NHL Cap Court: Do William Nylander or Adrian Kempe have bad contracts? Does anyone?

It’s been a while since we’ve broken out the Cap Court gimmick. The idea here is that we pick five players and try to figure out if they have bad contract from a team perspective. Too much money, too much term, that sort of thing. We make the case for and against, and find a few comparables to help us. Then we deliver a verdict.

Nice and simple. Or at least it’s supposed to be. But now that the salary cap’s upper limit is growing again, and growing quickly, does anyone have a bad contract anymore? Aside from the obvious misfires that nobody’s debating, just about every deal out there could be defended with a shrug and a mumbled “cap’s going up”.

It’s enough to make it tempting to hang a Sprit Halloween sign on the old cap courtroom. But this is still one of my favorite recurring bits, and we haven’t tried it all season. So let’s give it a shot. Five more names, five more contracts, and five more verdicts. Can we find a guilty verdict among them? We'll find out, and we'll start with one of the biggest names out there...

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Wait, is it weird that it's so hard to name the Eastern Conference's best player?

Who’s the best player in the NHL right now? What about the top five?

Connor McDavid is the most talented player in the world. You could argue that Nathan MacKinnon is best player this season, which is a slightly different category. Leon Draisaitl is right behind those two. Kirill Kaprizov has the biggest contract, and he’s mostly lived up to it so far. On the blueline, the eternal Cale Makar vs. Quinn Hughes debate rages on. And in goal, Connor Hellebuyck is the reigning Vezina winner, not to mention the MVP. Of course, all those guys are established veterans, but if you were building a team right now you might use your top pick on Connor Bedard or Macklin Celebrini instead.

Do you notice something odd about that paragraph?

It’s all Western Conference guys. Every one of them. And we didn’t even mention names like Jack Eichel, or Mikko Rantanen, or Leo Carlsson. The West is stacked. When you really think about it, there’s an embarrassment of riches stuffed into one conference.

And then you start to wonder: Wait, who is the best player in the East? And where would that player even rank leaguewide?

This came up last week on Puck Soup, where my beloved co-host Ryan Lambert had recently guested on a Canucks pod. They’d asked a seemingly simple question: If Quinn Hughes had gone to the Devils like we all expected, would he have instantly become the East’s best player?

We agreed that yeah, he probably would have. But instead, he stayed in the West, since that’s apparently where all the brightest stars have to be.

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Six Patrick Roy-inspired Oilers trades for a goalie that get increasingly demented

Thirty years ago today, there was a very good team with one crucial flaw.

They had an excellent roster, one that included two of the very best centers of their era. The forward depth was good. They had a decent blueline, one anchored by one of the better young offensive defensemen in the league. They had a good young coach. But the flaw was in goal – they had some decent goalies, but nobody who could be The Guy,  the sort of stud who could steal a playoff series or two on the long road to a championship.

Stop me if any of this sounds familiar, Oiler fans.

You know how the story ends. Our team is the 1995-96 Colorado Avalanche, and tomorrow marks the thirty-year anniversary of the biggest transaction in franchise history. On December 6, 1995, the Avalanche acquired Patrick Roy from the Canadiens in a five-player trade, and the rest was history. They won the Stanley Cup that very year, followed not long after by another. Joe Sakic and Peter Forsberg went to the Hall of Fame with multiple rings. And it all happened because Colorado’s front office recognized a problem, and took the biggest swing possible to fix it.

Could this year’s Oilers do the same?

The short answer: No, of course not.

We all know why. There’s a salary cap now. Trading is too hard, especially during the season. The price would be too high. Great players are almost never traded these days. And there’s also the not-very-small detail that Roy had basically walked out on his team a few days earlier, forcing Montreal to make a lopsided deal they wouldn’t otherwise have made. No elite goalies are doing that these days.

OK, sure. This year’s Oilers can’t take a big swing. It’s impossible to land a Roy-sized talent, or even anything close, even if it would be the last piece of a Stanley Cup puzzle. We have to be realistic, and we all know that when the Oilers eventually make their move, it will look a lot more like the 2024 Avs than the 1995 version – which is to say, they’ll try to find a Mackenzie Blackwood or Scott Wedgewood, then hope for the best. Or maybe they won’t do anything at all, and just roll the dice on yet another Stuart Skinner playoff run. But a blockbuster? Never going to happen.

Fine. But what if it did?

Today, on the eve of the anniversary of the Patrick Roy trade, let’s indulge in a little but of make-believe. Let’s pretend we live in an alternate NHL world where a team that was one star goalie away from a championship would actually, you know, go get a star goalie.

Which goalies could be the Oilers’ Patrick Roy? I have six suggestions. None of them are remotely realistic in today’s NHL. This is just a little Friday fun, a thought experiments to take you into the weekend. We'll go from the most to the least plausible.

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NHL weekend rankings: Kings roll, Sabres spiral, and a wild weekend in New York

Remember a few years ago when the NHL had that weird marketing campaign promising “no soap operas, just hockey”? I don’t think they got the memo in New York.

The Rangers have been tumbling down the standings lately, but they’ve shot to the top of the rankings of the league’s most interesting teams. Just two months into the season, we’d already had a hot start and a losing streak and a mysterious trade memo and all sorts of rumors. Then Friday rolled around, and it all blew up.

Let’s work our way through some thoughts on some of the news.

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