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Sidney Crosby vs. Penny Oleksiak, Connor McDavid and ‘The Simpsons’ (Puck Daddy Countdown)

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(In which Ryan Lambert takes a look at some of the biggest issues and stories in the NHL, and counts them down.)

9 – Brandon Manning

So Brandon Manning apparently told Connor McDavid, who never says a bad thing about anyone for any reason because he’s not programmed to do so, that he tried to injure him on purpose. And Connor McDavid, who is so quiet you hardly even remember he’s there, was understandably mad about it.

And people’s reaction was, “Well we just don’t know!” Oh I think we do know. Connor McDavid, the kind young man who has never been anything but nice to anyone said it so we know. Why would he make that up now, and not, say, a year ago? Probably because Manning, a cruel boy, said it last week. Doesn’t mean Manning necessarily tried to hurt him at the time. Totally possible that it was just trash talk, and pretty effective trash talk at that, apparently.

But do I believe that Manning said it strictly on the basis that McDavid says he did? Yeah.

Connor McDavid, who is literally the basis for Gallant from Highlights Magazine, wouldn’t lie to you about this or anything else. May he find so much peace in his life. And may Brandon Manning who I definitely believe is a meanie feel bad about what he said and maybe did to McDavid forever.

8 – Doubting Henrik Lundqvist

After all this time Henrik Lundqvist has like two bad weeks and you’re like, “Enjoy the bench, idiot.” Imagine that?

Pretty amazing, honestly. You’d think it would be more important for the team to figure out what may or may not be wrong with this Hall of Famer (my guess: nothing!) than to try to wring four or five extra points out of a mid-December stretch. But then you’d also think a team wouldn’t healthy-scratch a Hall of Famer more often than they have Dan Girardi. So you’d think a lot of things that aren’t happening for some dumb reason.

There has to be something wrong, right? Even if they’re not saying it, his foot fell off or something? That’s the only reasonable explanation. Because no one in the Rangers organization watches Henrik Lundqvist have two bad weeks and say, “Well that’s it for him.” Right? RIGHT?

7 – Doubling down on your goaltending

Then there’s the other side of the goaltender evaluation coin. Jim Nill, whose team is below .500, says that goaltending isn’t the problem, and the performances from his better players is.

I understand his position, to be honest. He can’t say “Well literally everyone in the league knows goaltending is a problem for us and I didn’t do anything to address it this summer when I really should have.” Doesn’t reflect well on him.

To be fair, Nill is not wrong that his high-end players haven’t really delivered. Tyler Seguin’s almost a point a game. And well, that’s about it for acceptable performances. You can understand guys struggling from time to time, as Jamie Benn has, but it’s because his shot generation has been in the toilet this season. John Klingberg’s struggles are well-documented. Jason Spezza missed time, as has Patrick Sharp, and Ales Hemsky’s gonna be out for most of the season.

But with that said: The goaltending has been awful. Beyond it, in fact. Antti Niemi is .902 in 12 appearances, and that’s 50 percent fewer games played than even-worse Kari Lehtonen (.892). So yeah, the Stars aren’t scoring, but if they were getting even .910 goaltending — still below the league average — their goal differential goes from minus-21 (which, oh my god) to minus-11.

That difference is pretty consequential. Probably saves the Stars something like three points in the standings. And wouldn’t that be so nice to have?

6 – Not getting it

I’m a little surprised that saying “Looks like the Blue Jackets have gone from terrible to mediocre,” ended up being such a hot-button issue. But I guess when your team is so bad for so long you’re gonna overreact to everything.

So let’s clarify something from this week’s WWL: Saying they were bad when they were winning against good teams, but good when they’re winning against bad teams isn’t moving the goalposts.

It’s pretty simple: A huge PDO and unsustainably potent power play allowed them to outperform a horrible xGF% that you might expect against a slew of big teams when you aren’t yourself especially talented. Now they are whaling on bad teams and winning despite a normalized PDO, indicating what? That they are better than the bad teams.

So here’s how it goes: A few great teams – gap – a handful of good teams – gap – a bunch of mediocre teams including Columbus – several bad teams – a few very bad teams.

But Columbus has all these points in the bank so they’re going to make the playoffs pretty comfortably instead of spending most of the season on the bubble. And then they’ll probably lose to a team that’s better than them. I would have thought that much was clear but this is the Ohio education system we’re talking about, so that’s my mistake.

5 – Gretzky on the Simpsons

Neither one has been good since 1997. Hate to tell ya, folks.

4 – The Cal Clutterbuck extension

Literally everyone alive knows it’s bad except Garth Snow. So I don’t know if that makes it very good (because it’s funny) or very bad (because it’s giving a 29-year-old whose calling card is an artificially inflated hits total five more years after this one). It’s probably both.

3 – The Flyers

The Flyers have a bunch of wins in a row now and even if they drop off a little bit (which they of course will), they’ve clawed their way back into the top three in their division albeit with a lot more games played than Columbus.

They have the roster to be pretty good on a consistent basis. And after his awful start to the year, Steve Mason is .922 in the month of December, which is about where you’d have thought he’d be based on his previous performances in Philly.

So yeah, I think they probably keep pace with Columbus the rest of the way and seize the second or third playoff spot in the Metro. Only makes sense. This is why they play all 82 I guess.

2 – Sidney Crosby, right up until he gives us the slightest reason to not like him any more

I love this Sidney Crosby stuff, man. The league-wide feeling about whether he is the best player in the world seems to be dictated entirely by whether he had a goal in his previous game. He didn’t win the Lou Marsh award (given to the best Canadian athlete of the year) this week, which is fine because a) he’s won it before, and b) he wasn’t the best Canadian athlete.

Probably because a girl — GROSS! — won it instead, people are steamed. Penny Oleksiak is a swimmer! And she’s only 16! And she only really had one great race!

But for real, people were ready to roll Crosby up in a carpet and throw him off a bridge when he was clearing 100 points and Marc-Andre Fleury was gaffe-ing the Pens out the playoffs every damn year. People legitimately thought Jonathan Toews was the best player alive for a not-inconsequential amount of time. But because Crosby won a Cup this year, oh yeah, best Canadian ever. Not just athlete. Just flat-out the best ever.

Hell yeah!

1 – Liking rookies only for as long as they are producing and then not liking them any more

And wouldn’t you know it, that same mentality is playing out for the “best rookie” contest now underway between Patrik Laine and Auston Matthews.

Laine is of course scoring all the goals he wants, including those into his own net, but has pretty bad possession numbers to go with the scoring. Doesn’t make him bad or anything close, but it’s something to consider when analyzing his play. He’s awesome but he has holes in his game.

Matthews is scoring a lot of goals after a long fallow period, but his underlying numbers all suggest that he’s dominant in all phases of the game, not just around the net. It means his consistently strong performances were well-supported.

And that’s even better, right? Well, some people would disagree. Especially those in the greater Winnipeg area. At this point Matthews is five points behind Laine, but they have the same number of assists. Matthews also has five fewer games played.

In much the same way it’s been impossible to escape the Crosby/Ovechkin(/Toews, hahaha) debate for years, this seems like it’s gonna be the new thing.

Here’s a take: Matthews is probably more valuable because he seems to do more things better right now than Laine does. Laine is still extremely valuable because his shooting talent is just going to score him a million goals in his career. They’re both very awesome and very fun to watch and I like them both. If you see either one on the street give them a dollar just for being so nice.

But actually they’re rich. Have them give you the dollar.

(Not ranked this week: People who would give up hockey if the NHL outlawed fighting.

No you wouldn’t, dummy. Stop lying to the nice poll people who are just trying to get good data. And if you did have the courage of your convictions — which you absolutely do not — you’d be too dumb to have a valuable opinion in the first place.)

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

(All statistics via Corsica unless otherwise noted.)