Melnyk’s spending, Amanda Kessel’s return (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.)
7. Not getting it
“I’m looking at all of it. It’s right across the board. There’s nobody safe when you have a year like we just did. No way. The status quo will just get us (back here) next year.”
That’s Ottawa Senators owner Eugene Melnyk on Tuesday, basically telling the assembled media that there will be big changes to this team’s roster and perhaps even management because of how bad the club was this year.
But saying he’s “looking at all of it” is probably not the correct characterization, because one thing you can be almost certain he will not do is “look at how much money he spends.” That most likely will not enter into the conversation. The Senators are routinely near the bottom of the league in spending, and as long as that happens, they’re not going to be all that good.
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Oh but someone obviously brought that up to him. His response?
“That’s baloney. Absolute baloney. We throw $68 million U.S. at this. That’s our payroll. Let’s get that straight. Which puts us way up there. Way over budget. You can’t just throw money at these things. We all know other teams that throw money at these things for decades, and they’ve gotten nowhere. So we need to do it a different way, and I think we are.”
Well, first of all, payroll is one thing, but $68 million is actual cash (and that has to include coaching or something, because General Fanager also has them at $64.1 million in salary obligations). In terms of cap obligations, the Senators are still at a little more than $64.9 million, 23rd in the league. There’s something to be said, of course, for spending smarter than they have, but would it surprise you to learn that basically everyone in the league spending more than $70 million is a playoff team?
Sure, the Detroit Red Wings are starting to look like they’re going to miss, and they’re third in cap obligations. The Vancouver Canucks are sixth. The Minnesota Wild, Toronto Maple Leafs, and Montreal Canadiens all top $70 million as well. There’s no explaining away Vancouver or Minnesota’s spending for their returns the last few years, but everyone else can be dismissed as circumstantial.
The Wings have been a playoff team for decades and they’re finally going younger, but still carry a lot of dead weight. The Leafs were chronically mismanaged for years and the current leadership has to eat money to make some of their problems go away. Montreal wouldn’t be in this position if they’d had Carey Price for more than a handful of games.
Meanwhile, Ottawa has missed the playoffs as often as it’s made them in the last six seasons, and advanced out of the first round a whopping one time (in the lockout-shortened season). If you think a new coach or a new GM or even a few new players fix that, I have an ailing franchise in the Canadian capitol to sell you.
Frankly if the Sens are spending $68 million for this roster then Melnyk is long overdue for a look at the books. But to not recognize that the self-imposed budget — and what a nice guy to go over it for this rotten club — is a major reason this team can’t be competitive is bananas.
One guy I really hope isn’t safe in this examination, by the way, is Erik Karlsson. Let’s stop wasting a generational talent’s prime years with this trash club. Trade him to Edmonton or something. Let him anchor a Cup run behind Connor McDavid in three years. Just let him get the hell out of Ottawa while he can still play as the best defenseman in the league.
6. “Parity”
Everybody has between nine and 11 games left in their seasons at this point, meaning that the battle for playoff spots is heating up. Or it would be if there was any sort of real mystery about who is going to make the playoffs.
There are, at best, five teams competing for two playoff spots, and that’s if you think the New York Islanders are at any risk of crashing out of the top Wild Card in the East (I don’t). Therefore, there’s no real point of interest to anyone outside Detroit, Philadelphia, Denver, or the Twin Cities. This is about as low-stakes as it gets.
And not even the divisional races are all that interesting, unless you have a particular amount of curiosity about who gets home ice in the 2-3 matchup in the Pacific or Atlantic.
The league has developed a pretty clear division between “haves” and “have-nots” this year, and it’s difficult to see that changing any time soon. The bottom 10 or 12 teams in this league are getting left behind. But the occasional fluky PDO run from a trash team, and hundreds of three-point games per year, make it sometimes seem as though this is not the case. What a league.
5. Important injuries
Tyler Seguin out a month, David Perron week-to-week, Michal Neuvirth out three weeks, MacKinnon day-to-day, Crawford day-to-day. Not a great week in the world of hockey if you’re a team hoping to lock down a playoff position in earnest.
4. Discord
Speaking of which, the Canucks are finally starting to figure out they’re awful, but here’s Daniel Sedin drawing the wrong conclusions from this awfulness:
“The only thing I worry about is effort,” he said. “And I think from some guys right now, the effort is not there. It’s not good enough. I think those guys know who they are. I think it’s embarrassing if you’re not giving the effort every night. Shift in and shift out, game in and game out, it has to be there otherwise it’s going to look like this.”
“I think it’s been an issue most nights. Early on, we won some games because we had enough guys battling. We’re there right now, trying to battle. But we’re not winning them. That’s a big difference. You’ve got to go in there demanding the puck. We have too many instances where that’s not the case.”
Look, I get it. Losing is no fun. And the Canucks have six different losing streaks of at least four games this season. That seems like it would be impossible but it’s not. They’ve only won seven games since the start of February. The list of grievances stretches to the horizon. But effort is not the problem.
Roster construction is the problem. Who looks at this group of players and says, “This is a team that can compete every night?” Well, sure, Jim Benning and Trevor Linden. But besides them? No rational hockey-watcher thinks this. There’s too much AHL talent on that blue line. There’s not enough legitimate NHL talent in the top-six. Or the bottom-six for that matter. And in net, well, Ryan Miller and Jacob Markstrom are just about average. Which doesn’t get you anywhere meaningful.
Maybe it’s good that the Sedins are finally calling somebody out, but you can’t expect, like, Radim Vrbata to do any more than he has. Jannik Hansen is the team’s third-best scorer this year, and he has 32 points in 57 games. Bo Horvat’s behind him with 31 in 71. That’s not an effort problem.
This is Melnyk-like thinking, if we’re being honest. How do you reasonably conclude that the things that need to be fixed are what carries out the process, not the demonstrably broken process itself?
3. Maybe figuring out why the NHL is so awful at giving people good peripheral entertainment?
Our own Josh Cooper spoke with Steve Mayer, the relatively new NHL executive vice president and executive producer for programming and creative development. What that means is he’s in charge of a lot of the non-hockey entertainment stuff you’re going to see on NHL programming going forward.
We can only hope he’s better than the last guy.
The All-Star Weekend Friday night show was a pretty solid encapsulation of everything that was wrong with it. It was a boring, bad show that was difficult to watch by any stretch of the imagination. The NHL Awards are, annually, even more unwatchable. The vast majority of musical performances at outdoor games fall into this category as well (eternal shout out to John Fogerty at Levi’s Stadium, though).
If Mayer, who has lots of connections to the entertainment industry, can make those shows in some way watchable, that will truly be the greatest accomplishment in our game in decades.
2. Anti-tanking
Let’s not all look at once, but the Leafs have points in six of their last eight games, all of them since they started calling up kids from their stellar AHL team en masse. In particular, William Nylander seems to have been worth the hype, piling up five points in his last two games alone (okay, they were against Buffalo and Calgary).
It’s gotten to the point that some Leafs fans actually think there’s reason to be optimistic about this team as it rebuilds with a bunch of good players under the age of 25.
But hey, not so fast. Because here comes Dustin Nielson from TSN 1260 in Edmonton:
You watch a decade’s worth of failed rebuilds (what are the Oilers on? Iteration 6 of this one?) and maybe you don’t see where any team has reason to be hopeful because the team was chronically mismanaged every step up the ladder. How could anyone do it right?
Is it too early to call the Leafs rebuild a success? Of course. Is it more than reasonable to say that Toronto is already clearly better-run than Edmonton has been at any point in the last decade? Obviously. This Leafs group hasn’t had a lot of run time but things are going right so far.
It might cost them Auston Matthews, of course. But hey, he might end up in Edmonton and be ready by the time Rebuild No. 7 is under way.
1. Amanda Kessel
After missing all of 2013-14 for the Olympics, then all of 2014-15 and a good chunk of this year as well with concussion symptoms, The Best Kessel made her return to the University of Minnesota lineup in early February, and played in the Gophers’ final 13 games.
She went 11-6-17 in those 13 games, and the Gophers won all but two of them. She was held off the scoresheet just three times. That run included the team’s second national title in a row, and Kessel’s third in a four-season career.
Kessel also scored the game-winner on Sunday, finishing her career with 248 points in 127 career games.
What a player, and what a way to go out.
(Not ranked this week: Chicago.
The morally bad organization that didn’t even think about suspending a star player embroiled in a sexual assault case and took more about eight months to suspend a prospect who allegedly posted revenge porn? No way to see that one coming. [UPDATE: The Blackhawks announced on Wednesday they did not learn of the investigation until this past weekend.])
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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