Shane Doan, Tampa's injuries and Keith's history (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.)

9. Doubling down

Yeah, you made a bad choice for Masterton. But you know what you should do in that case? Waste your Sunday column defending it as childishly as possible.

8. Shane Doan

Not content with being a Bret Hart-level hero in Canada for no particular reason, Shane Doan is now in the “espousing years-old ideas like they're new ones he came up with” business.

In 2012, Adam Gold presented an idea at the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference titled, “How to Cure Tanking.” The premise was simple: The team with the most points after being mathematically eliminated at the end of the year gets the first overall pick.

[Join a Yahoo Daily Fantasy Hockey contest today]

It gained a lot of traction and praise in the NHL last season, when the tanking discussion surrounding Connor McDavid and Jack Eichel was too significant to ignore. This ignores the fact that the idea is bad and dumb for a lot of reasons, but would it be better than the bad and dumb lottery system we have now? Maybe.

Anyway, this idea is now four years old, and was talked about on multiple occasions last season. So imagine the surprise when your ol' pal Shane “dirt on his dungarees, elbow in your chin” Doan miraculously came up with a cool idea to fix the draft: What if the team with the most points after being mathematically eliminated at the end of the year gets the first overall pick?

But wait, he thought of this a long time ago too: 

“This concept was born during a conversation Doan had with a friend amid the league’s most-recent lockout that nixed the first half of the 2012-13 season.”

I'm not saying he stole the idea and called it his own, but boy, Shane Doan sure is getting a lot of credit for “coming up” with something that has been around and well-known for a while.

And again, even if the “Gold Plan” were the greatest thing since sliced bread (also Shane Doan's idea), it wouldn't change the fact that in this day and age, players aren't the ones that aren't trying to win. GMs are. And if anything, incentivizing mediocrity is worse than incentivizing losing.

7. Being Tampa

The Tampa Bay Lightning have a really good team on their hands. Deep everywhere. Until the injuries pile up.

Last week Anton Stralman broke his leg. This week Steven Stamkos is out due to a blood clot in his arm. Both are likely out months, if not for the season. In the end, that may just be effectively the same thing, because a Tampa without these two players (Stralman is a possession monster, Stamkos somewhat quietly had 36 goals). 

And maybe you say, “Well, there's no replacing either of them, but at least you can get a significant portion of Stamkos's production back by calling up Jonathan Drouin.”

Nah, sorry, Drouin's day-to-day with a lower body injury. Who knows when he's back healthy?

Might want to hold Nikita Kucherov, Victor Hedman, and Ben Bishop out of the lineup once in a while down the stretch. Let 'em rest up, keep 'em healthy. Except you can't do that because the Bolts still haven't locked up a playoff spot.

This is really not fun right now.

6. Throwing your stick in the air, waving it like you just don't care who you injure

Duncan Keith got off easy, if we're being honest. Clear intent to injure, long history of doing cheap crap just like this, etc. Missing the rest of the regular season and one playoff game is hardly a punishment.

Two previous suspensions for the guy, a five-gamer for elbowing Daniel Sedin in the head, a one-gamer for slashing Jeff Carter in the face.

Sidenote: How did he only get a double-minor and a game for this?

That doesn't get into how he behaved in the 2013-14 playoffs against St. Louis, when he was just going full-on lumberjack to the point that even Don Cherry was like, “What's with this guy?”

Then there's this slash. There was one a few weeks ago on Johnny Gaudreau that I can't find video of but knocked Gaudreau out of the game. And so on. You could probably find instances of him baseball-swinging half the league. He does it constantly.

Six games. What a joke.

Of course, that hasn't stopped crybaby Chicago fans from going full conspiracy theorist and breaking video down like it's the damn Zapruder film. Yup, Charlie Coyle did a not-nice thing to Keith before Keith tried to give him a free rhinoplasty, and that's why the NHL should never have suspended Keith for as long as they did! Because you know what they say: Two wrongs make a right.

5. KHL calling

Pavel Datsyuk jumping to the KHL would theoretically be bad for Detroit because of how indefensibly awful they were when he was out of the lineup earlier this year. It would be worse because his cap hit would still apply to their total, meaning they probably couldn't replace him.

4. Avoiding the problem

Mark Stone has been out a while now. You may recall that it's probably because Dustin Byfuglien caved him way the hell in.

But the Senators are being awful cagey about saying that the injury Byfuglien gave him with that huge, mega-clean hit was a concussion. He missed the Sens' game the next day. Then on Monday, he ducked out of practice after just a few minutes. Dave Cameron said it was the flu or something. Didn't practice yesterday. Now he's doubtful for the rest of the year. Is it perhaps likely that, I don't know, he has a concussion from when the massive man checked him into oblivion? In fact, during the game, they called it a chest injury.

Why haven't the Sens said it's a concussion? Might have something to do with the fact that Stone got clobbered and then went out for another shifts after being very briefly checked out by the team's medical staff for five minutes. He apparently told his trainers he was okay. Seems an awful lot like ducking concussion protocol to get a good player back on the ice.

Seems like something a team could get fined for if they disclosed that he has a concussion now. I dunno, folks! Tough to say for sure he does have a concussion but Occam's razor and all that.

3. The Panthers

A bit of a mea culpa here: Earlier this season I said the Panthers were shaping up to be another Calgary/Minnesota/Colorado/Toronto. They were being out-possessed and outchanced every night, and playing very low-event hockey, but had a sky-high PDO that made them look better than they were. The feeling was that if they didn't change their approach, they were going to collapse just as all those other teams had.

Now, they're looking pretty comfortable atop the division. In part because they changed their approach. They're still carrying a huge shooting percentage, but over the last 30 games they have the 10th-best score-adjusted possession number in the league (51.6 percent) and have dramatically improved the rate at which they generate high-danger chances while still limiting the ones they allowed.

Prior to the start of February, they were a net negative in terms of high-quality chances (47.7 percent), possession (48 percent), and shots on goal (also 48 percent). That's not winning hockey over the long haul. But they've been so good for this last stretch that they're now just minus-17 in shots on goal, minus-5 in high-danger chances, minus-75 in shot attempts. These are all massive turnarounds that have them close to the break-even point in terms of percentages for the season.

Further, since they improved the team with a few low-risk trades at the deadline to shore up their depth (much-needed), their league ranks in those three areas — attempts, high-danger chances, and shots on goal — are sixth, fifth, and seventh, respectively. Extremely impressive.

This is what good hockey teams actually do: Figure out what's wrong with them, and fix them on the fly. Anaheim did it this year, and now it seems Florida did it too. Rather unexpectedly. They still don't strike one as being particularly likely to get all that deep into the playoffs, but they're a whole hell of a lot better than they were.

Credit where it's due.

2. Blaming everyone but yourself

Patrick Roy continues to amaze. Yeah, maybe Matt Duchene shouldn't have super-celebrated his 30th goal of the year given the state of the game, but Roy's demonstrable calling-out of his second-best player was effective in helping him accomplish what he set out to do: Distract from the fact that his team got clobbered, again.

The Avs are awful and Roy is a pretty big reason why. He is, in fact, probably the biggest reason (not that Joe Sakic is helping). But hey, no one was saying that after Roy kicked the stuffing out of Duchene for celebrating.

That's brilliant gamesmanship, really. Just a very impressive maneuver to avoid being asked why his team is so dismal once again.

But at this point, how is anyone reminded of anything other than the Oilers when they look at this club? Talented, but run by proven incompetents who are only in their positions because they were good players 20 years ago. They're not going anywhere, and as long as they don't, embarrassing stuff like this is going to pile up.

Fortunately, because Sakic is bad at his job, Roy is always going to have a lousy player to blame for his problems. Must be nice.

1. Enemy territory

Canada lost to the U.S. twice on Canadian soil and our wonderful women brought home the gold. What a nice thing to have happened in one of the best rivalries in all of sports.

(Not ranked this week: Everyone on the bubble in the Atlantic.

Do you guys just, like, not want a playoff spot? Let us know. We can give it to New Jersey or something.)

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.)

MORE FROM YAHOO HOCKEY: