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NWHL, Rangers, Oilers and Vegas (Puck Daddy Countdown)
8 – The NWHL
Can you even imagine if Gary Bettman was like, “Well we unilaterally decided everyone gets paid half as much now.”
Riots in the streets. Mobs with pitchforks out front of the NHL offices. Guillotines, maybe.
But the NWHL does it and no one really seems to care that much. Very messed up. Especially because if you cut even an league-minimum salary in half you’re still pulling in the multiple-six-figures range. If you’re making the NWHL minimum and your salary gets cut in half, you’re better off taking a few days of shifts at Starbucks for the rest of the year.
A professional hockey player earning the new league minimum of $5,000 for their services is, one supposes, better than nothing. But it’s still bad.
There are many reasons why this happened, and why the NWHL is different from the NHL in terms of how and how much it pays its players. But for this move to have been made without input from the Players’ Association is straight-up garbage.
Dani Rylan should let players decide if she takes a pay cut too. Don’t like it? Oh that’s too bad. Sign this contract anyway. Funny how it works that the players should take a significantly smaller piece of the pie but owners didn’t. Funny how it always works like that.
7 – The new All-Star voting rules
That thing everyone liked?
Now look, the whole John Scott thing was the most lightning-in-a-bottle situation the NHL could have ever come across. “Lovable no-talent who’s been teammates with half the guys on his All-Star team scores twice in a 3-on-3 tournament,” is as good as it could have possibly gone. That he won the MVP was one of those things you wouldn’t have accepted as realistic if it were scripted.
6 – Mika Zibanejad
Damn, man, that’s a brutal injury. I can’t even believe it’s “only” eight weeks. That looked like a season-ender for sure.
And he was having such a good season, too: 15 points in 19 games — easily blowing past the guy he was traded for, who’s struggling in Ottawa — and a strong relative corsi.
The injury is such that I wouldn’t be surprised to see him struggle himself, maybe a lot, when he comes back. Happens all the time. Guy breaks his leg and never quite gets back up to that same speed. It’s not an ankle or something like that, which can be a lot worse, but this one wasn’t pretty in any way, shape, or form.
5 – Maybe the Rangers?
Okay but let’s look beyond the Zibanejad injury (and to a lesser extent, the Pavel Buchnevich one): The Rangers may or may not be taking on water after their white-hot start.
Sure, they’re still winning. But earlier in the season, they were winning and supported by quality shots-for numbers. Now that support system has all but collapsed. Weird to say after just 20 games — though that is a quarter(!) of the season — but the whole “we don’t have a puck-moving defenseman” thing might finally be catching up with them.
There’s no good way to spin those numbers: They’re score-, zone-, and venue-adjusted to show, yeah, even though they’re winning and getting the benefit of score effects overall, they’re still well below water.
The good news is that they still have Henrik Lundqvist, whose .920-plus save percentage still appears to be as reliable as sunrise despite his being 52 years old, and that’s going to make up for a lot of other flaws. Moreover, they’ve banked 29 points in the first quarter of the season, so honestly even if they fall apart they’re looking pretty good for a playoff berth again.
More good news: They’ve got a lot of talent on every line at this point, adopting the “Maybe we put 12 guys out there who can actually play” model popularized by Pittsburgh. (It’s a copycat league, and if that’s the style everyone wants to copy, good.)
But then the bad news: You can have 20 talented forwards, but if your blue line is as bad as the Rangers’, this is always going to happen. I just figured it would happen a little later in the year.
If their process is falling apart already, I don’t have a lot of hope for them in the final 20 games of the season and into the playoffs.
4 – Maybe the Oilers?
Hey remember when the Oilers were winning all those games to start the year? And then they went 2-7-1 from Oct. 30 to Nov. 17? And everyone was like “What’s going on with these guys?”
Well, here’s the thing: All that losing coincides with Connor McDavid’s goal-less drought. Not surprising, really, that a team with this mediocre of a roster would be dependent on an elite talent to drive its success (though maybe not THAT dependent). But here’s the thing: The Oilers might actually be rounding into a form vaguely resembling a club that can win meaningful games.
Well heck, they’re going in the opposite direction of the Rangers, and their numbers are pretty encouraging overall.
The Oilers are a little below water in terms of expected-goal differential overall, but they’re heading in the right direction even without McDavid scoring a ton over the past several games.
3 – The Sharks for sure
Nice to lock in Brent Burns. Doesn’t matter the price point, that’s a guy you have to get under contract for the rest of his career, if only because it’s tough to envision that defense having a ton of success without him. Their window is open right this second, but perhaps not for all that much longer; the second Joe Thornton calls it a career things become a lot tougher basically overnight. Without Burns, you might as well trade Pavelski, Braun, Hertl and everyone else with any value, because you’re better off rebuilding at that point.
Burns is a freak. No one that size should be able to do the things he does with such ease, and that means you have to pay him whatever he wants. If eight years at $8 million was the ask, you get that signature on paper and worry about what he looks like when he’s 35-plus later. Not even Zdeno Chara could keep up his mega-elite performances through age 40, so I doubt Burns can do the same. It would fly in the face of all evidence we have about aging in this league.
You have to pay through the nose for what could be as many as five “dead” years where a guy isn’t worth the money but he used to be. Put another way: The Sharks probably figure Burns is worth well over $8 million a year right now, and will be for at least a few more seasons. Then they “lose” the value on that deal in the last four or five years. And probably they’re right.
But deals like this are why the NHLPA and the owners say they can’t possibly pay young players commensurate with their talents as soon as their ELC is done. You gotta pay good players too much when you know they’re gonna be bad just to keep them when they’re still good.
It’s very weird. We can all agree.
2 – Your Vegas Golden Knights
Oh my god they actually have a real name! And it’s the one they told us it wouldn’t be months ago and they said they were just registering that name to mess with us. Sick. Cool. Awesome.
1 – The Eastern Conference
Yo how about the fact that the West basically lost all its power in the offseason? Look at the standings: Only one Western Conference team in the top 8 in the league. Only five in the top 16.
If you look at expected goals, a good predictor of future performance, it’s six West teams in the top 15.
No one saw this coming. Crazy how it happened, to be honest.
(Not ranked this week: The Islanders.
Good lord, this team entered last night tied for the lowest point total in the league, with one fewer win than the tanking Coyotes. In one extra game played. It’s tough to countenance such a step back for this club, but one imagines a lot of the issue springs from a little thing that rhymes with Slack Slapuano. Just a guess. Just putting it out there.)
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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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