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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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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Puck Soup: UFA winners and losers

On this week's episode of the Puck Soup podcast:
- Free agency winners and losers
- Small trades that have been made
- Big ones that haven't (yet/)
- Changes in the women's pro game
- And more...

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>> Listen on Spotify

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Cap Court: Does J.T. Miller have a bad contract? Darnell Nurse? Jordan Binnington?

Welcome back to Cap Court, where we take a look at some of the big-dollar contracts around the league and try to figure out if they’re bad.

In the NHL’s hard cap world, a bad contract (as viewed from the team’s perspective) can be an anchor. They’re easy to sign but difficult or even impossible to unload, and can end up blocking other important moves. But as fans, we’re probably a little too quick to toss around the “bad contract” accusation, so it’s worth digging into some of these deals to see whether they actually deserve the label.

This is the fifth session of cap court, meaning we’ve looked at 20 players over the years. Eight of those 20 have been found guilty of being a bad contract, because I tend to try to be as charitable as possible here; some others were let off with a warning, and a few were exonerated completely. I’d argue that most of those decisions have held up well, even as a few may have shifted with a few more years of age and/or hindsight.

Either way, today will bring five new contracts that we haven’t looked at yet. And court is now in session.

>> Read the full post at The Athletic

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Puck Soup: Final countdown

On this week's episode of the Puck Soup podcast:
- The final matchup is set, and it's legitimately great
- Thoughts on the Avs and Lightning, plus our picks
- Is Tampa already the best team of the cap era?
- Ryan has crunched the numbers and will tell us how many Cups this season is worth
- We say goodbye to the Rangers, wonder what's next, and debate the Kakko scratch
- The Knights get Bruce Cassidy, the Flyers get John Tortorella (we think), but where's Barry Trotz?
- Trade talk around Alex DeBrincat and John Gibson
- The weird new MLS TV contract and what the NHL could learn from it, Ryan's Jurrasic World review, and more...

>> Stream it now:

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Who wins today, 2016’s Team North America or Team Everyone Else?

Five years ago this week, hockey fans got their first look at the roster for what would become one of the most unique teams in international sports history. In organizing the 2016 World Cup tournament, the NHL went off the board with their decision to include a Team North America, an unprecedented combo platter of Canadian and American stars who were 23 or under.

Did it make sense to have two counties combining for an entry in an international tournament, let alone when those two nations were rivals? Not really. Was it fair to weaken those countries’ main rosters by ruling out some of the game’s best young stars? Probably not. Was the whole thing a good idea? It’s fair to say that the initial reaction was mixed.

But then we got a look at the first draft of the roster, and even a traditionalist had to be intrigued. That initial March 2016 list featured 16 names, including established stars like Nathan MacKinnon, Connor McDavid and Jack Eichel. They’d eventually be joined by a group that included Auston Matthews (who’d yet to play an NHL game) and Mark Scheifele.

We weren’t sure if they’d be all that good, but we knew they’d be fun. It turned out they were both, stealing the show at the tournament with a run-and-gun style and all sorts of skill. They failed to medal, but beat Finland and Sweden. In terms of NHL star power, the future looked bright.

Five years later, the future is here. So today, I want to tackle a question sent in by Puck Soup listener Manny: Could a reunited Team North America beat an all-star squad made up of everyone else in a series played right now?

It’s a big ask. We’ve got a huge swath of the league to choose from, including stars who were too old for Team North America consideration, guys who hadn’t entered the league yet, and a handful of snubs. And we’ve got the benefit of hindsight, because while most of the 2016 team holds up well, a few haven’t seen their pro careers pan out as well as we all expected. Team Everyone Else should have a big advantage. But Team North America has Connor McDavid and Auston Matthews, so let’s do this.

One caveat: We’re doing North American players only. I originally thought about making it the kids against the world, but throwing names like Victor Hedman, David Pastrnak and Nikita Kucherov into the mix just tilts the scales too far in one direction. It’s Canadian and American stars only, and if you show up in the comments going “Uh, Leon Draisaitl?” then you have to do ten pushups and we all get to make fun of you. Let’s see where this takes us.

Forwards

Let’s start with the main course, because the Team North America forwards are ridiculous. McDavid, Matthews and MacKinnon may be the three best players in the league right now, so we’re absolutely loaded with top-end star power. But we’re not completely top heavy, with some excellent options for all four lines. Some of the names aren’t exactly Hart candidates, like Ryan Nugent-Hopkins. J.T. Miller or Vincent Trochek, but they’ve developed into very good players.

In fact, among the names on the final 2016 roster, there isn’t a single one that you’d describe as a bust five years down the road. And the only ones who’ve struggled to establish themselves as legitimate top-end players are Brandon Saad and maybe Jonathan Drouin.

Here’s how my Team North America lines would look in 2021:

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What’s the best team you can build in 2021-22 using existing contracts?

From​ time to time,​ readers​ will​ send​ me​ story​ ideas. Some​ are good, some​ not so much,​ but​ they’re always appreciated.​​ Every now and then someone will come up with something that is just the right mix of weird and fun and it turns into something cool.

But by far, there’s one idea that gets suggested the most: What’s the best cap-compliant roster you could build using all of today’s contracts?

It’s a neat idea, and we’ve seen it done well in other sports. But it never quite works in the NHL, because you just wind up with a roster stacked with entry-level deals. In an era where players (especially forwards) peak so quickly, those first contracts often represent such outrageous bargains that they make the exercise too easy. Let me start with Auston Matthews, Mikko Rantanen, Patrik Laine, Elias Pettersson and Brayden Point all at $900,000 or so, and I can stack the rest of the roster with pretty much whoever I want. Heck, give them all the bonuses too, they’re still dirt cheap. There’s no challenge to it.

You could get around that by limiting how many entry-level deals you could use. But today, let’s try something a little more challenging. We’re going to see if we can make the best cap-compliant roster that we can by using just existing contracts. But instead of building that team for this year, we’re going to try to do it for 2021-22.

Why 2021-22? The first reason is that it’s three years away, which means we lose access to all of those entry-level deals. Matthews, Rantanen and friends will all be on their second deals and making just slightly more than they are right now and the Jack Hughes cohort isn’t in the league yet so we can’t use them either. Three years also has the benefit of not being so far away that we’re just guessing about who’ll still be good by then. And there are more players than you’d think who already have contracts that reach into the 2021-22 season – 165 as of today according to Cap Friendly, including many of the league’s best players.

The idea comes with a couple of hurdles. The first is that we’ll probably have a new CBA by 2021-22, meaning there’s a chance that the cap system or HRR split could work differently by then. And even if we assume that nothing important will change, we don’t actually know what the salary cap is going to be by then.

That second problem is easy enough to solve by just picking a number that seems reasonable. Let’s go with $90 million, which would represent an increase of just over $10 million from where we are right now. The cap went up $8.1 million over the last three years, so mix in a little inflation and $90 million seems about right for 2021-22.

That leaves us with 165 players to choose from and a $90 million cap to work with to put together a 2021-22 roster that fits under the cap and looks like a Cup contender. How hard could that be? Spoiler: Harder than you might think …

(All salary information in this piece comes from CapFriendly.com. Also, all values listed are a player’s cap hit; we don’t care about the actual dollars due on the contract.)

Goaltenders

They say that you should build from the net out, so we’ll follow that advice. But when we do, we run into our first problem almost immediately. Of those 165 players signed through 2022, only nine are goaltenders. And none of them look like major bargains.

When you think about it, that makes sense. There’s more supply than demand for goaltending these days, so teams aren’t making long-term commitments to guys unless they think they’re foundational pieces. Mix in deals like Henrik Lundqvist, Frederik Andersen and Tuukka Rask that all expire the year before our 2021-22 season, and it’s no surprise that the pickings are slim.

But it’s a problem for our roster because we’re going to be spending way more on goaltending than we’d like. Even if we went with the two most inexpensive options we can find, Ben Bishop and Roberto Luongo, we’re still paying over $10 million for a position where it’s often smart to go as cheap as possible. And even Luongo can’t realistically be a pick for three years down the road since he’ll be 42 years old by then.

Instead, we’ll hand the starting job to one of the few guys on the list who looks like he could be a bargain: Anaheim’s John Gibson at $6.4 million. He’s performing at a Vezina or even Hart Trophy level these days, and while that doesn’t guarantee anything about how he’ll be playing in three years (or even three weeks), we’ll take our chances.

The other option here would have been Winnipeg’s Connor Hellebuyck at $6.166 million. He was great last year but has looked pretty ordinary this season. Hellebuyck should be fine, but I prefer Gibson enough to spend a few extra bucks. Ideally, we’d pick both guys, but $12.5 million will be too much to spend on goaltending, so we have to make a call here.

For the backup spot, we’ll go with Ben Bishop at $4.917 million, mainly because he’s the cheapest option available. Do I feel good about this pick? No, I do not – he’ll be turning 35 in 2021-22, and he’s a big guy who’s had hip problems. There’s a good chance he’s not an effective goaltender in three years’ time and we just wasted a big chunk of our cap on a guy who’ll be on LTIR or a buyout target. We’re two picks into this thing and I’m already angry.

But really, what other choice do we have? Carey Price at $10.5 million? No thanks. Cory Schneider at $6 million? Not a chance. Marc-Andre Fleury at $7 million? Maybe, but he’ll turn 37 during the 2021-22 season. Jonathan Quick ($5.8 million) and Martin Jones ($5.75 million) are at least worth considering, but we’re going to need every penny we can scrounge to fill out the rest of the roster.

That means it’s Gibson and Bishop, at a total cost of over $11 million. That’s pricey. Let’s see if we can claw back some of that space on the blueline.

Cap space spent so far: $11.317 million on two players, an average of $5.66 million each. We have $78.683 million left for 18 roster spots, an average of just over $4.37 million per player.

>> Read the full post at The Athletic

Weekend wrap: Senators' OT magic (but the backlash is on the way)

In the NHL playoffs, as the old saying goes, you’re never truly in trouble until you lose one at home.

There’s a corollary to that: If you lose two straight at home, you’re probably screwed.

The Ducks were facing that fate last night, after dropping Game 1 against the Predators on Friday night. It looked like Nashville might head home with a 2–0 series lead; the Predators held a two-goal lead after just 10 minutes, and led 3–2 midway through the second. But the Ducks stormed back, helped along by an uncharacteristically shaky outing from Pekka Rinne.

The two teams will now head to Nashville tied at a game apiece, with the series resuming tomorrow night.

The Penguins will be looking to follow the Ducks' lead tonight, as they host the Senators in what feels close to a must-win game. The high-powered Pens couldn't get much going in Saturday's Game 1, trailing 1–0 for most of the night before Evgeni Malkin tied it up late to briefly wake up a largely comatose Pittsburgh crowd. That gave the Penguins an opportunity to steal a win in overtime, but instead it was Bobby Ryan who capped it off for the Senators.

Game 2 goes tonight, and a Senators win would send them back to Ottawa with a shot at a sweep. The Senators head into this one having won five of seven on the road in this year's post-season.

On to the weekend's power rankings...

Top Five

Celebrating the players, teams, storylines and themes that have had the best week.

5. The Ryan Kesler vs. Ryan Johansen rivalry: The NHL playoffs are always better with a little bad blood mixed in, and the Nashville/Anaheim series is providing plenty early on. Much of it has come courtesy Kesler and Johansen, who've spent most of the first two games matched up against each other.

Things boiled over last night, with Johansen ripping on Kesler after the game. The mini-rant came after he appeared to be on the receiving end of a Kesler elbow, among other battles, and at one point included Johansen telling reporters that "I don't know how you can cheer for a player like that."

You can understand Johansen's frustration, but you have to think those sorts of comments are music to Kesler's ears. For the record, he was relatively complimentary of Johansen immediately after the game. But Kesler has been down this playoff road a few times before, and he knows how to get under someone's skin. He's apparently already there with Johansen, and there are still up to five games left to go.

4. Ben Bishop: The Dallas Stars got a jump on the off-season by locking down the first big-name UFA of the summer, signing Bishop to a six-year deal worth $29.5 million after acquiring his rights from the Kings.

The deal represents a pay cut for Bishop, who'll average about a million dollars less per season than he did on his last contract. But the term will more than make up for that; Bishop is 30 years old and coming off an injury-plagued season, and the market hasn't been especially kind to goalies in recent years. The track record for bigger goalies aging well isn't great, so getting a six-year commitment from a team is a clear win for Bishop.

From the Stars' perspective, Bishop is a clear upgrade at a position that's been a problem for years. He didn't come cheap (and they also had to give up a fourth-round pick to acquire his rights), but at some point GM Jim Nill needed to address his goaltending issues. There's an excellent chance that the contract comes back to bite the Stars by the end, but right now Nill has a potential Cup contender in place, and going another season with the status quo wasn't an option. Let's tentatively call this one even from a Dallas perspective, at least until we see how they wriggle out from Kari Lehtonen and/or Antti Niemi's contracts.

>> Read the full post at Sportsnet

Conference final preview + predictions

Welcome to the third round of the NHL playoffs. Let's get you caught up on what's happened so far.

The worst team in the Central, according the standings, made it through. The worst team in the Atlantic, according to the experts, did, too. The Presidents' Trophy winner went home in the second round, and their fans are very sad. And in the Pacific, a top seed that never wins Game 7 captured the division by winning a Game 7.

In other words, nobody has any idea what's going on, or what's going to happen. It's chaos out there. Beautiful, beautiful chaos. Let's get to the conference final preview.

Western Conference

One team is back in the conference final for the second time in three years. The other has never been here before, ever. It's not exactly a matchup between long-established hockey markets, but it should be fun.

WC Nashville Predators vs. #1 Anaheim Ducks

In this corner: The Predators (41-29-12, 94 points, +18 goals differential not counting shootouts), who struggled through an underwhelming first half of the season before hitting their stride in time for the playoffs.

The road so far: They stunned the favored Blackhawks with a four-game sweep in the opening round, then disposed of the Blues in six to reach the conference final for the first time in franchise history.

Injury report: With the obvious yet important caveat that just about everyone is banged up at this time of year and NHL teams are under no real obligation to tell us anything, the Predators injury list is fairly empty, apart from Kevin Fiala, who is out for the year after suffering an ugly broken leg in the second round.

The big question: How do you slow down the Predators offense from the blueline? The team's big three of P.K. Subban, Roman Josi, and Ryan Ellis have combined for 24 points, with each of those players ranking among the team's top five scorers. For comparison, the team's other three blueliners have just three points total.

It's rare for a team to get that much scoring from the backend, and it's made up for the fact that the Predators forwards have been only OK. It will be interesting to see if the Ducks make any sort of adjustment to try to take away those blueline chances and force the guys up front to beat them.

One player to watch: Ryan Johansen. The fourth overall pick in the 2010 draft has long been viewed as an underrated two-way center—think along the lines of a poor man's Jonathan Toews or Anze Kopitar.

The Predators paid big to get him, surrendering Seth Jones in a blockbuster trade with the Blue Jackets last year, and for the most part he's given them what they were looking for. His 61 points tied him for the team lead, and he led the forwards in ice time. Still, he's the sort of player who always seems to leave you wanting just a little more. He has a team-leading nine points in this year's postseason, but with a matchup with Ryan Getzlaf and Corey Perry looming, he'll be under the brightest spotlight of his career over the next two weeks.

Key number: .951, Pekka Rinne's save percentage so far in the postseason. You can dig into all sorts of numbers and narratives, but when your goaltender is stopping 19 out of every 20 shots, you're going to win.

Rinne isn't as good as his numbers indicate; he was a more pedestrian .918 on the regular season, and has been under .910 in each of his last two playoff runs before this current one. But that doesn't matter. He's red hot right now, and if he stays that way, the Predators probably win the series.

>> Read the full post at Vice Sports

Weekend wrap: Oilers make it seven

Well, that was an interesting weekend for the Edmonton Oilers.

On Friday, they suffered one of the most devastating playoff losses in recent memory, blowing a 3–0 lead with just over three minutes left in regulation before losing in overtime. That collapse had them facing elimination last night, in front of 18,000 Edmonton fans praying that the team could make it to seven.

That was seven as in a seventh and deciding game. Instead, they got seven goals, with the Oilers going full 1980s mode on a hapless Ducks team that just couldn't keep up. The Oilers had put three pucks past John Gibson before the game was nine minutes old, and the onslaught had only begun. By the time it was over, the Oilers had taken the game by a 7–1 final, racking up their biggest playoff blowout in 27 years.

The lopsided score doesn't necessarily mean anything heading into Wednesday night's Game 7. Oilers fans know that well, after watching their team get waxed 7-0 by the Sharks in the opening round before winning two straight to close out that series. Momentum from a big win typically lasts right up until the opening faceoff of the next game.

But there's more than one bad loss at play here. The Ducks have a history of crushing Game 7 losses. And this isn't a Washington Capitals type of history, stretching back decades to a time before some of the players were even born. Anaheim has seen its season end with a Game 7 loss on home ice in each of the last four years, and several key players were there for each and every one of them.

Last time around, it cost Bruce Boudreau his job and had Bob Murray demanding more from his core. Now they're facing the possibility of it all happening again.

Maybe none of that matters. Maybe the Ducks put together the sort of 60-minute game we haven't seen much of from them during this series, close out the young Oilers and move on, ending all the Game 7 talk in the process. But it's not hard to picture them gripping their sticks a little tighter if things go south early. And that's especially true if Gibson looks anywhere near as shaky as he did last night.

Either way, four weeks into the post-season, we're finally getting our first Game 7. And the dream of two Canadian teams in the conference final for the first time in 23 years is still alive, with the underdog Senators now just one game away from sending the Rangers home.

On to the weekend's rankings...

Top Five

Celebrating the players, teams, storylines and themes that have had the best week.

5. Vegas Golden Knights: The Knights have yet to make a trade, or at least any that we know about. But with six weeks to go until the expansion draft, George McPhee and company have been keeping busy. They signed their second player over the weekend, landing highly covered KHL star Vadim Shipachyov. And according to one report, he could be joined by Shipachyov's former teammate Evgeni Dadonov soon.

Targeting the KHL isn't a bad strategy for a Golden Knights team that won't get much help from the expansion draft. They're going to have plenty of holes in the lineup, especially if McPhee can start locking down some deals that see him acquiring picks and prospects in exchange for passing on certain teams' veterans. And because the roster won't be very good, they should have plenty of cap space to work with. Signing establish NHL free agents could be a tough sell, so raiding the KHL makes sense. And it's nice to see the Knights finally start to feel like a real team.

4. Conspiracy theories: It's been a good week for the tinfoil-hat brigade.

After shaking off the disappointment of a draft lottery that didn't really offer up much in the way of conspiracy fodder, fans who see hidden plots lurking behind everything that happens in the league took centre stage after the Alex Ovechkin/Matt Niskanen/Sidney Crosby incident.

Most of us saw a play that was somewhere between an unfortunate accident and an outright dirty hit. Not so, argued others — it was all part of a secret plan, hatched by the Capitals at a players-only meeting held after Game 2, and then ruthlessly executed in the early moments of Game 3.

Meanwhile, as the Capitals were planning the demise of their opponents, the NHL and its officials were apparently doing the same for the Oilers. Thanks to a pair of questionable goaltender-interference calls — and we'll get to those in more detail a bit later — we now know that the fix is in.

Why? Well, because obviously the league doesn't want Edmonton in the conference final. You see, the Oilers don't have much to offer the league beyond its very best and most marketable young player, and Anaheim is a really big TV market that... wait. OK, the logic here may need more work.

But logic is never the point for these sorts of things. They're dumb and pointless, and deep down we all know it. But sometimes it's good to vent, and if a shadowy backroom plot helps that along, so be it. It's the playoffs; we can all reactivate our brains once the offseason arrives.

>> Read the full post at Sportsnet