Brayden Point? Jaccob Slavin? Six active players who could be tough Hall of Fame calls

The Hockey Hall of Fame will announce its class of 2026 on  Monday, and you know what that means: It’s time to get mad about who’ll get in and who won’t.

That guy from your favorite team? He should be a lock! That guy from the team you hate? He’s a bum, why are we even mentioning him? That other guy who seems like a classic borderline call? You’re very, very sure you know the right answer there too, and anyone who disagrees is a big fat stupidhead.

You get the drill. Or at least I hope you do, because we’re doing a Hall debate today. Just not one about this year’s class.

That’s not to say that this year doesn’t present a few opportunities to argue various cases. Patrice Bergeron is a lock, and Carey Price probably is too after losing out to the numbers game last year. That leaves two spots on the men’s side, and with a weak-ish crop of first-year eligibles other than Bergeron, that gives the committee a chance to backfill some candidates who’ve been waiting for years.

That’s cool, but honestly, I can’t do another round of Patrik Elias or Henrik Zetterberg or Curtis Joseph debate. Rod Brind’Amour remains a tough call, especially now that he’s won a Cup behind the bench (which shouldn’t matter to his case as a player but obviously does). There are plenty of arguments to be had on those names and more.

Just not today. Today, we’re going to break out a gimmick we like to try every year or so: A look at the active players who are shaping up as the toughest calls down the line. By definition, none of these guys are finished products. But all of them are closer to the end than the beginning, with enough road behind them that we can at least make some educated guesses on where they’ll wind up.

>> Read the full post at The Athletic

Emergency Cap Court session: Does the rising cap change the verdict on these stars?

But the cap is going up.

For years, it’s been the go-to excuse for any questionable contract signed in the NHL. Aside from the years immediately following the pandemic, the NHL’s cap ceiling always goes up, at least a little bit. And that meant that any criticism of a contract would immediately be met by a condescending reminder that the cap would eventually go up. A rising cap was an optimistic fan’s – and an overspending GM’s – very best friend, even when it was obviously nonsense.

Except…

Well, now the cap is really going up. Like, way up, by an amount that’s enough to have us reconsidering what we thought we knew about how the league’s economics work. So today, I’m convening a special session of Cap Court, the feature where we put contracts on trial. We’re going to reach back into the last few editions of this column to find deals that got the dreaded “bad contract” verdict, and give them another look based on last week’s news.

I went back through the archives and found five contracts that have a solid case for appeal. Let’s see if any of those can reverse the original call.

>> Read the full post at The Athletic

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Do Mark Scheifele or Mika Zibanejad have bad contracts? NHL Cap Court returns

Welcome back to Cap Court, where we put the questionable deals of NHL stars on trial to find out whether they deserve the dreaded "bad contract" label.

As always, we’re viewing “bad” contracts through the lens of the team that’s stuck with them, since that’s ultimately how fans are forced to do it, even though we’d never begrudge a player taking on offer that’s put in front of them. Importantly, we’re also only looking at contracts from this day forward – a deal could have made sense and even provided value for the first few years, but we’re only looking at what’s left on the books.

We’ve been doing this long enough that names like Jonathan Toews, Carey Pruce and Jakub Voracek have been on the docket. Heck, one of the early editions featured Ryan Suter and Oliver Ekman-Larsson, a combined five teams and three buyouts ago. Have all of our calls been proven right? Look, we’ll do the cross-examining around here, thank you very much.

This time around, we’ve got five more names. We'll start with a big-market blueliner...

>> Read the full post at The Athletic

The Athletic Hockey Show: Mark Scheifele, Leafs lose, Avalanche/Knights series and draft lottery reactions

On this week's episode of The Athletic Hockey Show:
- The Habs beats the Jets but its overshadowed by a scary injury
- Should Scheifele be suspended? Was he trying to inure Jake Evans?
- Wrapping up another Leafs loss
- With a 2-0 lead on the Golden Knights, are the Avalanche inevitable?
- Ideas for spicing up the draft lottery
- Thoughts on where Seth Jones might end up
- This week in hockey history featuring the most famous stick measurement ever, 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’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

How to fix the NHL's broken offer sheet system

We’re closing in on the July 1 opening of the NHL free agent market, and while much of the attention is focused on big-name UFAs like John Tavares, Ilya Kovalchuk and John Carlson, there’s also the usual batch of excellent young players hitting RFA status. And that means it’s time for our annual round of “Will this be the year that somebody signs an offer sheet?”

We already know the answer. No, it probably won’t.

It should be. There are plenty of players who could be eligible that any team would love to add, including names like William Karlsson, Mark Stone, Jacob Trouba and William Nylander. In a league in which players (especially forwards) hit their prime in their early 20s, offer sheets remain one of the only ways to acquire a young star who can instantly slot into the top of your lineup. For most teams, short of winning the draft lottery in a year with a sure-thing franchise player or two available, it’s just about the only way.

And yet we never see them. The NHL hasn’t had an offer sheet signed in over five years, going back to Ryan O’Reilly’s two-year deal with the Flames back in 2013. There have been only eight in the salary cap era, five of which had already come by 2008. And only three cap-era offer sheets have been signed by players who could be considered stars at the time – O’Reilly, Shea Weber in 2012 and Thomas Vanek in 2007.

It’s not like there’s a shortage of impact players in the RFA pool for teams to target. In 2015, a GM could have made a play for Vladimir Tarasenko. In 2016, there was a chance to sign Nathan MacKinnon, Mark Scheifele, Johnny Gaudreau or Nikita Kucherov. Last year, the target could have been David Pastrnak, Evgeny Kuznetsov or Leon Draisaitl. These are franchise-altering players, many just entering their most productive years, all of them available to any team that was willing to extend an offer. And yet, nothing.

From a distance, none of this makes any sense. Every GM in the league has a tool in their toolbox that can be used to acquire a superstar in his prime, and virtually none of them ever bother to use it.

When hockey fans complain about the lack of offer sheets, they often settle on one culprit: the GMs. If they actually put winning first, the thinking goes, we’d see offer sheets every year. But if their priority was to stay chummy with their colleagues, and to make sure their status in the hockey management old boys club remained in good standing, then they’d think twice. Wouldn’t want to get uninvited from a round of golf at the next GM meetings.

There’s probably some truth to that. But there’s a bigger issue: offer sheets are broken.

Put differently, the problem here isn’t just the 31 men who don’t seem to want to use the system. It’s the system itself. Given the way the rules are currently set up, a lot of the GMs who keep passing on superstar talent are actually acting rationally.

>> Read the full post at Sportsnet

Weekend wrap: Early statements

It’s one game. The first game doesn’t necessarily tell us much about how a series will play out — remember the Bruins thumping the Lighting in their second-round opener? — and there’s a good chance that this one still has a long way to go, with plenty of twists and turns baked in.

But even with all the obvious caveats in place, things couldn’t have gone much better for the Jets on Saturday night. They won the game, which is obviously the important part. But not all wins are created equal. Sometimes you steal a game, or barely hang on, or win even though you didn’t put together a 60-minute effort. Sometimes you win games you probably deserved to lose.

And sometimes, you show up and are clearly the better team from start to finish. That’s the sort of game the Jets put together on Saturday, scoring on their first shot and pumping three goals past Marc-Andre Fleury before the game was eight minutes old. The Golden Knights regained their footing from there to keep the game respectable, but that’s all they did, as the Jets largely shut them down the rest of the way. Despite playing from well behind for almost the entire game, the high-flying Knights managed just 21 shots and never seemed to be taking the game to their opponents.

Again, it’s one game, and maybe we got the result we should have expected – with the Jets coming off the high of a Game 7 win in Nashville and the Knights seeing their first action in nearly a week, some early Vegas rust may have been inevitable. If the series goes long, that discrepancy in time off may yet come back to hurt the Jets.

But that’s if the series does go long; it didn’t look like it would on Saturday. And while Fleury was brilliant against the Kings and still leads the league in post-season save percentage and goals-against average, it’s fair to point out that he’s now given up three goals or more in five of his last six games. With Connor Hellebuyck looking sharp lately, that’s not a good sign for the Knights.

We’re still in uncharted territory with this Vegas team, which now trails a series for the first time. Maybe they rebound with a better effort tonight and take the series back home tied at one. But the early returns are in, and they’re clear: The Jets were the better team through one game. Now we find out how many more they need.

Road to the Cup

The five teams that look like they’re headed towards a Stanley Cup.

5. Your team: That’s right. With only four teams left in the playoffs and a suddenly unwieldy five-team power ranking format to work with, we can confirm that your personal favourite team is holding down the fifth spot. Congratulations, and never let it be said that we don’t give credit where it’s deserved.

4. Tampa Bay Lightning: Nikita Kucherov hasn’t done much in the conference finals so far. But he did find a creative way to make last night’s highlight reel: by kicking Brett Connolly.

Dangerous play by Nikita Kucherov on Brett Connolly at the end of Game 2 pic.twitter.com/jiTvhccn8I

— Brady Trettenero (@BradyTrett) May 14, 2018

3. Vegas Golden Knights: We knew their success was already getting attention from outside of the hockey world. But here’s a new audience we may not have counted on: professional gamblers.

>> Read the full post at Sportsnet

Weekend wrap: Doing the splits

Well, you knew it wouldn’t be easy.

As good as the Winnipeg Jets are, they’re facing the Presidents’ Trophy winners. Coming home up 2–0 in the series was always going to be a tough ask.

Still, they nearly pulled it off. After a strong performance in Game 1 led to a 4–1 win, the Jets went into last night’s second game in Nashville with at least some hope that they wouldn’t need to come back. Those chances took an early hit when Ryan Johansen opened the scoring less than a minute in, but a pair of quick goals put the Jets back in front.

The Predators pushed back in the second, scoring twice to retake the lead. Brandon Tanev and Johansen traded goals within seconds of each other early in the third, and the Predators looked like they might escape with the regulation win. But Mark Scheifele tied the game with a minute left, briefly silencing the Nashville crowd and sending us to overtime.

Sudden death provided the kind of hockey that’s all sorts of fun to watch if you’re neutral and agonizing if you’re not, with the two teams going up and down the ice and trading chances. The first extra period didn’t solve anything, and it took five minutes of a second frame before Kevin Fiala finally ended it.

The result means we make it out of the first weekend of the second round without any teams collecting a second win. The Sharks had tied their series with the Golden Knights with an overtime win of their own on Saturday. And the Capitals evened things with the Penguins on Sunday afternoon, although the win didn’t come without some controversy. Meanwhile the Bruins and Lightning will play their second game tonight, with Boston looking to head home as the only team in the second round to go up 2–0.

That all makes it tough to pick out any favourites, but let’s see what we can do.

Road to the Cup

5. Vegas Golden Knights: We’ll nudge them back into the top five partly on the strength of that impressive Game 1 blowout win, and partly because we’re still not sure which direction that Penguins/Capitals series is headed.

4. Tampa Bay Lightning: You never want to get too silly with the “must win” label early in a series. But with the way the Bruins looked in Game 1, tonight feels pretty close for the Lightning.

>> Read the full post at Sportsnet

Grab bag: Hart problems

In the Friday Grab Bag:
- The Hart Trophy debate gets complicated
- The NHL makes small progress in the replay review mess
- An obscure player from one of my favorite 1980s teams
- The week's three comedy stars make me worry for Winnipeg
- And a look back at the selection of the Sedins at the 1999 draft

>> Read the full post at Vice Sports

Weekend wrap: Central casting

Every now and then, we like to use this space to focus in on one particular division. Last month we went through the Metro and tried to make sense of a traffic jam of teams all separated by a few points. This month’s division features slightly more separation, but no fewer question marks. Let’s take a run through the Central.

For the last few years, the Central has been the league’s standard-bearer as the top division. That perception was largely driven by the Blackhawks and their three Stanley Cups, which made sense. But despite being a mini-dynasty, Chicago didn’t dominate the division during the regular season; last year was actually the first time since the current format came together in 2013–14 that the Hawks finished first, or even had home-ice in the opening round. Teams like the Stars, Blues and even the Avalanche have taken turns having big years, and last year’s playoffs turned into the Predators’ big coming-out party. In three of the last four years, the Central has taken both wild-card spots and sent five teams to the playoffs.

They may be headed in that direction again this year; we’re just not sure which five teams it would be. The Stars and Wild headed into the weekend controlling the two wild-card spots. Both teams were hoping to aim a little higher heading into the season, with the Wild coming off a 106-point season and the Stars loading up in the off-season to get back into the playoffs. So far, neither squad has really clicked, although both are still within range of the division’s top three.

The Stars come out of the weekend holding onto their spot, but the Wild ceded theirs after getting pummeled by the surging Avalanche, winners of five straight. That’s an impressive feat for a Colorado team that was dead last by a mile last year, then traded one of their best players earlier in the year. Joe Sakic and Jared Bednar don’t seem like punchlines anymore, and it’s starting to feel like last year’s disaster may have been more of a worst-case scenario than a real indication of where the franchise was at.

But the real action has been at the top of the division, where the Jets, Blues and Predators have taken turns leading the charge. For most of the first half, it was the Blues who looked like the best of the group, but they wobbled somewhat through December after Jaden Schwartz got hurt. That continued as they dropped a pair on the weekend, although by picking up a point against the Capitals they at least held onto second place.

That’s because the Predators have been losing ground over the last few weeks, winning just three of nine. They’ve got a key injury of their own in Filip Forsberg, who’ll be out at least a month with what we now know is a broken hand. The team has gone cold ever since that Western Canada swing in mid-December that saw them win three straight by a combined score of 13–1, although they did earn a solid win over the Kings on Saturday.

All of which opens the door for the one Central team we haven’t mentioned yet. And they probably deserve a section of their own.

Road to the Cup

The five teams that look like they’re headed towards Stanley Cup–favourite status.

5. Boston Bruins (23-10-7, +29 true goals differential*): With points in 11 straight, the Bruins make their first appearance in the top five.

4. Winnipeg Jets (25-11-7, +27): There’s that missing Central team. More on them down below.

>> Read the full post at Sportsnet