Puck Daddy Power Rankings: Alex Ovechkin’s guarantee, Mike Babcock and blind faith

[Author's note: Power rankings are usually three things: Bad, wrong, and boring. You typically know just as well as the authors which teams won what games against who and what it all means, so our moving the Red Wings up four spots or whatever really doesn't tell you anything you didn't know. Who's hot, who's not, who cares? For this reason, we're doing a power ranking of things that are usually not teams. You'll see what I mean.] 

7. Guarantees

Alex Ovechkin is human garbage to make a guarantee!!!!!!!

Not like Great Leader Mark Messier, who is a perfect angel. Ovechkin is bad.

6. Blind faith

On some level you have to stick by your guy if you let him fire the coach and steer your team rather cavalierly into the ground — you don't want to look ineffectual, after all — but the extent to which Sharks owner Hasso Plattner defended Doug Wilson this week was simply breathtaking. A small sampling follows.

Hoping Joe Thornton and Patrick Marleau, in their advanced age, will improve:

“We are in this rebuild process. Reset, rebuild. There’s no question. Everybody knows when you look at our players, two top stars are getting older. They are both fit. That’s the good news. They haven’t had any major injury like other players. We hope that they can continue to play at that level, or even beef it up a little bit and lead the young ones we have put in to become a strong team.”

Relying on guys in their late 30s to guide you through a rebuild seems antithetical to the point of a rebuild, but maybe that's just me.

Why Doug Wilson still has a job:

“So we have to continue on our way. You ask about Doug. Doug started this, we discussed this restructuring, I use a different word. Two years ago, when do we do it? We still had these top stars, and how do we do it? We were full of hope that we can even go through without losing too much in performance.

If the guy who got your team broken down to the point it needed a rebuild (debatable by the way) is the guy in charge of guiding you out of that ditch, and actively makes the team worse, isn't that bad? Speaking of which...

The team's shortcomings:

“In the end, we will talk about financial issues, but it is his job to do these negotiations, find us the players. You know, as everybody knows, we need a defenseman or two, and we need probably a better fourth line. Then we will have a good team again.”

A defenseman or two and a good fourth line. Well, it's tough to find defensemen, but let's review Wilson's fourth-line moves this past summer. They were all bad, you say? Hmm.

5. Divisional playoffs in the West

The Western Conference Finals are set between Anaheim and Chicago, and those two teams sound just about right based on what we knew going in. They were, on paper, clearly the best the West had to offer.

But their paths to the second round included a grand total of three losses combined. Chicago put down Nashville in six and swept Minnesota, while Anaheim bounced Winnipeg in four and Calgary in five. How much of this is due to the fact that was a little weak this year? Probably a lot, but also the divisional playoffs allowed Calgary — a truly bad team — a path to the second round to face a club against which they could offer little resistance. Chicago likewise ran into a team in the second round that simply wasn't as good and never could have hoped to be.

Would things have been a little more entertaining in 1v8, 2v7, etc. format. Anaheim would have slaughtered Calgary in the first round, instead. Chicago would have run Vancouver over. St. Louis vs. Winnipeg could have been a decent series, same for Nashville vs. Minnesota. That, it seems, would have produced more competitive second-round matchups, especially if the higher seeds advanced out of all of them.

The Western Conference Semifinals were a joke, completed in just nine total games. Hopefully it's just a one-year thing but it could also very easily not-be. If it becomes this easy to make the Conference Final in the West going forward, you might as well not even play the first two rounds.

4. Appendectomies

Poor Ryan Callahan misses Game 6 last night because his appendix acts up on him. Awful break given that even he's not been great in these playoffs, you don't want to have to slot anyone into an elimination game on short notice. He could be out a while, which also complicates matters.

So the question is, “How long will he be out?”

A little research (i.e. typing “NHL appendectomy recovery” into a search engine) shows that at least three NHLers have had appendectomies in the last few years: Patrick Sharp, Craig Adams, and Jonathan Ericsson. Of the three, though, only Ericsson's was in-season. And he came back after just three days. And, well, he was actually pretty good.

Everyone's different, of course. Some guys might recover after a few days, others a few weeks. Likelihood seems to be that Callahan will be back as soon as he can skate on his own. He'll check himself out of the hospital like the Chief after he smothered McMurtry if he has to. There's no way he's missing even one more game than he absolutely has to.

3. Youth is served at Worlds

Lots and lots of youth on the U.S. team at the World Championships. In all, 17 of 25 players on the roster were born in the 1990s. The U.S. won its group, with 18-year-old Jack Eichel leading the way.

This is perhaps not any sort of indication that The United States Has Arrived In International Hockey any more than it had already, of course, because this isn't a best-on-best tournament and they let a lot of really poor teams get into the tournament to begin with. But that the U.S. piled up 22 goals in seven games, and only allowed 14 (eight of which came in the two games that weren't regulation wins, which seems like a problem). You take that.

Especially because all the good American players are still playing in the playoffs. Not like loser Canada. Pretty easy to average seven goals a game when all your superstars got bounced in the first round or didn't even make the playoffs.

2. Bruce Boudreau

Isn't it hilarious how Bruce Boudreau is a bad loser? Oh except it turns out he's awesome. Number of times teams that got a full season of Boudreau have finished lower than first in their division: Zero.

Boudreau is one of the great coaches in this league. Glad to see him get recognition.

1. Mike Babcock

The process of someone hiring Mike Babcock this summer boils down not only to who can offer him the most money — and believe me there are bank vaults all over North America being emptied regardless — but who can offer him the best chance to win a Cup again.

Teams aren't interviewing Mike Babcock for their vacant positions, he's interviewing them to see if he wants to bother filling it. You have to be pretty sure this won't come down to, "Who can give me the most money?" (But I guess it might, right?)

Must be nice to be Babcock right now. He can go anywhere and ply his trade. Now, we've seen some pushback stuff about how, "Are we really sure he's the best coach in the NHL?" and I get the point of it. He might not be. But he's, a) certainly better than Randy Carlyle, as one Toronto writer who's not worth mentioning here put it (to be exact, it was, "Carlyle has the better all-around hockey pedigree" than Babcock, which is an astonishingly idiotic thing to say), and b) the guy who is clearly the best coach to hit the open market in quite a while. The line that forms around the block every summer for even the most mediocre "best unrestricted free agent" group each summer — remember the hilarious clamor over David Clarkson? — should be an indication of just how stupid all this stuff gets in the most benign cases.

So like, even if Babcock is not the best coach in the league (and he very well could be, though I would listen to other arguments as well, including those for Boudreau), this is at least like if John Tavares hit July 1 without a deal.

Is Tavares the best player in the world? Nope. Is he still great, and does he make any team instantly better? You bet. And that comparison is a worst-case scenario for Babcock.

He's, like, really good. If Ryan Suter and Zach Parise can get the damn red carpet rolled out for them, this guy should too.

(Not ranked this week: Thomas Vanek.

People are really eager to trade him after a  21-goal, 52-point season, huh? Hey wasn't Minnesota's problem in the playoffs goalscoring? And no, Vanek didn't do much of anything in the postseason but if you're weighing performances over 82 games versus those in a four-game sweep — and you'll note no one else on his team did anything too well either — that seems a little silly. With whom do you replace him?)

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