The Athletic Hockey Show - Who’s the NHL’s luckiest team?

Episode Date: March 16, 2026

As the saying goes, sometimes it's better to be lucky than good, and in the spirit of St. Patrick’s Day, Max and Jesse make their picks for the luckiest teams in the NHL this season. Plus, The Athletic’s own Sean McIndoe joins the show to discuss Auston Matthews sustaining a season-ending injury following a Radko Gudas-induced knee-on-knee hit last week, Gudas’ subsequent five game suspension, and if the Maple Leafs should launch a full-scale rebuild this coming offseason. And, to close things out, the guys deep dive into Jesse’s NHL goalie tandem power rankings 2.0.Hosts: Max Bultman and Jesse GrangerWith: Sean McIndoeExecutive Producer: Chris FlanneryProducer: Chris FlanneryWatch full episodes on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@theathletichockeyshowJoin our Discord Server: https://discord.gg/VTm9VjkFSubscribe to The Athletic: https://theathletic.com/hockeyshow Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This is the athletic hockey show. Hey, everybody, Max Boltman here alongside Jesse Granger for another episode of the athletic hockey show. We got a lot to get today. Obviously, we're going to hit the Toronto stuff. Austin Matthews, the injury, the suspension, maybe a bigger picture conversation there. We'll bring in Sean McIndoo for that. Jesse, your goalie, tandem rankings came out last week. I definitely want to dig into those with you.

But it was St. Patrick's Day weekend this week, and I figured in honor of that, we could do a little segment on the NHL teams we think have been the luckiest this. season. And I'm going to try to not just make this a beat-up tour on the Pacific Division, but it sure feels like the pool immediately starts with the Pacific Division, who seems like they're going to get a playoff team with a points total that would be vying for last place in the East by the end of this. Yeah, I don't think we've ever had a division winner since they went to four divisions, a division winner under 100 points. And the Pacific winner might not get to 90 points. They probably will end up getting to 90, but it's going to be hard. Like, they're going to need to finish strong to get to 90. It's crazy how bad this

division is. I obviously am covering the Golden Knights on a nightly basis here, and they keep losing, and yet I check around the league, and so did every other team in the Pacific. So it doesn't matter how many times they lose. They never drop in the standings. You know, luck for them. It's like you kind of make your own luck in some ways, not in the way that you're in the Pacific Division, but they have a great roster. I don't think any of us are surprised to see the Vegas Golden Knights in first place in that division, it's more so seeing them in first place with only 31 wins on the season, with only, you know, to your point, 76 points, 14 of those are from overtime losses. When I watch them, they still have flashes where they look like a team that's going to

really make some noise. The problem is, and I saw them live a couple weeks ago, or maybe only one week ago, time is a little bit of an illusion right now around the coming off of the trade deadline and a road trip for me. But they started real slow in Detroit, and they managed to come back and win. The second half of that game looked like the Vegas squad. Golden Knights. The first half of that game, I was like, what am I looking at here? That's been every game for them, this whole season, basically. That one, they were able to come back

and win, but a lot of the times they just fall one goal short at the end. This team has really, really struggled to score goals when the game is at a neutral game state. Like when the other team isn't sitting back on its heels protecting a lead and you've got a forecheck and you've got to actually gain the offensive zone time, they're not just going to give it to you by backing up. The Golden Knights are struggling. They look, this is a team that has traded draft picks and traded young players in order to win now. And when you do that for nine years in a row, eventually you're going to start to get a little bit older and a little bit slower. I think the Golden Knights still have a ton of talent.

They've got plenty of scoring on the roster, but they look a little slow. And that's hurting them, especially on the forecheck. And it's leading to they're not spending the offensive zone time that they're used to because teams can just break the puck out too easily against them. and especially early in games, when teams have their legs, the Golden Knights have struggled. They've fallen behind a ton. I think they're the luckiest team in the league for a million reasons. One of them is being in the Pacific. Two is the fact that they can just trade for every player who's unhappy with his situation,

and they know that they'll just sign them to an extension because Vegas is awesome, and they get to play golf year-round, and they have no state income tax. And they can just, so it's like every single player that's not happy with this team, Rasmus Anderson, come on down. We already have Noah Hanifin and a whole, like, Mark, Stark, stone, go down the list. I think that's part of the reason I would count them as lucky. Now, although there are other teams that have all those benefits and don't take advantage of them the way the Golden Knights do. They don't operate as aggressively. So they deserve credit for that. It's not, they didn't luck into this roster.

But I do think that there have been things that have played in their advantage. And not only is the Pacific the worst division this year, it's been the worst division for basically nine straight seasons since the Golden Knights have come into the league. And they have crushed those Pacific Division teams for the most part. And that's what they're doing this year. And it's part of the reason I'm a little skeptical of this team doing well in the playoffs. Their last 17 games against playoff opponents, how many wins do you think the Golden Knights have in their last 17 games against playoff opponents? You want to take a guess? Well, my hope would be at least like eight, but I'm guessing based on the fact that you're asking me this, it's going to be more like five.

Yeah, you were, it's two. And Detroit was the second one. They were one and 16 prior to that win against Detroit. But they, or sorry, sorry, Detroit was the first one. And then they got Pittsburgh the other night, which is technically still in playoff position. This team, my point being, when they've played good teams, they have not looked like a good team. And the names on the roster are good. The history of what we've seen from this team for nine years says that they are good.

And Bruce Cassidy is a hell of a coach. They've got great players up and down the roster. Can they turn it on at some point? Yes. They have yet to show me a single reason this season to believe. that they can win in the playoffs. And usually if you're, if you're going to talk about a team that kind of flips the switch that,

that knows the early season games doesn't matter, the switch doesn't flip on April 16th. The switch has to flip sometime in the month of March. So the clock is ticking a little bit of it. I don't think either of us is going to be shocked to see them still end up in the conference final and maybe playing against a beat up team that emerges from the central, maybe emerging from it. I don't think we're going to be shocked if that happens.

But in order for them to happen, in order for that to happen, they need to kind of flip that switch pretty soon here. You talked about Detroit and Pittsburgh. those are both candidates for this. When we first hatched this idea like a week, week and a half ago, there were teams that I think we might have been talking about. Detroit negative goal differential had been the healthiest team in the league up to about a week ago and probably I think probably still is by man games lost.

But now they're down three of their four centers plus their top center prospect. Their lineup has very banged up as, so I think we take them out. And I think we take Pittsburgh out certainly. I mean, Crosby was already hurt by then. And again, I was looking at kind of the OT. loss metric and all those points that they've piled up in that manner. But it's pretty hard to call a team that's playing without Crosby and Malkin lucky too. So I think we got to exempt them from this. I was thinking just though in the Atlantic, like Boston is a team that has really outperformed

their underlying numbers all year long. And I'm trying to kind of get my head around them. And do I think they're lucky? Or do I think Jeremy Swayman has just been that good? Yeah. I mean, the PDO numbers are through the roof for that team, which is typically the the luck stat that we like to look at. And that's mostly, it's not really the shooting percentage. Boston's not really like shooting the lights out. And that's something that you can always like count to go the other way at some point. It's the safe percentage that's through the roof with Jeremy Swamon. And it's, and it's specifically when you look at the, the dangerous chances, like when you look at the quality of shots, because Swamon's safe percentage, I think it's like

905 the last time I checked, which this season, that's more impressive than normal, just because the league average is 896. So it's, it's better than average, but it's not. like sky high, but then when you look at the goal saved above expected, which is always my favorite number for goalies, Swayman's right up there near the top of the league. He's been phenomenal. He had a disappointing first season under that big contract, and I think a lot of Boston fans were really down on him and thinking he didn't deserve that contract in the first place, and now we've got him, and he's not, he never proved that he was a number one, and now we've got this huge deal. In year two of that contract, he is absolutely living up to it and showing that

he deserved the contract, and I think you can feel good moving forward with at least that part of the team if you're the Bruins. I never know how much to make of PEDA, which if you're if you're not familiar, it's basically the sum of a team's shooting percentage and safe percentage. And we figure that most teams are going to shoot most players, most teams are going to shoot right around 10, 10.5 percent. And we figure most teams save percent is going to be right around 90 percent, add those up and you get an even hundred, right? And so if you're, if you're way higher than 100 or way below 100, like if you're like 103, 104, we tend to assume you're getting lucky in some regard. But what if you're just shooting average, to your point about the Bruins, you're shooting your

10%, your 10.2%, and you get a goalie that's giving you like a 925, which is what we expect from the goalie that leads the league and save percentages, and he's one of the best goalies in the league. Well, you're going to end up with 102, 103 PDO. And so to me, like, that doesn't scare me if that's how it's coming. It's really just the shooting percentage that should scare you if you're shooting the lights out, that doesn't tend to be repeatable. And if you want to look at like the top PDO teams, well, what's funny is the top three are just powerhouses. It's Colorado, Dallas, and Tampa Bay. Those are the top three teams in PDO. I wouldn't expect that they're going to fall apart. Right behind them is Seattle and Boston. We brought up Boston. Seattle's another team that they're

making a run. Again, we talked about how weak the Pacific is. Seattle is taking advantage of that. They're kind of right there on the borderline of that wildcard slash third spot in the Pacific. And when you look at the roster, it's very unimpressive. Like there's not a lot of firepower there. Chandler Stevenson, I know well. He played in Vegas. He's doing a lot of work. And every time I watch a Seattle game, he pops, but he's not a superstar.

He's not a hundred point player. They don't have a lot of firepower, but they play pretty well as a team. That's a team. When I look at the PDO, it's like, okay, maybe that team is due for a little bit of a letdown. And that's happened, the last time they made the playoffs, this was kind of the case, too, right? didn't they just have a bunch of guys that scored like 15 to 20 goals on like 12% shooting as a team or something like I'm trying to remember the exact stat but they they've done this before

it was insane shooting percentage that year I remember that yeah yeah the team that they're jostling closest with there's where there's two that the kings who I wouldn't call it very lucky especially with some of the injuries they've had but the san Jose sharks are in a playoff spot as we speak as we record this on Sunday night with a negative 25 goal differential but the reason that I'm going to say that they're one of the luckiest teams in the NHL is just the fact that they happened to win the draft lottery in the year Macklin-Colabrini was eligible because as this year winds on, I have a hard time envisioning Macklin-Colbrini not being at least in the top three on my heart ballot.

Like this is, we throw the word generation around too often. This is what it looks like. This is what it actually looks like. Yeah, I mean, it's, you talk to like players and coaches that got to play with him and coach him in the Olympics like Bruce Cassidy here in Vegas. It's like, what was your biggest takeaway from the Olympics? Macklin Celebrini is terrifying. That's my biggest takeaway.

Like that guy, he is so good. And then you look at the numbers and it's unbelievable, the difference in like, in like, he's up there. He's not quite as many points as McDavid or McKinnon, but he has 94 points. The next highest player on the Sharks has 45. That's Will Smith with 45, less than half the number of points that Macklin Celebrini has. He is unbelievable.

I will push back a little bit on calling them lucky for getting Celebrini because they actually, if the odds would have played out the way they should have, the sharks should also have Matthew Schaefer, which at this point, if you gave Matthew Schaefer to that team, the way Ascarov looks for the future, they're set in that, the way Will Smith and Celebrini and Eklin look, the only thing they don't have is an elite defensive prospect. If you put Matthew Schaefer on that team, it's like, I'm ready to call three cups before they all retire. They still have some work do without him. But can you imagine if Schaefer was on that team? Well, that's how dynasties and Laz is not here, so I'm allowed to use that word, uh, end up getting built, right?

It's, it's, it's you get Taves and Kane. It's you get Malkin and Crosby. Like, this is how the great teams, headmen and Stamcoast of our, of our era have been built. And if they had Schaefer, who by the way, Celebrity and Schaefer are also like the two most mature 18, 19 year olds I've ever seen, uh, to have that. Like you, they would be the team that we're talking about for the next decade plus. Yeah, absolutely. No question. So maybe they're a little unlucky.

No, I'm not going there. You get either one of those guys and you're going to have a chance to become an elite team. If you got both, then they, then they would be the luckiest team, I think. Although, that's fair. Not necessarily the spirit we're trying to do this with. Luck comes in a lot of forms. But I think when you combine it with the year they're having, it was a fair, uh, fair point to brooch.

For sure. And they've won a bunch in overtime. That's the other thing is like the sharks, they get all these points in overtime. And like, we can argue whether. that's real hockey or not, it's not going to be here when the playoffs get here. So they are collecting a bunch of points in hockey that won't help them when the playoffs arrive. 12, as of the time that we're recording this, they have 20 regulation wins and are in a playoff spot. There's certainly some luck involved with that, the coin flip that is three on three in the

shootout. All right, let's take a quick break right there. We're going to come back with Sean McIndoo. We'll be right back. All right, we're back. And after talking about some of the teams that have been the luckiest in the league this season, let's change course and talk about one of the unluckiest, HL teams this year in a multitude of ways. It's a novel concept to do a segment in hockey media about the Toronto Maple Leafs, but I think I'd like to take a stab at this. And to do that, we're going to bring in Sean McIndoo. No one knows the Toronto Maple Leafs as well as you.

And I want to just, let's start with Austin Matthews here right now, because that's the big talk around the Leafs. And the Radco Goode has hit. It ends in a five-game suspension. It's a substantive suspension, but it certainly feels like there's an appetite for more, Connor McDavid, is kind of stumped for an interrogation or an investigation or a rethinking of the suspension process with the Department of Player's Safety. First, your thoughts on Matthews, the hit and then the suspension.

Yeah, I mean, dirty hit. That's, uh, the, the knee on knee hit is kind of one of the few ones that we don't really have to get into a ton of parsing about intent or any of that stuff. It's if you stick your knee out and you hit another guy. in the knee, that's a dirty play because if you, I'm not saying Raiko Goodus went out trying to hurt someone, but if you went on to NHL ICE saying I want to hurt somebody, that might be the single best way to do it, is to get them knee on knee when they've got the weight on there. And yeah, significant injury took one of the better players in the league, certainly one of the

best known players in the league, one of the highest paid players in the league out for the rest of the season, from a guy with a pretty decorated history of getting suspended and yet got five games. Nobody seems to be happy. I mean, from the Leafs perspective, welcome to our world. I mean, the Maple Leafs fan base and organization has not been happy with Department of Player's Safety going back quite a few years now. And I don't know, maybe this is the play that convinces everyone that for once we weren't

being raving lunatics, or maybe this is just the one-off exception that proves the rule. But dirty, ugly hit. And honestly, whether the suspension is five games or eight games or ten games, it doesn't really impact the Toronto Maple Leafs because they're without their most important player now for the rest of the season. And then initial reports are it won't affect him beyond that. We'll see, though. You know, these injuries are serious for a reason.

we don't know yet if surgery is an option. This could have an impact even going beyond this year, one way or another. What was your reaction? I saw a lot of people saying that they wanted the Maple Leafs players to stick up for him more, maybe go fight Ragco Gudis, whatever it is. Biazza and Prong were both pretty adamant that they thought that there should have been more done by the players. We're not here to call NHL players cowards, but what was your thoughts on the way that really nothing happened. It didn't even look like that idea entered their mind until a period later.

So here's the funny part of the story from my perspective. I didn't tune into that game until the third period. And I did not know what had happened earlier in the game. So I had no idea that Austin Matthews had been injured. I had no idea what the circumstances were. I just, after a long day, I thought, oh, I can flip on the third period and watch my team. and I watched with no context, the Maple Leafs come on that third period. And I was like, hey, looking pretty good. Look at these guys actually dropping the gloves a little bit. They're getting physical.

You know, that's, I wonder what's lit a little fire under these guys. And I got to feel happy about the Maple Leafs for about five minutes, which brings, I think, my season total to about five minutes. And I then saw, of course, the Austin Matthews situation. from earlier in the game. And very clearly what happened is they did not have the response at the time. Clearly, they went in and during intermission Craig Baroubae tore a strip off them, and rightly so. I mean, for goodness sakes, I mean, Craig Baroube, this guy fought his way to stay in the NHL

for about 15 seasons, and he's got to watch his team respond like that. I mean, it was pathetic. It was awful. It was everything that people are saying it was and deserving of all the criticism. The one thing I would say, Jesse, you mentioned, does somebody have to go and fight Rakogoodis? Racko Goudis knows how to fight, and he's done it a lot in the NHL. And in this era, not too many guys in the NHL can say that. And certainly of the guys that were on the ice for the Maple Leafs at the time, that's not something in their skill set.

So I don't think anyone is saying you've got to go and. fight, Raiko Gudas. You've got to go and grab them and pull them out to center ice and pair off and you know, it's just one v1 and you're going to get your face caved in and take a moral victory or whatever. This wasn't about a fight. This should have been four guys on one guy immediately. And whatever you want to call that, it's not a one-on-one fight. This is a situation where, I mean, the fact that nobody even made a move in that direction just kind of. Just kind of kind of tells you how fundamentally broken this team is on the level of what it even means to be a team. Because, you know, we saw comments from a couple of the guys who were on the ice saying,

well, you know, we didn't really see the play. It doesn't matter. You turn around. There's, there's the meal ticket and he's down on the ground holding his knee. There's the guy with a history of dirty hits five feet away. There's the referee with his arm in the air. I don't know. Put it together, guys. You know, it probably wasn't a puck over glass or something that happened. So go, you know, go figure it out, go do something about it. You know, this, no Lee fan wants to hear anything about, oh, you know, we made them pay on the power plate. That's, if it's game seven of the playoffs, go ahead and do that. If it's game one of the playoffs, maybe that's what you do.

It's game 60 something of a season where you're not making the playoffs. You're playing the Anaheim ducks. Nobody cares who wins this game. You don't get, nobody cares who scores on the power play. This was the easiest possible way for this team to make some sort of statement. And, you know, it doesn't matter how low you put the bar with these guys. They just still trip over it. And they did again.

And they're getting ripped for it. And they deserve it 100%. I don't think, I can't imagine anybody could defend what we saw from these guys. Well, you talk about it kind of being a broken, something being broken there. I think that's kind of the place I wanted to take this today. Because look, this season's lost. I mean, they may or may not finish with the worst record in the East. It still seems unlikely, but the Rangers are getting a little hot.

The Leafs are now down Matthews. You don't know what can happen. And that's a bad spot to be in. But I don't know still if the best move for this franchise is to try and rebound, retool, or obviously rebuild. And the rebuild one is the scariest one for them because this was the product, like last year's team really, was the product of the whole big build. And it didn't go where it was supposed to go. And now you lose Marner, and I think we all knew that that was going to take some figuring on how to respond to that. Obviously, poorly, worked out poorly this year.

There was really no one in free agency then. There's no one in free agency now. You're going to go into this one potentially. Depending on how bad it goes, it could save them their draft pick. It's top five protected pick, the one that they sent to Boston for Brandon Carlo. If you're a least fan, the only good thing that can come out of this with Matthews is that maybe now you have a slightly better chance to keep that pick. But it feels like it's a fork in the road moment yet again for a first. franchise that we've talked about forking the road moments with at least three consecutive

off seasons in a Rocheon. And I'm curious, like, what do you think the path is at this point? Well, I mean, first of all, let's be clear that when you talk about the Toronto Maple Leafs, any kind of conversations about what big, bold, brave decisions should they make are theoretical conversations. It's a nice hypothetical. The reality is, as you said, this team's been at a fork in the road for years now, and they always choose the same path, which is the path of least resistance.

What's easiest? What's going to involve the least amount of work from our super highly paid front office? What is the one thing that we could do that isn't much of anything, but we can kind of sell it as something, and then everybody puts their feet up on the desk and hangs a minute. mission accomplished banner and waits for the results to change. And of course, they never do. So look, should this team be open to making a big move, potentially even evolving an Austin Matthews or William Nealander? Yes, they should be open to that. And they should be willing to have some tough conversations around it. Both players have no move protection, obviously, because everybody on

the Leafs, who is eligible has no move protection, because, again, that's the path of least resistance when you're putting a roster together. But yeah, that should be the start of a discussion, not the end of it. And they should absolutely be open to move in everybody. I know there's been a lot of concern or sort of confusion in the Toronto fan base because there were reports that Matthew Nyes may have been in conversations last week leading up to the deadline. Look, Matthew Nyes is a great young player.

I enjoy watching him a lot. I hope to do it for the next decade. He's not untouchable. This guy isn't Sidney Crosby. If there's an offer out there, of course you have that conversation. They should be doing that with all of these guys. The frustration level in Toronto and in the Toronto fan base, which as you guys know, expands well past the city limits of Toronto, is extraordinarily high right now. I think you could very easily sell a lot of this fan base on a total tear down, a total, let's just start over.

The problem with that is that they don't own their next two first round draft picks. And that really makes it difficult to execute on any sort of a tear it down to the studs kind of rebuild situation. Because as you said, they've got to pick this year, which if they finish in the bottom of five, which they might, still unlikely, but it's possible, then they get to keep the pick. Otherwise, it goes to Boston. But it's also next year's pick. That's already been traded to the Flyers. That was in the Scott Lawton trade.

The guy that's already come and gone and turned into a third round pick, that pick hasn't even come due yet. That's not till next year. And if they were to keep their pick this year, then it becomes Boston next year, Philadelphia, the year after that, completely unprotected. So, you know, to tear it on down, we're going to trade Austin Matthews for picks and prospects. We're going to do it with Nealander. You're going to finish in the last place then, and you're not going to have a pick at the end of the rainbow to look forward to. So I almost feel like it has to be a retool by default. But again, it's not, that's not a case of a team making a decision.

That's a case of a team making a bunch of bad decisions and easy decisions that box them into a corner where they can't do what they probably really need to do. Which really fits the path of least resistance thing, right? I was going to bring up the pick situation. It makes it impossible to properly do that full, blow it up and rebuild move. Unless you traded him to Philly, I suppose, and got the pick back, but which, you know, I guess can't be ruled out. I don't know if that's the place you'd most want to send him. But the path of least resistance theory makes it likely that they have to almost keep trying for the next two or three years, which is brutal because Matthews only has two years left on the deal after this. So they're in a very tight situation here.

And I don't see a good way out of it. And look, Austin Matthews is the centerpiece of all of this because, you know, A, he's the best player. He's the highest paid player. We don't know the health outlook now. Although, again, like, it certainly doesn't sound, I mean, this wasn't an ACL or something that would have potential long-term impact. They dodge that bullet at least. But it really comes down to what does he want over the next two years, as you say. So he's signed two more years after this one. which means next summer would be the one where they would want to get an extension done. He has total trade protection. They cannot trade him without him coming to the table and saying, yeah, I'm willing to go and here's where that would be. So again, they have conceded any sort of leverage before the situation even begins because that at some point was the easy thing to do. And so that's what the organization did. And a lot of this is going to be up to Austin Matthews.

There's been reports and talks that, you know, he's not going to leave him in the lurch. He's not going to pull a Mitch Marner and string him along until the end and then walk. If he does want out, there'll be communication and that sort of thing. And that'd be nice. Certainly the organization has more than bend over backwards for this guy over the years to treat him as well as they possibly can. and to give him pretty much everything he asked for. So it would be nice if some of that loyalty came back to the other side if there was a scenario where there was going to be an exit. But who knows?

I mean, it's easy to say that now. Who knows what it might look like in a year or even this summer if he says, you know what? I've made my decision and the time to move on is now. There may be scenarios where it works for everyone and maybe that ties into hitting that reset button and doing the total start from scratch. or maybe it's something else or maybe it does still involve an extension. That's absolutely on the table. But until you know one way or another, you're sort of in wait and see mode. And again, absolutely critical stuff for a very important and critical franchise for this league.

And for the most part, the decision making is out of their hands before it even starts. Well, I mean, the other part of it is everyone's under contract. Like, when you look at the contracts for next year, it's Callie Yarncroke and Troy Stetcher. Those are the two expiring deals that are on their UFAs. And everyone else is under contract. So like you said, if you are going to make big changes, they aren't going to be just kind of the one that's right in front of you, let this guy go sign a free agent. Like it's going to have to be bold moves, trades something in order to change something

because it's not going to be easy with the way the contracts are set up. And that's the way it is with, I mean, you know, what is essentially a core two now with Matthews and Nealander being the highly paid guy still in their prime. John Tavares is still there, but as an older guy, and on the discounted deal, he's signed. He's not a guy you're going to necessarily look to turn around and flip. You know, again, it's the easy way is to sit back and you wait and then maybe you get a phone call from Austin Matthews this summer or next summer saying, you know what, I want to be a Florida Panther or I want to be a Vegas golden night. And then you sit down or whatever the team is and do you try to trade him for 25 cents on the dollar because he's already picked his destination.

And even if he gives you two or three spots, you know, you're basically looking at the Artemmy Panarin package at this point, which was not much of anything, but, you know, the Rangers took what they could get. The tough way to do it would be to sit one of those guys down and say, I know you've got a few years left. your contract, we are going to move you. Give us a list of 10 teams. And if that ticks somebody off or if that bother, if that upsets someone and that creates friction, then you deal with that because you've got a highly paid GM and 18 assistant GMs or whatever they have. And the whole reason you have this big expensive front office should be to handle tough scenarios. Is that hard to do in Toronto of all places? Yeah, absolutely. That would. would be really, that'd be real tough stop.

Is anyone in the NHL allowed to say my job's hard, so I'm not going to try? I don't think anybody other than GMs are allowed to do that. I certainly know nobody on this roster would be allowed to do it. If William Nealander comes out after tonight's game and says, I know I didn't play well, but it's hard. It's hard to score a goal, so I just didn't. He'd be ripped 10 ways from Sunday, and rightly so. So I don't see why Brad Trilliving or whoever it is replacing.

Brad True Living should get the easy pass. I mean, look, there's a couple of scenarios that are going to happen coming into the summer. Either Brad True Living is somehow going to work a Jedi Mind trick on Keith Pelley and keep his job, which will tell us everything we need to know about how broken this organization is on the inside. Or he will be replaced and then we see who comes in. and we see if a replacement comes in and says, I'm going to roll up my sleeves and get to work right now, or if they come in and do the whole, it's going to take me a year to get the lay of the land and all of the.

This team doesn't have a year. They don't, I mean, they don't have this year. They've got to make, as I say, some hard decisions very quickly. And, you know, that's got to be the first question, Keith Pelly is asking Bradger Living or anyone else, what hard decisions are you willing to make today? because there's a whole bunch of them need to happen. And doing it the easy way has not worked, let's just say.

Yeah. There are a couple interesting contracts, especially with a barren free agent market. I wonder, you know, the return for like an Anthony Stolars, I just think about what Edmonton, not that Edmonton has all these great assets that Toronto wants. But there are going to be goal eating teams. The Florida Panthers might be a goalie needy team this offseason potentially. The guy like Anthony Stolars, I think, could command quite a bit. Jake McCabe, although he's got a full no trade.

Brandon Carlo even on this free agent market. These are guys, we saw it at the trade. I don't, to your point, Sean, I don't have no idea how that didn't extend to Scott Lawton. Some of the guys that drew first round picks at this deadline and Scott Lawton doesn't mind-blowing. But yeah, you're right. And I mean, until the deadline, Bradford Living had not made a single trade since July 17th, which is madness. So, I mean, right there, priority number one, the GM doesn't get to take two months off in the summer. You know, I'm sorry.

There's, and the GM doesn't get to take the whole first half off if things go badly. And you sit there and go, I'm going to get Troy Stetcher off waivers. And then I guess my job's done because I can't do anything else. Maybe I'll, I'll fire the assistant coach in charge of the power play. And that's all I'm going to do. You know, that's all I'm going to do was kind of the mantra of a lot of the Kyle Dubas brand of Shanahan era. It's not going to play in Toronto anymore. And I hope they understand that, but I'm honestly at this point.

I'm not completely sure that even the Maple Leafs themselves realize how ugly this whole thing might be about to become if they don't get off their behinds and actually do something this summer. Very interesting summer on deck in Toronto. Sean, thanks for doing this. We're going to take a quick break right there. We'll come back. Jesse, we're going to talk about your goalie tandem rankings. Let's be right back. All right, we are back.

And Jesse, I teased it a little bit there in that last segment there, talking to Sean about the Leafs and talking about Stolars. And I realize that as I say, you know, could you trade Stolars? You have the Toronto Maple Leafs in this great article, your NHL goalie tandems, which just came out. You have the Toronto Maple Leafs rank 28th. So maybe that's like a little rich for me to talk about moving Anthony Stolars. But I just feel like if they're going to head in a more rebuilding direction, that's an asset

that could really help it. Am I crazy for saying that? No, I don't think so at all. And yeah, they're 28th. The thing is that tandem of Wall and Stolars clearly out. performed a year ago. They were arguably the biggest strength of that team a year ago. And it wasn't like they went into the season thinking, we've got two studs in net. Like, it was a surprise that Stolars and Wall were as good as they were. This year, they've crashed back to Earth a little bit.

I think that they're somewhere in the middle. I don't think they're as good as they were two years ago. I don't think they're as bad as they are this year, probably somewhere in the middle. But if you're looking for somewhere to clear some cap space and possibly get something in return, I think one of those goalies is probably a good way to do it. Part of the reason is a part of the reason is, I think Dennis Hildeby, who is the third goalie, he's come up and played a few times, he might be the best goalie on the team. Now, I like Joseph Wall a lot, and I think he's got the potential to be like as high as like a top 10 guy in the league. But he hasn't been so far, and he's been hurt a lot over his career. He has a really hard time staying healthy. Dennis Hildeby

has come up, and I've loved what I've seen from him just in the limited time. He is gigantic. He's six foot seven tied for the tallest goalie in the league this year. There are a handful of guys that are that big that have been in the league. But, He moves so fluidly. Like most of those guys, when they're six foot seven, they are kind of lanky, kind of awkward. They move like you'd expect a six foot seven person on ice skates to move. Hildebee doesn't. He's like he's fluid.

He's not the fastest guy, but for a six, seven guy, he moves really well. I like what I've seen. If I was the Maple Leafs and I could get something for Stolars, I would be comfortable with the tandem of Hildebee and Wall going forward. All right. It's a really good list. It's an interesting list for sure. No surprise at the top.

You know, the New York Islanders led by. Ilya Sorokin, who, is he the Vesna favorite at this point, him or Vasselowski, some order? Yeah, I mean, they're definitely, in terms of the odds, they are all in, all on their own. I was arguing on Twitter with people that Jeremy Swayman should be in that argument. Like, I think he's the third. I think he's third, but I think he should be in the same kind of stratosphere as those two. According to the odds, he's not. It's clearly Seroken or Vasselowski.

Serocon has deserved a Vesna for a while. He had a season a couple years ago that was, like, his goal, say, to have expected were insane. like the third highest ever. And he didn't win the Vesna. It was O'Mark that year, who also had a great year. But I think Seroquen's finally going to get his deserved Vesna. And the numbers for Seroquan this year are absolutely just ridiculous. I mean, he's first in just about every stat.

The thing that the one that impresses me the most is his high danger safe percentage is just bananas. I mean, the guy, it's his just for like, so people can understand high danger, 29 feet and in. Basically, this is right in front of the net. Slot shots. Yeah, slot shots right in front of the net within 29 feet, like inside the dots, in the slot. The league average on those shots is 813. So they are very hard to save. Like 813, you're doing pretty decent. Sorokens is 879. Not only is that the highest of any goalie in the league for high danger chances, his save percentage just on the most difficult chances alone is higher than Sergey Bobrovsky's total safe percentage for the whole season.

Freddie Anderson, Jordan Bittington, I can go down the list. There are a bunch of goalies whose total save percentages, everything they've seen, is lower than Sorokin on just the most difficult saves. He's like just in his own universe, he is unbelievable. He's so good. He's the only reason the Islanders aren't one of the worst teams in the league. See, that's the Jesse Granger difference because I was about ready to say there's definitely goalies in the league with below at 879 save percentage.

you know who they are and that they were good. I was not going to guess that there were good goalies with less than an 879 on the season. Obviously, you know, Bob Brofsky not having a great year. Anderson's getting toward the tail end. But these are not, you know, guys who had a call up for five games and got shot. These are legit NHL starting goalies. And that's a really good stat. The rest of the top of this list, I don't think the first four, not too surprising.

Minnesota, they were very high on your last. This might have even been number one on your last version of this list. Washington, Colorado, both in there. Buffalo at number five. I don't think I was expecting that one. Alex Lyons had a tremendous year. And we've seen him the last three years. He has these stretches where he gets red hot.

This is the year, it seems like, where he's found a way to take that hot stretch and just kind of keep it going. Yeah. When we talk about Buffalo, and rightfully so, we mostly talk about the offense because this team can just pour goals in the net. But their goaltending numbers are right up there with the best in the league. And Lyons a big part of that. UPL, Uco Pekulukinan has come back and been awesome. but he's been out for most of the season. It's mostly been lying carrying the load. And like you mentioned,

this guy gets hot. We saw him in Florida. He took Sergei Babrovsky's job the year they went to the Stanley Cup final. Babrovsky ended up getting the job back and carrying him to the cup final and rightfully so. But Lion got him there. He got him to the playoffs. He's had hot stretches. You saw him in Detroit. And to me, when I look at his style,

it makes sense. I understand why he's a hot and cold goalie, and he has these stretches because he plays way out of his net. He is heels on the like he is he is challenging shooters aggressively. And when you do that, when you're reading the play right, no one's going to score on you because when you're standing way out there, if you're in the right position, there's absolutely no net to shoot at and the puck's just going to hit you every time. Now, if you play like that and you read the play incorrectly or you're a half second behind,

it's going to be a disaster. And we've also seen that from Alex Line. The reason he isn't thought of as an elite goalie is because he doesn't maintain this high level of goaltending for long stretches. Can he continue this through the playoffs? I think he can. It's been a long enough sample size. Early in the year, I was talking to Matthew Fairburn, our awesome Sabers rider up in Buffalo, and he was like, goalies don't do this at this age, like become a starter. And I'm like, yeah, I'm a little skeptical. Like, I've seen a month like this out of Alex Lyon. And I don't, I wouldn't bank on that happening longer. But now that we've seen it for basically the entire regular season, like, I don't know if it's the Buffalo system that is just clicking with his game. Maybe something clicked in his own game. Like maybe he, he, he, he, he, he, the goalie coaches he's working with, he found something. Whatever it is, he looks phenomenal. And when you watch the film, the numbers are good and the film backs it up. Like, he is playing great hockey. And the Sabres are a good team. And I, like, I don't, I don't think goaltending is a weakness for that team at all. And if at any point, he does cool off, UPL has been lights out since the Olympic break. And he's a goalie that, like, in the goalie community,

goalie coaches have been saying that guy has so much talent for so long. Like, he's like, McKenzie Blackwood is a similar one. Like goalie, people who know goalies, think the world of UPL. He hasn't lived up to that yet, but I think that they've got two good options in good form. If you're a Sabres fan, you've got to feel good about the goaltending going into the playoffs. The thing about Lyon, too, that's interesting.

I get what you guys are saying. Like, it doesn't happen at this age. Nothing happened for him at the age it was supposed to happen for. He had to wait forever. He had to go through the minor league grind forever just to get an opportunity as a number three and then a number two in the NHL. And so, yeah, he would have these hot streaks.

And I think it shouldn't be surprising that a guy who had, to wait that long just to see NHL action couldn't sustain, you know, 40 game workloads or whatever right away. But over time, it's like anything in life. Like you learn how to, you know, you adapt to whatever the new surrounding is. You go up a level. Something gets harder and it takes some amount of time. Maybe you can do it in bursts. But over time, it just becomes this, this owned skill. And so that's the one thing I'll say. Like, I certainly have a soft spot for Alex Lyon. He's the kind of guy who I think when his playing days are done can do anything. He can work in hockey. He can work in TV. He's just an incredibly bright guy, very driven guy, and I'm very happy for him.

But I'm also buying it kind of on those grounds of just like, I don't see why he can't be the exception to become a starting goalie at this age because it took him longer than everyone else just to get here. Yeah. And like I said, he's made me a believer as the season goes on. Initially, it's like, okay, I've seen this story before with this guy. Like, it's a month, okay, but six months, five months of good goaltending, the level he's playing at. Like, you don't accidentally stop that many pucks for five months. He's, he's been awesome. All right. I'm not trying to pick my second Andre Vasselowski fight with you in a two-week span. But I was interested. Like we talked about how it's like Serochen and Vassilovsky, like, you know, one or the other. And by the way,

the Vesina odds per our producer Chris, Vasselowski is actually minus 135. So the slight favorite here, Seroken at Even Money and then Thompson, Logan Thompson, way back there plus 1800. That's a huge gap. I was surprised that the lightning were as low as six. Like I get what you're saying in that the backup situation on the island is much better, David Riddick versus Jonas Johansson. But you wrote in the article, the tandem is just Vasselowski. And given that, I kind of thought they'd still be top three. I, you know what? I really wrestled over Tampa Bay. And like, I'm, I'm putting the rankings together in my sheet and I moved them up and down a lot. And they, I think they probably, I did have them, I think, as high as three at one point. They are a tough team to rank in

terms of goalie tandem rankings because it's such a gray area. Like there isn't a black and white. way to do this. The way I try to do it in my head is whatever percentage of the games that goal he can play and play it well, that's how much of a percent I'm going to give him like in my head in terms of ranking these. So like a guy like Vasselowski is going to get more, I'm going to give him more credit than I will a guy like Logan Thompson, who's also been awesome, but doesn't play 65 games the way Vasselos he does. Here, the thing I don't like about the tandem in Tampa Bay, and I've been complaining about this for years. They don't invest in the backup position.

They basically do league minimum salary and we'll just put whoever we can there because we're going to play Vaselovsky 65 games. I think if they gave him a better, like Sorokens, he had Varlamov before that, awesome partner. You see these guys, like even Hellebuck, when he got Eric Comrie and Lorette Braswa,

when they had their best seasons, that's when Hellebuck won the heart. I do think that there's value to having a good backup goalie, even if you've got a superstar who's going to play 60 games, you can give him more nights off. You can keep him fresher for the playoffs. If Vasilevsky doesn't play well in the first round of the playoffs, which is what happened last year,

he didn't play very well in that first round now. Florida was awesome, and it wasn't Vaselowski's fault that they lost, but he didn't stand on his head and get you through the round like he has the potential to do. It bothers me that they don't put more emphasis on that position and try to get Jonas Johansson. I wrote it in the story.

Teammates love him. Awesome guy. He fits the role, but he's not good enough to give enough starts to keep Vasilevsky as fresh as I'd like. So in a purely tandem ranking, I do knock them down a couple pegs because of that. If we're going into the playoffs where everybody just plays their number one and we're just ranking goalies, Vasi's right up there at the top. The guy's awesome. I believe in him more than pretty much any goalie in the world when the playoffs get here. So it is interesting how 60 has just kind of become the magic number.

I'm not saying it's random. It seems to be accurate. Like 60 games are, so that's what you want your your ace number one goalie to be at. It's not 68. It's like 60 to 62. It's a very fine sweet spot. And the number of back-to-backs factors into that too, but it just seems like the right workload. On the other side of the state of Florida is what I think is going to be one of the most

interesting goaltending situations next year because we heard Sergey Bobrovsky's name going into the trade deadline. He's getting up there in age. Is he 38 now, Jesse? Yep. Yep. Yep, 38 years old. If he wants any term, you're a little nervous.

And even if he doesn't, I mean, he's played a lot of hockey the last three years. And for that reason, I'm kind of willing to write this season off and say, okay, like, let's see what happens if he gets a full off season to rest. Danil Tarasov's had a better season than him this year. And if the Florida Panthers wanted to, they rank 21 on your list, which is, you know, that's, I think, factoring in this season's Bobrovsky. At ceiling, they're probably much more like a top 10 potential. Yes. hand them. Yes. How much patience should they have, though, with a 38-year-old Sergey Babrovsky, who has done everything for their franchise, but he's also 38, and this year would

certainly, you know, hinted a cliff. It's interesting because they are both UFAs, not just Bobrovsky, but Teresov is also up for a new deal. And if I were them, and I do think this is probably what they end up doing, I would like to sign Bobrovsky to a one-year deal, like you said. If he wants term, things get more complicated. I would prefer to sign him to a one-year deal. And you can pay him a lot of money. I think Sergey Bobowski is still capable of being elite. Like, pay him the way he deserves, but for only one year. And then you can get Teresov, who shouldn't be expensive because he hasn't proven that he can be a top goalie in this league. Columbus had a lot of high hopes for him. He never ended up reaching him. They finally moved him

so that they could put Jet Grieves in there, and Jack Grieves is awesome. Terrasov has looked much better under Bobrovsky. I think if I'm Florida, that's still my future. I think Danil Tarasov is the future number one for this team, but he's not ready yet, but I want him to play more. When I looked at, I was looking at the, like, goalies who are playing the highest percentage of their team starts, Karel Vemelka is number one in Utah. And I don't think people give him enough credit for being the workhorse that he is. The guy's played 77.8% of Utah's games, and he's doing it awesome. He leads the league in wins. UC Saros right behind him, Dustin Wolf right behind him.

And then fourth in the league is Sergey Babrovsky at 69%. For a 38-year-old who's been to the cup final three years in a row, we don't need to play him the fourth most of any goalie in the entire NHL. What are we doing? Especially when Danil Tarasov is above league average in just about every stat. It's not like he's cratering them when they put him in games. He's better than Bobrovsky statistically. So for me, ideally for the Panthers, like in a dream world,

I think you get Babrovsky on a reasonable one-year deal. You sign Teresov longer and he's your future. And you play him 40% of the games and give Babrovsky. I don't want it a 50-50 split, but I think it should be much closer to that. Give Teresov some more responsibility, take some off of Babrovsky. And then hope that when you get to the playoffs, when you're healthy and everybody's back and that team is what we expected them to be this year, you've got a healthy, fresh Bobrovsky ready for the playoffs and try to win one more cup. When you say it that way, it seems pretty simple.

So I guess maybe I'm overthinking it by saying it's this big dilemma. That sounds like the obvious solution if it's doable. If, yeah, but like you said, if Sergey Bobrovsky wants three years, all of a sudden it gets real complicated because you could, they've already signed Brad Marchand through the year 3,00046 or whatever year that is that he's signed to. You can't do that with Bobrovsky too. Like, I mean, I guess you can.

And if you win a cup, then who cares how screwed the cap situation is. But it does get more complicated if Bobrovsky wants more than a year. Yeah. All right. I don't want to spoil this whole list for people because I mean, because I want him to go read it. The NHL goalie tandem's on the athletic, but I do want to ask you just one kind of open-ended one here.

The next time you do this list will probably be either in the off-season or going into next year or early next year. Between now and then, who do you think has the most approved or the most to gain, which teams goalie tandem? That's a great question. I think Calgary is one that can move way up because Dustin Wolfe is having a sophomore slump. This happens. He came in as a rookie.

He was amazing. Teams start to get a book on you. He's a smaller goalie. they started to find ways to score, and they have done that this year. As I just mentioned him in that last segment, he's playing a ton. And it's only a second year in the league. He's a really young goalie. They have put everything on him.

And Cooley leads the league in safe percentage. He's been awesome. He only had six games of NHL experience coming into this year. He hasn't played a ton, but in his limited time, he's been good. I think Devin Cooley is one of the better backups in the league. So their ranking is actually being carried by the backup right now, Devin Cooley, who's having a great year. but only because Wolf's stats are so bad.

Like, when I watch the film, I still think Dustin Wolf is going to be a Vesina caliber goalie for most of his career. So I think that if he returns to that, now, the play in front of him has got to get better. Calgary's a mess. If they can improve, if Dustin Wolf can get back to playing like he was as a rookie, and I think that that's absolutely in the realm of possibility. And Devin Cooley remains one of the best backup goalies in the league. I could see Calgary's got a lot to fix, but I could see them saying,

wow, we are set in net, and they are one of the top five, top 10 goalie tannums in the NHL for long foreseeable future because these guys are both young. Dustin Wolf, I think is 24. Devin Cooley's only like 27, 28. These guys are very young. They could be, they love each other. They're like they're not quite swam and Olmark hugs after every, like it's not quite that level, but these two guys love each other.

I think that could be a great tandem that shoots up the rankings if Wolf kind of rounds back into form. And probably an underrated one, right? Like I don't think Calgary is going to get. get a whole lot of national attention here for the next couple years here. So that one could fly under the radar. So that's a good, that's a good shout. All right, that is going to do it for us.

Thanks for listening to this episode of the Athletic Hockey Show. Wednesday, we're going to find out how many Shons is too many when we have Mack and do, Gentilly and Frankie, the honorary Sean Carrado. So make sure you tune in for that. We'll talk to you soon.