The Athletic Hockey Show: What to root for, what we'd like to see from TNT, an idea for new draft picks and more

On this week's episode of The Athletic Hockey Show:
- What we'd like to see TNT do with the NHL
- Connor McDavid chases 100 points, and other stories to root for
- That weird piece of history that Max Domi might be responsible for
- The Knights beat the Avs in a battle of (maybe) the league's two best teams
- A listener has an idea for NFL-style compensatory draft picks
- How the NHL tried that idea once before, and the loophole that made it a disaster
- Hockey's worst birthday and the tradition it indirectly inspired, a weird European tour and more...

The Athletic Hockey Show runs most days of the week during the season, with Ian and I hosting every Thursday. There are two versions of each episode available:
- An ad-free version for subscribers that you can find here
- An ad-supported version you can get for free wherever you normally find your podcasts (like Apple or Spotify)

McDavid’s 100, Leafs vs. Habs, and six more things to root for down the stretch

We’re headed down the stretch in the regular season, and there’s a good chance that you know exactly what you’re rooting for. If your team is fighting for a playoff spot, or first place in a division where that really matters, you’re locked in. That’s all you care about it, and rightly so. Having something to care about in a season’s final weeks is all sorts of fun.

But what if you don’t? Maybe your team has been out of the race for weeks, or months, or are the Sabres. Or maybe they’re at the other extreme, and have already clinched whatever spot you were hoping they’d earn. If that’s you, you might find yourself staring down two more weeks without any real rooting interest.

I’m here to help. So today, I’ll offer up eight suggestions for outcomes you can root for as the season winds up. It goes without saying that if any of these conflict with what your favorite team needs to happen, you go with your team. Loyalty trumps all. But if you’re neutral, and just looking for one or two things to cheer along and/or get irrationally mad about, I’ve got you covered.

Idea 1: Root for Connor McDavid to get to 100 points

Let’s start with the one that I feel like we can get close to unanimous agreement on.

When the NHL announced that the abbreviated season would be just 56 games long, fans knew that most of the major milestones would be out of reach for another year. Nobody would get to 50 goals, and even 40 might be a stretch. Hitting 100 points? That would mean scoring at a prorated 146-point full season pace. In other words, forget it.

But here’s McDavid having a season for the ages, and he’s got a chance. It’s a slim one – the Oilers have nine games left, and he still needs 19 points to hit the century mark. For most guys, that’s a once-in-a-lifetime heater. But for McDavid? It’s realistic, especially with all his remaining games coming against the Flames, Canucks and Canadiens.

Who’s going to root against this? OK, maybe Calgary fans just out of spite, and we’ll allow that. But everyone else should be on board. McDavid’s brilliance means we’re not getting an Art Ross race this year, or even a Hart Trophy debate. He can at least give us this, along with the ridiculous highlights the hot streak would surely generate.

Ultimately, 100 points is an arbitrary cutoff and it wouldn’t be any less impressive if he finished the season with 99. But fans like round numbers, and it would be undeniably cool to see a player hit triple-digits in a season where it wasn’t supposed to be possible. There hasn’t been a player in a generation who’s as much fun to watch as Connor McDavid. Let’s see the kid go full-on beast mode for the rest of the year and hit the magic number.

Idea 2: Root for the Hurricanes to take the Central and set up an all-Florida matchup

I probably don’t have to sell you too hard on cheering for the Hurricanes. They’re a fun team, they’ve got a ton of skill, and you know they’ll cook up some sort of crazy celebration when it’s all over. Who doesn’t like that? OK, we can think of a few people, but most of us are on board, even if grudgingly.

But that’s not even the best reason to hope Carolina takes the Central. Instead, it’s because the Hurricanes as top seed would put the Lightning and Panthers in second and third, meaning we’d get the first all-Florida playoff matchup in NHL history. Despite being in the same division for almost three decades, the two teams have never met in the postseason. This might finally be the year.

In theory, there’s nothing magical about geography. But in hockey rivalries, it tends to work. The Battle of Alberta was amazing. The Battle of Ontario had some great moments. The three-way Battle of California is mostly on hold, but it was amazing when it was cooking. The Battle of Florida could be next.

We might get fireworks. Or we might just get two really talented teams battling it out. That would be good too. So here’s hoping the Hurricanes stay out of the way.

And since we’ve slotted in the top three spots in the Central, we may as well do the last one…

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Puck Soup: Welcome to TNT

On this week's episode of the Puck Soup podcast:
- The NHL announces a new TV partner, and says goodbye to an old one
- What we'd like the new broadcasts to look like
- What the NHL needs to do to attract new fans
- Connor McDavid = good
- Where the playoff races stand
- Godzilla vs. Kong, Mortal Kombat, Name Pat Falloon 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.

Remember that prediction contest that was supposed to be easy? So far, it hasn’t been

Back in January, when the season was days away from starting, I decided to try something new. It would be a prediction contest, but with a twist: It would be super easy. Or would it?

The rules were simple. I’d ask eight straightforward questions about how the season would play out, like “Name a team that will definitely miss the playoffs” or “Name a coach who will definitely keep his job”. You could give me at least one and as many as five answers to each of them. You’d get points for each right answer, and the points increased the more answers you gave, so it made sense to give as many as you could. But if you got even one of them wrong, you scored a zero for the whole question, meaning you had to figure out how confident were you that all of your obvious answers were sure things.

If you missed it the first time, or could use a refresher on who you picked, the original post is here. I thought it might be fun. The readers apparently agreed, because over 800 of you entered the contest. That was, uh, a bit of a problem, since I hadn’t really thought through how I’d do the actual work of scoring this thing. Still haven’t, in case you were wondering. Any students out there looking for an offseason job?

With that many entries, and only one first-place prize up for grabs, it quickly became apparent that playing it safe wouldn’t win the day. Sure, you could have given one sure-thing answer for each question and banked points on all eight, but it wouldn’t be enough to win. Somebody was going to have to run the table with eight perfect questions, each with multiple answers.

The contest covered everything from opening night through the first day of free agency, which means we’re right around the halfway mark now, so I thought it would be worth it to check in on how you’re all doing.

Answer: Not great! In fact, despite the over 800 entries, there’s a decent chance that we won’t get a many perfect entries after all. It’s possible we won’t even get one.

This was, of course, the whole point. The “easy” contest wasn’t ever supposed to be easy in the first place. Instead, it was a way to remind us that an NHL season always seems predictable until it starts to play out, at which point things go off the rails quickly. In fact, I originally assumed nobody would get a perfect score back when I figured I’d get 100 entries; when the number kept ballooning, I started to have my doubts.

I still do, and we’ll see how it plays out. But for now, let’s run through all eight questions and see where things are at.

1. Name up to five teams that will definitely make the playoffs this year.

This was arguably the easiest question, and with some teams already clinching and several others all but there, we’re close to being able to mark it complete. As you’d expect, the same handful of teams showed up in just about every entry, and the Lightning, Leafs, Avalanche and Golden Knights will all hold up their end of the bargain for the hundreds that took them. There may have been a few nervous moments for the 300 or so who picked the Bruins, but they seem safe now too.

But even on this one, there are a handful of possible problems lurking. About 20 of you took the Canadiens, and about 30 had the Stars, and both still have work to do. A far bigger problem looms with the Blues, who showed up in over 150 entries. And the Flyers weren’t far behind, meaning some of you are going to lose your perfect entry status on question one.

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Weekend rankings: The Canadiens’ spot slips away, while the Central race is down to two

Look, we’re not saying it’s going to happen. We’re not even saying it’s likely to happen.

Still, you’re a little nervous about missing the playoffs, right Habs fans?

OK, probably not. Being “a little nervous” was two weeks ago, when the Habs were refusing to close this thing out even as the Flames were spiraling and the Canucks were sidelines. By last week, we were asking how worried the Canadiens should be, and the answer their fans kept offering was “A whole lot, but thanks for asking, really glad you brought that up right now”.

Here’s where we’re at in the North. The Leafs just took two from the Jets in games that saw Winnipeg pull its star goalie and bench its best forward, so even though we’ve been here before, it’s feeling pretty safe to say Toronto will finish first unless they collapse. That will give us an intriguing Jets/Oilers matchup in the first round, with lots of old-school Smythe Division baggage to unpack.

So who gets fourth? For most of the second half, that’s been Montreal’s spot to lose. It still is, but man, they’re working on it. They’ve won three of their last 11, they can’t score, and Carey Price and Brendan Gallagher are both out. They can’t use Cole Caufield because they don’t have cap space, and they don’t have cap space because of how Marc Bergevin approached the deadline, and here we are.

But despite it all, they came into this week with an opportunity to put the whole thing to bed. A five-game Alberta trip featuring three against the Flames was a chance to knock out Calgary with a win or two, at which point it would just be about holding serve long enough to outlast the Canucks.

Instead, the Habs split two with the Oilers and then dropped the first two of the Calgary series, both in regulation. That moved the Flames to within six points, which is still a big gap, and if Montreal win the finale tonight then that’s probably about it for Calgary. But if the Flames finish the sweep, hoo boy.

Meanwhile, the Canucks are lurking, even with Elias Pettersson unlikely to return this year. They’re ten points back but with five in hand, including two more this week against the Senators. Dom has Vancouver’s odds at 19% and the Flames at 11%, which leaves the Habs sitting well north of “probably” but nowhere close to “sure thing”.

The bottom line is that Montreal is still running this show. They’ve got ten games left including tonight and if they win, let’s say six of them, we’re pretty much done. Winning six of ten isn’t too much to ask. It’s pretty much the baseline expectation for a playoff team.

Is that what the Canadiens are? We’re not sure. We’ve got ten games to find out.

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