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.

>> Read the full post at The Athletic

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

The return of Cap Court, with a twist: Which NHL stars have great contracts?

We’re into late July, and with apologies to Vladimir Tarasenko and Matt Dumba, the free agent frenzy is pretty much done. And this year, I think we can all agree that it was… fine? That’s about it, right? There weren’t many big names available, and the flat cap meant that there weren’t as many big deals flying around as we’re used to seeing.

That’s probably good news for the 32 teams, who tend to make the worst mistakes when the UFA market opens. Looking back at this year’s deals, there were certainly a few overpays, but nothing that seems outrageous. Maybe GMs are finally learning. Or maybe the flat cap meant they just didn’t have enough to spend, and will be right back to setting piles of money on fire next summer.

Either way, this sudden burst of thriftiness feels like something worth recognizing. So this week, I’m breaking out an old gimmick with the return of Cap Court. That’s the feature where we pick five contracts and put them on trial, judging the deals based only on the years that are left and the cap hit they carry. We’ve done five of these over the years, meaning 25 verdicts have been handed down, and it’s fair to say that every reader agreed with 100% of them.

But this time, there’s a twist: We’re not looking for bad contracts. This time, we’re looking for great ones.

As always, we’re viewing this from a team’s perspective, meaning we want to know which contracts are “great” the way Nathan MacKinnon’s was for the Avalanche for all those years. MacKinnon himself might disagree with the idea that that was an especially great contract, since it ultimately cost him tens of millions of dollars. Or maybe not, and he’d tell you that he was happy to leave some cap room for his team to build a winner around him. Players always say that when their contract is tossed into the “great” pile. Some of them might even mean it.

I’ve picked five contracts that I think you could argue are great ones from a team perspective, but could also fall into the range of merely good. That doesn’t mean that I think these are the only five deals on the league that could qualify, and in fact I’ve left some off the list that are pretty obviously huge bargains. Leon Draisaitl, Cale Makar, Brad Marchand and Jason Robertson are all underpaid, relative to what they bring to the table. So is Connor McDavid, even though he carries the second highest cap hit in the league. Jack Hughes might be one more big season away from becoming the new MacKinnon as far bargains go. I’m not sure anyone would argue any of those, which means we don’t need to waste time putting them on the docket.

The five names I’ve chosen should be at least a little tougher. So court is now in session: Are these good contracts, are do any of them rise to the level of being great ones?

>> Read the full post at The Athletic

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