Laine, all-star voting and too much parity

The following is from an email exchange between Dave Lozo and Sean McIndoe (Down Goes Brown). Each month they will talk some nonsense and debate the biggest topics in the NHL in our monthly review. You can also check out the Biscuits podcast with Sean and Dave as they discuss the events of the week.

DGB: So when we did our October roundup, the big story in the league was how the young kids were dominating. Since then, we've seen Auston Matthews go through a scoring slump and Dylan Strome sent back to junior. But for the most part, the kids are still running over everyone. Patrik Laine is tied with Sidney Crosby for the league lead in goals, Matthews and Mitch Marner are on pace for 60-plus points in Toronto, and Zach Werenski looks fantastic for the Blue Jackets. So this is officially a thing now, right? Are we witnessing one of the best rookie classes in NHL history?

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Lozo: Hang on. Let me turn my hat backward, grab my skateboard, slide on my black-framed glasses that don't have any lenses and... there. Hello, fellow youths that are taking over this sport! A very lit af day to you all, fam! What? No, I'm not a cop. I'm young! Like you! How cool are the Pearl Jam?!

I'm in love with Laine. I want to be friends with him. I want us to be Snapchat buddies. I want to go on Tinder double dates with him. I want to go to the arcade and... I mean, I want to do tandem VR mask adventures with him, because real young people don't go to arcades anymore, daddio! He's so fun and good so what I'm most excited about is how his coaches or teammates or the league itself turns him into a robot.

We're unsure whether Laine feels the same. Photo by Brace Hemmelgarn-USA TODAY Sports

I'm least excited about the Leafs rookies because Toronto media types like YOU will pit them against each other, turn against Matthews because he's a beautiful American, then there will be stories about trading one of them for a defensemen. Toronto doesn't deserve them. One of those three guys will get Kessel'd and you know it. I bet it's Matthews, who will then win a cup with PK Subban in Nashville.

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DGB: Man, I wish I could say you were wrong, but that's absolutely going to happen. But for the record, the early leader is William Nylander, who's already got media in Toronto calling him lazy. He just doesn't work as hard as those Canadian-born players, am I right? (Note: William Nylander was born in Canada.)

But yeah, Laine is great. I wonder what would happen if you hooked Gary Bettman up to a lie detector and asked him how he honestly feels about having his two most marketable young stars in Laine and Connor McDavid stuck in Winnipeg and Edmonton. OK, I know what would happen: the lie detector would start glitching like a Westworld robot as soon as Bettman touched it. But still, the NHL's marketing department can't be thrilled with this, can it?

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Lozo: Here's one thing I've learned during my nearly four decades (spoiler: I'm old) on this planet—if the NHL's marketing department is against it, it's probably against something great for the league and its fans. This is the league that saw John Scott fall in its lap last year and proceeded to do everything to force it off its lap over and over until the NHL decided to go with it because it had no choice.

For instance, let's say if you wanted to vote for Bryan Bickell this year, who is battling MS and may be in the midst of his final NHL season because of it. Can you vote for him? Yes. But it's hard because you have to write him in. So if you wanted to vote 10 times for Bickell as a way of doing something—which you should—it's this big hassle to do so. But you should do it because his wife was tweeting out links to get fans to vote for Bickell, so clearly it's OK with Bickell and his family.

Side note: I would have written back sooner but I'm at a bar watching the Giants game and they just gave up a safety and a field goal and are down 5-0, so I was distracted by my rage crying.

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DGB: Don't worry, the Giants are in the red zone, I'm sure this will turn out fine.

OK, so the all-star voting thing. I feel like you and I aren't quite on the same page, but we're in the same ballpark. That's a mixed metaphor and doesn't make any sense, but people know what I mean. I get the Bickell idea. I see the appeal. But can we agree that the power rankings for all-star voting options looks something like this?

1. Just voting for good players, the way All-Star Games are supposed to work.

1a. Voting for somebody like Bryan Bickell who isn't really an all-star but deserves some recognition for other reasons.

2. Mindlessly stuffing the ballot-box for the players on your own team.

3. Not voting at all, meaning that the rosters get stacked with players from whichever city is hosting because they're the only fans who care.

...

58. Printing off paper copies of the ballot at home, then eating them.

...

1,482. Organizing a campaign to vote for somebody terrible like Shawn Thornton or Steve Ott because you liked the John Scott thing and somehow believe that jokes are just as funny when you re-tell the same ones over and over.

Agreed?

>> Read the full post at Vice Sports

Weekend wrap: Defending Linden, weird standings, and what's wrong with the Rangers?

Opening faceoff: A moment of parity

We’re living in the NHL’s age of parity. That’s been well-established for a while, and whether fans like it or not, most of us have come to accept that this is just how the league works now.

Anyone can beat anyone else on any given night, the loser point means almost everyone finishes over .500, and aside from a few outliers at either end, the gap between good and bad is smaller than ever.

But even given that reality, something weird is happening in the NHL these days.

We're used to parity being something that reveals itself over the course of a season, where there's enough time for the occasional hot and cold streaks to balance out. But these days, you don't even have to take a long view to find league-wide parity. It's playing out over the course of a few weeks.

Last Thursday, a reader sent me a note with an interesting observation: Heading into that night's action, 27 out of the league's 30 teams had won either four, five or six of their last ten games. That's a full 90 per cent of the league within a game of breaking even.

The other three teams weren’t even extreme outliers; nobody in the NHL had won more than seven or fewer than three of their last ten.

Take a look at the standings today, and you'll see a similar story — although not quite as extreme. Twenty-four of the 30 teams fall within that four/five/six-win range, and again, nobody is outside of that three-to-seven range.

That's not quite as extreme as we saw last week, but still less than what we'd expect if we were just randomly flipping coins.

Meanwhile, only one team in the league (the Philadelphia Flyers) has an active winning streak longer than three games, and only one (Colorado Avalanche) has lost more than that many in a row.

None of this is to say that some teams aren't playing especially well or poorly lately, as we'll see in the sections below. But even those teams aren't really seeing any dramatic swings in their win/loss records these days, and the practical impact has been that we're not really getting all that much movement in the standings.

Nobody is soaring or plummeting; instead, we're seeing a handful of teams move up or down by a spot or two, but nothing that feels like a big change.

There's still a lot of season left, as we're constantly reminded. That might be good news for NHL teams who aren't happy with their place in their standings and are hoping to make a move.

The way everyone's going these days, it may take a while to get anywhere.

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Road to the Cup

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

5. San Jose Sharks (15-9-1, plus-9 true goals differential*) – Yeah, I know, I'm not completely sold on this pick either. With the Capitals and Lightning struggling, it was either the Sharks or the Blue Jackets, and the Sharks have won six of seven.

Besides, I still want to see one more solid week from Columbus. (My current plan is to say that every week for the rest of the season and hope nobody notices.)

4. New York Rangers (17-8-1, plus-31) – This seems low, right? It probably is, but see the section below.

>> Read the full post at Sportsnet

Podcast: Death to the loser point

In this week's episode of Biscuits, the Vice Sports hockey podcast:
- Gerald Gallant's firing, and the whole weird cab thing
- Brian Burke's defense of the (indefensible) loser point
- The lack of scoring, bigger nets, and hockey hipsters who won't shut up about 1-0 games
- Why the expansion draft is going to be so much worse than you think
- Probably some other stuff that I forgot.

>> Stream it now on Vice Sports

>> Or, subscribe on iTunes.

Grab bag: It's not too early to get angry about the next lockout

In the Friday Grab Bag:
- Baseball gets a new CBA without a work stoppage. This should make you angry.
- Busting the myth of the all-important first goal
- An obscure player with an all-time great name
- The week's three comedy stars
- And on the 21st anniversary of his final game in Montreal, a YouTube look back at the origin story of Patrick Roy

>> Read the full post at Vice Sports

What could the NHL learn from baseball's new CBA?

Hockey fans had a reason to smile this week. A pro sports league was facing down the threat of a labour disruption while working to hammer out a new collective bargaining agreement, and for once it wasn’t the NHL.

That ended last night, when word emerged that Major League Baseball and its union had reached a tentative deal. The league’s CBA had been set to expire at midnight last night, threatening to cancel the annual winter meetings and other offseason activities, and disrupt a labour peace that stretches back over two decades.

So no, hockey fans, yours isn’t the only sport that goes through this stuff. Still, the timing is interesting, coming in the midst of what seems like the first salvo of the hockey world’s next big showdown. The NHL’s offer to extend the CBA in exchange for Olympic participation sure seemed like a thinly veiled attempt to set up the NHLPA to take the blame for a 2020 work stoppage, and it will be interesting to see if fans fall for it. Either way, the pieces are starting to move around the board, even four years before hockey’s next lockout begins.

Meanwhile, hockey fans yearning for the good old days of analyzing CBA minutiae can get their fix by turning to baseball, where the expiring MLB agreement and the reported replacement hold some interesting ideas. Not all of them apply to hockey – one of baseball’s biggest sticking points was an international draft that the NHL wouldn’t need, for example. But many could, if the NHL wanted to get creative.

So as we wait patiently for hockey's next CBA apocalypse, let's flip through baseball's recent versions and see if there's anything that the NHL could borrow from the boys of summer.

IDEA #1: FREE AGENT COMPENSATION PICKS

One of the most contentious issues in recent MLB CBAs has been draft pick compensation for free agents. Introduced in the 1970s and modified over subsequent agreements, the concept calls for teams that lose players to free agency to be compensated with draft picks. Those picks could come from the signing team or from the league itself (or both), and depend on the quality of the player lost. But in its simplest form, the idea is to compensate teams that lose free agents, avoiding the worst-case scenario of watching a key player walk away for nothing in return.

It's worth pointing out that MLB players don't like the rule, and have been pushing back on it for years. You can see why. A team is less likely to want to spend big money on a free agent if they know that they'll also have to surrender a high draft pick as compensation. Players have fought to reduce the rule's scope; for example, the 2011 CBA limited compensation to players that had received a qualifying offer and been with a team for a full season.

This time around, MLB players pushed to have the concept dropped entirely, although reports say the new CBA will maintain it in a limited form.

Could it work in the NHL?: Anything like the most recent MLB rule would be fought hard by the NHLPA. After all, NHL teams are even more obsessed with hoarding draft picks than their MLB brethren. It's hard to imagine a team like the Oilers being willing to spend $42-million on Milan Lucic if they knew they'd also have to ship their first-round pick to a division rival.

That said, a modified version of the idea in which only league-supplied picks were in play could work. Under that scenario, the league could create new picks to compensate teams that lose certain UFAs. Those new picks could fall within the existing rounds, or perhaps in a new round altogether – MLB sandwiches a mini-round in between the first and second for exactly that purpose. That wouldn't even be all that new of a wrinkle for the NHL, which already creates compensation picks for unsigned draft picks.

From a fan's perspective, there would be pros and cons of the approach. On the one hand, the NHL's free agency market has been withering away over the years, as teams make sure to re-sign top players rather than lose them for nothing. Adding some compensation to the mix could encourage teams to let more players walk, resulting in more offseason fireworks on the open market. On the other hand, that would dry up the market for midseason rentals, making the trade deadline even less active than its recently been.

There are arguments on both sides. But either way, the NHL would want to make sure that any new free agent compensation rule didn't leave any obvious loopholes for teams to exploit. They've been down that road before.

>> Read the full post at Sportsnet