Puck Daddy Power Rankings: NHL Player Safety, selling ice cream, Mike Babcock

[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.] 

5. So we’re just not suspending anyone, huh?

So far in these playoffs, there have been about 100 suspension-worthy incidents (rough estimate). Incidents that, if they’d happened in the regular season, would have resulted in multi-game bans for the perpetrators, who would have earned every ounce of the discipline.

Instead, the NHL’s Department of Player Safety seems to have taken the postseason off, presumably after hanging a “Gone Fishin’” sign on Stephane Quintal’s still-spinning desk chair.

First PK Subban didn’t get suspended for breaking Mark Stone’s wrist — or whatever he did, I’m still not totally sure anyone 100 percent knows — but maybe you say the game misconduct was enough of a punishment. Okay. But if he did that in the regular season, maybe-breaking a guy’s wrist on a baseball-swing slash 40 miles from the puck and the play, he’s gone for at least a game. That much is obvious.

And what about Dustin Byfuglien charging in after Corey Perry scored a goal and just straight up punching him in the head? A shot to the noodle after a play doesn’t seem at least worthy of some sort of discipline? Oh, right, he got a two-minute minor. Gotcha.

Or what about almost everyone in this Calgary/Vancouver series? Both Deryk Engelland and Alex Burrows have had late instigators — which necessitate a suspension — rescinded. Kris Russell didn’t get a thing for cross checking Nick Bonino in the back of the head (pretty similar to that Dustin Byfuglien hit on JT Miller a few weeks ago that got him tossed for four). Michael Ferland didn’t get a thing for boarding Luca Sbisa. Nothing to Brad Richardson for punching Matt Stajan repeatedly after the latter was already on his back on the ice. Nothing to Derek Dorsett and Dan Hamhuis for double-teaming a guy and not even getting broken up by officials for a good minute? And there are more. After all the bad behavior in this series, both teams should be playing with half an AHL lineup at this point.

You can frankly go on for a while here, but apparently everyone in DOPS is sitting on the beach, enjoying some margaritas, and waiting until the next regular season — when games don’t matter as much — to start teaching guys lessons about trying to severely injure their opponents.

Johnny Gaudreau might want to try lighting his stick on fire for the rest of this series and using it as a weapon, because the playoffs are Thunderdome. Just about anything goes.

And even if someone does get suspended at some point (yeah right!) it’ll only be for half the games they actually deserve because playoff suspensions count double or whatever unwritten rule the league must follow says.

4. Selling ice cream

So Jim Rutherford took a run at a Pittsburgh reporter after the team lost, and this is being spun as, “Jim Rutherford is losing his composure because his team is bad and he did a bad job building it.”

That doesn’t really seem like a reasonable assessment.

Rob Rossi’s critique — the big criticism he has of Rutherford’s job as GM so far, apparently — is that the Christian Ehrhoff signing, a bargain at $4 million, didn’t address the team’s needs? “The last thing the Penguins needed last offseason was another veteran defenseman,” Rossi wrote.

Well, maybe he’d have been able to prove himself a little better, and maybe even help the Pens play a little better in these playoffs, if he’d been healthy. Or if Kris Letang were healthy. Or if Olli Maatta were healthy. Were any of these things the case, we’re not having a conversation about how badly Rutherford screwed up.

But the Penguins are, in fact, missing all of their top three defensemen. All of them. Their three best D, one of whom may be considered among the best in the league when he’s playing well, on the shelf. And that means ice time they should be getting are going to Paul Martin (23:24 per game) and Ian Cole (22:54) and — oh god — Ben Lovejoy and Rob Scuderi (21:50 and 21:02). Shuffle those guys down in the lineup for a healthy top-three and one of them’s not even dressing. Let alone playing more than 21 a night.

And this isn’t to defend Rutherford, either, because he’s not really a great GM and he didn’t do enough to fix the team. But who are the teams that are looking the best in these playoffs right now? Tampa and Anaheim? Take their top three defensemen away and boy all of a sudden they’re not looking quite so dominant.

So yeah, you got yelled at by a GM. And sure it’s funny that he told you to sell ice cream. But if your critique is “he spent too much on a very good defenseman who got hurt,” you weren’t right about that first part.

3. Conspiracy theories

Finding evidence that the NHL might have screwed up the draft lottery isn’t the same thing as finding evidence that the league acted in bad faith. No one outside of Edmonton wanted Connor McDavid in Edmonton.

If you start looking at every screw-up the league makes as evidence that there’s a conspiracy to screw [your team] afoot, the world’s gonna close in around you awful quick. The NHL screws everything up. That’s the default setting. Messing up the draft lottery ball situation is a feature, not a bug.

2. Trophy season

Congrats to Winnipeg fans on their shiny new medal from the NHL media this week. You win!!!! Even if your team is getting its brains beat in and you should be miserable!!!!!! Hooray for you!!!!!!!!!!

Look, it’s nice that hockey fans in Winnipeg finally got an NHL playoff game after all this time, I guess. But boy, act like you’ve been there before.

1. Coaching candidates

In the past few weeks a lot of coaches have gotten fired by or — haha — Mutually Parted Ways With their teams. More will probably be coming soon enough (like, say, when the Penguins get eliminated). Which means there will be a lot of job openings this summer, which you’d have to think only start to get filled after the playoffs.

That’s because the big fish here is obviously Mike Babcock. Every team in the league is like, “Oh yeah, we have a job opening. We definitely want Babcock to take it.” And Babcock is wise to not disabuse them of the idea that they might actually be able to let that happen. If he hits the open market on July 1 — and he almost certainly will — there’s going to be a feeding frenzy. Everyone wants Mike Babcock because he is a good coach (probably not the best in the league, but certainly up there). He’s going to be paid as such very, very soon.

But the odds that he’s going to, say, Buffalo or Philadelphia, which apparently have him just as high on the list as everyone else, seem incredibly, almost impossibly low, do they not? Even if Terry Pegula backs a dump truck full of money onto Babcock’s front lawn at 9 a.m., is that the situation Babcock really wants to get into? Similarly, does he want a defense with a top pairing (in terms of ice time) of Mark Streit and Mike Del Zotto? You’d need a lot more money than what you probably think is reasonable — we’re talking Toronto money here — to make that happen.

But hearing every team’s preferences in a coaching candidate is like hearing who they’d like to draft in June, regardless of draft position (“We’re picking No. 12 and we hope McDavid falls to us there.”) or who they’d like to sign this summer (“Isn’t that Stamkos kid a free agent soon?”) or which supermodel they’d like to marry.

Where would this league be without wishful thinking, I guess.

(Not ranked this week: Winnipeg fans.

Oh you said “Katy Perry” to the Anaheim forward Corey Perry. Because their surnames are the same. And the implication is that women are bad and it would be bad to be a woman. So you’re making fun of him with the idea that he is a woman himself, and therefore bad. Haha, that’s classic. Great work. You are cool and good.)

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