Puck Daddy Power Rankings: Kessel and Crosby; Canes on the move?

[Author's note: Power rankings are usually three things: Bad, wrong, and boring. You typically know just as well as the authors which teams won what games against who and what it all means, so our moving the Red Wings up four spots or whatever really doesn't tell you anything you didn't know. Who's hot, who's not, who cares? For this reason, we're doing a power ranking of things that are usually not teams. You'll see what I mean.]

7. Defenses in the Eastern Conference

So Phil Kessel is going to play with Sidney Crosby, huh? There wasn't really a good answer between Kessel-and-Crosby or Kessel-and-Malkin as far as opponents went, but if you're looking to keep Pittsburgh goals off the board, that was probably about as bad as the news could have gotten.

Earlier this summer I ran the numbers on how badly a Crosby-and-Kessel combo would torch defenses, and the answer I came up with when you took plenty of data over the course of their careers into account, I came up with an estimate of about 4.65 goals for per 60 minutes, and 2.99 just against. I think those numbers make sense within the context of what we know about both players (it's a nearly 60.9 percent share of goals at 5-on-5), and the breakdown would lead to Kessel and Crosby being on the ice together for about 90 to 95 goals at full strength.

What number of those are going to be Kessel's? I don't think it really matters, but anything fewer than 30 would be pretty shocking. And that's at 5-on-5 only. If you get them out there on the power play along with, say, Malkin and Letang, you can basically forget about it. Put me down for Kessel breaking 50.

The good news for Pittsburgh's opponents next season, though, is that its defense is pretty not-great. It's not bad, and Letang is obviously very high-end, but this is probably going to be a team that's winning a lot of games 4-2 and 5-3.

Should be entertaining, if nothing else.

6. The Hurricanes

So a thing everyone seems to have forgotten for a while now is the fact that Hurricanes owner Peter Karmanos is still trying to sell at least some of his majority stake in the team. Has been for nearly a year, in fact.

Which helps to explain why the Hurricanes haven't added any free agents (though they did make a few trades), and why the team is just spinning its wheels on re-signing Eric Staal and Cam Ward. If it wants to. Which it shouldn't.

All Ron Francis did, really, was pull off the Alex Semin buyout (no small investment!) back in June, and since then it's all quiet. Don Waddell confirmed to the Raleigh News and Observer that there had been talks with potential buyers, but nothing has happened here; part of that might be because Karmanos wants to sell his stake but also retain control of the team, which doesn't seem like how things should work.

The Hurricanes have, however, finally increased season ticket sales for this coming season after six of declines, so that's something to highlight to potential buyers. But the column also floats the idea that the league might only expand to Las Vegas so that the Canes can be purchased and moved to Quebec.

Shoot, I sure can't wait for that weekly discussion.

Boy, it seems like just yesterday we ever so briefly weren't worried about the ownership situation for a team in a non-traditional market, doesn't it? Well, that was a nice little run we had there. And it makes a lot of sense, then, that the league is so furiously pushing all this...

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5. Expansion

We're now into the third and final phase of the expansion process for Quebec and Las Vegas, and I kind of can't believe it's actually happening, even now.

That whole Quebec thing apparently might not work out (see item No. 6), and that would be very strange, but it might at least give the Seattle groups the impetus and ability to put together something on their own.

But here's what I can't stop thinking about: How bad the rosters for those teams will be for those teams. We haven't had an expansion in this league for more than a decade, and I think we have collectively grown way better at player evaluation and development during that time.

Going from 28 to 30 teams expanded the league by some 46 player jobs (rosters carry a max of 23 guys), and that was a 46 more than had been in the league just a few years earlier. Weird as it is to think about, when Connor McDavid was born, there were only 26 teams in the NHL. That meant that from 1997-98 to 2000-01, the league added 92 jobs to the previous pool of 598. That's a big jump. And by the end of that expansion era, you were starting to see some real garbage get onto actual NHL rosters. Look at what the inaugural Columbus Blue Jackets roster looked like. Geoff Sanderson led the team in scoring, which tells you everything you need to know (but shout out to Ron Tugnutt for his .917 save percentage that season!).

In two years, a prospective Quebec and/or Vegas team won't be that much better. Imagine what a McDavid or Crosby is going to do to those teams if they end up in the same division. It'll be a bloodbath.

4. The Oilers' captaincy

Apparently there's a big hullabaloo afoot in Edmonton over whether Andrew Ference should continue to be the Oilers' captain. Fair enough, I guess. The team's defense isn't all that good to begin with, and the fact that he's going to spend a lot of the season as a No. 6 or a healthy scratch tells you a lot about where his game is at these days.

No fault in it, of course, given his age and the miles on him. But it's a reality that you probably don't want your captain getting healthy-scratched 30 times in a season. So Ference might be stripped of the “C” at some point in the near future, even if he doesn't think it'll happen any time soon.

Conventional wisdom says you give it to Taylor Hall, obviously. But let's be real here: Anyone who gets it any time in the next year or three is just keeping it warm for that kid wearing No. 97.

3. The Mark Giordano extension

Oh yeah, $6.75 million is a bargain for Mark Giordano. In theory.

Right now? Absolutely. A lot of people spent most of yesterday saying he's only 31, and that's true enough. But he turns 32 on Oct. 6, so for all intents and purposes, this season upcoming is his age-32 year. That means when the new deal kicks in, he'll be 33. And he'll play basically the entire last season of his deal — if he makes it that far — as a 38-year-old.

That's the cost of doing business, obviously, because if you want to keep the AAV down you have to extend out the years, but given looming extensions for Johnny Gaudreau and Sean Monahan (whose entry-level contracts are likewise up this year) as well as Sam Bennett (RFA in July 2017), it's tough to see how conservative the team might have to be for those guys, especially if the cap stays flat.

That doesn't even get into the idea that defensemen don't generally get better as 33-year-olds, let alone 35-year-olds, which is what Giordano will be in Year 3 of a six-year deal.

Let's also take into account the fact that, leaving aside the lockout-shortened season a few years back, Giordano hasn't played more than 78 percent of his team's games since 2010-11. In the last three full seasons, he's missed a combined 60 games, which is enough that people should be worried about it.

“Well if he'd stayed healthy, he might have two Norrises,” is a decent argument here, because he should by all rights have won two Norrises given the work he actually put in, and I might have even voted for him in 2014 regardless. But if you're using hypotheticals on something he's proven is a big problem for him — that is, staying healthy for the full 82 — then that's not a great argument.

I've argued for a while that if his ask came in at any more than four years, Calgary should have traded Giordano — who I understand is their captain — rather than land themselves in cap hell over a guy who can't stay healthy and will be 33 when this six-year deal starts.

Especially because they just went out and got a franchise-level right-side defenseman this summer to effectively act as a failsafe in case the Giordano talks ended in a stalemate. It's not a bad thing to have Giordano, Dougie Hamilton, and TJ Brodie tied up for a combined $17.15 million until 2020 (that defense is going to be a meat grinder), after paying them just $14.42 million for this coming season (unfair). But this feels very much like a contract that could start to be pretty ugly around Year 3.

2. Uncomfortable contract situations

Speaking of contracts for high-end defensemen, Greg touched on something last week that's worth examining: How Dustin Byfuglien will fare this year.

There's the forward-versus-defenseman angle (he's more valuable to the Jets on the blue line) and the fact that he's probably going to see his goal total come down doesn't help his bargaining position. But given that he's 30, it's likely this is his last big contract year, so he has plenty of reason to rage against any attempts to limit his value strategically.

There's also the fact that the team needs to re-sign Andrew Ladd before he becomes a top free agent target next summer. However, given how many good young players sit in the Jets' system, do they really need either of them?

And what happens if they decide they don't? Can you imagine the buying frenzy for either one at the deadline?

Players of this caliber don't just grow on trees and if developing them was so easy, even for a team as farm-rich as the Jets, why aren't there more players as good as Byfuglien? It's all about weighing future versus present, I guess, and Winnipeg's present isn't, like, great or anything.

1. Defiance

I love the idea of Alex Ovechkin being the only NHLer participating in the Olympics in 2018.

Just him scoring 20 goals in eight games against a bunch of college players, and playing 25 minutes a night without breaking a sweat. Hilarious.

(Not ranked this week: The London Knights' Team Kane.

Let's go with Team Schremp instead.)

Ryan Lambert is a Puck Daddy columnist. His email is here and his Twitter is here.

(All statistics via War On Ice unless otherwise noted.

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