Let's build the worst possible roster of contracts that's still somehow cap compliant

Six years ago, I wrote a post based on a premise that I thought was stupid, bordering on pointlessly absurd. If you know my work, that’s really saying something.

A few days earlier, I’d tried to build a roster using the best players and contracts that I could fit under the salary cap, which is not as especially dumb idea and was actually kind of fun. But then, somebody asked me to flip the script, and build a cap-compliant roster of the league’s worst contracts. At first, that seems fine. But then you get into it and realize that “bad contracts” and “cap compliant” don’t work together at all, as you find yourself being priced out of some of the very worst deals because you don’t have room for them. The whole thing didn’t make one bit of sense.

Needless to say, I did it anyway, the readers made it one of my most popular posts of the season, and lately some of you have been bugging me to do it again. Fine, why not, it’s August and nobody will remember this ever happened.

>> Read the full post at The Athletic

(Want to read this post on The Athletic for free? Sign up for a free trial.)

Do Elias Pettersson and Jusse Saros have bad contracts? NHL Cap Court returns

Let’s do another round of Cap Court. You know the drill by now: Five players, five dicey contracts (from a team perspective), and five arguments over whether the deal is actually bad enough to be “bad”.

Today, we’ll cover a perplexing goaltender, a one-time sure thing who may have peaked as a rookie, and two players recently traded away by the Senators. But we’ll start with what I believe may be the single biggest contract in terms of total dollars that we’ve ever tackled in this column…

>> Read the full post at The Athletic

(Want to read this post on The Athletic for free? Sign up for a free trial.)

A brief history of the Thornton Award, a fake trophy for best debut with a new team

It’s summer and nothing’s happening. Let’s make up another fake award.

We did this last summer, when we introduced the Pollock Trophy for a season’s best trade. Prior to that, we’ve also done the Carson Trophy for best sophomore season, as well as the Bourque Trophy for best final season. None of these actually exist, but they should, and that’s enough for our purposes.

For today’s award, we’re going to create the Joe Thornton Award for the best debut with a new team.

A couple of quick rules: Rookie debuts have their own award, so they don’t count – a player has to have previously played for another NHL team before joining a new one. Unlike most awards, we're taking the playoffs into consideration. And finally, a player has to have played at least half the season with his new team, because I don’t feel like figuring out how to rate deadline pickups. Other that that, the field is open – we can be looking at trades, free agent signings, waiver pickups or whatever else.

We’ll cover the cap era, starting with a 2006 recipient. It’s Slow News Summer, let’s argue about an award that doesn’t exist.

>> Read the full post at The Athletic

(Want to read this post on The Athletic for free? Sign up for a free trial.)

Getting a new CBA without a lockout is bad, actually: The Contrarian returns

It’s late-July, we’re two months away from games that matter, and NHL GMs have apparently taken the rest of the summer off. Let’s get Contrarian.

This is the feature where you send in your most obvious takes, and I tell you that you’re wrong, whether I believe it or not. In the past, we’ve made the case that Mark Messier was a great Canuck, Ray Bourque’s Cup win was bad but Brett Hull’s crease goal was good, and Bobby Orr’s flying goal photo is overrated. Last time, we made the case for Alexander Ovechkin being an overrated bum, and also for Alexander Ovechkin being an underrated legend, because we’re flexible like that.

This time, we’ve got a new CBA, an old legend, and everything in between. Let’s dive in.

>> Read the full post at The Athletic

(Want to read this post on The Athletic for free? Sign up for a free trial.)

The minor playoff rule change that altered NHL history, including 4 Cup winners

During the 1986 offseason, a very strange thing happened in the NHL: The league made a rule change that nobody got all that upset about.

That was rare, even back then, because fans like to complain about things. But this change was so simple, and so obviously the right decision, that there really wasn’t anything to complain about. Or so we thought.

The rule had to do with the playoff format, and the league’s ongoing attempts to have one that made sense. Since 1974, when the league added a fourth round to the playoff tournament, the first round had always been shorter than the others. Originally it had been a three-game preliminary round, later increasing to five games. In 1986, the league decided to expand the first round to seven games, the same as the others. And everyone went “Sure, that makes sense”. Maybe a few of us complained that the extra games would make the season longer. But the extra playoff hockey, and the extra revenue it would generate, was an easy sell. And so the change was made, and then nobody thought of it again.

Until today. Or in my case, until a few weeks ago, when a reader named Andrew asked a question: How much does hockey history change if the first round had stayed best-of-five?

The answer, as it turns out, is “a lot”. So today, we’re going to go back to that decision from nearly 40 years ago, and work our way through an alternate version of NHL history that could – fair warning – make some of you sad.

>> Read the full post at The Athletic

(Want to read this post on The Athletic for free? Sign up for a free trial.)