Puck Daddy Bag of Mail: Old guys without a Stanley Cup

Hey everyone, with the NCAA season over, it’s time to roll out a new feature for the summer. It’s a mailbag column. People love those.

Wow, the first round is already over. I hate to see it!

Fortunately (for me only) it also led to a lot of very interesting questions that can be answered in this week’s Bag of Mail. As always, you can email me here and reach out to me on Twitter here if you have a question.

Off we go:

Jimmy asks via email:

“After three full regular seasons and two playoff experiences, what is the verdict on Seth Jones? Has he lived up to expectations since being ranked #1 NA skater pre-2013 draft?”

Well on the one hand, he’s certainly the No. 1 defenseman — by a decent margin — in Columbus. That’s damning him with faint praise a little bit because the Nos. 2 and 3 are David Savard and Jack Johnson, but obviously the kid is a player. It’s worth noting, though, that he’s used in advantageous situations, kind of like a Duncan Keith, to put his offensive powers to their greatest use.

And with 40-plus points and 12 goals this year, I think you can say he did well for himself.

As for the question about whether he lived up to the draft ranking, well, it’s tough to say. The two North American skaters who were picked ahead of him Nathan MacKinnon and Jonathan Drouin, and they’ve had their troubles. MacKinnon has slowed down a lot since his first season, only clearing 50 points each of the last two seasons on what was admittedly a dumpster fire of a team.

Drouin totaled the same production this year after a contentious 2015-16 season, and certainly showed flashes of brilliance in a somewhat limited role. But for right now he has fewer career points than Bo Horvat, so y’know.

If you want to make the argument that Jones, who has 125 points from the blue line and is second in games played in his draft class behind only Sean Monahan, is the best North American skater in his draft class, that’s tough to argue. Monahan, who already has 107 goals in his career, might be the only other guy for whom you can make a real case, and I’d tend to lean toward the nice American kid instead.

Tony Abbot asks:

“You mentioned last week the Wild were doomed by the lack of an elite player. Do they have an avenue to getting one or are they just screwed?”

If we’re talking about just this summer, yeah, seems like they’re just kinda screwed on this one. This is for a few reasons.

First and foremost, elite players are very hard to come by in this league. Teams are reticent to give them up, and it often takes considerable packages to pry even the “available” elite young players out of teams looking to sell them. Take, for example, Dougie Hamilton basically saying he wasn’t going to re-sign in Boston and the Bruins still getting three picks out of Calgary for him.

Or maybe Tyler Seguin (plus Rich Peverley and Ryan Button) requiring a very good player, a very good prospect, and two other pieces. And in both those cases, that was Boston making a bad decision.

Do the Wild have pieces, or the willingness, to go out and pursue someone? Maybe. Will someone like that be made available? Probably not.

Of course, you can also develop your own elite prospects, but that typically requires you to either hit the jackpot on a mid-first-round pick, which isn’t impossible but it’s not easy either. The Wild done it in their history, nabbing Brent Burns at No. 20 in 2003, but then they traded him to San Jose, where he became elite. And also that was 14 years ago. Overall, the Wild’s draft history highlights the problem with finishing either barely in or barely out of the playoffs: You can get decent NHLers but you’re probably not going to get difference-makers.

Now, another way to acquire players is obviously via free agency. But they rarely become available and the team probably won’t have the money to go out and acquire anyone worth getting (as Kevin Shattenkirk seems to be the big prize). They have more than $68 million already committed for next year, and need to re-sign Mikael Granlund, who was just their leading scorer. And Nino Niederreiter and Erik Haula, who are good depth forwards. They might also want to keep Christian Folin around.

Then after that they still have a few holes at the forward position to fill, as well as a seventh defenseman and a backup goalie. They don’t have money to throw around.

So yeah, this team won’t get an elite player this summer unless something crazy happens. Which, with the expansion draft and everything else, I guess you never know.

Dylan asks via email:

“I feel like there aren’t any good Old Guys Without A Cup this year, am I just ignorant of the good story lines?”

Yeah I guess I hadn’t really thought about it but at this point, you’re right. The oldest guy without a Cup in the entire playoffs is Mark Streit, who will be 40 in December. And even that doesn’t really count because he’s not going to play in these playoffs and didn’t play the requisite games

After that, it’s Chris Neil, who’ll be 38 in June. And Ottawa’s not likely to win the Cup.

It might be a function of “the league is getting younger” and therefore most good teams don’t have many guys who are way up there in age like they used to be, but there really aren’t a ton of guys where you’d say, “Oh finally, he’s getting his shot at the Cup.”

Here are the 10 oldest guys without a Cup left in the playoffs, plus the oldest guys on the teams without OGWACs in the top-10:

Mike Morton asks: “Why is Bobby Ryan good again?”

Bobby Ryan only scored 13 goals in 62 games this year, marking his worst full-season performance ever. But in these playoffs, he has four goals in six games, as well as three assists.

Part of it is that he’s shooting the puck more. He averaged 1.8 shots on goal per game this season, which is an abysmal number for a guy who’s meant to be a sniper. But in these playoffs, he’s upped that number to 2.7, which is fine.

Also, it shouldn’t surprise you that he shot 25 percent in all situations in the first round, as opposed to 11 percent in the regular season.

If you dig deeper into the numbers you see that a lot of other things have gone right for him in this postseason, though.

Worth noting, though, he’s spent 42 percent of his 5-on-5 ice time playing with Erik Karlsson. In the regular season, that number was closer to 35 percent. And Karlsson — despite a broken foot, somehow — is in Legendary Mode right now. Karlsson has six points so far in this postseason, and four of them were on Ryan goals. He’s a big-time facilitator.

And look at who Ryan played with in the regular season: Kyle Turris and Ryan Dzingel. In the postseason it’s been more Clarke MacArthur and Derick Brassard. Perhaps they fit his style more.

But again, I keep going back to that shooting percentage. It’s very high.

Finally, someone called Travis Yost asks:

“What’s your take on the Jackets?”

Travis thanks for your question. They’re good.

Bye everyone.

Ryan Lambert is a Puck Daddy columnist. His email is here and his Twitter is here.

(All stats via Corsica unless otherwise noted.)

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