Puck Daddy Power Rankings: World Cup Young Stars roster; NHL Draft; trading block

[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. The free agent crop

Well we're about a week away from July 1 and while there's a lot of stuff to talk about in the next seven days, the fact that a lot of places are leading their “Here are what we consider the top free agent forwards” list with Matt freakin' Beleskey should tell you everything you need to know about what a snoozefest the Free Agent Frenzy [sic] is going to be on July 1.

6. World Cup of Hockey GMs

Wow, so exciting. Doug Armstrong is running Canada, and Dean Lombardi helms the U.S.

Yawn.

These are fairly obvious choices (as long as you keep in mind that a few guys probably begged out of duties for Team Canada), and at least Lombardi is a smart one. And sure, we shouldn't exactly be going for surprise here, because you want the best GMs putting your team together.

But these two announcements earlier this week really only opened up the question of who is going to GM the “North American Young Stars.” The U-23 team is my everything for the World Cup, because of the list of really good young players who will get to be on it. Here's a lineup I'd consider taking based on performances this past season (interestingly, there are not a lot of U-23 North American wings worth considering, so a lot of centers got shifted to the wing):

Brandon Saad - Nathan MacKinnon - Ryan Strome
Jonathan Huberdeau - Connor McDavid - Jonathan Drouin
Johnny Gaudreau - Jack Eichel - Mark Scheifele
Alex Galchenyuk - Ryan Nugent-Hopkins - Sean Monahan
Extras: Sam Bennett, Auston Matthews (assuming he's eligible, and if not: Bo Horvat)

Dougie Hamilton - Aaron Ekblad
Jacob Trouba - Seth Jones
Ryan Murray - Morgan Rielly
Extra: Matt Dumba

John Gibson
Connor Hellebuyck
Extra: Malcolm Subban

Okay, so things fall apart when goalies get involved. That's a decent team otherwise. Certainly has a lot of cap flexibility. (By the way, the World Cup of Hockey should totally have a salary cap to level the playing field so Canada doesn't just crush everyone on home ice like we all know it will.)

Someone has to put this team together, and who does so will be intriguing. We've heard a lot of chatter about, “Wouldn't it be nice if Kyle Dubas were the GM,” and the answer is “probably yes” because Kyle Dubas has a hell of a head on his shoulders, and as far as high-ranking front-office types go, he's probably the Youngest of Young Stars.

Either way, this is all I will be thinking about until the GM, and later the full roster, is revealed.

5. Evgeni Malkin's attitude

Why it's almost like years of being saddled with not-good linemates is actually bad for morale. Of course, when Sidney Crosby wants better linemates, he's competitive. When Malkin wants them, he's angry and wants a trade and sad about it. If only Malkin were from Magnitogorsk Jaw, Saskatchewan. The Penguins wouldn't be having these problems.

4. The NHL awards

Now that the celebrity presenters have been revealed — and laugh all you want about the looseness of the NHL's definition of “celebrity” here, but the presenters in 2010 included... oh wait, they somehow got Mark Wahlberg for that one — and everyone in the NHL has gotten their little butts to Vegas, we can really focus on the greatest awards show in television history.

We're now less than 12 hours away from puck drop on what is the NHL's biggest annual ignoble failure. Please don't forget to watch the torturous nine-hour pre-show red carpet special, because... what's that? They moved the red carpet special to Periscope? Hahaha good lord. They moved the red carpet special to Periscope, folks.

Anyway, tune in. You might even recognize someone.

3. Teams hoping for cap flexibility

We're looking at a cap of $71.4 million. That's basically the full 5 percent escalator, baby. Enjoy your escrow, cowards!

2. Trades, trades, trades

On the other hand, all the chaotic trades that were likely to happen in the next week just got a whole lot less likely.

I mean, there probably will still be a lot of them — and a healthy percentage are going to involve goaltenders — but even with the full 5 percent escalator, you're still looking at a lot of teams without a lot of flexibility. As of right this second (Tuesday afternoon), no one has exceeded that number for next year, so sayeth War on Ice, but six teams have $6.4 million or less in cap ceiling room to work with, and that's probably going to make for some rather uncomfortable decisions in the next few weeks.

Chicago is obviously the team that's most likely to move someone or several someones, as people have discussed endlessly, especially vis a vis Patrick Sharp (and all they want is the moon for that guy, who's just 33 years young!).

But man, no one's talking about Philadelphia. How does a roster this bad cost almost $69.4 million? Well, it doesn't include the Chris Pronger money coming off their books. So let's call it $64.5 million. Okay then, how does a roster this bad cost $64.5 million? Especially when they only have 11 forwards under contract and no backup goalie. They're really not in that much cap trouble, but if you were them, wouldn't you be active on the trade market anyway? Look at all this effectively dead money: A combined $9.1 million for RJ Umberger and Vinny Levavalier, Another $17.35 million for Mark Streit, Andrew MacDonald, Luke Schenn, and Nicklas Grossmann. Hoo boy, Ron Hextall might want to start working the phones now.

Who thinks they need crappy, "gritty" veterans and has a bunch of cap room? Calgary? Probably Calgary.

Meanwhile, you can expect some crazy scrambling from a few teams as they try to clamber up to the $52.8 million cap floor. Three teams are at leat $13.5 million from that right now: Buffalo, Nashville, and Arizona. Nashville has a ton of free agents to sign, so no problem there; they spent $60 million last season against the cap and that sounds like a reasonable number again.

Buffalo's gonna go another year of tanking, and have very few players to re-sign or who are worth re-signing (and they might buy out Cody Hodgson). So you gotta figure they're more than happy to take a team's bad contracts in exchange for a pick and a prospect or two.

As for the Coyotes, well, they barely have an arena, so they're barely going to get to the cap floor. The good news is they only have three defensemen signed for next year right now, and only seven forwards, and only one goalie (and that goalie is Mike Smith, so...).

The takeaway here: Holy cow, Don Maloney has a busy summer ahead of him.

1. Updating how we draft

I want to talk about two things now that are near and dear to my heart: The NHL draft, and analytics.

One of the things stats-folk will scoff at in the NHL is the idea that things like shot attempts and zone start percentages are in any way “advanced.” Because they are very much not.

But in developmental leagues, that data is still burgeoning, because it's not tracked officially in the NCAA, CHL, high school, junior A, or foreign junior leagues. Well, that's not entirely true, because the NCAA tracks it, but the data has only been compiled for the 2014-15 season that just ended, and it's still woefully incomplete.

For instance, we know how many shots Jack Eichel attempted at 5-on-5 in his 40 games for BU (221), as well as how many were saved (101), went wide (57), were blocked (45), or were goals (13). But we don't know how many attempts he was on the ice for versus against, nor his zone start percentage, nor his quality of competition, nor his minutes played. And so while we have something, and something is better than nothing, it's also not as good as it could be. (I'm kind of on the forefront of pushing for better data in college hockey, but it's an uphill battle to say the least.)

However, for most leagues, even getting that data is difficult if not impossible, and instead really can only be guessed at. Which isn't fun or anything, and it's certainly not illuminating. That leads to a lot of stuff about “The Eye Test” and how important it is to mix that with standard stats like, well, points, and weight that against the quality of competition (i.e. it's harder to score in college than it is in major junior, but harder still to score in Swedish men's leagues, etc.)

For some time now, individual NHL teams have invested in “advanced stats” at the developmental level and probably gotten some good data out of it. They won't share, and why should they? It's their data.

But even with the most basic data — and this is the amazing part — people are starting to figure out more about the prospects we've been hearing about for months or even years. For instance, this look at the highly controversial Lawson Crouse from Money Puck is intriguing and enlightening, and based on little more than age, scoring, league of competition, and (interestingly) height.

Crouse has long been hailed by scouts as an easy top-10 pick based on his size, physical game, maturity, etc. The problem is the numbers don't back that up; yeah he's 6-foot-4 and already 215 pounds (good lord) but he only went 29-22-51 in 56 games for what was admittedly a poor and injury-riddled Kingston team. And a lot of that scoring was facilitated late in the season by the healthy return of Sam Bennett. Lots of reason for stats guys to be suspicious that this was just another one of those “he's big and scoring at nearly a point-a-game pace, so he must be good” things we've heard for years and years from scouts.

But using the “Player Cohort Success” (PCS) model developed in the past few months, the projections state that, when controlling for all the above factors, Crouse does indeed look like a top-10 pick, because his numbers are actually comparable to guys like Ryan Getzlaf, Rick Nash, and Patrice Bergeron.

Does that guarantee success at the NHL level, and a lot of feeling good from the team that potentially snagged him a little later than he should have gone? No. Would it vindicate the stat boys who spent all season deriding him? Maybe not. But you can't say we're not learning a lot about kids based on advanced data to which we've typically had little to no access, even if it's based on wholly not-advanced statistics.

Hockey is learning and teams need to catch up. The future of their franchises is at stake.

(Not ranked this week: The summer hangover.

NHL awards tonight. Draft this weekend. Free agency starts a week from today. Good lord how does it already feel like mid-August? What will mid-August feel like? Come back, hockey.)