Ringing in the new NHL season with some 2021 resolutions

I have this post that I like to do every year right around the time that the NHL season is almost about to start, where I recognize a new beginning in the hockey world by suggesting some resolutions. Get it? It’s funny, because they’re new year’s resolutions, but it’s September.

Welp.

While 2020 will go down as the most messed up year in sports history, it’s at least leaving hockey fans with a nice bit of symmetry. With camps opening over the coming days, we get to have our new season and our new year at pretty much the same time. That means I get to do this resolutions gimmick at the same time you’re probably making the real thing. Or maybe you’re not, and you’re just planning to mark the end of 2020 the same way I am, by standing on your front porch at 11:59 p.m. screaming “GET OUT I HATE YOU” at the sky while your kids slowly inch back towards their rooms. We’re all coping in our own ways, is what I’m saying.

Where was I? Oh right, new season’s resolutions. As always, I’ll be offering up a few suggestions for how all of us — fans and media, newbies and diehards — can do this hockey thing just a little bit better. You’re welcome to pick and choose which ones might work for you. Maybe you already do a few of these, or you don’t think you should. If so, that’s fine. The main point is that we all have room for improvement, and far more importantly, 2020 can go screw.

Let’s stop acting like a shot that hits the post is a lucky break for the goalie

I’ll admit that I tend to pick on goalies. And rightly so, because they’re all huge weirdos who’ve ruined entertaining hockey by getting way too good at their jobs. I’m telling you, kids, this sport was a happier place when the goalies were all 5-foot-3 and had to desperately wave their adorably tiny limbs around to make saves before falling over because somebody made them try to move sideways. Now they’re all RVH cyborgs who wear the power armor from “Fallout” as equipment and who can shave 10 points off their save percentage by learning how to hold their head at a slightly different angle in the offseason. I hate them.

But today, a peace offering to my goaltending friends: We need to stop pretending they got lucky when a shot hits the post.

We all do it. You’ll hear about a goaltender getting a shutout, but then somebody chimes in with “Sure, but they gave up three posts.” OK … and? What does that have to do with anything? They stopped every shot that was going to go in the net, right? What’s the problem?

It’s especially weird since hockey fans generally hate the concept of luck. It’s the one four-letter word you’re not supposed to ever say at a hockey rink. You know the drill. Good teams make their own luck, good players just “find a way,” it all evens out anyway, etc. Fair enough. But then a goaltender has a good game, and we all want to accuse them of being lucky.

If a player dekes a goalie out of his shorts but then fans on the open net, you could call that luck. If a sure goal is taken off the board because the referee mistakenly blew the play dead, sure, that’s luck. If an ancestor of the bat from the 1975 Fog Game swoops down from the rafters just as the goalie is beaten clean on a slapshot and the puck hits it in mid-air, Randy Johnson style, and bounces harmlessly away, then absolutely, that would be luck.

But when a shot that wasn’t going in doesn’t go in? That’s not luck. That’s a shot that missed the mark. It’s not a goalie’s job to stop those. Tom Barrasso was right!

That’s not to say that we shouldn’t make note of shots that hit the post. Those are near-misses, and in a game of millimeters, like the modern NHL, they’re important moments. But the goalie is responsible for keeping the puck out of a very specific 24-square foot space, and that’s it. If they do that job for 60 minutes or more, that’s all we can ask. So let’s stop telling goalies they were just lucky when they weren’t.

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NHL Mega-Mock Draft: We picked everything to build a league

The pitch came with a warning.

This is either a great idea or a really, really terrible one.

As the managing editor of our hockey coverage in the U.S., Sarah Goldstein is the best audience for these kinds of ideas because she generally likes them. And she has a sixth sense for understanding what subscribers will enjoy. That you’re reading this indicates where she stood on the idea.

The pitch was this: What if we got 32 hockey writers together and we drafted everything? A franchise player. An owner. A market. A GM. A coach. Had we consulted Mark Lazerus earlier, we probably would have included a mascot.

Besides being really fun to do, it was an attempt at trying to figure out what was most valuable to a successful NHL franchise. And within that conceit, ranking the value of each of those commodities since you could take any one of them in any round. For us, it was the first time we really tried to dig in and figure out if Lightning owner Jeff Vinik was more valuable to the success of an NHL franchise than Oilers captain Connor McDavid.

Even as recently as a few weeks ago, the jury was still out as to whether this was a great idea or terrible. Or maybe just simply the result of a bunch of writers and editors with too much time in between actual hockey games.

But sometime in the middle of a recent Zoom call with 30-plus hockey writers, each loudly offering their opinions of each pick and its merit, it was clear that maybe it wasn’t so terrible. When the debate extended for days in an internal Slack channel, optimism was even higher.

Here were the rules put in place for the 2020 NHL Mega-Mock Draft:

We had 32 writers join the draft, each charged with starting a franchise from scratch. They had to pick a franchise player, a GM, a coach, an owner and a market. The owner and market had to be actual NHL cities and owners. Sure, we’re operating somewhere in fantasyland already but we wanted some assessment of reality. We didn’t want to walk away with Beyonce owning a team in Paris. Although seeing that now, maybe we should have.

The players could be any age, which opened it up to prospects outside the NHL. They also had no contractual attachments, so there weren’t bonus points for getting Alexis Lafreniere on his entry-level deal. The GM and coach had fewer restrictions. If you thought there’s a better coach in college or the AHL than currently behind an NHL bench, you could grab them. Same goes for the GM. And these franchise starters definitely took advantage of that opportunity. This wasn’t an attempt to build an all-time team. It was to build a franchise from scratch to have success today. Lastly, for the sanity of Commissioner Goldstein, there were no trades allowed.

The process was fun. The results, we hope, are interesting. Ultimately, it’ll be your call if we ever do this again.

Here are the results of that draft, with commentary from Craig Custance and Sean McIndoe, and explainers from the writers:

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Is Iginla for Nieuwendyk the greatest win-win trade in history?

This weekend will mark the 25-year anniversary of one of my favorite trades of all time: the Joe Nieuwendyk for Jarome Iginla blockbuster that reshaped two franchises.

It’s just such a great deal. You couldn’t ask for more star power, with both players going on to become Hall of Famers. It was the sort of big, gutsy move that used to happen back in the pre-cap days but has faded out of favor over time. And to this day, it still holds up as just about the archetypal veteran-for-prospect deal.

Like most legendary deals, it didn’t go down quite the way most of us remember it. For one thing, it wasn’t a one-for-one trade, even as important piece Corey Millen has largely been written out of the retellings. It was somewhat overshadowed at the time by the repercussions of an even bigger trade that had gone down just a few days earlier. The deal wasn’t exactly a Day 1 hit in Calgary, where a local newspaper ran a headline reading “Jarome Who?” And there’s the small matter of Nieuwendyk’s season-long holdout, one that had helped get Flames GM Doug Risebrough fired just weeks earlier. That part makes the story a little more complicated, and often gets left out.

But that’s all fine, because Jarome Iginla and Joe Nieuwendyk were both awesome. And that’s the real beauty of the trade: It worked out just about perfectly for everyone involved. Iginla went on to become quite possibly the greatest player in Flames history, while Nieuwendyk led the Stars to the franchise’s only Stanley Cup a few years later, winning the Conn Smythe along the way. Both sides got exactly what they were hoping for.

Most NHL blockbusters, in hindsight, have a winner and a loser. The Hawks got taken to the cleaners when they sent Phil Esposito to Boston, the Kings clearly won the Wayne Gretzky sale trade, the Leafs robbed the Flames in the Doug Gilmour deal, and so on. Most aren’t quite so lopsided, and a strong pair of homer glasses can occasionally make things seem a little better, but we can almost always look back and know which team would do the deal again and which might prefer a do-over.

But every now and then, we get a deal that works out for everyone. Is Iginla/Nieuwendyk history’s top trade in that category? Let’s try to figure that out, as we remember five more big deals that both sides would happily do all over again.

And we might as well start with another famous Flames trade …

The Brett Hull trade

The setup: Heading into the 1988 trade deadline, the Flames were a very good team two years removed from a loss in the Stanley Cup Final and well on their way to the best regular season finish in franchise history. But they still had Wayne Gretzky and the Oilers looming in the playoffs, and GM Cliff Fletcher wanted to load up on veteran depth for what he hoped could be a Cup run. If that meant he had to move a rookie sharpshooter with a famous last name and a shaky work ethic, he was willing to do that.

The trade: The Flames sent 23-year-old Brett Hull and Steve Bozek to the Blues for Rob Ramage and Rick Wamsley.

The impact on the Blues: Reasonably positive. Hull scored 40 goals in his first full year in St. Louis, then exploded for 228 over the next three seasons, leading the league each time. He won the Hart in 1991 and ended up scoring 527 goals in 11 seasons with the Blues

The impact on the Flames: Calgary lost to the Oilers again in that year’s playoffs, but that summer’s Gretzky trade opened the door, and Ramage and Wamsley helped the team finally take home the Cup in 1989.

Why it might be the best: On the surface, this is basically the early prototype of the Iginla/Nieuwendyk trade, as one team gives up a future stud but wins a Cup shortly after.

Why it might not: Wamsley was a decent backup during the 1988-89 season, but made just one quick relief appearance in the playoffs as Mike Vernon shouldered the load. Ramage was a dependable piece who ate minutes and could play at both ends. Neither guy was exactly a “Nieuwendyk wins the Conn Smythe” sort of impact. Do the Flames still win without them? They might, yeah.

Bottom line: Hull was so good for so long that this might be one of the only trades where a team that quickly won a championship might still want to at least think about a mulligan. I don’t mind keeping it in the win-win category because a Cup is a Cup, but the Iginla/Nieuwendyk deal checks all the same boxes and does them better.

Heatley for Hossa

The setup: Coming out of the 2004-05 lockout, Dany Heatley needed a fresh start after his role in tragedy in Atlanta. Meanwhile, Marian Hossa signed a three-year deal with Ottawa because he wanted to stay with the Senators, which meant he was in for a surprise.

The trade: Hours after getting the 26-year-old Hossa’s signature on an extension, the Senators flipped him to Atlanta for the 24-year-old Heatley. In a nice bit of symmetry with the Iginla/Nieuwendyk trade, this is another one of those deals that people incorrectly remember as being one-for-one, with defenseman Greg de Vries playing the role of Corey Millen.

The impact on the Senators: Heatley was everything the Senators were hoping for, slotting in on a formidable top line with Jason Spezza and Daniel Alfredsson and recording back-to-back 50-goal seasons, the only times in franchise history anyone has hit that mark. The good times lasted four seasons before a bitter fallout led to a trade demand and eventual deal to San Jose.

The impact on the Thrashers: Hossa clicked nicely with Ilya Kovalchuk, nearly matching Heatley’s offensive output while being the far better two-way player. He was traded at the end of his third year in Atlanta (for a disappointing return), but still had nearly a decade of excellent hockey left in him.

Why it might be the best: Considering this move was basically forced on one of the teams involved, it worked out about as evenly as it possibly could have, with both teams getting exactly what they were looking for.

Why it might not: The two stars combined to spend less than seven full seasons with their new teams, and neither turned into much on the way out of town, so the long-term influence here isn’t all that impressive.

Bottom line: This is a solid contender, and could take the title of best win-win trade of the cap era. I don’t think it beats Iginla/Nieuwendyk for overall impact, though.

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Puck Soup: New season when

In this week's episode of the Puck Soup podcast:
- Lambert and I work through what we know about the NHL' return-to-play plans
- Are we getting too late for a January 13 opener?
- We run down the current odds for various individual awards, and highlight our best bets
- A fun quiz where we don't have to explain he rules for half an hour because Greg isn't there
- And more...

>> Stream it now:

>> Or, listen on The Athletic or subscribe on iTunes.

>> Get weekly mailbags and special bonus episodes by supporting Puck Soup on Patreon for $5.

Team Loyalty vs. Team Vagabond, and everyone in between

It sounds like we’re going to have a 2021 season, with camps starting in just a few weeks. That means we’re in the final days of the offseason, and I’ve still got a long list of weird topics to get through. We’d better get to work.

Could a roster made up of players who only ever played for one NHL team beat rosters made up of all the other combinations? Let’s find out!

I’m going to make a 20-man roster of players who stayed with one team for their entire NHL career. Then we’ll compare it to rosters of guys who played for two teams, and three, and then four and five. We’ll finish it off with a roster of players who showed up on six or more teams over the course of their careers. Are there enough good players like that to even build a team? I have no idea, I don’t tend to think these things through in advance.

But first, a few ground rules:

• By “teams” I really mean franchises. If somebody was on the North Stars when they moved to Dallas, that counts as one team. If a guy had multiple stints with the same franchise, we count that as one team too. And this is obviously NHL only; we’re not counting any other leagues, including the WHA.
• The player has to has actually appeared in at least one game for a team for it to count. Short stints are absolutely fine, and will turn out to be crucial for most of the later teams. Two games work as well as two decades. But if a player was technically team property but never suited up, that doesn’t count.
• Since we’re interested in how many teams a guy played for over a full career, no active players are eligible. I know it’s hard to imagine Sidney Crosby or Alexander Ovechkin playing somewhere else, but there was a time we said that about Ray Bourque and Henrik Lundqvist. Your NHL career has to be over to qualify.
• Each 20-man roster will feature 12 forwards, six defensemen and two goalies. I’m going to try to play wingers on the wing and centers at center wherever I can, but I’m not going to get too hung up on position. And this isn’t so much of a rule as a guideline, but if a call for a roster spot is close, I’m going to defer to the more recent player. I just think it’s more fun for readers that way.

Since I’ve been helping my kids with their science fair projects lately, I’m going to go ahead and state my hypothesis up front: I think the one-team roster is going to take this easily. I can just think of too many legends who are going to be featured on that squad. But I’m interested to see if anyone can give them a challenge, and which roster it might be.

We’ll do this in order, which means we start with the favorites.

Team Loyalty (i.e. guys who played for one team)

 

FORWARD	FORWARD	FORWARD
Rocket Richard	Mario Lemieux	Jean Beliveau
Joe Sakic	Steve Yzerman	Mike Bossy
Bobby Clarke	Stan Mikita	Gilbert Perreault
Henrik Sedin	Daniel Sedin	Pavel Datsyuk

DEFENSE	DEFENSE	GOALIE
Nicklas Lidstrom	Denis Potvin	Ken Dryden
Dit Clapper	Jacques Laperriere	Bill Durnan
Ron Greschner	Red Horner

Yeah, I’d say these guys are good.

Are they unbeatable? I’m not actually sure they are.

There are no surprises up front, where a French connection of Mario, the Rocket and Beliveau would be unstoppable. They don’t let up after that, with an Yzerman/Sakic/Bossy unit that would score a ton, and plenty of big names in the bottom six. There’s so much depth here that we don’t even get a chance to use names like Alex Delvecchio, Dave Taylor or Teeder Kennedy. Modern guys like Patrik Elias didn’t even get an invite to camp. Team one’s forwards are ridiculous.

But then we get to the blue line, and it’s…. not great, right? The first paring of Lidstrom and Potvin is obviously fantastic, and we’d be fine with them playing 30 minutes a night. But after that, it turns into surprisingly slim pickings. Dit Clapper and Red Horner are old-time legends, and Jacques Laperriere is a Norris winner who’s in the Hall of Fame. But Ron Greschner, as good as he is, seems out of place. And if we didn’t use him, we’d be considering names like Ken Daneyko and Chris Phillips.

What’ the deal? Why does it seem like legendary forwards often stay with one team, but defensemen rarely do? I’m not sure, but I’m kind of fascinated by this. Maybe it’s an anomaly that will look different in a few years if we can add names like Mark Giordano or Duncan Keith, but for now it’s weird.

The goaltending options aren’t deep either, but we can sneak in two Canadiens’ stars who had short but impeccable careers. (Dryden was originally Bruins property but never played a game for them, so we can use him here.) Turk Broda is also an option.

So there’s your single-team roster, the one we figured would be the favorite. They’ve very good, but a shaky blue line leaves an opening. Can another team take this? Let’s find out.

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