Lombardi’s summer, Chayka in Arizona and the Wild (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.)
9. Brian Elliott
It’s not so much that Brian Elliott’s doo-doo performance in Game 6 against the Dallas Stars (three goals conceded on just seven shots, and the big ol’ hook) was in any way an indicator that he is not a big-game goaltender. It’s that this is how he will be perceived if the St. Louis Blues don’t win the series.
That’s regardless of what he does in Game 7.
The thing with Elliott is that he has never been seen as “good enough” by the Blues to warrant being the full-time starter. They infamously brought in Ryan Miller in an experiment that was doomed from the start, then they tried Martin Brodeur in an even more calamitous tryout. Then they figured he and Jake Allen could platoon for a little while.
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And in these playoffs, he has largely been fantastic. We’re talking .926 even including last night, and that follows a .930 in the regular season. And a .917 the year before that. And a .922 in 2013-14. He was also .940 in 2011-12. Simply put, this guy is really good, but he has never played more than 46 regular-season games with the Blues.
The performances over the last 53 appearances should have earned him a longer look at the starting job for next year. But because the 54th was so bad one wonders if the Blues are smart enough to recognize that doesn’t affirm every doubt they’ve ever had about it. Every great goalie has a bad start now and again, and lots of them come in high-leverage situations.
I’d give him the start in Game 7 and let him be the starter going forward regardless of result. But these things don’t happen in a vacuum and you have to think the Blues are looking to make changes if they don’t at least get to the Conference Final. Elliott, for all the good he’s done them in recent years, could be one of them.
8. The NHL 17 cover vote
The only thing I want to see end up in a river is every copy of this game-that-hasn’t-materially-changed-since-2008. Put Jyrki Jokipakka on the cover for all I care, as long as you put an actual good game inside the packaging for once.
7. Dean Lombardi
The Los Angeles Kings’ GM has put himself in tough cap situations before. Last summer they had to let Justin Williams and Andrej Sekera walk, and used the flimsiest of pretenses to terminate Mike Richards’ contract and free themselves from cap hell.
This summer, well, if I were a Kings player I wouldn’t bring anything but my wallet across the border.
Lombardi is facing his toughest summer yet. With the realization that the Dustin Brown contract is and always has been terrible suddenly arriving at his doorstep, the need to re-sign Milan Lucic (or somehow acquire a reasonable replacement), and Darryl Sutter playing coy about whether he’ll come back to the team for a new contract, Lombardi has a lot of questions and no concrete answers.
The last of these issues is the biggest, because while the Kings certainly have elite talent on board, we’ve seen a million times that a handful of high-level guys isn’t enough in and of itself to bring a team even close to the promised land. There’s no question that Sutter is the most successful systems coach in the world, insofar as you can basically count on the Kings to be one of the top-two possession teams in the NHL every season. It’s no coincidence that trend arose more or less the second he arrived on the scene.
You can re-sign everyone on the team for league minimum, but if Sutter walks that’s an almost unfillable hole for the Kings to deal with, especially with Bruce Boudreau now off the market (more on that later). Maybe you hope John Stevens can begin to replicate the kind of success Sutter’s teams routinely had, but I dunno.
This might be the end-times for the Kings as we know them.
6. John Chayka
Amazing that this kid with little high-level hockey-playing experience (four games in the BCHL is the highest he ever got) went from a stats guy to an assistant GM to a full-on National Hockey League General Manager in the space of three years. More amazing still that he did it by 26.
However, I don’t envy him this position.
The league as a whole still feels at least a little bit skeptical about the practical application of statistics in team-building, and Chayka in many ways feels like a test balloon as to whether these things will work in any real way. If he “fails” — which is totally possible giving the general if understandable unwillingness of Coyotes ownership to actually spend money — then that’ll be it for any “stats guy” under the age of 40 with little to no hockey-playing experience just about forever. (It’s worth noting, though, that Chayka’s former company is involved with manually tracking micro-stats like zone exits and entries, and we don’t have a ton of evidence as to how that data is contextualized in creating a winning hockey team. Right now, we can only make assumptions as to how effectively these stats drive decision-making.)
I’m sure the league won’t be especially conservative in defining “failure,” either. If Chayka can get the Coyotes into the playoffs on a regular basis, then that should be good enough given what’s being spent down in Arizona. But because we know how things go around here, we can be reasonably certain that unless they routinely advance out of the first round, they will carry a loser label regardless of how much bang-for-the-buck Chayka wrings out of the system.
And with a team owner and the head coach now in top Hockey Ops roles, all the looking over the shoulder the kid is bound to experience probably helps a lot, right? What could go wrong?
5. Guy Boucher and Marc Crawford
Nice for these guys to get another chance in the league, but given that they went to Ottawa you can bet it was for short money. And it’s not like they’re taking over that good of a team. The only thing they can really hope for is that Pierre Dorion is successful in offloading a ton of the dead weight on this roster, and that whatever systems they implement don’t try to rein in Erik Karlsson in any way.
Step 1: Let that beautiful boy run wild and free.
Step 2: Figure out how literally everything else works.
4. Bruce Boudreau
Nice to get paid and all — and boy, that’s a nice chunk of change for Gabby — but I can’t help thinking the Wild aren’t that good, and will only get worse as time goes on. Therefore, I worry this isn’t a good fit for Boudreau given what he can do for teams in general.
The Wild feel very much like a dead-end team, what with all the guys aging out of their primes who are still on big contracts, and the relatively underwhelming prospect pool — Hockey’s Future has their system ranked 25th in the league, and even if that number’s not totally accurate, they’re still probably in the NHL’s bottom half — it’s not easy to see a bright future even with their brilliant new coach.
Maybe he works some magic and rejuvenates the careers of Jonas Brodin et al, but even then, in that division, how good are they really? My big concern here is that Boudreau ends up tarnishing his legacy a bit, because money aside, it seems like he bet on a bit of a nag.
3. The New York Islanders
Travis Hamonic has withdrawn his trade request. That solves a big ol’ problem they would have faced this offseason. Maybe being in a winning environment is attractive to players. I guess we won’t ever know.
2. The Tampa Bay Lightning
Despite all the cries of “Look how easy it was for them to get here!” that rang out on Sunday as the Bolts put the Islanders out to pasture, this team should frighten a lot of people.
They’re on to their second straight Conference Final, and this time they did it without either Steven Stamkos or Anton Stralman. These are elite-level players who make a huge difference, and the Lightning haven’t had them for a single playoff game. The closer these players get to returning, the scarier the prospect of playing the Bolts becomes for anyone who draws them down the line.
Yeah the path was easy, but they dominated the Detroit Red Wings and Islanders. Eight wins in 10 games, without two great players. If they’d struggled to put either team away, then yeah, maybe you say they’re a bit of a paper tiger. But they gutted both opponents to the tune of a 30-19 goal differential in all situations — 61 percent — and that doesn’t happen by accident.
The games are about to get tougher, but anyone denigrating how well they’ve played to this point isn’t paying much attention.
1. The Minnesota Wild
Conversely, they got the best available coach by far, and in doing so probably added eight or 10 points to their 2016-17 season total without adding a single dollar to their cap obligations. That’s how the NHL works these days, and will increasingly work going forward. Any edge you can find, you have to take it. Good on the Wild for doing just that.
They’re still not a very good team, but at least they’re getting smarter.
(Not ranked this week: The Calgary Flames.
One gets the feeling that missing out on Boudreau is going to be one of those things they’ll look back on with deep regret. Especially if they end up hiring Randy Carlyle instead.
Boy do I ever hope that happens.)
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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