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Puck Daddy Countdown: No guarantees for Henrik Zetterberg
Has Henrik Zetterberg played his last game? (Getty)
6. Arbitration
One of the things that’s stupid about arbitration in the NHL is that every time you hear “The team came in at $1 million and the player is asking for $3 million,” you can feel good about betting your entire life savings on “The arbitrator’s going to give him $2 million.”
A lawyer on Twitter with a locked account who I’m therefore not going to link to said there’s a pretty simple reason for this: If an arbitrator goes in one direction or the other — that is, if the player or team makes a compelling case for their number — the side that “loses” has the power to fire that arbitrator. If you split the difference, nobody’s happy and everyone is simultaneously.
But that kinda takes all the intrigue out of the arbitration process, and really makes you wonder how on earth Jacob Trouba’s took six damn hours. The artifice of it is appalling — why not just come up with your numbers and split the difference right away — but that’s all billable hours I guess.
Anyway, it’s stupid.
5. Overvaluing your own players
So the Canucks re-signed Troy Stecher the other day to a two-year deal with a $2.325 AAV, which sounds just about right I think. But the way that worked out for Canucks fans, you’d think they just got the steal of the century. Oh my god Troy Stecher, wow he’s great!!!
And it’s like, “Is he?”
Don’t get me wrong, he seems like he’s fine. But he doesn’t really move the needle in terms of, say, underlying numbers and he has a grand total of 35 points in 139 career games and he’s already 24 years old.
This is one of those things where he was highly touted coming out of college (probably a little too highly) because he scored a good (but not massive) amount on a very good team. This is a guy who averaged less than 19 minutes a night and was basically used as the sheltered No. 4 defenseman on a Canucks team with Mike Del Zotto as the No. 2, so you tell me how good he is, really.
The answer seems to be “not very.” Don’t get me wrong, it’s good to have useful depth players and he’s definitely one of them, but lower-end middle-pair defenseman seems to be his quality level, if you even want to call him that much, aren’t the kinds of guys you should be celebrating if you’re even moderately well-run. The Canucks are of course not moderately well-run, so fair play there, but does it really serve you to get your hopes up about a guy who can’t even crack this Canucks team’s top-three? I feel like probably it doesn’t.
4. Zetterberg?
Seems like there’s not a lot of info out there right now about whether Henrik Zetterberg — who very quietly had 11 goals and 45 assists in a lost season at age 37 — is going to play next season, which is weird.
I know everyone wants to give all due caution with respect to his health and, yeah, he’s 38 so that’s pretty old for a hockey guy of any quality, let alone one who probably doesn’t want to just be a token addition because of Who He Is.
But still, it’s weird that we might have seen Zetterberg play his last game (in the NHL at least) to literally no fanfare. Imagine if he just kinda retires? That would be bizarre.
(By the way, did you know Zetterberg doesn’t have 1,000 career points? He’s only at 960. Now granted, 22 other guys over 37 have scored 40 in a season in the lockout era, nine of them more than once. Zetterberg is absolutely good enough to do that. If he can stay actually play and his team doesn’t totally crap out on them. Neither of those things seem like guarantees. Bummer.)
3. Getting your hopes up
Speaking of the Canucks, there sure seems to be a lot of talk about whether Quinn Hughes, who apparently dazzled at rookie camp, will bail on the University of Michigan to sign with Vancouver before the season starts.
I could see it going either way, to be honest. I don’t think Hughes would struggle at the NHL level because of what he did at Worlds and how he plays a very modern game. But at the same time, what would he play in the NHL, like 15 or 16 minutes a night? At Michigan he would probably play more like 25-plus, get top power play minutes, all that kind of stuff.
It’s an interesting question as to what’s better for his development in the long run, but if it’s me making the call here I don’t try to sign him despite the local pressure. Let him make that decision if he wants to but I’m not leaning on him at all.
Zach Werenski, a guy I’ve compared Hughes to a lot (not just because they both went to Michigan), went back for a second season and now he’s really good. Would he have helped in a doomed season in Columbus a few years ago? I dunno, but probably not. Hughes is in the same boat. Why burn a year of his ELC when the team’s gonna stink?
2. Making a comeback
All this stuff about “Jaromir Jagr isn’t sure about an NHL return this season but it probably won’t happen” is some very “no kidding” stuff. The Flames bounced him, no one was interested because he was injured after that.
He says it’s his goal to make it back and I believe him, but he’s 46 and might not be able to stay healthy. Might be the end of the line, at least in North America. That, too, is a bummer.
1. The waiting game
The other thing I don’t like about arbitration is how spread out it is. That’s done for logistical reasons, obviously, but there are a few guys whose numbers will be really interesting if the process gets that far.
Brandon Montour today can maybe make a case for a decent chunk of change.
Jason Zucker on July 28 will be fascinating.
I wanna see that Cody Ceci number on Aug. 1 for a real solid laugh, probably on both sides.
Kevin Hayes on Aug. 2 and Mark Stone on Aug. 3 are two guys I bet get super lowballed by their teams.
And then on Aug. 4, that William Karlsson hearing could be hysterical.
Again, that’s all “if it gets that far,” which it so often doesn’t. But those are the guys where I’m really hoping it gets that far.
(Not ranked this week: Unsigned veterans.
And speaking of unsigned free agents, one of the things I always think sucks at this time of year, but which definitely makes sense from a team perspective, is when a guy like Toby Enstrom has to sit around all summer waiting for the phone to ring. These are guys who can play a bit but probably isn’t worth a huge multi-year deal or anything, and clubs just take a ton of caution with them.
Like obviously it behooves a team that has use for an early-to-mid-30s player to just give him a training camp invite in September, because it’s not like there’s a line of employers around the block for him. And it’s not just Enstrom, because there’s always a handful of guys who can meaningfully contribute but it’s easier to just give them a PTO and, maybe, a $1 million, one-year deal.
But for those guys? No good.)
Ryan Lambert is a Puck Daddy columnist. His email is here and his Twitter is here.
(All statistics via Corsica unless otherwise noted.)
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Trending Topics: What's next for Jacob Trouba and the Jets?
What’s next for Jacob Trouba and the Jets? (Getty)
At this point you have to think the new contract Jacob Trouba signed after going through arbitration — a split-down-the-middle, one-year deal worth $5.5 million — is a Band-Aid on a gaping wound.
All indications are that maybe, just maybe, Trouba might not have been appeased after his brief holdout-but-not-technically and then trade request in 2016. While the Jets have certainly improved a lot and addressed many of his concerns (such as playing him on the right side of the ice) since then, there’s now an air of, let’s say, uncertainty around what this one-year deal means.
Unfortunately for the Jets, a lot of people seem to think that this might all be a precursor to Trouba bolting town at the earliest opportunity; unfortunately for him he’ll be an RFA with arbitration eligibility again next season, but few NHLers would want to play on one-year arbitration contracts for the latter half of his entire RFA run? The question, then, is whether this is at all a tenable relationship.
Because if the Jets don’t think they’re going to be able to re-sign Trouba long-term next season — and he’ll be due a huge raise because he’s a high-end defenseman who will be locked up for his entire prime — then their options are immediately not that good in terms of long-term success.
Generally speaking you don’t give up a player as good and young as Trouba and get an equal return from the other team. You might be able to make up most of his value piecemeal but certainly it’s rare to go star-for-star or anything like it. Especially when you’re the team that has decided you can’t keep the player around in the first place.
There are a few options for Kevin Cheveldayoff here. The most immediate is also the one he probably likes the least: Trade Trouba before the season starts. I know, I know: He’s probably the best defenseman on one of the best teams in the league, and trading him would be a huge blow to that team’s likely success this season.
But you have to consider two things here. First, his actual dollars-and-cents value — at just $5.5 million AAV this year — is incredible. You would be losing a great, cheapish, young player but that only jacks up what you can reasonably demand, even if you are negotiating from a position that isn’t particularly strong. Second, you get out in front of potentially thousands of questions being asked of players, coaches, and front-office types in the organization all season long about Trouba, preventing him from becoming the kind of Poochie figure the Winnipeg media has traditionally sharpened its knives against.
This is an unattractive option, for sure, but it’s one that must be considered simply because if you think this team minus-Trouba-but-plus-maybe-two-other-goodish-NHLers is still going to be a potential top-five club. Certainly, it’s clearly in the top five right now, but the loss of a player like that hurts badly.
I can’t imagine a scenario in which this actually happens, but it has to be kicked around. See what’s out there for an offer and if someone just about knocks your socks off, then you have to really consider it, because you don’t want to let this get much farther without some kind of clarity. No player should be untouchable in this league, with the possible exception of Connor McDavid, so these are important conversations to have.
Another option: You can keep Trouba around headed into the season, let him be as good as he is for you, and hope all the success convinces him to stay. Maybe you can even work out an extension before the season ends. Obviously Cheveldayoff would know a lot better than me whether Trouba’s days in Winnipeg are all but over the second he sheds his RFA status, and that’s a big consideration there, but if you have even a bit of hope that a player this good can be convinced that this is a team worth staying for, you probably have to take it right?
The other consideration there is that if you don’t keep Trouba and potentially endanger the team’s viability near the top of a tough division, anything resembling a return to the Western Conference Final probably goes up in smoke. Is that something the Jets organization would accept as part of the cost of doing business with a player like that? I don’t know. Obviously the Jets are getting a little better at being able to retain high-end talent than their previous reputation might have suggested would be the case, but at the same time, it’s not like they’re really attracting it either.
That makes Trouba difficult, if not impossible, to replace, and could therefore topple the team’s ability to meaningfully compete for a Cup with this group. So just given where the team is right now as a group, keeping him seems to be the wisest and probably only reasonable course of action, even if it causes you a problem later.
That’s the most likely scenario. You keep Trouba around, let the season go how it goes. The Jets are obviously a top contender for the Cup (if they can get past Nashville in that divisional final again) and it’s important to remember that Trouba is technically still improving as a player given that he won’t be 25 until late February.
And if at some point in the season it becomes clear he’s not going to sign long-term (seemingly a distinct possibility), then you trade him at the draft or at least before July 1. The return certainly won’t be as big as it would have been if you traded him with two years of RFA status, but the idea of potentially entering into another acrimonious six-hour arbitration hearing to get one more year of would likely be a below-market AAV then losing him for nothing really can’t be entertained either, right?
The question of whether the Jets should have made a trade when the request was made two years ago is silly. He was an elite up-and-coming defenseman but he certainly hadn’t proven much with two injury-plagued seasons and only about a third of a point per game. In fact, that Trouba has only played more than 65 games just once in his career is another issue for Cheveldayoff to navigate here because that, too, probably brings down the resale value.
But when he’s actually on the ice, Trouba is incredible. Certainly one of the four or five best defensemen under the age of 25 in the league today. To lose him would be a crushing blow to the Jets’ D corps. You really have to ask, though, how much longer they can actually afford to keep him.
Ryan Lambert is a Puck Daddy columnist. His email is here and his Twitter is here.
All stats via Corsica unless otherwise noted.
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What We Learned: The Wild are going to be expensive, but will they be good?
The Wild have a large range of outcomes for 2018-19. (Photo by Jason Halstead /Getty Images)
Off the top of your head, where do you see the Minnesota Wild finishing in the Central this season?
They’re only technically in the same league as the division’s twin titans of Nashville and Winnipeg, which seem destined to finish 1-2 (you pick the order).
Of course, the Wild finished in that third spot last year; a distant third, mind you, with a 13-point gap between Winnipeg and themselves. And that came with some serious ups and downs; they were one of the worst possession teams in the league last year, and really only got to where they were because of an a PDO that was ninth-highest in the league.
And to be fair, they had a number of key players miss a pretty good amount of time. Jared Spurgeon only played 61 games. Zach Parise just 47. Nino Niederreiter checked in at only 63. Those are all very useful players and if they’re missing a quarter or close to half of a season, your on-ice results are going to suffer, especially if they miss a bunch of games at the same time.
But at the same time, Eric Staal scored 42 goals and 76 points. Jason Zucker cleared 30 in both goals and assists. Mikael Granlund had 67 points. Ryan Suter and Matt Dumba both hit 50 points from the blue line. Devan Dubnyk was once again top-notch at .918 in 60 appearances.
The problem for the Wild, then, is that the rest of the division seems to be improving, and it was pretty tightly packed around the middle of the Central to begin with. Nine points separated Minnesota from sixth-place Dallas, with Colorado and St. Louis between them. I would argue that all those teams improved this offseason, and Chicago should be (much) better if Corey Crawford is fully healthy, even if they’re not the Chicago of old.
Note that many of the Wild players I just listed as having enjoyed great seasons are, for the most part, outside their prime production years. Staal and Suter will turn 34 during next season. Spurgeon will turn 29. Dubnyk just turned 32. Other teams have aging producers as well, obviously, but these were some pretty outsized years from past-their-primes players, so it’ll be interesting to see what they can actually put together in 2018-19.
The real problem with the Wild, though, is the playoff format. The gap between Nashville/Winnipeg and the rest of that division is so significant in terms of on-paper quality (you can never guess when injury or quirky underperformance will rear their heads) that you’re better off finishing in the wild card spot in the division and taking your chances with the winner of the Pacific than finishing third and getting as brutally crumpled as the Wild did in the first round last year.
And with the new contract Matt Dumba signed over the weekend — five years with a $6 million AAV, the value of which I’ll get to in a minute here — this team is about $5.6 million south of the cap limit, and still have to re-sign Zucker, who has 111 points over the last two seasons. That scoring total ties him for 63rd in the league in that time, just ahead of Jordan Eberle and Sean Couturier, for instance, and likely means he’s going to be looking for a fat paycheck. That probably pushed Minnesota up around the absolute top of the league in terms of cap obligations.
(Also worth noting: There are few Bruce Boudreau stans in the hockey media bigger than me, but my man only has so much to work with, y’know?)
So this is a cap-limit team with a first-round-limit ceiling in the playoffs unless things go very heavily their way. This is, I guess, why the team brought in a new front office crew this summer; there’s a recognition that they’ve built a rather expensive team that probably reached its peak in terms of reasonable competition within the division, let alone the Western Conference or league writ large. And with so many of their top players (such as they are) on the wrong side of 30, one wonders how much longer this approach is going to be kept up.
Simply put, seventy-nine-point-something million dollars a year to get bounced in the early rounds of the playoffs again isn’t and shouldn’t be viewed as a tenable situation, but as I wrote repeatedly like four or five years, simply paying a lot of money to players who are above-average but certainly not stars in the league doesn’t make them worth their contracts. The Parise and Suter contracts don’t expire for seven more seasons and it’s a hell of a lot of money to spend on two guys whose impact on the ice is going to diminish.
The good news is there aren’t too many long-term commitments otherwise — Dumba and Niedereitter, both of whom are under 26, are the only other guys signed for more than the next three seasons — and the team does have some promising, youngish players to supplement the old guard. That Dumba contract is probably a little too much in terms of AAV, but he has 35 goals over the last three seasons and you gotta pay for guys like that, I guess.
Only 12 defensemen in the salary cap era besides Dumba have cleared 50 points in a season before the age of 24, so what are you gonna do? The term is fine, for sure, but Dumba doesn’t really move the needle in terms of underlying numbers; he’s still improving given his age, but paying a lot for that particular player seems more optimistic than rational. Because of those 13 defensemen, only eight repeated their 50-performances at least once before turning 28.
Nice to have young players who can make an impact, certainly, but the Wild fall into that classic trap of having a number of goodish, cheapish young guys and goodish, expensive old guys and very little in between, which doesn’t allow for a continuity of quality over years.
And with this team in particular, what even is that quality, really? Can you really afford to run out the clock with all these early-to-mid-20s and mid-30s players over the next three years if this is where you’re gonna get?
While anyone can get on a hot run and make a deep playoff push, the Wild don’t really have a realistic chance to do that unless they land outside their own division for the playoffs. Which is theoretically possible, but in actual practice you shouldn’t want to hope you finish seventh or eighth in the West to get a viable path to the Conference Final, where you’re likely to get clubbed anyway.
So the Wild, again, seem to be at a crossroads with the direction of their franchise, but none of their paths forward seem particularly favorable.
What We Learned
Anaheim Ducks: They’re officially bringing back, well, a version of the original Mighty Ducks jersey, which should just be their actual jersey anyway. This one kinda stinks but what are you gonna do?
Arizona Coyotes: God if the Coyotes are worth $500 million, what’s Vegas worth now, a year after paying that same amount of money to be a team?
Boston Bruins: The cool thing about if the Bruins got Artemi Panarin? He would be the second-best left wing on the team.
Buffalo Sabres: Casey Mittelstadt looks like he could soon be a difference-maker at the NHL level, which is probably a little ahead of schedule to be honest.
Calgary Flames: The Flames love putting useful young depth players on waivers for no reason, but at least they didn’t lose Brett Kulak for nothing like they did Paul Byron.
Carolina Hurricanes: I would not recommend making a 19-year-old rookie your No. 1 center, no.
Chicago: Jonathan Toews wants a big bounce-back season for himself and his team. I want a million dollars. Nice to want things.
Colorado Avalanche: The Avs are probably going to avoid arbitration with Patrik Nemeth and that’s the only guy they need to re-sign at this point.
Columbus Blue Jackets: *Craig Finn voice* Don’t let Oliver Bjorkstrand explode!!!!
Dallas Stars: You can say what you want about the Stars but there really aren’t that many bad contracts on the books.
Detroit Red Wings: Wow the Red Wings might actually play talented kids instead of mediocre 29-year-olds in important situations. Signs and wonders.
Edmonton Oilers: Put Joe Gambardella in the NHL. Yes. Do it. Think about where he went to college and don’t be a coward!!!
Florida Panthers: Vinnie Viola is selling his mansion in New Jersey and I’m buying it.
Los Angeles Kings: A great mid-July pastime is to look at NHL signings and guess what percentage of them are AHL-quality goons. Here’s one now.
Minnesota Wild: The Wild have a new AHL head coach and it seems like when you’re hiring guys out of the Penguins coaching system you’re making a good decision.
Montreal Canadiens: This is brutal.
Nashville Predators: Yes. Thanks for asking.
New Jersey Devils: Only roster eight defensemen if you’re gonna play seven every night. Which, by the way, you should do that.
New York Islanders: Frankly, gang, I don’t know that they have much of a choice in the whole “should we tank?” discussion.
New York Rangers: When the richest and biggest-name teams in the league are openly saying they’re “rebuilding” that should be a good indication that it’s a perfectly okay thing for every team to do when needed.
Ottawa Senators: This is going really great.
Philadelphia Flyers: Man, that Forsberg-to-Nashville trade effectively got the Flyers Scottie Upshall, Ryan Parent, Scott Hartnell, and Kimmo Timonen plus a third-round pick? Good lord!
Pittsburgh Penguins: Okay, sure, Derek Grant. That’s someone.
San Jose Sharks: Chris Tierney? That’s even more someone.
St. Louis Blues: This is a take where I go, “Ahhhh, maybe?” Which kinda defeats the purpose of the take.
Tampa Bay Lightning: Really feels like everyone in Tampa is just sitting around going, “Well jeez hey when’s this Karlsson thing happening? Soon? Soon. Gotta be soon.”
Toronto Maple Leafs: Andreas Johnsson‘s one of those guys where it’s like, “Yeah he’s probably a real player.” He went point-a-game in his second AHL season and 1.5 a game in the playoffs. Granted, that’s on a stacked team, but he’s 23 and a guy who can score like that is probably a good bottom-six option at an absolute minimum.
Vancouver Canucks: I would not want to be in the business of extending Alex Edler, despite his long-term status with the org.
Vegas Golden Knights: It’s really too bad the Golden Knights didn’t have to change their name. That would have been so funny.
Washington Capitals: Yeah, no.
Winnipeg Jets: I’m gonna write more about Trouba this week but: yikes.
Gold Star Award
Maybe this makes me a kook in hockey circles but every NHL team should have as many jerseys as they want. Who cares as long as they’re cool or weird or whatever? I don’t like the Ducks’ new “classic-inspired” thirds but at least they’re trying something. More throwbacks would be a good thing.
Minus of the Weekend
This is some kinda take.
Perfect HFBoards Trade Proposal of the Week
User “Kshahdoo” loves this time of year.
STL gets Panarin (but only with extention)
Toronto gets Parayko
Columbus gets Nylander
Signoff
Help! Help!
Ryan Lambert is a Puck Daddy columnist. His email is here and his Twitter is here.
(All stats via Corsica unless otherwise noted.)
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Trending Topics: What should Columbus do with Artemi Panarin?
Columbus has a decision to make when it comes to the Breadman (Jamie Sabau/NHLI via Getty Images)
The Artemi Panarin drama in Columbus continues to roll on.
First there was the revelation that the player and GM Jarmo Kekalainen met in France early in the week to discuss the decision not to re-sign with the Blue Jackets this summer. That’s fair enough on both sides; the team wants to make sure this elite driver of offense can be locked up as soon as possible for as long as possible, while the player wants to keep his options open.
Then, it came out that not only did Panarin not want to negotiate right now, and also doesn’t want to negotiate after training camp opens because he, predictably, wants to focus on hockey.
It certainly puts Columbus in an interesting spot, because this is now something like the Matt Duchene situation in Colorado last year, or the current one in Ottawa aroudn Erik Karlsson. Something has to happen to get this guy moved out of town because it’s an untenable situation.
The problem, apparently, is that Columbus isn’t likely to get back any kind of helpful asset unless the team to which Panarin is being traded would have a reasonable assurance that it would be able to re-sign him before the end of the season. So if Panarin won’t negotiate after the season begins, the pressure is on for Kekalainen to get a list of teams where the player would be willing to go for the long-term, and start negotiating with them directly.
The idea that Columbus would keep Panarin to start the season, maybe hang onto him until the deadline or longer, and then let him walk for nothing is something to consider as well.
If Columbus isn’t going to get anything of particularly significant value for this coming season — when they should be fairly competitive in the Metro if not the Eastern Conference as a whole — they have to at least consider the idea of keeping him just to be competitive.
It’s easy to forget that Panarin scored 82 points in 81 games this season, and the next-closest scorer on the team was Seth Jones, 25 points back. That’s a huge gap, and one that didn’t get a lot of talk around awards season; he got one fourth- and one fifth-place vote for the Hart, neither from Columbus-based writers, and that doesn’t really seem fair to a guy on a team whose next-highest-scoring forward only had 48 points.
So if Kekalainen can’t make a deal in the next seven weeks or so, and Panarin’s trade value drops to the point that you’re only getting picks, prospects, and probably a cash dump for him, can the team actually afford that? It’s an interesting question because this was a very good team last year despite the lack of non-Panarin offense, but they already scored eight goals below the league average. Maybe you say the maturation of a few players on the roster helps bridge that gap, but Panarin was on the ice for almost 44 percent of his team’s goals last season, and either scored or had the primary assist on more than 26 percent of them.
This is a guy you can’t give away for futures if you want the current team to be any good. No other player on the Columbus roster has the ability to make that kind of a difference. Probably none of them are even close.
So if Columbus can’t get anything for him to help this season, they basically have to keep him unless they really feel like missing the playoffs. Simply put, they cannot expect to go into this season and remain competitive by bumping every left wing on the roster up a spot in the rotation.
I guess it depends on what Kekalainen thinks this team can do with Panarin in the fold, right? Because if you look at this group and say it could come out of the Metro and at least make the Conference Final if things go right (and that’s an extremely plausible scenario as far as I’m concerned) then the playoff revenues alone maybe make it worth the risk. This is, again, a good young team that has plenty of potential to be dangerous in the playoffs.
But it’s a big gamble knowing that if you’re, say, first or second in the division and third or fourth in the conference around mid-January, you probably aren’t going to trade him and he’s probably going to walk on July 1. If you basically have to keep him at the deadline and then you run into a hot goalie in Round 1 and only get two or three home dates out of it? Well, crap. That probably wouldn’t be as valuable to the franchise as the picks and prospects you could have pulled if you traded him around the deadline or, indeed, at some point this summer.
The hard negotiation deadline of “at the start of training camp” might be an attempt to get Columbus to ante up with an eight-figure AAV or something. Panarin can very reasonably make an argument that he’s worth this kind of money; he’s seventh in league scoring over the past three seasons behind former linemate Patrick Kane, Sid Crosby, Connor McDavid, Nikita Kucherov, Blake Wheeler, and Jamie Benn. Panarin can reasonably make a claim to a good chunk of Kane’s offensive explosion as well as his big season with no meaningful help in Columbus last year. And unlike Kucherov, who just re-signed on a massive contract in Tampa, he doesn’t have any lower-cost RFA years left to give.
In an ideal world, you re-sign him now and sort out the other money issues later. There are plenty of too-big contracts on the team for players that don’t have as much of an impact as Panarin, so if you need to get rid of David Savard somehow, well, that’s the cost of doing business.
It is, unfortunately, not an ideal world, so Kekalainen is probably looking at some tough decisions.
Sure, if Columbus can find a destination where they can get a good or even very good player back, then trading him now is worth the hit. That player isn’t likely to be as helpful as Panarin, but the roster overall is very solid and they would probably still be a playoff team with a guy who might max out around, I dunno, like 65 points.
And yeah, you also don’t want a whole season in which every player on the team is asked every day, “What’s gonna happen with Panarin?” And that’s for sure what would happen. There’s almost no good outcome here short of an extension. Players this good just don’t come to any franchise, let alone Columbus, all that often.
But if you’re looking at nothing but futures anyway, you might as well roll the dice and enter the season knowing you’re in a tough spot. Given the makeup of this group, the alternative is, somehow, a lot worse.
Ryan Lambert is a Puck Daddy columnist. His email is here and his Twitter is here.
All stats via Corsica unless otherwise noted.
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Puck Daddy Countdown: Could the Senators, Canadiens solve each other's problems?
A Karlsson-Pacioretty swap is an interesting idea but that doesn’t mean it’s a good one for either team. (Getty)
6. Undoing a good thing
A thing the Flyers announced last week was that they’re considering moving Claude Giroux back to the middle of the ice this season.
Now, I wasn’t sure last year that moving him away from the middle of the ice (because maybe it was hurting his productivity) was a good idea, and then he ended up being an MVP candidate. So y’know, the idea that you’d move him BACK? I dunno man.
Obviously the Flyers don’t have a ton of centers on the roster, right? Couturier is awesome and the addition of James van Riemsdyk really crowds the left side of the ice if you keep Giroux there as well. But this guy just saw his production increase from 58 points in 2016-17 to 102, and it’s like, “Well I bet there’s a pretty good reason for that.”
Maybe that reason isn’t that they moved him to the left wing, but like I said with the 3M line in Calgary, why would you mess with what is pretty clearly a successful mix on that top line. Obviously a lot of Giroux’s scoring can be attributed to some pretty good luck, but still! You don’t see too many teams say, “This change that made a guy into a 100-point scorer? Let’s hit CTRL+Z on that one.”
Curious to see how it works out, that’s for sure.
5. That Adam Henrique contract
I truly don’t see where Adam Henrique is worth $5.85 million a year from ages 29 to 34.
Don’t get me wrong, he’s definitely a good player, but that’s “high-end No. 2 center” money and it’s tough for me to say for sure that he’s a high-end No. 2 center. Currently, it’s the 32nd-largest AAV for a center. That ranking will likely drop next summer, but nonetheless, it’s a bit high.
He scores 40-plus points a year pretty reliably but his underlying numbers over the last three seasons are really not very good in comparison with what his teams did when he was off the ice.
Plus, among the 90 forwards with at least 3,000 minutes at 5-on-5 since 2015-16, Henrique ranks 78th in primary points per 60. For most of that time, he was just past his prime. The idea that he’s going to keep up that level of scoring as he ages out of his 20s and into his early 30s? Not well-founded, that’s for sure.
So I’m uncertain where the value in that deal comes from if you’re Anaheim.
4. Wild ideas
Saw something on TSN the other day that the Canadiens and Senators may be able to solve each other’s problems by just trading their captains.
Obviously that couldn’t be a 1-for-1 deal because Erik Karlsson has a lot more value than Max Pacioretty, but it’s, uhh, intriguing for sure. With Shea Weber out until December, the Habs need a high-end defender and they don’t come much higher-end than Karlsson. And while the Senators would probably want a defenseman in addition to some scoring pop, there aren’t many guys who score at the rate Pacioretty does.
But could this actually work? The Senators would, once again, be kicking the can down the road because much like Karlsson and Kyle Turris before him, Pacioretty would want big money next summer and why would anyone on earth choose to tether themselves to this franchise long-term? Can you imagine if the Sens traded a generational talent for a good goalscorer who would almost certainly want out immediately?
Plus, for the Habs, why on earth would Karlsson sign there after this season? And are the Habs on Karlsson’s no-trade list? (Pacioretty doesn’t have any trade protection, not that he cares too much right now, you figure.)
You’re just swapping problems to divisional rivals in what are almost certain to be lost seasons for the respective franchises. It’s an interesting idea but that doesn’t mean it’s a good one for either team. Which, hey, given how these teams are run, is why it’s probably going to happen.
3. Getting very mad at the Coyotes
Ahhhh, can you believe the Coyotes made use of their cap space to acquire a good young player? I hate when that happens!
Now, to be fair, it happens a lot, but as has been pointed out by plenty of people this isn’t a case of the team using this contract to sneakily get above the salary floor. They were already well above it.
People just like to get mad at the Coyotes for existing and I get the impulse but also like, take it easy.
2. That Jussi Saros contract
Over the last two seasons, 53 goaltenders have played at least 2,500 minutes in all situations. Of that group, only nine have exceeded their expected save percentages (based on the quality of shots they faced) by 10 points.
Those goalies: Sergei Bobrovsky, Philipp Grubauer, John Gibson, Juuse Saros, Antti Raanta, Jon Quick, Corey Crawford, Roberto Luongo, and Carter Hutton.
You’ll note that a number of them are guys who were backups and moved into starting jobs — or at least 1b roles — this summer. Saros, fourth on the list at a .924 save percentage versus .909 expected, is potentially one of them.
His three-year contract carries an AAV of just $1.5 million and could provide the Preds with insane value when Pekka Rinne’s contract expires after this coming season. You never want to project a guy’s backup numbers as directly correlating with what he’d do as a starter, but that’s an impressive list to be on and well, the Preds have the personnel to make his job awful easy.
Even if Saros is only league-average, getting that for $1.5 million over the next three seasons would be amazing, especially because this team will need to re-sign Ryans Hartman and Ellis, and Kevin Fiala, next summer as well.
(Man, how does a team this good have 15 players signed for 2019-20 at just $56.2 million already? Come on.)
1. An interesting approach
New Rangers coach Dave Quinn hiring Greg Brown and David Oliver to be his assistants is something you don’t see much in the NHL.
These are two guys with plenty of assistant-coaching experience at the lower levels of the game (Brown with Boston College for more than a decade, Oliver with Lake Erie for just two seasons) but nothing on their resumes at the NHL level except for Oliver being Colorado’s director of player development for the last four years.
Non-traditional hires, to be sure, from a guy who was himself a non-traditional hire. One might normally expect a team with a coach who has as little big-league experience as Quinn to lean on him to hire guys named like Gord Toilet who has been an NHL assistant coach for each of the last 80 seasons and gave Gordie Howe his first cigarette or something.
But nope, two guys with no real experience at this level. Pretty bold move, but if you’re a team like the Rangers with plenty of money and a clear mandate to rebuild from the ground up, you have the luxury of fooling around with traditional thought and maybe getting somewhere with it.
Definitely something to watch this season, but knowing Quinn and Brown in particular from their college days, I bet it works out.
Also, the fact that Brown — long considered the heir apparent to Jerry York as the head coach of Boston College’s legendary program — made the jump here kinda indicates to me that, ahh, York ain’t retiring any time soon even though he’ll be 73 next week. Pretty interesting, to me.
(Not ranked this week: Ray Emery.
Seems like a lot of people in hockey took this one particularly hard. It was just horrible news.)
Ryan Lambert is a Puck Daddy columnist. His email is here and his Twitter is here.
(All statistics via Corsica unless otherwise noted.)
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Trending Topics: With new forwards in the fold, will Calgary break up 3M line?
Where does Elias Lindholm fit amongst Calgary’s lines? (Getty Images)
The Calgary Flames knew they had a lot of areas they needed to improve this summer, and perhaps the most pressing was the team’s forward group.
To that end, GM Brad Treliving brought in Elias Lindholm (via trade) and James Neal (via UFA signing). These are two perfectly good top-six forwards who can be productive in a way that many of the Flames’ other forward options really haven’t been in the past two seasons.
If you want a list of their top-six forwards during that time, talent-wise, the Flames could really only offer five names: Johnny Gaudreau, Sean Monahan, Matt Tkachuk, Mikael Backlund, and Michael Frolik.
One might also argue for Micheal Ferland, who went to Carolina in the Lindholm/Hamilton/Hanifin trade, but I would note that if you only rack up 66 points playing a huge chunk of your minutes with Gaudreau and Monahan, that’s the barest amount of work you can actually do and still be considered an NHL player.
Anyway, bringing in Lindholm and Neal brings the grand total of legitimate top-six forwards on the Flames roster to seven, which you’ll note is one greater than the six they need. It’s never a bad thing to have seven top-six forwards, of course. All the best teams do. But where the Flames in particular are concerned, the dynamic has the potential to create an interesting ripple effect for the roster.
Over the past two seasons — which are delineated here because that’s when Tkachuk came into the league — the Flames’ top two lines have been pretty clearly defined. The top line was Gaudreau, Monahan, and literally any guy the coach felt wouldn’t fall down too often. The second line was the 3M line of Tkachuk, Backlund, and Frolik. Both were, to one extent or another, pretty effective. None of those five named forwards scored fewer than 69 points over the past two seasons, and while Frolik’s lack of offensive production is arguably a problem, it’s also worth noting that both of his linemates averaged close to 50 points a season in these last two campaigns.
Moreover — and this is the important part — the 3M line is and has been a possession juggernaut of a quality rarely seen in the league. Over the last two years, only eight lines have been together for at least 800 minutes at 5-on-5, and these three lead the way in ice time at almost 1,360 minutes. Their expected goal difference over that time is pushing 57 percent. Just as a point of reference, Boston’s big line of Patrice Bergeron between Brad Marchand and David Pastrnak — the best line in the league — is only a little more than half a percentage point ahead of the 3M boys.
Which is to say, this is probably a line you don’t want to break up, even if their actual goals-for number (55.3 percent) is a smidge below what they “should” score based on expected goals.
More to the point, they dramatically underperformed expected goals in the Flames’ no-playoffs 2017-18 campaign (58 percent expected, 46.8 percent scored) due largely to a killed combination of rotten shooting luck and worse goaltending, which added up to a PDO of just 96.8.
So the question for the Flames, and specifically new coach Bill Peters, is a simple one: What do you do with both Lindholm and Neal? One of them is going to have to take bottom-six minutes if you don’t break up the 3Ms, which you shouldn’t do.
It would seem the natural fit for a trigger man like Neal is to play alongside Gaudreau and Monahan because, well, they’re going to create a lot of open looks and if someone who is a proven scorer without elite talent gets put with elite talent, that’s only going to result in more goals.
Plus, the Flames extended Lindholm on a new six-year deal with an AAV of $4.85 million just yesterday. Solid number, maybe a little too long on the term; that’s the cost of doing business. But that’s not the kind of contract you give to someone who’s going to be getting third-line-and-second-power-play-unit minutes, y’know? (Not that Frolik, at $4.3 million against the cap, is exactly making bottom-six money either.)
Let’s talk this out, then. Frolik played more than 200 minutes away from his normal running buddies last season (and almost 620 with). All of Tkachuk and Backlund’s underlying numbers suffered, but their goals-for percentage did not. In fact, they went from getting outscored by three to outscoring by one, which is a swing of about 1.2 goals per 60 minutes.
Pushing a negative goal difference into positive territory is always a good thing, so it seems as though Frolik would be the natural pick to be bumped to the third line, with the option, one supposes of changing it back if things go sideways with one of the other lines.
But again, you’re talking about a roughly 11-point swing in expected and actual goal difference, and one wonders if the 3Ms scored as they did in 2016-17, if the Flames are even pressing this hard to sign two top-six forwards or trade Dougie Hamilton at all. I mean this is the difference between perceived and actual performance; if a baseball player hits it right at the center fielder or shortstop all season, it doesn’t matter how often he wasn’t striking out. People, even in baseball’s mostly smart front offices, aren’t gonna look deep enough to see his BABIP was x far below the league average if that x is a big enough number.
It seems to me the Flames perhaps went searching to solve a problem they didn’t have, but again, having talent on the roster is certainly preferable to not having it. I wouldn’t break up the 3M line with a gun to my head, but I at least see where the decision-making comes from here.
In fact, I even see the argument for moving Frolik, who’s a good, solid two-way forward, onto a line with Sam Bennett and Mark Jankowski in hopes of making them both more productive and less likely to concede goals. But whether that actually works out depends a lot on Lindholm’s performance. Not that you’d move Backlund for Lindholm (right???).
I don’t think they really counted on Tkachuk to be as effective over two seasons as he has been, and Backlund’s big-money contract is directly attributable to that effectiveness. This is a unit that went from just okay and maybe a little underwhelming individually to incredible thanks mostly to what Tkachuk brings to the table.
There are, potentially, a number of creative and effective solutions here, and Lindholm being able to play both center and the right wing really improves the team’s flexibility. The club had to do something about the previously awful forward group and it has. One just hopes they have the good sense to stick with what works extremely well even if luck sometimes goes sideways.
Put another way, the Flames have undoubtedly gotten better up front. But they’ve got one hell of a gift horse in that 3M line and it really seems like Treliving is looking it straight in the mouth.
Ryan Lambert is a Puck Daddy columnist. His email is here and his Twitter is here.
All stats via Corsica unless otherwise noted.
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What We Learned: The Marc-Andre Fleury contract is inexplicable
There’s no doubting the importance Fleury has to the organization as a sort of goaltender-slash-spokesman, but it seems they put the latter title first in signing this contract. (Getty)
I have been trying to wrap my head around the deal Marc-Andre Fleury signed with Vegas since it was first announced.
There is not a universe in which it makes any kind of sense.
For one thing, the Golden Knights signed Fleury a year early, and coming off a career-best season in which he dragged an otherwise not-great team to a Cup Final. As a general rule, you don’t want to pay guys who get bad teams to places no one thought they could go the kind of money commensurate with reaching those levels.
It should be obvious to everyone on earth that Fleury is not as good as he was in the regular season or playoffs. This was a .927 season — the highest of his career by a decent margin — followed by a .927 playoff that was much, much more impressive before he totally melted down against Washington. That kind of outsized outlier performance screams “Beware,” but George McPhee refused to heed that call.
Instead, he shackled his club to a goalie that, while popular in the city and among his teammates, is signed until he’s well past 37 years old. At a $7 million AAV.
To be fair to both sides here, Fleury has almost inexplicably gone .920 over his last 200 regular-season games, and .920 goalies have to get paid, but they don’t have to get paid a year early when you’re only bidding against yourself, and they absolutely shouldn’t get paid through their age-37 seasons. The fact of the matter is that it’s quite likely Fleury turns back into something resembling his career average, which is right around the league average.
And to give a little more credit to both sides here, the money probably doesn’t matter that much because if Vegas hasn’t changed its plans for building slowly through the draft, trades and so on, then you gotta spend money on somebody, and the top line, plus Paul Stastny, plus Fleury seems like a perfectly fair place to do it.
There is, of course, no use arguing whether the money or term are good. Neither are. Everyone knows that. You can’t justify paying a career-average goaltender $7 million dollars for his age-35, 36, and 37 seasons. Full stop. Unless this guy is Dominik Hasek — and he of course is not — this is a nonsense signing.
Maybe people won’t notice so much if Fleury doesn’t perform well next season — or any of the three after that — because Vegas isn’t likely to keep having the kind of offensive success it did last year, but even if you’re getting better-than-average goaltending, it won’t be so much better that Vegas can reasonably sustain the success it had last year. They probably won’t come close.
That likelihood creates a lot of problems, not the least of which is that we don’t know what the fan support in Vegas looks like when the team isn’t any good. Not that they haven’t cultivated a solid base or anything here, and not that people don’t love Fleury in particular, but if this team finishes in the bottom-10 next year, the year after that, etc., will people keep showing up? Fleury was always going to be the poster boy of the franchise, regardless of how he did last season, so now just as everyone else seems to have increased their own internal expectations for how good this team can be going forward, this contract might do the same for Fleury.
Again, if he’s average, or worse, at some point in this contract, one wonders how the revelation that this was a bad contract is actually taken. People in this sport are willing to throw all but the absolute very best goalies under the bus, and this particular goalie now has an untradeable contract.
More to the point, though, the issue is that Vegas just put Fleury into a tie for the third-highest goalie cap hit in the league. He now trails only Carey Price and Henrik Lundqvist, and is dead even with Tuukka Rask. I don’t think anyone on earth would confuse Fleury’s career numbers with any of those three players, and Lundqvist, a guaranteed first-ballot Hall of Famer, the best goalie of his generation by a good distance, is the only one who signed in his mid-30s.
I guess the primary reason I don’t understand this contract is that it didn’t have to happen. Vegas wasn’t under any type of time crunch to sign him before a certain date (well, I guess technically July 1, 2019, but they had dozens of weeks) and seem to have wrung no type of hometown discount from getting out in front of this issue now. They bought as high as humanly possible on a goalie who, unlike another recent goalie signing in Connor Hellebuyck, isn’t likely to maintain even previous levels of performance. Everything after 34 or 35 is a total guessing game. Guys can go from great to bad in a single offseason. And put simply, they often do.
So it’s difficult to say what Vegas was doing here, except making a PR signing now, on an otherwise quiet day for the league. There’s no doubting the importance Fleury has to the organization as a sort of goaltender-slash-spokesman, but it seems they put the latter title first in signing this contract.
What We Learned
Anaheim Ducks: Why would you turn to Adam Henrique to spark your offense? He’s perfectly good but 50 points seems like his absolute ceiling.
Arizona Coyotes: The Coyotes faced what could fairly be considered “undue backlash” for that Hossa trade. Like, I get it because they trade for dead money a lot but they got a good player out of it and it doesn’t really matter. Stop bailing out Chicago, sure, but whatever.
Boston Bruins: The idea that the Bruins would shake up the defense, perhaps by trading Torey Krug, does not seem well-considered.
Buffalo Sabres: Gotta keep locking in those 2015 BU Terriers.
Calgary Flames: I easily can see the Flames being a very bottom-of-the-barrel playoff team next season, for sure. Not quite certain where that actually gets them, but they could do it in that division. For the record, I can also see them missing by a dozen points.
Carolina Hurricanes: Yeah when you put it this way: Adding de Haan and Hamilton to your blue line is a pretty good upgrade for just about anyone in the league.
Chicago: I really hope Corey Crawford is over all his health issues but man, imagine what happens to this team if he isn’t. Yikes.
Colorado Avalanche: Speaking of which, Grubauer being a 1b in Colorado seems pretty good but also who really knows?
Columbus Blue Jackets: That’s some nice value for Oliver Bjorkstrand. He seems like he could turn into a very useful forward.
Dallas Stars: Yeah, sure, the Stars should trade for literally everyone. Why not.
Detroit Red Wings: Really wonder how much more room Anthony Mantha has to grow here. Another 24-goal season would be a nice resume-builder.
Edmonton Oilers: Well, “impressive” is one word for it.
Florida Panthers: We’re at the “I’m writing about AHL depth signings” part of the summer already? Good lord.
Los Angeles Kings: This headline is the reason the phrase “don’t put the cart before the horse” was invented.
Minnesota Wild: Yes they absolutely have hit their ceiling. Definitely.
Montreal Canadiens: The Habs keep signing first-round picks, which isn’t a bad idea because they tend to be talented players, but also: Ehhhh.
Nashville Predators: Haven’t seen much this summer to convince me shouldn’t be the Cup favorite again this year. Doesn’t mean they’ll win but this is a great team despite having no additions.
New Jersey Devils: Oh come on.
New York Islanders: Get ready for Barzal to have way too much expectation heaped on him in the next few years. Good luck kid.
New York Rangers: Imagine thinking there’s a “right” guy to be your enforcer who isn’t “nobody.”
Ottawa Senators: No, don’t do it Brady!!!
Philadelphia Flyers: Stop getting your hopes up about prospects based on rookie camp performances. Come on.
Pittsburgh Penguins: Giving Daniel Sprong a chance to actually play at the NHL level seems like a good idea. He was ridiculous in the AHL last year as a rookie.
San Jose Sharks: Jeez there are a lot of jokes to make here.
St. Louis Blues: Ah yes I have to agree: The Blues’ recent failures are definitely Vladimir Tarasenko’s fault.
Tampa Bay Lightning: Brian Bradley being on the Lightning’s Mount Rushmore is absolutely indefensible.
Toronto Maple Leafs: The Leafs keep making nice, cheap signings and that’s what you gotta do if you have a bunch of expensive elite players.
Vancouver Canucks: Hard to put yourself in the mindset of being a coach who has to run a mess of a team for the full 82 knowing you’re not coming into the playoffs.
Vegas Golden Knights: Important to get out in front of those high expectations now.
Washington Capitals: Totally have my popcorn ready for that Tom Wilson deal.
Winnipeg Jets: Mark Scheifele is great but he would never ever get anything resembling a John Tavares contract.
Gold Star Award
That Phil Danault contract is like a Magic Eye puzzle. You really have to not think about it to see the reason why it’s a value.
Minus of the Weekend
Rest in peace, Ray Emery. Truly awful news.
Perfect HFBoards Trade Proposal of the Week
User “Jokerz89” is an agent of chaos.
Something along the lines of Krug, Backes, Lauzon, Senyshyn, and a 1st for Nugent-Hopkins and Klefbom
Signoff
Well Seymour, you are an odd fellow, but I must say: You steam a good ham.
Ryan Lambert is a Puck Daddy columnist. His email is here and his Twitter is here.
(All stats via Corsica unless otherwise noted.)
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Trending Topics: Connor Hellebuyck and paying for goaltending
Connor Hellebuyck just made himself some serious coin. (Jason Halstead/Getty Images)
Connor Hellebuyck became the first of Winnipeg’s notable restricted free agents to get a new contract this summer, signing Thursday for six years at $6.167 million AAV.
It’s a perfectly reasonable number for a 25-year-old goaltender who was a couple years away from UFA status and who was a Vezina finalist this season. The deal puts him sixth in cap hits among goalies, which might seem a little high given that Hellebuyck has exactly one season as a starter under his belt. But teams always pay out the nose for big contract years, and he’s probably still improving given that he’s only 25.
The fact is, though, that from the Jets’ perspective, a .920-plus save percentage seems like a reasonable expectation based on his complete CV, from college to the AHL to his career .917 as an NHLer who played his early years behind a notoriously leaky defense.
Yes, .920 is a lofty expectation in reality; over the last five seasons, only seven goaltenders have played at least 120 games and also posted a .920 save percentage or better. That Hellebuyck is now the sixth-highest-paid netminder in the league says that’s what the Jets want from him.
For reference, the seven goalies north of that number are John Gibson, Carey Price, Antti Raanta, Corey Crawford, Sergei Bobrovsky, Roberto Luongo (what a marvel!), and Tuukka Rask. And to give you an idea of how tight things are at the very top of the league, the gap between Gibson and Rask is about three extra goals per 1,000 shots faced. Of course, the gap between that and the league average is an additional five pucks per 1,000 shots, so margins are already pretty thin.
Which is, I guess, the issue with teams giving goaltenders big money. The guys who are the absolute very best make a huge difference for their teams, but the margins are closer than you might think. Take Price, for example. It’s reasonable to say he’s the best goalie of the last five years: .923 over 248 games behind a team that hasn’t been that good.
He allowed just 574 goals on more than 7,400 shots, but over a five-year period, he only prevented the Canadiens’ opponents from scoring about 46 goals versus what an average goaltender would have done with the exact same workload. This is a guy who gets paid $10 million against the cap, and when healthy is probably worth that. Winning and losing in hockey is done on razor-thin margins, so a guy who saves you fewer than 10 goals a season versus an average player is surprising valuable.
Plus, as the old saying goes, “Goalies are voodoo.” Which is to say that their performance is very difficult to predict. Let’s circle back to Hellebuyck: He was .918 in limited appearances as a 22-year-old and looked for all the world like he was the Jets’ surefire starter. Except he sucked in his first chance at the No. 1 job, going .907 in 56 appearances simply because Winnipeg didn’t have any better options. But then last season, he rebounded to be .924 in 67 games and was a big part of the reason the Jets were so difficult to play against from October to May.
So the Jets just gave their goalie with fewer than 150 games of NHL experience the sixth-biggest cap hit in the league, and are clearly counting on him to be the goalie he was most recently, instead of the one whose career save percentage before 2017-18 was well below the league average.
On the surface, most of the goaltending stats (save percentage minus expected save percentage, goals saved above average, etc.) kind of indicate that among NHL starters, Hellebuyck is pretty good — certainly in the top 15 in the world — but maybe not worth as much as this new contract.
No one can know what the Jets are really getting here, but they’re making an educated guess that the nearly 4,300 shots Hellebuyck has faced tells the story regardless of the most recent performance, and that based on aging curves and all that, the team will get more of the .920 version than the .910. And sure, plenty of goalies have had a good year or two then flamed out; the Penguins have to be concerned about that with Matt Murray, whose performance this year versus that of Marc-Andre Fleury’s unrepeatable .930 with Vegas led to a lot of tiresome “did the Penguins choose the right goalie” pieces.
But a reasonable basis for comparison here is to compare Hellebuyck to his peer group. Take all the U-25 goalies in the league over the last three seasons and say “What does Hellebuyck look like there?” Again, aging curves are important to keep in mind, because U-25s are technically still improving, and finding ones with the kind of workload Hellebuyck has shouldered in his two-plus seasons is not all that common. In fact, he’s second among U-25 goalies in terms of minutes played, only about 240 behind John Gibson.
And he’s tied for third in save percentage among the group of seven U-25 goaltenders who played at least 80 games over the last three seasons. His .917 is dead even with Andrei Vasilevskiy and Matt Murray, both of whom I think we’d say are really good goalies (though again, Murray was abysmal this past season), behind Gibson and Robin Lehner, who clock in at .923 and .921, respectively.
But in the end, the reason you pay a lot of money for star players is that they drive goal difference in your direction more heavily than anyone else, right? And because goalies are more valuable in terms of doing that, based on the amount of minutes they play, it’s reasonable to argue that all but the highest-paid goalies are, in fact, undervalued in the market.
Gibson is likely to cash in when his contract is up next summer, probably to a greater extent than Hellebuyck, and Tampa can still expect strong value from the Vasilevskiy deal for the next two seasons before he gets insanely expensive. Murray’s current deal also lasts for two more years and I’d probably bet on a bounce back season, though to what extent is hard to guess; his early career numbers behind an elite team are so good that to set them as a good expectation is probably unfair to him.
As a general rule, if you’re posting any save percentage at or above Hellebuyck’s career average of .917, you’re probably worth a boatload of money. But it’s also easy to understand why anyone would look at any goalie contract over $5 million and say, “Ehh, that’s risky.” But in terms of the raw cost of every point in the standings, any performance resembling another Vezina-worthy campaign will pay for itself very, very quickly
Murray showed this year that the bottom can drop out at any second and there’s no guarantee that it ever comes back, and the reams of criticism Rask has absorbed for half a decade despite being one of the best goaltenders of his generation, show that unless a goalie is .920-plus literally every year, people are always going to have their doubts.
Hell, that kind of performance wasn’t even enough to keep Roberto Luongo in Vancouver, and it took a second Stanley Cup before anyone acknowledged that Corey Crawford was anything close to an elite goaltender.
So again, I get the due caution people want to pay a goalie contract, but if you have a goalie you like, you gotta pay to keep him around. And Hellebuyck has given Winnipeg relatively little reason to dislike him both in his first three seasons and for the next six.
It may seem like a little too much money for a goalie that might just be a little better than average, but maybe overpaying is preferable than the alternative. And based on its goaltending history, Winnipeg should know that better than anyone.
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Ryan Lambert is a Puck Daddy columnist. His email is here and his Twitter is here.
All stats via Corsica unless otherwise noted.
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Puck Daddy Countdown: Happy trails Alex Burrows
Alex Burrows had himself a very fine NHL career. (Jeff Vinnick/NHLI via Getty Images)”n
7. The Habs
On the one hand, the news that Shea Weber is going to miss probably the first two months of the season is a major bummer for a team that was already dealing heavily in major bummers.
Guys want out, and who can blame them, and now any hope that Weber could be anything resembling a No. 1 defenseman after playing just 26 games last year are potentially dashed. It’s not so much that he’s going to miss a quarter of the season, so much as it is he missed like two-thirds of last year’s too.
This is just starting to feel like the Hockey Gods’ way of piling misery on a team already buried in an avalanche of it. “You want to trade the $10 million hospital donation guy for an older, worse player? Let’s see how that works out for you.” Weber’s odds of being as effective as he was before these injuries are probably pretty low. He’s turning 33 in about a month and guys don’t come back from these kinds of injuries playing the same way they used to, right? More concerning for the Canadiens is that he’s locked in for nearly $7.86 million AAV (although at much less than that in terms of actual dollars) through…….. 2026.
I did NHL Network radio last Friday and they asked what potential solutions the Habs could come up with here. Short of trading Max Pacioretty for a top-three defenseman, which would create its own problems, there’s nothing I can see. There are no particularly good defensemen left on the UFA market. You just have to bump everyone up in the lineup and grit your teeth for the first two months of the season. What a nightmare.
Did Marc Bergevin run over a witch’s dog? Like, man.
6. A reason to leave
It’s probably not a good sign when you announce a cheap four-year contract for a player and the immediate response from a bunch of hockey diehards and professional journalists covering the sport for a living is, “Who the hell is that?”
Such was the reaction when the Islanders gave Ross Johnston four years at $1 million AAV. But it’s understandable: Johnston got more years on this deal than he has career NHL goals. He’s 24, had almost 200 PIMs in just 62 games across the AHL and NHL last season, and was in the ECHL for a spell as recently as 2015-16.
This is a guy who is, uhh, bad. He’s bad. No other way to say it. An insanely ineffective player who only got signed because he averages like two hits a game and Lou Lamoriello loves guys like that.
People wonder why John Tavares left? The Leafs said they’d sign Matthews, Marner, and Nylander. Lamoriello probably said he’d get to play alongside Val Filppula.
I mean honestly, look at what Lou has done since July 1. Traded for(!) Matt Martin, signed Leo Komarov for FOUR years, locked in Filppula, extended Ross. Like, what on earth is going on with this franchise?
This team might as well not play this season. They’re gonna be bottom-three, easy. How are you not insanely depressed if you’re an Isles fan? How do you not look at Tavares leaving and go, “Well no kidding.”
5. Back and forth
I think the worst thing in the history of hockey is this Karlsson trade and all the rumors about “Tampa is the frontrunner, now it’s Dallas, no it’s Tampa again, ah it’s Dallas.”
Especially because as Steve Yzerman said on the Kucherov extension’s conference call, he never really felt like the trade was close to being done, let alone completed pending the trade call. Now, that might be a guy throwing out a smoke screen, for sure, but at the same time, maybe not.
This is going back to that thing I said a few weeks ago about not really believing all these things until things are well and truly settled. At this time of year, people have an interest in selling you these rumors, and you’re a lot more likely to bite on them because there’s less going on in the sport.
What would really be funny is if Vegas came out of nowhere and made the trade after a relatively quiet free agency period. I’m rooting for that as much as I am to see Karlsson on Tampa.
4. Being best buds
Because the Toronto media is absolutely awesome and good, they’re already ginning up controversy about how John Tavares and Auston Matthews are NOT FRIENDS AT ALL and ACTUALLY ENEMIES WHO HATE EACH OTHER.
Imagine being dumb enough to believe these kinds of rumors. Because it was like three weeks ago that they were trying to be like, “Auston Matthews is plotting to murder Mike Babcock click here for proof,” and then both of them were like, “C’mon guys,” so we’ve moved on to the Battle For the No. 1 Center Spot: This Time It’s Personal.
I hope Tavares and Matthews just start holding hands all the time so Steve Simmons and Damien Cox end up having nervous breakdowns.
3. Wanting out
So it turns out the Blue Jackets aren’t doing too good with Artemi Panarin these days because he doesn’t really know if he wants to live in Columbus and play for this particular team for the next eight years.
One wonders how much a certain coach has to do with that (ha ha ha), but also like, it’s a small market and a team that historically isn’t very good. I thought they were well above the league average this past season, thanks in large part to Panarin coming aboard, but they still lost in the first round (again) and they’ve still won a grand total of five playoff games in franchise history.
Wouldn’t you at least want to look at what your options are these days? Especially because of how much teams are willing to give difference-making UFAs a la Tavares.
Not that Panarin is Tavares, necessarily, but this is a guy who’s been in the league for three years and he’s seventh in scoring over that stretch. You don’t think a 27-year-old Panarin couldn’t push $9 million with just about any team in the league in the same kind of UFA environment?
Unless I were absolutely convinced I was on one of the absolute best teams in the league, I would 100000 percent be totally willing to go to market. It’s not even a hard decision.
2. Super team likers
Hey speaking of which, shout out to the Bolts for locking in Kucherov for eight years at a relative bargain price of $9.5 million AAV. Most of that’s in bonuses but who cares. He’s 25 and he’s second in scoring over the last two seasons behind Connor McDavid, who makes considerably more than that.
Kucherov for-sure left money on the table here, but that’s the price you pay to be meaningfully competitive for a Stanley Cup for three, four, five years. Plus the fact of the no-state-income-tax thing. Plus the fact of not having to pack up your life. Plus the fact of $9.5 million being a hell of a lot of money regardless of how much more might have been available.
But the thing with this contract, and also the rumors about Karlsson wanting to dictate his landing spot, and also the Panarin rumors, maybe we’re starting to see the NHL going in the direction of the NBA. Maybe elite talents are starting to realize they can punch their ticket anywhere they want, and they want to play with other great players and have a shot at a championship while also getting rich.
I’ve long felt hockey players are too willing to commit to bad teams long term out of, what, loyalty? Maybe they’re finally figuring out that this isn’t necessarily the best path forward. And that might be what finally shatters the stultifying parity that’s made this league so damn boring in the cap era.
1. Alex Burrows
Happy trails to a guy who didn’t make his NHL debut until he was almost 25, and still somehow managed to play more than 900 career games there. He scored 200-plus goals and 400-plus points, largely as a result of getting to play a huge chunk of his career with the Sedins.
But while I understand why people don’t like the player, for obvious reasons, you gotta respect the fact that he’s probably the best linemate the Sedins ever had and made a whole ton of money for a guy who played parts of four different seasons in the ECHL.
Plus he did the Marc Crawford impression that was so good and is probably the best ball hockey player ever. Have a good one.
(Not ranked this week: Slowing down.
Well we’re not even to July 15 and it already feels like nothing’s gonna happen for the rest of the summer. Probably the Karlsson trade will keep us all busy for a few days but otherwise what are we really looking forward to? The damn Patrick Maroon signing? Cool.)
Ryan Lambert is a Puck Daddy columnist. His email is here and his Twitter is here.
(All statistics via Corsica unless otherwise noted.)
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What We Learned: The NHL's other looming free agent apocalypse
Blake Wheeler will be difficult for the Jets to retain. (Jonathan Kozub/NHLI via Getty Images)
After all the attention that has been understandably paid to Toronto’s current and future salary cap situation, it got me thinking about other elite teams and what their cap situations look like going forward.
Obviously Tampa is going to have some big issues dealing with their roster, even before the potential addition of Erik Karlsson, simply because they have so many elite and very good players. They’re already close to a cap crunch of sorts, and next summer they will have to strike new deals for Nikita Kucherov, Yanni Gourde, Brayden Point, Anton Stralman, Slater Koekkoek, and Jake Dotchin, among other players.
It’s therefore likely that seismic changes are on the way for that roster, but this is something that’s already pretty broadly acknowledged league-wide. However, there’s another top team that is going to be staring down some serious issues in the future and could end up having to make some difficult decisions in short order.
Winnipeg currently has the lowest cap obligation in the league as of this writing (less than $52.7 million, giving them about $26.8 million to play with right now). As we await word of new contracts for seven restricted free agents. While most of them aren’t going to be too expensive, the new deals for Connor Hellebuyck and Jacob Trouba will likely be significant. Altogether you can expect those seven guys to pull perhaps $20 million against the cap, which leaves the Jets with plenty of room this year.
That is, one supposes, a benefit of finding a buyer for Steve Mason’s contract and Paul Stastny bouncing for Vegas with no replacement in sight except probably from within.
But it’s next year that’s the problem. The Jets will enter the 2019 offseason with about as much money in cap obligations as they have this year, but a good chunk of the core likely locked up long-term. However, they will also have to re-sign Patrik Laine and Kyle Connor among their RFAs, and both will probably be quite costly. Laine especially could potentially command at least Leon Draisaitl money, if not more (one supposes this depends heavily on what the Leafs give their pending RFAs). Again, these are deals the Jets can comfortably fit under the cap.
But it’s the UFAs that pose some serious problems. Can they reasonably afford to retain or find replacements for Blake Wheeler and Tyler Myers? You can say what you like about Myers’ contributions to the team, especially vis a vis his $5.5 million cap hit, but he’s at least a second-pair defenseman and those seem to be getting fairly expensive these days; you can probably get an upgrade at the same price point, but not as much as one might think, even if the cap goes up substantially again (which it probably won’t).
However, you absolutely won’t find a reasonable replacement for Wheeler, who’s a point-a-game guy and makes just $5.5 million against the cap. So the question becomes how much do you pay him, since he’ll be 32 to start the new deal, and what do you reasonably expect from him? Because if you’re committing multiple years and a raise to a player that far past 30, you might be in a bit of trouble sooner than later.
And while there will be a few intriguing UFA forwards potentially hitting the market that same summer (Tyler Seguin, Jeff Skinner, Jordan Eberle) the question, again, becomes what you pay those guys to hopefully be almost as good as Wheeler.
The issue for the Jets isn’t so much the salary cap as it is the fact that they’re a budget team. They have a small venue in a small market and have traditionally shied away from really approaching the cap ceiling. Last year they were more than $5 million short of it, and the season before that their obligations were about $6.5 million short. So the question becomes not only if the Jets will be able to keep those guys, but if they have the stomach to push that close to the cap ceiling (likely over $80 million at the very least) to do it. They have never exceeded $70 million in cap obligations, and though they probably will this year, one wonders if there’s a natural stopping point south of whatever the cap’s upper limit is.
If so, that creates some potentially uncomfortable questions for Kevin Cheveldayoff. On the one hand, the Jets are likely to be a top-five team in the league again this season and that carries with it the need to be as competitive as possible with an elite roster. But can this team really afford to potentially let Wheeler and/or Myers walk in free agency and get nothing in return?
There is only one bad contract on the roster that could be moveable, because that ill-advised Dmitry Kulikov deal expires after 2019-20 and you might be able to talk someone into taking your $4.33 million bottom-pair defender if you sweeten the pot or pull off a stunning con.
I don’t know that there’s a comfortable answer in what to do here, especially if there’s an internal budget that must be adhered to. You probably can’t trade a Wheeler-type player if you’re in the thick of a divisional title and potentially going after the Presidents’ Trophy. But if you keep him, don’t win the Cup, and then maybe have to let him walk in free agency, that’s going to be tough to deal with organizationally.
Again, you don’t often get multiple years of a guy scoring a point a game for just $5.6 million, so the Jets have enjoyed a significant luxury. They likely won’t get anything like it again in this league.
This is, to be sure, a rich man’s problem. When you have so many good players it becomes difficult to pay them all, it’s a lot better than the alternative. And Cheveldayoff has really put the Jets in a position where they have relatively few contracts on the books that could even be considered “iffy.”
How he maneuvers out of this fix will be pretty telling when it comes to the future of one of the best young teams in the league.
What We Learned
Anaheim Ducks: The Ducks’ power play wasn’t that good the past few years, but is it really something they can fix?
Arizona Coyotes: It’s good that we’re getting more stories about how it’s not easy to be a person of color and play this sport at a high level.
Boston Bruins: Yeah, pretty hard to disagree with this assessment.
Buffalo Sabres: Jack Eichel has been in the league too long to be able to change his number without also changing teams. It’s unacceptable.
Calgary Flames: If Spencer Foo makes the Flames’ roster, that’s probably not a good sign for the Flames’ depth.
Carolina Hurricanes: You really have to like that Calvin de Haan deal but at the same time, it’s not some sort of huge game-changer.
Chicago: Bowman hasn’t made a move to improve this team’s not-good defense, which seems like it’s not a good idea.
Colorado Avalanche: Where did anyone on earth get the idea that John Tavares might have even considered signing with Colorado? Come on.
Columbus Blue Jackets: That was a nice little extension for Boone Jenner. Can’t be mad at it.
Dallas Stars: If you get the chance to add Erik Karlsson, you take it regardless of what’s being asked. But Jeff Skinner wouldn’t be a bad consolation prize.
Detroit Red Wings: It’s possible that Filip Zadina would be able to play in the AHL if he doesn’t make the Red Wings roster, but he’ll probably make the Red Wings roster.
Edmonton Oilers: Who could have seen this Lucic deal turning into a nightmare on the day it was signed? No one!
Florida Panthers: The Panthers are gonna be a cap-limit team. Probably should have kept those Vegas guys, eh?
Los Angeles Kings: The Kings have invested in a startup with four employees and no headquarters that makes it cheaper to make good ice for hockey rinks. I’ll believe it when I see it.
Minnesota Wild: Remember when it used to be a big scandal to suggest the Wild didn’t have a lot of impact talent on the roster? Well…
Montreal Canadiens: This Shea Weber thing is so awful for the Canadiens and Marc Bergevin specifically. There are EIGHT years left on this guy’s deal.
Nashville Predators: The Preds just made a big free agency mistake.
New Jersey Devils: No. Next question.
New York Islanders: This is one of those “whether he likes it or not” things.
New York Rangers: A thing teams with cap space should always do is try to get in on trades as third-party negotiators, take on some salary and get picks and prospects out of it. Always use as much cap space as you can if it gets you something.
Ottawa Senators: This headline is bleak.
Philadelphia Flyers: Based on where Christian Folin went to college, this is a very savvy pickup.
Pittsburgh Penguins: Barring a bounceback year from Matt Murray (possible), the Pens are firmly outside the top five teams in the league but also probably somewhere solidly in the top eight.
San Jose Sharks: Nice little contract for Dylan DeMelo. Term and money look good for both sides.
St. Louis Blues: Dmitrij Jaskin never really panned out as expected, huh? He only had six goals last season.
Tampa Bay Lightning: Pretty amazing how fast you can go from “we might be done for the summer” to “we might trade for one of the best players alive.”
Toronto Maple Leafs: We’re still gonna act like the Leafs have the flexibility to trade for a defenseman of note, huh?
Vancouver Canucks: Im… improve the power play? Am I reading that right?
Vegas Golden Knights: I love this Colin Miller deal. Really good player signed cheap for his entire prime.
Washington Capitals: Real nervous to see how this Tom Wilson deal works out. It’s gonna be bonkers.
Winnipeg Jets: This is bold prognostication.
Gold Star Award
This is very nice from Vegas.
Minus of the Weekend
Just trade Karlsson already!!!
Perfect HFBoards Trade Proposal of the Week
User “xNogaitx” has it figured out.
To Montreal:
Carl Hagelin (4M)
Daniel Sprong (750k)
2019 1st round pick
Conditional 2021 2nd round pick *
To Pittsburgh:
Max Pacioretty (4.5M) – Retained 2M
Paul Byron (1.16M)
Signoff
No mother, it’s just the Northern Lights.
Ryan Lambert is a Puck Daddy columnist. His email is here and his Twitter is here.
(All stats via Corsica unless otherwise noted.)
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Trending Topics: You have to take the Leafs at their word
Auston Matthews and William Nylander are re-signing priorities for the Maple Leafs. (Kevin Sousa/NHLI via Getty Images)
By all accounts, the Toronto Maple Leafs’ leadership group laid every card in the deck on the table in courting John Tavares.
Whatever Tavares wanted to know about the team’s present and future plans, Kyle Dubas and Co. were more than happy to accommodate him. This is an interesting strategy because, if he hadn’t chosen Toronto, in theory, he would have been able to tell the GM of his new team, “Here’s everything Toronto wants to do for the next five years.”
But perhaps because of that honesty and certainly in large part because of how clear and achievable the vision the Leafs laid out was, Tavares chose his childhood team and created an elite power in the league in one fell swoop.
A big part of that future plan, presumably, is how the club will handle the pending restricted free agency of its elite young forwards. William Nylander is currently out of contract and likely due a nice raise from his entry-level deal; he is on two consecutive 61-point seasons and will be paid commensurately, after an adjustment for the fact that he’s an RFA. I wouldn’t want to try to nail down the number too much, but he’ll almost certainly make north of $5 million against the cap on what I’d expect to be a long-term deal.
Next summer is the real problem, of course, when the Leafs will have to pay Auston Matthews and Mitch Marner — both of whom produce even more than Nylander — as well. Marner will cost probably a little bit more than Nylander but perhaps not much, barring an explosive offensive season this year which is certainly possible. Matthews will be able to command an eight-figure salary.
This has naturally led to a lot of fretting about how the Leafs will make it work, and it’s understandable for people to wonder if they can at all. After all, Toronto has a lot of money tied up in guys like Patrick Marleau and Nikita Zaitsev who don’t pull their weight (AAV-wise), and in theory, they can jettison those players in one way or another.
But with all that concern for how he’s going to be able to pull off this kind of deal, Dubas has been steadfast: “We can re-sign all of them, and we will.” Literally, every Maple Leafs decision-maker asked about it has expressed utter confidence in this approach. It’s not even being discussed as a vague or likely possible outcome. They’re just straight-up saying it’s going to happen.
How all that comes to pass is obviously up for interpretation, but it’s rare we see statements with this total absence of equivocation or outs being provided. Effectively, Dubas is handing Brendan Shanahan a filled-out pink and saying, “If I can’t keep the Nylander/Marner/Matthews/Tavares group together next summer, feel free to use this.”
Because to come out and say the things he’s now saying with so much force and confidence — and certainly with Shanahan’s full backing — that to not get it done has to be pretty close to a fireable offense.
That doesn’t mean the decisions won’t be tough, though. There was some amount of concern (though not this much) about how Edmonton would make it work with all their talent, such as it was, when Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl had their big raises kick in. Peter Chiarelli’s answer was to trade Jordan Eberle and further hamstring his own team.
Now, that’s not a good answer, mind you, but it’s an answer. One doubts that Toronto would be so foolish as to make a trade like that, but if they have to trade Nazem Kadri, find a buyer for Freddie Andersen when Garrett Sparks is ready, or let Jake Gardiner walk in free agency to keep those four forwards together, that’s the cost of doing business. But unlike the Oilers, the Leafs don’t have a ton of money tied up in depth players. That will be even less of a problem when Ron Hainsey comes off the books next summer.
Obviously, none of us know what the salary cap is going to look like next summer, but I wouldn’t go around expecting an increase on par with what we saw this year. Likewise, it’s impossible to predict whether Nylander, for example, gets hurt this season, that might affect his cap number. If Marner only puts up 55 points or something (also unlikely) that could impact his salary as well.
Moreover, who’s to say that all three taking some level of a hometown discount to keep the band together hasn’t been discussed? I wouldn’t expect any of them to take substantially less than their market value, but if the team can get all three to do that collectively, that would be a big help.
It’s not unheard of for guys to do that, either. San Jose built its great core and kept them all together for years, remaining competitive the whole time, because of solid management decisions farther down the roster to keep costs down. Toronto will need to make similar decisions and find landing spots for at least one or two guys, but the idea that they would let one of these three pending RFAs go elsewhere at the expense of keeping 52-year-old Patrick Marleau is absurd.
Again, it’s more than fair to wonder how they make it all happen, and there’s certainly an element of “show me” to it. But at some point when the Leafs’ front office universally says, “This is 100 percent going to happen,” you have to believe that they’re not lying to you or about to do some sort of semantic sleight of hand.
What further proof of this do you need than Tavares’s commitment to the team? He could have made more money for a longer time in Brooklyn. He could have gotten a comparable deal from Tampa or Dallas. But he chose Toronto and was not shy about saying that it was because their plan for the seven years of his deal was spelled out clearly and effectively.
Ryan Lambert is a Puck Daddy columnist. His email is here and his Twitter is here.
All stats via Corsica unless otherwise noted.
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Puck Daddy Countdown: John Tortorella gets his feud on
John Totorella is running his mouth once again. (Jamie Sabau/NHLI via Getty Images)
9. Those Canucks signings
Just in case you thought that maybe the Canucks were only doing the thing of signing not-great players to big contracts because they wanted to stay competitive for the Sedins, well, July 1 refutes that pretty effectively.
The money they gave out to Jay Beagle and Antoine Roussel were so far beyond bad — four years each at $3 million AAV — as to defy explanation. For all the credit this team gets for drafting well under Jim Benning, their NHL talent evaluation is quite frankly embarrassing. Yeah young guys need veteran leadership to learn how to play in the NHL and the Canucks have a lot of young guys, but you don’t need to give Jay Beagle “CONOR SHEARY” money and four years to find veterans who can help with that.
These guys just aren’t effective NHLers and for a rebuilding team to torch a roster spot on them for a year or even two, well, you gotta pay somebody with the cap going up this much. But for four years? It doesn’t begin to make sense.
This team is now married to two guys, who are past their primes and only getting older, while they’re supposed to be rebuilding. The idea that they’ll take roster spots and important roles from guys who need to develop is hardly farfetched.
This is everything wrong with the Canucks regime in a nutshell, and there’s no way it’s getting fixed any time soon.
8. Pursuing Slava Voynov
The idea that anyone would want a player like Voynov is understandable on the surface. When last he was in the NHL, he was a high-end second-pairing guy and there are a lot of teams that would love to have someone like that. Hell, for the right price there isn’t a team in the league he wouldn’t fit on.
In theory.
In actual practice, of course, one must consider the moral implications of why Voynov is available in the first place, and what that means in a “Hockey Is For Everyone” league with a Statement of Principles that has been, from what I understand, endorsed by the pope.
If the league allows him to come back — it shouldn’t, regardless of his legal status — any team that debases itself to try to sign him, of which there will be several, should be ashamed of itself. The facts of his case are not up for dispute and the pictures are gruesome reminders of what Voynov thinks is acceptable, based on the fact that there were multiple reported incidents.
So for every guy who can’t keep a job because he likes going to museums or perhaps makes his postgame interviews a little too much about himself, let’s always remember that this guy is a convicted domestic abuser and NHL teams are sadly all too willing to take “If You Can Play, You Can Play” to its logical extreme.
Pathetic.
7. That Jack Johnson contract
I didn’t think I would have to do this but I’ve seen multiple people defending it and I have to go off now. You did this. Not me.
The idea that Johnson is in any way a fit for this team is laughable, and few would even try to force an argument on whether he was good in Columbus, especially in the past two seasons. He ended last year as a healthy scratch and for good reason.
The pro-Johnson-to-Pittsburgh argument goes something like this: Jim Rutherford drafted him and Sergei Gonchar has turned poor defensemen into good ones. Let’s take out the trash on both of them.
Who cares that Jim Rutherford drafted Johnson 15 years ago or whatever? Like honestly, what does that matter? He liked a guy who exhibited a lot of promise at the University of Michigan, traded the kid only because he wouldn’t sign in Carolina, and then got hundreds of games’ worth of data that he couldn’t be a difference-maker at the NHL level. If Rutherford’s teams had controlled Johnson’s rights the whole time and given him this contract despite all the evidence in the world that he’s not good in the NHL, well, wouldn’t we say, “What’s Rutherford thinking?”
But OK, this is a reclamation project. Those work out sometimes. I don’t know why you’d want to try that reclamation project over a five-year period. Especially given that this is a guy who will be 32 years old for half of this coming season. It’s not a gamble, then. This is Rutherford signing up to pay a guy who flatly sucks $3.25 million until he’s 37 years old. If we think Johnson stinks in his age-31 year, what does he look like when he’s 35? Okay great, he has two more years on the books after that, or at least lingers for years as a buyout cap hit.
Now let’s talk about the idea that Sergei Gonchar has turned other bad defensemen into good defensemen, which has been pointed out more often than the Rutherford Connection but is somehow even dumber. Let’s look at it this way: Who are the defensemen Gonchar “made good?” Definitely you would say Justin Schultz. Maybe you would also say, like, Jamie Oleksiak.
The Penguins got both of them when they were, what, 25ish years old? Still in the primes of their careers. Schultz, I think you could argue, was even on the upswing. And more to the point, I think it’s reasonable to argue that the Penguins didn’t necessarily do anything to make Schultz better besides put him in a position to succeed. He was overwhelmed in Edmonton because the Oilers, in their infinite wisdom, thought he was a top-pairing defenseman despite all evidence to the contrary. It’s very not-weird, I think, that when the Penguins stopped putting him out there against top competition, he suddenly looked like a competent second-pair power play specialist!
Plus, y’know, do you think maybe playing behind Crosby and Malkin and now Brassard makes defensemen like Schultz and Oleksiak who previously didn’t play for the Penguins look better than playing behind guys from their other, worse teams? It’s not impossible.
The deal sucks and is going to look continually worse in March, two Novembers from now, February 2020, the fourth year of the contract, and beyond. Any rationalization to the contrary is galaxy-brain nonsense.
I’m not joking when I say the Penguins would probably be better off flushing $3.25 million down the toilet every Oct. 1 and telling the league to count it against their cap number.
6. Those Islanders transactions
How do you make up for losing your franchise center? By signing one of the Leafs’ problems away, trading for another even bigger one, adding a Flyers’ problem (they’re in the same division now), and then getting the 13th-best forward from last year’s Penguins (also in the same division).
Are we sure he’s not still on the Leafs’ payroll?
5. Not using an agent
Drew Doughty didn’t use an agent in negotiating his big contract and, in doing so, saved himself like $2.5 million in agent’s fees (3 percent of the deal’s value).
But because of the way Doughty structured the deal, he’s not only not-buyout-proof, but he gives the Kings a hell of a lot of incentive to buy him out the second he turns out to no longer be effective.
In the end, the math works out such Doughty, in an effort to save himself $2.5 million, he might end up costing himself like six times that amount.
Smart stuff.
4. Trading Karlsson
I’m really just hoping this happens sooner than later. Like, just do it already. Everyone knows it’s going to happen. Everyone knows you’re gonna get an embarrassing return for him. Let’s go already.
3. James Neal?
Had someone ask me what’s in it for James Neal to sign with Calgary and not Vegas. It’s an interesting question.
From what I can tell, the Flames only offered an extra $750,000 per year in AAV, which is more than wiped out by the provincial income tax. So the answer, I guess, is that he thinks the Flames have a better chance to be competitive in the next five years, or maybe Calgary promised him a better role (i.e. with Monahan and Gaudreau, who could probably use a legit finisher). It’s not because the Flames buyout-proofed his contract, because every cent is paid in straight salary.
I’m not sure Neal is going to like what he finds in terms of either Vegas or Calgary being in contention for anything within the next five years, but hey, it’s a bunch of money.
2. St. Louis
I wrote WWL before the Ryan O’Reilly trade, so here’s a quick take on that:
The Blues now have some very promising center depth between Schenn (who should stay the No. 1), O’Reilly, and Bozak. Like I’ve always said, if Bozak is your No. 3, you’re in good shape.
I’m not sure it puts them in the same neighborhood as Winnipeg and Nashville even in that division, but they just became a much tougher out in the postseason. Which, hey, they didn’t even make it last year. So that’s something.
1. Feuds
I love when John Tortorella starts dropping F-bombs about the Penguins. He’s gonna tell Brandon Dubinsky to use a guillotine on Sidney Crosby next season.
(Not ranked this week: Helping the Leafs.
I made a joke in WWL this week about the Leafs being able to find a buyer for Matt Martin is the most incredible thing in the world to me. As many as a dozen teams were in on him to one extent or another. Why in the world should that be true? It’s still 2018, right?)
Ryan Lambert is a Puck Daddy columnist. His email is here and his Twitter is here.
(All statistics via Corsica unless otherwise noted.)
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Trending Topics: What is the Kings' plan going forward?
The Los Angeles Kings are only going downhill from here. (Photo by Harry How/Getty Images)
The Los Angeles Kings have the second-highest payroll against the cap of any team in the league, behind only Chicago. And that’s before Drew Doughty’s massive new contract kicks in for 2019-20.
They’ve added talent this summer in Ilya Kovalchuk and basically maxed out their spending limits barring one or two very, very small moves to round out the roster.
But here’s a question for you: Where does any of this get them?
Kovalchuk helps, probably a decent amount. He’s 35, sure, but even if he’s just a sheltered-usage power-play specialist he’ll probably get to 45 or 50 points with relative ease. That’s his offensive talent level. The question is, though, whether they were an “adding a 35-year-old maybe-borderline-elite scorer” away from really doing anything of note in the league this season, or the next, or the one after that?
One wonders what the Kings thought they were last season, because they were the second-to-last team in the playoffs in the West, playing in a crap division that certainly padded their point total. Moreover, they got elite goaltending all year from a group that doesn’t traditionally provide it as well as a 61-point season from Dustin Brown.
Can they reasonably expect that kind of production from Jonathan Quick and Brown next year? Probably not. Quick is 32 and his .921 save percentage was the second-highest of his career, albeit not that far out of his career average (.916) that this is some egregious Marc-Andre Fleury-like abberation. Nonetheless, goalies don’t just get better as they age, so assuming he faced the same workload (almost 1,870 shots) and stops his career average, that’s 10 extra goals against. Probably about three points in the standings.
But do you think the Blues, who were the first team out of the postseason, maybe added some points to their own totals this summer? That’s a problem.
Meanwhile, I don’t think anyone is overly optimistic that Brown is a reliable 60- or even 50-point guy, so what do the Kings do when he turns back into a pumpkin? The obvious answer is, “Hope Kovalchuk covers for him.” But even if you shuffle everyone on that side of the ice down one spot in the lineup, I’m not sure Kovalchuk adds 10 goals to your total above and beyond what an outsized Brown season did.
The thinking, maybe, is that adding Kovalchuk solidifies the Kings’ position within the Pacific, especially as Anaheim could be on a downswing and Vegas certainly won’t be a 109-point team next season. But even given the general weakness of the division where does this team realistically see itself in the West? Can’t be much higher than the current seventh if they’re being honest with themselves.
One might argue that this team, with the same core, won a Cup in 2012 as a 95-point eighth seed. But that was when Anze Kopitar was 24, Doughty 22, Mike Richards and Jonathan Quick 26, Jeff Carter 27, Slava Voynov pre-deported, and Justin Williams on the roster. Now all those guys are six years older, Voynov maybe coming back to the NHL (though probably not with the Kings) after years away, Richards basically forced into retirement, and Williams toiling fruitlessly for Carolina. Kovalchuk makes up for some of that, but not all of it.
Is this team anything other than, if we’re being generous, a second-round out? Because they got swept out of the first round last year (by an expansion team ha ha ha) and still needed unexpectedly great years from two wrong-side-of-30 players to do it.
And the larger point is that the ghosts of the Dean Lombardi era will be haunting this team for a while, and short of signing John Tavares they weren’t going to be able to steer this ship away from the rocks of inevitability. They’ll likely be worse this year than last. And the year after that as well.
By the time we get to 2020-21 (and barring any amnesty buyouts they might be able to pull off), the Kings will have about $57.9 million committed to just nine players. Those players? Well, it’s not pretty: 38-year-old Ilya Kovalchuk; 36-year-old Dustin Brown, Dion Phaneuf and Jeff Carter; 35-year-old Jon Quick; 33-year-old Anze Kopitar and Alec Martinez; 31-year-old Drew Doughty; and the spring chicken, 28-year-old Tanner Pearson.
That doesn’t include their likely plans to re-sign Jake Muzzin and Tyler Toffoli, who are currently 29 and 26, respectively, already more or less out of their primes. Other guys will have gone by then, assuredly, and others will have matured into usefulness. One can probably even see the Kings making trades to offload one or two of those bad deals.
But boy that’s a lot of money committed to a lot of guys who have already played a hell of a lot of games. This attempt to wring a little more competition out of a group that already won two Cups comes off as at least a little bit sad, if we’re being honest. Like, trying to whip Brown and Phaneuf into giving you anything more than they already have seems needlessly cruel, doesn’t it?
As with the John Carlson thing in Washington, you couldn’t reasonably let these players walk, but paying Kopitar and Doughty a combined $21 million until they’re in their late 30s is only likely to piss the fans off four, five, six years down the line. People in Chicago aren’t exactly enthused at the price tag for Toews and Kane anymore and we’re like three years into those deals. Those two guys at least had a little more youth on their side at the time.
One wonders if the Kings pursued Kovalchuk so aggressively because they made the playoffs last year. If they fall a few points short, as Brown only puts up 45 points or Quick is only a little above average, does the front office try to make something happen in free agency this summer, or do they just let this thing turn to rust?
You can never really blame a team for wanting to be competitive after a surprisingly good season. That’s in these guys’ blood. And it’s admirable in its way. But at the same time, you don’t get style points for how spectacularly you crash. That just makes it harder to put the ship back together again, and that should have always been the Kings’ long-term plan.
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Ryan Lambert is a Puck Daddy columnist. His email is here and his Twitter is here.
All stats via Corsica unless otherwise noted.
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What We Learned: Is anybody better than the Maple Leafs?
The Maple Leafs look awfully dangerous right now. (Maddie Meyer/Getty Images)
After literal years of speculation and expectation, John Tavares is a Toronto Maple Leaf.
This is a seismic shift in a division that already had two of the best teams in the league, and a conference that’s home to the winners of the last three Stanley Cups. Make no mistake, there hasn’t been a bigger free agent signing in the NHL since Zdeno Chara left Ottawa for Boston, and the impact Tavares will have in more or less immediately making the Leafs a contender is probably even greater.
Let’s even forget that Tavares left money on the table and took a true-hometown discount to sign with the Leafs, because that’s not material this season. And frankly, it probably isn’t material beyond that because if you look at that CapFriendly page, they dont have a huge amount of commitments beyond 2018-19. Yeah, their RFAs are gonna be expensive to re-sign, but they’ll have plenty of cap space to deal with most of those concerns, especially if you can get everyone to do the buy-in on the hometown discounts a la Golden State, as Steph Curry and Kevin Durant both took significantly less money to keep that super-team together.
Anyway, I’m just gonna say it: The Leafs might be the Cup favorites right now.
I know I know: “But what about that defense!” I get it, but look, the Leafs’ D situation probably took a pretty big step forward just with the loss of Roman Polak, let alone the continued maturation of, say, 23-year-olds Connor Carrick and Morgan Rielly. You can’t always trust Mike Babcock to do the best possible deployments of talent but if Nikita Zaitsev and Ron Hainsey get a decent reduction in their run-out and the actual most talented defenders on the team are all playing 20ish minutes, I can see this team taking a step toward being Cup-competitive in a way that it perhaps was not last season.
More to the point, though, the extent to which running Tavares-Matthews-Kadri-whoever down the middle is going to help this team make that step even bigger is significant. There’s an argument to be made that the Leafs shouldn’t even run out a fourth center at all, because those three guys combined deserve to be playing a combined 60 minutes a night. You wanna say it’s like 21 or 22 for Tavares versus top talent with plenty of time on the first unit, and some PK duties. About the same or a little less for Matthews against second lines, plus first-unit power play. Then the rest for Kadri on the second PP unit plus the kill.
Put another way, Matthews and Kadri combined to play only about 35 minutes a night last season and the Leafs got some pretty good mileage out of it, so add Tavares’s 21 or so to that and you only need a fourth-line center for about four minutes a night. What’s the point.
That gives you flexibility to either dress seven defensemen (which I think is smart for any team) or a kind of “flex” forward if necessary, at whatever position you need him.
The other issue for the Leafs, as mentioned above, is that the Atlantic might now have three of the five best teams in the league (the other two being Nashville and Winnipeg in the Central).
It’s reasonable to argue that because of the divisional playoff format, the Leafs’ path to the Cup is probably the most difficult in the league, and the same is true of both Boston and Tampa. To even get to the Eastern Conference Final, they will have to play two top-five teams. Not easy. And it’s not hard to love what both Boston and Tampa will ice this year. But can either of those teams even come close to matching up against that 1-2-3 down the middle? Nope.
Now, obviously both the Bolts and Bruins have better defenses, but the Penguins and Capitals both had kinda middling defenses and won the Cup. More to the point, the Leafs will probably be spending like 55 percent of the game in the attacking end so to the extent that defense matters in the playoffs, they’re going to use their guys to retrieve the puck and stretch the ice rather than actually do as much stay-at-home stuff except situationally.
It’s fair to say that neither Nikita Zaitsev (and yikes that’s not a good contract) or Ron Hainsey (also not a good contract but a less-bad one certainly) won’t be the guys who can do that but you gotta play to your strengths and Babcock probably won’t be allowed to play 22 minutes a night anymore. Or at least, you’d hope so.
Even if you don’t think the Leafs should be considered a prohibitive favorite to win the Cup — I’d argue they’re at least third as of this writing — you have to understand the extent to which they gain even more flexibility going forward. There are a lot of old guys whose contracts come off the books next summer and after 2019-20, and Kyle Dubas can probably find someone to take Matt Martin at $2.5 million given what Ryan Reaves is getting these days. That is, if you really need to free up that little money.
So what the Leafs have done here, is given themselves two No. 1 centers, and you really can’t overstate how valuable having two guys this good is in the NHL. Especially as Matthews and the various other very young wingers continue to mature. Even if you think Tavares starts declining hard in the back half of this contract, they’ve effectively purchased four or five years of extreme Cup-competitiveness.
The pressure’s on, sure, but it’s Toronto and the pressure’s always on, even when you suck. Tavares knew what he was signing up for, obviously, but he also knew what it takes to win from having suffered with the lack of it for so long.
There’s no better way to win the Cup than by getting a ton of talent and now, especially up front, pretty much no one in the league has as much as Toronto.
What We Learned
Anaheim Ducks: When you have a roster this good, you gotta stand pat!
Arizona Coyotes: Adding a guy like Grabner, who’s gonna be 31 on Oct. 5, is something to watch because he’s a speed guy and it’s hard to maintain speed when you’re old and stuff like that. Three years is a lot even if you think his poor career underlyings are overshadowed by his ability to create chances on the rush.
Boston Bruins: I like Jaro Halak as a backup to Tuukka Rask a lot, in theory, but the Bruins’ first few moves of the free agency period were… adding Islanders and Hurricanes. Maybe not the best strategy.
Buffalo Sabres: The Sabres added Carter Hutton as their backup, giving them three Lowell guys for next season. Please note the 2017 Stanley Cup Champion Pittsburgh Penguins also had three Lowell guys. Might not be a coincidence.
Calgary Flames: The Flames really seem to have improved their forward depth, which was always their big problem, but that goaltending situation ain’t getting better. Not sure what’s gonna happen here but I’m not optimistic either.
Carolina Hurricanes: Petr Mrazek getting another chance as a potential 1b with the Hurricanes is a relatively safe bet. And if it doesn’t work out, well, it’s not like this club isn’t familiar with bad goaltending.
Chicago: Giving Cam Ward a full no-trade is redundant. Cam Ward’s save percentage is a no-trade. But hey, if you get a chance to add a guy who is a 20-year-old plus a 19-year-old in 39-year-old Chris Kunitz, that’s the kind of youth movement this team needs.
Colorado Avalanche: Looks like the Avs were all about adding okayish depth guys like Ian Cole and Matt Calvert and that’s fine, if you ask me! Not sure they can count on another playoff appearance with this roster as-is but I guess MacKinnon could have another titanic year.
Columbus Blue Jackets: Little happening for Columbus at the start of July here. Wonder if they’re waiting for some movement with Panarin or something.
Dallas Stars: Intriguing add in Val Nichushkin. Be interested to see what he brings to the table. But here’s something that’s more interesting: How did Roman Polak get a raise?
Detroit Red Wings: The Red Wings adding all these veterans on short-term deals is like, “Well, who cares because it’s one year and they can probably trade them”
Edmonton Oilers: Tobias Rieder is an interesting player. I’m saying “interesting” a lot today but it’s this wasn’t a great UFA class and guys who Have Upside or are otherwise in the Cody Franson All-Stars group of guys whose underlyings make them seem better than the eye test or their scoring numbers do. The deal here is a pretty good gamble, though.
Florida Panthers: I think Michael Hutchinson probably has something to add for this team. I don’t know how much that actually helps in terms of making them any good, but I’m still a bit of a believer.
Los Angeles Kings: I’m gonna have a Kings take in the next day or two on here but this Drew Doughty contract, hoo boy. He’ll be 30-plus for all but like 2 of its 96 months. Way too much money.
Minnesota Wild: Adding a bunch of Leadership guys is gonna be what gets this team over the top – just kidding.
Montreal Canadiens: That’s a really nice gamble on Xavier Ouellet. I like that deal a ton as a bet on a guy who posted good underlyings with a crap team. He might be able to do that again this season!
Nashville Predators: Yeah they just didn’t need to do anything, so not doing anything of note in the past week is totally reasonable.
New Jersey Devils: An Eddie Lack bounce-back season would be nice but I’m not holding my breath.
New York Islanders: The speed with which Islanders fans went from Needing Tavares to saying, “Actually he’s not even as good as Mat Barzal and the kids will add more than enough goals to make up for his absence.” Deluded.
New York Rangers: Nothing worth doing for a team in their position, so have fun out there.
Ottawa Senators: The revelation in the Ottawa media that the Senators are almost a quarter of a billion dollars in debt is… something else. I guess I’m not surprised but how is it that much? That seems impossible.
Philadelphia Flyers: That James van Riemsdyk contract is defensible but I’m not sure where this team thinks it’s headed. They’re trading Wayne Simmonds real soon here. Maybe it already happened by the time you read this.
Pittsburgh Penguins: The Jack Johnson contract is instantly one of the absolute worst in the league. It’s indescribably bad. Five years for a healthy-scratched a guy who will be three months from his 32nd birthday at the start of the season is, like, what the hell man.
San Jose Sharks: Now it seems like freeing up all that cap space was maybe not advisable. Missed out on Kovalchuk and missed out on Tavares, the latter despite reportedly bidding an extra $2 million AAV per year. Anyway, that’s too much money for Logan Couture.
St. Louis Blues: I pretty much like both David Perron and Tyler Bozak as middle-six guys and I think the money is one of those things that isn’t avoidable. However, I’m not sure where these adds get a team like this, that’s firmly third-best in its own division on a real good day.
Tampa Bay Lightning: Good price for Ryan McDonagh even if he’ll be 30 when the deal starts. Hard to be cynical about this deal for now though, but they might have some more irons in the fire for a brand-name talent (via trade, obviously), and that’s scary.
Toronto Maple Leafs: Underrated aspect of this is Dubas stealing a franchise player from Lamoriello. Very funny, to me.
Vancouver Canucks: I mean if the price of adding Antoine Roussel and Jay Beagle (a combined 12 goals and 32 assists last year) is four years and $6 million, well, you gotta do it.
Vegas Golden Knights: I have to say I literally laughed out loud at the Ryan Reaves contract. I can’t wrap my head around that one. He’s terrible. Like the Stastny deal though.
Washington Capitals: I love that Michal Kempny deal. He was a top-pairing guy for the Cup run and got just $2.5 million for five years. Not bad at all.
Winnipeg Jets: Sucks to clear a bunch of cap space to sign someone and then have him go to the team that beat you in the Conference Final. But hey, that’s hockey baby!!!!
Gold Star Award
Tavares is getting so much of his $77 million in bonuses. Hilarious.
Minus of the Weekend
Just because the cap went up a lot doesn’t mean you have to give fourth-line guys $2 million. Just saying.
Perfect HFBoards Trade Proposal of the Week
User “HailMcJesus” is trying to get out of a jam.
To Edmonton:
Christian Fischer
To Arizona:
Milan Lucic, 2019 1st
Signoff
Seymour, the house is on fire!
Ryan Lambert is a Puck Daddy columnist. His email is here and his Twitter is here.
(All stats via Corsica unless otherwise noted.)
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Puck Daddy Countdown: Tavares, O'Ree and same old Senators
The John Tavares sweepstakes will likely end in predictably boring fashion. (Photo by Mike Stobe/NHLI via Getty Images)
7. Wanting to be traded
Max Pacioretty very clearly wants out of Montreal at this point, and the Habs seemingly just can’t make anything happen to actually accomplish that goal.
They had not one but two deals in place to move him at the draft and both got scuttled. Couldn’t get him to the Islanders because of teams (including Montreal ha ha ha) making way-off-the-board dumb picks in the top 10. Couldn’t get him to L.A. because the Kings couldn’t pay Pacioretty what he wanted because of the whole Kovalchuk thing.
Things are so bad Pacioretty canned his agent in hopes of getting something pushed forward.
One wonders how Erik Karlsson feels watching all this play out.
6. Unforeseeable circumstances
It was revealed on Tuesday morning that, yup, the Ottawa Senators are going to buy out Alex Burrows just 16 months after trading a decent prospect (Jonathan Dahlen) for him and immediately signing him to a two-year contract.
Burrows’ total contribution to the Senators’ cause over 91 games? Just 12 goals and 13 assists, and a 46.2 CF%, which was slightly worse than what his team did when he was off the ice.
Now, if you’re out there saying, “Hey isn’t that a 35-plus contract? Why would they buy him out?” well, here’s a funny thing: Because they keep his full cap hit this year but only pay him two-thirds of the money owed to him over the next two years. Pretty sweet deal when you’re trying to field a $35 million roster but still hit the cap floor.
And jeez, that’s another thing: Didn’t, in trading a B-plus prospect and signing the player day-of, the Senators think this was a good investment less than a year and a half ago? It’s almost like Burrows being a crap contributor was totally foreseeable, which is weird, because a lot of Smart Hockey People probably loved the deal at the time. Pretty funny how that ended up (again).
5. Guys not getting qualified
Pretty interesting list of pending RFAs who weren’t qualified by their teams this week. Anthony Duclair, Devante Smith-Pelly, Nail Yakupov, Derrick Pouliot, Dylan DeMelo, Petr Mrazek. Those are just the guys I can think of off the top of my head.
This is a lot of guys who, to one extent or another, are useful NHLers, but one imagines the teams have their reasons. Smith-Pelly, for instance, is someone who probably feels like he’s worth more than he is because he had that great Cup Final. Does he want $3 million or something? He’s not worth it, but some team might be dumb enough to give it to him.
DeMelo is a guy who probably thought he was gonna be able to pull a lot in arbitration, so that’s why San Jose — even with its boatload of cap space and Ilya Kovalchuk scooped off the market — moved on.
Some guys, like Mrazek, Yakupov (the poster boy for a pretty rotten draft, all things considered), and Pouliot just played themselves out of jobs.
Duclair is the most interesting to me. He had that great season with Arizona when he first got there. I believe he was like 20. Then he had a real poor shooting year and missed a bunch of time the next season. And last year, he put up just 23 points in 56 games for dead-end Arizona and Chicago teams. The decision to pass on him, from Stan Bowman’s point of view, is a little surprising just because well, he’s still only 22 and he probably wasn’t going to be that expensive.
Point is, with Duclair in particular, there’s still plenty of runway for this guy to improve and maybe become the kind of player he was when he was 20. Maybe not, also, but if you can get him for like $1 million, I bet he’s at least as good as Smith-Pelly at half the price.
4. That J.T. Miller contract
Not toooooootally sure J.T. Miller is worth $5.25 million, but his last two seasons have been really good and if you can consistently score 20-plus that’s worth something. Especially if Tampa needs to trade him, y’know? That’s a team-friendly deal in that particular case, and with the potential for getting John Tavares aboard, and all the looming contracts they need to sign next summer (Kucherov, Gourde, Point, McDonagh, Dotchin) and the year after (Vasilevskiy, Sergachev).
Not sure how you make that work but hey, ol’ Stevey Yzerman has wriggled out of jams before.
3. That Bryan Rust contract
On the other hand, Bryan Rust getting $3.5 million is realllllllllllllllllllll team-friendly.
This is a guy who’s probably a 40-point player, reliably, but also puts up monster possession numbers for a team that needed a cap-healthy deal. He plays with everyone, pretty much makes them all better. That includes both Crosby and Malkin.
Can’t believe what a good contract this is. Boy oh boy.
2. John Tavares
It’s gonna be hilarious when all this round-the-clock coverage of his meetings with 20 percent of the teams in the league ends with him re-signing with the Islanders because they gave Barry Trotz $1.50 more per hour than Washington would.
1. Willie O’Ree
This was a decision that should have been made a million years ago but they finally got it right.
Now to sit back and wait for everyone who should have made this decision a million years ago to congratulate themselves for making the right decision before O’Ree dies.
(Not ranked this week: Slava Voynov.
Apparently the Canadiens — the team that decided P.K. Subban was a really bad guy in the room after he donated $10 million to a local childrens’ hospital — is really interested in acquiring Nice Hockey Man Slava Voynov, who’s not allowed to live in the U.S. because he beat up his wife real bad. This after the NHL Network repeatedly called John Vanbiesbrouck a good guy.
But no no no, believe me, everything with this sport’s culture is totally alwhite I mean alright.)
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Ryan Lambert is a Puck Daddy columnist. His email is here and his Twitter is here.
(All statistics via Corsica unless otherwise noted.)
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Trending Topics: That's too much money for John Carlson
John Carlson is good, but not $8 million a year good. (Photo by Gregory Shamus/Getty Images)
You knew for sure the Washington Capitals were going to re-sign John Carlson when they got Colorado to take the Brooks Orpik deal off their hands.
That decision — likewise inevitable the day it was signed, just like 60 percent of all Day 1 “oh they shouldn’t have signed that” contracts in the league today — freed up a ton of money and the Caps certainly always intended to spend the cash on Carlson, coming as he was off a career high in points and a key role in his team’s Stanley Cup win.
But eight years and $64 million? That’s a lot of money even for an elite defenseman; it ties him for second in the entire NHL, in fact, even with Brent Burns at an $8 million AAV, and just short of PK Subban’s $9 million.
Oliver Ekman-Larsson has reportedly agreed to an $8.25 million AAV that can’t be signed until July 1, but even still, Carlson is a top-three defender in terms of the actual cap hit he carries. That number will probably change again next summer when Erik Karlsson and Drew Doughty get new contracts.
But let’s even say, OK, John Carlson is now being paid like a top-five defenseman in the NHL. Does that strike anyone else out there as being absolutely off the rails? You have to pay for talent, sure, and Washington wasn’t about to let the guy who they think was their best defenseman (he wasn’t) walk in free agency. You pay to keep guys. But boy, they sure do like paying premiums for their own players.
Let’s take, for example, the T.J. Oshie deal, another one of those contracts where everyone said it would be a problem a few years down the line. They gave a 30-year-old eight years at $5.75 million after he shot 23 percent over 68 games and tacked seven goals onto his all-time career high, set the season before. Then this year, huh, he shot a lot closer to his career average and, despite playing six additional games, also scored 15 fewer goals.
You can defend it now, because they won the Cup and Oshie was pretty damn good in the run-up to that championship, but three years from now, when Oshie’s 34, what does that contract look like? Probably not great, right? Which is not ideal, because that puts you only halfway through the deal.
And that doesn’t mean Oshie is anything resembling a bad player at his position. He is, in fact, very good, and moreover that $5.75 million AAV is kinda team-friendly right now. Not so much three, four, five years down the line, but absolutely team-friendly right now even if 18 goals in 74 games is fairly disappointing.
But the thing with the Carlson contract is that it is in no way team-friendly, and even if you’re a big believer that Carlson is a great No. 1 defenseman (he’s not) there’s little to suggest he can ever live up to the terms of this deal.
Again, he’s coming off a career year, but one that is so far outside the realms of what he’s been able to do in the past. Carlson is a few years younger than Oshie was when he signed his deal (which is probably what helped keep Oshie’s AAV down) so he got the full benefit of being able to max out his value. Forget about three, four, five years down the line. This contract is an overpay on Day 1, and it doesn’t begin to make sense from a practical standpoint.
That’s not to say I truly don’t understand the impulse here if you’re Washington. First, this is a win-now team, because its ability to be competitive ends when Ovechkin, Backstrom, and certainly Holtby hit a wall. That’s definitely going to happen well before this Carlson deal comes to an end, and there’s probably going to be someone dumb enough to take it of Washington’s hands in 2023 because the cap will be like $89 million by then and the rebuilding Capitals will retain salary. Who cares!
Second, even if you don’t think Carlson is worth this money (he isn’t!), if he hits the open market and goes elsewhere, that creates a vacuum on the blue line that needs to be filled. Not that I would ever say winning the Cup is a curse for any team, but it does create something of an expectation of competition, and you absolutely couldn’t sell your fanbase on letting Carlson walk when you’d still need to find a replacement for him; the next-best UFA defenseman on the market come July 1 is, I dunno, Toby Enstrom? You can get him for way less than $8 million but you can’t sell that to people who just bought $150 worth of Stanley Cup Champions merch from shop dot nhl dot com.
Third, maybe, is that you can easily sell yourself on a guy who eats big minutes (even if he doesn’t do as much with them as he maybe should, based on reputation and now, his take-home pay) if you are also bringing back his partner from that Cup run. Michael Kempny has, as of this writing, received a multi-year offer from Washington and is weighing it. If you can keep a pairing that effective together, and also keep Kempny’s AAV down, that is probably a little more palatable. But that depends on a lot of factors outside this contract, which again, was not particularly advisable.
Let’s put it this way: Of the 57 guys who have played at least 5,000 minutes over the past three seasons, Carlson’s ability to contribute goals above the replacement level is a little above the middle of the pack — 23rd in the league — at 2.52 per 82 games. That puts him in the same neighborhood as Anton Stralman (who’s a very good defenseman) and Dmitry Orlov (also good, but certainly not regarded on the same level as his teammate).
It’s hard to argue Carlson isn’t a top-30 defenseman in the league, which is to say he’s a clear No. 1. But he’s certainly on the lower end of that top 30, and he’s no longer being paid like it. Moreover, if you were looking for a Carlson replacement — and this was something I said during the playoffs — Orlov might reasonably have been someone worth trying in that role. (This is to say nothing of the fact that Matt Niskanen was the Capitals’ best defenseman the last two seasons, but it’s definitely worth noting that he, uh, was.)
Carlson appears to contribute more than those other two guys in his GAR neighborhood because he has the benefit of playing on arguably the best No. 1 power play unit in the post-cap NHL, though I would certainly also hear arguments for the Sharks four or five years ago. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Carlson joins Oshie as guys who are good players but happened to have insane-production seasons the year they were going RFA when they got a good chunk of their scoring from being on that power play. Nearly half of all Carlson’s points came on that man advantage this season (32 of 68), and while being a guy who can produce on the power play has value, it’s also important to contextualize these things when assessing a player’s actual value.
Again, the Caps really weren’t in an enviable position here. Someone was gonna pay Carlson a ton of money and there were no other good replacement options on the market except, perhaps, via trade (which would have been difficult to pursue). Just like Chicago a few years ago when they overpaid for Kane and Toews, they couldn’t afford to just let those guys walk, for a litany of reasons.
But also like Kane and Toews, it’s hard to be sure they could really afford to keep them either.
—
Ryan Lambert is a Puck Daddy columnist. His email is here and his Twitter is here.
All stats via Corsica unless otherwise noted.
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