The Auston Matthews Bowl, sure.
When the 28th place Toronto Maple Leafs collide with the 30th place Edmonton Oilers tonight at the Air Canada Centre, it will be a collision of two clubs already out of post-season contention, and already plotting moves to make next season better.
Programming Alert: Watch the Maple Leafs take on the Oilers Monday on Sportsnet at 7:30 p.m. ET
And December hasn’t yet arrived.
For the Leafs, this is no surprise. Mike Babcock correctly predicted “pain,” and after a nifty little winning streak, the Leafs have regressed, with James Reimer not healthy enough to provide elite goaltending and Jonathan Bernier lost somewhere within himself. That brings Garret Sparks into the narrative tonight and heck, why not? He’s 22 years old, has been the best AHL goalie the Leafs have and could produce the kind of energy this team could desperately use.
For the Oilers, this season’s troubles are a surprise. A new GM, a new head coach, a new franchise player, new goalies and some free agent signings made believers of many that this season would be the one in which Edmonton made a bold move forward, but we’ve said that countless times in recent years and more of the same has been the result.
Connor McDavid is hurt and out for a while yet (Oilers are 3-8 without him), and the youthful core of Taylor Hall, Jordan Eberle, Nail Yakupov and Ryan Nugent-Hopkins does not seem to have learned the necessary lessons from all that losing to drive this club forward. All this said, GM Peter Chiarelli won’t panic, and the only recipe here is to double down on more youth, whether it’s Matthews next June or whomever.
Now’s a good time for Leaf and Oiler fans to remember the draft lottery next spring won’t reward the worst of the worst nearly as much as in the past. While the 30th place team in the league was guaranteed no worse that the second overall pick in previous years, from 2016 forward the lottery will determine the top three draft picks and the 30th place team could draft as low as fourth overall.
That’s still a good pick in a draft that probably goes five players deep with Matthews, London Knights winger Matthew Tkachuk, Finnish forwards Patrik Laine and Jesse Puljujarvi, and Sarnia Sting blueliner Jakob Chychrun. It could even be that Mississauga Steelheads forward Alexander Nylander, brother of William, might join this elite group before season’s end.
The Oilers, needless to say, have demonstrated that picking first overall doesn’t guarantee anything. Looking back, taking Tyler Seguin ahead of Hall, or Gabriel Landeskog ahead of RNH, or Alex Galchenyuk/Morgan Rielly/Jacob Trouba/Hampus Lindholm ahead of Yakupov wouldn’t have put Edmonton any further behind than it is now, and might well have produced a better team.
Matthews, by the way, returned from a back injury last Wednesday for Zurich of the Swiss league and scored two goals.
Staal situation coming to a head
The Eric Staal situation in Raleigh should come to a head this week. His agent, Rick Curran, is expecting Canes GM Ron Francis will inform him this week as to whether the club wants to negotiate an extension with the 31-year-old veteran centre.
Owner Peter Karmanos has been trying to sell the club but still maintain control, and that hasn’t gone anywhere yet, which has complicated matters. Staal has four goals and 10 assists and is in the final year of a contract that comes with an $8.25- million hit. It’s hard to see anything but a contract that comes with a significant “hometown discount” making much sense for Carolina, and the NHLPA wouldn’t be in favour of Staal taking a financial step back.
Goalie Cam Ward is in the same situation and is also a client of Curran’s. Jordan Staal and Jeff Skinner, both of whom have a number of years left on their contracts, are also Curran clients. These pieces are all connected, and a decision on Eric Staal will begin the process of sorting this out. The Canes have drafted some nice players in Noah Hanifin, Haydn Fleury and Elias Lindholm, and Justin Faulk is an emerging star, but attendance (11,306) is the worst in the league and Karmanos’s future is unclear.
Maple Leafs last standing in no-fight club
The Leafs are now the only NHL team without a single fight this season. Carolina and Tampa Bay were with the Leafs in the “zero fights” club last week, but then Brad Malone fought twice and Ryan Callahan dropped the mitts on Saturday night and the Leafs were left on their own.
At this point, there doesn’t seem to be much, if any, correlation between fighting and winning. The three busiest fighting teams — Columbus, Anaheim and Philadelphia — all sit outside the playoff picture right now. Montreal, tops in the NHL, has had one fight.
No team in NHL history, as far as anyone can tell, has ever gone an entire season without a fight. The NHL’s low water mark for fighting, according to hockeyfights.com, would be the 1961-62 Detroit Red Wings, a team that had only three fights. In the post-expansion era, the 1967-68 Pittsburgh Penguins had only six.
During the 1980s, when fighting increased dramatically, one year the Washington Capitals fought the least of any team, and they still had 56 scraps.
Now, with fighting down 50 per cent in the past five years and 20 per cent since last season alone, we may have a number of teams with five or fewer scraps this season.
That it’s the Leafs taking up the rear (or leading the pack, depending on your point of view on these things) is unusual in that this is a dramatic culture change. Last year, the Leafs had 24 fights, putting them around the middle of the pack. The two seasons before that, Toronto led the league in fighting.
Did NHL get weekend suspensions right?
A couple of quick thoughts on the suspensions that were, and weren’t, in the NHL on the weekend.
If Brandon Dubinsky had received an appropriate five-minute major for cross-checking Sidney Crosby in the head Friday night, there would have been a greater sense of justice than after Dubinsky was suspended for one game by the league on Saturday. After all, how did Crosby and the Pens benefit from that?
The league, meanwhile, felt very confident that Matt Beleskey’s shoulder-to-shoulder hit on Derek Stepan was legal, particularly given that it came 0.7 seconds after Stepan had released the puck. The NHL’s threshold for a hit to be considered late is 0.8 seconds.
Well, maybe, but Stepan was still in a vulnerable position. Should have been a one-gamer.
Injured Pastrnak won’t make trip with Bruins
One of the quieter injuries to a good young player this season has been suffered by Boston winger David Pastrnak, who cracked the Boston lineup as an 18-year-old last year.
Pastrnak, the 25th pick of the ’14 draft, has missed 12 games with a non-displaced fracture in his left foot that has him in a walking boot and won’t go west on a three-game road trip with the club this week.
Now or never for Flames
Three losses for Calgary in three road games last week killed the sense the Flames were coming out of their early season funk. Now, with five straight at home beginning tomorrow night against Dallas, you get the sense it’s now or never for Bob Hartley’s team to demonstrate whether this has any chance of being a playoff season.
One of the interesting developments is that Hartley and the organization has clearly decided that they want Dougie Hamilton to play his way out of his early season woes, rather than earn ice time. He’s played 20:45 or more in four of the last five Calgary games. Meanwhile, there has to be great concern over the play of captain Mark Giordano, who hasn’t been anything close to the player he was before a serious bicep injury wrecked his season last year. Odd to see Giordano with a team worst minus-15, even if that stat doesn’t carry the heft it once did.
Disappointing Jets yet to take flight
Given the excitement the Winnipeg Jets generated in the second half of last season, their lukewarm performance this season has to rank among the NHL’s biggest disappointments so far.
Carrying the NHL’s lowest payroll, about $11.5 million below the cap, while generating all kinds of revenue is creating an interesting talking point in Manitoba, particularly with captain Andrew Ladd and defenceman Dustin Byfuglien unsigned.
Young winger Nikolaj Ehlers started the season looking like the game-breaker up front the Jets could dearly use, but the rookie now has one goal in his last 16 games. So far, at least, Winnipeg doesn’t have any reason to miss Kane, who has two goals in 14 games, missing 10 others to injury.
Hamonic trade talks go quiet
A week ago, it looked like a Travis Hamonic trade was imminent. Certainly, a number of general managers felt Islanders GM Garth Snow was poised to deal the defenceman, who has asked to be moved. A week later, the entire matter seems to have gone ice cold.
It’s just another indication of how wedged in teams are by the salary cap, and how the value of a player in 2015 is determined as much by the cap friendliness of his contract as by his ability. Hamonic, because of his relatively affordable and locked-in deal, is a much harder player to deal.
Kessel deal not paying off for Pittsburgh
Moving to a team with two world class centres hasn’t yet spurred Phil Kessel on to new scoring heights. The winger has seven goals this season with Pittsburgh and is on pace for 25, not the production the Pens were hoping for when it traded a 2015 first-round pick and prospects Kasperi Kapanen and Scott Harrington to the Leafs.
That first-rounder, by the way, becomes a ’17 first-rounder if Pittsburgh misses the playoffs.
What is going on with the Ducks?
The Ducks were one of the teams hoping to get a crack at Hamonic, and like the Flames, looked to be coming around before losing three of their last four. Ryan Getzlaf had five assists against Calgary, but followed that up with one assist in losses to Chicago and Arizona.
Anaheim has a six-day break coming up in mid-December, and at that point it’s expected GM Bob Murray will summon all his senior staff for a meeting on the short-term future of the team.
Firebirds respond well to firing fiasco
Remember the mess in Flint when the owner of the major junior Firebirds tried to fire the entire coaching staff?
Well, that was reversed, and since then the club is 5-3, with draft eligible winger Will Bitten leading the team in scoring.
Pitkanen returns to the ice
Finnish hockey writer Juha Hiitela reported Monday that former NHL defenceman Joni Pitkanen has started practicing with Karpat of the Finnish league, and could play this season. This would be a remarkable comeback given that Pitkanen has been out since April, 2013 after breaking his heel on a race for a puck on an icing call.
His injury was one of the final straws that forced the NHL to go to the current hybrid icing rule. The 32-year-old Pitkanen, who couldn’t even put a skate on his foot last year, hasn’t ruled out a return to North America.