Weekend rankings: Panic rising, Flames changes, Wilson’s suspension and more

We had a running joke around these parts in the opening weeks of the season: It was always too early. Nobody knew anything, no conclusions could be drawn, we probably shouldn’t have been ranking anyone but it was all in good fun.

We’re almost two full months in to the season and [looks around the flaming wreckage of the league] yeah, I think it’s safe to say it’s not too early anymore. And for a lot of teams, none of this is fun anymore.

Where to begin. Let’s start with some good news: The Canadiens had what may have been their first genuinely good game in a month, rolling the Jets 7-1 on Saturday. The win was their first in three weeks that didn’t feature somebody getting fired in the middle of it, so that’s progress.

Montreal’s week turned down the temperature slightly on a season that was in danger of falling apart. It also saw them lose their distinction as the only team to fire a coach during the season, as the Flames joined that club by icing Geoff Ward in favor of Darryl Sutter. Yes, that Darryl Sutter, the one who led the team to a Stanley Cup final back in the pre-cap days and won two rings in Los Angeles but hasn’t been behind a bench since 2017. This is GM Brad Treliving’s fifth coach of his tenure, and if the change doesn’t spark something, you have to wonder if it’s the last.

Sutter wasn’t behind the bench on the weekend due to COVID protocols, but is expected to join the team today. He presumably watched his new team cough up a 2-1 third period lead to lose to the Oilers in regulation on Saturday before getting a point in a shootout loss to Ottawa last night. He’ll inherit a team that hasn’t won two straight in four weeks, dropping X points back of a Montreal team that holds three games in hand for the North’s final playoff spot.

Here’s the thing: There are a lot of teams who’d look at the Flames right now and think “Man, I wish we had it that good.”

The weekend started with dueling GM press conferences in Buffalo and Vancouver, two teams that entered the league together five decades ago and have managed to wind up in virtually the same spot today. Two furious fan bases, two coaches on the hot seat, and now two GMs trying to buy some time. Kevyn Adams went with the “not good enough” approach, but his lukewarm defense of Ralph Krueger only made a change behind the bench feel even more inevitable. As for Jim Benning’s request for two more years of patience in Vancouver, well, I’ll let Thomas Drance take a carving knife to that performance.

Look around the league, and the hits keep on coming. The Devils have forgotten how to score. The Predators are ready to burn it all to the ground. It’s starting to fall apart in Columbus, and we’ll get to that down below. The Stars can’t get right, the Oilers are still trying to figure out what happened against the Leafs, the Sharks still can’t get a save… about a third of this league is a serious bummer right now.

History tells us that a few of those teams will find their footing and make something out of the season, even if that just means a failed playoff run. Others will make changes in the coming days and weeks. Some will insist on staying the course all the way to the bitter end. And they’ll be joined by others, the ones that save their collapse for the second half.

It’s depressing if you root for one of those teams, and maybe a certain kind of entertaining if you don’t. It’s a lot of things. But it’s not too early. Not anymore.

---

>> Read the full post at The Athletic

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

Grab bag: When Cup handoffs get awkward

In the Friday Grab Bag:
- Are Nashville fans real fans? Are you? Is anyone?
- The NHL unveils its ten best teams ever
- An obscure player who posted what may be the saddest season stat line ever
- The week's three comedy stars
- And a look back at Gary Bettman's most awkward Cup handoff ever

>> Read the full post at Vice Sports

Weekend wrap: Capital Wasteland

So the good news is that the Blue Jackets have cooled off after winning 16 straight, and look like they’re not going to run away and hide with the Presidents’ Trophy after all.

The bad news is that now it’s another Metro team that looks unbeatable, and it’s the team that ended the Blue Jackets’ streak. Apparently ending a team’s shot at the all-time streak record is some sort of Highlander thing where the winner absorbs the loser’s powers, because now the Washington Capitals are running over everyone.

Their two weekend victims were a pair of pretty good teams in the Blackhawks and Flyers. No matter; the Caps smoked both, winning those two weekend games by a combined score of 11–0. That ran their current win streak to nine, and moved them past Columbus into first place overall. Since the puck dropped on that streak game with the Blue Jackets back on Jan. 5, the Caps are 6-0-0 and have outscored their opponents 26–3.

The Capitals are unstoppable. Nobody can score against them at even strength. And if the playoffs started today, they'd head into them as the league's top seed and Stanley Cup favourites.

For most teams, that would be considered a good thing.

But this is Washington, and Capitals fans don't exactly have the best history when it comes to getting their hopes up. That's led to some handwringing over whether the team is peaking too early, and to headlines about the winning streak that include the words "Oh noooooooo."

You can kind of see where Caps fans are coming from. After decades of periodic playoff collapses, this had been shaping up like the sort of year where they could sit back, watch their rivals eat up all the attention and expectations, then sneak into the playoffs as a solid but under-the-radar dark horse.

Then they started winning and, well, so much for that plan. Now it's all eyes on Washington. Braden Holtby is back in the running for another Vezina, Nicklas Backstrom is getting pregame ceremonies, and Alex Ovechkin has people debating where he ranks among the greatest goal-scorers of all-time. And Capitals fans who'd been banking on a nice quiet underdog vibe are suddenly curled up in a ball and dreading what's inevitably to come.

Tonight, the Caps visit the Penguins in what may be the week's best game, not to mention a possible first-round playoff preview. It's the first game of a tough stretch that will see them play seven of nine on the road, so fingers crossed, Washington fans. Maybe they can snap out of this unfortunate hot streak sooner than later.

Road to the Cup

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

5. Montreal Canadiens (27-11-6, +26 true goals differential*) – They're back, if barely. More on that below.

4. Pittsburgh Penguins (26-11-5, +20) – They went pointless on a three-game road trip, and have dropped to third in the Metro.

>> Read the full post at Sportsnet

Are the Carolina Hurricanes secretly good?

Are the Carolina Hurricanes any good?

That's the question that popped into my head as I was watching their comeback win over the Arizona Coyotes on Sunday night. It was an up-and-down game, one in which the Hurricanes were up 3-2 after two periods, blew that lead and trailed midway through the third, and then stormed back with two late goals for a regulation win. And that's a fitting outcome for an up-and-down team that has had its moments despite the fact that they're probably not very good. Unless they are. Which they're not. We think.

On the surface, it seems like an easy question, one that can be answered with one glance at the standings. So let's start there: The Hurricanes' win over the Coyotes vaulted them from a share of dead-last in the league all the way up to 25th overall. And while it's no doubt a source of pride to pass teams like the Toronto Maple Leafs and Columbus Blue Jackets, that still leaves them far closer to the first overall pick than the playoff race.

So, yeah, they're bad. End of post, and sorry for wasting your time.

Except ...

>> Read the full post on ESPN.com

Weekend wrap: The trade market heats up

A look back at the biggest games and emerging story lines of the NHL weekend.

Theme of the Week: The Trade Market Wakes Up

We’re now two weeks away from the NHL’s trade deadline, and last week brought us the season’s first major deal. While we’re unlikely to see any moves over the next two weeks that rival that Jets/Sabres blockbuster in terms of size and scope, it stood to reason that the transaction page would start getting busy any day now.

“Any day” turned out to be yesterday, when we got our second major deal of the week: the Predators loading up for their playoff run by adding veterans Cody Franson and Mike Santorelli from the Maple Leafs. Both players will be unrestricted free agents in a few months, although either or both could re-sign with Nashville before the offseason. Franson is the main prize, a big right-handed defenseman with decent offensive numbers, while Santorelli is a depth forward enjoying a nice comeback season on a cheap deal.

In return, the Leafs got the Predators’ first-round pick, along with prospect Brendan Leipsic. Neither represents a sure thing, but they’re two decent future assets for a team that doesn’t have many to work with. The deal also signals that the Leafs are serious about finally starting a full-scale rebuild.

Who wins? That’s the beauty of these sorts of short-term rental deals. We get to hem and haw about it now, wait until we see how the season turns out, and then retroactively revise our opinions. If the Predators win the Cup, or at least come close, then they win big. If the Leafs … well, nothing good will ever happen to the Leafs, so we don’t have to worry about that.

We’ll do a more in-depth deadline preview in the days leading up to March 2, but this week, let’s spend a little time sorting out the buyers from the sellers.

Cup Watch: The League’s Five Best

The five teams that seem most likely to earn the league’s top prize: the Stanley Cup.

5. Chicago Blackhawks (35-18-4, plus-41 goals differential) The Hawks return to our list, largely based on the horrible things they did to Marc-Andre Fleury in yesterday’s shootout. That stuff will help them in the playoffs, right?

4. New York Islanders (37-18-1, plus-23) Tonight’s game against the Rangers is a first-round preview, because we’ve all agreed to make these teams play in the first round whether or not the standings say they should.

>> Read the full post on Grantland

In praise of the Negative Value Guy

In the NHL’s salary cap era, a good player with a bad contract is not a good player.

Or at least, he’s not a good asset, which these days is essentially the same thing. It’s no longer enough to judge players based on what they can do on the ice while letting the front-office accountants worry about who makes what and for how long. In a league that features a hard cap and guaranteed deals, a player’s value is inescapably tied to his contract.

None of what I just wrote is remotely controversial. On its own, it’s probably not even all that interesting. Every NHL fan understands this sort of thing on some level, and talk of contracts and cap hits permeates the discussion of any player. It’s why we all lost our minds when CapGeek went away — smart fans need this stuff to function. And it’s why we can have those fun arguments over whether you’d rather have Jonathan Toews and his monster contract or John Tavares and his bargain one.

But a funny thing happens when you start working your way down the list and follow this kind of thinking as far as it can go. As sports fans, we’re used to valuing players on a sliding scale from “really valuable” to “not valuable at all.” We’ll argue over who gets what label, of course, but the basic rules remain the same. A good player is worth a lot; a bad player is worth next to nothing; a truly terrible player may even be worth nothing at all.

Once a hard cap comes into play, things can get unintuitive. You start to realize that “no value” isn’t really the bottom of the scale after all. A player with an especially bad contract can’t really be said to be worth nothing, because that’s being too kind. He might actually be worth less than nothing. We’ve hit the floor and kept on digging, and down there we meet a relatively new specimen in the hockey world: the Negative Value Guy.

Again, this isn’t some sort of new concept — in other sports, fancy stats based on concepts like VORP (value over replacement player) and WAR (wins above replacement) have flagged players with negative value for years. But that’s based on what happens on the field, and those players tend to be rare, a type of outlier you rarely see sticking around for long. Hockey doesn’t have a widely accepted all-in-one value stat like that yet, but if it did we’d no doubt see the same thing: a handful of players kicking around the league who probably didn’t really belong based on their production.

I’d argue that once you start factoring in contracts and cap hits, we’re no longer talking about a handful of fringe players who dip ever so slightly into negative territory. There are lots of negative value guys, and you’ll find them on just about every NHL team. That’s because we’re no longer talking about a player’s value to his team in between whistles during a given game, but his value to his franchise as an asset.

Here’s one way to think of it: An NHL player is a negative value guy if he can be made available on the open market, at no cost, and nobody would want him. If that happened, we’d know that even “free” was too high a price to pay to acquire someone. That’s negative value.

And of course, that exact scenario plays out all the time. It’s called waivers, and it’s the way that NHL teams can make a player available to any other team in the league. Here he is, they say. If you want him, he’s all yours. You just have to assume his full contract.

Sure enough, on most days during the season, a player or two hits the waiver wire. And in the vast majority of cases, the player clears. Those guys, at least temporarily, have negative value in the eyes of the free market. Around the league, 29 other teams take a look at a potential asset being offered up for free and say, “No thanks, you go ahead and keep him.”

A lot of those players are fringe NHLers whom fans have barely heard of. But bigger names occasionally go through the process, and we saw one example just two weeks ago, when the Los Angeles Kings waived center Mike Richards.

Richards is a reliable two-way player, one who’s won gold on the Canadian Olympic team and two Stanley Cups. He’s certainly not the player he once was — he scored 80 points as a 23-year-old in 2008-09, but his offensive numbers have been dropping steadily for five seasons. This year, he’d spent time on the Kings fourth line and was even a healthy scratch on some nights, so his days of making all-star teams appear over. But on the verge of turning 30 and in his 10th NHL season, Richards is exactly the sort of battle-tested veteran with a winning pedigree over whom teams used to get into bidding wars. Even if his game isn’t what it once was, you’d think he belongs on an NHL roster.

And yet he cleared waivers. Richards may not be a bad player, but he comes with a terrible contract, one that carries a $5.75 million cap hit through 2020. That’s too much money and way too many years for a guy who contributes what Richards does. And in today’s NHL, that makes him a negative value guy.

>> Read the full post on Grantland

Grab bag: Wayne vs. Mario in the battle of awkward ads

In this week's grab bag:
- Three comedy stars, plus one awesome kid
- Are the Sabres tanking?
- An election-week obscure player
- A cautionary tale about giving big money to Cup-winning goalies
- And Wayne Gretzky and his cast of 7-Up misfits challenge Mario Lemieux for the title of history's most awkward hockey ads

>> Read the full post on Grantland

2012 World Championships preview

The new "Canada has to play without sticks
to make it fair" rule got mixed reviews.

Hockey fans never seem quite sure how to feel about the World Championships. On the one hand, international hockey is always entertaining. On the other, it can be difficult to get too excited about a competition that takes place right as the NHL playoffs are kicking into high gear.

This year's tournament, which got underway yesterday, is being co-hosted by Finland and Sweden. And as always, most of the coverage has focused as much on the intrigue around which players would accept invitations to represent their countries. With the roster still in flux even after the tournament starts, it can be tough to separate the also-rans from the contenders.

Here's a closer look at the six countries favored to take home the medals.

Russia

Team outlook: While the roster does feature Evgeni Malkin and Pavel Dastyuk, experts agree that the lack of a third-line center could be a major issue for the 30 or 40 seconds a game that they'll need one.
Key player: Team officials can't figure out why Ilya Bryzgalov hasn't shown up yet, since based on a look at his stats from the first round the Flyers clearly lost in four straight.
Prediction: While the players acknowledge that being under a microscope is just part of playing for Russia internationally, they're still not sure why Barry Trotz keeps showing up at their hotel and asking the front desk if he can have a look at their key cards.

Sweden

Team outlook: As always, the players will focus on the three tenets of Swedish international hockey: a high-tempo offense, a team-wide commitment to defense, and skating by their goaltender every few seconds to yell "Hey, just making sure but you're not Tommy Salo, right?"
Key player: Pekka Rinne, since he was kind enough to make sure the entire Detroit Red Wings roster was available.
Prediction: Daniel Alfredsson finds himself hoping for a matchup against Canada in Stockholm, since it would be a nice change of pace to play a home game against a team wearing maple leafs without being booed.

Read the rest of this post...

Other Montreal Canadien fan complaints

Montreal Canadiens fans aren’t very happy these days. The team has been a disappointment all season, with a combination of injuries and lacklustre play leaving them well outside of the current playoff picture.

But apparently that's not even the biggest problem facing the franchise. That honor would be reserved for interim Canadiens' coach Randy Cunneyworth, who's hiring generated controversy because he can't speak French. Tension over that issue may be taken to new heights today, when Canadiens fans (or at least groups claiming to represent them) are reportedly planning a pre-game protest outside of the Bell Centre.

But while the language-based outrage is getting all the attention, it's actually only one of several demonstrations planned for today by fans in Montreal. As it turns out, Canadiens fans are fed up and they're not going to take it anymore.

So forget about which language the coach is speaking. Here are some of the other issues that Montreal Canadiens fans are currently upset about.

• Whenever you call Montreal's 911 emergency line, the automated attendant doesn't get to "report a Boston Bruins body check" until like the third or fourth option.
  
  
• The team has refused to release details of team captain Brian Gionta's recent health issue beyond calling it a lower body injury, which on that guy doesn't really narrow it down.
  
  
• While it was nice to see them borrow our patented "stuff the ballot box to elect all your mediocre hometown players to the All-Star Game" move, foolish Senator fans forgot the part about including an unrestricted free agent for Brian Burke to overpay in the offseason.
  

Read the rest of this post...

2009-2010 Season Preview: The Southeast Division

As we count down the final days leading up to the 2009-10 regular season, let's take a look at each of the 30 teams with the official DGB Season Preview. Today, we look at the Southeast Division.

Atlanta Thrashers

The good: The team does, in the strictest technical sense, still exist.
The bad: Their plan to finally make it back to the post-season seems to involve building around former Maple Leafs.
Biggest question mark: How will the team react to the absence of Garnett Exelby, which will force them to play with two defencemen in proper position?
Fearless forecast: A frustrated Ilya Kovalchuk decides to stop passing, hang out at the red line instead of playing defence, and take eight-minute shifts, making him the first player to ever play exactly like you do in NHL 10 "Be A Pro" mode.

Washington Capitals

The good: Alexander Ovechkin seems to finally be coming out of his shell, and may even be willing to participate in occasional off-ice promotional activity.
The bad: I entered "Semyon Varlamov" into a Russian-to-English dictionary, and it came back "Steve Penney".
Biggest question mark: Why does every photograph of Mike Green look like it was taken three seconds after somebody woke him up?
Fearless forecast: The Capitals win 50 games, or more than the Nationals, Wizards and Redskins combined.

Florida Panthers

The good: Recently named Bryan McCabe captain.
The bad: Oops, that last one was supposed to be listed under "the bad". I guess Bryan's not the only one who gets confused about which side things are supposed to go in.
Biggest question mark: With Jay Bouwmeester's departure, which veteran will step up and teach the younger players what it takes to miss the playoffs every single year?
Fearless forecast: A guy who looks oddly like Jim Balsillie starts spending a lot of time in South Florida.

Tampa Bay Lightning

The good: Vincent Lecavlier appears poised for the sort of big year the team had in mind when they signed him to an $80M extension.
The bad: That apparently makes him the only person associated with this franchise who has any actual money.
Biggest question mark: Wouldn't it be better if we all just agreed that the lockout actually started in May of 2004?
Fearless forecast: The Montreal Canadiens make an aggressive deadline push to trade for Martin St. Louis in an attempt to add size.

Carolina Hurricanes

The good: Cam Ward's stellar play continues to indicate that he hasn't yet realized that he's Cam Ward.
The bad: While Ric Flair may be a native South Carolinian, having a crazy old white-haired man scream maniacally is really just an uncreative ripoff of Don Cherry.
Biggest question mark: Does Aaron Ward get one free sucker punch on Scott Walker to use whenever he wants? (Answer: Yes.)
Fearless forecast: The free agent signing of Tom Kostopolous forces coach Paul Maurice to slightly modify his famous quote to "There was a lot of purse stealing out there."