We talk forever and constantly about player trades in the NHL and whenever we want to get whimsical, we even talk about swapping coaches. In a roundabout way, that happened this past offseason — a three-way exchange that saw Jim Montgomery go from Dallas to Boston, Bruce Cassidy from Boston to Vegas, and Peter DeBoer from Vegas to Dallas. Cassidy’s and DeBoer’s teams face off in the Western Conference final beginning tonight, while Montgomery coached the Bruins to the most regular-season wins (65) in NHL history.
So, wins all around.
Which of course leads us to the next logical progression in the NHL trading game — a swap of general managers.
I’m pitching Kyle Dubas, former Maple Leafs GM, for Brad Treliving, former Flames’ GM in a one-for-one deal.
And before you jump to the comments to explain why that wouldn’t, couldn’t or shouldn’t happen, hear me out.
Treliving, if you’ll recall, mutually parted ways with the Calgary Flames soon after their regular season ended in disappointment. They missed the playoffs with 93 points, never quite getting untracked after the significant offseason personnel changes they made, which were largely set in motion when Matthew Tkachuk forced a trade out of Calgary and Johnny Gaudreau left as an unrestricted free agent.
But Treliving was never shy about tackling big problems and finding solutions and that’s a quality the next GM in Toronto is going to need.
As you know by now, an opening emerged in Toronto Friday morning, when the Maple Leafs announced that they would not extend the contract of Dubas once it expires on June 30. That was messy — messier than it looked at first blush after president of hockey operations Brendan Shanahan outlined the timeline of what transpired between the unhappy end of the season and the decision to move away from Dubas.
Shanahan described the search for a new Leafs GM as urgent and suggested it wouldn’t be rushed but that it was a priority.
Notwithstanding the fact that the Maple Leafs could only get past the first playoff round once in his tenure, objectively, Dubas had a pretty good run as general manager with the Leafs with some of the top regular seasons in team history.
In his exit interview last Monday, Dubas — presumably anticipating that this could be the result — said he wouldn’t immediately look for a new job, if the old one evaporated. He wanted to take time to refresh and be with his family. Fair enough.
When the Flames began the search for Treliving’s replacement, Don Maloney — the new president of hockey operations and the interim general manager — said he was looking for a bright young voice to run the team. It almost seems as if the job he was describing perfectly squared with Dubas’ resume.
If Dubas needs some time away from the game to recharge his batteries, there is nothing to prevent Maloney from carrying on as interim GM through the rest of the offseason. He has enough experience, from his previous jobs in Arizona and with the Islanders, to handle the duties on a short-term basis.
Maloney was adamant, whenever he spoke about this hire, that the important thing was to make the right choice, even if the search took them deep into the summer. If they’re not prepared to turn the reins over to Craig Conroy, who seems like the logical internal candidate, then they can carry on with the current iteration of the front office through the draft and into free agency.
I know Dubas is a polarizing figure in Toronto, but the reality is, other than trying too hard to sign John Tavares when he ultimately needed that salary-cap space down the road, he has a lot more wins than losses on his decision-making report card.
Also, there is a learning curve to every job, including NHL general manager. Many GMs that survive long term do better the second time out rather than the first time. I’m going to guess that once Dubas has a chance to reflect on what happened and what’s next, he’ll realize there are only 32 of these openings in the league and if someone comes calling, maybe even before he’s ready to commit, it’ll be in his best long-term interest to answer the call and at least listen.
Practically speaking, the only wrinkle really is that both are officially under contract until June 30.
The Flames reportedly denied the Pittsburgh Penguins’ request to interview Treliving for their general manager’s opening — something that smacks of spite and does the organization little good moving forward.
Reputations count — and especially the reputations of Canadian small-market teams operating in aging arenas. If possible, you want to become a destination for talent of all kinds — playing, coaching, managing.
A huffy, “hold-him-to-his-contract” response to what was framed as a “mutual” parting of ways does little to enhance that perception. Dubas to Calgary. Treliving to Toronto. Why not?
A busy offseason for Oilers and Maple Leafs
Two weeks ago, or at the start of the second round, our preview spoke about the possibility of an all-Canadian final. It didn’t seem preposterous, because at that point, Edmonton and Toronto were the favorites on virtually every betting site that is now an official NHL corporate sponsor. Both lost and Canada’s Stanley Cup drought is now 30 years and counting. The question for both organizations is: what now?
In fact, it’s two separate questions.
What do you do? And what can you do?
The NHL salary cap is destined to rise by only $1 million next year, but it is likely to soar the year after that, because the players’ escrow debt will have been repaid, and NHL revenues have been quite robust since the return to normalcy after the pandemic.
Effectively, every responsible team should be formulating a 24-month financial plan. Step 1 gets you through the 2023-24 season and then there’ll be, probably, about a $7 million jump in the cap, which would finally create some financial relief for the 2024-25 season.
In Edmonton’s case, the key bit of offseason business is getting RFA defenseman Evan Bouchard under contract. Bouchard’s value and importance soared after the Oilers traded Tyson Barrie to Nashville in the Mattias Ekholm deal. Bouchard was promoted to PP1 from PP2 and — not only did it not go backward, but it was also better. Bouchard is coming off his entry-level deal and his production this year — 40 points in 82 games — means there’ll be an overage of $850,000 charged to next year’s cap.
A bridge deal seems to be almost a certainty. It’s hard to imagine Bouchard risking his long-term future in Edmonton, and the chance to work the puck to Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl by pricing himself out of the market right now. Skinner gets an $1.85 million raise so he’s not going anywhere. The $750,000 of Milan Lucic’s retained salary — thanks to the James Neal trade of a few years back — comes off the books, but Neal’s buyout charge, of 1.916 million, has another two years to run. So, a little help there, but not a lot.
Dylan Holloway will be an NHLer next year, and you could see an NHL path forward for Xavier Bourgault or Carter Savoie, or maybe both, so … potentially three forwards on entry-level contracts, which would make it easier to say goodbye to Kyler Yamamoto and possibly Warren Foegele.
Those are decisions that need to be made, but not really hard decisions. In the salary-cap world, building a team is like completing a jigsaw puzzle. To win a championship, all the pieces need to fit. The difference is they don’t need to fit forever. They just need to fit one time.
If you have big pieces such as McDavid and Draisaitl, or in Toronto Auston Matthews and Mitch Marner, you know what they can do, and where they contribute to the overall scheme of things. It’s making those pesky smaller pieces fit, that’s the greater challenge.
Edmonton’s path forward in terms of roster construction doesn’t seem all that complicated, frankly.
Toronto’s is a different story.
How to make $4.687 million of Matt Murray’s contract evaporate will be challenge No. 1. Thankfully, it’s only a year remaining, which makes it a little easier to dish off. There’s been a spirited debate about which, if any players, out of their Core Four up front should be traded. We had the discussion internally here at The Athletic when we cobbled together the first iteration of our offseason trade board.
My vote was for William Nylander — for no other reason but the most practical financial one. You can move the $6.962 million owed Nylander easier than the $10.903 million of Marner. John Tavares has a no-move clause so he isn’t going anywhere and Matthews is the premier goal scorer of his generation, who says he wants to stay.
You don’t make your team better by moving a player of Matthews’ talent. You make your team worse. Lots worse. And just as with Edmonton, it’ll be a handful of players on entry-level deals and players willing to take a discount to play in Toronto that’ll fill out the roster. People have obsessed about Toronto’s goaltending forever now but look at who’s thriving as the NHL playoffs have been whittled down to the remaining four contending teams.
Which leads us to:
Goaltending in these playoffs
Courtesy of MoneyPuck, the top-six goalies in the postseason, out of 28 ranked candidates, are in order: Sergei Bobrovsky, Igor Shesterkin, Frederik Andersen, Ilya Sorokin, Jack Campbell and Adin Hill.
The bottom-six goalies, out of the same 28 candidates are in order: Vitek Vanecek, Stuart Skinner, Marc-Andre Fleury, Jake Oettinger, Andrei Vasilevskiy and Connor Hellebuyck.
I’m going start by cherry-picking names from the bottom six, because that list includes three names that are a who’s who of must-have goalies, and the ones who are supposed to tilt a playoff series in your favor, if all else is equal.
So here you have Hellebuyck, Vasilevskiy and Oettinger. There’s also Skinner, a 2023 Calder Trophy finalist, who looked unsure and unsteady through most of two rounds, but kept getting opportunity after opportunity to start, even as Jack Campbell — who played 118 mostly effective minutes in relief appearances — looked solid, whenever he received the opportunity to play. That was an odd development, especially in a year where the coaches of three of the four surviving teams there weren’t afraid to make a change in goal, when injuries or performance dictated that they should.
Or to put it another way, these coaches didn’t rely on the old 1980s/1990s narrative, which said that while it’s fine to alternate goalies in the regular season in the playoffs you needed to ride one horse hard all the time.
So, Florida turned to Bobrovsky after Alex Lyon listed a little. Carolina went to Andersen after Antti Raanta lost twice. Meanwhile, Vegas — out of necessity, not by design — switched to Hill following the Laurent Brossoit injury.
The Vegas goaltending narrative is particularly intriguing, now that the Golden Knights are one round away from making the Stanley Cup Final for a second time since their inaugural expansion season.
Hill was plucked out of the San Jose Sharks’ system, as an insurance policy, because both Brossoit and the nominal starter, Robin Lehner, had offseason hip surgeries. In Lehner’s case, it was determined early on that he would miss the season. Brossoit wasn’t going to be ready until November, so until then, rookie Logan Thompson was the designated starter and Hill was going to be his backup.
But there was a scenario there in which Hill could have gotten pushed out if he hadn’t played well once Brossoit was given medical clearance. Instead, the Golden Knights rode that tandem right up until the point when Thompson’s fine rookie season was derailed by injury.
Then, for a time, the Golden Knights couldn’t keep any goalies healthy. It’s why they added yet another insurance policy — Jonathan Quick, from Los Angeles via Columbus — to the mix at the trade deadline. The result was well-documented at the time. At one point in March, Vegas won four consecutive games, using four different goaltenders, which had never been done before in NHL history.
It’s partly a product of Cassidy’s “goalie friendly” system, which limits the opposition’s high-danger chances and partly because they had some intel on Hill, via goalie coach Sean Burke and Burke’s son Brendan, who was a teammate of Hill’s in junior. Sean Burke has long been seen as the NHL’s ultimate “goalie whisperer” going back to his days in Arizona when he helped Ilya Bryzgalov, for a time, become an elite-level netminder. When Bryzgalov left the nest as a free agent to Philadelphia it didn’t go nearly as well.
Hill vs. Oettinger, on paper, seems like a giant mismatch. But throughout these playoffs, what looked like a giant goaltending mismatch on paper has proven to be something far different on the ice.
If, at the start of the exercise, someone had predicted that the starting goalies in the conference finals would be Bobrovsky vs. Andersen in the one bracket and Hill vs. Oettinger in the other, how many would have gently nodded in agreement?
And how many others would have savaged that prediction? Yes, exactly.
Maybe the lesson of these playoffs will resonate in Boston and Edmonton next year. Here are two teams that wouldn’t pivot off their starters, Linus Ullmark and Skinner, and it probably hurt their chances more than any other factor in their respective series losses to Florida and Vegas.
Skinner, presumably, will benefit from having a full year of NHL experience under his belt.
The hope is Campbell is better overall in his second full year in Edmonton on the grounds that he wouldn’t be the first goaltender in NHL history to sign an expensive free-agent contract and then falter early on, trying to live up to his paycheck every night. In theory, if Campbell and Skinner alternate next year, in the same way that Grant Fuhr and Andy Moog alternated back in the day, and then if the coaching staff has the courage to follow that rotation into the playoffs, maybe Edmonton will have a better result, next postseason.
I thought the quote of the year may have come from McDavid, in exit interviews. “It’s Cup or bust,” said McDavid. That’s a bold statement, a bold prediction; and a sign that he isn’t afraid of the challenge at hand, starting next October.
I like that. I admire that. And you hope that if anyone on the team shrinks from that challenge, then they’ll be weeded out between now and next April, which is when the Oilers will next get a chance to answer the Stanley Cup or bust question in the 2024 playoffs.
Hurricanes and Panthers need to recover from four-OT game
Goalie usage will obviously be an issue for Game 2 of Carolina-Florida after Thursday’s epic four-overtime game.
Both Bobrovsky and Andersen played exceedingly well, but both played the equivalent of more than two full 60-minute games in a single night.
Does it make sense to give them the night off for Game 2 just because you have a reasonably trustworthy, rested option on the bench?
The question came up, right after the game, and neither coach was prepared to answer immediately. They needed time to digest the question and maybe bring it to both the goalies and the goalie coaches. Some coaching decisions are easy. You just go by the book. This one is more complex.
Near the end of his postgame press conference, Panthers coach Paul Maurice, when asked about the strain a game that lasted almost 140 minutes puts on players, brushed up against the idea that maybe you have to put a cap on just how long an overtime game can go. His counterpart, Rod Brind’Amour, meanwhile, called the result “the worst possible way to lose” — a point that’s hard to dispute.
Carolina-Florida was always going to be compelling because of the threads that tie the two organizations together — Maurice and Brind’Amour’s relationship, the Staal brothers. This just adds another layer of intrigue.
You only hope that the physical demands of Game 1 don’t result in a flat Game 2, because that could easily happen. It’s not a lot of recovery time to get the juice back into the skating legs.
The only good news is, the teams had a long layoff between series, because they each eliminated their previous opponents in five games. Otherwise, they would be running even further on fumes.
(Top photo of Brad Treliving: Gerry Thomas / NHLI via Getty Images)