Puck Soup: Fourth of July edition

On this week's episode of the Puck Soup podcast:
- What are the Sharks doing?
- The rest of the coaching news
- The Kevin Fiala and Ryan McDonagh trades
- The most likely players to be traded this week
- Brock Boeser, Jesse Puljujarvi and 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.

A brief history of teams trading away recent top-five picks and the five ways it can work out

It’s​ been a weird year​ in​ Edmonton.​ The​ Oilers​ came​ in with​ high hopes, struggled​ early, fired their​ coach,​ seemed to rebound​​ and lately have struggled again. There are calls for Peter Chiarelli to be fired, and it’s widely assumed that he will be if the team misses the playoffs, if not sooner. And as you might expect, there’s been all sorts of speculation about what moves he might be willing to make to turn things around.

Among all the rumors, one name keeps coming up: 20-year-old winger Jesse Puljujarvi. On one hand, that’s surprising, since Puljujarvi is less than three years removed from being the fourth-overall pick in the 2016 draft. Then again, he’s had a disappointing year, and his lackluster career offensive totals mean he’s getting dangerously close to having the “bust” label slapped on him.

Still, would it really make sense for the Oilers to trade a young player so quickly after spending a top-five pick on him? Does that kind of move ever work out?

Let’s crack open the history books and find out.

We’re going to go looking for examples of teams making trades like the rumored Puljujarvi deal, and see what we can learn from the results. We’ll start our search at the onset of the entry draft era (when the league lowered the eligibility age to 18), meaning we’re going back to 1979 and have exactly 40 drafts to work with. We want to find players who fit these criteria:

• They were taken with one of the draft’s first five picks.
• They made it to the NHL with the team that drafted them. Players who were traded before appearing in the NHL don’t count, because we want cases where the player’s NHL coach and GM got to watch them up close before deciding to move on from them. Sorry, Eric Lindros.
• They were traded before finishing their third NHL season. Note that that doesn’t necessarily mean it was within three years of their draft year, since some players start in the minors or in Europe. But we’re looking for players who were given fewer than three full NHL seasons to establish themselves before their team gave up and dealt them.

Note that the last point is important – we’re looking for players who were traded before finishing their third NHL season. If you expand the criteria to include players who are traded immediately after completing their third season, you start to see some bigger names show up, including Ed Olczyk, Dany Heatley, James van Riemsdyk, Jonathan Drouin, Tyler Seguin and Phil Kessel. That’s our first interesting takeaway. Three years seems to be a tipping point of sorts for NHL GMs; once you’ve put in three full seasons, they get more likely to pull the chute and move you. And yes, those last two players were both traded away by Chiarelli. That could offer a hint about how the Puljujarvi situation plays out.

But let’s assume that the rumor mill is right, and that the Oilers really are thinking about moving Puljujarvi right now, before he’s spent three seasons in the NHL, despite recently spending a top-five draft pick on him. How rare would that be?

Rare, as it turns out. But maybe not as rare as you might think.

By my count, there are 26 players in the entry draft era that meet our criteria. We’re dealing with 40 years of drafts, so we’ve got a pool of 200 players here. Of those, 13 percent were moved within three years, or a little more than one every two years. I don’t know about you, but that’s a higher percentage than I would have expected. Maybe the Oilers aren’t crazy to be considering this.

But there are a couple of important qualifiers to put on that 26 number. The first is that these sorts of moves have become significantly rarer in the salary cap era, with only three of our trades involving players drafted after 2004. That’s 14 drafts involving 70 top-five picks, so our cap era percentage plunges down to four percent.

The second thing to keep in mind is that the trades on our list came out of a variety of different circumstances, not all of which have much to do with what Puljujarvi and the Oilers are facing right now. In order to find any meaning in the history of these sorts of moves, it’s probably helpful to divide them up into a few categories. So let’s do that.

Category 1: The mega-blockbusters

Our first category is one we don’t see much of anymore: The old school blockbuster trade, in which a surefire Hall of Fame superstar is traded in their prime. These deals used to happen every few years, but almost never do in the cap era. (That’s partly because players used to be able to force them by holding out, which doesn’t happen anymore.)

But when these deals did happen, the asking price would often involve one or more players who’d recently been high picks. Those players weren’t busts. In fact, it was the opposite – they were highly regarded prospects that a team insisted on receiving in return for a star. You’ve got to give something to get something, after all.

I’ve got four trades in this category, including the most famous one of all: The 1988 deal that sent Wayne Gretzky from the Oilers to the Kings in exchange for a package built around cash, draft picks, more cash, and 1986 second-overall pick Jimmy Carson. At the time, Carson was considered one of the best young players in the game, having just scored 55 goals as a 19-year-old. He only lasted one full year in Edmonton, scoring 100 points, and never really lived up to his early hype; he bounced around three more teams and was out of the league by 1996. But at the time, he was an established stud.

A year before the Gretzky deal, the Oilers traded another certified superstar when they sent an unhappy Paul Coffey to Pittsburgh in 1987 for a package that included a pair of players who meet our criteria: 1985 second-overall pick Craig Simpson and 1987 fifth-overall pick Chris Joseph. Joseph had just been drafted and had only played 17 NHL games, while Simpson was off to a great start in his third season. Simpson would become the first player to score 50 goals while being traded midway through the season, although that turned out to be a career high and injuries slowed his production. Joseph turned into a journeyman defenseman who played for seven teams in 14 years.

The other two deals involve two of the most productive stars of the 1990s. The Flyers included 1990 fourth-overall pick Mike Ricci in the massive package they put together to pry Eric Lindros out of Quebec in 1992. And the Ducks included 1994 second-overall pick Oleg Tverdovsky and 1995 fourth-overall pick Chad Kilger in their 1996 deal for Winnipeg’s Teemu Selanne. All three of those players had productive NHL careers, and Ricci and Tverdovsky were borderline stars. But it’s fair to say that neither the Ducks or Flyers really regret giving them up in those deals. (Peter Forsberg would be another question, but he was a sixth-overall pick and hadn’t yet played in the NHL when the Flyers included him in the Lindros trade.)

These were all blockbuster trades, and it’s fun to look back at them. But unless Peter Chiarelli is about to pull off a miracle that nobody sees coming, it’s probably safe to assume that any Puljujarvi trade isn’t going to look like this. So on to the next section…

>> Read the full post at The Athletic

(Want to read this post on The Athletic for free? Sign up for a free seven-day trial.)

Saturday storylines: Let's take it outside

Who wants a cold one? Tonight marks the return of outdoor hockey, as the Ottawa Senators and Montreal Canadiens meet at Lansdowne Park. It’s also a rare Saturday night without the Toronto Maple Leafs or Vancouver Canucks, while the three remaining Canadian teams get a tour of the Central.

HNIC Game of the Night: Canadiens at Senators

There isn’t much question over where most of the attention will be turned tonight, as the Habs and Sens take it outside at Lansdowne Park in what’s been dubbed the NHL 100 Classic. The game commemorates the meeting between the Canadiens and the original Senators in one of the first two NHL games ever played, way back on Dec. 19, 1917.

But while you can expect to see plenty of history on display, we can forgive these two teams if they’re focused squarely on the present. That’s especially true for the Senators, who desperately need a win to build some momentum after a brutal few weeks that’s seen them lose 12 of 14 to plummet well out of the playoff race. With rumours swirling of major changes on the way – and their GM being forced to deny that he’s about to fire the coach – the Senators are a team that desperately needs to start making up some ground.

They took the first step towards that on Wednesday with a win over the New York Rangers. The two points were important, but the way they were earned them may have mattered even more. Craig Anderson looked strong, Bobby Ryan was a force, Zack Smith finally scored and Matt Duchene may have earned his most important point as a Senator.

Almost as important: With a win under their belt, the Senators can now enjoy hosting the franchise’s first outdoor game, or at least go through the process without feeling like they can’t so much as smile. Still, the timing of tonight’s event isn’t ideal.

Between the losing, Erik Karlsson’s contract comments, a push for a new arena and rumours around ownership, conventional wisdom would say that the last thing this team would seem to need right now is even more distractions. But on the other hand, maybe that’s exactly what they could use. There are worse ways for an NHL team to forget its troubles than by getting out under the lights for a little pond hockey. And if a big crowd inspires Ottawa to collect a win against a division rival it’s chasing in the playoff hunt, even better.

Or they faceplant in front of a national audience. There’s that possibility too.

As for the Canadiens, their up-and-down season continues to defy any attempt at analysis. They lost three straight before beating the Devils on Thursday, falling back out of a playoff spot they’d climbed into possession of last week. The way things have been going this year, that means it’s time for everyone to write them off, at which point they’ll run off another win streak and surge back up the standings.

Outdoor games are always tough to predict – the puck bounces even more than usual, the weather can affect different players in different ways, and the whole endeavour often feels like it’s taking place as a separate piece of its own instead of as part of a larger season. For these two teams right now, that might be a good thing. The league might want tonight to be all about the past, but if the Sens and Habs can’t start banking wins soon, their playoff hopes might be history.

>> Read the full post at Sportsnet

Draft weekend winners and losers

The NHL's annual entry draft is somewhat unique in the world of pro sports. Instead of various teams scattered across the continent sending in picks for a commissioner to read, everyone gathers in one building, with all 30 teams squished together at massive tables on an arena floor to make the picks themselves. It's a system that has its plusses (more trades, at least in theory) and minuses (seriously, guys, shut up with the preamble and just make the pick), but it's rarely boring, and this weekend was no exception.

The biggest star of the opening round was, as expected, top prospect Auston Matthews. He'd been the presumptive top pick all season long, and despite a small measure of intrigue thanks to a late push by Finnish winger Patrik Laine, the top of the draft played out as expected, with Matthews going to the Toronto Maple Leafs and their vaguely insane fan base. The second pick also followed the script, with Laine going to the Jets. That's when things started to go off the rails a bit, and we'll get to that down below.

In the end, the draft may be remembered as much for what didn't happen—remember when P.K. Subban was getting traded?—as for what did. And it may be overshadowed quickly, as we count down the days to Friday's opening of the free agency signing period. More than a few teams headed into the weekend looking to free up cap space for this year's auction; not all succeeded, at least not yet, which could set the stage for an interesting next few days.

One way or another, the league is going to look a lot different a week from today than it does right now. But for today, let's take a look back at the winners, losers and surprises from draft weekend.

Top Five

Celebrating those who've had the best week.

5. Tyson Jost's grandpa—Jost went tenth overall to the Avalanche. It was a nice moment, given the often-difficult path he and his family had followed to get here. Then his grandfather reacted like this, and suddenly everyone's allergies were acting up:

Tyson Jost

— Brady Trettenero (@BradyTrett) June 25, 2016

4. 'Merica—Matthews became the seventh American to be taken first overall, joining the likes of Patrick Kane and Mike Modano (and also Rick DiPietro and Brian Lawton, but let's keep it positive). Two more Americans went in the top seven, and by the end of the round a total of 12 had been picked, equaling the number of Canadians taken and establishing a new US record. Perhaps even more encouraging, the picks weren't limited to the country's usual hockey hot spots, with picks used on players from Arizona and (especially) Missouri.

>> Read the full post at Vice Sports