the world. You could argue that Nathan MacKinnon is best player this season, which is a slightly different category. Leon Draisaitl is right behind those two. Kirill Kaprizov has the biggest contract, and he’s mostly lived up to it so far. On the blueline, the eternal Cale Makar vs. Quinn Hughes debate rages on. And in goal, Connor Hellebuyck is the reigning Vezina winner, not to mention the MVP. Of course, all those guys are established veterans, but if you were building a team right now you might use your top pick on Connor Bedard or Macklin Celebrini instead.

Do you notice something odd about that paragraph?

It’s all Western Conference guys. Every one of them. And we didn’t even mention names like Jack Eichel, or Mikko Rantanen, or Leo Carlsson. The West is stacked. When you really think about it, there’s an embarrassment of riches stuffed into one conference.

And then you start to wonder: Wait, who is the best player in the East? And where would that player even rank leaguewide?

This came up last week on Puck Soup, where my beloved co-host Ryan Lambert had recently guested on a Canucks pod. They’d asked a seemingly simple question: If Quinn Hughes had gone to the Devils like we all expected, would he have instantly become the East’s best player?

We agreed that yeah, he probably would have. But instead, he stayed in the West, since that’s apparently where all the brightest stars have to be.

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NHL weekend rankings: Thoughts on the Panthers, Blue Jackets, and holiday panic

It’s the most wonderful time of the year. Unless it isn’t.

The first half of the season is filled with checkpoints for NHL teams. There’s the curse of November 1st, when you’d better be within four points of the playoffs. By U.S. Thanksgiving, you’d better be in there, somewhere, or else you've really got your work cut out for you.

But by the holiday freeze? At this point, for most teams, you are what you are. And when some teams open up their presents at this time of year, they find a lump of coal and a handwritten note from Santa reading “you guys stink”.

Yes, it’s holiday crisis time for teams around the league. Let’s see if we can narrow the lost down to five.

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Who says no to these 11 trades (featuring things that can't actually be traded)?

It’s been a week, but most of us are still in shock. NHL GMs actually did it. They pulled off the impossible: meaningful midseason trades. More than one, even.

Well, if they can do it, so can we. Welcome back to “Who Says No?”, the feature where you send me your trade proposals involving things that can not be traded.

We tried this over the summer, with trades involving Brass Bonanza, Carlton the Bear and the 1999 Super Bowl. Were any of those trades realistic? No they were not. But neither was “The Canucks trade Quinn Hughes to a team that isn’t the Devils”, and look where that ended up.

What did you fine folks come up with this time around? I’m almost afraid to find out, but let’s dig in.

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Who wins, a team of Canadians who played in Canada or Americans who played in America?

There’s a concept in international best-on-best hockey that some causal fans may not be completely familiar with, mainly because I made it up just now: The double player.

It’s a player who’s represents his country both internationally and in the NHL. A double Canadian is a Canadian player who plays on a Canadian NHL team. A double American is an American player who plays on an American NHL team.

Jack Eichel is a double American. Matthew Tkachuk became one when he forced his way out from Calgary to Florida. Connor McDavid is a double Canadian, at least for now. Mitch Marner was, but not anymore. And Mario Lemieux, as great as he was, never earned the double distinction. So far, neither has Auston Matthews, Sidney Crosby or Cale Makar. But Quinn Hughes just did, a few days ago.

Cool. So who wins, a team of Double Canadians or Double Americans?

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NHL weekend rankings: A wild Friday shakes up the league, and our Top 5

December can be a boring month in the NHL. Opening night optimism is a faded memory, the deadline is still months away, the playoff picture is jumbled, and not much is happening.

And then, every once in a while, we get a day like Friday.

We got one of the biggest midseason blockbusters in years, with the Quinn Hughes trade to Minnesota. We got the long-awaited Oilers goalie trade, with Tristan Jarry coming over from the Penguins. Oh, and before those two deals dropped, we also found out that the Sabres might be on the verge of a front office shakeup.

Other than all that, pretty quiet day.

Let’s dig into those two big trades, with a few lingering thoughts…

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Which of the teams that are .500 or worse will find a way to make the playoffs?

The other day, I had a question I was wondering about: How often does a team that’s .500 or worse in December manage to still make the playoffs?

And I was surprised by what turned out to be the answer: All the time.

No, literally, it happens every season. Going back to the 2013 lockout (and excluding the COVID season that didn’t start until January), at least one team that was .500 or worse in December has made the playoffs each and every season:

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Who was the worst NHL GM to keep his job for five years or more?

 I’m a big fan of sports questions that seem simple but are actually more complicated than they appear, which is how I’ve managed to waste huge chunks of my life on questions about jersey numbers or building rosters of terrible contracts that are still somehow cap compliant. Today, we’re going to try another one.

Which GM had the worst long stint with a team, meaning five years or longer?

You can already see the problem. There are lots of GMs in NHL history who’ve held the role for a particular team for a long time. And there are lots of GMs who didn’t do an especially great job. But those two groups aren’t supposed to overlap. This is supposed to be one of the most important jobs in a relentlessly results-oriented league – if you’re not having success, shouldn’t your team replace you with somebody else who might?

You’d think so. And sure enough, most of the GMs who are remembered poorly fall short of our five-year cutoff, often by a lot. Even guys that stuck around longer than fans might have wanted, like John Ferguson Jr. in Toronto, Ron Hextall in Pittsburgh, Ned Harkness in Detroit or Peter Chiarelli in Edmonton didn’t get to the five-year mark. Five years is a lot.

But every now and then, for a variety of reasons, a team sticks with a guy well past the point that results would dictate. Those are the guys we’re interested in today, as we count down the ten worst GMs to get at least five years with the same team.

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NHL weekend rankings: Naming and shaming the (many) fake .500 teams

If you’re a sports fan, you know what “.500” means. In general, it means you’re average. Mediocre. Just OK. And specifically, it means you’ve won as many games as you’ve lost.

The exception: The NHL. Since 1999, the league has given out points for losing, which is dumb but we’ve been over that. In the NHL, we rank teams based on their points percentage, and because of those loser points, you can have a percentage north of .500 even if you’ve lost more than you’ve won.

Most years, it’s annoying. This year, with the loser point being well and truly out of control, it’s messing up the standings even more than usual. So this week, let’s take a look at five teams that are fake. 500 – which is to say, they’re sitting at .500 or better even though they’ve lost more games than they’ve won. We’ll name and shame those teams here, and rank them from least to most fake.

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Six Patrick Roy-inspired Oilers trades for a goalie that get increasingly demented

Thirty years ago today, there was a very good team with one crucial flaw.

They had an excellent roster, one that included two of the very best centers of their era. The forward depth was good. They had a decent blueline, one anchored by one of the better young offensive defensemen in the league. They had a good young coach. But the flaw was in goal – they had some decent goalies, but nobody who could be The Guy,  the sort of stud who could steal a playoff series or two on the long road to a championship.

Stop me if any of this sounds familiar, Oiler fans.

You know how the story ends. Our team is the 1995-96 Colorado Avalanche, and tomorrow marks the thirty-year anniversary of the biggest transaction in franchise history. On December 6, 1995, the Avalanche acquired Patrick Roy from the Canadiens in a five-player trade, and the rest was history. They won the Stanley Cup that very year, followed not long after by another. Joe Sakic and Peter Forsberg went to the Hall of Fame with multiple rings. And it all happened because Colorado’s front office recognized a problem, and took the biggest swing possible to fix it.

Could this year’s Oilers do the same?

The short answer: No, of course not.

We all know why. There’s a salary cap now. Trading is too hard, especially during the season. The price would be too high. Great players are almost never traded these days. And there’s also the not-very-small detail that Roy had basically walked out on his team a few days earlier, forcing Montreal to make a lopsided deal they wouldn’t otherwise have made. No elite goalies are doing that these days.

OK, sure. This year’s Oilers can’t take a big swing. It’s impossible to land a Roy-sized talent, or even anything close, even if it would be the last piece of a Stanley Cup puzzle. We have to be realistic, and we all know that when the Oilers eventually make their move, it will look a lot more like the 2024 Avs than the 1995 version – which is to say, they’ll try to find a Mackenzie Blackwood or Scott Wedgewood, then hope for the best. Or maybe they won’t do anything at all, and just roll the dice on yet another Stuart Skinner playoff run. But a blockbuster? Never going to happen.

Fine. But what if it did?

Today, on the eve of the anniversary of the Patrick Roy trade, let’s indulge in a little but of make-believe. Let’s pretend we live in an alternate NHL world where a team that was one star goalie away from a championship would actually, you know, go get a star goalie.

Which goalies could be the Oilers’ Patrick Roy? I have six suggestions. None of them are remotely realistic in today’s NHL. This is just a little Friday fun, a thought experiments to take you into the weekend. We'll go from the most to the least plausible.

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Don't set your mascot on fire: One reason to say "no thanks" to all 32 NHL teams

 I tried to be nice.

I really did. Last week, I wrote a whole long piece in which I offered thanks to all 32 NHL teams. It was pure positivity, nothing but puppies and rainbows. Was it out of character? Maybe, but we’re allowed to try new things. And I was trying something very new: Going a whole article without complaining.

And as I should have known would happen, a whole bunch of you responded with: Cool, now flip the script and do the negative version.

Fine. You win. Here’s one reason to say “no thanks” to every team. See if I ever try to be nice again.

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NHL weekend rankings: Early offseason lessons, plus the Wild, Oilers and Sharks

It’s December, which means it’s not too early anymore.

At least, for some things. For example, if a team is struggling to hit .500 at this point, it’s not just a case of a slump or a run of bad luck. That team is bad. There’s still time for them to get good again, absolutely. But right now? There’s no more pointing at the calendar and pretending everything’s OK.

I’m not as convinced that it’s not too early to pass judgement on the offseason. But we’re doing it anyways, so here we go…

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