The Two-Line Pass

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For whatever reason, it seems as if mediocre defensemen will dominate the trade market this year, and I don’t really know how much sense it makes. Jordan Leopold became the latest of these blueliners to get traded yesterday, moving to St. Louis for the absurdly high price of a second-round pick, just days after Douglas Murray got two out of Pittsburgh.

Is that the market? A mid-to-late second rounder for guys with little actual value and negative corsi relative numbers? Ridiculous. To put it another way, apparently the Blackhawks were in hot pursuit of Lubomir Visnovsky before the Islanders signed him to a big-money extension, and that’s because he has actually been good this year. But having been spurned, they will instead move onto other potential targets like Mark Streit (negative corsi), Robyn Regehr (negative corsi), Jay Bouwmeester (negative corsi), and Ryan Whitney (negative corsi).

It’s come to this, I guess. It seems unlikely that any of these players apart from Bouwmeester will actually help a team be good at hockey — this assumption is based on Bouwmeester largely enjoying a career offensive year despite an extremely low PDO, and playing heavy minutes against the toughest competition on the team for a mostly garbage club — but nonetheless, teams will be happy to pay extremely high prices for these guys. I can’t even begin to imagine what Bouwmeester fetches from whatever team is desperate enough to pay Calgary’s ransom, which will no doubt be boosted appreciably by the team trying to save face after getting robbed in the Iginla deal.

I have something going up on Puck Daddy tomorrow morning about how the market is largely going to be dead, and I believe that rather firmly. The only guys that are going to be moved are guys like Leopold and Murray, who are of little consequence, and whose former teams will be better for having moved them off their rosters. That’s even leaving aside whatever returns they fetch. Which again, seem to be considerable.

The trade deadline is almost by definition always a buyer’s market, and with so few sellers out there, the old adage about teams paying gallon prices for a quart of milk seem more likely to ring true now than not. But if the Blackhawks, or whoever, end up paying that for the defensemen being bandied about in the market these days, they’ll be getting closer to a pint.

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Darcy Regier isn’t known around the NHL as a guy who is really smart and good at his job. Or at least, he shouldn’t be. Sure, he’s long-tenured, having been the Sabres’ GM since 1997, but that, like Lindy Ruff before him, doesn’t mean he’s done well in the last few years.

He didn’t used to be this bad, of course, but when Uncle Terry came in with and built a Scrooge McDuck vault under First Niagara Center, Regier lost his marbles. Ville Leino, Christian Ehrhoff, Steve Ott, and John Scott. These are the big player acquisitions of the last two summers for the Sabres, and you see now how all of that is working out for them.

And even when he backs into a good decision, such as almost every team ahead of him passing on Mikhail Grigorenko because of xenophobia/stupidity, he can’t resist the chance to screw it all up. There was a time when Grigorenko was considered a top-3 pick in the 2012 draft, but he slipped all the way to No. 12 before Buffalo scooped him up. And it made Regier look really good when the kid actually made the Sabres out of camp.

Then Ruff didn’t seem to like his game much, even after the decision to keep him with the team after the traditional tryout period for all junior players in the NHL. Grigorenko was routinely a healthy scratch, which is something that people might point to as turning out okay for Steven Stamkos. But even when Ruff was fired, Ron Rolston also didn’t seem to have much time for the Russian, and over the course of the season he averaged just 9:45 a night.

The Sabres sent Grigorenko back to Quebec yesterday, after 22 NHL games in which he went 1-4-5, and in doing so wasted a year of his entry-level contract. I don’t doubt that Grigorenko was perhaps simply not ready for the NHL, but this whole thing has been mishandled from the start, as you might expect with Regier involved.

The GM said of the decision that it was a benefit to both parties to send him back, which seems specious. Grigorenko will undoubtedly benefit since, you know, he gets to play actual hockey again (he had 29-21-50 in 32 games for Quebec before joining the Sabres post-lockout). I don’t see how any of that benefits Buffalo.

“There’s benefits for us … We got to know his game,” Regier actually said as though video and in-person scouting don’t exist.

You know what? Just read every quote in that article and look at how hard Regier is trying to spin how badly he and his two coaches handled things with this kid. The amount of spin is actually almost admirable. But the fact of the matter is that Grigorenko now has just two years left on his deal instead of three, because they just couldn’t bear to send him back after the five-game junior player evaluation period. In the 17 games after that, Grigorenko saw 15 minutes or more just once, and got 10 or less in 10.

That, to me or any other logical person, probably isn’t worth the year of his entry-level deal they torched. But again, Regier has shown no compunction about wasting Terry Pegula’s money or goodwill, so I don’t know why we ever expected any less.

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Just days after Ilya Bryzgalov went out and said the Flyers were more or less finished this season if they got swept in their home-and-home by the division rival New Jersey Devils, his team went out and laid a serious egg in Newark, where stinkers that bad usually don’t get noticed because New Jersey smells bad and that’s the joke I’m doing.

The final score said 5-2 to the Devs, and that might not have even told the full story about how putrid Philadelphia was in the game. If New Jersey opening the score just 2:02 into the game was the first nail in the coffin for the Flyers’ season, Adam Henrique putting his team ahead just 37 seconds after Jake Voracek tied it midway through the first didn’t help at all. Ilya Kovalchuk’s shorthanded goal at 17:18 was probably just about it for Peter Laviolette’s prospects of taking a whack at turning the team around. The Flyers mustered just 14 shots over the final four minutes and ended the game with 25. A truly pathetic display.

After the game, the Flyers themselves said all the right things about how their performances in the last, oh I don’t know, 28 games are on them, and not their coach, in whom they still believe deeply and for whom they have nothing but the utmost respect. But the fact of the matter is that the old adage about not being able to fire the players stands true, and we have to be days, or even hours, from seeing Laviolette shuffling out of Wells Fargo Center with a box full of stuff from his desk in one hand and a ficus in the other. As with other teams which experienced colossally mismanaged offseasons (Detroit, Buffalo, etc.), the problems now being experienced on the ice are hardly the coach’s fault, but the axe dangles nonetheless above Laviolette, who otherwise has such a pedigree that you’d think it would be enough to save him from one bad season.

It won’t.

Philadelphia’s defense is held together with duct tape and the memory of Chris Pronger, and little more. Luke Schenn being out with the flu last night probably didn’t help, and Luke Schenn’s not that good. Bryzgalov has caught a lot of the blame for this failure, because that’s who Philadelphia writers decided long ago was the cause of all the team’s ills, and it’s not that he’s without fault, but the problems are so much deeper than just him that it’s reductionist at best and willfully ignorant at worst to hang all this around his neck like a particularly unfortunate ancient mariner.

The Flyers are behind the Islanders in the standings. That’s what it really boils down to, and Paul Holmgren, bad though he may be at his job, has a ready-made scapegoat in Laviolette. He hasn’t given the coach the fabled “Vote of Confidence” that often portends a firing, but if Bryzgalov’s ominous prediction is right then by this time next week we’ll be talking about new Flyers bench boss Lindy Ruff. And won’t that just be a hell of a lot of fun?

But if even Ruff isn’t able to turn this team around (and he isn’t!) then there’s always the amnesty buyout period this summer that’ll see the goalie go too. And if THAT doesn’t work, well, I’m sure Holmgren will come up with another person to blame.

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(Ed. note: This is a sponsored post for Jo Innes. 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!

If there’s one thing the Senators need in their attempts to make the Stanley Cup Playoffs for the second year in a row, it’s… well obviously it’s for Erik Karlsson’s achilles to reassemble itself 100 percent and be ready to play tomorrow.

But if there’s two things the Senators need it’s… okay well I mean there’s Jason Spezza getting healthy too, but that’s going to come relatively soon, I’m pretty sure. But if there’s three things the Senators need, well, I could do this all day. The fact of the matter is that one thing the Senators definitely did not need is to acquire Matt Kassian from the Minnesota Wild for a 2014 sixth-round pick yesterday.

Here’s a real quote from general manager Bryan Murray on why the Senators went out and acquired a player who has nine games under his belt this season, all of them at the AHL level:

“He’s a big strong guy, he’s a very physical player, he’s a very willing combatant. With the number of young players and injuries we have on our roster, there has got to be a sense of comfort that they can go out and play without being pushed around, which has happened a couple times here so we just felt it was a need and an addition that, given the opportunity to get one, a guy like this, a big guy, he’s a young player and we’re hoping that he’ll work with our coaches and be a real contributor to our team.”

That’s an awful lot of words to say, “The other teams in the Northeast have some fighters and we don’t,” but that’s the general thrust of it. At 6-foot-4 and 232 pounds, Kassian is a big boy. He also sucks at hockey. And so the Senators’ decision to use him in the lineup (albeit “at the coach’s discretion,” according to Murray) seems like it would be not at all conducive to winning.

It’s true that the Senators didn’t have a true fighter in the lineup. Hit-and-run pukes like Chris Neil don’t count, because he at least has some amount of value to the team outside punching guys in the face. This reeks of remorse for letting Zenon Konopka walk, coincidentally to the Wild, and even then, at least Konopka wins draws pretty effectively. The list of hockey things outside of fighting that Kassian does pretty effectively begins and probably ends with skating without falling down most of the time.

It seemed to me that the Senators were a just-okay hockey team last year, but one that wisely stepped out of the Northeast Arms Race that saw Montreal and Buffalo bulk up in order to better physically compete with the Bruins and Leafs. Somehow, their currently being fifth in the East despite being not-that-great and then suffering all those catastrophic injuries on top of it isn’t enough for Murray, and he has to try to make Paul MacLean waste a roster spot to put this bum into the lineup five minutes a night.

I’ll remind you again that Kassian only has nine games this season in the AHL. Obviously losing a sixth-round pick next year is almost the NHL equivalent of giving up nothing, but even that’s too much. The only thing I can think is maybe Murray thought he was getting a steal by acquiring Zack Kassian from the wrong team.

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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 Michael Morse. 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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We have obviously seen a lot of really bad hits in the NHL this season, and one problem that seems to consistently emerge in the immediate aftermath of these checks is team personnel — from announcers to players to coaches — falling down in their hurry to defend these hits as being totally clean and within the rules.

The most recent two example of this come from Philadelphia (where else?). The Flyers have long had in their employ some seriously dangerous thugs whose sole job seems to be trying to injure opposing players. And moreover, when one of those players crosses the line, from the gray area where legality and illegality come together so brackishly in this league, into obvious suspension-worthy play, this is an organization that tries very hard to make apologies for it at best, and outright defend it at worst.

That was the case when Harry Zolniercyzk leapt shoulderfirst into the Ottawa Senators’ Mike Lundin as he came across the blue line, and in doing so earned a five-minute charging major and game misconduct. Michael Jordan never thought leave his feet with as much fervor as Zolniercyzk did in trying to separate Lundin, who admittedly came across the middle of the ice with his head down (not that this is any sort of justification for trying to hospitalize him), but that didn’t stop blockhead announcer Keith Jones from saying that it was only the momentum of the ferocious hit that made Zolniercyzk leave his feet, not the obvious crouch-and-explode motion that immediately preceded contact. Jones further noted that jeez if he did make contact with Lundin’s head (and did he ever!), it was incidental, and not targeted. “That’s as close as it can get,” he said without a hint of irony.

Laughable stuff, but expected from the kind of dullard who also supported the Flyers’ crybaby decision to sit on the puck for 45 seconds against the Lightning because they didn’t like the defensive schemes with which they were being presented. That he did so on national TV, and not in his capacity as Flyers’ color man, without disclosing that he is a team employee, shows the kind of intellectual honesty with which we’re dealing.

Other defenses of Zolniercyzk came from equally-embarrassing hockey player Zac Rinaldo (”From my eyes, I thought it was beautiful. I thought it was a great hit, but I only saw it for a split second.”) and coach Peter Laviolette (”When you look at it, Harry didn’t really do anything wrong.”), but that’s to be expected, at least to some extent. If the Flyers went around decrying every dirty hit thrown by someone on their payroll, that’s all they’d do morning, noon, and night. No one has time for that.

Remember a couple years back when everyone made such a big thing about Andrew Ference coming out and saying teammate Dan Paille’s hit on Raymond Sawada had no place in the game? That’s because it was a big deal. Guys should feel free to call out teammates for dirty hits, because if we’re going to sit here and talk about “respecting opponents” and “respecting the game,” there needs to be some accountability.

The same is true in Buffalo, where Patrick Kaleta just got his second multiple-game suspension and third bit of supplemental discipline from the league in the last 18 months or so. Ryan Miller has been a pretty vocal advocate of getting garbage plays like the kind Kaleta throws around on the regular out of the game, but whenever his teammate reoffends, he’s quieter than the Sabres offense. You don’t hear him calling Kaleta a “piece of [poop]” like he did when Milan Lucic ran him, and that’s a shame, because teammates and coaches and GMs saying guys need to cut it out or get the hell off the goddamn team seems to work a whole lot better than the occasional five-gamer. It worked with Matt Cooke, and it can happen with pieces of garbage like Zolniercyzk and Kaleta, who very clearly need someone to constantly remind them, “Don’t try to kill anyone out there.”

Hockey’s a dangerous enough game without guys intentionally trying to injure opponents. So let’s start acting like this stuff is actually unacceptable, instead of letting it all slide.

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Last night Patrick Kaleta threw a pretty ugly crosscheck from behind on Brad Richards, as is his wont as the dirtiest player in the sport today. Everyone who isn’t a Sabres fan (and therefore hasn’t had their opinion automatically discarded as being worthless in all things) looked at it and immediately thought three things:

1) Here we go again with this Kaleta character.
2) I hope Brad Richards doesn’t have a concussion.
3) Brendan Shanahan is going to throw the book at him.

And indeed, pretty much as soon as the game ended, the usual people confirmed quick as you like that Kaleta would indeed face supplementary discipline. But then there was the little caveat thrown in that they weren’t sure whether it would be a hearing in person, or by phone. The distinction is obviously important. You can have an in-person hearing and get as many games as Brendan Shanahan of the Department of Player Safety chooses to throw at you. Could be a million, who knows. Having it by phone, on the other hand, means you’re getting five or fewer.

And so imagine the surprise of the hockey world when it was revealed bright and early the next morning that Kaleta wouldn’t even have to get out of bed to learn exactly how many games he was being suspended, because Shanahan would do him the favor of just calling him up about it. What doesn’t make a lot of sense is, y’know, why.

Let’s just put it in the simplest terms possible: Kaleta has twice been suspended by the NHL, and received a maximum fine one other time. The end of his most recent suspension (a four-gamer) came nine days before he picked up that fine. Those were both last season. That makes him a “repeat offender” in the NHL’s rather loose definition of the term, and anyone who’s watched a Sabres game in the last year or two knows that Kaleta has somehow skated on far more questionable offenses than that.

So the real question for Brendan Shanahan, whose job is ostensibly to protect players on the ice (at least according to his job title), is, “What gives?”

I heard Mike Milbury defend the hit — par for the course with that idiot — as only happening because Richards put himself in a vulnerable position, and he’s right about that. Richards’ vulnerable position was being on the ice with a guy who hits to hurt and has no respect for his opponents or the sport. How many guys does Kaleta have to almost put in the hospital as a result of his dangerous hits before a brave disciplinarian throws the book at him? He already pretty much ended Paul Kariya’s career. Would this be different if Richards had been stretchered out and forced to retire?

The answer is yes, and that’s the real problem with Shanahan’s ludicrous policy of suspending to the extent of an injury as a result of an illegal play. People only ever point out that if you suspended Joe Thornton for the David Perron hit a while back he would have missed half a season, and boy that’s no fair to Jumbo Joe. Pretty much true, there. But the fact that Brad Richards skated away on his own and returned to the ice a few shifts later (if you go back and watch the replay on GameCenter Live, he’s literally off the ice for less than two minutes before the announcers say he’s headed back to the bench, which really speaks well of the league’s strict adherence to Quiet Room policy) shouldn’t absolve Kaleta of the fact that he should be sitting seven games minimum. It’s a stroke of luck, really, that Richards was totally fine, but that luck is enough to get Kaleta off the hook from a more serious hammer-dropping.

There is, I suppose, a negligible difference between the maximum number of games Shanahan will throw out and what I would give him at a minimum (two, who cares?), but I think there are two considerations that an in-person hearing would bring about. First, it shows the league is actually serious about getting a moron like Kaleta to cut the crap, and maybe Shanahan could give him a nice icy stare as he tells him the next offense gets him 20 games no questions asked. Second, it would show the Department of Player Safety isn’t scared of that new CBA provision that states players can appeal anything over six games, which is the real reason this hit is only going to get Kaleta a fiver.

But Shanahan has long since had his balls cut off by the NHLPA and his bosses when it comes to levying suspensions that actually matter. Imagine what a hit like this would have gotten in Shanahan’s gun-slinging days if that James Wisniewski elbow in the preseason last year got him eight. That version of Sheriff Shanny wouldn’t let a gutless puke like Kaleta run around like this any more. But this version of castrato judge and jury lacks any sort of serious executory power, as evidenced by Gary Bettman coming in and cutting Raffi Torres’ richly deserved suspension to 21 games from Shanahan’s original 25.

That’s the reason guys like Kaleta haven’t been forced to clean up their acts like Matt Cooke was, and that’s the reason they’ll continue to injure and nearly-injure their opponents for the foreseeable future.

Pathetic stuff from Shanahan and his farcical claims to protecting player safety, but you can’t expect anything else any more.

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(Ed. note: This is a sponsored post for Steve Dangle. 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!

Noted video blogger (”vlogger”) and dumb Canadian idiot Steve Dangle proposed perhaps the most interesting of the sponsored topics yet. It’s one I’ve subsequently been thinking about a lot.

“Maybe [write about] who the next Calgary Flames are going to be. And by that I mean the next team to be totally screwed.”

Damn, that’s one hell of a good thing to think about. The obvious answer would be the Buffalo Sabres, who seem hellbent on turning Thomas Vanek and Ryan Miller into the next Jarome Iginla and Miikka Kiprusoff circa 2008 or so, the only good players on a team, surrounded by detritus and with their own skills fading slowly at first, and then with alarming rapidity.

Another pretty good answer would probably be the San Jose Sharks, who tried as the Flames did to force their way back to Stanley Cup contention with greybearded veterans and in doing so not only missed the boat on that, but also cost themselves several years worth of good draft picks.

You might even be able to say it’s true of the Carolina Hurricanes, treading water in mediocrity forever after one totally shocking and perhaps undeserved Cup run (the difference being they won and Calgary didn’t). The ‘Canes have since drafted Jeff Skinner, and probably won’t be so foolish as to trade him as Calgary did with Dion Phaneuf, but otherwise have a relatively bare cupboard and an aging-but-not-good-enough core, led until only recently by a bad coach.

But then last night, I figured out the perfect candidate for which team will be the next one to be as hopeless as the Calgary Flames are currently. It’s the Calgary Flames. Yesterday was perhaps the most embarrassing day in that franchise’s history, which, given the quality of the franchise’s management in the last several years, is really saying something.

It all began bright and early on Thursday morning in Calgary, when Jay Feaster pulled the trigger on the trade the brought ex-Flame Brian McGrattan, who is awful, back to Calgary for a minor league prospect in an attempt to become “tougher to play against.” Normally, this would be fine. Except McGrattan was on waivers one day earlier and cleared because no one claimed him. Baffling stuff, except that adding McGrattan would have pushed Calgary up to the league’s 50-contract limit. I conjectured that this was a precursor to some other kind of move that would necessitate them taking on an additional deal, and well hey look at that I was right.

Jay Feaster, of all people, was finally the one GM in the league smart enough to give Colorado’s Ryan O’Reilly the $5 million a season he wanted and deserved, and he did so through an offer sheet after apparently trying in vain to pry O’Reilly away via trade (astronomical asking price for a division rival, and all that). This was something that wise fans of a number of teams league-wide had been clamoring for since the O’Reilly situation turned truly acrimonious in Denver, and that Feaster jumped on the grenade was a bit of a surprise given how judicious such a move — which would only have cost Calgary a first- and third-round pick — was. With that having been said, the way Feaster structured O’Reilly’s contract also allowed the center to get a massive qualifying offer when the two-year deal expired, but that was less of a concern, largely because everyone was still sitting somewhat agog at the fact that Feaster made a pretty shrewd managerial move, as is generally the opposite of his wont.

However, the CBA certainly allowed Feaster to sign O’Reilly to that offer sheet, just as it allowed Colorado to match that offer and get all mad, which GM Greg Sherman did within a few hours.

In fact, that decision to match came midway through the Avalanche’s game that night, which rather coincidentally was being played against Calgary at the Pepsi Center. But hey, at that point, things were going very well for the Flames, as they were up 3-0 and looking like they would cruise to a win that would catapult them to a tie for 12th in the West with Edmonton. Instead, they gave up five of the game’s next six goals and lost 5-4 in regulation because the Flames are an embarrassing conflagration of a disaster.

That capped a pretty ugly night for the franchise, which has had too many of those to count on a couple dozen hands in the last calendar year. And then it got worse.

What most people, including the Flames organization, didn’t realize (or at least forgot) is that Jay Feaster is constantly skirting the borderline between incompetence and outright negligence. This morning it came out that what Feaster apparently didn’t know was that it also stated that if he had to bring the center onto the roster, he would have to first put him through waivers, where someone would have almost certainly claimed him. (Colorado was under no such restriction because he was their own restricted free agent and therefore had no waiver requirements.) So Calgary would have lost both those two picks and Ryan O’Reilly in the space of a day, for no reason at all other than Jay Feaster not knowing how the CBA works. Which, I am to understand, is a pretty large part of his job.

Now, that this didn’t happen is entirely a function of Sherman also not being a very smart GM. Because while he would certainly love to have O’Reilly back on his team (though perhaps not at that price point) having the opportunity to not only get two free draft picks, which were likely to be quite high, while also completely screwing a division rival that you now had a pretty decent reason to dislike.

But at least he got something out of the deal, and that something is a very good young center. Calgary got nothing but another regulation loss, a player no one wanted on waivers, and a whole lot of derision.

No one’s knocking them off the perch as the NHL’s most miserably-run franchise any time soon.

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(Ed. note: This is a sponsored post for Noha Beshir. 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!

It seems like about a million years ago that the Canadiens let their best defenseman sit out for a few weeks but man was that ever a dumb decision, huh?

Boy, PK Subban is a good defenseman, and with him the Habs have pretty well taken off under new coach Michel Therrien, where before he rejoined the team they were merely “surprisingly good.” Don’t everybody all look at once, but the Canadiens are improbably atop the Northeast Division, ahead of even their biggest rivals in Boston, and tied for first in the conference, which doesn’t seem like it should be possible.

And obviously it’s not just PK Subban who’s driving the Habs to these wins, but he’s second among defensemen on the team in relative corsi, though he has been used in a somewhat limited role, getting just under 20 minutes a night. But hey, it’s also difficult to argue with results. The Habs won seven of their first 11 games with Subban in the lineup this season, and that’s kind of a decent amount. Two of their losses also came in a shootout, although it was to Buffalo and most recently the Islanders, so that’s a little embarrassing.

(An unsponsored aside: All this, by the way, goes without mentioning that Max Pacioretty has been mindbendingly amazing this season, and that’s apart from his superhuman ability to suffer horrific injuries. He has 13 points in as many games, but do you want to see some bonkers stuff? Behindthenet.ca has his relative corsi at 39.5, which is crazily high. He also has a PDO of less than 1000, and is one of the few Habs who do, indicating that where most of his teammates have been getting a lot of bounces, he hasn’t been. So the fact that he’s unlucky and playing this well is kind of a little bit impressive I guess. When his PDO corrects a little bit he can probably expect to get even more points going forward, which doesn’t seem fair, but here we are.)

Certainly, no one expected them to be anywhere near this position, and even as they try to suck all the fun out of Subban’s game by banning all that “brash” stuff (CODEWORDS!!!) he used to do, he doesn’t seem to be be suffering any ill effects. If anything, maybe you’d like to see him pick up the scoring a bit, because he only has seven points, and the one he got last night was his first in four games. But still, he’s helping to make this excellent season from Carey Price possible, and that’s something.

The question becomes one of whether the Habs can keep this going, and while the answer seems to be something like, “Probably not at this level,” they haven’t been so lucky percentages-wise that they’re going to drop off the face of the earth at some point like the Wild did last season. They’re closing in on being halfway to the 50ish points that will probably be required to get into the playoffs, which most of us probably expected would be a threshold they’d cross around late March, not mid-February.

I don’t really get it, and I’m sure Habs fans don’t care, so I’m just going to say this is all because of Subban coming back. Screw it.

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