The Two-Line Pass

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My deep and abiding love for all things Teemu Selanne is by this point in my life well-documented, and perhaps has reached a point of self-parody. But man do I ever love Teemu Selanne.

At the risk of writing a bit too much about the Anaheim Ducks (who by the way beat the Blackhawks in a battle of the two best teams in the league and held one-time Hart trophy hopeful Patrick Kane minus-4, while Selanne scored the game-winner), it seemed earlier this year that Selanne, at 42 years old, was perhaps winding down his NHL career. The lockout can’t have been easy on anyone, least of all a greybeard by professional athlete standards who has openly talked about the motivation to continue training. Further, he’s an unrestricted free agent after this season and seems unlikely to make the $4.5 million against the cap he currently commands on any renewed deal.

But then in an interview yesterday, about whatever the hell he felt like talking about, he was asked about the distractions that the run-up to the extensions for Ryan Getzlaf and Corey Perry finally worked out. He gave the kind of answer you’d expect about how it didn’t affect the room and all that, but then closed, somewhat apropos of nothing, “If they can play eight more years, I can too. I’m in better shape than they are.”

Teemu, I think I speak for everyone who’s not an inhuman monster when I say, “Yes please.” The prospect of Teemu Selanne playing into his 50s is just about the greatest thing I’ve ever heard in my life. I was not in any way prepared to see him ride off into the sunset after this season, so short as it has been, and so bereft of Eastern Conference road dates.

And obviously I understand that no 42-year-old man is looking to play another eight years in a professional sport as tough as hockey, but just the idea that this might conceivably happen is enough to keep me warm. You also have to wonder what the quality of the Ducks this year might mean for Selanne’s return at least for, say, next season. Is he, like Corey Perry, liking what he sees from his teammates enough that next season is at least a possibility? Let’s hope so. Because Teemu is the greatest.

Teemu forever.

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So it wasn’t all that long ago that I wrote a thing saying the Ducks gave Ryan Getzlaf a silly amount of money for a bad number of years.

Then they gave Corey Perry the same number of years and even more money. I don’t understand it at all, but this time for a very different reason. If you’re going to give Getzlaf $66 million over eight years, then yeah you probably have to give Perry $3 million on top of that just out of consideration for the time he won a Hart Trophy and dragged a crap Ducks team screaming into the playoffs. That just about covers the added revenues from those few extra home dates, doesn’t it?

And the thing is, too, that it always stood to reason that if the Ducks kept Getzlaf, they would likewise keep Perry, considering how long they’ve been running buddies and how valuable they both are to the franchise. But the decision to keep them together also necessitates some sort of trade, doesn’t it?

The cap is coming down hard next season, and given who they currently have on the roster, the Ducks will be spending a whopping $21.975 million tied up in Getzlaf, Perry, and Bobby Ryan. About one-third of the $64.3 million salary cap next year. That’s not counting Cam Fowler’s $4 million, or Jonas Hiller’s $4.5 million (neither of which look like particularly prudent deals), which bumps the total amount being spent on just five players, three of whom are forwards, to $30.475 million, more than 47 percent of the cap.

This says three things:

1) Saku Koivu and Teemu Selanne, both of whom are free agents in July, will not be returning for victory lap seasons unless they come in at significant discounts, which they probably won’t. If you didn’t get out to a Western Conference game to see them live one last time, you blew your chance.

2) Bobby Ryan’s getting traded. He’s affordable, he’s younger than the other two, and unlike Perry and Getzlaf, his deal doesn’t have any restrictions on trades. Add in the fact that he’s been a repeated trade target (or at least is purported to have been) over the last however-many seasons, and it’s looking like he better start going through his house with a label maker.

3) The Ducks are going to be terrible.

Even getting out from under Ryan’s contract and replacing it with a slightly comparable player — the number of players who averaged 30 goals a year in the last four seasons, 11 fewer than Ryan’s total over that span, checks in at 18 — is unlikely; by my count, not one of them has lower cap hit than does Ryan. Having so little flexibility under the cap to sign, take on, or call up about seven guys (Anaheim has 16 signed for next season right this second for $53.484 million) doesn’t speak too well of how all this is going to work out.

Especially when you consider how hard Viktor Fasth is going to regress to the mean either later this season or into the next one. And how they’re going to have to unload Ryan. Or, if they somehow avoid doing that, dealing with the generally low quality of player they’ll be able to squeeze onto the roster will help to ensure a season as bad as this one was expected to be.

The best part about all this, by the way, is that an actual thing Corey Perry said after signing his team-dooming extension was that he was encouraged to stay by the Ducks’ strong performance this year. Yeah, Corey, about that…

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I read the Ryan Getzlaf contract extension news yesterday and, unlike many times when I’ve joked about such a problem, I actually thought the details contained in that first tweet about it were the result of a typographical error.

Granted, Getzlaf is having a phenomenal year as a 27-year-old with nine goals and 18 assists in just 22 games, and has been an elite forward in the league since his third season (save for a bit of a hiccup last year thanks to his shooting at literally half his career percentage). But at the same time, an average of $8.25 million a season for the next EIGHT years? That is a pretty sizable raise from his current cap hit of $5.325 million and, I don’t think, all that reasonable. Again, the guy is 27 years old. Now he’s signed until he’s 35. The odds that he can put up the kind of numbers he’s putting up this year in even half those next eight seasons seems rather low.

But moreover, I wonder what this means for everyone else on the Ducks. I’m pretty sure it means Teemu Selanne isn’t coming back. I’m also fairly sure it means either Corey Perry isn’t getting re-signed or Bobby Ryan is getting traded in the offseason or both.

Why it’s such a weird move is that the Ducks are obviously not going to start paying everyone. They’re not a cap ceiling team, falling about $15 million short of the limit this year, so to give one player that much money — about one-eighth of next year’s cap, which you’ll remember is going to fall, and about 20 percent(!) of what they have committed to the 15 players currently under contract — seems a little crazy. Especially because that player is Ryan Getzlaf. That’s Eric Staal money, and while I’d put him on roughly the same level as Eric Staal in terms of quality across the league, Eric Staal is also dramatically, almost hysterically overpaid; he shouldn’t be the fourth-highest cap hit in the league, because that’s insane.

Evgeni Malkin’s contract is up after next season. Think he looks at the Getzlaf contract and does the finger thing for money at Ray Shero? Because I sure do. He has four (soon to be five) seasons better on a points-per-game basis than anything Getzlaf produced before this year. The Penguins better be ready to fill Mario Lemieux’s pool with money for Geno to swim in.

While the ink was still wet on that contract, someone said this is another case of the NHL’s middle class disappearing, and maybe all that is true. But it seems more likely that this is just a case of a team signing a dumbass contract that doesn’t make any sense. It seems more like what happens when a team that has the ability to overpay their stars does so. This is a deal that affects no one but the best players on their own teams. It matters for Malkin. It matters for Tom Vanek, whose deal is up after next season as well. But those guys were going to get roughly this kind of money regardless of whether Getzlaf signed for $8.25 million or $1.25 million.

It doesn’t matter to the NHL’s rank and file because the Ducks were never going to spend beyond Getzlaf and their other stars anyway. That’s why no one ever complains or even talks about how bad Staal’s deal is: because no one besides the Hurricanes has to care about it. It plays no role in the market because everyone knows it’s ridiculous, and it gets filed away in their minds as such. It’ll be the same with this Getzlaf deal.

With that having been said, $8.25 million a year to Ryan Getzlaf is a pretty bad contract.

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It’s easy to get caught up in the ongoing storylines of this abbreviated NHL season. The Blackhawks are unstoppable. The Rangers are garbage without Rick Nash (but really great with him). The entire Northwest is pretty bad. The Flyers keep losing and have negative-a-million games in hand on everyone. The Habs are a big surprise atop the East. The Ducks are the second-best team in hockey somehow.

But one thing that seems to have escaped notice, and perhaps understandably, is that the Florida Panthers are terrible. Like, extraordinarily so. Worse than Columbus. The Columbus Blue Jackets are worse than them at hockey despite the fact that the Panthers play in the worst division in hockey (teams in the Southeast average 22.2 points, and Carolina has the lowest point total among division leaders with just 27).

To make matters worse, you could probably put up a pretty decent argument that the Panthers are lucky — just as they were last year when they inexplicably made the playoffs thanks to all those dumb shootout wins — to be in the position they are. That’s because their goal differential this season is minus-30. In 24 games. By comparison, the next-worst negative goal differential belongs to both Columbus and Buffalo at minus-15. But perhaps the best way to illustrate how bad it is to be minus-30 in 24 games is to say that the Blackhawks are plus-32 in the same number; the Panthers are almost as bad this season as Chicago is good.

Now, to get under the hood a little bit, there are a lot of pretty decent reasons why the Panthers are so bad after making the playoffs, and a lot of it has to do with the fact that they shouldn’t have made them last year. This was a poorly constructed, incredibly lucky team whose current leading scorer is Tomas Fleischmann, with 17 points. Fleischmann is a fine enough hockey player overall, but if he’s your team’s best point producer, your team has problems. The thing is, though, he’s not their best player, because that honor goes to rookie Jonathan Huberdeau, who has 11 goals and is the only Panther with a double-digit total in that regard, and only Tomas Kopecky, at nine, is even close.

Then there’s the goaltending situation. Suffice it to say that entering any two consecutive seasons with a two-man rotation of Jose Theodore and Scott Clemmensen will guarantee you one ghastly campaign at the least, and that’s certainly borne out by the results this year. Theodore leads the team with four wins in 14 games, thanks to his .893 save percentage and 3.29 GAA. Clemmensen’s stats are nearly a full goal and .041 worse, which is saying something. And just so you don’t think it’s entirely a function of those guys just being crap goalies (they are) Jacob Markstrom’s .913 save percentage in four games with Theodore on the shelf isn’t great, but it’s still only enough to keep his GAA barely lower than 3.

This is, and always was, a pieced-together team of mediocre veterans and too-young kids that was always going to be pretty bad team, made worse by Stephen Weiss nursing a wrist injury all year that recently ended his season (and by the way he’s going straight to the UFA market in July). It’s unlikely that anyone gets fired over how terribly things are going because last season was an aberration, and moreover no amount of silly free agent spending was going to patch over the fact that the team was clearly undergoing rebuilding work when Dale Tallon was brought aboard. If anything, last year hurt them in their efforts to achieve those ends.

This is more in line with what fans who actually want to see the team succeed long-term should be cheering for. Even if watching them is painful and sad.

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(Ed. note: This is a sponsored post for @67sound. If you want me to write about any old thing in hockey, all you have to do is donate $50 below. It’s easy and fun. Bye.)

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The prospect of losing a defenseman of the quality of, say, I don’t know, a Chris Pronger, just as a for-instance, must be terrifying to a few GMs around the league. I say that it’s only concerning to a small number because defensemen of Chris Pronger’s quality aren’t exactly the most common sight in the NHL these days, or indeed, league history. Chris Pronger, you see, is very, very, very, veryveryvery good.

But that’s what happened to the Flyers, and it wasn’t a Pronger-quality defenseman they lost to a concussion, it was Pronger himself. Which is probably worse because that guy has a tendency to forcibly drag bad teams by the hair into Stanley Cup Finals pretty regularly. That’s how it went with the Oilers in 2006, that’s how it went with the Flyers in 2010. The 2007 Ducks, it should be noted, were a good team.

That left Paul Holmgren in a sticky situation, as did his losing Matt Carle to Tampa on a not-so-great contract that he was probably right in not attempting to match. The Flyers blue line last year, after the Pronger injury, was famously thin, and given the number of goals the team scored last season (264, third-most in the league), it must have occurred to Holmgren that he could trade from one of his positions of strength to bolster one of his positions of weakness.

And so it was that he resolved to swap out freshly-extended James van Riemsdyk, who had a disappointing season in 2011-12, for a defenseman around which he could begin rebuilding his tattered blue line. Instead of doing that, though, he traded the former No. 2 overall pick for Luke Schenn.

Right now, that decision constitutes one of the most immediately-lopsided trades in recent NHL history, potentially ahead of James Neal and Matt Niskanen going to Pittsburgh for Alex Goligoski (there is some debate because it took Neal, now a 40-goal scorer alongside Evgeni Malkin, about half a season to find his legs in the Eastern Conference). After scoring 11 goals in 43 games all of last season, van Riemsdyk now has 11 in 19, but the shocking part is that it comes with an at least semi-sustainable shooting percentage of 15.9; at least he’s not like Brad Marchand shooting in the high 30s and low 40s all season.

This is, it should be noted, quite the departure for van Riemsdyk, whose career high in three prior seasons was just 21 goals in 75 games, and really only received his six-year, $25.5 million deal on the basis of his being electrifying in the Flyers’ run to the Cup Final. But that, one supposes, is the inherent risk of trading an extremely high draft pick who is entering the prime of his career for, well, Luke Schenn.

Schenn has been, hmm, there’s got to be a word for it… terrible doesn’t cover it, nor does disappointing. Okay, I guess Schenn has been upsetting for the Flyers so far this season. It’s tough to saw what he was brought in to do, exactly, but suffice it to say he hasn’t been doing whatever that was. This was most evident when the Flyers and Maple Leafs met two weeks ago, and van Riemsdyk’s new team torched his old one 5-2, and in which he blew Schenn’s doors off to score his then-eighth of the season. You can see that pictured above.

The two teams meet again tonight and with Toronto playing as well as it has (7-3 in the last 10, comfortably in a playoff spot) and Philly currently ninth in the East with 19 points from 20 games and a minus-4 goal differential to the Leafs’ plus-9, well, you can’t exactly expect good things for the defenseman in that deal.

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(Ed. note: This is a sponsored post for Corey Blauss. If you want me to write about any old thing in hockey, all you have to do is donate $50 below. It’s easy and fun. Bye.)

Hi! I’m writing these posts to benefit 826 Boston, a nonprofit writing and tutoring center for area kids at which I volunteer. If you want to make a donation, you can click right here. Thanks!

As you may or may not know, I love college hockey. I like it more than I like NHL hockey. And I like NHL hockey a lot.

Over the course of the average college hockey season I usually get out to 20 or 30 games in person and watch a bunch more on TV, and so I tend to get a pretty good feel for the teams that play in and around Boston. And this season, I can say unequivocally that one of the finest and most consistent teams I’ve seen either on television or in person is the Northeastern University Huskies.

Now, you might look at their 9-17-3 schedule and say to yourself that they’ve been struggling a bit, and that’s certainly true, especially considering they’ve only won four games out of 15 at home this season. I don’t think anyone thought they would be this bad. But the reason for that is that on paper the Huskies are pretty damn good, and occasionally they’ve shown it this season.

They’re led by Anaheim draft pick Kevin Roy (pictured above), who’s inarguably the best rookie forward in the conference in a runaway. He has 34 points in 29 games this season, 10 more than his nearest teammate (Winnipeg pick Vinny Saponari, who’s very good in his own right) and has seven more goals than Sharks choice Cody Ferriero. They’re also without sophomore Ludwig Karlsson, who was one of the best freshmen in the league last season, but who has played just one game since the new year. Braden Pimm and Garrett Vermeersch, who round out the team’s top five scorers are now slouches either. But overall I’d say the Huskies have two very good lines, and can go shot for shot with most teams in Hockey East, one of the best top-to-bottom conferences in the nation every single year.

This is evidenced by the team’s ability to actually show up for games every once in a while and rip the arms off opponents generally considered far better. This year they’ve beaten Merrimack (tied for first in Hockey East), Boston College (reigning national champions and a point back of first in the conference), twice put traditional power BU down in convincing fashion, and played UNH (currently tied with Merrimack) to a scoreless draw.

Those are good, solid wins, of which most teams nationwide would be envious, and a sign that Northeastern has, like, one thing slightly wrong with it. That thing is goaltending, and it’s in no way Northeastern’s fault. Going into the season I would have told you that any sort of reliance on apparent No. 1 Chris Rawlings would be reason enough to start waving the white flag in October, and the fact that his backup is Bryan Mountain, who isn’t even good enough to start ahead of Chris Rawlings, doesn’t really help at all. But it wasn’t supposed to be this way.

The conventional thinking was that Rawlings was going to go pro after his junior season, at which point a Northeastern recruit by the name of Jon Gillies was supposed to come in and be the No. 1 on his first day on campus. But for some reason, Rawlings didn’t go pro, and Gillies withdrew his commitment to Northeastern. He then briefly considered playing in the QMJHL but in the end opted to go to NU league rival Providence, where he has been the best goaltender in the conference as a rookie. So if you’re looking to point the finger at anyone for Northeastern’s lack of success this season, you can aim ‘er straight at Rawlings for two reasons: He didn’t go pro, and he stinks.

The good news is he’s gone after this season, at which point Roy and whomever gets the starting job can lead this team back to being good. Unless Roy goes pro, I guess. Which I bet he will.

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The Lead

We were given a whole slew of reasons to think the Ducks are the most revolting franchise in the NHL tonight.

As though we needed more.

Tonight, of course, saw James Wisniewski up and run Brent Seabrook, a former teammate, in retaliation for an innocuous hit on Corey Perry who, let’s face it, deserves any hit he takes.

Now, before all you Ducks fans start crying about it being a headshot and boo hoo Corey Perry’s just playin hard out there, let’s keep two things in mind. First, it could only technically a headshot because Perry put his head down around crossbar height (and even then, his arm got in the way of the Seabrook hit) and second, Seabrook had already committed to the hit but Perry turned at the last second and it otherwise would have just been your standard shoulder-to-shoulder check.

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The Lead

Tonight’s 6-0 loss by Anaheim to the mighty Boston Bruins featured just about every reason to possibly hate the Ducks that you could come up with.

They were taking cheapshots at Boston players, there were two boring-ass fights (if you stayed awake during that George Parros/Shawn Thornton tilt, you were either Shawn Thornton or George Parros), Corey Perry spent much of the night diving all over the place, they took a ton of penalties (two guys had over 10 minutes each), and people acted like they were a good team despite their lack of anything resembling solid play.

The good news, of course, is that the Bruins f’n steamrolled them. A six-goal shutout win is always nice, but it’s even better when the Ducks drastically outshoot their opponent and get outscored by a multiple of INFINITY. Plus, the turdiest troika in all of hockey — Perry, Ryan Getzlaf and Chris Pronger — were a combined minus-6.

If only Zdeno Chara had checked Perry in such a way that he landed in the third row of the premium seats, this would have been a perfect game for someone that hates the Ducks.

And boy do I hate the Ducks.

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The Ducks have begun using an interesting strategy to save cap space: send down guys on two-way contracts every off-day.

In order to save $12,000 in salary-cap space, the Ducks on Monday assigned two rookies, left wing Bobby Ryan and defenseman Brett Festerling, to their ECHL affiliate, the Bakersfield Condors.

The Ducks, who did not practice Monday, will recall Ryan and Festerling in time for the two to practice with the team Tuesday morning at Honda Center.

It just seems so.. odd. What does the extra $12,000 in cap space mean to the Ducks at the end of the day? It’s almost nothing in terms of an NHL contract and means even less against the cap. But Dan Wood says that the pro-rated $50-60,000 Anaheim saves could help them land a “relatively high-priced” player at the deadline.

It kind of makes sense because the salaries of players acquired through trade are pro-rated but by sending these kids up and down all season doesn’t that mean that the value of their salaries (a pro-rated base of $850,000 with bonuses that could push it up to $1.539 million for Ryan and a pro-rated $379,000 for Festerling) mean that they can only get a guy whose pro-rated salary is that much?

For example, the Ducks want to trade a draft pick (just so there are no sticky numbers going the other way) for a “relatively high-priced” player. Can’t that player’s salary, at best, be the sum total of Ryan and Festerling’s? I don’t know when a player in the $1.1-1.9 range became “relatively high-priced” but okay, sure.

Why, then, doesn’t every team do this? Wouldn’t it make sense to just constantly send your young guys up and down? The Islanders, just as a for-instance, have roughly 43 guys on the 20-man roster on two-way deals. Why not send ALL OF THEM down to Bridgeport on off-days to save however much against the cap and, if they fancy themselves playoff contenders around deadline time (ha!), they could then trade for your Jason Spezzas and Ilya Kovalchuks because they’ve saved x amount against the cap through this silliness.

Maybe the Lightning can do this and get that free agent center they’ve had their eye on.

Brian Burke has been let go as general manager of the Anaheim Ducks for no readily apparent reason.

Details to follow at the afternoon press conference, or so they say.

Interesting to note, though, that in this week’s Hockey Notes from the Boston Globe, Kevin Paul Dupont pondered what was next for Burkie, whose contract was up after this season. In fact, Burke even said he had a substantial offer on the table to return as Ducks GM. His return was unlikely, however, since, “Family issues, related to his first marriage, would be eased greatly if he worked closer to Boston, where he lived and worked for years as a player agent before going into hockey management.”

Obviously there are the rumors that he’d be jumping to Toronto as soon as his deal with the Ducks was done, but as Dupont points out, there are a number of teams that could use Burke’s services in one fashion or another, including the Blackhawks, who appear to be in complete makeover mode, and Bruins, who are still without a president and have been since Harry Sinden was crowbarred out of the job a few summers ago.

One thing’s for sure: Burke won’t be out of work for too long.