Two interesting and contradictory stories today that muddy the waters when we try to understand just how profitable it is to own a hockey franchise.

First is this North Texas news story, which features an interesting (and short) audio interview with a sports economist who claims that overall league sustainability sags because of hockey in non-traditional markets. Makes sense conceptually, though he doesn’t offer up much more evidence than “Hockey country in South Florida? No.”

I don’t disagree that building a sport in a non-traditional market is challenging and requires a billionaires’ equivalent of the welfare state in the meantime, but we are talking about huge media markets with mad sports cultures. If hockey is sustainable in cities with a population base like Winnipeg’s, it’s hard to understand how it couldn’t be sustainable in a city where even a fraction of its sports consumers would equal the same number of people.

More to the point, though, is how the angle of this story continues to calculate hockey profitability on a strict hockey-related-revenue-to-hockey-related-expenses ratio. That simply doesn’t reflect the manner in which value is derived from sports franchise ownership.

(One other point made during the interview that resonantes with me more, though, is that owners are emboldened by how strong the fan support was after the last lockout, and how fans are only damaging the long-term stability of the league if they welcome their teams back with open arms. We need to vote with our dollars. End aside.)

Now look at this tellingly contradictory story from South Florida, which says precisely what I and many others have been writing about for some time: those who own their own arenas or have favorable arena deals have a number of non-hockey related events and revenues to buoy their teams. “So what?” you might ask. That’s not hockey related revenue, and so shouldn’t be included when we talk about hockey’s profitability. Except that in many cases you simply can’t get your hands on that revenue without an arena, and you can’t get your hands on an arena without a regular tenant, and that your tenant then eats up a huge amount of your fixed expenses. Simply put, a hockey team might lose money, but your investment still gains.

We start to get a picture of an overall investment strategy: You don’t necessarily want a sports team, you want a sports arena. With an arena you can inflate real estate and land prices in the area, where you can strategically invest beforehand, and/or charge for retail space, and/or derive value from businesses you own nearby. To get an arena, you need a sports team, the cheapest of which is an NHL team in a non-traditional market. Even if you don’t have the arena, get the team and you can agitate for the local government to build you one with public tax dollars.

Once you’ve got your arena and team, your direct hockey-related revenue in-out ratio might produce yearly operational losses – you probably don’t make enough on ticket sales to pay for salaries and arena expenses. But your overall portfolio, made possible by owning the team, is producing value. You may even make a short term profit when you consider revenue sharing, merchandise sales, and television revenues, much of which is not reported. And if you’re lucky, maybe your team goes on a run, wins some playoff games, and you make some bonus short term profit. Meanwhile, your franchise is increasing in value year over year. If it’s in the middle of the pack, that means a 4%-11% return on your $200MM investment every year. All you have to do is have the money to cover any operational losses in the meantime, which some owners (remember those two guys in Tampa?) have trouble doing when all of their other speculative enterprises crumble in a crashing economy.

In the meantime, you can limit your operational losses by slashing payroll and agitating for a lockout to remove player rights. In the end, this narrative of non-traditional teams dragging down the league is only accurate if we continue to look exclusively at hockey related revenue. But owning a sports team isn’t about whether or not the team makes money. It’s about whether or not all of your investments, made possible through the ownership of that team, make money. Which is why the owners’ line about how broken the economics of the game are is so disingenuous.

I don’t doubt that some owners are actually losing money, and some owners’ investment strategies haven’t panned out. (Wang on Long Island hasn’t had as much luck getting a new arena as Katz in Edmonton.) But that players and fans should repeatedly pay for the unrealized strategies of various billionaires is asinine. The reason the Coyotes don’t have potential owners crawling all over them isn’t because there’s no appetite for hockey in Arizona. It’s because a state with an economy that runs on real estate sales has crashed and is near bankrupt. No one has any money to spend on anything, so real estate speculation has flatlined. As the economy recovers, look for more potential owners to start sniffing around these supposedly doomed outfits in non-traditional markets.

All of which to say that the owners of sports franchises are looking quite villainous lately. The Senators’ owner, Eugene Melnyk, is fairly mild in comparison – though he does have a tendency to make shitty, misleading statements about relocation right before tickets go on sale, or claim that his club is the second largest employer in Ottawa, which is ridiculous. But when we see the repeated manipulation of fan sentiment to get concession from the public purse, to drive down individual rights in the form of player arbitration (from guys who I would assume are staunch anti-state-interventionist Republicans to boot), and the plainly misleading reporting of franchise values, then I don’t know how anyone can be pro-owner in all of this mess.

With this first glitter of optimism we’ve received in weeks—generated, perhaps tellingly, by meetings where the NHL Commissioner and NHLPA head were both absent—I’ve found myself thinking about the prospect of seeing hockey this year. Up until today I’d just about given up on that notion. Goes to show how even the cynical like me can be bent by a mildly positive though largely ambiguous headline.

It also speaks to how little we fans may expect from either side in terms of PR, and how little we received. I’ve never felt like either side was invested in the feelings of the fans, except to the degree they could manipulate fan sentiment as leverage in their negotiations. Such is the magnifying effect of the 24 hour news cycle. What is a group of rich people fighting over how much richer one side gets to be than the other turns into the same group of rich people biting the hand that feeds them. Given how badly this thing has been cocked up, I can’t help but think some kind of overture has to be made to the fans to get them back on side; I’ve never heard people sound as cynical as they have these past two months.

Which makes the following question both a bit compelling and also completely ludicrous: is the best thing the league can do to make amends with the fans to axe Bettman?

It would be succumbing to an unfair stereotype—Bettman answers to the owners, after all. But consider that 1) Bettman is a convenient stand-in for the greediness of the owners and the brokenness of this negotiation process; 2) There are many skilled, cut-throat former lawyers who could play the role of facilitator and administrator, and 3) maybe it’s healthy to have a little bit of turnover at the top, especially when your guy has been in his role for almost 20 years. This track record of lockouts is not synonymous with Bettman’s track record. For better or for worse, Bettman is the brand.

How many more years do you want this guy booed every time he steps up to a microphone, be it at the draft or handing out the Stanley Cup? This is supposed to be the face of ownership, the powerful mask of the league itself. Fair or not, Bettman’s as divisive a figure as you’ll find in professional sports, and after yet another lockout I can’t imagine there aren’t enough owners in that board room to do the ultimate shanking in blaming this whole fiasco on him. They could wash their hands of the whole situation and get back to the business of making money.

Unlikely to happen, of course, as Bettman has created the ultimate insiders’ club. And there’s nothing more appealing to the rich white man who has everything than membership in an exclusive club. He’s ingrained himself with the league’s identity. But we might be starting to see the beginning of a fan backlash that could be counteracted by the appearance, if certainly not the reality, of regime change.

I was trying to find an image for this post, but figured you don’t want to see another photograph of Gary Bettman making a turgid face as he strains to offer another non-answer at a press scrum…

I don’t know what it says about me that Forbes puts out some of my favorite hockey analysis, but they’ve done it again with their annual report on the value of hockey franchises. In it, they illustrate that the media’s focus on the operational losses of franchise ownership–which are themselves specious claims for owners who also own their arenas–are nothing more than the short-term price one pays for what can be staggeringly lucrative mid-term investments.

We mortals are expected to get by on the sort of paltry returns available to people playing with mere hundreds or thousands of dollars. What Forbes’ list indicates is that if you can afford to sink $200MM into a franchise, you’ll probably get the kind of increases in overall value, year over year, that make losing $5MM a year in the short term more than palatable. (Presuming you’ve got it to lose after buying the thing, admittedly.)

I won’t focus on Toronto, where all sense and logic are destroyed in the void of abject homerism. Or on New York, where they have a license to print money. ($74MM in cool cash year-over-year, zero debt.) But Melnyk’s looking at a nice little $100MM return on his $120MM investment in the Sens about a decade ago. Double your value in 10 years? Anyone who even bothers to look at their RRSPs will tell you that’s a pretty good deal.

Ottawa’s operating income was probably slim to nothing – $14.5MM before taxes, etc. But between all of the undeclared revenues that are made possibly through owning a hockey team – non-hockey events at ScotiaBank Place, television revenues, merchandise – in addition to the return when Melnyk gets around to selling the team, even a small market team like Ottawa, presents an enviable investment.

Maybe more suprising is how much debt Ottawa is carrying. At 59% of value, Ottawa is eighth overall is debt load, among the likes of the Islanders, Panthers, Hurricanes and Stars. They’re worse off than Nashville and St. Louis. This seems strange since Melnyk’s had a decade to pay off that arena. This may speak to his financial woes at Biovail. He has a profitable franchise. He just isn’t paying down his principle fast enough to be able to enjoy it.

More surprising still is that despite all this debt he’s carrying, Melnyk doesn’t seem to be a hardliner in this lockout situation. Sitting right there with him, in 10th, are the Washington Capitals, and their owner Ted Leonsis has long been suspected of being a hawk in all of this. Though he’s got a few looooooong term deals, and he might be feeling buyer’s remorse, in many ways the Caps are better off than the Sens financially.

Over on Puck Daddy they’re talking about the gap between rich and poor teams, but I don’t know if that’s really the point. Teams, even the exceedingly poor ones, can claim to be losing money operationally, but the overall value of the franchises don’t go down at the rate that most franchises go up. Only three franchises went down in value last year – St. Louis, Columbus, and Carolina. Two remained neutral – Tampa and Phoenix. (That’s right, Phoenix did not lose overall sale value despite losing more money operationally than any other this season.) And everyone else experienced at least marginal growth. The middle of the pack franchises increased in value between 4% and 11%, which ain’t a bad return in one year for your $150MM-$300MM investment. Especially considering, you know, you get to own a hockey team on top of all that.

It’s been a long, long time since I’ve written anything on this blog. In fact, the last post I wrote, on September 20th, was a petition vowing that if any games were cancelled that I wouldn’t watch any hockey for the rest of the season. Since that time I’ve had just about no desire to contemplate our situation as hockey fans, and no interest in covering the ongoing non-event that is this lockout.

The reaction to that petition was predictable and fair. Most seemed to appreciate the sentiment–that only by withholding our dollars can we actually communicate with owners and/or players–but admitted that they would eat hockey up if and when it returned. I’m missing hockey something fierce; I don’t begrudge anyone the opportunity to watch the Sens play again. But I thought it only right to follow up on whether or not my position has changed over the last month plus…

Nope. The owners have cynically positioned the fans, leveraging our passion for the sport in a fight to undermine player rights. They’ve irreparably set the sport back at least a year or two after what had been years of record growth and some of the best hockey in years. My sense is still one of deep resentment. If any other company or brand, selling me any other product, so fragrantly took me for granted in this way I would never go back to them.

Now, I’m not saying that I’m never going to watch hockey again. And I have to acknowledge that Melnyk doesn’t seem to be one of the hardliners among the ownership cadre driving this thing. But I simply can’t go back to the way things were and pretend that this level of greed is a normal and cyclical thing in the overall scheme of CBA negotiations.

So what were my plans for 2012-2013? Well, after a surprisingly competitive season last year, I planned to consume Ottawa Senators hockey to about the same degree as any fan who bothers to write about hockey on his own blog. Which is to say that I was going to watch every game at least on TV, attend between a half-dozen and dozen home games, go to as many playoff games as I can, buy some merch, and drink a shit-ton of $11 beers at Scotiabank Place. I don’t spend like a madman when it comes to hockey. But I’m part of the gristle that makes hockey profitable in this city. If I was a die-hard with season tickets and a version of every jersey, then peeling back a little doesn’t make that much difference; I’d still be spending like mad. Instead, I’m the kind of consumer who had built hockey into my routine. What any lockout demonstrates to the consumer like me is that I don’t need hockey in my life that badly.

When there are this many companies willing to bend over backward for my entertainment buck I can’t go back to hockey spending. I won’t be going to any home games if and when hockey is back, not even playoff games. I won’t buy any merch, like jerseys or t-shirts. (Not even that Ottawa Senators Dream Capture Kit.) I won’t spend any money on arena food or beer.

So, why would I punish our small market team? Well, I’m on record (here and here) thinking that Melnyk has a habit of stretching the truth when it comes to describing the challenges of breaking even. And I can’t ignore that Daniel Alfredsson is re-considering his plans to play another year, and that we’re losing a year of Erik Karlsson and Jason Spezza in their prime. Hockey, and Ottawa Senators hockey specifically, is damaged because of this lockout. If we never break out of this habit of flocking back to hockey because we’ve missed it so badly, then we’ll only have ourselves to blame when all of this happens again in 6-7 years.

ESPN’s crack team of NHL analysts

It’s only natural that the hockey community’s perspective on ESPN’s amazing/contentious idea, their “Ultimate Standings,” would focus on the Leafs being dead last among all sports franchises. For even such a flawed methodology as one that basically asks a frustrated group of fans what they think, those results deserve a little bit of commentary. But there might also be a few things we can learn from what amounts to marketing data made public.

(Aside: what is with this trend? Pitchfork did something similar with their People’s List, which was treated around the internet as if it wasn’t just free market research. They even broke down all the demographics. Sports has always been a little bit more comfortable with its commercial nature, but indie music? It’s a weird contradiction to me to have so many indie fans happy to share their consumer habits in a public way.)

ESPN’s methodology is a combination of the standard—weighted averages across eight key categories, designed to smooth outliers and exemptions, economic analysis—and counterproductive—polling fans by phone and online. I say it’s counterproductive because if the goal is to collect reliable data and drop the extreme deviations, then you’d also need to account for the fact that sports fans tend to harbor hyperbolic attitudes towards their favorite and least favorite franchises. You can’t just ask sports fans for the objective truth. A real “Ultimate List” would measure fans actions over time, as opposed to opinions. (That’s an interesting discussion in itself: what counts? Just attendance at events and watching on TV, or blogging, and shopping, and Tweeting, etc.?) It’s not unusual for a sports fan to put one thing in extremely strong terms and do another thing altogether.

It’s also difficult to understand how a fan in one city might render judgment of another city’s “fan experience.” How would an Ottawa Senators fan answer the question of fan experience about the Leafs? I’ve been to a Leafs game and thought the atmosphere was amazing, especially considering they were already out of the playoffs and they were playing the Blues. Can I be trusted, as a rival fan, to say that in a poll? Even just looking at Title Track: “Championships already won or expected in the lifetime of current fans.” Pretty sure we know how Leafs fans feel about the latter part of that sentence, but they won quite a few Cups back when the sport was played in a tanning factory in Depression Era New England. How does a Leafs fan answer that question v. a Sens fan?

A good deal of the factors are economic—in other words, value for money—which is often tied directly to how poor the team is. The Coyotes are listed as the best NHL team on the strength of coaching, loyalty to players, and how cheap everything is. Depending on solid coaching, loyal players, and cheap tickets is just the sort of thing a team this close to folding has to do.

Therein is the contradiction for fans to consider when in the middle of CBA negotiation designed to increase the prosperity of teams. If the Toronto Maple Leafs, the most profitable team in the league, are the worst at delivering a good product at a good price, and the Coyotes, a total financial mess, are the best, is there an inverse relationship between a team’s profitability and fan enjoyment? Makes sense to me. You will derive more value buying products that are not in high demand. The OHL team in Ottawa, the 67s, delivers an amazing product for about $20 a pop. That’s much more value than the Senators, but we can’t pretend that the OHL is the NHL anymore than we can pretend that the Coyotes are as valuable to the league as the Leafs.

It calls into question the way the ratings are weighted. Title track is weighted much less than, say, coaching or affordability. But I can imagine quite a few Leafs fans who would think that all of the expensive tickets and years of poor coaching would be worth it if they could have that one, cathartic championship win. More importantly, I can think of a few Leafs fans who would spend all of their money on anything Leafs related if the Leafs won a cup. But it’s still a valid question: would you rather have a cheap and still reasonably fun hockey experience or a contender?

A lot of the NHL teams near the top of list are either teams that are forced to sell cheap tickets due to poor economic performance, or are in non-traditional hockey markets—Tampa Bay, New Jersey, Nashville, St. Louis. Some of the most profitable teams in hockey are near or at the bottom—the New York Rangers are in the middle at 63, the Canucks are 92, Montreal is 111, and of course Toronto is last at 122. I’m left to wonder, relying only on the results of ESPN’s flawed algorithm, if the fan who intersects with the game on very tangible levels—how much do tickets cost and does the team win?—will be better off without greater economic and performance parity. It seems to me that the better the team is in both of these categories, the more the fan is bled for their bucks.

It’s something to consider as players and league officials try to win the hearts and minds of fans during a lockout. Bettman has promised lower ticket prices before, and he probably learned enough of a lesson not to do that again. But when asked what they want out of this whole mess, fans may do well to remember that the owners have no intention of making their product more affordable if they get the kind of concessions they’re seeking from the players.

For Sens fans, Ottawa finds itself at a respectable 42. They do particularly well in fan relations (32), ownership (25 – which also includes community involvement, which Ottawa has a great history of. Glad to see it recognized here) and, interestingly, coaching and on-field leadership (21). You’ve got Jack Adams nominee Paul MacLean, and Alfredsson as one of the longest serving captains in the league, but last year they were rated 117 in that category. Quite an improvement for one year. Similarly, ownership improved by 25 spots and fan relations by 20 spots. The players’ ‘effort and likeability’ also improved an incredible 47 spots, which sounds about right considering the team doesn’t employ Alex Kovalev anymore.

I don’t know if the team’s community outreach was really that much better last season than the season before, but that’s fan perception for you: if a team outperforms dismal expectations, every single aspect of your team is perceived more favorably. It will be interesting to see where Ottawa figures on this list next year now that the Hockey News has picked them to be a playoff team. In the meantime, we’re left to wonder if the next six or seven year CBA will create a landscape in which owners will make much more profit and pass along their good fortune to us in the form of price hikes.

Plenty of interesting interpretations of Kyle Turris’ new deal out there. Maybe predictably, Sens blogs and fans think it’s a steal because the assumption is that he will progress towards the expectations of a third overall pick. If that happens, then the team bought some of Turris’ prime years at what might be a discounted rate. Others take a more measured (read: pessimistic) stance, assume Turris is getting a lot of money and term for not a lot of production, and wonder if Ottawa just threw $17.5MM at a nebulous concept.

Both of these perspectives are valid, of course, and both represent risk for the organization. If you lock him up ahead of time, you hope for value down the road at the risk of the player not reaching their projected performance. If you don’t, you sidestep the risk of an anchor contract, but at the risk that you may have to pay more if the player performs. What I find interesting in all of this is that fans would internalize these two scenarios equally.

I think I’ve said before on this blog that if the Sens are not spending to the cap–even a cap rolled back in the CBA negotiations–then I don’t particularly care if Eugene Melnyk is getting great value for his money. A goal is no more enjoyable if the player scoring it is being paid less for doing so. At least not for me. The only scenario in which I care if an owner is getting value for his money is one in which he intends to spend as much as he is allowed, and the value of his contracts will help the team compete against other cap spenders. But this team, so laden as it is with over-performing rookies, entry-level contracts, and players like Michalek, Karlsson, Alfredsson and Anderson over-delivering value on their contracts, then it I certainly can’t get motivated to anger if a player gets paid because management didn’t have the foresight to predict his performance. If Turris ends up being worth, say $5MM, why would I, as a fan, care that the team has to spend that?

When we talk about the fan experience of watching a hockey game, one factor–money–is abstract, and doesn’t really impact how entertaining the game is. The other–term–isn’t abstract because we watch these players for the years of their contract. It seems logical to me that we should have a greater investment in the quality of the product on the ice than in the owner getting value for his money. These things are related, of course, but less so when you have a team spending so little in any case.

What should terrify fans more is term. If this 23 year old incurs an injury or mental block or simply fails to perform without the motivation of needing a contract for five more years, then it affects me as a fan. Simply put, I’m stunned that this management was willing to give out a contract of that length after such a short audition. Erik Karlsson only got two more years than Turris.

Listen to Melnyk’s interviews and you don’t get the sense that this team is going through a temporary period of low-spending during a rebuild, to be followed, inevitably, by more spending to the cap. Something’s changed. Spending so much money only to have last year’s cheap-o team make the playoffs seems to have really gotten to Melnyk. Now, when he speaks about the team, he talks about it as if it inhabits a permanent state of small market spending, restraint, and patient prospect development. None of this is strange to me. What’s confusing is the attitude of fans (or at least those fans whose opinions I read online) who take some personal pride out of defending this billionaire’s cash. I’m not trying to troll here, Melnyk saved our team from bankruptcy after all. I’m trying to get at the tendency of armchair analysts like myself to look at every deal in terms of value for investment, even when the owner is openly saying he will spend less than he can on payroll and the league is in a bar room brawl over revenue sharing.

I like Turris (though I’ve been rough on the deal that brought him here), and he seems like a good depth player on a team that has a number of quality prospects coming up. And I hope that the team is seeing something in his off-season development that makes five years less of a risk than a one year, wait-and-see deal. But as of now, consider me perplexed.

Kyle Turris and his twin brother Tyle Kurris enjoy an afternoon of whatever this is…Rich people stuff? These guys look alike.

The Mighty Varada 

I guess we should analyze, huh? AUGUUUUUST.

Hard not to like a low-spending team getting a pretty decent second line center for $3.5M for the next five…presuming he’s a second line center and not a fourth liner the way Phoenix used him. I’m excited about locking in a young player with great pedigree, someone who’s primed to grow with this team and hopefully become a core member. On the other hand, it would have been nice to take a year to see what we really have on our hands here. If he ends up surprising the hell out of everyone and putting up 60-70 points or something, well then that’s the kind of problem every team wishes they had, and the risk seems far less than Turris becoming what he was on his last team and us counting down the days to his contract coming off the books.

I guess what I’m saying is that this team has become pretty great about taking players with flashes of brilliance–Bobby Butler playing with Spezza two season ago, Regin against the Pens in the playoffs way back in 1977– and giving those players guaranteed contracts that will look brilliant if the player’s success translates into a full season and cost nothing if they don’t work out. Turris’ deal looks the same on the surface, but is different in a few important ways. Obviously, it’s more money and more term. But also Turris has a body of work to analyze, where Butler and Regin didn’t.

Turris played two relatively full season in Phoenix, getting about ten minutes a game as a depth player. He played against weak competition, and had respectable possession numbers. In Ottawa, he proved that with an extra four or five minutes a night and against better competition, he can at least maintain those possession numbers–even improve on them relative to competition.

So I guess what I’m saying is that this is a totally reasonable contract by a team that can more than afford it, and it takes one of their prime chips for the UFA period next season off the table. All of this is great if Turris keeps up the good work. If not, well that five year term looks a little bit foreboding. If anything, you can tell the economics of this game have gone wacky when we all agree that paying $3.5M a year for a 23 year old player whose career high in points is 29 and career PPG is .403 is a crazy steal.

James

Well sir…if the pressure was on Turris to perform this season now it’s “iz-on” like old people say. And for 5 seasons. Comparisons to Mike Fisher and fans’ perennial displeasure toward him never quite reaching the nearly unreachable expectations put on him are to be trucked out upon his first dry spell. A huge difference is though, is that Mike Fisher was making an average of 5 million per which was too much.
Should Turris falter some or be usurped for 2^nd line centre (good problem) and slip to 3^rd line centre, his 3.5MM annual hit is a not impossible to digest.
Sidebar: Imagine Kyle Turris as 3^rd line centre facing off against the Tom Pyatts of the world because some Mika Zibanejad or Stephane Da Costa (what?) turns out to be a 60-70 point pivot? I would take that.

Put it this way: If things were to go South and Turris were to end up a 3^rd line centre, he’d be making 500K more than our beloved Chris Kelly currently is and for just one more year….except Turris is 23 to Kelly’s 31. Oh and has way, way more scoring touch.

This deal seems to work well for both sides of the table. Despite reports of his reputation in Phoenix (which you never know what the full story is / how much of it is Agent vs. Management  more than Player vs. Management, etc), Turris genuinely seems very eager to play for the Sens and to be part of this team’s core going forward.
Seeing as we are not and will ever be New York City (and who is in this work-a-day world?), getting players who want to be here for the long haul likely proves tough. People criticize how Murray seems to always give out that year or two more term than seems necessary such as on deals like Anderson’s 4. I think in the cases of quality players like Andy or Turris a franchise like Ottawa has to give a little extra than others would to lock them down, especially during a rebuild, . Makes me judge teams like Calgary a little less for giving Jay Bouwmeester a billion dollars a year for a little too long. A liiiiittle less I judge.

Turris wants to be here and conversely Murray and co have  shown him clearly that they are ready to make him a big part of Ottawa’s future. If he was underutilized before in his past life in Phoenix a five year deal shows those days are long over. Obviously, at this point in his career this is a gamble deal but so far Turris has shown in his time with Ottawa that if you give him the ball he’ll run with it (it’s a sports metaphor…I know, I don’t get it either).

As far as the gamble element of the deal goes, as we learned during my recent post on pedigree vs. performance in Ottawa’s lineup…….you DIDN’T read it? Well I want you to know that just because I litter my posts with diarrhea on toast jokes it doesn’t mean I don’t put time into them…ANYWAY, we learned(ish) that the safest round to gamble on is the first. That said, its important to note that Nikita Filatov was taken in the same draft as and way ahead of Erik Karlsson so, life is like a box of Lieutenant Dans but if you’re going to take a gamble on a player a guy with 3^rdoverall pedigree and a good track record on your team is not lunacy.

Welcome Kyle Turris

May the Team 1200’s post game call in show be forever at your back and The Alfie on your wing something something you to the stars.

PS. It hurts my and Varada’s feelings that you still dont follow us on Twitter 😦

Hoo boy is it ever hard to find hockey to write about in August. Especially given that there might not even be a season and my favorite team has decided not to spend any money—everything seems like it’s stuck in a perpetual holding pattern. Still, I managed to piece together some uninformed opinions about the league in between bouts of drinking outside in the sun.

Detroit: Can’t help but wonder if Kenny Holland’s incredible reputation as one of the best GMs in hockey is only now truly being put to the test. I mean, he had the greatest defenceman maybe of all time playing 30 minutes a night and into his 40s, and you combine that with late round steals like Zetterberg and a goalie like Osgoode, who stunk just enough in the regular season that they never had to pay him and suddenly became incredible in the playoffs every single damn year. This offseason, tasked with replacing Lidstrom, Holland did something very ordinary and predictable, not at all befitting such an apparent genius: he went after the best unrestricted free agents on the market.

This franchise enjoyed the longest sustained hand job from hockey critics the world over as proponents of “moneypuck” alternative metrics, vertical integration, and scouting proficiency. And it just resorted to the very antithesis of those things. Holland wrote a giant-sized novelty check to Suter and Parise, despite all the evidence that they couldn’t possibly provide value relative to that sort of money. And, just like all the other unoriginal big market GMs, when they miss out there’s very little in the way of Plan B.

Now I hear rumors that they’re looking closely at Bouwmeester and maybe even Gonchar, having to pay a premium in prospects or picks for mediocre talent, and I have to wonder: how did they not see this coming? How have they not been shoring up defensive prospects for the last ten years, knowing that one day their linchpin and captain would retire? Unless Holland has some kind of trick up his sleeve, or his metrics are so alternative that we can’t see how secretly good this defense corps will be, Detroit is going to regress hard this year. As a fan of a team that once lost Chara for nothing, I’m sympathetic. I think Detroit’s incredible run of playoff appearances may soon come to an end.

Edmonton: really enjoying the way certain hockey fixtures, especially those in Edmonton (obviously), are speculating on the team’s ability to possibly make the playoffs this season. This is a team that needs a 20 point bump over last year to be competitive for the eighth seed. To give you some perspective, Ottawa finished about 20 points out of the playoffs the season before last, and they were still up about 10 points on last place Edmonton that year. Now, Ottawa made a 20 point improvement on their place in the standings, but on the back of Karlsson’s Norris Trophy season, Spezza being top five in the league in point scoring, quality goaltending for the first time in forever, no injuries, Alfredsson being incredible at age 83, Paul MacLean’s system actually working, Milan Michalek shooting about 20% for a good chunk of the season, and a whole bunch of improbable comebacks. Edmonton makes no changes other than adding another very skilled teenager, a defenseman who is highly touted but has never played in the NHL, and Khabibulin being a year older. I don’t think anyone would be surprised to see Tambellini—or, god willing, someone else—sitting up there on TSN’s season-ending draft lottery show in the spring.

CBA negotiations: I don’t know if I’m being terribly naïve, but I don’t think there will be an enormous lockout this season. There’s just too much money on the line, and the NHLPA looks too well organized this time around to keep the discussions from being at least partially constructive. I know there’s a lot of posturing, and everyone is afraid of setting precedent for the next twenty of these things, but there just doesn’t seem to be that fundamental, existential discussion required this time. This isn’t about instituting a mechanism that will change every facet of the management of the game. This is basically about tweaking revenue sharing. Not to minimize the size of the differences between the two sides, but it just doesn’t seem so much more difficult than any other standard negotiation on how to split up the pie. No negotiation ever gets fixed early, after all. A few all-nighters in September and I bet we see a deal hammered out.

One wonders if there’s a way during future CBA negotiations to silo off some of these issues—say, have the main contract negotiation essentially comprised of revenue sharing methods, and then have sub-agreements for matters like participation in the Olympics. I know everything is related to revenues to some degree or another, but I can’t help but think that there will be a number of concessions made in the name of expediency if only because the scope of the discussion is so big.

In a way, I’m hoping that the first part of the season is cancelled. I’ve always thought that the 82 game NHL season is way too long, especially when you add all of those useless exhibition games which, here in Canada, are breathlessly announced and endlessly broadcast by a hockey-crazed media. I’m not above it. I watch too, and listen as Dean Brown or whoever analyses how Chris Neil, playing on the first line with all of the team’s good players sitting out because the games are meaningless, really came close to a shot on net there. By the end of every season I’m reduced to hockey exhaustion, waiting out the final 10-20 games in anticipation of the playoffs. I don’t even know how Islanders and Leafs fans feel, their seasons usually out of reach long before. If they could just go ahead and start the season on November first, I’d be okay with that. I’d prefer to trim the last 20 games off the schedule that the first, but I’m not against the concept.

In any case, I wonder how much longer we’ll have to wait before Melnyk weighs in with another one of his “this team needs to make it to the second round to break even” panic attacks.

Ottawa is proud to select, from the Frolindinhoff First Nations, Derek Carleton.

Hi everybody,

Let me be the first person to welcome you to summer. Welcome! As someone who …hmmm let me choose my words carefully as our lawyers have informed me that I cannot refer to what I do here as “writing” ….k, lemme start again. As someone who smashes a keyboard to produce word-like combinations with the possible intent of creating hockey-esque shapes I must admit that it can be a little tough to come up with interesting and fun subjects to discuss during these dog dangling afternoons. Seeing as the CBA does not qualify as remotely interesting but DOES qualify as a complete fucking bummer, we will skip that! Spotlight please… *soft R and B music*

Baby, there’s been a lot of talk about the rebuild lately. A lot of fussin’ and fightin’ about prospects. Lotta pillow talk about their current worth relative to development ceiling, their trade value, their blah di bling blong bluuuu. All this talk has got me thinking about what last season’s squad would look like if we put on that Natalie Cole record and stripped things dowwwn to …alright I am really sorry, I am creeping mySELF out at this point.
Here’s a chart I made. I wanted to examine what last season’s team looks like if you break it down to who drafted each player and where, what at this point in time is popularly viewed as their role on the team and if they have solidified themselves in said role. “BUT JAMES JAAAAAAAAMES!” You say, “I’ve already skipped over the boring part and noticed a bunch of people missing! Where be Filatov and the like!?” Well, You, that’s why you always read everything, and always leave a note. I arbitrarily chose to define a roster player as someone who participated in 20 or more games for Ottawa last season. Come away with me…

*Oh fuck fine. He played only 10 games for Ottawa this past year but the guy has suited up for over 150 games as a Sen so far so he makes the list.

*dusts hands* Well that just about wraps things up, now if you don’t mind…OH RIGHT, I didn’t talk about anything I noticed yet.

One of the first things that struck me is that the vast majority of picks on the team were selected by Ottawa. Given there have been a couple eras of management  at work and quite a few FAs and deadline acquisitions have come and gone over the years, at the end of the day the team is largely made up of in-house picks. I have to admit that it’s a pretty reassuring thing to see as the team goes through a rebuild.

Okay, did anyone else notice that Matt Carkner (who’s not even on the team anymore) was the only second round pick on the squad? And he was another team’s pick at that! I’m not sure what that means. I’m not trying to undervalue 2^nd round picks here. It might actually have more to do with how Ottawa tends to donate its upcoming a second round pick to pretty much every team it makes a transaction with. No fourth or fifth round picks on the team either. Funny as with all the talk lately about “Are undrafted signings worth it?” there were more of them on the team this year than rounds 2, 4 and 5 could boast combined. The more you know the more you grow I guess. *shooting star* 

Speaking of draft order, it would certainly appear that if you are a forward playing in the top 6 or a defenceperson playing in the top 4 you were likely drafted in the first round. Lots of pedigree up in there except for one weird thing: You may also find yourself playing in the top 6 or top 4 if you were some later round drop in the bucket.

All one has to do is review a draft table from nearly any year to see that being a even a high end first round pick does not mean you’ll get so much as a cup of coffee in the NHL but this chart shows me two things:

1. Pedigree seems to matter greatly to building a team.

2. Quantity of picks also seems to matter greatly to building a team as draft picks are like a box of shrimp boat captains you never know who lieutenant Dan your going to ping pong champion.

Maybe it’s because I’m a Sens fan and I’ve seen so many high pedigree flameouts but it is very satisfying to me that Jason Spezza is out there delivering on what he was supposed to be when taken 2^nd overall on draft day. Ditto Erik Karlsson. Also very  satisfying is watching a 6^th round pick play over 1000 games your team (mostly serving  as captain) or a 7^th rounder put up 17 goals in his rookie season. Looking at the line up this way makes me feel great about the combination of quality and quantity the Sens currently enjoy in the coffers. The Mark Borowieckis and Mark Stones of the world have just as good a chance of becoming NHLers as the Cody Cecis and Mika Zibanejads. Well maybe not JUST as good, but pretty damn good! Hockey is weird like that.

Anyone else see any patterns emerging from the Da Vinci thing?

Oh, I realized just now I forgot Brian Lee…umm… *shooting star*