Various Mark Messier leadership award winners, ranked by how poorly they held up

I’m not sure the NHL has a weirder annual award than the Mark Messier Leadership Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Leadership.

It’s not quite a slam dunk, because the Lady Byng exists. But at least that award has been around for a century, and is voted on by a pool of writers who’ll always get it right because democracy never fails. The Mark Messier is a relatively new award that, as far as anyone can tell, just goes to whoever Mark Messier himself deems worthy. What’s the criteria? Nobody really knows. Leadership, apparently.

The award started off in 2006 as a monthly honor, before quickly being retconned into a more traditional annual award. That version has been handed out 18 times, with no repeat winners, because it’s just really hard to be a good leader more than once in your career. And while some of those winners are guys with reputations as legitimately great leaders like Sidney Crosby, Patrice Bergeron and Jonathan Toews, other winners haven’t held up quite as well. We got a reminder of that this week, when the reigning Messier winner was traded after the team that had been trying to dump him for months threatened to waive him. You know, typical leader stuff.

So today, let’s look back at that list of 18 winners, and remember X times that the award didn’t turn out to be a great omen for the future.

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Brent Burns, Ryan Suter or Zach Parise? It's the 2024 OGWAC rankings

It’s OGWAC time again, the chance to embrace the most beloved of postseason tropes: the Old Guy Without a Cup, that grizzled veteran who enters the postseason still desperately seeking his first ring.

Usually, it ends badly, and we toss another year onto the pile. But every now and then an OGWAC gets the ultimate ending, one that usually involves the first Cup handoff and more than a few tears. Think Ray Bourque, Teemu Selanne or Lanny McDonald. It’s one of the best springtime stories to watch unfold. And every year at this time, we try to figure out who could be next, with our annual OGWAC rankings.

A reminder of the criteria: A player is considered “old” if they’ve been in the league for at least 10 seasons and will be at least 33 when the Cup is awarded. Of course, the older the better for OGWAC purposes, and we also prefer players who are healthy and contributing to their team’s run. We’ll consider candidates from all 16 playoff teams, but prefer players from teams that are considered legitimate contenders. And we’ll award some bonus points for players who’ve endured especially agonizing near-misses at some point in their career.

Oh, one more thing: We’re instituting a “three OGWACs per team” rule this year, mainly because one team seems to be trying to collect them all. Can you really be a great OGWAC story if you’re only going to be the fifth guy on your team to get the Cup passed to them? Probably, but we want to give everyone a chance, so three is our max.

Last year was the rare season where the Stanley Cup-winning team didn’t have a single OGWAC on the roster, meaning nobody dropped off the eligibility list. That said, we did lose some favorites to retirement, including Paul Stastny, Alex Edler and Wayne Simmonds. We’re also missing a few guys who didn’t make this year’s playoffs, including Mats Zuccarello and Nick Foligno, as well as an injured Blake Wheeler. So some spots have opened up on our list.

We’ve got 20 names for you, as we work our way from the fringe candidates to the year’s best OGWAC.

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Giroux? Burns? Kessel? Revisiting some of the toughest HHOF calls among active players

It’s Hockey Hall of Fame time, with the class of 2022 being honored all week leading up to Monday’s big induction gala. Roberto Luongo, Henrik and Daniel Sedin, Daniel Alfredsson and Riikka Sallinen are all worthy honorees in the player category, and the Hall is finally recognizing Herb Carnegie as a builder. It’s a great chance to look back and reflect on some true greats.

It’s also a chance to look ahead, and try to figure out which players might join Luongo and friends in the Hall some day. That sort of debate is half the fun when it comes to a hall of fame, and I’ve never turned down an opportunity to weigh in. One of my favorite pieces to write each year around this time is the one where I take a look at some active players and try to figure out if they’re on a HHOF path.

I’m going to do it again this year, but with a twist. Rather than coming up with new names, I’m going to revisit a half-dozen players that I’ve looked at over the years. Each of them was a borderline call at the time, and each is still active today. We’ll look at where their case stood a few years ago, what’s happened since, and whether they’re trending up or down. Then we’ll head down to the comment section, where you will yell at me about my wrong opinions and be mad that I didn’t include your favorite non-active player in a post that is only about active players.

As an added bonus, I’m also going to enlist some impartial help. Paul Pidutti has developed a model to produce “a comprehensive measure of HHOF worthiness” for players, based on a variety of factors including stats, honors, international play, longevity and peak. He’s been tweeting his player cards from his Twitter account at @AdjustedHockey and his web site at AdjustedHockey.com includes a detailed explanation of how the system works. No model is perfect, obviously, but it’s fun to be able to look at a case from a different angle, and Paul has graciously agreed to check in on our six candidates and share what his numbers say.

---

Phil Kessel

The last time we looked: At the end of the 2018-19 season, Kessel’s last with the Penguins.

The case at the time: Kessel had two Cup rings and a Masterton, had been robbed of a Conn Smythe, plus he was on pace to “cruise by the 1,000-point mark, maybe by a decent amount”. He was also just three years away from breaking the ironman record held by Doug Jarvis.

My verdict back then: I didn’t see him making the cut, partly because I couldn’t see anyone on the HHOF committee really going to bat for him. I did write that “if he can keep scoring near a point-per-game rate for a few more years, he’ll make it interesting”.

What’s changed since: Kessel spent the last three seasons in Arizona, which was great for his poker game but didn’t exactly boost his visibility. His numbers have been OK, but he hasn’t had the sort of late-career boost you might hope for. He still hasn’t hit that 1,000-point plateau and might not get there this season, and 500 goals is no longer in the realm of possibility.

That said, Kessel’s case has two things working for it. First, he’s on the Golden Knights now, and they look like a legitimate Cup contender, so another long playoff run could resurface his case. More importantly, he did indeed break that ironman record, although it belonged to Keith Yandle instead of Jarvis by the time Kessel got there. He’s about to become the only NHL player to ever hit the 1,000 consecutive game mark, which is pretty ridiculous for anyone, let alone a guy who spent his whole career being told he was an out-of-shape schlub.

Which way the case is trending: The ironman record gives him a signature accomplishment to build his candidacy around. But the offensive numbers have slowed more than we’d hoped, and at 35 we can’t pencil him in for much more production like we could a few years ago. Even with the record, I think his chances have dipped.

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Puck Soup: 50% of the time they lose everytime

On this week's episode of the Puck Soup podcast:
- The Oilers survive a hilarious Mike Smith blooper and take a 3-1 lead
- The Lightning look unstoppable
- What comes next for the humbled Panthers?
- The Avs look to put away the Blues
- The Rangers and Hurricanes in the only tied series
- More coaching changes, and we're still waiting on Barry Trotz
- Jack Adams finalists, Giordano's discount and lots more...

>> Stream it now:

>> Or, listen on The Athletic or subscribe on iTunes.

>> Get weekly mailbags and special bonus episodes by supporting Puck Soup on Patreon for $5.

The Habs are fixed, the Flames are unbeatable, the Kings are better than we think, and more from a busy weekend

This was kind of a weird weekend. There wasn’t one giant story that dwarfed everything else – no blockbuster trades, no coaches or GMs fired, no huge controversies to yell at each other about. But it wasn’t a quiet weekend either, and in fact there was almost too much going on to cover it all in depth.

So instead, let’s fall back to the overwhelmed sportswriter’s best friend and break out the bullet points, as we cover some of the weekend’s stories in a lightning round. (Not to be confused with a Lightning round, which is the Stanley Cup final).

• We have a win streak in Montreal! Yes, that’s right, I broke out the exclamation point even though it’s not very professional, because this is important. Believe it or not, this is somehow the first time all year that Montreal has won back-to-back games. Yes, one of them took overtime and yesterday’s needed a shootout. Look, they could use some positivity in Montreal right now, let’s all do our best to fake it for them.
• Elsewhere in Canada, the two Alberta teams have been rolling, or at least were until last night. The Flames still are, having won nine straight. We thought Jay Woodcroft has turned the Oilers around by asking them to start playing defense, which apparently had never occurred to Dave Tippett, but I guess he forgot last night. Either way, a note to the hockey gods: It is now mandatory that these two teams face each other in the playoffs. We will not be accepting excuses.
• Speaking of Calgary, Mark Giordano returned for the first time with the Kraken. I’m a sucker for a good comeback video, and since Giordano is one of the few returning players to have actually earned one, let’s rewatch it here:

• In another return of sorts, Winnipeg fans got a chance to welcome back Bryan Little, who hasn’t played since being hit in the head with a shot in November 2019. It was good to see him get a well-deserved ovation from the crowd.
• RIP to Rangers’ legend Emile Francis, who passed away on Saturday. “The Cat” was a goalie who also went on to serve as coach and GM in the 1960s and 70s before heading to the Blues. He was 95.
• The Predators have lost four straight, all in regulation, and have the Panthers tonight before a showdown with the Stars that suddenly feels very important in a tightening Central race.
• We had a trade to announce. Not much of one, but this isn’t one of those leagues where GMs are super bold and aggressive when it comes to actually doing their jobs, so we take what we can get. The Leafs sent failed UFA signing Nick Ritchie and a conditional pick to the Coyotes for Ilya Lyubushkin and the right to waive Ryan Dzingel. It’s a bit of a depth move and a bit of a salary dump, although it doesn’t help the Leafs’ cap much until next year. It’s also fun because the conditional pick could be as far away as 2025, and longtime readers know that I’m a huge fan of trades that reach way into the future. Let’s do this like junior hockey and trade picks eight seasons into the future or more. Come on GMs, you know you’re getting fired in a few years anyway, screw the guy who’s going to replace the guy who replaces you by trading all his picks away now.

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Debating the Hall of Fame cases of Brad Marchand, Jonathan Quick, Jason Spezza and others

It’s Hall-of-Fame induction week, as the class of 2020 finally gets their moment in the spotlight after a year of COVID delays. It’s a strong class, with Jarome Iginla, Marian Hossa, Kim St-Pierre, Doug Wilson and Kevin Lowe joining builder Ken Holland.

Great, who’s next?

That’s the fun part of having a Hall-of-Fame. Sure, it’s nice to honor the game’s greats. But what we really want to do is argue over the players who might make it some day. And that’s especially fun when it comes to the guys who are still active, since there’s still time for them to flip the script and make us all look bad. Plus I’m always fascinated by the players that you guys think are easy calls, since there are always one or two where the public consensus seems way off from what my ballot would look like.

We’ve done this a few times in recent years. We argued about Nicklas Backstrom, Ryan Getzlaf, Phil Kessel, Patrick Marleau, Shea Weber and Marc-Andre Fleury in this post, then tackled Brent Burns, Ilya Kovalchuk, Pekka Rinne, Ryan Suter, Justin Williams and Claude Giroux in this one.

Some of those guys are still a tough call, but we won’t revisit any of their cases today. Instead, let’s find a half-dozen new names to debate. We’re looking for players who are already over 30 and still active in the NHL. A few of these guys are names that readers bring up often, while others are ones I go back and forth on.

Eric Staal

Why it’s a tough one: We’re cheating a bit here because while Staal hasn’t retired, he’s not currently on a team so his “active” status is a little fuzzy. He still wants to play, but his current lack of a job makes this debate a bit easier, since it’s safe to assume that his career numbers won’t change much. And those numbers, as we’ll see, are right on the borderline.

The case for: The typical HHOF case comes down to two categories: How good was the player at their peak, and did they stick around long enough to hit major career milestones. Staal checks both boxes; he hit the 100-point mark in a breakout 2005-06 season that ended with him leading the playoffs in scoring on the way to a Stanley Cup, then stuck around as a consistent producer longer enough to join the 1,000-point club in an era where that’s tough to do.

The case against: Apart from that one big year, Staal never really had a dominant season. He was a second-team all-star in 2006, but that was the only year he earned any kind of award, and his fourth-place finish in Hart voting that year was his only top-ten season. We’ve seen guys make the Hall with a similar lack of awards recognition, including Dave Andreychuk, Mark Recchi, and even Marian Hossa this year. But those guys all racked up bigger career totals, while Staal barely inching past 1,000 points shouldn’t be enough.

Worth remembering: Staal ranks seventh among active scorers today, and the guys ahead of him are five slam-dunk HHOFers and Patrick Marleau, who’s also probably getting in.

Should he get in? Barring a comeback and late-career renascence, I wouldn’t have him on my ballot.

Will he get in? I don’t think it’s out of the question, especially with the Hall’s recent habit of going off the board on a pick most years. But I’m filing it under unlikely. He just needed another big year or two that never came.

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The Athletic Hockey Show: Expansion day

On this week's episode of The Athletic Hockey Show:
- Some expansion stuff that's already out of date
- Whether the Kraken will make the playoffs in year one
- Our dream doubleheaders to open the NHL schedule
- My devious plan for it I had a day with the Stanley Cup
- We try to figure out if there's any beverage that nobody has ever drank out of the Stanley Cup
- Chris Osgood's Hall of Fame case, Lou Lamoriello's Leafs legacy and more...

The Athletic Hockey Show runs most days of the week during the season, with Ian and I hosting every Thursday. There are two versions of each episode available:
- An ad-free version for subscribers that you can find here
- An ad-supported version you can get for free wherever you normally find your podcasts (like Apple or Spotify)

Seattle Kraken mock expansion draft: Why we’re taking Gabriel Landeskog but not Carey Price

In the next 48 hours or so, the hockey world at large will learn exactly which players the Seattle Kraken selected to stock the NHL’s newest franchise.

The NHL unveiled the protected lists of 30 teams Sunday (the Vegas Golden Knights are exempt) and predictably, there were some intriguing names left up for grabs.

Carey Price in Montreal was one. Price’s former teammate in Montreal, P.K. Subban, was another. The Predators left both their $8 million men, Ryan Johansen and Matt Duchene, available. The Flames couldn’t find a way to protect captain Mark Giordano

The one quality they share: They would all be pricey adds, maybe too pricey in the NHL’s flat-cap world.

Here at The Athletic, we’ve been doing mock drafts since before Seattle’s expansion bid even became official and what follows is our final attempt to sort out what Kraken general manager Ron Francis and his staff might come up with.

Procedurally, we’ve added one tweak to the exercise this time around and convened a “war room” designed to mimic the conversations the Seattle hockey operations staff is having internally right now. Our war room consisted of Eric Duhatschek, Ryan S. Clark, Sean McIndoe, Dom Luszczyszyn and Michael Russo.

Collectively, we’ve spent the weeks and months (and some of us, years), trying to work through all the expansion-draft scenarios that could possibly come up.

Then Canadiens GM Marc Bergevin threw us all a curveball over the weekend, successfully persuading Price to waive his no-move clause so Montreal could protect Jake Allen.

By rule, Seattle is obliged to select three goaltenders, nine defensemen and 14 forwards. The other four openings are “at large,” meaning they could be at any position. Seattle is also required to select players that meet a minimum salary-cap threshold ($48.9 million, or 60 percent of last year’s $81.5 million salary cap). They cannot exceed the cap.

Price’s availability forces you to start with him for reasons that are pretty apparent. If the Kraken were to take Price (and his $10.5 million cap hit for five additional years), then it would affect the remaining 29 decisions.

On the one hand, Price could be the Kraken’s 2021 answer to Marc-Andre Fleury, the cornerstone goaltending piece that helped Vegas get (and stay) so competitive in its first four years of operation.

On the other hand, if you took Price, you would immediately gobble up about an eighth of your available salary-cap space — and leveraging that cap room will ultimately be the key to whatever success Seattle has in the short-, medium- and long-term. Moreover, Price hasn’t been physically sound for years and the expectation is that at 34, he might not be able to summon up the sort of goaltending heroics he did in this past year’s playoffs.

A further complication: Price wasn’t the only battle-tested goaltender made available. The Kraken can choose from among Ben Bishop (Dallas), Braden Holtby (Vancouver) or Jonathan Quick (Los Angeles). Then there are younger, cheaper net-minding options as well: Vitek Vanecek (Washington), Kaapo Kahkonen (Minnesota) and Florida’s pending UFA Chris Driedger who, if you follow hockey Twitter, is almost certainly signed, sealed and delivered for the Kraken already.

Philosophically, NHL teams will tell you they are built from goaltending out, so that’s where we began too. Spoiler alert: After a vigorous debate, we elected NOT to take Price. The explanation is below.

In his previous life as an NHL GM, Kraken GM Ron Francis was known for his ultra-conservative managerial style, but he has a chance to swing for the fences a few times here and we’re recommending he do so with Colorado’s pending UFA captain Gabriel Landeskog. No other team is positioned as well as Seattle to overpay Landeskog and if you could ever coax him to an expansion team, he’d be the perfect captain — a foundational piece, in the prime of his career, who would help set the organizational culture going forward.

Generally speaking, hockey front offices are not democracies, but ours was.

The majority ruled.

In the end, we made a list, we checked it twice (to ensure we met both the positional and financial stipulations associated with the expansion draft), and we present it here for your critiques and comments:

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The 2019 OGWAC rankings

OK,​ kids. Hike up​ your​ pants​ around​ your​ armpits,​ hang an​ onion from your​ belt and park​ your​ walker over by​​ rotary phone, because it’s time for the annual OGWAC rankings.

For you newbies, an OGWAC is that beloved species of hockey player whose story everyone loves to hear during the playoffs: the Old Guy Without a Cup. He’s the grizzled veteran who’s been around forever and has probably come agonizingly close a time or two, but he doesn’t have a ring and he’s running out of time. Everyone’s rooting for him, and if his team does win it all, he usually gets the honor of being the first in line for the Cup handoff.

The greatest OGWAC story of all-time is Ray Bourque in 2001, one that still makes the toughest hockey fan you know cry a little. Others include Teemu Selanne in 2007, Lanny McDonald in 1989 and Kimmo Timonen in 2015. Last season’s OGWAC story was Alexander Ovechkin, who was a little young for the honor but has somehow had grey hair for five years, so we’ll allow it.

I’ve been breaking down the annual OGWAC rankings going back to the Grantland days and the format hasn’t changed much. It doesn’t need to, because the OGWAC is timeless. Or so I thought. Because this year, I’m starting to wonder if we don’t need something new.

I think we might need to introduce the OGWACWIT: The Old Guy With a Cup Who Isn’t Thornton.

After all, there isn’t really a ton of suspense about the top spot in these rankings. Joe Thornton has emerged as one of the league’s most lovable characters and will be a no-questions-asked Hall-of-Famer as soon as he’s eligible. But he’s about to turn 40 and has battled injuries in recent years. He’s almost at the end of the road and still doesn’t have his ring. He’s pretty much the archetypal OGWAC right now.

Even as wait to see if last night’s high hit on Tomas Nosek gets him suspended, Thornton is going to rank at the top of our list. Sorry for the spoiler. But there are plenty of other guys who are worth a mention too. Let’s count down the best stories of the Cupless guys who a.) are at least 33 years old; b.) have played at least ten seasons; c.) are in the playoffs and either playing or at least have a chance to at some point.

With the criteria set, let’s get to the rankings. We’re going to need a top 15 this time, because for reasons I’m not quite clear on, there are just a ton of great OGWAC candidates this year. And even a few OGWACWITs.

15. Dan Hamhuis, Predators

Hamhuis is a nice starting point because he’s basically the classic OGWAC story. He’s 36, has played 15 seasons and won’t have too many more shots at this. And of course, he had an agonizing near-miss in 2011 with the Canucks. That loss was especially tough for Hamhuis, since he was hurt in the first game of the final and didn’t play again. He hasn’t won a playoff round since.

This year’s Predators are an especially loaded OGWAC team, as we’ll see a little bit further down. That hurts Hamhuis’s standing just a bit, but he’s still worthy of a spot on our list.

14. Matt Hendricks, Jets

Hendricks is a bit of a tricky call. On the one hand, he’s a 37-year-old role player and his teammates love him. And unlike some of the other players on this list, this really does seem like his last shot at a Cup. On the other, there’s a good chance we won’t see him suit up for the Jets during this run – he barely played down the stretch and is really here to be a veteran leader as opposed to an on-ice contributor. In terms of the Jets who matter during this postseason, Hendricks doesn’t rank that high.

Still, it’s a long way to a Stanley Cup, and if the Jets can get past the Blues and go deep, you never know who they might need. And if Hendricks was in the lineup for a Cup win, he’d be close to a guaranteed first handoff. We’ll rank him here and hope against hope that his case gets stronger in the weeks to come.

13. Blake Comeau, Stars

Comeau’s the youngest player on our list, having just turned 33 in February. But he’s had the classic journeyman career that can make for a great OGWAC story, playing 13 seasons for six teams and never having seen the second round of the playoffs. In fact, he’s only ever been part of six playoff wins, including Game 1 against the Predators.

We can’t rank him too high since he’s presumably got more runway left than most of the other guys on this list. But let’s consider him an OGWAC prospect to keep an eye on.

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Handing out some regular season awards

The NHL regular season ends Saturday, but come Monday morning everyone will be busy obsessing over playoff matchups, and the 82 games we just spent weeding out 14 teams will be forgotten. So rather than waiting until then, we’ll do our year-end wrap-up a few days early. I mean, how much can really change in just 60 hours?

Let’s take a look back on the 2014-15 season by handing out a dozen made-up awards to the players and teams that made it memorable.

Biggest Season-Long Theme: Goaltending Is Voodoo

Andy Marlin/NHLI/Getty Images

Considering how often a goaltender can single-handedly decide the outcome of a game or a series or even a whole season, it might be the most important position in hockey. However, that poses a bit of a problem, because we do not understand how it works. Like, at all.

Look at this season’s top stories: You have Andrew Hammond in Ottawa, which was all kinds of fun but made no sense on any level. Just one year ago, Minnesota’s Devan Dubnyk was considered so awful that the goalie graveyard that is the Edmonton Oilers gave him away to the Predators, who gave him away to the Canadiens, who then assigned him to the AHL even though their other goalies were hurt. Today, he may be the league’s most important player.

We also had Rangers backup Cam Talbot, an undrafted free agent who had to replace injured All-Star Henrik Lundqvist and ended up outplaying him. In Winnipeg, a veteran with one of the league’s worst résumés and a rookie backup with three career games have combined to become unbeatable. The Sabres traded all of their goalies and acquired a guy in Anders Lindback who may well have been the worst in the entire league, and he’s playing so well he might single-handedly ruin their season-long tanking master plan. The Blues have an All-Star as their starter but thought it would be a good idea to sign the ghost of Martin Brodeur. The Stars had one of the most established guys in the league, and he was awful and ruined their season. Jimmy Howard is losing his job to a former 141st overall pick. Also, the Oilers now have a guy named Tyler Bunz, which is neither here nor there, but I still wanted to mention it.

None of this makes any sense, and yet we’ll do what we always do with goaltending: Wait until the season is over, look back at the random chaos that just went down, and pretend we saw any of it coming. Of course, we didn’t, just like we almost never do. How could we? Goaltending is voodoo.

It’s also going to dominate these awards. Sorry for the spoiler, but you had probably already figured that out.

Best Feel-Good Story: The Hamburglar

There’s no better proof of the “goaltending is voodoo” theory than Hammond, a 27-year-old rookie with lousy minor league numbers who gets called up as a we-have-no-other-choice emergency injury replacement and then goes on a history-making hot streak. Next thing you know, fans are throwing hamburgers on the ice and the Senators are making a miracle playoff run that could still see them steal a wild-card spot.

On Tuesday, Hammond was shelled for three goals in the first period of a must-win game against the Penguins. Then he stood tall the rest of the way as Ottawa roared back from down 3-0, earning a 4-3 win in overtime to keep their playoff hopes alive. It was a miracle, but Hammond didn’t seem all that fazed since pretty much every game he’s played this year has been a miracle. After the game, he was asked about the last time he enjoyed hockey as much as right now. “I don’t know if there’s another time in my life,” Hammond said. “It’s the NHL. It’s what I’ve always dreamed about playing.”

Does Hammond’s story make any sense? Not really. Can it last? Probably not. While it’s possible he’ll turn out to be the next Dominik Hasek or Tim Thomas, showing up late before kicking off a lengthy career as a top-tier guy, it’s much more likely he’s the next Jim Carey or Steve Penney. For now, though, that doesn’t matter. Andrew Hammond is making all of us feel like we could be NHL goalies, too.

Best Trade: Dubnyk to Minnesota

This one’s as easy as they come, so let’s up the odds a bit: Where does the Dubnyk trade rank among the best ever?

Remember, when the deal went down on January 14, the Wild were in 12th place in the West, eight points out of the playoffs, and riding a six-game losing streak. Their about-to-be-fired coach was losing his mind. Essentially, they were done. And then Dubnyk shows up, they win their first game 7-0, and they basically turn into the 1977 Canadiens.

Granted, that’s not all Dubnyk, but he’s started every game since the trade, and he’s been consistently fantastic. The Wild are headed to the playoffs as a wild card, and they’ll be just about everyone’s sneaky dark-horse pick to go on a deep run. If that happens, the Dubnyk deal really will have to go into the discussion for the great trades of all time. Not bad value for giving up only a third-round pick.

>> Read the full post on Grantland

The Calgary Flames vs. the numbers

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: There’s an NHL hockey team that’s not all that good according to the numbers, yet somehow keeps winning. The stats guys say that it can’t possibly continue, that we’ve seen this movie before, and that history tells us the ending won’t be happy. But others aren’t so sure, wondering if maybe, just maybe, this is the team that’s figured out a way to beat the system.

Unless you’re brand new to hockey, you have indeed heard this one before, and you’ve heard it more than once. Four years ago, it was the Dallas Stars. The year after that, it was the Minnesota Wild. Last year we had two teams, the Colorado Avalanche and the Toronto Maple Leafs, offering different interpretations of the same role. All of them seemed to be defying the numbers. All of them eventually crashed back down to earth.

This year’s overachiever is the Calgary Flames. Heading into the season, they weren’t expected to be very good. And 73 games in, they haven’t been — at least according to many of today’s most-used stats, which rely on proxies for puck possession to determine which teams are most likely to experience sustained success. The more you have the puck, the more you should win. It doesn’t always work out that way in the short term, as factors like goaltending, special teams, and just plain luck can get in the way. But wait long enough, and your possession numbers catch up to you. They always do. We’ve been down this road before. We know what’s coming. We’ve seen it all before, over and over again, for years.

So why do this year’s Flames seem like they’re different?

Let’s start with the numbers. By now you’re sick to death of hearing about hockey’s new wave of advanced stats, most of which aren’t especially advanced at all. The new thinking has redefined hockey analysis, invaded NHL front offices, and started showing up in even the oldest of old-school media coverage. At a basic level, those numbers tend to focus on possession rates, a relatively new approach that turns out to tell us plenty about a hockey team.

And what it seems to tell us is this: A team’s possession numbers are just about the single best predictor we have of future success. If you woke up from a coma three-quarters into an NHL season and were forced at gunpoint to pick the teams with the best chance at winning the Stanley Cup using only one stat, you’d want a look at the possession numbers. Ideally, you’d want those numbers to be for even strength and in close situations only, or even better, score-adjusted. Those are important distinctions, but to keep things simple, we’re just going to lump everything together as “possession” today. Possession numbers typically predict the future better than anything else — better than goals scored or allowed, better than shooting or save percentages, better even than wins and losses. A big part of that is that possession numbers tend to be much more consistent than other stats, which rely on smaller sample sizes and can fluctuate wildly from game to game and from week to week.

So possession tends to equal wins. Which you’d expect, when you think about it — a hockey team that can maintain a 55 percent–45 percent edge in possession is like a baseball team that gets 11 innings at bat while the other team gets the usual nine. That’s an enormous advantage, and while it wouldn’t translate into a guaranteed win every night, over the course of a long season you’d expect it to add up.

And in most cases, it does. For example, if you’re the sort of fan who looks at possession numbers, you weren’t remotely surprised when the Kings won the Stanley Cup as an 8-seed in 2012, and you barely blinked when they did it again as a 6-seed last year. And you knew that the Stars, Wild, Avalanche, and Leafs were all headed for a fall, even as their fans insisted they were for real. A basic understanding of possession stats is the great spoiler alert of hockey fandom.

All of which brings us to this year’s Flames, one of the worst possession teams in the league. They sit 28th in score-adjusted Corsi, and the only other team in the bottom third that’s even close to a playoff spot is doing it on the back of a goalie who’s probably going to win MVP. And it’s not just the fancy stats that point to the Flames being a bad team. On paper, they don’t have a ton of talent, and their best player and captain, defenseman Mark Giordano, was lost for the season last month.

And yet, numbers be damned, Calgary just keeps winning. A team that everyone expected to contend for last place overall is instead right in the thick of the playoff race in a very tough Western Conference. After one month, it was a cute early-season plotline. After two, it was getting into Cinderella territory, a fun little story that nobody really took seriously. You couldn’t even say the Flames were counted out, because that would imply that anyone had ever counted them in.

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Weekend wrap: Is this the year a goalie or defenseman wins the Hart?

A look back at the biggest games and emerging story lines of the NHL weekend.

Theme of the Week: Is This the Year a Goalie or Defenseman Wins MVP?

The midseason mark typically presents an opportunity to start narrowing down the various awards races, picking out the front-runners and shrinking the fields down to a handful of realistic contenders who voters can focus on for the rest of the season. But when it comes to the biggest award of them all — the Hart Memorial Trophy for league MVP — the first half hasn’t provided much clarity.

While a player’s value can be measured in many ways, the Hart Trophy often just ends up going to the league’s leading scorer — the Art Ross winner has also been named MVP in eight of the last 11 seasons. But this year’s tight scoring race clouds the picture, with 16 players within 10 points of Jakub Voracek’s league-leading 53. A look down the top 10 further complicates things. Alexander Ovechkin, who’s earned three of the last seven Harts, is nowhere to be found. Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin, who’ve combined to win three more, are both near the league lead, but two players from the same team posting similar totals could end up canceling each other out.

Meanwhile, two of the season’s breakout stars, Philadelphia’s Voracek and Dallas’s Tyler Seguin, play for teams that look likely to miss the playoffs, which still stands as a deal-breaker for many voters. And other top scorers like Vladimir Tarasenko and Tyler Johnson are relative newcomers who might find it difficult to garner much leaguewide support this early in their career.

All of this may open the door for a rare sight: a non-forward taking home the league’s top individual award. The Hart Trophy has evolved into the near-exclusive domain of centers and wingers, who’ve won 37 of the last 41 awards. Only six goaltenders have won the award in its 90-year history, and only two have done so since 1962 — Dominik Hasek, who became the only goalie to win the award twice when he took it home in 1997 and 1998, and Jose Theodore, who won a tiebreaker over Jarome Iginla in 2002.¹

Defensemen have had an even tougher time in the post–Original Six era. Since Bobby Orr’s three straight Hart Trophies from 1970 to 1972, only one defenseman has been named MVP. That was Chris Pronger in 2000, when he edged Jaromir Jagr by a single vote. Since then, a blueliner hasn’t so much as been a finalist for the award.

It’s an odd phenomenon. It’s not as if there’s some sort of belief that defenseman and goalies can’t be valuable — the Conn Smythe, awarded to the playoff MVP, has gone to a non-forward 10 times in the last 20 seasons. Perhaps goalies and defensemen just fall into the same trap that pitchers do in baseball, with enough voters figuring “they’ve got their own award” that non-forwards can’t win without a season for the ages.

In either case, there’s a growing consensus that this could be the year to avoid the forward logjam. Plenty of voters seemed willing to throw their support behind Nashville goalie Pekka Rinne before his recent injury. Some of that support now seems to be drifting toward Carey Price, and Roberto Luongo has earned some consideration. There hasn’t been quite the same level of support for defensemen, although Calgary’s Mark Giordano gets an occasional mention.

Only time will tell whether the current mood among Hart voters continues, or whether they retreat back to the more comfortable forward ranks as the season wears on. Of course, any of the top-scoring forwards could make the whole discussion moot with one long hot streak (and Crosby, with seven points in his last three games, may already be doing just that).

But for now, at least, there’s some momentum to mix things up. That alone could be enough to make this year’s voting a little less predictable.

Cup Watch: The League’s Five Best

The five teams that seem most likely to earn the league’s top prize: the Stanley Cup.

5. New York Islanders (30-14-1, plus-19 goals differential): They edge out the Lightning for the fifth spot after earning big wins over the Penguins and Rangers by a combined score of 9-3. (We’ll just pretend we didn’t see Saturday’s letdown game against the Canadiens.)

4. Chicago Blackhawks (28-15-2, plus-34): We’ve had them ranked no. 1 for six weeks, but there’s no denying that the Hawks just haven’t looked like themselves in the new year, going 3-5-0 against a schedule devoid of any top teams.

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At the quarter-pole*, some early NHL awards

We’ve reached the quarter pole in the NHL season, which means two things: It’s too early to start drawing conclusions and throwing around awards, and we’re going to go ahead and do those things anyway. So dig your tuxes and gowns out of the closet, because we’ve got a dozen early-season awards to hand out.

Most Valuable Player: Sidney Crosby, Pittsburgh Penguins

Ho-hum. Crosby won the award last year, he was the overwhelming favorite to win it this year, and so far that looks like it’s exactly what he’s going to do. He’s not running away with the scoring title, which is a mild surprise. But all the guys keeping pace with him come from struggling teams, and the Hart Trophy basically always goes to someone from a Cup contender. So it’s Crosby by default, which is basically too boring to spend any more time on.

Most Valuable Player Who Isn’t Sidney Crosby: Jakub Voracek, Philadelphia Flyers

That’s better! And we’ve got several candidates to consider, like Voracek, who’s tied with Crosby for the lead in points, and Tyler Seguin, who leads in goals scored. Steven Stamkos has been fantastic, Vladimir Tarasenko has owned the highlight reels, and Rick Nash’s hot start left him carrying basically the entire Rangers offense.

And that’s just the forwards, which is … well, which is probably all we need to talk about, since defensemen and goalies rarely win the Hart.¹ Besides, we’ll get to those guys in a minute.

I’m going to go with Voracek, who’s recorded a point on over half of the Flyers goals this year, and is basically single-handedly keeping them in the playoff picture. Will it last? No, not at his current pace, but that shouldn’t matter. We’re trying to recognize the first quarter of the season here, not predict the rest of it, so Voracek has earned the right to pick up Crosby’s scraps.

Least Valuable Player: The Backup Goalie, New Jersey Devils

Do you know his name? I didn’t know his name, and apparently neither did Devils coach Peter DeBoer until the weekend, when he finally gave him his first start of the season in the team’s 21st game. Before that, Cory Schneider had gotten the nod each and every time, becoming only the third goalie in the salary-cap era to make that many starts in a row to begin a season. That streak ended on Saturday, when DeBoer remembered that he had a second goaltender on the roster.

The guy’s name is Scott Clemmensen, by the way. That probably sounds familiar, since the journeyman has been backing up around the NHL since 2001, including three separate stints in New Jersey. He got his first start of the season against the Flames in Calgary. He lost. LVP! LVP!

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(* I know, I know.)