Steven Stamkos, Sergei Bobrovsky and hockey puppies (Puck Daddy Countdown)

8. Telling your kids you’ll get them a puppy if an NHL player scores a goal

So this is a thing now?

Parents got sick of forcing their small children to cry when a moderately popular local player was traded in a cloying and transparent attempt to get a signed jersey they will probably put on eBay within the week. So this is the new thing to get their kid on the news or a local broadcast for a second.

“We’re gonna name a puppy after Taylor Fedun if he scores tonight.”

Yeah okay. Parents who do this stuff to their kids should be in jail.

7. Sergei Bobrovsky’s groin

The thing with counting on any sort of rebound for the Columbus Blue Jackets any time soon is not so much that they don’t have talent in the pipeline. They have plenty of promising players up front, and a defense led by Zach Werenski and Seth Jones for the next decade will probably look pretty good. It might get to the point where even John Tortorella couldn’t screw up this team’s path to success.

Except they really need to draft a replacement groin for Sergei Bobrovsky.

Bobrovsky’s talent is unquestioned. He won the Vezina at 24. and since moving to Columbus four years ago has a .921 save percentage while the rest of the league averaged about .914. But here’s the problem: Since January 2014, Bobrovsky has missed 52 games with a groin injury, and was just put on injured reserve with another one on Monday.

The two most recent are, apparently, small aggravations of an injury suffered early this year, which isn’t so bad, but he’s still out indefinitely and it’s a major theoretical and real-world problem for Columbus going forward. Bobrovsky’s cap hit is a whopping $7.425 million, the highest on the Blue Jackets by a considerable margin, and he’s signed through 2019. If this is going to become a thing where he’s missing 20 games a year with this injury, it’s a major concern.

Fortunately, the Jackets are now sending Bobrovsky to a different specialist than the one he has been seeing, and a doctor who specializes in sports medicine told Aaron Portzline that there’s probably a light at the end of the tunnel in terms of his groin being able to just get back to 100 percent and staying there.

For his sake, and that of this currently hopeless team, you’d really hope so.

6. Friday night’s All-Star “festivities”

This has some very real potential… to match the NHL Awards in terms of absolute drudgery.

You read the lineup and you’re just like, “Hmm, I’ve heard of the guys from the NHL. Aaron Lewis I think is the guy from Staind and it’s been a while since anyone cared about his work (thanks!). Big and Rich had that embarrassing “Save a Horse, Ride a Cowboy” song that should have had them brought up on charges by the Hague. I don’t know who anyone else is, so suffice it to say they are not good.

Due to truth in advertising laws, I have to assume they’re only calling this show “NHL All-Star Friday Night: Live in Music City” because referring to it as “festivities,” would imply at least one (1) person will have fun.

Meanwhile, the NHL could have booked this actual band from Nashville, but didn’t, because the NHL is always bad and wrong:

5. Celebrity coaches

Speaking of All-Star weekend, it’s all well and good to have celebrity coaches, but when those celebrities are Dierks Bentley (legitimate celebrity), Vince Gill (celebrity in 1992 with a certain subset of Americans), Charles Kelley (the guy from It’s Always Sunny, I think?) and Chris Young (pretty sure it’s the very solid outfielder for the Boston Red Sox), the word ought to come with scare quotes around it.

4. Low-balling Stamkos?

So the Lightning apparently offered Steven Stamkos $8.5 million, which seems like a lowball offer considering what his peer group — in terms of production, star power, etc. — makes in the league today. By the end of that contract, if the salary cap continues to rise (not a guarantee these days), $8.5 million would probably look like a roughly $6 million contract does now.

The general consensus is that Toronto would probably give him a cap hit starting with an “10” at this point, so Stamkos would likely be insane to give up that extra money on the table.

However, a sports tax expert told the Tampa Bay Times that even if Toronto gave him $10 million a year for seven years — remember, you can’t sign someone else’s UFA for more than seven years — then the value of that deal, when things like taxes and so on are taken into account, is actually well below the $8.5 million-for-eight offer Tampa extended.

After all, Florida doesn’t have a state income tax.

At the end of the contracts, $10 million times seven from Toronto would likely be worth a little more than $29.7 million, versus the $36.7 million or so he’d earn on $8.5 million over eight. Annual take-home pay in Toronto: $4.24 million. Annual take-home pay in Tampa: $4.59 million.

The big thing that gets ignored in that analysis, though, is that escrow is really high right now (18 percent), and not always easy to predict. Escrow is also taken out of gross pay, not net, so Stamkos would be paying that percentage on $10 million, not $8.5 million. Meaning that’s another weight on the scales in Tampa’s favor.

Let’s not act as though this is something players don’t care about; if Stamkos is pulling down an extra $350,000 in take-home pay to stay in Tampa, that might be worth putting up with not liking Jon Cooper very much as a coach.

You can put up with a lot for $350,000 a year after taxes.

3. Winter Storm Jonas

Hard to find anyone who had a bigger impact on hockey this week than the blizzard that belted the mid-Atlantic region.

Anaheim at Washington, postponed. Philadelphia at Brooklyn, postponed. Pittsburgh at Washington, postponed. An AHL game, played in an empty arena.

But at least the blizzard didn’t give up a trash goal to Dalton Prout, which is more than I can say for certain other Jonases I could mention:

2. That Sasha Barkov extension

When I wrote a few weeks ago that the Florida Panthers were not very good, I got a lot of pushback behind the scenes about, “Actually the Panthers are very smart now and you’re wrong.”

While I am still not wrong about on-ice production (they have a 47.8 score-adjusted CF% since that column was published) it seems that they’re doing all in their power to get smart in the halls of power.

In the last two weeks, the Panthers announced that they were the team which hired two very respectable advanced stats guys to supplement a hockey ops staff that already had the very-smart Brian MacDonald on it, and then they signed Aleksander Barkov to an almost inexplicably great contract that is going likely to pay off big-time, and in short order.

Barkov is already at 12-18-30 in 38 games this year, with some very strong peripheral numbers for his career despite the fact that he’s playing tough competition. He’s also just 20.

Since the shootout was introduced, only 13 players have scored at least 90 points in 163 games before turning 21: Eric Staal, Alex Ovechkin, Evgeni Malkin, Patrice Bergeron, Jordan Eberle, Nathan Horton, Ryan Getzlaf, Alex Radulov, Jamie Benn, Wojtek Wolski, Kyle Okposo, Dion Phaneuf, and Barkov. With a few exceptions, that’s some very good company.

So getting him until he’s 27 or so, at just $5.9 million. Los Angeles is paying $25,000 less in AAV for Dustin Brown. Until 2022. The same year Barkov’s deal expires.

1. Stan Bowman

Very few general managers continue to do so much with so little cap flexibility from one year to the next. As with any GM, there are regrets, but it’s tough to argue that anyone rebounds from them quite so well or consistently.

His iffy cap management has basically forced him to give away a borderline All-Star starting lineup over the years, but this team stays very, very good throughout.

Pretty incredible.

(Not ranked this week: Ruining 3-on-3.

Remember when 3-on-3 started and everyone joked, “Can’t wait to see how coaches ruin this!” Well, it happened. So far this month, only 59 percent of overtimes actually see a goal scored, down from 70 percent in October and 67 percent in November. There will be a natural point at which these declines level off, but still, this is very typical of the NHL. There was a fun thing and now it is not so fun as it once was.)

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.)