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Oft-Injured Teams Likely To Rebound In 2017-18

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Every year, some teams invariably get the short straw when it comes to injury. The Washington Capitals, notably, were the healthiest team in the league, and ended up winning the Presidents’ Trophy. That said, organizational depth is absolutely vital, as the Penguins survived well enough to repeat championships, even though they were bottom-5 in man games lost. Ultimately, there are a few franchises that are merely anticipating a restart in 2017-18, in hopes of entirely forgetting the abuses of last season. These three teams are those which suffered the worst, and have a solid chance to rebound in the upcoming campaign.

Tampa Bay Lightning

The Lightning lost Steven Stamkos for the majority of the season after he was diagnosed with a torn meniscus in November. He missed an astounding total of 65 games. Ryan Callahan was also lost for the majority of the year, losing 64 games of action to a lower-body injury. After that, the onslaught of injuries kept hammering away. Nikita Kucherov only lost 8 games, but was felled on three separate occasions. Ondrej Palat missed only 9 games as well, but his presence was sorely missed when absent. Cedric Paquette lost 23 games, while Tyler Johnson missed 16. It seemed that no one was safe on Tampa’s squad more man-games than an other teams when you factor in essentially retired players.

Tampa will look to remain healthy this season, after an incredibly unlucky venture in 2016-17. They have the depth to endure losses, but the sheer carnage last season was too catastrophic to overcome. Still, they finished only one point out of the final wild card spot. They could easily have squeaked into the playoffs and inflicted serious damage. This year, as long as the fates turn their way, they should be right back in the competitive mix.

Winnipeg Jets

Tyler Myers lost out on the bulk of the season, only playing in 11 contests. As a big component of the team’s defense, he will need to be back to peak performance if the Jets hope to stop some of the bleeding in their own end of the ice. Center Bryan Little lost 23 games to a lower-body injury, while Shawn Matthias missed 37 contests to an upper-body ailment. Not a single player survived the entire year without succumbing to some sort of injury or sickness, and the team as a whole struggled to find a consistent groove with so many bodies filling in and falling out.

The Jets need consistent goaltending and less obnoxiously aggressive defense if they hope to reach the post-season again. That said, simply remaining healthy will go a long way in transforming Winnipeg into a dangerous team. Mark Scheifele was absolutely dominant last season, and with reliable depth behind him, only good results lie ahead. The Central is also slightly less intimidating this year, even with Dallas making as many transactions as they did. Nashville and Chicago both took steps backward, the Blues remained relatively the same, while the Wild made lateral moves.

Vancouver Canucks

Vancouver will have a tough time entering the playoff conversation. In the relatively weak Pacific however, anything can happen. The Sedin twins are another year older, and GM Jim Benning hasn’t acquired any game-breakers in the off-season (Michael Del Zotto doesn’t count). Still, when a team loses over 300 man-games to injury in a year, things should theoretically improve the following year. Admittedly, some of their most heavily injured players were nominal players, like Derek Dorsett (68 lost) and Anton Rodin (79 lost). Still, they missed the presence of multiple depth players at a time and ultimately relied too heavily upon call-ups to crawl through the year. Jannik Hansen (39 lost), Chris Tanev (29 lost), and Erik Gudbranson (52 lost) are far from world-beaters, but on a team as thin at both offense and defense as the Canucks, their losses were unsustainable.

It remains to be seen how much of an impact general health will play for the Canucks. They still need their top players to find consistent production, and their younger players (Bo Horvat, Sven Baertschi) must continue to progress. That said, with a little luck, they might find themselves somewhere near the mix yet again. With new coach Travis Green and a fresh beginning, perhaps there is one more Wild Card berth left in a team that has been prolonging their inevitable full-on rebuild.

Columbus’ Tortorella Is Next Coach In Need of Payday

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The Columbus Blue Jackets may find themselves in some coaching trouble as head coach John Tortorella is entering the final year of his contract and if the team doesn’t ante up soon, he could walk at the end of the season next year. However, the problem is that coaches are making a lot more money than they used to and a team like Columbus has never paid a coach more than $1.5MM a year, which went to Ken Hitchcock. According to Yahoo Sports’ Greg Wyshynski, the team may be forced to offer up at least $3.5MM to keep the veteran coach in Columbus.

Wyshynski writes that in the last few years, teams have been spending when it comes to coaches with Toronto’s Mike Babcock starting the process after the Maple Leafs gave him a $6.25MM per year deal. From that point on, Joel Quenneville cashed in with the Blackhawks at $6MM and Montreal gave Claude Julien $5MM to take over the Canadiens. It could be this new trend that has also spilled over into many teams hiring first-time coaches like this offseason when the Arizona Coyotes (Rick Tocchet, Florida Panthers (Bob Boughner), Vancouver Canucks (Travis Green) and the Buffalo Sabres (Phil Housley) all grabbed young coaches that wouldn’t demand big paychecks.

Could Tortorella be the next coach to break the bank? Currently, according to Aaron Portzline of the Columbus Dispatch, Tortorella makes $2MM per year, but the Blue Jackets only pay $750,000 of that as he is still receiving money from his one-year stint in Vancouver. However, the two-time Jack Adams Awards winner, which goes to the NHL’s best coach, deserves a major raise and if the Blue Jackets don’t offer that, they could lose him.

Vancouver Canucks Announce Full Coaching Staff

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Following in the flurry of coaching news, the Vancouver Canucks have announced their full coaching staff for the 2017-18 season. New head coach Travis Green will be joined by Newell Brown, Nolan Baumgartner, Doug Jarvis and Manny Malhotra as assistant coaches, while Dan Cloutier will return as goalie coach. Glenn Carnegie and Ben Cooper will also be part of the staff in skills development and video respectively.

Green will attempt to take Canucks in a direction rarely seen in Vancouver as they begin to truly rebuild the franchise for the first time since the Sedin twins were drafted in 1999. He’ll be joined by a good mix of experienced and up-and-coming names, as the team tries to build a new identity behind some of their younger players. Brown was fired by the Arizona Coyotes recently after four years in the desert, but has 20 years as an NHL assistant to his name. Baumgartner will follow Green from Utica for the first NHL opportunity of his coaching career. The former Canucks defenseman actually had the best season of his playing career in Vancouver, when he registered 34 points in 70 games during 2005-06 for the club. He would only play 73 other NHL games and record 13 points over his career, making his stop in Vancouver a memorable one.

The announcement comes as something of a promotion for Malhotra, as he had previously been listed as a development coach in the organization. The long-time NHL center will still have to wait for a chance behind an NHL bench however, as only Brown and Baumgartner will be there during the game. Another former Canucks player, Malhotra was part of the team that went to the Stanley Cup Finals in 2011, but missed most of the playoffs after a scary eye injury that nearly ended his career. His return in game two of the finals is one of the most memorable moments for any Canucks fan of the last decade.

 

Snapshots: Second Overall, Jackman, Rinne

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The Philadelphia Flyers will listen to teams calling about the second-overall pick according to Dave Isaac of the Courier-Post, but don’t expect them to make any deals. After moving up in the draft lottery, the Flyers have a chance to pick an elite talent at No. 2 in Nico Hischier or Nolan Patrick and continue building towards a contender down the road.

With Travis Konecny, Ivan Provorov and others making an impact already, the Flyers look like they’ll have a real chance to surround Claude Giroux and Jakub Voracek with enough talent to compete before they start to decline. Both stars are signed long-term for over $8MM, and still have enough good years left to be around when this year’s pick makes a real impact. The top prospects have been doing interviews at the NHL Combine, and will both participate in all the fitness testing this weekend.

  • Barret Jackman is back in St. Louis after the team hired him today as their new development coach. Jackman retired from the NHL last fall after 14 years, and will now take on a role coaching the young players coming through the system. The 876-game veteran played all but one NHL season in St. Louis and recorded 186 points over his career. Never much of an offensive guy, he instead offered reliable defensive structure and penalty killing, eating up minutes on the back end against tough competition. Winning the Calder trophy for Rookie of the Year in 2003, he’ll be able to relate to kids coming into the league at a young age and finding success, only to struggle through the next few seasons.
  • Pekka Rinne was in the starter’s net today at practice for the Nashville Predators, according to Chris Johnston of Sportsnet. After being pulled in Game 2 and replaced by Juuse Saros, there has been much speculation whether Rinne would be given the net for Game 3 tomorrow night. It looks like for at least another game, Peter Laviolette will go with the guy who got him here and give Rinne another chance.
  • Elliotte Friedman of Sportsnet reports that Newell Brown is in consideration for an assistant coaching position alongside Travis Green this season. Brown was fired by the Arizona Coyotes earlier this spring after another poor special teams effort last season. He coached with the Canucks for three seasons prior to going to the Coyotes, and was part of the staff that took Vancouver to the finals in 2011.

Coaching Notes: Baumgartner, Vegas, Quinn

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Iain MacIntyre of the Vancouver Sun is reporting that Nolan Baumgartner is expected to join the newly-hired Travis Green behind the Vancouver bench. Baumgartner was an assistant coach of Green’s in Utica, and is the epitome of a professional hockey journeyman. Playing for seven different NHL franchises, but only getting into 143 games, Baumgartner is considered a solid coaching prospect that has a good insight for the game. This will be his first opportunity behind an NHL bench.

The Canucks will announce their new staff tomorrow afternoon, and will begin to work on their roster for next season. As MacIntyre writes, Green and the new staff will be expected to just develop the younger players coming up for the immediate future, with no pressure to compete for the playoffs right away. If the Canucks do in fact stay the course with a rebuild, Green will try to slowly shepherd the team back towards a competitive culture during his four-year contract.

  • Gerard Gallant won’t start his assistant coach search until after he’s done his work at the World Championships, but he already has an initial list of names to potentially join him on the Vegas bench. Though he’s set to help Jon Cooper coach Team Canada at the Worlds, he hopes to have the search completed in about six weeks. “When it’s a good job, a lot of people want the job,” he told Dan Marrazza of NHL.com who also reports that GM George McPhee and AGM Kelly McCrimmon will have to sign off on his staff.
  • Among the many staffing notes in Elliotte Friedman’s latest “30 Thoughts” column for Sportsnet, is one about David Quinn and the potential job in Buffalo. Obviously, Quinn—who currently coaches at Boston University—would be a solid fit with a young team looking to take the next step but it is his connection to Jack Eichel that now makes it a bit awkward. The report that Eichel wouldn’t sign an extension with Dan Byslma as coach was thoroughly dismissed by both sides, but it did precede Bylsma’s firing by just a day. The optics of Eichel being a “coach-killer” would get pumped up even further if the replacement was his old college coach, even if the report was incorrect. Terry Pegula likely doesn’t want to pour any more gasoline on that Eichel fire, after working so hard to put it out immediately.

Vancouver Canucks To Hire Travis Green As Next Head Coach

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The Vancouver Canucks have hired Travis Green to become their next head coach. The deal extends through the next four seasons.  The team fired Willie Desjardins earlier this month after another disappointing season, and have looked internally for their next bench boss. Green had been coaching the Canucks’ AHL affiliate Utica Comets for the past four seasons, turning in a winning record in each of them.

Green played 970 games in the NHL for six different teams, scoring 455 points including a career-high 70 in 1995-96. A three-time 20-goal scorer, he was celebrated more for his checking ability and faceoff acumen than offensive game. His first coaching opportunity came with the Portland Winterhawks of the WHL, which he led to a championship after taking over as head coach midway through the 2012-13 season.

He’ll now take the reins of a team looking to get younger and start a real rebuild, despite still having some money tied up in several aging players. At the trade deadline, the Canucks started accumulating assets, dealing off Jannik Hansen and Alex Burrows for prospects. They’ll now look forward to this Saturday where they’ll find out which slot they will be drafting in come June. Regardless of where they fall at the top of the draft, they’ll be adding another blue chip prospect to go along with Olli Juolevi from last year’s draft.

Bob McKenzie of TSN was the first to report the deal on Twitter, while Dan Murphy of Sportsnet reports it will be for four years.

West Notes: Green, Stastny, Eakin

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While the Canucks are still considering several different options to fill their head coaching vacancy, TSN’s Darren Dreger reports (Twitter link) that Travis Green, the bench boss at their AHL affiliate in Utica, remains the front runner for the job.  He adds that more interviews will be held this week.

Green recently completed his fourth season with the Comets, his only coaching experience at the professional level.  He has interviewed for NHL jobs in recent years though obviously he hasn’t been able to land a spot yet.  Green is no stranger to the NHL game though, having played parts of 14 seasons with five different organizations before retiring in 2007.

Of course, Green isn’t the only coach that has been linked to Vancouver as earlier today, it was reported that one of the others being considered is former Edmonton coach Ralph Krueger.

Other news from the Western Conference:

  • Blues center Paul Stastny returned to practice on Tuesday, Tom Timmermann and Jeremy Rutherford of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch note.  Head coach Mike Yeo had him skating with the third line and was pleased with his progress: “I thought he was skating well. I thought he was involved in every drill and conditioning didn’t look like an issue and timing and execution didn’t look like it was an issue either.”  With St. Louis comfortably up 3-0 in their series against the Wild, they can afford to take their time with their top center so it doesn’t seem likely that he’ll be back in the lineup in what could be the clinching game tomorrow night.
  • The looming expansion draft is going to result in some notable players hitting the trade market and one of those could be Stars center Cody Eakin, suggests Mike Heika of the Dallas Morning News. He notes that as things stand, Eakin may be forced to shift to the wing for next season, a position he hasn’t had as much success at in the past.  Accordingly, it may make sense for GM Jim Nill to try to move him in advance of the draft which would free up another protection slot up front to work with.  Eakin is coming off a tough year with just 12 points in 60 games but had at least 35 in each of the past three years which may be enticing to other teams around the league.

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