NHL emails, Nail Yakupov and Nazem Kadri diving (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.)

 

10. What NHL players think of the working class

Shameful from Jonathan Bernier. That probably man makes $12 an hour!

9. The Bieber/Gretzky incident

A great thing about hockey is that every hockey fan in the world took Justin Bieber receiving an autographed jersey from Wayne Gretzky as the largest affront imaginable. Imagine if, like, NBA or NFL fans got all upset every time a celebrity wore a jersey of literally any team in that sport.

Meanwhile, if an attractive female pop star wore a Lemieux jersey on stage, the joyous frothing at the mouth would have drowned the world. Christ, that picture of the girl from Heroes licking the Stanley Cup still gets passed around on a regular basis. And she licked the Stanley Cup.

Please like my sport, but only if you meet the parameters of enjoyment I have arbitrarily set for who is and is not allowed to like my sport.

(Related disclosure: Pretty sure I have never heard a Justin Bieber song. Maybe he's bad. I can't imagine caring what dumb shirts he wears regardless.)

8. David Poile

The aghast manner in which the Predators' GM addressed Jimmy Vesey's decision to test free agency this summer was something to behold. They offered him a top-six role! They offered him ice time in the playoffs! He swore on a stack of country albums that he was going there as recently as the deadline!

The amount that matters is of course zero, because This Is A Business and so on. That's what people are saying. And they're not wrong.

But here's the bigger issue in all this for me: You gotta have a contingency plan in place.

The second Nashville was unable to sign him this summer, they had to proceed as though this was a possibility, regardless of what his camp was telling them. The ability to go UFA as an elite-level college player — which Vesey clearly has been for two years — is always going to be a major spanner in the works when the team that drafted him tries to sign him. Add in the rumblings anyone around the college game was hearing all year, disregard the transparent and syrupy Players' Tribune article where oh jeez gosh he just loved college hockey so much he simply had to come back. And you have a pretty convincing case that this was always going to happen.

Certainly, it's an issue that should not have impacted the team's deadline planning, because again, this was always a very, very real possibility.

A decent comparable here is obviously Kevin Hayes. First-round pick of Chicago, plays four years in college, becomes an elite-level performer (which any first-round pick in his draft year-plus 4 should be doing) when he changes to a more straight-ahead game as a senior. Anyone around the sport heard all along that there was basically no way he signed with the team that drafted him, and would of course test free agency. Then he did.

I don't recall Stan Bowman making a big old stink about it. In fact, he didn't. Was he stringing them along too? They paid for him to go to a playoff game, and tickets are expensive!

I'm never going to blame a player for assessing all his options to their fullest extent. I'm always going to blame a general manager for getting weepy about it in the media. Poile did it with Ryan Suter and he did it here. Like, it's a business, right?

The Leafs employ his father and drafted his brother. Did this honestly not at least strike you as a vague possibility?

7. Making it about yourself

Hey Wes McCauley, dial it back. This is what people talk about when they say refs need to be reminded no one comes to see them.

6. Electronic mail

Yeah so we figured out why the NHL didn't want those emails released to the public. Brendan Shanahan acknowledging that the league has a serious prescription drug problem. Gary Bettman saying “pun intended” about the NHLPA putting up a fight (get it?!?) on eliminating fighting. Bill Daly admitting there's a link between fighting and concussions.

No one looks good here.

But no one looks worse than NHL senior vice-president of communications Gary Meagher, who told a market research firm:

“I could sum up in one line… NFL is in the business of selling that they are making the game of football safer at all levels -- it is smoke and mirrors but they are masters of smoke and mirrors. The nhl has never been in the business of trying to make the game safer at all levels and we have never tried to sell the fact that this is who we are… The question is: should we be in that business and if we were, what could we possibly achieve without throwing millions of dollars at education.”

Yep, that's ugly.

The answer to the two questions he posed: “Obviously,” and “saving lives.” The sport generates multiple billions of revenues, but hey, education? That's for idiots! And when the research firm representative said that was a cynical take, well, there was this:

“Not cynical at all. NFL invests hundreds of thousands of dollars each year around their pr campaign to deal with violence … They produce concussion websites, send former players around teaching young players how to play the game safer, they produce videos for young football players ... I could go on and on ... We do none of that and don’t view it as an important part of our mandate … NFL views their role as being leaders in the game of football …”

The idea that the NHL doesn't view itself as a leader in the game of hockey is laughable, and this is a very, very enlightening look at how much the NHL actually cares about this in real life: Basically not at all.

Cool. Great.

5. Relocation

Wake me up when the Hurricanes' moving trucks are being loaded. And let me know if they have snow tires on them. Until then please don't bring it up to me.

4. Anyone playing Tampa in the first round

We've gotten some not-great injury news in the last few weeks, with important players getting hurt for decently long stretches of time. However, Anton Stralman breaking his leg is a borderline tragedy for the Lightning.

There aren't too many players on that roster whose prolonged absence would have such an impact. Maybe Ben Bishop or Victor Hedman. But other than that...

3. Getting nasty with Naz

Few players in the recent history of the league are as good at drawing penalties than Nazem Kadri. He is absurdly good at it. So of course referees are taking the opportunity to no longer call penalties when he legitimately draws them.

The reason why? He draws too many penalties.

This friggin' league, man. “Oh we want to generate offense, we want to see more scoring.” But then instead of protecting skilled players who generate offense and draw penalties (which by the way generates offense), the refs actively look to not-call penalties he draws, and in the case of Saturday night just lets him get cross-checked. From behind. Into the boards. At a critical juncture of the game. In full view of the officials.

Instead of doing that, let's make the nets bigger and the goalie pads smaller and have long goal reviews on stupid little screens that don't work correctly so that we can take away what little offense is actually generated.

Meanwhile, I'm sure, if Nazem Kadri gets slashed in the wrist and tries to exact some frontier justice for himself (given that he's going unprotected by the league's officials), he's going to the box for a deuce.

What's the guy supposed to do?

2. NCAA free agent signings

This is the good time of year for some NHL teams. The college season is over for almost everyone, and clubs are signing their draft picks (who may or may not actually be worth the SPC they're signing) and that's all well and good. Unless you're the Predators.

But the best thing is when guys sign NHL deals as free agents, because then it's a team getting something for free. Defensemen Ethan Prow signing with Pittsburgh and Casey Nelson with Buffalo are probably the two big ones right now, but more are going to happen before the end of the regular season.

You can keep track of them all here. It is good to do that.

1. New Yak City

Yeah, Nail Yakupov probably did need to be traded at some point here.

There was just a lot of tire-spinning with the Oilers, and the way he's been used during the time since he was drafted has been suboptimal. If I'm not mistaken he's been through three GMs and four coaches in that time, which is a big ask of anyone to put up with.

But since the trade request was revealed, it's been tough to avoid all the talk about what a huge bust this kid is and how he sucks and so on.

First things first with this: He probably shouldn't have come into the league as an 18-year-old, but that wasn't up to him.

Second: When he did come into the league, he had to play for the goddamn Oilers.

Third: He's still third in his draft year in points and goals, and second in games played.

Fourth: Oilers.

Fifth: This isn't exactly the greatest draft of all time here. Who in the first round would not be viewed as The Biggest Bust In A Decade if he were taken first overall? Filip Forsberg? He didn't even make it to the show with the team that drafted him. Ryan Murray? He can't stay healthy and he's not great when he is. Alex Galchenyuk? You'd think he ran over half the Montreal media's cats.

Sixth: Craig MacTavish and Steve Tambellini were this team's decision-makers for the first three years of his career.

Seventh: He had 10 points in his first 11 games this year because he was playing with talented players (Taylor Hall and Connor McDavid). The most common linemates in his career? It's Sam Gagner and Derek Roy.

Eighth: Edmonton!

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Jeez I wonder why this kid's been such a disappointment.

(Not ranked this week: The Buffalo PHWA.

This vote and the chapter's reaction to the due criticism it was the figurative version of drunk-driving a truck into a Tim Horton's -- the vote itself, fraught with bad decision-making -- and fleeing on foot -- crying that everyone was mean on Twitter.

Allegedly.)

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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