Elias Pettersson, Philipp Grubauer, and the rest of the NHL’s first month all-disappointment team

We’re well into the second month of the season, and it’s time to stay positive by talking about all the players having terrible seasons.

OK, that sounds weird. Picking 20 players from around the league and labelling them as early-season busts doesn’t sound especially positive, after all. But its not all bad, for two reasons. First, as we already highlighted a few weeks ago, bad starts by good players will often turn out to be meaningless, the sort of thing that all balances out by the end of a season. And maybe more importantly, it’s worth remembering that your favorite team isn’t the only one with underachievers. Almost every team has a few guys who aren’t living up to expectations; that’s just life in the NHL. We’re all in this together.

So today, we’re going to build a full roster of early-season letdowns. Twelve forwards, six defensemen and two goalies, with a max of one player per team so that it’s not all Canucks we maximize the positivity. Then we’ll shower them in good vibes for their inevitable turnaround. You’re going to do that part, right? Of course you are. The power of positive thinking!

On to the roster, where we’ll build from the net out.

Goaltenders

Philipp Grubauer, Kraken — You never really got the feeling that Grubauer was part of the Kraken plan as they assembled their first roster. We all kind of assumed he’d end up back in Colorado, even after he officially hit the UFA market. When that didn’t happen, Seattle swooped in and made the deal, seemingly setting up an excellent pairing with Grubauer and Chris Driedger. Instead, both guys have been mediocre at best, leaving Seattle with almost $10 million worth of not-great goaltending, and one eye on a Grubauer contract that runs through 2027.

it’s unfair to the kraken that goalies exist, IMO

— Sean Gentille (@seangentille) November 15, 2021

Linus Ullmark., Bruins — When Ullmark signed a surprising four-year, $20-million deal to become Boston’s new starter, he was positioned to be the long-term replacement for Tuukka Rask. A month in, he seems to have already lost the starting job to Jeremy Swayman, at least temporarily, and his numbers are barely so-so. Look, Rask never actually said that he wasn’t coming back for sure, right?

First pair

Jakob Chychrun, Coyotes — One thing you heard a lot heading into the season is that the Coyotes would be awful, but at least Chychrun would be good. So far, both predictions have turned out to be too optimistic. Arizona has been worse than awful, and Chychrun has just one goal on the year after scoring 30 over the last two seasons. That part won’t last — he’s still generating shots, and he’s not going to shoot 2 percent forever — but the year has been a worrying step back for a guy who seemed headed towards the Norris conversation.

Alex Pietrangelo, Golden Knights — This one is debatable. No, literally — we saw Jesse and Dom battle it out between the pro-Pietrangelo and anti-Pietrangelo sides. That was from the first week of November, and he’s had three multi-point game since then, so maybe the ledger is tipping. Still, when a Cup favorite is paying a guy nearly $9 million to carry the blueline, “debatable” probably isn’t what you’re hoping for.

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The Athletic Hockey Show: Those unbeatable Sabres

On this week's episode of The Athletic Hockey Show:
- The Sabres start off hot, and you're a bad person if you're not rooting for them
- How worried should fans in Chicago and Montreal be?
- Teeing up Jesperi Kotkaniemi's return to Montreal
- A caller has an interesting point about some history that will be made next week
- A listener applies for the intern job
- This week in hockey history and lots 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)

The Bizarro-meter’s Eastern Conference offseason rankings

We’ve fired up the bizarro-meter for our annual attempt to figure out which NHL teams had the strangest offseason. Not the best or the worst or the busiest, mind you, but just the strangest.

Yesterday, we looked at the Western Conference, with top scores going to Golden Knights and Blackhawks, and the buyout-happy Minnesota Wild leading the way with a score of 8.6. Can anyone from the East compete with that score? [Remembers what the East teams were up to this year.] Yeah, I feel like a few of them can, but let’s see where this goes…

Atlantic Division

Tampa Bay Lightning

The offseason so far: We knew that cap Armageddon was coming, and it wasn’t pretty. The Lightning lost an entire line in Yanni Gourde, Blake Coleman and Barclay Goodrow, plus David Savard and Tyler Johnson. They offset those losses with a few cheap veteran signings, highlighted by Corey Perry, but overall it was a whole lot of talent hitting the road.

But their strangest story was: Losing all those good players and still looking like every bit like an elite Cup-worthy roster. These guys are annoying.

Bizarro-meter ranking: 2.5/10. Newsworthy, sure, but not especially bizarre. Maybe the only weird part for Julien BriseBoise is that he didn’t have to do this last year.

Detroit Red Wings

The offseason so far: It was basically the Alex Nedeljkovic trade and then a handful of depth moves.

But their strangest story was: If Nedeljkovic turns out to be the answer in goal, Steve Yzerman will have added a key piece at a low price.

Bizarro-meter ranking: 3.4/10. Yzerman continues his slow-but-steady rebuild. Every year, we say that he’ll eventually have to get more aggressive, but apparently that point hasn’t arrived yet. The Wings are on track, but it’s hard to see how they’ll be all that much better this year unless Nedeljkovic goes full superstar.

Florida Panthers

The offseason so far: The big news was landing Sam Reinhart from the Sabres at a reasonable price. They lost Chris Driedger and Alex Wennberg to Seattle, the former through the expansion draft and the latter as a UFA, and also said goodbye to veteran defensemen Keith Yandle and Anton Stralman.

But their strangest story was: The Panthers once again losing two good players to an expansion team was pretty funny after the whole Vegas disaster, even though they pretty much played this one fine.

Bizarro-meter ranking: 4.1/10. It feels like this could be nearing make-or-break time in Florida, with Aleksander Barkov in the last year of his deal and Jonathan Huberdeau a year behind him, so maybe there’s an argument that the Panthers should have been more aggressive. But they landed a big player and didn’t lose anyone crucial, so they should be better.

Boston Bruins

The offseason so far: The Bruins didn’t pull off any blockbuster moves, but they certainly churned through a big chunk of the roster, with lots of names moving in and out. The biggest change is in goal, where Linus Ullmark takes over from Tuukka Rask, at least until we know if and when Rask is coming back. They signed Nick Foligno but lost David Krejci, who was more important than most of us gave him credit for. And they re-signed deadline acquisition Taylor Hall to a fairly reasonable deal.

But their strangest story was: Probably the whole Rask/Ullmark thing, since it feels like we could be headed for anything from Rask being done in the NHL to him returning midway through the season to reclaim his starter’s job (at which point Ullmark’s contract feels onerous).

Bizarro-meter ranking: 5.2/10. The Bruins were busy, and it’s rare to see a contender have his much uncertainty about their goaltending heading into a season, but nothing they did seemed especially surprising under the circumstances.

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The Athletic Hockey Show: Oh sheet

On this week's episode of The Athletic Hockey Show:
- Thoughts on the Jesperi Kotkaniemi offer sheet, and where it goes from here
- Still no Jack Eichel trade, and is there any good way out for the Sabres?
- Lots of listener feedback on our August debate episodes
- Is Patrik Elias a Hall-of-Famer?
- The 30-year anniversary of the Scott Stevens/Brendan Shanahan ruling
- Plus Lundqvist's popularity, McSorley's high-stick, the 1972 Summit Series opener and lots 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)

What lessons will the rest of the NHL learn from the Jesperi Kotkaniemi offer sheet?

The Carolina Hurricanes offer sheet to Jesperi Kotkaniemi has become the talk of the NHL. While that’s not an especially high bar in August, this is a pretty irresistible story for a hockey fan. It’s got the novelty of the rarely seen offer sheet, some genuine intrigue over how it will all play out, and a solid dose of pettiness to add to the mix.

That last bit is the angle that’s getting most of the attention these days, and rightly so given how clearly this move was inspired by the Habs’ 2019 offer sheet to Sebastian Aho. NHL front offices are filled with bitter grumps with long memories, but they’re usually not this over-the-top. From the $20 signing bonus to the word-for-for press release, apparently the Hurricanes don’t do subtle.

But while I can appreciate some junior high-level drama as much as the next guy, I’m wondering about a different angle: Where does the NHL go from here? After all, this a copycat league that’s notorious for GMs reacting to anything that happens by immediately shifting strategy to… well, something different. Sometimes they learn the right lesson. Often, they don’t. So what are NHL GMs going to talk themselves into after watching this whole mess unfold from their cottages?

I’m not sure, but I’ve got a few possibilities. Let’s work through how this might play out.

Lesson 1: Offer sheets are too dangerous, never try them

This one’s simple. The Canadiens’ offer sheet to Aho was the first one the league had seen in six years, and the biggest since Shea Weber in 2012. In between, hockey fans were left wondering why nobody was using a powerful weapon that was sitting right there in the rulebook. We could argue over whether Montreal’s move had any chance of succeeding – it didn’t – but at least they tried, which is more than you can say for anyone else.

And now, they have their reward: A retaliatory offer sheet aimed at one of their key young players. The lesson, it would seem, is to stay away from offer sheets entirely. You’ll just about never get the player, you get your fans’ hopes up for nothing, and you might just be putting a target on your own RFAs a year or two down the line.

Let’s be honest, we’re all pretty sure that this is the lesson that NHL GMs will end up learning from all this. But is it the right one?

Maybe, but there’s one problem with that theory: We’ve been hearing about the risk of retaliatory offer sheets for years. It comes up every summer, as yet another crop of top-tier RFAs would come and go without a single attempt. When fans would wonder why GMs were so hesitant to even try an offer sheet, one of the first reasons offered was always the threat of payback. But it basically never happened; before this weekend, the last time a team tried a retribution-based offer sheet was in 2008, when the Blues responded to the Canucks signing David Backes by going after Steve Bernier.

That was it. The Predators never went after a Flyer after the Weber offer. The Avs didn’t target any Flames after Ryan O’Reilly. The Sabres didn’t go after any Oilers after Thomas Vanek. Until this week, a GM who tried an offer sheet had as much chance of being challenged to a barn fight as they did of facing a return attempt. But they kept bringing it up anyway, hiding behind a mostly imagined threat as a reason to avoid doing their jobs.

Now it’s finally happened. But it sure seems like the fear of this kind of situation was already baked into whatever calculations teams were doing. It was the monster under the bed that they were already afraid of. Now that the monster is real, does that really change anything?

It might, which is why we’re all assuming that we’ll hear this excuse even more often in the coming years. But in the interest of encouraging GMs to keep their options open, let’s see if we can flip this one around…

Lesson 2: Offer sheets can actually work, so use them more

All those offer sheets we mentioned in the last section were matched. So was every offer sheet of the last 24 years, with one exception: the infamous Dustin Penner deal in 2007, which led to the Brian Burke/Kevin Lowe feud. Penner was a decent player in his day, but he wasn’t exactly anyone’s idea of a star. The last genuine difference-maker to switch teams after an offer sheet was… geez, does Chris Gratton in 1997 count? Shayne Corson in 95? Do we have to go all the way back to the Scott Stevens/Brendan Shanahan days in the early 90s?

You get the point. Offer sheets just don’t work. The incentive for teams to hold onto their own RFAs is just too high. That’s always been the system’s biggest problem. Why bother signing another team’s star to an offer sheet that won’t work? Sure, you can mess with their cap situation a bit, but that’s about the only benefit. Otherwise, you’re wasting your time, because teams always match.

Except along comes the Kotkaniemi deal, and the Habs… might not?

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Grab Bag: The problem with letting the players police the game

In the Friday Grab Bag:
- If you want players to police the game, be honest about what that means
- I have suggestions to improve the only good page on the NHL web site
- An obscure player from maybe the greatest stat spoiler I've ever seen.
- The week's three comedy stars
- And a look back at a wild 1998 line brawl and goalie fight

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Grab Bag: Oh la la

In the Friday Grab Bag:
- Thoughts on Tom Wilson's suspension
- Jesperi Kotkaniemi makes history
- An obscure player who's tied with you and me in career scoring
- The week's three comedy stars
- And the 1979 New York Rangers would like to sell you some jeans...

>> Read the full post at The Athletic