Crying about draft lottery, NHL goalie gear (Puck Daddy Countdown)
(Ed. Note: The column formerly known as the Puck Daddy Power Rankings. Ryan Lambert takes a look at some of the biggest issues and stories in the NHL, and counts them down.)
6. The expansion draft
Last time we had one of these things, the proliferation of no-movement and no-trade clauses really hadn’t caught on around the league. Now, it’s a major issue.
And that’s something the league is trying to address now, for whenever they do actually expand and need to get a bunch of mediocre-to-bad players onto an expansion team. Former Canucks front-office guy Laurence Gillman is now working up a plan that would allow for the league to actually take the step to have an expansion draft, including drafting the new rules surrounding it. The current CBA is very, very different from the one seen 16 years ago, and while a lot of people are going to have a say in the matter, the issue of players having no-move clauses is one I’d expect to be a major hurdle.
As far as I’m concerned, “no-move” should mean they cannot be moved without permission for any reason, whether that’s a trade, being sent down, or indeed, being dropped into the expansion draft pool. Good luck getting the NHLPA to sign off on that.
Not that it really, really matters, of course. The players that get selected in expansion drafts are generally bad, and almost certainly aren’t going to be with their clubs five, six, seven years down the line when they’re actually any good at all. Another issue here is, of course, that an expansion team probably wouldn’t be too likely to reach the cap floor even if they take on some truly odious contracts. How do you work around that and likewise get the NHLPA to sign off?
I would think a lot of teams would be more than happy to have an expansion draft not just to pocket the cash from the expansion fees, but also to get out from under some of the more costly mistakes their GMs have made in recent years.
There’s just so much nonsense about this up in the air right now, but hopefully we’ll have a better idea of the issues at hand after GM meetings.
5. Crying about the draft lottery
Pretty hard to believe that GMs don’t want to see the Edmonton Oilers get another first-overall pick this year (they probably won’t!) but this is what happens with a team so chronically mismanaged over the course of a decade, especially when the league’s policy is, “We’ll give you the good players if you’re really bad.”
The draft currently incentivizes teams to tank, as we all know. If you’re kinda bad, you might as well be deeply bad. Hell, that’s probably true if you’re mediocre. There’s no real way to reliably draft your way out of picking in the 10-20 range every year. You have to get really lucky on a mid-round pick and hope some of your later choices work out as well. But now, it’s pretty amazing that teams are only just now starting to realize that this is a pretty good way to go about things if you want to be able to compete at an elite level.
Honestly, I feel bad for the Oilers in a way. Because they happened to win a handful of draft lotteries they’re now the poster boys for everything that’s wrong with the system. It’s like getting people all worked up about “voter fraud” when those people represent such a ludicrously small percentage of the process as to be effectively non-existent. Until the Oilers were run like crap for the last little while — and have only now resolved to get their act together — this basically never happened, and the worst teams in the league were, really, truly bad. Now the difference between the 30th-place team in the league and the one in 20th-place isn’t as great as it once was, both in terms of points and actual quality. The Oilers don’t need Auston Matthews to get over the hump, only because he alone won’t address the team’s myriad issues.
If anything, all the pouting from the other 29 GMs only serves to hurt the other teams that eventually do need the first overall pick in a worse way than the Oilers. The likelihood that such a run of incompetence as Edmonton has enjoyed will ever happen again is exceedingly slim.
4. 3-on-3 overtime
Hey remember all those people who said, “It’ll take a while, but coaches will figure out how to take the fun out of 3-on-3 overtimes?” Turns out they were right. Only 34 percent of 3-on-3 OTs went to a shootout from October through the end of December. Since the start of the new year, that number is up to almost half.
This is bad. But it was inevitable. And it’s still better than what we used to have. But let’s just put a bullet in the shootout once and for all, play more 3-on-3, and be done with it.
3. Shrinking goalie equipment
Another aspect of the league’s many, many problems is getting greater discussion this week. Goalie pads are far too big these days, and it’s inhibiting offense in much the same way it did prior to the Second Bettman Lockout in 2004-05. Something has to be done, but some goalies say equipment is already smaller than it used to be, and that if it shrinks any more, someone is going to get seriously hurt.
This opinion, however, is not shared by every goalie. Robin Lehner, for example, believes that goalies are way too big these days, and thinks that more should be done, and that it can be without increasing the risk of more goalie injuries. In an interview with Buffalo’s WGR, he noted that a lot of that is just a smokescreen to improve save percentages anyway, and that most of the padding they do have is superfluous, and because plenty of goalies are gaming the system anyway.
“We should have the protection we need not to get injured,” Lehner said. “You should not [be able to] fit four arms in that arm [pad]. It should fit around your arm. You shouldn’t have shoulder pads sticking up to your ears. It should be rounded to your shoulders. It’s just what it should be. It has to be a clearer system on how to do things because equipment managers and goalies around the league are really good at manipulating the changes.”
And it’s not like Lehner is spitting out some sour grapes here, either. He has a .926 save percentage in his injury-shortened season, which is a really good number. If even he’s advocating for smaller pads, you know that he does so in spite of the fact that the bigger ones have clearly been to his benefit. What a nice boy.
2. Three-point wins
File this under “things that are never going to happen,” along with “a Canucks Stanley Cup,” but it really should. Greg talked about it yesterday and it’s nice to see more people talking about it, but the NHL won’t budge from the two-and-sometimes-three-point-game format it has used for years.
The big reason why: It would take away Gary Bettman’s favorite talking point about “parity” in the NHL. We all understand it’s artificial parity. Anyone who watches the sport knows it. But it’s parity nonetheless, and if you can sell more tickets because your team is apparently (but not actually) in the playoff race longer, then that’s perfect.
That also creates BS fights for final playoff spots. For example, Pittsburgh, Detroit, Philadelphia, and Carolina are currently separated by six points, with varying degrees of games in hand. Under a new, three-point-win system, the Penguins would already be comfortably in the driver’s seat for the first wild card spot, while Carolina would be two wins back of Detroit, and Philadelphia only a point ahead of them.
It might create more offense as teams go for three points in regulation rather than just two, but as long as you get the coinflip of a potential shootout, I dunno. Again, it’s just not going to happen so I don’t know why we’d speculate. The league would rather prioritize dumbass ideas like this, for some dumbass reason:
Wow, can’t wait to see defensemen standing right next to the trapezoid for a change instead of in it. That’ll really make the sport more exciting.
1. Sticking to your guns
For some reason the coach’s challenge is here to stay in more or less its current iteration. Doesn’t begin to make sense, but then again this is the NHL we’re dealing with.
It loves to find everything that’s not wrong with the sport and fix it. And the stuff that’s actually wrong? What are ya gonna do? Just have to accept it.
(Not ranked this week: St. Patrick’s Day jerseys.
More like YUCK of the Irish. Okay, see ya.)
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.)
