Puck Daddy Power Rankings: Lundqvist's injury; NHL in Las Vegas

[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.]

6. “One of the best goalies ever is hurt? No big deal!”

I do not understand these people who say that losing Henrik Lundqvist for a month or more is of little consequence to the New York Rangers. The math behind it doesn't make sense, let alone the actual logic of saying out loud, “Oh yeah, no Lundqvist for a month is not in any way worrisome.”

Like, okay, fine, Cam Talbot is an elite backup goalie whose play the last two seasons kind of makes you think he deserves a shot to start somewhere. This is the same logic applied to Anton Khudobin, who in one season of actual quality work in Boston proved more than capable of backing up Tuukka Rask, and eventually signed with Carolina to platoon with Cam Ward. He went .926 in 36 games last season, and this year he's only .909.

In Khudobin's 76 career games, he has a .924 save percentage, but the likelihood that this guy who'll be 29 in May is another Tim Thomas-level late bloomer that can become the most dominant goalie in the league is, you'd have to say, low. Likewise, even when he was stultifying opposing defenses for the Bruins, if Rask had come up with, say, I don't know, a puck in the throat and had to miss a month and a half, there's one word for the appropriate reaction: Panic.

Part of this, I think, is the fact that the Rangers rather comfortably occupy a playoff spot; the odds that anyone in the East who's not currently in the top eight is making a run any time soon are just about nil. Thus, even if Talbot is a total disaster — which he probably won't be given that the Rangers are a good team and he's at least a capable NHLer — he's not going to cost the team a postseason berth, just given the odds.

But to conflate “won't make the team go into a sickening tailspin” with “won't give the team cause for concern” seems ludicrous. Take a look at who Talbot started this season before Lundqvist got hurt to see the quality of his work: at Columbus, St. Louis (when they were still playing mediocre hockey), at Toronto, Philadelphia twice in a row, at Detroit (two days before a game against Pittsburgh), Carolina, at Los Angeles (the night after a game in Anaheim), at Boston. That's a decent mix of poor and good opponents, and his save percentage is mostly good because he does very well against bad teams; he shut out the Flyers both times he played them, as well as the Hurricanes.

Not that this recent run since Lundqvist's injury is exactly representative of his quality (the Rangers are 1-1-1 despite letting just 68 shots total get to him, because Talbot's on .882) but he played three quality opponents in Boston, Nashville, and Dallas, and, well, this is what happens.

Lundqvist almost certainly would have played two of those games. Nashville and Dallas were back-to-backs with travel in between, and Talbot worked both of them, which is a problem for Alain Vigneault and not necessarily Talbot. But nonetheless, seeing the team's save percentage drop even five points over the course of a month could be deeply problematic.

Again, they won't lose a playoff spot, but losing Lundqvist could mean the difference between finishing second or third in the division, or in a wild card spot. You'd much rather the former than the latter, because advancing out of a first-round series with the Bolts or the Isles is a lot harder than doing so against the Penguins or Capitals.

Panicking, I guess, doesn't really get anyone anywhere in the event of a near-catastrophic injury like this. But pretending it's no big deal is just insanity.

5. The drive

Yesterday marked the start of the season ticket drive in Las Vegas, and to really illustrate how gung-ho the league is to get a foothold in the market, Gary frickin' Bettman made the trip out.

The would-be team is aiming to generate as many as 10,000 or even 13,000 deposits for its season ticket drive to prove to the NHL that it's a good and real market, and not any sort of gimmick at all, no way no sir. They'll probably get it. The casino-purchased tickets alone will probably get the club most of the way there.

Bettman has said that they should know within a couple of weeks whether there's enough interest in the market for a team at all, and if that bridge is crossed, one has to assume others will come along and also be crossed quickly enough.

I think this is an attractive idea for a lot of people, the league included. Essentially, it seems as though they see it as potentially just being able to have hot and cold money running out of the faucets for such a franchise, even if hockey in the southwest has often had shall we say tenuous and brief periods of success only. The good news is that a Vegas team would be the only professional-sports show in town and maybe something people might want to do if they make the trip out and get sick of losing at craps. The bad news is that it would be maybe the 486th-most interesting show in town overall; you have to think that the average Vegas tourist would rather try to see Penn and Teller than Price and Eller.

The NHL is looking to expand and, unfortunately, Vegas is probably as good a place as any to do it. But that should tell you something about the quality of available expansion market overall, shouldn't it?

4. ESPN having hockey again

I think the main reason that people are very skeptical and even upset about ESPN getting the television rights to the World Cup of Hockey is that it kind of torpedoes any “ESPN doesn't care about hockey” jokes they might have wanted to make in the future.

Look, let's not mistake the Worldwide Leader picking up these rights for a sudden interest in scooping up an NHL package of their own, but even if the deal is made just they can fill some of their duller summer months with a little bit of programming, is more hockey on TV somehow a bad thing? Like, you were gonna watch it anyway, yeah? And you don't like Pierre McGuire or the NHL on NBC talking heads? So what, then, is the problem?

This might be making a deal with the devil in some ways — “ESPN” has long equalled “bad” to hockey fans for reasons that I don't think you can necessarily begrudge them for — but if this makes the network actually start caring a little more about hockey again, the only thing that gets hurt is that somewhat-deserved perception.

And even if it is a Satanic pact, at least they're being well-compensated for making it. If the league and players' union are projecting revenues of as much as $120 million for a two-week tournament, that seems like it's a pretty good deal, doesn't it?

In short: Hockey's on TV, you'll watch it anyway. And maybe Barry Melrose won't be as insufferable as Pierre McGuire. Maybe.

3. Devan Dubnyk

When the Minnesota Wild made the trade that brought Devan Dubnyk to town, I don't think anyone imagined this kind of turnaround. I actually think I've probably been one of Dubynk's more ardent defenders, as I believed he kind of got a raw deal in Edmonton playing behind a disaster of a team. Apart from a few notable hiccups career numbers have always been somewhere near league average, which is saying something for a goalie who spent 171 games with the Oilers.

He certainly got his game back together in a backup role with Arizona, and is now on his fourth team in two seasons.

I don't think anyone could have expected this: in his first 10 appearances with Minnesota (not counting last night against Winnipeg), he allowed just 14 goals, and yeah he's been on the receiving end of some tough results, but he's winning so often that it's easy to forget them. That's good for a .940 save percentage, which is unreasonably high, but only as unreasonably high as the team's save percentage before his arrival was unreasonably low.

You have to wonder how much longer this kind of success lasts, because while Dubnyk has always struck me as a roughly average NHL goaltender or maybe a little better, the wheels have to come off here at some point, don't they? Not that he isn't keeping hope alive in St. Paul because he definitely is. The Wild are certainly making up ground and don't seem so far out of the playoffs, but three-point games being what they are, it's a really tough road to walk down.

All credit to Dubnyk, though, because he's almost certainly going to get another contract out of this, and certainly he deserves it based on his past work. This isn't reflective of his quality, and if Minnesota sneaks in, they really ought to just take whatever revenues they generate from the playoffs and deposit them directly into Dubnyk's bank account. Mike Yeo should also be paying for the guy's meals for at least the rest of the season.

2. Tank city

Taylor Hall has a leg injury — maybe a knee! maybe an ankle! maybe both! — that will hold him out for as long as six weeks. For those scoring at home, six weeks is just long enough for him to miss all but the Oilers' final 10 games or so, and at that point, why even bother to bring him back?

1. Not getting it

David Clarkson was actually a healthy scratch for Toronto's last two games, which is something I figured would never happen just given the politics behind such a move (i.e. benching a guy who makes $5.25 million and was hailed as some sort of franchise savior by idiots who somehow didn't see this coming). But Clarkson has been so desperately bad this year — not unlike the way that he was desperately bad last year — that Peter Horachek had seen enough. 

And the thing is, Clarkson has always been a player that provided limited value, and the problems with those limits are only magnified by the ludicrous contract and sillier dreams of what he Could Be. This is who David Clarkson is, right? Like, a third-to-fourth-line guy who can play physical and occasionally chip in offense, and who enjoyed one year ever of success in attack. It's made him a millionaire many times over, because members of hockey's old boys club will always be fascinated with past performance and grit more than rational player value and usage.

But here's the real problem with Clarkson: he's been bad, but he doesn't think so. He argued with Horachek about being scratched, and when asked after the fact about it, he said something along the lines of this being something to send a message... to the rest of the team.

Which, okay, whoa. Unless that message is, “If you play as badly as David Clarkson, you're going to get scratched,” who learns anything from that? Dude gets paid more than any forward on the team not-named Phil Kessel, and people are acting like if he scores 15 goals this season then that will somehow be acceptable? He's up to 10 right now, but he's shooting 11.1 percent. If Clarkson doesn't think there's something wrong with his game, and that he's not performing at an NHL level, well, I think that's entitlement via his contract talking. By all accounts he's a terribly nice man, but he's not an especially good hockey player, and if he sees himself as one, or sees himself as deserving of better than being an occasional healthy scratch, that strikes me as a worry.

Of course, if his real beef was the fact that he's getting scratched while a player who's been even worse than him this year remains the team's No. 1 center, then he's got a point.

And we all know how rare it is for David Clarkson to have a point.

(Not ranked this week: Changing the names.

There has long been a discussion among nerds who care about this kind of thing about whether the names of the so-called “fancy stats” — like corsi and fenwick and PDO — are actually some sort of barrier to entry. I've always found that a little silly because if you'd rather them be called “unblocked shot attempts for” instead of “fenwick for” then you're just being obstinate for the sake of it, and probably because Stats Are Bad.

With the NHL on the verge of unveiling its own, more advanced stats engine, Scott Cullen once again brought up the idea that changing the names would go a long way. My guess is that the NHL would like to get as far away as possible from having to explain the term “corsi” and “fenwick” in depth, and would rather come up with their own abbreviations. In part because putting a weird name on it for a major sports league — even if it's in deference to the people who actually figured out these stats have value nearly a decade ago — is not going to be palatable.

As one of Those Guys when it comes to stats, I have to say I'm not necessarily against such a change, but coming up with a good abbreviation for corsi and fenwick that doesn't get too cumbersome is going to be key. Like a lot of people in this area, I've put a lot of thought into the idea and I don't know that there are too many good options. That probably won't stop the NHL from changing them anyway.

I actually don't mind a change, and I think PDO in particular is one where you can come up with a better and more descriptive shorthand, but it has to be done right. Because again, if you're letting a goofy name stand between you and a better understanding of what is inarguably true about the sport — that success is driven by possession and can be judged on a finer level than goals, assists, and wins — then you're beyond help anyway. History will trample you.)

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