The Athletic Hockey Show - What can the winless Preds teach us about free agency?

Episode Date: October 21, 2024

On today’s Monday show, Max and Laz discuss what’s gone wrong with the 0-5 Predators to start the season after signing the trio of Stamkos, Marchessault, and Skjei on July 1 and what lessons can be learned about spending big on free agents. Plus, The Athletic’s own Jesse Granger joins the show to talk about the paradoxical impact of lower save percentages leading to higher premiums for elite goalies. Hosts: Max Bultman and Mark LazerusWith: Jesse GrangerExecutive Producer: Chris FlanneryProducer: Chris Flannery Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This is the athletic hockey show. Hey, everybody. Max Boltman here alongside Mark Lazarus for another episode of the athletic hockey show in Las. We're about a week and a half into this season, coming up on two weeks, actually. And the Nashville Predators, the offseason champions of the NHL, are still without a point. This will not be news to anybody. But I wanted to hear kind of what you've thought of the Predators to open the season. I've seen them twice. So I've got my thoughts.

I'll share those in a minute. But what has your reaction been to seeing how hard this name? Nashville team has struggled out of the gate. I mean, obviously it's surprising. We all thought this was team that was that was locked into a playoff spot that was, you know, going to contend for the Central Division crown in a very difficult division. And here they are, oh and five. Look, you can go through their numbers and you can come up with a million reasons why this is an aberration, right?

They have an 893 PDO right now, lowest in the league. Colorado, by the way, is next. It gives you an idea of these teams that might be due for a regression to the mean in a positive fashion. They have a 5.7 shooting percentage, worse than the NHL. Stephen Stamco's, who has a 16.6 shooting percentage for his career, is shooting 5%. He finally got one in the other night. I mean, that shot he took that went off Alex Lyons stick shaft. I mean, that summed up this entire Predators start to the season right there,

where just everything that can go wrong is going wrong. UC Saros is playing the same as Tristan Jari. I mean, there's just a, they have an 858 say percentage. evens, everything that can go wrong is going wrong. And that's how you fall to 0 and 5. Most of this stuff, you feel like it's going to correct itself. But I don't know, the problem is in the NHL, it gets late real early around here, doesn't it? It does. And if you look at the standings right now, they're the only team in the league with zero points, obviously. But even within their own division, they are already eight points back of the Minnesota Wild and the St. Louis Blues,

who are at fourth and fifth in that division. And that, by the way, is before you factor in the Colorado Avalanche who were just barely ahead of the Predators in seventh in that division. So even just in your own division, you're getting pretty close if this spiral continues to having a double digit hole to dig out of two weeks into the season. And the NHL's because of the loser point, it's like designed to make it almost impossible to climb the standings. Now look, we always have to remind ourselves of the Oilers last year of the Blues five or six years ago, whatever year that was, 2019.

You can do this. You know, I'm a Mets fan, so I'm in mourning this morning, but, you know, the Mets started 0 and 5. They were under 500 going into June, and they were the best team in baseball from June 2nd on, and they still had to play on the last day of the season had to win a game in order to make the playoffs as the seventh or the sixth seat. Now, that's in a league with 162 games in which it's relatively easy to climb the standings because there are no loser points. The NHL makes this very difficult, and, you know, the Predators have to have like a 110 point pace, the rest of the year now in order to kind of climb out of this hole. That's kind of the math you have to do on this.

And that's a big ask. And if the wild and the blues are better than we expected them to be, I think most of us did not have them really in the playoff picture, then that just makes that climb even harder. So I've seen them twice now. Once live and once just on TV, they play the Red Wings twice. The Red Wings got them both times, obviously, their own five. But what's jumped out to me is how an old Nashville looked.

And it's not the kind of the crash and, bang kind of predators that I was used to seeing, or at least in those games it was. And they were pretty possession heavy. They outshot Detroit by a factor of like two to one. It just wasn't that much quality, especially at five on five. You mentioned that Stam Coast look that I'm sure he had to feel like, you know, he would never see one go in again after that one doesn't go. But I, so I looked it up because I was thinking, like, are these guys as old as they've looked

to me? And their top six really kind of is. He's got Gus Nyquist, Philip Forsberg, Ryan O'Reilly, Steve, and Stamco's. March or so has now been dropped down, but you start adding those up and there's nothing, not much on the other side of 30 here for the Nashville Predators. Now, I assume that that's kind of what Tommy Novak and Luke Evangelista are supposed to bring there is a little bit of spark, and they'll experiment with some things. They'll get it going. My understanding, I can't really ever say I've covered a team truly old enough for this to be the case, but it's kind of true that

the older teams seem to take a little while to get going. Is that right? You've covered some teams on that side of things more often. Yeah, I think that's fair. These are guys who have been through this 82 game grind so many times in their lives. And I think we talked about this a little bit last week. That first, you know, you get to training camp and you get to the start of the season and the excitement of opening nightwear is off being like, oh my God, it's six months until the games I really care about happen. And there is a little bit of that. You know, young guys are just excited to be in the league. And older guys are, they're trying to get through, right?

They're just trying to make it to April healthy so that they can be good in the playoffs. But there has to be some urgency here. I mean, if you're a, if you're, this is a team that's built to win now, perhaps more than any team in the league, including the Oilers. Like, because like you said, this is an older team that doesn't have a lot of next years left. And when you sign guys like Stamco's at this stage of his career, it's because you're trying to win right this second. And to start 0 and 5 and to do it in the fashion they've done it. You know, we talked about Stancoast and March, so Brady Shea came over. He's supposed to be a big addition.

The predators have been outscored eight to one with Brady. Shea on the ice through five games at five on five. Everything you did this offseason was supposed to be great and everything has been a disaster so far. March or so has one goal in five games. Stamco's has one goal in five games. She's getting just absolutely, he's just drowning out there. Saros, your goalie, who you traded Ascarov, the next great goalie because you were so

believed in Saros, as, you know, he's proven they should. He's having the worst stretch of his career to open a season. It's a disaster. It's an absolute disaster. And they have to turn it around quick. They can turn it around. There's 77 games left in the season. It's not Panic City just yet.

But you got to do it soon because, like we said, it's really, really difficult to make up ground in the NHL. You know, Edmonton did it in a really crappy division. Nashville is not in a crappy division. So you know, especially early in the season, people are primed for things that they can, for trends, for things that they can extrapolate and make broader points about it. And with the Nashville Predators, it's obvious. It's exactly what you just alluded to with, with Steve. Sam Coase and with Marcossoe and all these guys that they brought in,

the natural takeaway for a lot of people here is going to be do not spend in free agency, at least to this level. Where are you at on that topic? Look, you should always be trying to make your team better, right? You know, you want your team to spend money. But the thing is, free agency, this is what always happens, is you always have to overspend in free agency, right? So if it doesn't work, it really screws you over because you've probably spent more than guys

are worth just to get them to come to your team because it's a bidding war. you know, acquiring guys via trade, you know, at the trade deadline, sometimes a much better way of doing this. But it's hard for, Stephen Samcoast has spent 175 years in Tampa Bay. And now all of a sudden he's in a new city with a new system, new teammates. We should allow him some grace, a little bit of grace period here, to figure things out. Same with March or so. He's been with Vegas for so long now.

And Brady Shays coming from Carolina. That's a team that plays a very specific style. And it's difficult to make those transitions. And when you have three key players doing it, you know, this can happen. That's not an excuse. It's not acceptable. But, you know, you have to understand that this is still October hockey. And it's rough on everyone, but it's especially rough on someone coming to a new team with severe expectations placed on their shoulders.

You know, Stephen Stamcoast is an all-timer. He is a Hall of Fame player. And, you know, that carries some weight with it. And it's not something he had to carry by him. himself in Tampa Bay because he had Kuturav, he had so many other great players there. I'm sure he's feeling the pressure. I'm sure he'll handle it fine in the long run. But, you know, there's when you spend that kind of money and you don't get immediate bang for your buck, that's what gets coaches fired. That's what sends fans into panics.

And this is where we're at right now with Nashville. Now, I do think just from a reality check perspective, there's a couple numbers here that that I think are important to point out here. So we talk about, you know, some of these acquisitions. We talk about some of these older guys. If you go to the Nashville Predators devolving hockey page and look at some of the expected goal stuff, they got seven guys above 50% in the expected goals four percentage. Philip Forsberg, Ryan O'Reilly, Gus Nyquist, Stephen Stamcoast, all in that mix. Like those guys are- Brady Shea is in the 30s, the low 30s.

That is true. But a lot of these older guys are still getting decent, you know, shot quality and kind of territorial underlying numbers here. So that could be a sign of encouragement. On the flip side, if you look at that as a team, they are the third worst team at generating expected goals per 60 minutes in the NHL, only better than the Blue Jackets, only better than the senators. That is not where you want to be. So there's a little bit of a two-sided coin there. On one hand, you go, okay, well, some of the big names look like they probably should be breaking through a little bit here.

On the other side, you really need them to because overall it has not even come in terms of shot quality in terms of expected underlying. Well, there's two aspects of that, right? That's the PDO aspect, you know, for, I'm sure everybody knows what PDO is at this point, but you're shooting percentage plus your save percentage, right? Yes. And when you're under 1,000, it means you're probably due for something good to happen. If you're over 1,000, you've been a little lucky. 893 is an incredibly low PEDO.

This team has some bad luck, some bad puck luck. The shots aren't going in, and UCSarros is not playing as well as we know UCSarros can play. The other factor is, it's been five games. This is a terrible sample size. Like all your expected goals like numbers and and and and you know those don't really carry a lot of weight this early in the season. It's way too early to be talking about XG. You know, it's hard because like on the one hand, I'm up of two minds of this. Like this is a terrible, terrible start and it's really difficult to come back from.

On the other hand, it's five freaking games. It's hard because it's just that this is why I hate the loser point. If this was a three to one system, I'd be less concerned right now. now about an 0-15 start. But it's really difficult to come back from an 0-and-5 hole the way this league is stupidly designed. Well, they still haven't gone to overtime. They still wouldn't have any loser points.

No, but I'm saying that the teams ahead of them are getting loser points. Oh, yeah, yeah. You know, and it just makes it harder to climb that hill because, you know, you have to get clean wins against division opponents. And all their division opponents, even Chicago, which is, you know, last year was free points have been in six games and they've been very competitive in every single one of them. This is not, there's no pushovers right now in the Central Division. There's no easy points. There's no Anaheim and San Jose in this division. It's going to be very difficult to rack up

points in a hurry in the Central Division this year. So an 0 and 5 start in this particular division is even more more, more, it's not insurmountable, obviously, but it's more difficult to surmount than it would be in another division. You touched on kind of this is the circumstances that coaches usually feel the heat for. And it seems all too predictable. It usually is just kind of whose goalie is struggling. That's the coach that's feeling the most heat at a given time. I think we're probably in agreement that it's too early for that to really be happening right now for anybody, including an 0 and 5 team. It should be, but this is the NHL and we've seen this happen a lot. Five, I think, is still on the early side. The Blackhawks fired Dennis Savard four games into the season in

2008. That is nuts. And they had to win. It's because they had Joel Quenville on the staff as a scout and they were looking for a reason to pull the trigger there. And guess who's out there right now waiting to be hired? It's Joel Quenville. Now we can debate all day whether he deserves this chance. I've written about it a million times at this point. But he's there and someone's going to hire him. And a veteran team with lots of stars on it is the kind of team that Joel Quenville can make

magic with. So I'm just saying, I do not think Andrew Burnett's going to be fired. I don't think he should be fired. But Joel Quenville is waiting in the wings. and so is Jay Woodcroft. There are options out there where this could theoretically happen in a league that tends to be a little knee jerky sometimes. Well, where I was going to go with that is at what point do you think that that conversation is legitimate?

I don't think it's now, but is it? Well, let's think in recent years. You had, you know, Woodcroft was fired in Edmonton. They were, I think, three, nine and one. Jeremy Colleton was fired in Chicago. They were one nine and one. So, I mean, you're talking, you get to that 10 game mark. and if you haven't turned things around,

that's when GMs tend to, you know, get a little trigger happy. In their upcoming stretch, they got Boston, Chicago, Columbus. You would like to think that especially those Chicago and Columbus games, high, high priority games for the Predators. And then it's Tampa, Edmonton, Colorado,

L.A., Washington, Florida, a hot Utah team, Colorado, Edmonton again. Yeah. It is not an easy stretch here. You got to pick up the points where you can. You can, exactly. And that's,

This is how a season spirals out of control, right? As you stumble out of the gate and then the pressure builds to win these games, the schedule gets tough, you lose a few more, you go on a road trip, you have it, you fall flat on your face and all of a sudden, you know, your coach is fired. And sometimes it works, work for the Oilers, work for the blues in 19. Andrew Burnett, he should be feeling some heat right now just because that's the way it works in the NHL. It probably shouldn't work that way in the NHL, but it does. We see it year after year after year.

someone's going to panic early and pull the trigger. To your point last year, that was Jay Woodcroft getting the axe in Edmonton, and Pierre LeBron had a great interview with Woodcroft this morning on the athletic. I think it's the first time Woodcroft has spoken, at least as I've seen. He was laying low. I know every single reporter and TV guy in Edmonton was texting him like every week saying, ready to talk, ready to talk, ready to talk. And he was just laying low.

Got to give him credit for that. Laying low and yet staying in Edmonton. from what it sounds like in the article, which, you know, I respect from a family standpoint, the advantages of that, but it would be very tough. Certainly, I would, I would not have an easy time with something like that. Yeah, he's a recognizable guy in that city. It's not like he's like in L.A. or something like that. He's in freaking Edmonton, just walking around as the fired coach. That's, that takes some, that takes some fortitude, you know, some mental strength to do that. He now finds himself in what I would think is one of those interesting positions for, for coaches.

when you get your chance and it doesn't go, I mean, honestly, Woodcraft had some pretty good success at Edmonton before the way things started last season. But now you're a fired coach and that means you get the label from the public, which I hate this label. But people will call it a retread. And all of a sudden, that is how you were branded forever because you've had the job once before. What I find with these coaches is they now have to be more selective on their second go around because there may not be a third. Once you've been fired once, even after having a lot of success, you start to get that label that, you know, okay, you really have to succeed on a sustained level at the next place. Where do you think would be a good fit for for Jay Woodcroft? What should he be looking for whenever his time comes again?

Well, first of all, like, nobody hates the retread mill more than I do. But look at the final four last year. Peter Lavillette, Paul Maurice, and Pete DeBore are like the ultimate retreads, right? They've been in like 718, some of these guys. So, you know, being a fired coach, all that means is you're going to get another job. It's almost a guarantee that you'll get another job. But it's not, though. It's not a guarantee.

And what frustrates me about the way people talk about it and about the label retread is there's no other profession where we would talk about experience that way. I don't go in for a surgery and go, oh, I hope this doctor hasn't done a surgery before. I hope this is a new innovative doctor who's going to try something experimental on me. We don't talk about anything else like that. It's fair, yeah, but it's just, you know, when you get fired from a professional sports team, you, it's such a high profile failure, right? Like that stink kind of follows you, whether it should or not. It's so high profile. No, very few people get fired that problem.

It's like losing an election, right? Like, you just, it's tough to come back from when, you know, millions of people have said, nah, now we're good. But it just, it does seem that that experience, like, I think as fans, we look at it that way, but. most GMs do value that experience. And they all want to find the next Bill Belichick, right? The guy who was terrible the first time around, but learned the right lessons and then goes on to become a genius coach. Almost every coach, you know, has, you know,

there's not a lot of John Cooper's out there who instantly were successes and right up the bat. Most of these guys fail the first time around. And then they go on to become successful coaches. So Jay Woodcroft will work in the NHL again, just like Joel Quenville will. If you're looking for where he'd fit, there's really only two teams.

There's so few coaches with any real tenure right now that the only ones you could really look at that are possible, you know, firings in the near future would be, as we're talking about Andrew Burnett, which still feels like a long shot. And your neck of the woods, Derek Lone, because Detroit's just stuck in neutral,

maybe even reversing a little bit. I think Woodcroft would work better off, you know, if it's Quenville and it's Woodcroft, Quenville makes sense in Nashville, and I feel like Woodcroft would make more sense in Detroit, where he's got some young guys to work with, to kind of build an identity around and kind of start more from the ground up, whereas Quenville wants a ready, he'll take any job at this point, I'm assuming, but he would like a ready-made team like he walked into in Chicago. But don't you think any team that would fire a coach mid-season is operating like a ready-made?

If you're firing somebody mid-season, you're not looking to do a big reset. you're doing it because you expect that season's results to improve starkly and dramatically and quickly. Well, tell me, tell me about Detroit right now. Is that is that the mindset? Is that Steve Eisenman's mindset? It seems like he's been, you know, playing for the distant future forever now. It's very hard to tell.

And I think that's a problem that it's very hard to tell. But I think they have expectations of being at least where they were last year. I think that's what the organizational kind of hope would be is that they're still right in that mix down the wire to certainly late March, ideally into deep April, where last year they came up a tiebreaker short. I think they want to be right in that same mix. Do I think that their end-all be-all with that? No, because I think they know how many prospects they still have deeper in the system.

You know, you mentioned that these young guys, most of them are not in Detroit yet. And they've taken a really different tact with that than virtually every other rebuilding team. They did just call up Marco Casper this weekend, which I think brought a. a big spark to them and maybe showed why they need a little more of that young energy on their team. But they've only other than him, they had one rookie on their season, opening roster. And that's Albert Johansson, who's like their seventh defenseman. So it is a surprisingly old roster for where they are, kind of like in Chicago where, you know, you have Connor Bedard and Lucas Reichel and, you know, but there's so many veterans at the average age, you know,

Myrtle does his like average age column. I think the revenues were in the top five oldest in the league in that against here. So the Blackhawks were in the top 10, too, yeah. Yeah. So, It's a hard situation there. I don't think it's impossible that the Red Wings could at some point make that decision in season if things go poorly. But I think if they do it, it's because they expect results to improve dramatically. I don't think they would do that just to walk it back to another big rebuild kind of thing. And for the record, I hate that we're talking about this. This is ridiculous.

So we're talking about this two weeks into the season, less than two weeks into the season. We're talking about people losing their jobs. But this is the reality of the NHL. This is, we see it in the NHL more than any other sport where people will lose their jobs so quickly for, you know, it tends to be just desperation moves by a GM because what else can you do? As they say, you can't fire the team. So you fire the coach. It's just if you start 0 and 5, if you're not making any progress, this is what happens in the NHL. That's why we have so many teams that have a first or second year head coach right now, which is why we thought there wouldn't be.

be any firings early on this year. But then you have starts like this and you start to wonder. Right. I mean, the issue as I see it is that teams have no patience anymore for head coaches and they blame everything on head coaches or if they maybe they don't actually put the blame on them. But that is where the hammer, so to speak, tends to. It's the only move they can make, right? It's like it's like when a team's down three nothing in the first period and it's three breakaways or three on ones. And the coach pulls the goal, even the goal he had nothing to do with it. Because what else can you do? You know, you have to send some kind of a shockwave through the rest of your lineup.

So you yank the goalie and you say, this is your fault. And that's what you do with a coach sometimes is to send a shockwave through that room. You just have to pull the biggest trump card you have. And that's what it is, is firing the coach. Right. So like Lalone, for example, started at the start of the 2022, 23 season, that makes him tied. If you go by, you know, games and not just like, you know, higher date where you got like four guys, five guys hired in a two-week span.

It would make him tied for the sixth longest tenured coach in the NHL already. It's really unbelievable. Two years and a couple games. Like it's a ridiculous trend in the NHL. They have zero patience if you don't get me to the playoffs in two, maybe three years, goodbye. There's no other sport where it's like that. I mean, baseball to a small degree, like you could lose your job after one season,

but these in-season firings, it's so kind of unique. I know that the New York Jets just fired their head coach, but he had been there. These panic moves are so kind. Haman in the NHL that we barely even blink at them anymore. Yeah. And maybe we're fueling it by talking about the Predators so early here on their start. So let's take a break right there and we'll be right back.

All right. We are back. And, Laz, we touched on this in the previous segment. But what I really want to do with Nashville today is make them kind of a jumping off point for a broader discussion on free agency. And I think one of the takeaways that people are going to have from this is that, you know, okay, this just proves free agency bad. Don't spend it free agency.

And I think that there's something. to the level at which the predators use free agency, how much they spent and how deeply invested they became. But I also wanted to talk about that topic on a broader level, because there are plenty of examples out there, too, where you go get the big splash free agent and it works. Maybe not in the most massive way immediately, but like Sergey Bobrovsky just won the Stanley Cup after having a free agent contract that many people, including myself, thought was doomed on the day it was signed. I don't think the Florida Panthers have one ounce of regret for that contract at this point here. So I want to talk a little bit about free agency more broadly here.

Well, it's interesting because then you know, you have situations like this where a team goes out and makes a big splash and it doesn't work. We've seen it time and again. I mean, Mark Messier in Vancouver, Ilya Briss Gullov to the Flyers, Jack Campbell last year. God, the Rangers have like a laundry list of this, you know, Bobby Holik and Wade Redden and Scott. Gomez and Brad Richards, guys that just didn't work out and had to be bought out at some point. But sometimes you get Artemi Panarin. Sometimes you get a Sergei Mabroski. Sometimes it really does work.

So it's tough to make that call on whether it's worth or not. You're going to overpay, but you need to make your team better. And no fan has ever been upset that their team spent money in the summer, right? No, but they get upset like three weeks into October. Like think back to the summer of 2012. One of these great examples of this was when Minutes, Minnesota signed Ryan Suter and Zach Parisi to match, I think it was matching contracts, huge deals. Like these were like pre-lockout, like where you could do this kind of deal, deals.

And it was huge deal for Minnesota. They thought this was going to completely transform the franchise. And in the end, it didn't work, right? They both players are bought out. The Wild are in cap hell because of this. They have $14 million of dead money on the books. But were those signings awful? The Wild became perusal.

perennial playoff teams. They lost in the first or second round every year, but it gave them a credibility and a standing that they didn't have before that. So is that a disaster of a signing? How would you assess that? I don't know if it's a disaster, right? I think Parisa in particular never really found the level of production in Minnesota that he had in New Jersey. He still was productive, like he was still like a 60-point player, high 50s point player, but coming from New Jersey, I think Minnesota probably thought they were getting like an 80-90 point guy and he just wasn't that. And that's part of the tough thing about free agency is you're getting these guys almost by definition at the end of their prime. Like the way it works in the HL is you really can't hit free agency before 27 unless you start at like 18, 19 years old.

And even then you're hitting it at 2526, right? So if you can get a guy at 2526, you're over the moon, right? That's smack dab in the middle of his prime. And because you can't go more than seven years on an outside free agent, like, You're not having much downside there. But most of these guys are hitting it at 27, 28, 29 years old. And you know there's some built-in downside at the back end. It's just you don't know how close to the cliff, so to speak, they are.

Like if you're signing guy at 28 and he's coming off a point per game season, you're hoping he's got three or four more of those. You might only have one more of those. You might have zero more of those. Yeah. And that's the problem with everyone wanting a seven or an eight-year deal is you're guaranteed to have some bad years at the end of those deals. What's fascinating to me about the Souter and Parise ones is the other suitors for Souter and Brisei were to the Chicago Blackhawks. And the Blackhawks thought they were going to get them.

They were surprised that they didn't. And it was a big blow to them for a team that had won the cup in 2010 and was trying to restructure things to go on further. If they do sign those guys, do they win in 2013 and 2015, those teams look a lot different. And you wonder if it would have derailed those dominant years. years of championships and if they dodged a bullet there. And you just don't know with free agency, every time you sign a guy in free agency, you're rolling the dice every single time. There's no guarantees here.

So, you know, it seems like getting guys at the trade deadline works out better. You get your Mark Stones that way and they can transform a franchise in a lot of ways. It's just, it's free agency is you have to do it. You can't just build through the draft. If you just build through the draft, you kind of become the Detroit Red Wings where you're just waiting and waiting and waiting. You have to add, you have to find, like, we always talk in Chicago about Marion Hosa.

You know, he went from the Red Wings and the, and the penguins, and then he signed the big deal with the Blackhawks. That's the best free agent signing in the history of Chicago sports. They don't win any of those three cups without Marion Hosa. It's a free agent signing can have that impact. So you have to go out and try, but every time you do it, it's a risk. Souter, do you really think Souter, Those championships don't happen.

The Suter was a top 10 Norris guy, like five or six of those first years. Maybe it does. Maybe those guys' legacies as individuals changes dramatically if they're on if they're on championship teams instead of going to Minnesota. You just don't know. But when you miss on these free agents, sometimes it's for the best. And when you hit on them, sometimes it's for the worst. That's the risk.

That's why GMs get the money, right? Because they have to make these assessments. They have to, you know, take these chances with someone. else's money. Here, give me your $85 million. I'm going to spend it this way. And when you blow it, you really blow it. And then you're stuck in these guaranteed contracts forever. This isn't the NFL where you can wriggle your way out of a lot of these deals. You are stuck with these contracts forever, it feels like. Look at the wild. They haven't had those guys in their team in years and they're still paying them. I feel like there's almost like a formula to like when you spend or who you

spend on in free agency. And I think for teams that are in the rebuild, they're usually getting, for lack of a better word, like bridge guys. Like you're in Chicago right now for you, Mark. Like the Blackhawks have Nick Folino in there, not because they think Nick Falino is this like big long term core piece, but because they need veteran insulation here. Tavo-Thervina, I don't think you can make a similar case, although a little longer contract. But like, he's there to bridge the gap to some of these guys. So that's one time that you do it.

You're flush with cash. You can afford to overpay a little because all your guys are on ELCs. The other side of things is when you have a super, star, a guy that you have no other chance of getting, if not for overpaying. And yes, they are going to be a big piece for you, but you already feel like you're fairly close or could be fairly close or you have reason to believe that what you have coming is going to get you there. And that would be like the New York Rangers when they signed Artemian Panarin, right?

I don't remember exactly what year the Panarin signing was, where it fell sequentially with the Kako and Lafranier drafts. But it feels like that has worked out for them where they have. some good players already in place there in New York. They have some young guys on the way, and then they add this top 10. You need someone to push you over the top. You need someone to give you that extra, that boost. What about a John Tavaris in Toronto?

That's seven-year, $11 million deal, which at the time seemed so great. He became a captain. He's been very productive. Do you look at that as a success? Was that a good signing? They haven't done anything in the postseason, but he's been a really good player and a really good citizen for them for a long time. and he's been a good influence on the younger guys like Matthews and Marner and

Nielander. What do you make of a signing like that? Is that a successful signing? I think right now it's a terrible contract, right? At this age, $11 million is too much for John Tavares. It is. And I think it's probably stopped them from doing some improvements to their own team and addressing some specific things, you know, fully head on,

not having to kind of like nibble around the edges and all that. You know, they lost now some cadre is that in that two seasons. spot and he goes on and he wins a Stanley Cup in Colorado, right? So, like, I think it's hard to call it like a roaring success, but I do think by most objective measures, that deal for Tavares specifically went well. Like by free agent standards, it went well by star free agent contract. It's just that without the team's success and when you see the impact of having so much money tied up in so few players in Toronto, it's kind of hard to call any of those a success, right?

Like, it's, except I guess the Matthews one because he's been an MVP and all that. But we know what matters in that market and in that evaluation. It is winning and it hasn't happened. So it's probably hard to call any of these deals they signed successes. Yeah. And then it goes back to the risks that we're talking about. Look at Nashville. Okay.

So Stamco's, he's 34 years old and they signed him for four years. And Marchesau is 33 years old. They signed him for five years. So these guys are both signed until they're 38. we're talking about, you know, signing these guys at 27, 28, 29, and at the end of those contracts it's going to get bad. Nashville paid for the back end of those deals. Nashville paid for the bad years, potentially.

Now, Stamco's was fabulous last year. There's reason to believe that he could be a really good player for a really long time. That shot's not going anywhere. He's always going to have that shot. We saw it when he finally scored, that classic one-knee, one-timer from the left circle. He'll be able to do that until he's 50. but you're still paying for a diminished player. No player is the same at 37 that he was at 27.

Even Sidney Crosby at some point is going to fall off of a cliff here. And so, you know, the older these guys get, the risk you're out, you should be giving two or three year deals out to these guys. But the way you bring them is by giving them that extra year. That extra year of security is why guys will take the deal. So, you know, if Nashville offered Stamcoast two or three years, he might not be a Nashville predator right now. So that adds to the risk of these free agent signings.

You have to overspend. And then you have to throw in another year or two to lure them over. And it becomes a bidding war. And unless these guys win championships, you could always look back and go, I don't know, we shouldn't have made that trade. Shouldn't have made that signing. I think the other thing when Nashville to remember is like, what was the alternative? Like, were they going to be able to go into a true full?

I guess you could have traded UC Soros. You could have. But can you really, you have Roman Yose and Philip Forsberg. Like, are you really going to be a body? bottom five team in the NHL as long as you have those two guys on your roster? They would have been a seventh or an eight seed year after year after year if they had kept going the way. I do not, like, I don't mean to be critical of national. I like teams that go for it. This is a team that said, you know what? We went on a heck of a run last year. We had a

16-0 streak. We believe in our goalie. We have a Philip Forsberg is becoming a superstar. Roman Yose is a superstar. Let's bulk up. Let's go win right now. This is a franchise that's never won the Stanley Cup. Let's go get it right now. We see the Western Conference and, you There's a lot of good teams. There's not a lot of great teams. This could be our chance. I respect that they went for it. They should go for it.

But just because you go for it doesn't mean you're going to get it. Yeah. There were two teams, Las, that in the bulk of the 2010s were kind of always around the playoffs. And they kind of needed that one extra bump over the finish line. And one of them was San Jose Sharks, and it never happened. They pursued it aggressively. They traded for Eric Carlson. It just didn't happen for him.

They didn't win the Stanley Cup. and now they're in a tough spot, but I think that their future is still pretty bright, long term with some of the young guys that they have on the way and already there in some cases. The other was the St. Louis Blues, and it did happen for them in the most random year. Like you said, they had a really bad start like this too,

but they were always around it, always around it, and then just when it looked like, you know, the end had come, they go and they win the Stanley Cup, they sustain it for another few years. Now they're in a little bit of that kind of, you know, middle ground territory where which side of the playoff bubble early on will see. But if the blues in Washington Capitals had never won, didn't spike those Stanley Cups late in their kind of Cores careers,

they are the San Jose Sharks, right? They're the same thing. They're just a team that was that never could get over the hump. And then you win that one time. All you got to do is win one. Everybody wants to win multiple cups. You just got to win the one though, right? And it was all worth it.

So that's what Nashville was trying to do. And it might still work for them. It's five games. It's five games. 77 games left. It's five games. Yes, it could absolutely work. And then we'll all be laughing about what a stupid podcast we had on October 21st. But you like a team that goes for it, right? You don't want a team that's comfortable that's playing it's safe. You don't want your GM to be worried about making the wrong signing. You want your GM to go out and get the best players he can possibly get. And that's what Barry Trots has done in Nashville. If it works, great. If it doesn't, too bad. But at least you took your shot, you didn't let the pitch go by. And I kind of wonder if Trots' background as a coach informs that at all where he knows, you know, when there's kind of the juice to go chase it versus when to, I mean, maybe he doesn't know when to sit back, but maybe he always has the ambition.

That's what I wonder. I wonder if you're a coach. You want it every year, right? Your coach is never thinking about tanking. A coach is never thinking about four or five years down the road because he will be fired by then. So I think a coach mentality in the GM chair is very interesting. You know, we have a lot of ex-players as GMs. We don't have a lot of ex-coaches.

And if, you know, coaches always are playing for the here and the now. And you wonder if Barry Trotz is going to be able to take a step back at some point, even if it's two or three years down the road and say, all right, we need to start this over. Our cycle is complete and we need to start again from the bottom and I need to start moving some of these guys. You wonder if a coach will be able to have that mentality. Because the coach is always trying to win. The Blackhawks were tanking two years ago, and Luke Richardson's out there trying to win.

You know, he's actively saying I'm trying to do what Kyle Davidson doesn't want me to do. Coaches never, ever think about losing. Never think about next year. But it all sorts itself out, right? Like that's where I was kind of going with the sharks thing. It's like they were both, they were doing the same thing the blues were. And it just didn't work. And eventually for them, it became clear, okay, a lot is to start over.

And the blues had to start over, but never to that same. extent, right? They're still kind of hanging around at the fringes there. They had the one year they picked in the top 10, but they're still kind of right around it. And so, and it's tough. Like, Detroit's a team like that where even, you know, you really don't have it with no top five picks. Is that was one top five pick? Yep. Because they're constantly going around and around and around, hanging around. They're just good enough to not get a lottery pick, but they're not good enough to get in the playoffs. And that's how you develop a team that's got a lot. lot of really good players, but no megastars.

You know, San Jose, it's been a long time since they've been relevant already, and it's going to be a long time, but they've got a couple of pieces already that maybe Detroit doesn't have, that maybe St. Louis doesn't have, that Washington's not going to have because these teams kind of cling to that mushy middle. They're just trying to, you know, get to the playoffs. You're here in Chicago, this is the Chicago Bulls Factor. They're trying to get one round of playoffs because that revenue puts them over the top for the year. That's all Jerry Reinsdorf cares about is getting one round of the playoffs. there's a lot of teams in the NHL like that.

They just want to get one round of home games in the playoffs, and that's considered a success organizationally, even if it's not among the fan base or in the room. I will say Detroit did try the tank method. It just didn't work for them, right? Like, I mean, they could have had top five picks way more than once. It's just they seem to always drop. And then, you know, it's which year are you in the top five?

It worked out for them. They got Lucas Raymond with that fourth overall pick, who I think he's probably one of the two or three best plays. in that draft class, at least by NHL success so far. That part was fine. But there's other years, you know, they drop in the Zadena year, and they drop in the Rasmussen year, and you look back on some of these things,

and you go, man, where would they be had it not gone this way? So we'll take a break on that. Jesse Granger will be with us when we get back. I'll talk to a second. All right, we are back, and we are joined by Jesse Granger for Granger Things presented by BetMGM. And Jesse, we talked to you about goalies a lot here. We're going to do the same thing this week.

For a while now, since maybe the mid-2010s, NHL-safe percentages year by year have been trending down. And I know that at the early season, that tends to be most dramatic. But we sit here about two weeks into the season, and I know it's early. But I'm looking at an 898. If it held, it would be the first sub-900 save percentage since, like, 1995, which I think is like when you and I were born, basically. I know it probably won't hold to that degree, but does that number surprise you? Is that a little more extreme than we're even used to early in a season?

Yeah, it is. I mean, you're right that early in the season, we do get the 800s just because the defenses and the structure are all behind. And honestly, probably the goalies are behind too. Like the timing is just tougher early in the season. And we do see that. But like you said, the fact that it's continuing on, it's nine years in a row that the safe percentage has gone down,

nine straight seasons. And during those nine years, I was looking, what's crazy to me is I didn't realize how much the scoring had actually gone up. In those nine years, it's almost gone up a full goal per game. Nine years ago, it was just like just barely over five a game and now it's 5.96 per game goal. So you're looking at a whole goal more than we had nine years ago. And what's interesting to me, and I'm going to kind of pose this to you guys and see what you think about it. But we're seeing goalie's finally getting paid. With more regularity than we had over the last three or four years. Like, Connor Hellebuck just last summer, it seemed like he had a hell of a time getting

a deal and barely got more than we're seeing guys get this year who have not proven themselves nearly as much as Connor Hellebuck with two Veznas and multiple, multiple seasons of being the starter. Now we see Jeremy Swam and get paid. We see Linus Omerk get paid. Ottinger just got his eight-year deal. And I'm wondering if, and like, that's the opposite of what you would think. think, it's like, okay, all the goalies are playing worse every year. You'd think that the goalie

market would go the opposite direction. And what I'm wondering is, was it having the opposite effect? Was the fact that nobody could score nine years ago and the defenses were, the defense was playing so well. And it seemed like you could win with anybody in that. Did that de-prioritized the goalie position? And now that we're seeing scoring up and we're seeing a higher scoring league and there's no doubt. You watch hockey. The players are more skilled than they were nine years ago. The The offensive efficiency is unbelievable what we've seen in it. It's great. It's making it harder to play goalie.

I don't think it's ever been harder to play goalie in the history of the NHL. And we're seeing it with just 18 goalies have a 920 save percentage or higher this year. And I went back and looked in just two weeks into the season because you want to keep that sample kind of equal. I couldn't find a season where there were less than that with the 927 percentage. So it's becoming harder. And you're seeing Igor Shostark and Dominate and Ottinger dominate and Hellebuck dominate. And I'm just wondering if this increase in scoring has made it harder to play goalie and suddenly having one of these elite goalies is more of an advantage than it was just as recently

as like five or six years ago. What do you guys think about that premise and maybe that having to do with why these goleys are finally getting paid? I'm sorry. My ears are still ringing from Max pointing out you guys were born in the mid-90s. I'm still having trouble processing that and getting past that. It's an interesting theory. I think it's what it's doing. I think you're right. But what it's doing is it's further delineating between the elite class of goaltenders and the replacement player level of goalies, right? Because we've always talked about there's like a handful of goalies, right, that are really worth having, that are really worth paying. It's more than a handful now. We're getting to the point where it's like, there's like a third of the league has a

goalie where they think we can win the Stanley Cup with that guy. That guy can carry us to the Stanley Cup. So those guys are worth paying for it because you're right. I mean, you know, we got third liners and fourth liners that can pick a corner from almost anywhere on the ice from 90 to angles along the goal line. These guys can score from anywhere. There's so much skill in the league, way more skill than we've ever seen. So I think what it does is if you have one of those elite goalies, they're worth paying for. Everyone else is still looked at in the old way where it's like, all right, if you're just one of these guys, you know, we're going to give you three million. We're still going to pay $5 million total for our goaltending because we don't really believe in you

and we don't want to give you an eight-year deal. So I think what is further done is it's kind of created more of the haves and the have-nots in the goaltending market because It is more valuable than it used to be. You can't hide a goalie anymore. You can't play a Barry Trots trapping kind of style of hockey and protect your goalie in this NHL. So the great goalies look even better, the mediocre goleys look even worse.

Yeah, it kind of reminds me in a weird way of like baseball where there's all this innovation on the pitching side of things. And all the new stuff coming to the game seems like it's on the pitching side. They're adding VLO like crazy. You know, there's all these shapes to pitches that are like, oh, how on earth would you hit that? That maybe to a higher degree, but slightly mirrors kind of the skill revolution, I guess, of the NHL where all of the infusions of innovation are coming with the puck, right? It's the shooters and their new techniques. It's the ways that they're creating offense.

And that leaves the goalies as kind of the baseball hitters. They're the ones responding to this innovation. And the guys who prove they can do it, the guys who can see 101 and take it out to left center field, those guys are going to be the ones that get paid, right? And that's the goalies, I think, in this case, the guys who can see all these new ways that shooters are attacking them and track all these new motions and get used to, okay, now they're going to go low to high. They're going to go across the slot, all this, you know, these, these emphases that we're seeing for shooters. If you're a goalie that proves they can stop that, there's nothing more valuable. Yeah, for sure. And it's sports always do this, right? They like suede.

And I'm sure we're going to see the scoring uptick. And then I'm sure 10 years from now, nobody's going to be able to score again. It's just kind of like the goalies get the edge and then the shooters get the edge. and then the goalies get the edge. And right now we're seeing, I think, a shift in that. What's interesting is, so it wasn't that long ago, a few years ago where it was seen as like, there are so many good goalies. And it's still true.

I mean, there are teams with three goalies and they're all, like they can't decide which of the three goalies is better. They're all equal. Like Detroit had a million goalies there for a while. They've now narrowed it down to two. But I think there were more NHL caliber goalies than ever before. And there probably are right now. And I think that has to do with the coaching of the position.

And I think that we realize a ways back geometry, the way positioning, the way you can cut off all the angles. And really, like, especially with the RVH and the butterfly, like, they perfected the way to play goalie. And then I think that made it easier to play goalie because now suddenly you can teach someone this geometry. And if you get into this position when the puck's here, they can't score on you. There's no net to shoot at. And I think that we got a ton of competent NHL goalies because of that. Like now all of a sudden, there are so many guys that can do this position. and that's why the goalies couldn't get paid because there are so many guys we can replace you with if we don't pay you.

We can just we can get cheap on the position. It's like running back in the NFL. There's so many good guys. They plug in a third string guy. He runs for 100 yards. Like it's so easy to find a running back. I think it became that for goalies in hockey. It became too easy to find a goalie.

And that created the problem where the elite guys couldn't get paid. Well, now I think the shift towards the forwards where all of a sudden, wow, it's, it's all of a sudden it's getting a lot harder to find a competent NHL goalie. I think we could talk to a few teams around the league that would back me up on this. It's suddenly not as easy to find a competent goalie, and that is good for the guys at the top of the heap, that what they're providing cannot be replaced by just mid-level guy that you just plug in. You know, we talk a lot about October hockey and how kind of ragged it is out there and how messy it is. Is it harder on the goalies?

We always talk about how, you know, nobody ever trades for a goalie at the trade deadline because it's too difficult to integrate a goalie into a system as opposed to a forward in the month you have before the playoffs. Is October more difficult on a goalie than it is for, say, a forward? I think it is because the play is less predictable. I think like the more, and like you'll hear goalies sometimes say, I think it's easier to play goalie in the NHL than it is the AHL. And that's because the skill and the predictability of the play. These guys are doing what they're trying to do. In the AHL, it's like just a mess of sticks.

and then all of a sudden the puck comes flying out of that pile of sticks and there's no read on the play. In the NHL, it's a little easier to read. I think October hockey is probably more difficult to read the play because you're having more like turnover is right in front of your net where it's a breakout and they just pass it to a guy in a slot. Like just mistakes make it harder to predict the play and stay ahead of the play and be on those angles that we were just talking about. So I do think that it's probably harder on the goalies. And I think just timing, right? You hear guys talk about how the game can be fast when you first come back and it takes a few games or a few shifts. Well, for a goalie, it's like the difference between a millisecond for those guys is a goal and a save.

So I think that just you're physically like your hand-eye coordination trying to catch up with things early in the season. It's probably tough. Add in the fact that nobody's playing defense, there's six goals a night. And that's the crazy thing. So we've talked about how high the scoring's been. The save percentage is lower than it's ever been. The goals are higher than they've ever been. I looked up the over-unders to see how many games.

have gone over the total, the scoring total, and how many games have gone under? And this blew my mind. And this just shows you kind of the person, like the way we're viewing the NHL now. There have actually been more unders than overs this season, which is crazy to me. Is that just because the over unders have been higher because the league is trending this way? ingo, exactly right. The expectation for goals is so much higher now that even though we're having record breaking scoring early in the season, they're still going under the totals just because the expectations

are that much higher. So yeah, it's super interesting what we're seeing. It's a fascinating thing where it's like scoring is up, good for the goalies. It doesn't make any sense at all, but it appears to be the case. Okay, one last thing, Jesse, I wanted to get your take on. Tomorrow the athletics, NHL front office rankings are going to come out, determined via an anonymous poll of NHL execs. And I imagine that when they do, Vegas is going to come in pretty high on that list with all the success they've had. I just wanted to kind of get your take in anticipation of those rankings, wherever they end up ranking on what's made Vegas so successful so fast. Oh, I know what the fans are going to say. LTIR. Cheating.

Okay, so obviously the cheating and the LTIR jokes are going to come quick. But I will say that like that's half joking and half not. Like I wouldn't say cheating because they're following the rules, but no team in the NHL has found ways to use the rules in their advantage. I don't think the history of the NHL, has a team found more loopholes to use in their advantage? I've been looking at, like, now during the trade deadline, we see these three-way trades where one team acts as the middle team to just take up. They're just going to retain the salary and move them on. Those happen like, it seems like 75% of the trades made at the deadline, use that type of trade. The Golden Knights invented that. How crazy is that? It seems like that's

been around for a long time. The Golden Knights were the first team to ever do that. Their first year, it was Ryan Reeves that they were the middleman on. And it's just, it's very strange that they're able to find these loopholes and they're aggressive with it. Like, not only are they, do they find them, they use them to the maximum. So I will say that I think part of the reason Vegas has been so good is its willingness to find new ways to use the rules in their advantage. In a cap world, the margins are so small. And they've been able to find very good margins that other teams hadn't found. So I'll give them credit for that.

And then I think also just the courage to make big moves. Like these moves that they make, a lot of them have worked. Jack Eichael worked out great. Very easily could have not worked. I mean, things were not looking great for Jack Eichael and Buffalo. He was coming off of, he needed the neck surgery, the no player had ever gotten. Like, they have taken tons of risks that I think other GMs maybe wouldn't have taken. And they've paid off.

They obviously got a cup. We'll see how things go from here. They are running low on future assets. And this team doesn't look as good or as deep as the last few have. So I think that eventually those bills do come due when you, when you, when you, mortgage offer future assets for the for the present but um they've done a great job they won a cup so they did it even if even if it does end up falling apart like you you won the stanley cup and i think that they they probably deserve to be higher in those right pretty high in those rankings

our main topic for the show today was free agency and and the viability of it of spending big and free agency and kind of around nashville and then they're so start vegas is a team not all true free agents like i think petrangelo was the only like true big money free agent they've had but they've acquired a couple of guys on either expiring contracts that they extended, like Hannafin, like Stone, or they did bring in a hurdle. And he's not a free agent, but he's basically at the very start of one of those long-term deals, too. So they're a team that has operated, I think, in a similar way, albeit not through strictly the UFA channel. The league would be a more fun place if more front offices were that aggressive. Like seeing what Doug Armstrong did in St. Louis

this year with the offer sheets and how fun that was, how exciting that is, how smart that is, I think, I'd like to think this is a copycat league and we're going to see more, more aggression, but it's just, it doesn't seem to be in most NHLGM's DNA to take those chances. I will say that I think that the Golden Knights do have an advantage in terms of being in Vegas and like Nashville, you see it too, because no state tax. It's a warm weather city, golf courses everywhere. These guys get to play golf all year round. They don't have to pay state income tax. I do think that they can be aggressive on the examples Max gave, Mark Stone, Noah Haniffin, one year deal. They can give up the house for those guys because they know they're confident

that they will resign them. If you're Winnipeg or another place that has a harder time attracting free agents, maybe you can't make those swings because you can lose out on those guys and give up a bunch of assets for not getting. I think having the advantage of the confidence that these guys will resign here helps them be as aggressive as they've been. All right. That's going to do it. for us. Thanks for listening to this episode of The Athletic Hockey Show. Please, if you're enjoying the show, leave us a five-star rating and review. Sean Gentilly, McIndoo, and Frankie Corrado have you covered on Wednesday. Talk to you soon.