Happy holidays, at least once we get one last night of action out of the way tonight. We’ve got a busy schedule of 13 games on the slate, at which point everyone gets a few days off to relax and unwind, spend time with family, and give thanks that you’re not a Sabres fan.
To mark the occasion, here are my five Christmas wishes for all the NHL fans out there.
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Welcome back to Rules Court, where things will look a little different this time around.
Without digging into the details, we had to make the difficult decision to fire one of our long-serving judges because he knows what he did. That opens a spot for Shayna Goldman to join holdovers Sean Gentille and Sean McIndoe. Welcome, Shayna, and we hope you realize what you’ve signed up for.
The rest of the gimmick hasn’t changed. You send in your proposals for changes to the NHL rulebook, CBA or whatever else. The three of us consider your argument and cast our vote. Convince at least two of us, and your new rule becomes reality, just as soon as Gary Bettman gets back to us.
We have eight cases on the docket this time. Let’s see how many can make the grade.
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The New York Rangers are in freefall, suffering through the kind of in-season implosion we rarely see from a contender. The captain has been traded, the longest-serving star is on the block, the coach is on thin ice, and the GM is getting blasted from all sides. It’s a mess, to put it lightly.
And it’s all coming after a 2023-24 season that saw the Rangers produce the best record in the league. That led me to an idea for a post: Which team put together the worst season immediately following a Presidents’ Trophy win? I could go through the history and find other teams that had similar falls, and highlight the ones that were good comparisons for this year’s Rangers.
Then I ran into a problem: I’m not sure there are any.
With the obvious caveat that the season isn’t over and there’s plenty of time for the Rangers to turn this back around, what’s happening in New York right now is verging on unprecedented. We’ve seen Presidents’ Trophy winner take a step back; that’s almost to be expected. We’ve even seen a few miss the playoffs, although that’s extremely rare. But this level of full-fledged meltdown? I don’t know.
Let’s do it anyway, if only to make Rangers fans feel like they’re not completely alone. I’ve picked out seven of the worst seasons by teams that had just won the Presidents’ Trophy. That award dates back to 1986, meaning we have nearly four decades to work with. Surely we can find hope for our pals in New York, he said, not especially confidently.
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It’s mid-December. Do you know what level of crisis your favorite team is in?
Chances are, the answer is “pretty darn high”. This is the time of year when we normally see a few teams figuring out that reality isn’t going to match their hopes; that’s just how the season works.
But this? I’m not sue I can remember a season where this many teams felt like full-fledged disasters. I’m not even referring to teams like the Sharks who have bad records like we expected. That’s business as usual for a rebuilding team. I’m talking about the kind of seasons that get lots of people fired.
How bad is it? Bad enough that we need more than our usual five spots, and we still won’t be able to cover everyone.
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I’m not sure the NHL has a weirder annual award than the Mark Messier Leadership Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Leadership.
It’s not quite a slam dunk, because the Lady Byng exists. But at least that award has been around for a century, and is voted on by a pool of writers who’ll always get it right because democracy never fails. The Mark Messier is a relatively new award that, as far as anyone can tell, just goes to whoever Mark Messier himself deems worthy. What’s the criteria? Nobody really knows. Leadership, apparently.
The award started off in 2006 as a monthly honor, before quickly being retconned into a more traditional annual award. That version has been handed out 18 times, with no repeat winners, because it’s just really hard to be a good leader more than once in your career. And while some of those winners are guys with reputations as legitimately great leaders like Sidney Crosby, Patrice Bergeron and Jonathan Toews, other winners haven’t held up quite as well. We got a reminder of that this week, when the reigning Messier winner was traded after the team that had been trying to dump him for months threatened to waive him. You know, typical leader stuff.
So today, let’s look back at that list of 18 winners, and remember X times that the award didn’t turn out to be a great omen for the future.
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One of the most important things a sportswriter can do is admit when they’re wrong. Or at least, that’s what I’ve been told. For me, personally, it never really comes up.
OK, that’s not quite true. I suppose it’s possible that I’ve been wrong once or twice, in between my normal bouts of absolutely nailing pretty much every prediction I make. And in those rare cases where it happens, I should probably try out this whole self-reflection thing I can keep hearing about.
But there’s a problem: That nagging doubt that maybe I’m not so wrong after all.
You might experience the same thing. So today, let’s take a look at a few things we all thought we knew about the 2024-25 NHL season that are trending solidly towards the “oops” category, and see if we really need to concede defeat quite yet. After all, it’s important to admit when you’re wrong… but were we really?
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Remember a few years ago when the NHL had that weird marketing campaign promising “no soap operas, just hockey”? I don’t think they got the memo in New York.
The Rangers have been tumbling down the standings lately, but they’ve shot to the top of the rankings of the league’s most interesting teams. Just two months into the season, we’d already had a hot start and a losing streak and a mysterious trade memo and all sorts of rumors. Then Friday rolled around, and it all blew up.
Let’s work our way through some thoughts on some of the news.
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Exactly one year ago today, I wrote a column about being old, and the subtle things I miss about what hockey used to be. No big issues, to be clear – we’re talking stuff like how the water bottles used to pop off the nets, and how linesmen used to have to climb the glass to avoid the puck. If I’m being honest, I figured it would be a bit of a throwaway, the kind of mid-season filler that’s fun for a day and then fades quickly. Instead, it ended up being one of my more popular columns of the season, and I decided to make it a regular feature.
Then I forgot. Because I am old.
But if there’s anything us old fogies do better than the occasional memory lapse, it’s celebrating the random anniversary of things that weren’t all that important to begin with. So today, one year later to the day, I’m bringing the gimmick back, with a half dozen new items. Well, old ones. You’ll figure it out.
But first, just like last time, a disclaimer: This is all in good fun, and very much not meant to be some whiny screed about how much better things used to be, and how Gary Bettman has ruined everything by dragging the game into the 20th century. If you have strong feelings about that stuff, please take them elsewhere, because I am decrepit and fragile.
Let’s get old.
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If you’re a sports fan, you’re familiar with the adage “Father Time is undefeated.”
It’s ubiquitous because it’s true. It’s why we talk about the dreaded “wrong side” of 30, and even fret over long-term deals signed by 29-year-olds; even the greatest athletes on earth are still subject to aging.
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Somebody should probably check on Duane.
You remember Duane, the disgruntled Buffalo fan who reached his breaking point in January 2020. Frustrated after watching his beloved Sabres spin their wheels on their way to what would be their 10th straight playoff miss, Duane decided he had to do something. So he called into a local radio station, took a deep breath, and then opened up an emotional vein.
He went in on the players. He went in on management. He went in (especially) on ownership. It was a hard listen, but no real fan could turn away, because we’ve all been there at some point. As I wrote at the time, we were all Duane.
But some of us were more Duane than others, because some teams are more hopeless than others. And so a few days after Duane’s meltdown, I went through the league to try to figure out which fan base would be the next to hit rock bottom. And almost five full years later, it’s time to ask that question again.
We can start with some good news. Of the nine teams in that 2020 post, three have been reasonably good in the years since – the Rangers, Wild and Devils haven’t won any Cups, but they’ve all had more ups than downs over the last five years. Sometimes, there really is a reason for hope.
Other teams haven’t been as lucky. So today, we’re going to use the same scoring system as last time to figure out which team’s fans should be closest to a Duane-like nadir. To qualify for consideration, a team has to be in danger of missing the playoffs for at least a third straight season. You wouldn’t think a league with as much parity as the NHL would have all that many teams on their way to a three-peat, but it’s a longer list than you’d think, with 12 teams in all. It's a group that doesn’t even include a few fan bases who probably feel pretty miserable right now, including the Bruins, Rangers, Islanders and Predators, since they all made the playoffs last year. All I can say is wait your turn, guys.
This is always a tricky exercise, since (as you’ll no doubt see in the comments), some fans insist on eternal optimism while others take pride in being as miserable as possible. The reality is that all of these fan bases have it bad. But who’s got it the worst? Let’s start counting down…
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A big NHL trade in November? Are they allowed to do that?
Apparently they are. And while Saturday’s deal that sent David Jiricek from Columbus to Minnesota may not quite rise to the level of a certified blockbuster, but it's at least enough to be the November equivalent, and it’s a fascinating trade. Let’s dive into it a little deeper.
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Welcome back to The Contrarian, one of the most beloved and popular features that I write. Unless it isn't.
The concept here is simple. Readers send me statements about the NHL which they believe to be obviously true, bordering on the inarguable. Then I argue against those statements anyway, and see if I can convince you to start thinking the unthinkable.
Do I actually believe any of this? Maybe, but that’s not the point. The point is that I’m a sportswriter, and if I’m going to have any success in this media world, I need to master the art of making ridiculous contrarian arguments that make just enough sense to be infuriating.
Previous editions of The Contrarian have seen me make the case that Mark Messier was a great Canuck, Ray Bourque’s long-awaited championship was bad, and Brett Hull’s skate-in-crease goal was actually fine. Today, we’ve got a new batch of reader statements that can’t be argued. Spoiler alert: All of them will be.
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We’re a quarter of the way through the NHL season, which means it’s time for two things: Saying “quarter-pole” around your most pedantic friends just to annoy them, and writing pieces about how nothing is going the way we expected.
We’ve been covering that latter ground for most of the season around here, including last week’s reminder that you were wrong about all this stuff too. So this time, let’s switch it up. Sure, this is a league where almost nothing is playing out the way we thought: the Oilers are bad, the Flames are good, the Predators are terrible, the Capitals and Wild are great, the Jet are dominant, the Avalanche are .500, and the Bruins are collapsing. Connor McDavid is outside the top ten in points, Connor McMichael is unstoppable, and Connor Bedard is regressing in year two. None of it makes any sense. But if we dig deep enough, surely we can find a few things that are actually playing out pretty much the way we all expected, right?
Of course we can. I’m not sure we can find five, but let’s try.
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The firing of Jim Montgomery this week was newsworthy for plenty of reasons, mostly surrounding what it means for the spiralling Bruins. But it was also interesting for awards watchers, who probably recall Montgomery winning the Jack Adams as coach of the year in 2023. It’s fair to say that the list of that year’s finalists has, as the kids say these days, not aged well.
Ruff didn’t even make it through the 2023-24 season, while Hakstol was gone early in the offseason. Montgomery was the comparative ironman, making it all the way until Tuesday.
Three coaches, the apparent very best of the best in 2023, all fired before the end of 2024. We have to ask the question: Is the Jack Adams cursed?
No, because curses aren’t real. But it is a weird award, one that’s typically voted on as much based on short-term surprise factor as long-term excellence. If the trophy truly went to the best coach in the league every year, we’d expect to see plenty of names listed as multiple-time winners, just like we do for the Hart or the Vezina. With the exceedingly rare Jim Carey-level exception that proves the rule, you almost never see nominations for major player awards go to guys who are out of a job entirely within a few years.
But you do see it with the Jack Adams, in part because the broadcasters who vote on it typically lean towards coaches whose teams have exceeded expectations, which is nice but not the same as being the best at the job. Worse, a spot as a Jack Adams finalist combined with an surprisingly strong season often raises expectations, and expectations can be an NHL coach’s worst enemy.
So maybe it’s not surprising that we see the occasional outlier like that 2023 trio of soon-to-deposed coaches. The problem is it’s not much of an outlier at all. So today, let’s look through the Jack Adams finalists for every season of the cap era and ask a simple question: How well did the list hold up, in terms of those guys clearing the low bar of simply keeping their jobs?
I’ve pulled ten years where the answer ranges from “not great” to “big oof”, which seems like a lot considering we’ve only got 19 years to choose from. Let’s count down those 10 lists of finalists, from bad to worse.
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Sidney Crosby is bumming me out these days.
Not because he’s playing poorly. Quite the opposite – even at 37, he’s still scoring and playing a strong two-way game. No, the sad part is that it’s not anywhere near enough for the Penguins. With a sub-.500 record in a surprisingly tough division, their seasons already looks like a lost cause.
If so, it will be third straight year that Crosby misses the playoffs. And with two more years left on his extension, and little in the way of optimism that the aging Penguins can get any better, getting to five straight doesn’t seem unrealistic. Assuming he doesn’t push for a trade, it’s legitimately possible that we’ve already seen the last of Sidney Crosby in NHL games that actually matter.
Maybe things will turn around in Pittsburgh. But if not, Crosby could at least take some solace in knowing that he won’t be the only legend to end his career with little or no playoff action. It happens more than you might think, especially when we’re talking about players who are still performing at a high level. You’d think the hockey gods would make sure that every star got the sendoff they deserve. But for every Ray Bourque or Lanny McDonald or Mark Recchi who goes out on top, or even an Adam Oates who at least comes close, there are stars who never get that chance.
Let’s remember a few of those guys today, if only to make Sid feel better. OK, fine, to make me feel better about where Crosby might be headed.
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We’re over a month in the NHL season, just days away from US Thanksgiving. Are you ready to admit you were wrong?
I am. When it came to predicting how the 2024-25 season would play out, I was very wrong. I almost always am. I’m bad at this, and you should not trust anything I say about anything.
But you’re bad at it too, and I have proof. For the last few years, we’ve had the prediction contest as a permanent record of where the general preseason consensus was among hockey fans, or at least my readers. And one month into this season… woof, you guys are looking bad.
So before we get to my rankings, which will be wrong, let’s humble the howling mob with a look back at five key developments you totally whiffed on.
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We were treated to the top comedy moment of the hockey season this week, and we have a former Devils goaltender to thank for it.
No, not Mackenzie Blackwood hanging a 44-save shutout on his former team, although that was pretty funny too. This was about Martin Brodeur. Or, as he’s apparently now known, “Satan’s Wallpaper”.
That’s his nickname, you see. At least it is according to fine folks at Jeopardy, the famous quiz show that featured him in a question on Monday night. It’s always neat when the NHL gets some mainstream pop culture rub. And this time, the reaction from fans was unanimous. And that reaction was… “what?”
Nobody seems to have any recollection of that actually being Brodeur’s nickname. Not among fans, or media, or his fellow players. When I asked about it, I got hundreds of replies from confused Devils fans, many of whom had watched Brodeur for decades, and not one told me that they’d heard of this so-called nickname. The confusion spread to reddit and social media and news organizations.
Two things here. First, fake or not, “Satan’s Wallpaper” is an absolutely A+ nickname. Seriously, that’s right up there with The Chicoutimi Cucumber. Whoever came up with this needs to be in charge of fixing modern hockey’s broken nicknames.
And second, I’m pretty sure I know what happened here.
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The NHL’s GMs are meeting this week, and one of the items expected to be discussed is the replay review system. It’s mostly working fine, the league’s powerbrokers seem to agree. But reviews are taking too long, and maybe we should learn from the NFL’s recent changes that allow replay officials to nudge referees over missed calls. And, of course, people are mad about goaltender interference reviews. As always.
This latest flare-up in the debate was prompted by a close call in a recent game between the Jets and Lightning. That one initially went against Winnipeg and was upheld after a coach’s challenge, much to the frustration of Jets’ goaltender Connor Hellebuyck. You wouldn’t think that “guy whose whole job is preventing goals thinks goal he allowed shouldn’t have counted” would be major news, but here we are.
It’s all led to another round of the usual “nobody knows how interference works” hysteria, the sort of performative confusion that certain fans, media and even coaches love to put on whenever a call goes against their team (but weirdly, never when it goes the other way). It’s also led to the latest appearance of what seems like a reasonable question: Why is this all so subjective? Why can’t we just have a black-and-white rule that works the same way every time, and that we don’t have to argue about?
It’s a fair question. And apparently, some of you are either too young or too new to the sport to know that there's an answer. So on behalf of us old-timers, here's the short version: We tried that, it was a disaster, and everyone hated it.
We also vowed never to do it again, but lately it feels like that might not last. If the “just get it right” crowd forms a coalition with the “just keep it simple” brigade, maybe we’re headed back to the cut-and-dried interference calls of the past. It’s might even be inevitable; if we really can’t stomach any ambiguity on these calls, then we don't really have any other options.
But if so, we should at least know what we’re getting into. And if you’re the sort of fan who’s found themselves wondering why we can’t just do this the easy way, you should know the history of how we got here.
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We’re a month into the season, which seems like more than enough time to look back at the offseason and use the benefit of hindsight to completely shift our opinions of everything that happened.
You remember the offseason, right? The Predators were the big winners, the Jets were huge losers, the goalie carousel ended up with everyone in exactly the right spot, and a few teams would pay the price after chickening out on making big trades. After watching each team play a dozen games or so, we now know that we were completely wrong. We're so much smarter now.
Will we be completely wrong again, in slightly different ways, a few weeks from now? Almost definitely. But for now, let’s take a look back at the best and worst of what did (and didn’t) happen.
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Hey folks…
Thinking of doing another edition of The Contrarian. You send in a statement that you think is obvious or inarguable, and I’ll try to come up with the contrarian view.
We've done a few of these, and the ones that work best find that sweet spot of feeling difficult but not impossible. "Mark Messier was a bad signing for the Canucks" and "Ray Bourque's Cup win was good" worked great. Stuff like "Connor McDavid is good at hockey" or "The Leafs have a bad playoff record", not so much.
Send me your sure-thing statement via email at dgbcontrarian@gmail.com.
The Hockey Hall of Fame will welcome seven new members this weekend, including three players from the men’s side. That’s one fewer than the committee is allowed to induct, meaning they didn’t run out of room; they just decided that some of the bigger names weren’t worthy.
Good. The Hall is supposed to be tough to get into, and we should be slamming the door on some of the names that just don’t deserve a spot.
At least, that’s the angle we’re taking today. I’m not necessarily a Small Hall guy, and I’ve spent plenty of time over the years making the cases for various stars. But I think there’s value in trying the other side sometimes, if only to force the supporters of certain stars to sharpen their arguments. So today, I’m going to make the case against 10 names that could be front and center when the HHOF committee holds their next meeting.
We tried this a while ago, with a list 15 players. That was two years’ worth of inductions ago, and four names from that piece have got the call: Mike Vernon and Tom Barrasso in 2023, then Jeremy Roenick and Pierre Turgeon this year. Apparently my other 11 arguments were just more convincing.
We won’t be doing any repeats this time around, so check that older post if you want to see my case against names like Rod Brind’Amour, Patrik Elias, Ryan Miller or anyone else you're expecting to see today but don't. This time, the group of 10 will be made up of some names that I left off last time, as well as a few new that are new to the mix. I won’t bother with a few players I think are easy slam dunks, including Zdeno Chara, Joe Thornton and Patrice Bergeron, and we’re not tackling anyone who isn’t eligible until 2027 or beyond, including anyone who's still active.
That still leaves us with plenty of names to consider, including several who’d probably have my vote. Here’s why none of them should make it – just for argument’s sake.
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I’ve had the Hall of Fame on my mind this week, mostly because it’s induction weekend. That’s the fun part of the calendar that starts with you going “Oh yeah, that’s who they picked back in the summer” and ends with a cool ceremony that honors the game’s legacy.
It’s also a good time to debate that legacy, and argue about bests and worsts and in-betweens. That’s what we’re going to do today.
About a year ago, I wrote a post where based on a simple question: What was the best team that had no Hall-of-Famers? I settled on the 2006-07 Sabres as the winner, in case you’re wondering. You had plenty of your own suggestions, and we wasted the entire day arguing about it, which is what the hockey gods want us to do with HHOF debates.
Today, let’s flip the question: What was the worst team to have the most Hall-of-Famers? That’s a little tricker, just because we’re not dealing with an absolute value like “none”, but I think we can feel our way through some sort of weird ratio of team quality to HHOF totals. We should probably have a cutoff, though. Five? Five sounds good. Let’s find some really bad teams that at least five Hall-of-Famers in the organization.
I’ve come up with five teams that I think make for solid candidates. Have a look, then make your pick and/or tell me why I’m wrong.
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It was a rough year for one of my favorite stats. Years ago, when Elliotte Friedman introduced his curse of November 1, I had the same reaction that most fans seemed to: It didn’t make sense. Over a decade ago, Friedman pointed out how rare it is for a team to be four points out of the playoffs at the start of November and end up making it, but the results felt wrong. After all, you can make up four points in two games – doing it in five months should be easy. And yet, Friedman found that the failure rate was close to 90%.
So can any teams break the curse this year? Yes. Two of them, and that’s it, because only two teams were four points back as of Friday. Those teams would be the Predators and Blackhawks, and yeah, I think one of them is a little more likely to make the push than the other. But thanks to a late start and Gary Bettman’s beloved leaguewide parity, almost everyone is close enough not to panic yet. (In the East, nobody was even two points back when the new month began.)
OK, so much for this year’s early season curse narrative, at least until US Thanksgiving arrives and we can switch to that one. But there are still lots of good teams that are outside the playoffs right now, including some we all assumed would make it. So today, I’m going to see if I can name five teams that wouldn’t be in the playoffs if they started today (based on points percentage), but that have a good shot to be in when it matters.
That’s going to be tougher than it could have been, since the Oilers moved back into a spot after last night's win and robbed me of a freebie. But we love a challenge, so let’s do this from least to most confidence.
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It’s Halloween, which means it’s time to settle in and watch a scary movie. Have you considered highlight clips of your favorite player?
That probably wouldn’t work, at least if your player is someone like Cale Makar or Kirill Kaprizov or Nikita Kucherov. Those guys have been great through October, and other stars are at least living up to expectations. Not everyone is, though, and that means it’s time for our annual team full of starts that are scary, or at least disappointing. We’ll pick a full roster, with a max of one player per team and some honorable mentions to round out the field. (Is it dumb to pretend that every team has a player having a bad start worth singling out? Yes, of course, but you guys get mad when I don't include your favorite teams, so here you go.)
A scary start doesn't doom a season – last year’s list included names like Juraj Slafkovsky, Matt Duchene and Stuart Skinner, and they all ended up having good years. There was even a passing mention of Connor Hellebuyck, and he won the Vezina. Then again, some players never really recovered from a slow first month. And we won’t know who’s who until much further down the road.
For now, let’s get in the Halloween spirit, building from the net out. (Side note: It's also an annual tradition that at least a few of these guys have big games immediately after I write this piece, so feel free to send thank you notes if it happens for your team.)
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If you’re a hockey fan and you love power rankings, you got some great news a few days ago: The Friday rankings have returned.
There’s a common misconception out there that there’s some sort of rivalry between those rankings and these ones. But there isn’t, because we’re trying to do different things. These rankings are the long-term view, while the Friday boys are more of an immediate snapshot. I do my thing, Dom and Other Sean do theirs, and the readers win. A rivalry? Not even close.
They were a few weeks late to the season, though, especially since we’ve already been hard at work on two weeks’ worth of rankings under our belt. I wonder why that was. Let’s see what they had to say about that:
“Sure, we could’ve assembled our little list last week — but there were teams that had only played three games. It felt wrong. Integrity counts, professionally and personally, and some sample sizes are simply too small.”
(Does an extended Kubrik Stare off into the middle distance like Gary Roberts before a playoff game.)
Integrity? Right, screw those guys, a rivalry it is. Here are five issues I had with the first set of rankings from those two Taylor Swift lyric-loving weirdos.
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It’s two weeks into the season, and we’re all still trying to get our bearings. When it comes to those questions you might have percolating in your hockey fan brain, there’s nothing better than having a forum where you can ask a well-informed expert. Unfortunately, you have me instead, but ah well, we’ll make the best of it.
It's mailbag time. Which early-season storylines were on your mind? What kind of crazy hypotheticals were you able to dream up for me? Will I be able to make it all the way through without being asked about The Amulet? Let’s find out.
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We’re a few weeks into a new season, and there’s a good chance your team is off to a bad start. Maybe it’s simply disappointing, or maybe it’s bordering on disastrous – these things come in different flavors. But when it happens, it leads to panic and a sense of impending doom, as you can’t help but hear about looming milestones like November 1 or US Thanksgiving, and how the season will be a total writeoff if your team isn’t back on track by then. A slow start is the worst.
Also, it might not matter.
The “might” is a key word here, because a slow start can absolutely torpedo a season. But it doesn’t have to, as history often reminds us. So today, let’s see if we can calm a few nerves for fan bases in Colorado, Nashville, Buffalo and elsewhere, and maybe rekindle a few memories for others. Let’s look back at your team’s worst start to a season that ended up being just fine, thanks.
We’re going to define a bad start a little loosely here, which allows us to play around with some arbitrary end points, although we want a team that’s at least under .500. For some teams, that cold streak will only last a few games, while others might take months to get going. And of course, the “didn’t matter” part will be in the eye of the beholder – for some of these teams, a few extra points in October could have meant home ice, or a better playoff matchup, or who knows what else down the road. But the larger point remains: Often, a few bad games is just a few bad games, and good teams find a way.
There is hope. You just need to know where to look. Let’s remember some bad starts.
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We’re two weeks into the season. Do you know what to believe?
Probably not, unless you’re delusional. A typical NHL season doesn’t tip its hand this early, and will even toss a few decoys our way to throw us off the scent of what’s really going on. Nobody should be quite sure what they believe, unless it’s you guys having zero faith in Sam Reinhart. Who leads the league in scoring, by the way.
So no, I’m not quite sure what I’m buying into yet. But I’m starting to narrow down the list, which is where we’ll start with this week’s bonus five.
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Hey folks...
We're a few weeks into the season, and it feels like a good time to do a mailbag. I need your questions. Fun ones, silly ones, complicated ones, simple ones, about everything from fictional awards to history to real, actual hockey news. Topics could include predictions, early surprises, the contest, or whatever you'd like. Please bring it. Send your questions, comments and rants via email at dgbmailbag@gmail.com.
Thanks,
Sean
Every year, right before the season starts, I run a prediction contest for readers. I come up with ten simple questions about what’s about to happen – which teams will and won’t make the playoffs, which jobs are safe, which players will have good seasons, that sort of thing. You send in your answers, and we throw it all into a big database and wait.
It’s one of my favorite posts of the year, for two reasons. The first is that you guys are inevitably terrible at predicting the season, and I get to make fun of you all year for it while feeling better about my own equally terrible predictions. That’s the main reason.
But there’s a bonus to this sort of thing, in that it also functions as a stealth survey of where fans are at heading into a season. I don’t know too many places where you can get this sort of volume of hockey fan opinions. It’s not a truly unbiased poll, because it’s self-selected instead of random and I think we can all agree that my readers are smarter than everyone else’s. But it’s pretty close, and it can be interesting to dig into the data and see what the wider hockey world seems to be thinking.
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Welcome back to Cap Court, where we put the questionable deals of NHL stars on trial to find out whether they deserve the dreaded "bad contract" label.
As always, we’re viewing “bad” contracts through the lens of the team that’s stuck with them, since that’s ultimately how fans are forced to do it, even though we’d never begrudge a player taking on offer that’s put in front of them. Importantly, we’re also only looking at contracts from this day forward – a deal could have made sense and even provided value for the first few years, but we’re only looking at what’s left on the books.
We’ve been doing this long enough that names like Jonathan Toews, Carey Pruce and Jakub Voracek have been on the docket. Heck, one of the early editions featured Ryan Suter and Oliver Ekman-Larsson, a combined five teams and three buyouts ago. Have all of our calls been proven right? Look, we’ll do the cross-examining around here, thank you very much.
This time around, we’ve got five more names. We'll start with a big-market blueliner...
Welcome back, NHL. And welcome back to the NHL weekend rankings.
If you’re a longtime reader who knows how this all works, feel free to skip ahead to the Bonus Five. But if you’re new, or you could use a refresher, please read the next bit before you rush off to yell at me in the comments.
These rankings are a bit different from some of the others you might find out there. We’re not trying to capture a snapshot of how things stand in the league right now; instead, we’re more interested in trying to figure out how things will end up. The rankings here are based on two questions: Who’s winning the Cup, and who’s going to finish dead last? Simple questions, but hard ones to get right.
So how do we do it? The idea is to take it slow, starting from something that feels like a consensus early on and then gradually adjusting based on what’s happening on the ice. The key there is the “gradually” part; we try really hard not to overreact to a few games here and there. That means that a team doesn’t shoot up the rankings just because they have a good week, or beat the defending champs. And we don’t give up on a preseason favorite just because they stumble out of the gate. Hold that thought.
This way of looking at things isn’t better or worse than the more common approach that other rankings take; it’s just different. The advantage is that we’re less likely to get tripped up by short-term flukes – for example, we never had the Oilers as a bottom-five team last year, even when they had the worst record in the league in mid-November. The main downside is that some of those overreactions are fun, and I get that it’s frustrating when you see your team ranked behind someone they just beat the brakes off of. And yeah, sometimes we’re a little behind on spotting an important trend. As my kids will tell you, that’s not out of character for me.
So that’s it: Think long-term, react cautiously, and don’t expect the rankings to swing wildly based on what happened in the last week. And one more thing: Each week will feature a top and bottom five, plus an extra team in each section that didn’t make the list but feels worth mentioning. That team is not necessarily ranked sixth – if I wanted to do that every week, it would just be a top and bottom six. They’re just a team to talk about. For reasons I’ve never quite understood, this part really seems to trip people up.
Oh, and we also like to throw in a bonus top five based on whatever’s happening. Like this one:
The NHL season has started. Are you intrigued?
Probably not, because that's a weird word that only ever gets broken out for gimmicks like this, but whatever. Let's mark the new year with my annual list of names around the league who I'm especially interested in tracking over the coming season.
We’re looking for 12 forwards, six defensemen and two goalies, plus a coach and a GM. One name per team, with enough honorable mentions to get every team a mention. And just to make things a little tougher and spread the intrigue around, nobody from last year’s list is allowed to repeat.
Like all great teams, we’ll build from the net out. Last year’s list started with an American goalie with a new contract who ended up winning the Vezina. Can we make it two years in a row?
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Every year, I write two annual prediction columns. In one, I try to predict where each team in the league will finish where, and which ones are legitimate Cup contenders.
That column ran last week, and I don’t like it.
Not this year’s version in particular. I just don’t like making those basic meat-and-potato type of calls, because the risk/reward just doesn’t work for me. If I’m right, big deal – oh wow, you had Edmonton as Cup contenders, way to go out on a limb. And of course, if I’m wrong about anyone (which I will be), I have to hear about it from the fan base all year long. Where’s the fun in that?
Then you have the second prediction column. This one. The fun one.
This is the annual column where I get way too specific on my predictions for each team. It’s not enough to think something might happen; I’ll give you an exact date. Oh, some player is going to post nice numbers; good for them, but what specific numbers will those be? Anyone can predict the basic stats; how about the weird ones you’re not even thinking of?
And the best part of all: All of these predictions are so oddly specific that there’s no chance any of them will be right. Unless they are, in which case you will never hear the end of it.
I can’t lose. So let’s dive in, as we drill down on one call for every team.
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The NHL season has technically arrived, with a European appetizer being served up today between the Devils and Sabres. But the real debut comes next week, with the other 30 teams seeing their first action beginning on Tuesday. That’s when we’ll finally start to find out how teams will look in games that matter, after weeks of the so-called experts telling us what to expect.
But first: it’s your turn.
After all, if me and all my colleagues are going to be forced to embarrass ourselves with bad predictions, then it’s only fair that you get your chance too. And around these parts, that means an entry in the world’s easiest prediction contest.
The concept is simple. I’ll give you ten questions that should be super easy to answer. You decide how confident you’re feeling, and how many answers you want to give. Each right answer means more points, but each wrong one means you take a zero. But you won’t have to worry about that, because again, the questions are super easy.
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Fun fact: In the NHL, the “pre” in preseason stands for predictions. We all have to make them, including you – the reader prediction contest is coming later this week, so be ready. For now, it’s my turn to lay my cards on the table, with my annual division-based attempt to dice up the league.
The rules, as always: I get four divisions, with exactly eight teams each. We’ll have the bottom-feeders, the middle-of-the-pack, the legitimate Stanley Cup contenders, and then the teams I just have no idea about. Because I enjoy making my own life difficult, that eight teams per division rule is mandatory. (Insert your own joke here about the “no clue” division having all 32 teams in it otherwise.)
We’ll start form the bottom and work our way up…
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Welcome to part two of the annual Bizarro-meter rankings, in which we rate each team’s offseason to see which were the weirdest. As always, “weird” doesn’t necessarily mean bad or good or anything in between; this isn’t an evaluation so much as an opportunity to recognize the teams that kept things interesting over a long summer.
Yesterday was the Eastern Conference, with the Capitals and Lightning leading the way. Can anyone from the west top their scores? Spoiler: Yes. But who? Let’s find out.
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Slow news summer is finally over, meaningful hockey is almost here, and it’s time to get up to speed on the offseason. Let’s get weird, by firing up the trusty Bizarro-meter to measure which teams had the strangest summers.
If you’ve been following this gimmick for years, maybe even dating back to the original Leafs-only test run from the infamous David Clarkson offseason, then you know the drill and can just skip ahead to the rankings. But if you’re new to this, please consider this very important caveat: “Bizarre” does not necessarily mean “bad”. Teams can do strange things that work out brilliantly. And far more often, teams can take the predictable path of least resistance and end up wishing they’d been more creative. Over here at Bizarro-meter Industries, we are neutral on questions of good and bad. We’re just looking for what was weird.
As always, we’ll do this in two parts by conference. Today is the East, with the West coming tomorrow. Let’s start in the Atlantic.
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While the never-ending dead zone of the offseason drags on, we’re actually getting close to meaningful hockey. Rookie camps are already happening, and the real training camps will open soon. From there, we’ll only have to get past a few weeks of “best shape of his life” chatter, awkward PTOs, and half-speed preseason games before things finally start to matter.
That means that it’s also the time of year when the TV broadcasters are holed up in the spacious meeting rooms in their office towers, holding top-secret meetings to plan out what their coverage for the new season will look like. (Note: I have no idea if this is true.) And that’s good, because this post is for them.
I have a few requests.
Nothing unreasonable. I know that some fans have big-picture changes they’d love to see from the league’s TV partners, but that’s not the point of today’s post. Instead, I’ve got what I think are a half-dozen relatively minor tweaks I’d love to see to the broadcasts. OK, sure, it’s basically a list of pet peeves that I’d like to see addressed, and maybe they only apply to me. But that’s fine, because I’m the main character and everything the NHL does should be tailored to my individual whims, so I’m sure the TV big wigs will be hanging on every word.
Grab a note pad, TV producers and directors, and get ready to make your product way better… at least in one viewer’s eyes.
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Today’s somehow-still-the-offseason time-waster is the long-awaited return of The $200 Game.
We first tried this a little over five years ago, so a refresher is in order. We’re building six-man rosters – three forwards, two defenseman and a goalie, with no other positional requirements – for individual NHL franchises. The salary cap is $200, and each player costs $1 per regular season game that he played with that team. Each player must have played at least one game, meaning no sneaky zeroes allowed (i.e. the Coyotes Rule).
You get credit for the player’s entire career, so the key is to find guys who had very short stops with one team during a great career spent almost entirely elsewhere. Martin Brodeur in St. Louis, that sort of thing. As we found out last time, that means that trade deadline rentals are our friend, as are stars-turned-journeymen who bounced around a lot over their last few seasons.
I highly recommend going back and checking that original post from five years ago, which will give you the hang of this. Back then, we covered a dozen teams: The Original Six, plus the Penguins, Avalanche, Kings, Stars, Hurricanes and Blues. The consensus was that that the two best teams were the Blues, led by Brodeur and Wayne Gretzky, and the Hawks, led by Bobby Orr and Dominik Hasek.
Today, we’ll see if we can top that with 12 new teams, starting with one that can walk us through how all this works.
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The hockey world just went an absolutely miserable week, probably one of its worst ever. That might make it a weird time to pull out the old Grab Bag gimmick. Or maybe not, because we could all probably use a laugh right now. Unfortunately you’re stuck with me, so “laugh” might be asking too much, but maybe I can at least get a slightly louder than normal exhale out of you. Let’s see if we can find a way to have some fun.
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We’ve almost made it through the dead zone of August. But with a few weeks left in Slow News Summer, I realized we haven’t done a full roster-building exercise. That’s not good, so let’s dive into a topic that’s been in the news lately: Captains.
Today’s question: Who wins, a team made up of guys who captained more than one team, or guys who were never captains at all?
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Predicting the NHL award winners for the coming season can be a hit-and-miss exercise, to put it lightly.
Sometimes the obvious favorite wins, like Connor Bedard taking last year’s Calder. At -135 odds, that means the bookies thought he was more likely to win than everyone else combined, and sure enough he ran away with the award, to absolutely nobody’s surprise.
Other times, the winner is a little bit less obvious, but only a little. Last year’s Rocket Richard favorite was Connor McDavid, but Auston Matthew was right behind him at +300, which is to say 3-to-1 or a 25% chance – hardly a surprise winner. Nathan MacKinnon was 10-to-1 for the Hart, trailing only McDavid. Connor Hellebuyck’s Vezina (13-to-2) and Quinn Hughes’ Norris (10-to-1) were in the same range.
But we do get surprises, like Rick Tocchet winning the Jack Adams despite being a 25-to-1 preseason longshot, trailing behind 15 other coaches, including several like D.J. Smith, Todd McLellan and Jay Woodcroft who didn’t even make it through the season.
Tocchet became the latest in a long list of surprise award winners, at least based on those preseason odds. That preseason part is important, because many of those winners go on to feel like they were obvious or even inevitable, and it’s hard to remember that there was a time when nobody was expecting them. For example, when Leon Draisaitl won the Hart in 2020, he’d gone into the season as a 22-to-1 longshot. When Adam Fox won the Norris three years ago, he’d been listed at 35-to-1, well back of names like Torey Krug and John Klingberg. Marc-Andre Fleury was 40-to-1 for the 2021 Vezina, trailing behind Mikko Koskinen, while Linus Ullmark was 80-to-1 for the 2023 version, tied with Logan Thompson for 23rd place.
You get the idea. Every now and then, someone comes out of next-to-nowhere to win a major award, and nobody sees it coming.
Or do they? That’s the idea behind today’s post, as three of us -- Dom Luszczyszyn, Sean Gentille and Sean McIndoe -- are going to take our best swing at nailing a longshot. We’ll take eight of the major awards and limit ourselves to players who are listed at 20-to-1 or worse, and try to make the case for why our guy could shock everyone by taking home the hardware.
If we’re right, you’ll never hear the end of it. If we’re wrong, we’ll never bring it up again. Sounds like we can’t miss, so let’s take a shot at this.
(All historical odds are taken from Sports Odds History. All odds for this coming season are from Draft Kings, and were current as of publish date.)
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I know a lot of stuff about the NHL. That’s not bragging, because most of what I know isn’t even vaguely useful, and it all takes up space in my brain that should probably go towards keeping tracks of my wife’s birthday or my children’s hopes and dreams.
But the bigger problem is that a lot of this stuff bothers me. This league, man. Am I right?
So today, in the dead of summer with nothing else happening, I’m going to share some of this stuff with you. Some of you old-timers will already know a few of these. I’m sure I’ve made passing references at least a couple over the years. I’m doing this partly because I think it’s interesting but mainly because I’m hoping some of it annoys you too and I won’t feel like a giant weirdo.
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Welcome to the August mailbag. Is it going to get weird? (Scans actual headlines.) It had better. Let’s do this.
Note: Submitted questions have been edited for clarity and style.
Who wins a seven-game series: The team that just won the Stanley Cup, or the best team that didn't make the playoffs IF the series starts the day after the Cup is won, the challenger is fully healthy, rested and prepared, and the champs don't know the series is happening until that morning? – Ben D.
First of all: This is one of the best questions this mailbag has ever had. But to really make it work, we need to establish the stakes. Otherwise, the easy answer is “The champs just won the Cup so they don’t care if they lose every game 10-0 and wouldn’t bother trying.”
So here’s what we’re playing for: The champs are informed that the Cup is on the line, and if they lose the series then their win is stricken from the record. That ought to get their attention.
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We’re into August, well and truly the dead zone of the NHL offseason. While we occasionally do see a major roster move or two this late into the summer, it’s just as often the case that all the big headlines are done until we get close to camp.
So if the 2024 offseason is all but over, what was your favorite blockbuster? Was it the Mitch Marner trade that finally blew up the Leafs’ underachieving core? Or maybe big moves involving Martin Necas or Nik Ehlers? Are you going with one of those culture-changing shakeups that the Rangers promised? Or maybe it was when the Ducks finally pulled the trigger on the long-rumored Trevor Zegras deal.
Oh… right.
None of those deals have happened. At least not yet, and in some cases, pretty clearly not anytime soon. The summer hasn’t been a total letdown, with some legitimately big moves involving names like Jacob Markstrom, Mikhail Sergachev, Linus Ullmark and Pierre-Luc Dubois. But overall, if you’re a fan the dying art of the hockey blockbuster, the summer’s been a bit of a letdown.
This sounds like a good excuse to make up another award.
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Joe Pavelski retired this summer. Actually, he seems to have done it about a half-dozen times, which is weird in its own right, but we’ll allow it. He had a great career, lasting 18 seasons, cracking the 1,000-point mark and representing Team USA internationally.
And while it may not have been quite as important as those accomplishments, Pavelski also did something else: He continued a long line of NHL stars named Joe. It’s been a classic NHL name since the league’s earliest days, when Phantom Joe Malone gave way to Bullet Joe Simpson, paving the way for modern era stars like Joe Sakic, Joe Nieuwendyk and Joe Thornton.
Joe is a great old-school hockey name. But these days, the emphasis is on the “old”, because it’s just not a name your hear much anymore. The popularity of first names will rise and fall over generations, after all, and the NHL is no different. And when Pavelski made his exit official, I’ll admit that one of my first thoughts was: Was that the last Joe we’ll ever see in the NHL?
Not quite, as it turns out. We still have Joe Veleno in Detroit, and if you also count guys named Joey, we’ve got Daccord and Anderson. Crisis averted. The legacy of Joe lives on, at least for a few more years.
But that got me wondering about some other classic hockey first names that haven’t been as lucky. In this new world of Brayden, Jayden and Kayden, a few names you might have come to associate with NHL greatness are now nowhere to be found in the league.
Is this all an incredibly thinly veiled excuse to Remember Some Guys? Of course it is, absolutely. Welcome to slow news summer. Let’s start our list with arguably the most famous hockey name ever.
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Last week, we published an attempt to rank the goaltending outlook for all 32 NHL teams. It was a three-person effort, with Jesse Granger handling the scouting duties for each team’s current situation, Scott Wheeler grading the prospect pipelines, and Sean McIndoe looking at contracts and cap situations. By averaging out and weighting the scores, we wound up with a countdown from the worst outlook to the very best.
If you missed the series, you can find it here:
And then, in a stunning development that nobody could have foreseen, some of you didn’t agree with each and every ranking.
That was fine. It was even a big part of the point. But the twist here is that we didn’t necessarily agree with the overall rankings either. After all, all three of us had our own views, and the final list had come together by averaging them out. That meant that we might not necessarily buy the exact order either.
Scott is enjoying some well-earned vacation this week, but Jess and Sean figured it would be worthwhile to take one last look at the project, and have our say on what we got right, what we think we maybe didn’t, and any final words we can offer.
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We’ve made it the third and final part of our attempt to answer one question for each of the 32 NHL team: How good should they feel about their goaltending, both for right now and looking into the future?
Part one covered the bottom 10, and you can find it here. Yesterday, we went through the mushy middle, and that post is here. Today, it’s the top 10.
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Welcome back to our attempt to rank the goaltending outlook of all 32 NHL teams. The basic question we’re trying to answer: How good should each team feel about their goaltending, both for right now and looking into the future?
Yesterday, we introduced the project and counted down the bottom ten. Today, we’re counting down the mushy middle on our way to tomorrow’s Top 10.
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So you want to talk about the future of NHL goaltending? Good luck.
No really, good luck. You’ll need it. Predicting what will happen with NHL goaltenders in the next game is tough enough, let along looking years down the line. As just one example, have a look back at how NHL GMs ranked the league’s goaltending tiers just three years ago, when Darcy Kuemper was better than Igor Shesterkin, and Jusse Saros and Linus Ullmark couldn’t even crank the top 20 because they were trailing behind Elvis Merzlikins and MacKenzie Blackwood. Over half the players on that list aren’t even starters anymore. A lot can change in the crease, and quickly.
So sure, somewhere out there, right now, a goalie you’ve barely heard of is getting ready to have an out-of-nowhere star turn that will earn him Vezina votes, while somewhere else, a highly paid star we all consider a sure thing is about to face plant and take his team’s season with them. You just can’t predict this stuff with any certainty.
But that doesn’t mean you can’t try. And it doesn’t mean that you can’t put together a snapshot of where the league stands right now. That’s what three of us have set out to do, with a summer project that looks to rank each team’s goaltending outlook.
The basic question here: How good should each team feel about their goaltending situation, both for right now and peering into the future?
Here’s how this will work. We’ve given each of the 32 teams a ranking in three categories:
Current goaltending: How good is their goaltending at the NHL level right now? How good does it project to be in the near-term, which we define as the next three years? This section includes the two goalies who are expected to start the 2024-25 season, as well as anyone else in the system who can be projected to play games. The Athletic’s goaltending expert, Jesse Granger, handled this section.
Future prospects: This section ranks each team’s goaltenders in the system who’ve yet to establish themselves as full-time NHLers, with a focus on ceiling and upside. Prospect guru Scott Wheeler weighs in here.
Note that in theory, there can be some overlap between the first two sections. Yaroslav Askarov is a prospect, but will almost certainly spend meaningful time in the NHL over the next three years. Jake Oettinger is the Stars’ starter now, and at just 25 years old he’s also their future. That’s OK, because Jesse and Scott are looking at those players from two different perspectives: How good they are now (Jesse), and how good they can be and for how long at their eventual peak (Scott).
Cap and contracts: Who makes what, and for how many years? Ideally, a team will have the security of having their good goaltenders locked in at a reasonable price and term. In a hard cap league, a good player making too much for too long may be a negative asset, so contracts matter. There’s going to be some guesswork here, as some key players need new deals. For example, Igor Shesterkin hasn’t signed an extension with the Rangers yet, but that doesn’t mean we just assume that he walks as a UFA in 2025. The key is that this section is about getting value from good players for as long as possible, not simply having the lowest cap hit you can. Sean McIndoe handles this section, with cap info from Puckpedia.
For each category, teams were ranked from 1 to 32. Those scores were then weighted, with Current getting a 1.0 weight, while Future was given 0.75 to recognize the difficulty in peering too far into the future. Cap was weighted at 0.5; it’s important, but history shows us that there are ways to wiggle out of bad deals, although it may be painful.
This will be a three-part series. Today: The bottom ten.
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Today’s time-waster is a simple one: What’s the best team in history that didn’t have a single Hall-of-Fame player on the roster?
A few of you have sent in variations of the question over the years, and it’s a good one. Nice and easy. I’m not even sure we need the traditional bullet-point ground rules.
We’ll do this by decade, more or less, going back to the first expansion. For more recent teams, we’ll obviously have to use some judgment and common sense over who might make the Hall some day. The 2017-18 Capitals don’t have a single Hall-of-Famer right now, but I have a feeling that Ovechkin guy might get in eventually, so we won’t count them. That challenge will get easier as we work back, but never completely go away, since the committee sometimes drops a decades-old selection on us, seemingly out of nowhere. But we’ll do our best, and maybe check in old pal Paul Pidutti and his Adjusted Hockey model for a sanity check when we need it.
With that in mind, let’s give this a shot. We’ll start in the 2010s and work our way back.
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It’s mid-July. All the best free agents have signed, all the trade talk has cooled off, the draft is in the rearview mirror, and nothing is happening. Half the hockey world has already taken off to a cottage or golf course, cell phones turned off. Welcome to the dog days of summer.
Or, as we call them around here, pretty much the best time of the year.
Yeah, it’s time to get weird. This is the time of year when my boss is on vacation and there’s no hockey news to get in the way of me torpedoing your productivity with random trivia and time-wasters.
It’s not for everyone. If you’re looking for in-depth analysis of line rushes from prospect camp, I can’t help you. And if you’re the sort of person who likes to stomp off to the comment section to grumble “Slow news day?”, let me answer you in advance: No, dummy, more like slow news month, consider having some fun with the whole sports fan thing for once in your life.
See? I just called some of my readers dummy. You can’t get away with that stuff in February when people are paying attention. Hockey summers are the best.
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July 1 has come and gone and we’re officially into a new year of the NHL calendar, which means it’s pencils down on the 2023-24 prediction contest. Let’s see how you did.
First, the background for any newcomers out there. This was year four of the contest, in which you answer 10 seemingly simple questions about the upcoming season with as much or as little confidence as you can muster. More answers means more points, but even one wrong answer means a zero for the question, so in theory there’s a balance to be found.
This year’s contest had a little over 2,000 entries. You can find the original contest post here. We went through those initial entries to figure out what they told us about the coming season. And we had a midseason check-in to see how you were doing.
As always, while the idea here is to get the highest possible score and win, the real fun is in looking back at the entries and seeing how smart (or dumb) the wisdom of the crowd really was. With that in mind, let’s look at each of the questions, and just how “simple” they turned out to be.
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Did you enjoy the NHL offseason?
OK, so it’s not technically over. But it feels that way, because in one week we went from crowning a champion to draft weekend to free agency day. Now the trade talk is mostly quiet, the big boards are pretty much bare, and Pierre has left for the cottage. So… have a good summer, everyone?
Well, maybe not quite yet. There are still a few names left on the trade block, a couple of jobs still to fill, and we’ll get the usual trickle of “oh right that guy” UFA signings. But for the most part, much like your neighborhood Fourth of July party, the fireworks are already over.
So what kind of summer did your team have? Let’s take a look at the 10 types of NHL offseasons, why they happen, and what they usually lead to. Bonus points if you can figure out which current teams I was thinking of when I wrote each summary.
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Two months ago, I launched a new prediction contest. After a few years of running the regular season contest and watching you all fail miserably, I figured we could double our fun by adding a playoff edition.
It was a simple contest, with just one question: List as many or as few playoff teams as you’d like, in order of how many games they'd win during the postseason, from most to fewest. And I taunted you with the promise that you’d still get it wrong.
And then, a funny thing happened.
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The initial wave of the annual free agent frenzy seems to have slowed down, so let’s take a breath and ask the big question: Class, what have we learned today?
The NHL delivered on the promise of a busy market, with names flying off the board all day long. There was plenty of movement of unrestricted free agents, several big extensions, and even a handful of trades. Let’s recap the day with ten lessons we can pull from a frantic day. That won’t be enough to cover each and every signing or even every team, but we’ll try to hit on as many as we can. And we’ll do it quickly, before something else happens and renders all of this irrelevant.
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The NHL draft has ended, capping off a two-day event in Las Vegas and a busy week across the NHL.
Surprised?
OK, probably not by the existence and/or ending of the draft. But half the fun of an entry draft is the surprises it hits us with, both big and small. After all, we spend weeks making mocks and ranking prospects, and if everything just went off according to those lists, it wouldn’t be very interesting.
Let's take a moment to recalibrate, by running through some of the most and least surprising moments from the past week. We'll do this in chronological order, reaching way back into the past for our first pick...
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You don’t have to spend very long in Las Vegas to realize that two things are indisputably true about this place: You will either be sweating buckets or freezing to death with no in between for your entire stay, and this town knows how to sell the sizzle.
Everything here promises to be the best, coolest, most unique thing you’ve ever experienced. Any wall with even a few square feet of space will be plastered with ads for shows and events, all of which are somehow ranked #1. (By who? Nobody knows.) Every slot machine is bigger and brighter and louder than the last, every bar promises to be the top party destination in the city, and anything you decide to do will be the most fun you can possibly have. They promise.
Of course, promising is one thing. To send the customer home happy, you have to actually deliver. Still, there’s something to be said for being able to sell that sizzle. It’s something the NHL hasn’t been very good at in, well, forever. Maybe a weekend in Vegas will inspire a few of the marketing minds.
In the meantime, tonight’s Round 1 arrived with plenty of potential, with several possible storylines and unanswered questions hanging over the event. That was the sizzle. But as expected, not everything could live up to the hype. So let’s wrap up Night 1 by running through 10 stories that came into the night feeling worthy of the Vegas hype, and seeing how they actually turned out.
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It’s time for this year’s draft week time-waster, the annual tradition in which we spend a day arguing about one of the most intriguing events on the NHL calendar. This year, let’s take a new angle on an old question: What was the worst draft pick of the cap era?
It’s a question that comes up often enough that you can probably recite the usual suspects. Nail Yakupov in 2012. Nikita Filatov in 2008. Gilbert Brule in 2005. That bum that your favorite team took instead of the stay-at-home defenseman your uncle wanted.
But are some of those names fair? Yakupov was a bust, sure, but the 2012 draft was a mess. If the Oilers had somehow had a premonition from the future and shocked us all by passing on Yakupov, who would they have taken instead? The next player picked was Ryan Murray. The next forward was Alex Galchenyuk. The fourth overall pick was Griffin Reinhart, and the Oilers are probably glad they never acquired… OK, bad example maybe, but you get the idea. In 2008, Filatov was picked ahead of Colin Wilson, Mikkel Bødker, Josh Bailey and Cody Hodgson, who all had better careers by far but weren’t exactly franchise players. Brule went just ahead of Jack Skille, Devin Setoguchi and Brian Lee.
There were better plays available later in those drafts, of course, but it hardly seems fair to say a team whiffed on a top-ten pick because they should have taken a guy who ended up going 173rd. Clearly, that player was never a realistic option. It’s easy hindsight, but it’s not real criticism.
Today, let’s look at the problem a different way, by rephrasing the question: Who was the worst pick of the cap era, judged by how good the players taken right after him turned out to be? It’s one thing to pick a bust who’s only slightly worse than the picks who followed. It’s another entirely to watch a cast of all-stars immediately go off the board.
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It’s over.
No, not the Stanley Cup final, although that’s over too. Congratulations to the Florida Panthers, who narrowly held off Connor McDavid and the Oilers, avoiding a historic collapse and capturing the franchise’s first championship. It caps off a three-year stretch that saw the Panthers win the 2022 Presidents’ Trophy, then follow that with back-to-back Eastern Conference championships. With a Stanley Cup banner now set to fly in Florida, it’s been a truly dominant stretch, one that’s worthy of all the praise that will be thrown its way in the days and weeks ahead.
No, what’s over is the narrative. You know the one, about how winning NHL teams have to be built. You’re familiar with all the beats. Let’s recite them together.
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In theory, the question is right up my alley.
If the Panthers lose Game 7 on Monday, will it be the biggest collapse in NHL history?
It’s the sort of history-based debate that I’m usually all over. In fact, when it first became apparent that the Oilers were going to make a series of this, I started thinking about how this piece could look. If you’ve been reading me over the years, you can probably picture how it would be laid out. We’d pose the question, then list a bunch of potential contenders for the honors. We’d weigh the pros and cons, putting it all in historical context, drop a few one-liners, and then arrive at a conclusion roughly 2,000 words later.
The problem is, when it comes to this Panthers’ collapse being the worst of all-time, I don’t have 2,000 words for you. I don’t need them.
I only need one: Yes. And then a few more: It’s not even close.
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It’s Hockey Hall of Fame time, which you could be forgiven for not knowing because there does seem to be some other hockey stuff going on these days. But the Class of 2024 will be announced on Tuesday, no doubt sparking another round of debate over who make it, who got snubbed, and why the committee has clearly never watched a single game involving your favorite team.
You know what that means. It’s time to welcome another class to the Hall of Very Good.
We’ve been doing this for a few years now, but let’s refresh your memory on what’s about to happen. Some fans use “Hall of Very Good” as an insult, a way to devalue the career of a guy who may not quite deserve a plaque in the real thing. That’s not what we’re about here. Instead, we’re going to use this space the celebrate the players who presumably don’t have a realistic shot at induction, but were still pretty darn fun to watch in their day.
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The Edmonton Oilers were apparently feeling a little bit contrarian this week.
With all of hockey ready to crown the Florida Panthers, hand over the Cup and call it a season, the Oilers ruined the party on Saturday night. They finally showed up for the final, and turned what was supposed to be a coronation into a butt-kicking. In the process, they made all of us shelve our “Panthers win” takes for at least one more game, and sent the hockey world grumbling to the airport for yet another travel day.
I can respect it. I’ve been known to dabble in the whole contrarian thing myself, with takes like “Mark Messier was a great Canuck” and “Ray Bourque’s Cup win was bad, actually”. With some unexpected time to kill before Game 5, let’s break that gimmick out again.
As always, the concept is simple: You make what you think is an obviously true statement, the kind of thing that nobody could even argue with. I take the contrarian position, and make my best case. And as always, you can try to guess which of these arguments I actually mean, and which are just a case of a grumpy sportswriter instinctively going against the grain.
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One year ago, the Vegas Golden Knights were celebrating their Stanley Cup win from just a few hours earlier, and their long-suffering fans were saying goodbye to a gut-wrenching drought that had spanned six long years. And perhaps nobody was celebrating harder than Jonathan Marchessault, who’d just been named the Conn Smythe winner as playoff MVP.
Maybe more importantly, fans of the other 31 teams were testing their hockey knowledge with a “Who Didn’t He Play For?” quiz.
Yes, it’s somehow been a year and a day since we last broke out this gimmick (although there was an offshoot variation during the season to keep you sharp). That year has flown by; it feels like just yesterday we were talking about the Florida Panthers being in the Stanley Cup final. But it tells me that it’s time for another round. So let’s take our cue from Marchessault, and use this quiz to honor Conn Smythe winners.
In theory, that means this edition should be the easiest one yet, since you’d figure that most Conn Smythe winners don’t switch teams all that often. But that’s fine, because I’ve been told that you’d prefer that these things were a little more forgiving. Apparently some of you don’t bother memorizing every team Michel Petit ever played for, because you “have better things to do” and “don’t use hockey trivia to hide from our real-world problems” and “seriously, we’re worried about you, Sean”.
As always, the format is simple. I’ll give you a player and four teams, and you tell me which one he never played for. You get 16 questions in all, then scroll back up and score yourself based on this handy system.
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We’re two games into the Stanley Cup final. Which is to say, maybe halfway through.
That’s the pessimist’s version, assuming you’re not a Panthers’ fan. If you’re neutral, or close enough, your main hope at this time of year is for a classic final, the kind of seven-game masterpiece you’ll remember fondly years or even decades down the road. We may still get that, although with the Oilers down 2-0 and struggling to find offense, our hopes are dwindling.
We’ll get a better sense of how this series will shape up tomorrow night. But as we wait, let’s take a look back at all the earlier series that got us here. It’s time to rank the path to the 2024 final, as we count down the 14 series that led us to this matchup, from worst to best.
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The Athletic Hockey Show runs four days a week during the season, and will feature me with Other Sean Gentille on Wednesdays.
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