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Mailbag: How should the NHL change its schedule?
A little more Bruins-Habs around the holidays wouldn't hurt anyone. (Ryan Remiorz/CP)
The Christmas break is finally over and it's time to get back to hockey.
Pretty much everyone is looking forward to what's ahead, because that's what you do around New Year's, right? Teams right now are more or less what we think they are, so the next half of the season that lies ahead will be instructive but also not as exciting as it'll be made out to be.
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Nonetheless, people have questions and I want to answer them because of my pleasant disposition.
So here we go:
Erik asks: "If you had the power to enact it, what would be the one change to NHL scheduling beginning next season? Why?"
There are a lot of beefs I have here (10 games starting within an hour of each other every Saturday, random nights where there are no games at all, etc.) but the thing I absolutely hate the most is the deference to other sports on or around major holidays. Three days off around on Christmas is just dumb.
Like, yes, football owns Thanksgiving and I was of course glued to my television for like 10 hours watching basketball on Christmas but the NHL has to understand that people wanna watch hockey when they have the day off. The Winter Classic being on New Year's Day is in itself a comparatively audacious decision to go up against bowl games, but it's not enough.
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Like, why on earth is the NHL not doing what the NBA does on Christmas for Black Friday? There was the NHL Thanksgiving Showdown between two garbage teams in Flyers/Rangers and almost every team in the league played. That's not bad, but it could be better.
What if, instead of just randomly assigning teams to each other, NBC cleared the decks and used the off day on Thanksgiving to line up a handful of elite matchups or classic rivalries like the NBA does with ESPN and ABC? Caps/Penguins, Knights/Sharks, Leafs/Bolts, Jets/Predators, Bruins/Canadiens. Pretty easy! Maybe people might, I don't know, be excited to watch that.
Michael asks: "Are we just waiting to see how far Tampa goes in the playoffs at this point? Is there any degree of certainty we can place on their postseason run?"
Yeah pretty much. They're the best team in the league and everyone knows that and that's fine. They're just gonna try to lock up No. 1 in the East, keep everyone healthy and in good form, and see what the bottom of the playoff bracket produces for them. They're basically a lock to make the playoffs and would almost certainly smoke anyone they drew at the No. 8 seed.
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The problem is that they play in a division with the Leafs and Bruins, who seem destined to play each other in the first round again, and both those teams are good enough to beat them in seven games. You could say the same of anyone who comes out of the Metro, since Washington did it last year despite being a clear underdog.
Obviously they probably have like a 1-in-4 or 1-in-5 chance to actually win the Cup — certainly the best in the league right now — but that means they have a 3-in-4 or 4-in-5 chance to not win it. That's hockey, I guess.
Henry asks: "Are the Panthers doomed to mediocrity forever?"
It's fair to say their mediocrity in the past was caused by an unwillingness (or, if you prefer, inability) to spend to the cap. You can develop all the good players you like, but unless you're spending money to complement those players depth-wise or retain them long-term, you're not gonna win. As recently as the expansion draft and the Smith/Marchessault decision, money was the issue motivating their badness.
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This year, well, they banked on a 39-year-old goaltender and a guy who's never played more than 44 games in a season. Sometimes that's gonna go sideways on ya. I definitely thought they'd be really good — a borderline 100-point team — but the goaltending just hasn't been there, and everything else really has. That's hockey, too, I guess.
Mitch asks: "Let's say James Neal starts playing more like he has in the past. How much better does Calgary become?"
The Neal contract was not a good bet to begin with, even if you had an optimistic view of what he would bring to the team this year. He has shattered all such expectations in a negative way, registering just 3-4-7 in 36 games so far. Very bad.
The fact is he's only 31 so this collapse in his shooting percentage (down to 3.8 percent from last year's 12.4, and a career 12.1. He's been a drag on Calgary's underlying numbers, but he's also sitting on a PDO in the 96 range, which will probably come up.
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The bigger point of concern is that he's shooting just 2.2 times a game, down from 2.9 last year and 3.3 as recently as 2015-16. That's a big decline, but to your point, if he keeps shooting at the same rate and finishes more than 12 percent of them from now on, he can get to 15 or 16 goals.
Which is bad for $5.75 million, but it's better than the alternative, which is that he just really kinda sucks now.
RJ asks: "Is Ivan Provorov bad now? I have always been skittish on him, but this year he has just been awful. Is this forever or just a blip?"
Any time a guy in his early 20s scores 15 or so goals from the blue line, the hockey world craps its collective pants and has a skewed view of the guy forever.
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That said, Provorov is being put in a position to succeed this year and not getting it done. I think some of it is going to be related to the fact that I do not rate Robert Hagg at all, and he's been Provorov's most common D partner this year. There are other factors, of course, but Provorov has been a lot better with both Shayne Gostisbehere and Travis Sanheim (his two other most common D partners).
I don't know why you'd keep a pair together for 251:19 if it has a sub-46 Corsi-for percentage, but then again I'm not an NHL coach who got fired.
Jarrod asks: "What does Rantanen's contract this summer look like? For a historically stingy owner and franchise, could he try and pull a 'MacKinnon's deal is our ceiling?'"
Think Draisaitl money.
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Avs ownership might want to try to lowball him — why wouldn't they want to keep his cap hit down? — but the success Willy Nylander just had in getting exactly what he wanted out of the Leafs is going to embolden a lot of RFAs to be aggressive going forward. The days of MacKinnon contracts are dead.
And like Draisaitl, Rantanen is putting together a dominant season next to an elite-among-elites center at exactly the right time. Good for him. Get that money, bud.
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Ryan Lambert is a Yahoo! Sports hockey columnist. His email is here and his Twitter is here.
All stats via Corsica unless noted otherwise. Some questions in the mailbag are edited for clarity or to remove swear words, which are illegal to use.
