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Mailbag: Who would be smart to offer sheet Nylander?
William Nylander's holdout just keeps creeping along. (Frank Gunn/CP)
We made it.
Hockey season began anew yesterday and while a lot of teams are still on Game 0 of 82, we are already hurtling toward its conclusion once again. Just think: In six weeks, everyone will have played about a quarter of their schedule already.
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It's a long season but it goes by so fast. Soon we'll forget all the optimism we might feel today, and a lot of the skepticism too. But for now, there are plenty of questions left about everything from rookie performance to new expansion possibilities.
Let's start the season off right:
Sahil asks: "Hypothetically, what caliber of player is worth offer sheeting if you're a bottom feeder?"
We're obviously talking about Willy Nylander here so I'll say this: I don't think any team that could hypothetically have a good shot of finishing in the top 3 in the draft — that is, anyone you'd think would be bottom-five — should offer sheet a player like Nylander.
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I like Nylander a lot, obviously. It's hard to find 21-year-olds who can reliably put up 60 points a season. But the amount you have to give up to sign him to even a deal with an AAV of $7 million — which is what he's rumored to want — is significant. A first, second, and third in the coming draft. It's hard to get 60-point guys even with the fifth pick in a draft, and if you do, they probably take a year or two to get there. Nylander certainly did, because he wasn't in the NHL until his age-20 season.
But if you're a bottom feeder, and particularly one that, like the Sens or Canucks, is just starting the rebuilding process, well, what's the point of getting him right now? If you're gonna stink, you might as well really stink and see what the lottery gives you.
There aren't a lot of elite RFAs that come up for a signing, and even if you can get, say, Auston Matthews next summer, you'd probably have to pay the top price of four first-round picks because he is assuredly gonna want something like McDavid money. It's not every day someone like Matthews comes along, but the first pick in your next four drafts is a lot even if you're only picking in the top 10 or so.
The teams that should target Nylander types specifically, though? Mid-table teams with cap space to burn, like Philadelphia, New Jersey, or Carolina. If the Devils sign Nylander, for example, they'd be giving up something like the 14th pick in the first three rounds of this year's draft. Who cares?
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Jazz asks: "Outside of guys like Dahlin and Svechnikov, what rookies are you excited to see debut this year and have high expectations for?"
I think the obvious answer here is Elias Pettersson. The Canucks are gonna stink but he was the best player in a men's league last season at 19, leading all players in points and goals per game. In the latter case, by a pretty good margin. He won't be 20 until more than a month from now. Just electrifying talent.
But if that's a little too obvious for you as well — I think Pettersson is probably on the inside track to win the Calder, so… — gimme Miro Heiskanen in Dallas, Florida's Henrik Borgstrom, or Svechnikov's Carolina teammate Martin Necas as guys who will impress pretty quickly.
Steve asks: "Is this the year I actually have to get on the Leafs bandwagon so as to not be ostracized by my friends and loved ones?"
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If you live in Toronto, you already know that the Leafs get the lion's share of attention even when they're just-okay and the Raptors are good. The Raptors should be very good this year (provided you get a healthy and focused Kawhi Leonard and not one who's just counting the days until free agency), but the Leafs should be a lot better.
Like I said the other day, the extent to which people are already dissecting the Leafs power play is bordering on absurd, but that's how it goes when the this team is good.
Even if the Raptors are the best team in the East (and unless Gordon Hayward , Jayson Tatum, and/or Kyrie Irving get hurt, they will not be) the extent to which the Leafs will probably run up the score on some of the rotten teams in their division is gonna get them the majority of the headlines all year long.
Jeff asks: "Will Seattle in 2020 put pressure on Bettman and the owners to get a new CBA done cleanly, without any stoppage/lockout?"
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People talk about player contracts with signing bonuses included as "lockout insurance." I can all but guarantee you the expansion fee the owners will all get from the Seattle ownership group is pretty good lockout insurance for them too.
Even a league as dumb as this one cannot possibly welcome a new team into its ranks with a two-month lockout, or anything close to it. Just an insanely bad way to get that relationship started, especially given how well things got off the ground for the Golden Knights last year.
Plus, hell, the owners have almost everything they want at this point anyway, and what they don't have is all stuff they can live without. Even the Olympics isn't something they can take away from the players out of spite because of the almighty yuan.
So yeah, if you were (understandably) still worried about a lockout, the odds on that probably drop to zero when the new team gets officially approved.
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Foofarawist (god, please don't with this stuff) asks: "Is Tom Wilson bad for hockey?"
Well, there are two ways to view this question.
On the one hand, yeah, guys trying to smoke other players as frequently as Wilson does is bad for the game because you don't want guys being concussed by borderline talents just because they had the audacity to shoot the puck in the middle of the ice while he was out there with a full head of steam.
"You gotta get that out of the game" is something you can say about almost every hit Wilson throws, even the… ahem… clean ones. So the fact that he is by far the league's leader in hits that have no place in the sport, yes, he is bad for hockey.
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But in the "bad for business" sense of "bad for hockey," no. No one watches a Tom Wilson hit and goes "That's it for me, time to watch basketball!" I think there's an inherent understanding that sometimes guys in a sport like this will hit to hurt. It's probably not good that this is the assumption, but I would imagine that's a thing nonetheless.
Let's put it this way, when Wilson got 20 games yesterday (should've been 30-plus) no one was like, "Finally, I can watch hockey again!" He just doesn't matter that much to people.
Sam asks: "How should I feel about Karlsson joining the team that initially traded for Mike Hoffman? Why does San Jose keep doing this to Ottawa–what did the Senators do to deserve this?"
If you're a Sens fan in 2018, you should feel like you're on a sinking ship, bud. I dunno.
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As for why the Sharks keep doing this to Ottawa, I think it's the Dmitri Filipovic line of: "Identify the sucker at the table and take runs at him until he's out of money." Doug Wilson has generally been a pretty good GM these last few decades, overreaction to the Kings reverse-sweep aside. Whoever has been in charge of the Senators at any point in the Melnyk era, not so much.
If you're a GM and there's someone as obviously desperate to give away something that's worth quite a bit away for pennies on the dollar, and you're not calling him every hour on the hour to say, "How we feelin' about Mark Stone right now, Pierre?" that seems like malpractice.
Nick asks via email: "I was wondering what your general take is on Justin Faulk. Was last year just a bad year or do you think a decline/stagnation should be expected?"
I mean I don't know what kind of down year we're talking about here. He only scored eight goals I guess, because his shooting percentage dropped literally by half, and he was on the ice for a lot of goals against because the goalies behind him couldn't make a save.
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But otherwise this is a guy whose CF% pushed 56 (plus-1.6 relative) despite playing 22 minutes against good competition. You'd like to see him up around 40-plus points again, sure, but defensemen don't generally create their own offense, y'know?
Cleaver asks: "How would you write a rule to get rid of head shots?"
Pretty simple. If you throw a hit that makes any head contact, that's a one-game suspension, no questions asked. Doesn't matter if it's incidental or glancing or whatever. Hit a guy's head, you're down a game. Next time you do it, it's two, then it's four, then it's eight. And so on.
My thinking here is you gotta have guys considering how they're throwing their bodies around out there, y'know? Maybe like 10 percent of the league ends up getting a game's suspension out of this kinda thing, there's a change, especially if 20 percent of that 10 percent do it again, and a smaller fraction gets rung up three times.
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At some point you see how close you could be to getting suspended for one, three, seven games in a year — the difference between hitting the head and not-doing it isn't that big, right? — and you force yourself to play with more control.
As always, I would prefer there be no hitting in hockey at all, so take this for what it's worth: If you wanna get rid of headshots, you can't just accept that sometimes headshots happen. Concussions absolutely don't have to be the cost of doing business.
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.
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