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Good morning to everyone except the guy who threw a live chicken on the ice during a Kings game in 1988. There isn’t much news to dig into this week, but some of us are still working away in the content mines. Let’s talk contracts, the Hall of Fame and fake awards …
One of my favorite features of the offseason published this week, as Dom Luszczyszyn broke down his model’s picks for the best and worst contracts in the league.
The list of best contracts proved two things: The model doesn’t understand how good that one guy on your favorite team is because it doesn’t watch the games, nerd. And also, Jack Hughes probably really hates reading this list every year. In fairness, the player who ranks No. 1 on this list signed his maximum-length $8 million deal in 2021 when he was 20 years old and the cap was flat, and nobody could have predicted that his production would increase and the cap would rise, except for literally everyone on the planet.
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But of course, today’s list of the worst contracts is where the real fun is, assuming you’re not a Flames fan (Jonathan Huberdeau tops this list). It’s kind of fascinating that, of the five worst deals, four were signed within the last 13 months — if NHL GMs are getting smarter about managing risk, it’s not by much. Oh, and be sure to check out Dom’s writeup for Sam Bennett, which is as close as you’ll come this week to seeing a human and a computer throw haymakers at each other in an alleyway.
There’s also this:
As a dedicated and decorated Hockey Hall of Fame Arguer, you know I was all over Peter Baugh’s piece today that breaks active players into tiers. For the most part, I think he gets it right — I might not have Jonathan Quick as a total lock given Ryan Miller isn’t in, and I might nudge Claude Giroux up a bit, but those are quibbles.
Here’s the main thing this piece made me realize: I am absolutely dreading the coming Corey Perry HHOF debate armageddon.
Perry turned 40 during the playoffs, meaning he’s getting into some seriously rare territory for modern-day forwards in a young man’s league. Let’s assume this is his last year, and that last year’s production in Edmonton roughly carries over to his new home in (racks brain) Los Angeles. That means he’ll end his career with fewer than 500 goals and 1,000 points, which have pretty much been the bare minimum cutoffs for offensive forwards whose careers weren’t cut short by injury. So he’s a no.
But he also won a Hart Trophy as regular-season MVP. The list of guys to do that without making the Hall is very short, and the list of forwards to do it is zero. So he’s a yes.
Except he probably shouldn’t even have won the Hart that year, stealing it from Daniel Sedin (who did win the player-voted Pearson). And if nobody thinks fellow MVPs Tommy Anderson, Al Rollins and Jose Theodore should be in, we’re under no obligation to induct Perry. So he’s a no.
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Except it won’t be about the numbers, but rather about him being a winner, dammit, and that’s what’s going to make the whole thing so excruciating. Wait, does losing in the Stanley Cup Final every year make you a winner? I’m not sure it does, although he does have a ring from 2007 and two Olympic golds, so I guess he’s a maybe. But also, everyone hated the guy for how he played. Unless he was on your team, in which case you loved him. But he got sent home from the Blackhawks, even if the whole story never became public, and maybe that should count, so … I give up.
In summary: Part of me hopes he has 140 points and wins another MVP with the Kings this year, just to make this easier. But assuming he doesn’t, book some time off for the summer of 2029, when the Great Perry Wars will begin in earnest.
Of the 19 men inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame as a player in the 2020s, four played for only one team — Pavel Datsyuk, Henrik Lundqvist and both Sedins. Five more played for two teams, three played for four, and a stunning six played for five teams or more. But can you name the only 2020s inductee to play for exactly three teams? (A hint: He played for one of those three teams more than once.)
🏒 I’m often jealous of Sean Gentille’s work. This week, I’m jealous that he managed to parlay an offseason hockey story into a phone call from Adam Sandler.
🌱 Scott Wheeler has a fun piece on Ryker Lee, the diminutive prospect who grew (literally) into a first-round pick.
✈️ The Jets avoided arbitration with Dylan Samberg by signing him to a three-year deal. That’s good news for Samberg, and especially good news for the Jets front office, which will no longer have to tell an arbitrator with a straight face that it thinks the defenseman is worth only the $2 million it had submitted as its offer.
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⚾ OK, it’s not hockey, but I was fascinated by this piece on the etiquette of negotiating a baseball trade. I’d recommend it for hockey fans, as presumably a lot of this stuff would carry over across sports. And I’m going to make it absolutely mandatory reading for everyone in my fantasy football league.
Did you hear about the NHL’s new award, which goes to the player who makes the best debut with a new team? Probably not, because I made the Thornton Award up yesterday. Not sure what to tell you: This is the kind of thing that happens when it’s almost August and there’s no hockey news.
Yesterday’s post went back through the cap era and awarded the Thornton to each year’s winner. But you old-timers might want to go back even further. So let’s do that, with a bonus list of the five greatest pre-cap Thornton Award seasons.
5. After sitting out two months to force a trade, Paul Coffey got his wish in time to play 46 games with the 1987-88 Penguins. He made the most of that limited action, racking up 67 points, a 116-point pace over a full season.
4. Coffey isn’t the only 1980s Oiler we’ll see on our list, as you’ve probably already figured out. His former teammate Mark Messier was traded to the Rangers at the start of the 1991-92 season and went on to post 107 points while taking home MVP honors.
3. Let’s squeeze another defenseman in here, with Doug Harvey’s first season with the Rangers from way back in 1961-62. He won the Norris, which sounds impressive but wasn’t really news back then, because it was the seventh time in eight years that he’d won. He was good.
2. There are some excellent goalie candidates, including oldies such as Bernie Parent returning to the 1973-74 Flyers, or more recent cases such as the underrated Miikka Kiprusoff’s 2003-04 debut in Calgary. But none may ever top what Jacques Plante did with the 1968-69 Blues, coming out of retirement to not only win the Vezina but do it while posting a .940 save percentage to establish a new record. Plante would break his own mark two years later with a .944 in another debut, this time in Toronto.
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1. Not much suspense here, as the best debut season of all time is pretty much impossible to argue. That would be Wayne Gretzky’s 1988-89 season in Los Angeles, when he paced the Kings with 168 points and earned the Hart Trophy as MVP. And now, he’s also earned the far more prestigious Thornton Award.
Our only hat trick comes from a goalie: The only three-team HHOF inductee of the 2020s is Roberto Luongo, who played for the Islanders, Canucks and Panthers (twice).
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(Top photo of Sam Bennett: Steph Chambers / Getty Images)
Sean McIndoe has been a senior NHL writer with The Athletic since 2018. He launched Down Goes Brown in 2008 and has been writing about hockey ever since, with stops including Grantland, Sportsnet and Vice Sports. His book, “The Down Goes Brown History of the NHL,” is available in book stores now. Follow Sean on Twitter @DownGoesBrown
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