As we approach the start of the 2013-2014 season, I’ve been thinking about our current edition of the Ottawa Senators and fumbling toward making some kind of prediction. Looking up and down the lineup, you can get a pretty good sense of what to expect out of almost everyone. Some players are well-established in terms of the data available on their play, allowing you to modulate your predictions accordingly. The really young guys, like Mika Zibanejad, are still on their very affordable ELCs, so even if they have a bum season, and even if that bum season is the start of a trend, the risk to the club is mitigated somewhat by how little their inclusion in the lineup keeps someone else out of it financially. In other words, I can look up and down the lineup and still feel like Jason Spezza, if healthy, will contribute well relative to his salary. I can still feel like Chris Neil will take more penalties than he draws and just generally be an overpaid agitator. I feel like the young guys with a lot of variability in their game (or at least in our predictions of their game) but don’t cost too much–you can healthy scratch them, or send them to the minors if something drastic happens. Status quo, in other words. The Senators are a team getting all sorts of value up and down the lineup.

The big exception for me is Jared Cowen, who just earned a shiny new contract, and on whom the organization will be heavily relying to linchpin their second pairing. Part of the problem, and the big difference between Cowen and the other youngins, is that usually someone with such a small sample size either gets a bridge contract, or was so ridiculously good in that small sample size that their teams felt comfortable predicting more greatness. Cowen’s only played one full season in the NHL, and a combined eight games outside of that, not including playoffs. His numbers aren’t exactly pretty–not horrific, just not pretty–even in that tiny window. In his one full season Cowen played mostly on the third pairing, against weak competition, and received a large number of favorable zone starts. You could charitably say that he didn’t lose Ottawa any games–which isn’t as backhanded a compliment as it sounds (this is a tough league), but then, he was on his cheap ELC at the time. The risk-reward factor is always going to be high on a player making so little.

My main contention here isn’t that Jared Cowen is secretly terrible. It’s that there’s very little we can actually tell about him, or his future in the NHL, based on what we’ve seen so far, and that makes management’s decision to give him $12.4 million over four years an interesting one.

It‘s clear what the organization thinks of him: that four year, $3.1 million AAV is actually the conservative contract Cowen ended up with. Rumors were flying around in the off season that Cowen received an eight-year, $28 million offer. In both of these deals, we can glean that management assumes Cowen will be a top four defenseman for many years to come. Not spectacular, but someone in the Chris Phillips mold, who plays solid NHL hockey, provides up to 20 minutes a night, and around whom you can reliably plan your hockey team.

That’s a hell of an assumption. They’re betting, basically, that a player who’s experienced several major surgeries, missed all of last season, and has never really been leaned on quite so heavily, is ready to take a big, big step. It’s a calculated risk–the kind of thing you have to do in the NHL, no doubt, and especially the kind of thing that a poor team like Ottawa has to do to provide value down the line. But there’s little denying that Cowen is being paid in advance of proving he can fill the role the team needs him to.

It’s worth noting that the practice of giving your premier RFAs big deals up front isn’t exactly novel. Edmonton just gave Ryan Nugent-Hopkins $6 million a year, for example. The question, it seems to me, is whether you can include Cowen in the group of RFAs who have a ton of bargaining power, who might actually generate an offer sheet, and whose skill is so evident you have less of a problem assigning a lot of financial risk to them. He may very well be; I just don’t see how that assessment is being made.

Compare Cowen’s deal with, say, Cody Franson, who received a one year bridge, “prove it” contract from Toronto for $2 million. The Leafs may have to pay more for Franson in the future, but the point is that they’ll know more in the future. If your players turns out to be really great, I think you have to not mind paying him really great money. Paying someone what they’re worth seems less disastrous to me than paying someone less, and then they may not even be worth that. People are giving Montreal shit because they’ll have to give Subban the moon on his next contract, but I have to think that any GM in the league will take a Norris trophy winner on their team at market value. On the other hand, Ottawa has put themselves in a position where Cowen absolutely has to pan out as he’s projected to for that deal to provide value.

Ultimately, I think Ottawa’s deal with Cowen is a much larger risk than the sort of deals we usually jump up and down on management for. Sure, Alex Kovalev made $5 million a season, didn’t seem like he wanted to be here, and played poorly–but on a two year deal, and with a huge body of data with which to assess him, that’s a risk I can understand taking. The same can be said for signing Clarke MacArthur to a two year deal this past summer. There’s enough data there to justify it. If it doesn’t turn out, that doesn’t mean that the risk wasn’t justifiable at the time you took it. It means you misused them or had bad luck, or both. You can understand where the mistake came from by discounting your risk assessment.

With Cowen, you’re basically in a void. You look at his size and think, “I like big tough players.” You look at where he was drafted and think, “This guy has pedigree.” You watch video of him beating the shit out of Ryan White in the playoffs and think, “This guy has grit.” But there’s really nothing to point to that says that he’ll be a reliable second pairing shutdown guy for you for years and years to come. It’s a risk, especially for a team with an owner who is perpetually moaning about being over-budget and totally broke.

If I’m Cowen, I would have jumped at the stability of an eight year deal over the chance to make many more dollars at a theoretical future point in my career when I’m a dominant force in the NHL. If I’m Cowen I look at my own numbers, my injuries, and the apparent luster management perceives on my abilities, and I take the career deal for fear of that luster wearing off. Everyone, including Cowen, is assuming he’s going to be an upper-tier player in this league, if not a star. He may very well turn out to be, but if it does, let’s not pretend it was anything more than guesswork and luck. If there’s one thing we know, it’s that it can’t be the evidence. There isn’t any.

NHL preseason: the stuff of legendary performances by players who will soon be waived for cap space, quixotic line combinations involving guys who don’t even show up when you google them, and coverage so comprehensive it borders on claustrophobic. Want all 20 TSN analysts to tweet line combinations at you, and then analyze those combinations, and then do pre- and post- game coverage about something that is by its very definition meaningless? Lucky for you, we have two solid weeks of that!

You’ve also got trolling sportscasters telling fans of all teams that the way these guys are playing today means even the remotest thing about the season. Caveat: I’ve watched about fifteen minutes of preseason hockey total, mostly because I already think the regular season, let alone the preseason, is too long. But I check in. I read about Spezza’s twitchy groin, and how a defence that includes Michael Sdao barely held up against the Icelandic team from D2. I’m human. And I worry.

So, with that set-up, let me ask you: are you concerned at all about this?

Small sample size, weird defense, they played the Islanders in two separate games simultaneously, yadda yadda. I get it. It doesn’t mean anything. But on the surface of things? Holy hell have these two guys looked brutal.

Someone smarter than me should do an analysis of how accurate preseason is as an indicator of how players will perform when the season starts. We can all remember the big exceptions, like Brandon Bochenski lighting it up and then disappearing immediately. But what’s the norm, obscured from the naked eye by its perpetuity? What does the data say? It strikes me as odd to discount on the basis of the exception. It’s like looking at Alexandre Daigle and concluding that first overall picks are worthless.

All I’m really prepared for is conjecture at a glance. Looking at the Time On Ice leaders for goalies in the preseason, you do see a few things that are totally expected.

Cam Ward: plays a ton of minutes, totally stinks. Verifiable starters like Carey Price and Kari Lehtonen putting up league average numbers. Jonathan Quick and Tuukka Rask being absolutely dominant.

Go down the list and it plays out pretty much as expected. In other words, everyone who you would expect to suck pretty much sucks, and everyone you’d expect to play well is playing well. Craig Anderson and Robin Lehner may be outliers here. We better hope they are.

Because this is a team who allowed a lot of shots against last year, and will now have a second pairing of Jared Cowen and Patrick Wiercioch. Without at least league average goaltending, you could see this team struggle out of the gate, and even with the benefit of a full season ahead of them, we know how hard it is to play catch-up in this league.

Having said all of that: play ball already.

I have one rule about EA’s NHL series of video games: do not buy it every year. I used to do that, way back in the early naughts, but the changes were so incremental—”now with broken sticks!”—that I found the action of buying the new game akin to saying “I haven’t bought myself anything nice in a while.” So my rule is Only Every Other Year… At Most. And it’s that year! So, each WTYKY writer is going to review a different component of the game.

With me being the guy on the blog who writes about profitability and uses too many words to say something sort of simple and dumb, I’m going to review my favorite game mode: Be a GM. James, being a lot more fun than me in every conceivable way, will review the 20^th anniversary re-release of NHL 94, and Steve will do the Be a Pro mode, now called Live the Life.

My usual approach to Be a GM is to substitute some non-NHL team for the Phoenix Coyotes and do a ground-up rebuild. This year I’m playing as Dusseldorf EG, whose uniforms (in yellow) are something else. (Aside: Corey Locke!) We won 9 games in our first season, traded the first overall pick for Nail Yakupov, signed $50 million in free agents the next year, and made the playoffs in year two. Authentic!

Sports games allow the gamer the unique opportunity to see gradually improved iterations every year. Imagine the Uncharted games coming out every few years. Now imagine if they released the Beta version of each Uncharted and just fixed as they went along. That’s the NHL series in a nutshell.

My gripe is that upgrades simply don’t happen fast enough, and this is especially true of Be a Gm mode. Be a GM is essentially a series of menus—you can play the games themselves, but it seems beside the point if you’re building a team on a five year plan—and what you’d think would be easy fixes, or subtle tweaks in simulation algorithms, often go unfixed or unrefined.

For example, in the last few editions I’ve noticed that computer-controlled GMs would draft prospects but then, for no reason at all, they wouldn’t sign them. You could go to the free agent market every year, sort the menu to see the players with the highest potential, and find all of that year’s draftees just sitting there without deals. You could then sign the first overall draft pick to an ELC, without offering any compensation to anyone. Knowing that, I’d trade all of my draft picks for veteran NHLers, ransack the free agent market for unsigned prospects, and build a dynasty instantly. My point is that it’s fun to discover these loopholes, but once you do, the game is basically over.

I’m happy to say that in some regards, like the example I’ve given, there have been fixes. In others, quirks and gaps that make the simulation unbelievable persist.

Weird UI

Number one among those persistent issues is that the buttons across menus don’t map in a consistent way. The “accept” button on one screen might be the “back” button on another. This leads, occasionally, to rejecting a deal you would have liked to have accepted, or vice-versa. Elsewhere, EA tries to incorporate a cell phone quick menu into every screen, so by simply pushing a button you’ll bring up your GM’s phone and, using it as a sort of master menu, can jump from one sub-menu into a whole other menu tree. It’s sort of like a ‘home’ button. This mostly works, except when they abandon it altogether and the button you usually use to bring up your phone becomes the button you use to change the display between the NHL and AHL, or counter-offer a trade, or zoom in on a player’s details.

What you’re getting with this kind of inconsistency is an amalgam of changes over several years, without anyone doing a ground-up redesign of the Be a GM user interface. You have to wonder why EA would pour resources into completely redesigning their physics engine or fighting, and not dedicate a small fraction of those resources to doing a usability test on menus. I suspect it’s because I’m the only one playing it, and that’s fair.

Likewise, across game menus there’s a general lack of explanation contrasted with unused screen space. Go to the home menu screen: in a small column on the left are a few unexplained options. You have no idea what half of them are without clicking on them and mucking around for a bit until you find out. The other 80% of the screen is taken up with a picture of a television, which is playing a loop of things that are too small to see.

It’s totally bizarre that a franchise that has been around for 20 years would have such terrible, unintuitive design principles. You basically have to start a game mode and play around with it for a few minutes before you even figure out what the object of that game mode is. Every year they’ll put a new sheen on it, but at no point do they seem to put themselves in the shoes of a casual gamer.

Likewise, the value of a player is expressed in several interesting, though unhelpful ways. Each player has a five star potential system, but it’s not clear whether the stars designate where the player will be when they reach their potential, or how much potential they have left. To make matters worse, the stars are color coded. Because games don’t come with manuals anymore, you don’t know what any of this means unless you get a little interstitial loading screen that happens to randomly explain…and even then, you only have about four seconds to read this explanation before the loading is done.

It’s all surreal. In a game mode that is basically about reading information, that you can’t understand the information you’re given or navigate menus effortlessly is a major hurdle to enjoyment of the game.

Weird messaging

One of the game’s other big quirks is that the messaging you receive from other GMs and owners doesn’t ever quite correspond to your actions. You can sign the biggest UFA in the pool, trade for a star, buy-out a player, and move up in the draft, only to have your owner say “Your actions (or lack thereof) surprised me…you better know what you’re doing.” Or your owner can tell you he expects you to get 36 wins in a season, good for 72 points, and then tell you he expects you to make the playoffs, which doesn’t really seem possible with that number of wins. And—my personal favorite—a rival GM can offer you a deal, which you accidentally reject because of the inconsistent button overlay, and when you propose the exact same deal back to him he might say “My fans would drive me out of town if I accepted this! Are you crazy?” It’s bizarre, and it also makes the whole make-believe aspect of a simulation impossible to sustain.

…but it has gotten much, much better than it used to be. GMs provide more nuanced information about what they want. The trading block feature is much more detailed, allowing you to construct packages of players that will actually go through as opposed to constantly guessing what your trading partner needs. You can retain salary cap hits when you trade a player, or ask a trading partner to retain cap hits. When they reject a deal, they say why, say what they like about your offer, and tell you to try again. It’s all much more informative than in previous years, when to pull off a deal you basically had to throw everything and the kitchen sink at a GM, and even then, they probably didn’t have the cap space to accept it.

No Coach, No System

What I find the absolute weirdest about this hockey simulator is the lack of a coach in the whole mix. At no point can you choose what kind of coach you want to hire, and build a team around that. It doesn’t have to be complex—pick a defensive specialist, complement him with defensive players, and the team gets a performance boost. Fire your underperforming coach and see if the team performs differently. Hire an established guy and see it hurt your bottom line in the short term. Go cheaper and take a risk your team underperforms.

With a coach, you can also make the ‘assistant coach’ metric mean something. Right now it’s something you build up with experience points, RPG style, and he feeds you information which, to be honest with you, I’ve never felt I needed to read in the first place. (It’s also surreal to have an assistant coach who answers to you, and no coach…) In any case, it’s a big omission in what claims to be a realistic hockey simulator.

Which brings me to…

Auto line changes and the idiot assistant coach

This problem seems to date back to time immemorial. Let’s say you have a bona fide top line center, rated at 87. Your second line center is an 82. Your third line center is an 80, and your fourth is a 75. Your top line center is hurt early on in a sequence where you’re simming a batch of about ten games. What does your assistant coach do? Well, without the simulation stopping, and without you knowing that he’s hurt, your assistant coach subs in a scratched prospect, rated at about 61, to be your new top line center. From where you’re watching, the team’s sudden tailspin, losing ten in a row, is inexplicable. You check the stats when the sim is done; who is that guy? He’s a -15 with no points in ten games, and played about 25 minutes a night. And, with that, your season is shot. (Go with your gut, assistant coach!)

This gets at the crux of the game’s weirdness. While some aspects will be unbelievably intuitive, something as elementary as line changes that will pair complementary players with one another are clunky, happening without your control, and turn the entire season around on a dime. Some events, like your scout needing a new assignment, will interrupt a sim, which means you have to start a new sim from the point of interruption (very annoying if you’re trying to sim a batch of 40 games and the longest scout assignment is six weeks). Other events, like a star player being injured, you won’t even be notified of.

Injury frequency

There are actually very few things you can do to improve your club outside of free agency. You can improve your amateur scouting, and you can improve your pro scouting, but neither of these make huge differences in the game because even with all of the available information, a prospect is still years away from contributing. You can improve the information you get from your assistant coach, which you won’t read. And finally, you can try to reduce injuries, which would be HUGE—but doesn’t seem to work.

I remember in previous iterations of the game you weren’t just able to turn injuries on and off—you could also set the frequency of their occurrence. That was great, because injuries in NHL 14 are rampant. At one point in a recent season, every single one of my top six forwards and my starting goalie was out for at least three months, even though I’d spent all of my experience points making sure my injury prevention and rehab was maxed out. It didn’t make any sense. The game doesn’t have long term injury reserve cap relief either, and you can’t trade injured players, which means there’s nothing you can do except stink. Which we did. Dusseldorf EG had a tough season.

Dependency on free agency

Because of the fact that you’re not rewarded for getting value out of your lineup—finding deals, producing a contender on a budget, etc.—you can spend whatever you need to spend to win, and you won’t go anywhere unless you do. So, when you think about it, the game comes down to signing the top 2-3 free agents every year, and simming the season to see what happens. If you don’t, the cap just keeps escalating, and you won’t be able to keep up with the joneses.

This removes the whole aspect of having a Be a GM mode that would make it not only rewarding for those who try to put ourselves in the shoes of both the GM with the infinite budget, and the GM who can barely afford the salary floor…it also removes the aspect of the game that might teach a gamer a little bit about how the league works. Why not give teams an internal budget, and make sure the owner’s expectations correlate? That way, the player has to decide—just like real players and GMs have to decide—whether they want to go to the city with the huge budget and all the expectations of a shorter timeline, or to go to the tiny backwater and try to do something special. Between this and the coaching omission, Be a GM mode seems pretty outdated.

Chaos theory

What the NHL games ultimately get right—even if they’re not trying to get it right, and it’s all coincidence—is their ability to simulate the utter chaos and unpredictability of this league. If I were simming a few seasons and saw Montreal finish third last one season and then win the east the next, I’d probably think there was a problem with the algorithms. But that’s hockey for you. And ultimately that’s EA’s Be a GM mode. It’s still addictive as hell, even if I would much rather play a no-frills, all-text simulator that truly puts you in the tough spots GMs face every day.

In conclusion, Be a GM Mode is a deeply stupid simulator. It’s fun, accessible, and very cartoony–just like everything else EA produces. But a cursory look around on the internet will reveal a whole host of much more thoughtful, deep, and comprehensive simulators available to you.

Ice picks…get it? I know…the Florida Panthers aren’t the only ones who are going to have a rough year, Dear Reader.

The WTYKY Season Preview

The hockey season is about two weeks away, which means that barring a last-minute Ron Hainsey signing, most teams have set their lineups and will be about as good in two weeks as they are now. That means we can safely embark on the soon-to-be-embarrassing exercise of season predictions.

I’ll be honest with you—these new divisions make it pretty much impossible for me to wrap my head around who is a playoff team and who isn’t, so we’re going to just do a reverse-overall-standings split into three groups of ten, while pausing along the way to offer insightful or possibly erroneous commentary. First comes Varada’s take then comes James’ then comes Tim Murray in a baby carriage (amazing to picture). Enjoy.

VARADA’S PIXXX:

The Bottom Ten

30. Calgary
29. Florida
28. Buffalo
27. Winnipeg
26. Colorado
25. Tampa Bay
24. Columbus
23. Toronto
22. Carolina
21. Phoenix

I want to say right up front that parity has made a bottom ten finish not as bad a thing as it once was. There’s almost as much distance between tenth last and dead last as there is between tenth last and a playoff spot. So picking somebody to finish, say, fifth last is not really such an awful thing as it appears. (Case in point: Ottawa finishes fifth last a couple of seasons ago, makes the playoffs the next year. Everyone acts surprised, but look at the standings: Ottawa simply wasn’t as bad as finishing fifth last might imply.)

Having said that, Calgary is pretty clearly heading for a long and awful season. Their first line center is Matt Stajan. Their goaltender is Karri Ramo. Their top defenseman is a massively overpaid Dennis Wideman. They’re in a tough division where everyone has gotten better or at least stayed about the same. I don’t think I’m out on a limb here. They’re going to be awful. I hope Mike Cammalleri gets traded soon–he’s too fun a player to languish there. Fun fact: Mike Cammalleri makes $7 million this season!

Putting Toronto in the bottom ten, and below Carolina, is going to simply be discounted as me being a Sens fan, though there’s plenty of analysis out there on just how lucky the Leafs were last season. While I don’t think they’ve gotten much worse, they haven’t gotten much better either despite the additions of David Clarkson and Jonathan Bernier. I think the Clarkson deal is over-maligned; he’s a good player, or least he will be this season. It seems to me that pessimism over the final years of his seven year deal is leaking into feelings about next season. But they also lost two very useful players in Grabovski and MacArthur, and their defense is still questionable. Combine that with the luck factor and they’ll come back to earth hard. And that’s assuming they can actually get Kadri and Franson under contract, the likelihood of which is a total mystery to me.

Winnipeg moves to possibly the most difficult division in the league, and Columbus can’t survive on Vezina-level goaltending again. Maybe this is the year Steve Yzerman gets fired by Tampa. He runs that team the way I play Be a GM mode on Xbox. Which is to say, poorly.

The Middle Ten

20. Anaheim
19. New Jersey
18. Dallas
17. Nashville
16. Edmonton
15. New York Islanders
14. Washington
13. Minnesota
12. Ottawa
11. Montreal

I was as excited as any Ottawa fan to see Vollman of Hockey Abstract pick the Sens to win the Presidents Trophy, and I hope his mathematically-computed prediction holds true—but part of me refuses to tempt the hockey gods by going along with it. I’m too skeptical. Is Karlsson 100%? Will Anderson come back to earth? How is Spezza’s back? We haven’t seen a version of this team without Alfredsson in almost two full decades—how will they adjust to their best two-way forward leaving town? They’ll be good, and I think they’ll make the playoffs, but I don’t think they’re appreciably better than the 7^th place team they were last year. They’ll get 10-15 more goals out of Bobby Ryan than they might have expected out of Jakub Silfverberg. That’s not enough of a difference to me to turn them into elite contenders.

I was tempted to pick Montreal much lower, but ultimately a team that finishes bottom three one season and then wins their conference the next season is too much of an unknown to do anything more than stick them in the middle of the league with a big question mark next to their name.

I’m also showing huge improvement for Nashville (though still no playoffs), and that’s not (only) Seth Jones. I just think they’re a good team that underachieved last year.

Other than that, this is the great mediocre middle ground that is your 2013 NHL. Everybody gets a participation badge! Any of these teams could find themselves within a half-dozen points above or below the cut-off line for the post-season. I think Edmonton, Nashville and Dallas just miss. As for Washington, most are predicting that they’re in trouble now that they don’t have the easy Southeast to rely on. Personally, I think they get their act together as a result.

The Top Ten

10. Philadelphia
9. Detroit
8. San Jose
7. New York Rangers
6. Boston
5. Pittsburg
4. Vancouver
3. Chicago
2. St. Louis
1. Los Angeles

I’m more bullish on Philadelphia than perhaps I should be, especially since I’ve also got the Rangers and Pens from the same division in the top ten, but they’re a deep team. The Streit pick-up, though an overpayment, will serve them well. Goaltending is a massive question mark, as always. Anyway, I have Philly anywhere from top ten to bottom ten, but I just can’t see them stinking as badly as they did last year with Lecavalier up the middle and another year for all of their young players. At some point Brayden Schenn is going to turn into a beast. Anyway, I don’t like them so much as I like all the teams in the middle less.

Picking St. Louis to finish higher than Chicago is also ballsy. I just think they’re ridiculously deep at every position, and if Halak is back to 100% health they’ll have their formidable goaltending tandem back as well.

Obviously picking somebody other than the team who set a record for most consecutive wins this year, and then went on to win the Cup, is pretty stupid. What can I say—it’s hockey, and I’m trying to pay lip service to the chaos underlying this game we love. Chicago will play mediocre hockey out of the gate, look tired, be only slightly above .500 approaching the holiday season, and then turn it on and be near the top of the league by the end of the season. And they may very well repeat and win another Cup. But it won’t be enough to catch Los Angeles in the regular season standings.

As for LA, they didn’t make many changes aside from allowing Rob Scuderi to walk, but they didn’t need to make many changes. They have best-in-class players at every position. I was blown away by how well they played last season, making it to the conference finals a season after winning the cup. They’ll eat up Anaheim, Calgary, Edmonton and Phoenix in their new division. Everyone is in their prime, and they have at least another few seasons of scary good hockey in them. They’re my pick for best team in the league.

X Factors

Other than injuries, the new divisional format could be as awkward as a junior high dance. Lots of teams who aren’t used to one another having to play regularly, and seeing every team in your barn at least once also changes the dynamic. Finally, the Olympics will throw a huge wrench in the middle of everything, as it usually does. I’m not picking the Rangers to finish 7^thoverall if Henrik Lundqvist tears his adductor muscle in his first game for Team Sweden.

Thanks and now shut down your browser…I mean time for JAMES’ PIXXX:

Well, here we are. This is where I pretend to have my finger on the pulse of the league! *Wipes nervous sweat from brow and types “What happened in the Western Conference last year?” into Wikipedia* Thanks for reading! The best part about predicting hockey is that I feel that completely BSing your picks has about as much credibility as a so called hockey expert’s picks. THANKS ONCE AGAIN FOR READING! Seriously, some magazine / website / webazine picked Ottawa to win the President’s trophy so… *rests case*

The Bottom Ten

30. Florida – This team is the man and the boy in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. The rest of the league is the Cannibal horde that roams the ashen wasteland that was once Earth. The Panthers are so bad that they bought out Filip Kuba and THAT WAS SOMEHOW A BAD MOVE. These clowns have it all: Leafs runoff like Kris Versteeg and Joey Crabb, iffy at absolute best reclamation projects: Scott Gomez, Jesse Winchester, and oh speaking of whom lots of Sens runoff dudes who couldn’t even hang on a rebuilding team: Bobby Butler, Matt Gilroy. You’ve got your star-ish players who I had no idea were on the team: Tomas Fleishmann, Ed Jovanovski. Last but certainly not least they suffer the annual emancipation of their quality players. This year’s model: Stephen Weiss….I think the only hope this team has is if Jakob Markstrom channels his inner Sergei Bobrovski and bails the big cats out for wins but out of embarrassing blowout losses as well….all season. I saw Florida play in person once last season and to think this team might actually be weaker now is just…wow. Keep carrying the fire Jonathan Huberdeau…one day ye shall be released.

29. Calgary – What can be said that Varada didn’t already say.  I will add the very real possibility of a complete desperation move (due to Matt Stajan being their no. 1 centre) of rushing 18 year old first round pick Sean Monahan into the NHL. You know, just to add that extra clusterfuckocity. I’ve seen way crazier shit happen. So beginneth the first Iggy-less Flames season since 1996 (!) but also of very noteworthy import, Mika Kiprusoff has unofficially retired according to some reports…so…

28. Buffalo – I am not joking I forget this team even exists sometimes.

27. Dallas – Ladies and Gentlemen put your hands together for Buffalooooo Weeeest!!!

26. Winnipeg – The Jets have been hard at work all summer signing players I have never heard of to deals. Congrats Brenden Kichton (?) on his 3 year 1.86 million dollar contract! …is that even a million dollars after taxes? Anyway, enjoy those Western roadies boys.

25. Colorado – I almost don’t know why this team is so bad but they did little to improve. Maybe if the players try to go through the wall for Patrick Roy in his first season behind the bench it could go better. A healthier Landeskog can’t hurt things. A slight jump in standings after an absolutely dismal season.

24. Columbus – ? Uhhh…Ottawa trades Jim O’Brien and future considerations for Jonathan Audy-Marchessault and a conditional pick at some point?

23. Edmonton – Hmmm, the Be a GM Mode of my game keeps saying “Insert NHL defensemen to start game” but I haven’t even touched their roster yet. *blows on cartridge*

22. Tampa Bay – Now I really don’t know what makes this team so terrible either but I have to admit that I love that they are. Nothing like a team you don’t like struggling despite getting the league’s premier goal scorer with the number 1 pick, a bruising 6 foot 6 defenseman with the no. 2 overall and has a player so good he can win the Art Ross at age 38. Sure these guys could still turn out to be the sleeping giants that they are considered year after year or, you know, not. I’m going to say probably not.  Speaking of giants, is Ben Bishop their no. 1 goalie in his sophomore season? Damn! He’s a really good goalie, but uh…no pressure buddy. 45 career games and off ya go! Agree with Varada that I think Steve Yzerman, despite BEING A GOOD NEPEAN BOY and former Raider, might be the most over hyped GM in the league. Whoa he picked Canada’s Olympic team! Wow, definitely not a job most people who play fantasy hockey couldn’t do. How much was that team worth in Cap space I wonder?

21. Washington – This is a team I am just salivating at the chance to watch get dummied. I used to really like watching the Caps but I don’t know, after years of shitting the bus (that’s right) I have grown to love rooting against them. Maybe it’s the years of undeserved entitlement to high seeding at playoff time? I still love Alex Ovechkin. It’s hard to dislike a guy who’s considered Crosby’s rival but was there a less deserved Hart trophy won than his this year? He wasn’t even great for an entire shortened season. It was much representative of the Caps playoff birth. They pulled it together enough halfway through the to make yet another (and their final) HILARIOUS 3^rd in the conference finish. As is customary they made a pretty quick exit. It’s just crazy to think Mike Ribiero of all people carried the Caps and then for them to lose him in the off season? Great stuff. Grabovsky was a good pick up but quality forwards have never been Washington’s weak link. There’s been talk the last few seasons of the Caps’ window closing.  With the long overdue dissolution of the South Easy Division prepare to see the beginning of the end of the Capitals as a threat.

The Middle Ten

20. New Jersey – An admitted crapshoot guess. This team annually manages to do pretty well despite my doubts. Even though he is no one’s favorite player the loss of Ilya Kovalchuk hurts everything but the Devils’ pocketbook. Ditto Clarkson. Even at his 73 years young, Brodeur and new partner Cory Scheider serve as a pretty solid tandem on paper. Worth mentioning that Jaromir Jagr is their second highest scorer at the time of this post. A 41 year old top offensive threat and a 41 year old starting goalie: Pray to the groin gods Devils fans.

19. Philadelphia – I am howww you say, not so bullish (inbullish?) on this team. Giroux enters the season fresh off an injury which I think could hurt them out of the gate. Call me “not a Montreal fan” but I do not believe the acquisition of Lecavalier makes your team significantly better. Another weird contract that will come back to haunt them. There’re a lot of bright spots on this team though. I mean, really, it’s perplexing why they struggled so much last season but some times good teams turn sour. Ray Emery I think will be the difference maker for the Flyers but if he goes down or struggles things quickly get very weak in net. Especially concerning when you consider Rayzor wont be playing behind Chicago’s D corps anymore. Could go either way but I’m calling another rough year in the City of Motherly Love.

18. Carolina – *yawns and types “Is there anything interesting one can say about Carolina’s Hurricanes? into Askjeeves.com* Is Eric Staal hurt still? Is Jeff Skinner? That could be bad.

17. Phoenix sorry my bad ARIZONA apologies all around. – Saturday December 21^st, 2013, in the second period of a game Mike Ribiero suddenly realizes he is no longer passing to Alex Ovechkin. He nearly thinks “I’ve made a terrible mistake.” After the game he looks up on his smartphone where the Caps sit in the now non-cushioned standings and buys a season’s pass to Phoenix’s Wet N’ Wild Waterpark (which he can use year round). Sens fans remain obsessed with David Rundblad’s development while Kyle Turris continues to score heroic playoff OT winners for the Sens.

16. Nashville – Me: Siri, help me cheat and find me something informative and witty to say about Nashville Predators.
Siri: “I cannot find anything to help you cheat on Natasha Prendehurst.”

15. Toronto – The additions of Clarkson and Bernier are good. The losses of Grabovsky and MacArthur *tents fingers* for absolutely nothing are for sure bad. Phil Kessel is very chubby for a guy who can skate like the wind, Dion Phaneuf make learn good off season do things. The media is already pitting Reimer against Bernier and I am making a giant bowl of popcorn. I think they make the playoffs again but it’s more of a struggle to get there this time/ to do anything. Something-something offer sheet Nazim Kadri already!

14 Montreal – Maybe I’m definitely biased by the banged up squad that Ottawa literally beat down in the playoffs but I do not much believe in this team. If Price falters (which we’ve seen) the Habs don’t have much in the way of a backup in Budaj (which we’ve also seen). There are a lot of quality up and comers for Montreal as we witnessed in the sound out play of Brendan Gallagher, Alex “Im actually American” Galchenyuk and PK Subban. The addition of pain in the ass Dany Brier helps and George Parros will…add…much needed Movember leadership?…I see a down season for the Canadians in a very competitive and physical division but not a disastrous one. They still make the playoffs but will again be in rough shape by the time they get there.

13. Minnesota – Here’s a team that spends eleventy squillion dollars in salary and didn’t even finish ahead of the Binghamton Senators in the league standings last year. Can you imagine the motivation level of a Dany Heatley that knows he’s about to be bought out? He’s going to be ordering Little Caesar’s Hot and Readys to the bench. Yikes. Oh, also, Matt Cooke is a top 5 point getter on this team right now. Seems like these guys will continue to get their heads kicked in by the Chicago Blackhawks.

12. Ottawa – Okay, here we go. Here’s what I have to say about the team that’s hardest to separate from emotionally, enjoy! This year will be another positive one for Ottawa but with a twist: It will be more balanced than we’ve become accustomed to. Not all players will have perfectly healthy seasons and enjoy career years in points nor will they take up an entire floor of the Ottawa General Hospital. Goaltending will be good but human, goals will be more consistent, some players will struggle, coaching will remain great and the Sens will finish in a decent spot. Predictions: Bobby Ryan will work out fine (if your expectation is around 30 goals) as will Karlsson in his return (if your expectation is around 60 points). Milan Michalek will be injured during the Olympics and Pageau will actually live up to the hype and stick with the squad. Another playoff year and I cant wait!

11. New York Islanders – I suppose I’m going to have be fun and pick at last one surprise team so here it is. Since no one is reading at this point anyway, I’m going with the Highliners to make a solid jump after a 27 year rebuild. Their playoff round against the Pens showed that this is a young team with serious wheels and a lot of skill that is slowly coming together. Rick DiPietro’s banishment helps general vibe of their new building. As a Sens fan, I know teams have surprised with less. If they can get some goaltending and conduct the proper cleansing ceremonies they could catch the East off guard.

The Top Ten

10. Vancouver – This team reminds me way too much of the post-cup final Senators. Disciplinarian coach comes in, players unhappy in their roles mixed with heavy media scrutiny. A top 10 finish is admittedly a good problem but with Vineault’s exit and the hasty and bizzare dealing of Cory Schneider I see as this as the start of many hasty and poor decisions. After failing to deliver on consecutive President’s Trophy wins and a string of divison titles I can this resulting in nothing but a tidal wave of pressure from fans and Van city’s notorious media alike. Remember when anything short of capturing a cup was a failure in Ottawa? These guys are deep in that but now featuring an openly unhappy goaltender who’s becoming known for cracking under pressure with no viable backup in place OH! and a complete asshole of a new coach who has no problem throwing his players to the wolves if things go south. You thought Don Cherry was hard on the Sedins? Just wait. I still see them doing pretty well by the merit of their roster but the microscope is really going to be on this squad.

9. San Jose – No fucking idea. Thanks for reading!

8. New York Rangers – Solid regular season, non-surprising playoff exit at hands of lower seed. AKA business as usual. Nickname Idea: The Metropolitan Bed Soilers.

7. Anaheim – No fucking idea 2: I watch YouTube videos of Bobby Ryan about 4 times per week so that’s where I’m at.

6. Detroit – Yeah I know. It’s just a prediction made by an idiot and it still hurts to look at. A good finish…a great one even. Look, they’re a really good team that I think will benefit greatly from their move to the East. Silver lining: Uhh…they’re slowly getting pretty old I guess?

5. St. Louis – If Ken Hitchcock can turn Brian Elliot into an all star goalie all bets are off.

4. Boston – Man, I miss when Boston sucked. I’ve heard chatter that the Bruins are on the decline but I just don’t see it. I hope Ottawa can win a few more against them this year than they have been because hot damn are they a boring team to watch win 1-0 over and over. Remember how last season MacLean was like, “I don’t know, Lehner beat them once…start him every game I guess?” Celebrate the moments of our lives.

3. Pittsburgh – This friggin’ team. Ugh. Marc Andre Fleury has been seeing a sports psychologist which is on some amazing Martin Gerber type shit. Knowing Ray Shero if things go wrong he’ll just somehow manage to trade for Jonathan Quick and Henrik Lundqvist by giving up Deryk Engelland and a 9th round pick because I hate this team so much.

2. Los Angeles – I don’t know much about the Kings (What? Sorry for not watching a bunch of Kings games) but they seem really well built and didn’t change much.

1. Chicago – After their 2013 performance it’s really hard for me to bet against these guys. You know your lineup is scary good when the biggest obstacle facing them is fatigue from having TOO MANY OLYMPIANS on the team.

X Factor: 
The NHL.

Lost amid the hubbub of hacked posts by “random useless bloggers,” acrimonious casino negotiations with the city, and the ongoing and totally unnecessary row over Alfredsson’s departure is the fact that ten years ago Saturday, Eugene Melnyk took over the Ottawa Senators.

It’s just as well that what might have been an occasion for celebration was quietly observed by a few and ignored by most. In the last decade, Melnyk has managed to significantly damage his standing among some hockey fans–or, at the very least, to damage his public image. In his frequent radio and newspaper interviews, he’s prone to utter one after another sensationalist quote, often contradicting himself in a way that seems totally disconnected from how the world sees him and his small market franchise. The interviews are mostly harmless–even entertaining. But if the first nine years of the Melnyk regime were marked by his gradual descent from saviour billionaire to buffoonish personality, then the last year has marked a further fall towards the caricature of a comic book villain, more in line with a Daryl Katz or Jeremy Jacobs.

It’s not just that he’s taken his penchant for bullish overstatement from the realm of sports talk to city council, where he’s thrown his weight around in an attempt to slide the council’s deliberations in his favor. It’s that he, like so many NHL owners, is more than happy to play with the heartstrings of hockey fans to get what he wants. In that he’s not at all unique; he’s not even as bad as some. I’m accustomed to his annual interviews about the possibilities of relocation without strong fan support, conveniently on the eve of season ticket sales. I’m left to conclude that what Ottawa has in Eugene Melnyk is the sort of ego required to amass a $1.5 billion pharmaceutical fortune in the first place.

Melnyk is just another obscenely rich person among many. Give me that kind of money and then tell me I can’t get my way, and I’ll probably seem a bit tone deaf too. But what we’ve observed over these months may be symptomatic of the NHL’s tendency to rely on these billionaire saviours in the first place–these men riding high on whatever entrepreneurial success they may currently be experiencing–over much safer options.

For every Ed Snider and Mike Illitch, there’s a “Boots” Del Biaggio, or Oren Koules and Len Barrie. For every stable fortune, there’s a fortune balancing precariously on a bubble. And so goes the future of each franchise–all of their eggs in one basket, praying the real estate market doesn’t collapse, or the tech surge fade. In some cases, this arrangement ensures years of futility and wasted potential, such as with the Islanders, who are one of the league’s most storied franchises and whose fate is tied perpetually to owner Charles Wang like a drowning man to an anchor.

Perhaps it’s naive of me to suggest, but should the NHL not be doing more to matchmake between diverse groups of investors, those who might not be able to afford a franchise on their own, but who might band together to cover or refinance the weaker links in their network in the event of failure?

I’ve written pretty extensively about how inaccurate I feel the reports are of hockey’s supposed inviability as a product. To reiterate: I think operational “losses” should be thought of as operational costs in light of the underlying value of the investment going up; I think there are multiple, non-hockey related revenues that are only possible because of team ownership, and that these revenues can go unreported; and I think cash flow problems are unrelated to Ottawa as a market so much as liquidity problems in the economy as a whole and Melnyk’s finances in particular. But because we rely on men with big personalities and complex financial problems and aspirations, fans are left to wait for the problems of individuals to be resolved rather than the responsible machinations of investment networks with plenty of checks and balances. It’s no wonder we have so many lockouts.

(And here’s a sobering thought: if the life of the Canadian Tire Center is 30 years, and we’re at about 20, that means opening up negotiations with the city on a new arena in the next few years.)

After all this, I’m left to think about what 10 years of Eugene Melnyk means for Ottawa Senators fans. When he bought the team (and the arena, for a paltry $120 million. The franchise is now worth closer to $300 million), he was effectively saving it from bankruptcy. In a city that has (repeatedly) lost its CFL franchise due to shady ownership, Melnyk signified a new era of credibility. Here was a self-made man ready and willing to buy into our little market, not because franchise ownership was something that self-important billionaires did, but because he believed it was a solid investment. Melnyk has invested in the city of Ottawa, both through charitable deeds and his efforts to rally the charity of others.

At least…that was the image. Ten years later, with all of those deeds thrown back in the city’s face as an increasingly desperate-seeming Melnyk pushes for concessions from city hall, I’m not so sure that narrative is believable anymore. And the next 10 years, if they too belong to Melnyk, could be a lot less rosy than the first.

How can Melnyk fix his image with the public? Staying out of the media would be a good start. He might harbor ridiculous beliefs, like the Senators being the second largest employer in Ottawa, and he’s more than welcome to those beliefs so long as he keeps them to himself. Secondly, Melnyk can embark on a transparent, open dialogue with both city hall and the constituents it represents, rather than throwing barbs around in the papers about the city seeming like a third world country. Thirdly, if he just can’t resist answering Don Brennan and Bruce Garrioch’s emails, he can at least be honest about the money–are we only spending about $50 million on player salaries because that’s the smart thing to do, or because times are tight? Why is the Senators’ debt ratio one of the highest in the league?

Finally: when in doubt, be gracious. Nobody ever faults a person for being polite and professional, even when they’re hiding something. When Alfie leaves town, take out a full-page ad in the Citizen thanking him and every time somebody asks about the circumstances of his departure, simply wish him luck. When someone wants to talk finances, thank the fans for making all of this possible. Maybe don’t hack people’s blogs, if that’s a thing you’re considering doing.

More and more, the sports franchise is becoming a public institution. Quite literally so, now that new arenas are being built with public money. And if that’s the case, it means winning the hearts and minds of us little people, us “random useless bloggers” who also happen to give free publicity and pour thousands of words out about the team we love. Melnyk needs to scrub up, pay a PR person, and win back some of the good faith he started out with ten years ago.

(Watch a video of Melnyk’s first presser as Sens owner here.)