Grantland grab bag: Kaleta sucks, Letterman rules, and a Stompin' Tom mystery

In this week’s grab bag: Screw you Patrick Kaleta,: the advanced stats debate; Wayne Gretzky visits David Letterman; and did Stompin’ Tom’s good old hockey game really happen?

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Grantland: A look at the new guys

It’s easy to forget that last summer featured some major player transactions in the NHL. Between free agency and an unusually active trade market, plenty of players found new homes. Some of those moves have worked out well. Others … not so much.

Here are a dozen of the biggest names who switched teams before this season, and an update on the impact they’ve had so far.

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The NHL's official application form for submitting an offer sheet

Jay, just curious, how many pages of the new
CBA have you not got around to reading yet?

The Calgary Flames tried to offer sheet Ryan O'Reilly last week. You may have read about how that turned out.

But while we now know how close the Flames came to disaster, there's an aspect to this that most of us aren't familiar with: how an offer sheet gets made in the first place. Given the millions of dollars involved, you might assume that it's extremely complicated. It's not. The GM in question just has to complete a simple form to get the process started.

Luckily, DGB spies were able to obtain a copy of the very same form that Jay Feaster and the Flames recently had to fill out.

***

Dear general manager,
Thank you for your interest in signing an NHL player to an offer sheet. To help us process your request as quickly as possible, please fill out the form below.

Your name: ____________________

Your team: ____________________

Name of player: ____________________

Name of player's team who will immediately match this offer, making this whole thing a huge waste of time: ____________________

Amount of money that player is worth: ____________________

Amount of money you are offering that player (or just draw an arrow to the number written above, then write "times three"): ____________________

Offer sheets have rarely been successful in the NHL. Please indicate why you feel this is a good year to sign an RFA.
(   ) This year's condensed schedule may make teams less likely to match a front-loaded offer.
(   ) Next year's tight cap could make it harder for teams to find the space to match aggressive offers.
(   ) Brian Burke is not currently an NHL GM, so I probably won't have to fight anybody in a barn.
(   ) Can really focus on player transactions this year, since thanks to the Blackhawks this isn't one of those annoying seasons that's plagued by all sorts of distractions and uncertainty over who's going to win the Stanley Cup.

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Grantland: Jay Feaster is not alone

Just one day after trying (and failing) to land Avalanche free agent Ryan O’Reilly with an aggressive offer sheet, Jay Feaster and the Calgary Flames found themselves in the center of a controversy over whether they’d almost committed an all-time blunder.

According to a report, the Flames would have had to place O’Reilly on waivers as soon as they signed him. That means Calgary would have given up the draft pick compensation and the $2.5 million signing bonus, only to see its new player immediately wind up elsewhere. That didn’t end up happening, because the Avalanche matched the offer sheet, robbing us all of what would have no doubt been a fascinating legal scramble, but the incident embarrassed the Flames and has fans calling for Feaster’s head.

All of which puts Feaster & Friends in good company. After all, NHL hockey is complicated business, and the Flames’ offer-sheet saga certainly wasn’t the first time that somebody in the hockey world found themselves getting tripped up by a legal loophole.

Whether it was through confusion, dishonesty, or just plain old incompetence, here are some infamous moments in NHL history that had fans and team officials alike scratching their heads and checking their rulebooks.

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Grantland grab bag: There can only be one Little Ball Of Hate

In this week's grab bag: Brad Marchand needs a new nickname, Alexander Ovechkin gets ripped, and we spend some quality time with the 1994 NHL all-stars.

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