How much worse can it get for the historically awful Canadiens? Plus Capitals, Devils and more

fascinating games? That one’s easy.

It has to have been Saturday’s showdown between the Oilers and Canadiens. Two teams whose seasons have gone off the rails, one of which seemed to be turning things around and still had something to play for. It was Evander Kane’s debut for the Oilers, signaling some new hope to go with all the trepidation that comes along with rolling the dice on a guy like that. Edmonton came in having won three in a row to creep back into playoff contention, but knowing that a loss to the lowly Habs would snuff out any momentum. The Canadiens were looking for something, anything to grasp onto, just a little bit of optimism for a team that’s well beyond crisis mode.

Well, they held Connor McDavid off the scoreboard. There’s that. They still absolutely got their doors blown off, losing 7-2. It got just a little better the next night, when they kept it relatively close and lost 6-3. That was against Columbus, who are supposed to be bad, but nobody is bad against this Montreal team. Not the Blue Jackets, not the Coyotes, not you and your out-of-shape friends, as long as that one guy with the goalie equipment shows up. If not, maybe it stays close.

the canadiens are an absolute horror show. they legitimately might not win another game this year

— dom at the athletic (@domluszczyszyn) January 31, 2022

So where do we go from here? We’ll start with what’s quickly becoming my new favorite tradition down in the bottom five section: the weekly Brutal But Accurate Arpon Habs Headline. This week’s entry is The ‘unwatchable’ Canadiens continue to re-define what rock bottom means to them.

That might be underselling it. Montreal has given up 26 goals in their last four games, lost six straight, and also 12 of 13, and also 19 of 21… good lord they’re terrible. I think I’d actually feel bad for them if I didn’t still have fresh scars.

What’s gone wrong? Pretty much everything. Really, the 2021-22 Habs are becoming the test case for what happens to a team when absolutely everything that could go wrong does, all at once. Most teams eventually have to deal with a string of injuries, or COVID, or their star goalie missing extended time, or their best defenseman being unavailable, or their young stars stalling out, or a key offensive blueliner falling off a cliff, or front office upheaval, or a lame duck coach, or one of the most brutal road trips ever. But all of that happening at the same time? You get this. And this is terrible.

We’re at the point now where you wonder just how bad it can get. The worst season is the 104-year history of the franchise is certainly in play, and I’m sure the members of the 1939-40 team are ready to pop champagne corks for that. Worst team of the cap era? They’re already on pace for that. Worst team in modern NHL history that wasn’t a recent expansion team? That one should be safe thanks to the 1989-90 Nordiques, but they still might have a shot at grabbing second place from a 1983-84 Penguins team that was openly tanking for Mario Lemieux. Oh, and the Habs are somehow doing this in an era where you get points for losing. It shouldn’t even be possible, but here we are.

really starting to feel like the canadiens could end up being the worst team in the history of the NHL

— Sean Gentille (@seangentille) January 31, 2022

And sure, maybe at this point you just root for rock bottom. Maximize the lottery odds, clean out as much deadwood as possible, find a new coach in the offseason, get Carey Price back whenever he’s ready, and hope that all this losing builds character for the young kids instead of ruining them. If you break a few records in the process, hey, who’s counting.

Everything on the table. Except for the ping pong balls giving you Shane Wright, of course, because why would anything good happen in a season like this?

On to the rankings. I bet you’ll never guess who’s holding down the number one spot in the bottom five?

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Grab Bag: Season highlights for bad teams, the Wendel Line and remembering the NHL Awards “Silver” sketch

In the return of the Friday Grab Bag:
- Good thoughts for bad teams
- The three comedy stars
- The Wendel Line
- An obscure player with a horrifying instagram account
- The infamous (and hilarious) Olympic "Silver" sketch

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The Athletic Hockey Show: When goalies attack

On this week's episode of The Athletic Hockey Show:
- Aaron Dell gets a three-game suspension
- Remembering the short list of other goalie suspensions
- Breaking down Taylor Hall's hit on Nathan MacKinnon
- The Coyotes think they're going to play where?
- Keith Yandle sets the ironman record, but Phil Kessel is on his trail
- Four teams with strength-of-schedule issues worth watching in the second half
- Marc-Andre Fleury to the Caps, goalie ironman streaks and lots 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)

Puck Soup: Ironman in an Apple store

On this week's episode of the Puck Soup podcast:
- Thoughts on hockey's ongoing racism problem
- The Canucks make some intriguing hires
- The Flyers keep on losing
- Ryan tells a story about Keith Yandle in an Apple store
- Aaron Dell, the Blues, and lots 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.

What’s the best six-man lineup you can make out of guys with the exact same cap hit?

This space has turned into salary cap central over the last little while, as we worked through my previous cap-related predictions and then put some potentially bad contracts on trial. That wasn’t intentional, since that would imply that I do any kind of long-term planning. But sometimes these sort of themes just pop up, and you just have to go with them.

So today, we’re finally going to tackle a question that lots of you have sent in over the years: What’s the best six-man lineup you can make out players who all had the same cap hit?

This is exactly the sort of question we love around here, because it’s dead simple and also harder than you think. For example, right off the bat we know we can’t use a lot of really good players. Connor McDavid’s $12.5 million hit can’t help up, because nobody else is that high. A $10.5 million hit gives us a solid start with Carey Price, Jonathan Toews and Patrick Kane, but then we run out of options. And some guys have completely unique AAVs, meaning we have no use for Auston Matthews at $11,640,250, Artemi Panarin at $11,642,857, or Alexander Ovechkin’s old $9,538,462.

Still, we should be able to find some solid combinations. But first, a few ground rules:

• First and foremost, the same cap hit means what is says: The exact same AAV, down to the dollar and cents. Close enough is not close enough.
• We’re looking for a goalie, two defensemen and three forwards, but we’re not otherwise getting hung up on position here.
• We’re not using ELCs or league minimum deals here, because that would (literally) be cheap. We’re also not looking at retained salary, buyouts, or any bonuses that rolled over into the following season.
• This part is important, so watch me break out the italics: We can use any contract a player has had during the cap era, but our team only gets credit for the best of what he did during those seasons. If we want to put Joe Thornton on Team $5,000,000 we can, but that means we only get his one 2018-19 season in San Jose, not his entire body of work.
• Finally, one quasi-exception to that last rule: We’ll allow extensions that have been signed but haven’t kicked in yet. That will involve making some assumptions about aging curves and productivity down the road, but that should be fine because when has a hockey writer ever been wrong about the future.

Let’s do this. (As always, thanks to the invaluable Cap Friendly for all salary-related info.)

Before we start listing teams, let’s huddle up for some strategy. I can see two paths forward: either we go with nice round numbers that will probably have more players to choose from, or we pick a well-known bargain contract as see if we can build a team around that.

Let’s start with the second option. Arguably the single best contract of the cap era is Nathan MacKinnon’s current one, with MVP-level play in exchange for a $6.3 million hit. That’s a great start, and gets even better when we realize we can put him on a line with Patrick Kane and Jonathan Toews in their early-20s. But that’s about as far as we can go, as Cam Ward is the only other player to have a cap hit of exactly $6.3 million. We can’t make a team here.

We run into a similar problem if we try to build off two current Florida Panther bargains in Jonathan Huburdeau and Alexsander Barkov, both at $5.9 million. We can give them William Karlsson to play with, and have a few goaltending options with long-ago deals to Kari Lehtonen and Semyon Varlamov, which are enticing, and current-day Phillip Grubauer, which is not. But again, there are no defensemen to pick from, although Nate Schmidt’s current $5.95 million is close.

I also can’t find enough teammates for Brad Marchand’s $6.125 million hit (which only offers us Mark Schiefele), Shea Theodore’s $5.2 million (just Sam Reinhart), or Leon Draisaitl’s $8.5 million (which gets us a great forward line with Steven Stamkos and Mika Zibanejad’s upcoming extension and has in-his-prime Henrik Lundqvist in goal, but no blueline). It gets especially frustrating if you try to build a team around David Pastrnak’s $6,666,667 hit, only to realize that elite seasons from guys like Joe Thornton, Ilya Kovalchuk and Dan Boyle came at a price of $6,666,666. You just had to squeeze that one extra dollar, didn’t you David.

OK, so the “build around a bargain” strategy doesn’t seem to be working. For now, let’s go with the round numbers that we know will at least give us enough players to work with.

Team $5,000,000

This number is low enough that we won’t find many elite options from current contracts, although we can grab Jonathan Marchessault as well as the pre-extension deals for Morgan Rielly, Ryan Pulock and Zach Werenski. Up front, we could also look at two Avalanche contracts from the past: two years of Ryan O’Reilly’s offer sheet, and Peter Forsberg for one of his comeback attempts. Instead, I’m going to take Marchessault and then grab a 40-goal season from Jeff Carter, plus some Selke-winning defense from a young Patrick Bergeron.

On the blueline, I’ll take Rielly from today’s group and pair him with Sergei Gonchar’s first few years in Pittsburgh. And I’ve got lots to choose from in goal, where I could have today’s Juuse Saros, Thatcher Demko or Robin Lehner, or a Cup-winning Marc-Andre Fleury from the Penguin days. But there’s an easy call here, as I can take Tim Thomas during his Bruins’ peak when he was the best goalie in the league.

Forwards: Patrice Bergeron (2011 – 2014), Jeff Carter (2008 – 2011), Jonathan Marchessault (2018 – 2024)

Defense: Sergei Gonchar (2005 – 2010), Morgan Rielly (2016 – 2022)

Goalie: Tim Thomas (2006 – 2009)

Not bad! But almost certainly not the best we can do. Let’s toss another million on the pile and see what that buys us.

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