Andre Khatchaturian

A couple years ago the Toronto Maple Leafs acquired Phil Kessel from the Boston Bruins. In doing so, they pretty much mortgaged their future. They traded their first-round pick from 2010, second-round pick from 2010, and their first-round pick from 2011 in order to get Kessel.

Phil Kessel has not disappointed. He has had consecutive 30-plus goal seasons, including 62 points this season. However, the Maple Leafs were in no position to let go of valuable draft picks. The Maple Leafs hadn’t (and still haven’t) made the playoffs since God knows when.

When a team is in that position, they need to rebuild from the bottom with strong draft picks and build a solid foundation. With Kessel, they ended up receiving the second pick in the NHL draft last year and this turned out to be Tyler Seguin, the 19-year-old who scored three goals in the Eastern Conference Finals this year.

Seguin is getting valuable playoff experience this year and might get his name on the Cup in his first season. He has a bright future ahead of him and the Maple Leafs are kicking themselves in the forehead because they passed up the opportunity to get him.

To think things couldn’t get worse for the Leafs, the Bruins ended up taking their ninth pick from this year’s draft. Also, the second-round pick from last year’s draft, Jared Knight, turned out to be a pretty good player for Boston, too. He made his AHL debut this year and had two assists in three games. In the OHL, Knight scored 70 points in 68 games and he looks like he’s a promising prospect for the B’s.

With the Bruins already in the Stanley Cup Final this season, they only get stronger in the future with such high draft picks. Meanwhile, the Maple Leafs get poor draft picks and a player who can barely crack 60 points. That is not a recipe for success.

And now this summer, the Bruins can probably go after Ryan Strome, who scored 106 points in 65 games with the Niagara Ice Dogs of the OHL, or Ryan Murphy, a high scoring defenseman who should provide the Bruins blueline with a scoring punch.

These are players that need to be developed in the Maple Leafs’ system so that they can put them back in the playoffs again. The Phil Kessel trade is slowly turning into one of the worst trades in recent memory for the Leafs.

They will continue to struggle and their divisional rival Boston Bruins, who are already a Stanley Cup caliber team as evidenced by this year’s run, have a great future with Seguin, Knight, and whoever they draft this year at No. 9 overall.

It’s one thing mortgaging to your future away, but to mortgage it away to one of your rivals is an irreversible mistake. The Leafs will continue to be a down trodden second rate team until they make smarter front office decisions.

Andre Khatchaturian

Alex Burrows had scored a huge goal in overtime to give the Canucks a 2-0 series lead.

Canada’s favorite team had the momentum going into Boston. They were looking to take the crowd out of it.

And then Aaron Rome changed the series in one split second.

This article was not written to vilify Rome, who has no history of dirty behavior. It wasn’t written to justify his suspension. It wasn’t written to say whether if the hit by Rome deserves a suspension.

No. It wasn’t written for any of that.

Whether the hit was dirty or not, it sent shockwaves across the NHL. It galvanized the Bruins and their crowd and they responded in a big way with eight goals in last night’s rout.

It gave them momentum going into the rest of the series. The uncertainty of Horton’s condition throughout the game and the rest of the series helped the Bruins rally together for a common cause last night and it will be the same throughout the history.

The truth is, injuries like this bring a team closer together. The Bruins are already a close knit team as evidenced by their Stanley Cup run.

But now, it’s personal. Forget the Burrows biting incident. That was child’s play compared to the hit on Nathan Horton.

Word came out that Horton has a “severe concussion.” These words do not sit well with anybody. Seeing how stars like Sidney Crosby have not been able to return from a concussion so easily, who knows when we’ll see Horton again?

Also, another reason why the Bruins will be more united is because they know that the player they are losing is more valuable than the player the Canucks lost.

It gives them even more reason for every single player to step up. And it will happen.

The Bruins are very multi-dimensional. They have numerous scorers. From veterans like Mark Recchi to young guns like Tyler Seguin. They are packed with scorers and each and every player on the team is going to fight even harder to get Horton’s name etched on the Cup.

We saw what happened with the Pittsburgh Penguins this season when they lost Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin. Everyone thought they were done but other players like Tyler Kennedy stepped up to help the Penguins achieve their second highest point total in franchise history.

Now that the Bruins have cracked Luongo and have all the momentum, they believe they can beat the Canucks. The first two games they lost were close nail biters. They could’ve won both games.

And as long as they have their netminder playing supreme hockey, they know for a fact they can win.

Losing Horton for the Bruins is like losing a family member. Winning it for the city of Boston is one thing, but winning it for one of your best teammates is another.

The hit has also the series more physical and chippy. Shawn Thornton received a game misconduct and a rare fight broke out in the third period. The fact that the Bruins were doing their finger mocking throughout Game 3 means that they don’t have a short memory.

They remember the bite, and they’ll remember the hit. It doesn’t matter if it was intentional or not. It already happened. Horton’s gone. And Boston’s up for revenge.

And the best revenge they can get is by winning three more games.

Andre Khatchaturian

Throughout the Atlanta Thrashers’ existence in Georgia, the Penguins repeatedly destroyed them. So the relocation for Pens fans probably just means that we’ll destroy them in Winnipeg instead of Atlanta.

But there’s more.

Gary Bettman stated in his state of the NHL address before Game 1 of the Stanley Cup Final that relocation will be necessary after this coming season. For now, Winnipeg will remain in the Southeast and any geography student will shake his head in disgust when he looks at the current divisional alignment.

However, eventually Winnipeg will be moved to the Western Conference. This will cause for some shake up in the NHL. Winnipeg moving west means that they will probably be placed in either the Central or the Northwest division.

This will leave a vacancy in the Southeast division. The closest geographical NHL city is Nashville. So they will probably be placed in the Southeast. This means Pittsburgh will play Nashville four times.

Nashville is a strong up and coming team and they are lot more difficult matchup for the Pens than the Thrashers ever were. However, they’re in Washington’s division so it’s highly unlikely we’ll see Washington beating up on their division every year with two solid teams in Tampa Bay and Nashville in their division.

Bettman also stated in his state of the NHL address that there was a good chance that Eastern Conference teams would play Western Conference teams twice each year rather than once, which is the norm now.

So this means that Winnipeg should be just placed in the Central division and everything is good right?

Possibly, but another scenario has both Detroit and Columbus moving to the Eastern Conference.

There is speculation that teams these teams, who are in the eastern time zone, want to move to the Eastern Conference. They want to do this to ease the burden of travel. Since both cities are far more eastbound than Nashville is, the scenario exists that Nashville stays in the Western Conference’s Central division but both Detroit and Columbus east.

This means a flurry of changes will come which will probably look like this and include a rare imbalance in the East and West because other than the Winnipeg team, there really isn’t any team that the league can move westward.

Atlantic

Pittsburgh
New Jersey
Philadelphia
New York Islanders
New York Rangers

Northeast

Boston
Buffalo
Montreal
Toronto
Ottawa
Detroit

Southeast

Columbus
Carolina
Washington
Tampa Bay
Florida

Central

Winnipeg
St. Louis
Chicago
Nashville

So as seen above, the Atlantic won’t change, but having Detroit in the Eastern Conference means that we can never have a Penguins-Red Wings Stanley Cup again, but more importantly this implies that it will be increasingly more difficult to make it to the Finals with the Red Wings lurking there every year.

Columbus can probably be another team the Penguins can beat up on in the regular season so that may help them.

Also, the Central division with four teams looks like a division which Chicago can constantly dominate.

It seems highly unlikely that the NHL will head toward the unbalanced conferences notion. But if Detroit wants to move east there seems like no other solution because geographically, all of the teams other than Winnipeg are placed properly in the NHL.

The first scenario seems more likely but either way, the road to the Cup will be a little bit more difficult for the Penguins with Nashville or Detroit in the Eastern Conference.

Andre Khatchaturian
Ever since the lockout ended, the NHL has been blessed with young stars like Sidney Crosby and Alexander Ovechkin that have revived once-dead markets. Attendance figures in Pittsburgh, Washington, and Chicago were abysmal prior to the lockout. The NHL banked on these stars and were also lucky to have popular teams in the Stanley Cup Finals which helped ratings grow and eventually lead to a record TV deal with NBC and Versus a few months ago.

NHL Stanley Cup Final ratings for each series had a downward trend from 1995 until the lockout. Then, straight out of the lockout, when the NHL was doing everything in its power to right the ship, they were faced with two Stanley Cup matchups that brought in small ratings. In 2006, Edmonton and Carolina produced a 1.8 household rating. This was lower than anything pre-lockout from 1995-2005. The year after in 2007, Anaheim and Ottawa produced an even lower household rating at 1.2.

In the three following years, the NHL saw its ratings increase every year.

Why?

Great matchups. Star players. Big markets.

2008 and 2009 saw Sidney Crosby’s Pittsburgh Penguins play against one of America’s most popular teams in the Detroit Red Wings. Ratings more than doubled from 2007 in the first matchup with a 2.6 rating. The following year, Game 7 between Detroit and Pittsburgh brought in eight million viewers on average and this was the highest number of viewers for an NHL game since Game 6 of the 1973 Finals.

Finally, last year, Philadelphia and Chicago, two hockey mad markets, outdrew the 2009 finals. The deciding Game 6 had the highest overnight rating in 36 years.

This year, however, despite an increase in the regular season ratings and some solid series ratings in the postseason, the elite showcase event for the NHL might heavily decline. After a record breaking performance last season, we are one Vancouver win away from having a Canadian team in the Stanley Cup Final.

Having Vancouver in the final means we automatically lose one U.S. market and this is a major blow to the NHL and NBC. Also, when the Canadian team in the final is not Montreal or Toronto, who are historically popular teams and have a huge following in the United States, it hurts even more. What will be even more detrimental to the ratings is if Tampa Bay also makes it to the finals.

We’ll have our fourth small-market U.S. team vs Canadian team Stanley Cup Final since 2004. And it’s these series that generally draw the lowest ratings. This will be a huge blow to the NHL’s momentum which has picked up heavily because of great Stanley Cup Finals in the last three years and the booming success of the Winter Classic.

The fact of the matter is that the small-market U.S. team vs Canadian team series’ have drawn the lowest ratings. Edmonton vs Carolina, Ottawa vs Anaheim, and even 2004’s Calgary vs Tampa Bay were the three lowest rated finals in the last 15 years.

The NHL can take solace in the fact that they have their $200 million TV deal already wrapped up for the next 10 years with NBC and Versus. The NHL is also praying that Boston wins their series out east. Boston, like Chicago and Philadelphia, is a great American city that will help garner ratings. Boston is a very passionate sports town and the Bruins have a strong following throughout the country.

Also, Vancouver has several stars in the Sedin twins and a world class goaltender in Roberto Luongo. Their proximity to Seattle also means the ratings in the Great Northwest will be up. But quite frankly, most of the U.S. population lives in the Central and Eastern timezones, and without a powerhouse from those regions, it’s almost certain that the NHL’s ratings will drop this June.

As mentioned before, Boston can give it a little boost, and even if Tampa Bay makes it, the fact that the NHL’s popularity has grown over the last few years means that there is no way the NHL will generate ratings as low as 2007’s abysmal 1.2 rating. We won’t have that, but it will be a significant drop from last year’s rousing success.

Some may argue that one of the most successful Stanley Cup Finals was in 1994 when Vancouver played against the New York Rangers in an epic seven game series. But this series had New York involved. New York is the largest North American market and it helped generate the whole USA vs Canada headlines. Tampa Bay does not do that. It’s a retirement community in Florida. Boston does to a certain extent, but not to the same extent as New York did.

If Tampa Bay plays Vancouver, expect Stanley Cup ratings to dip below 2.0. A Boston appearance against Vancouver will have the ratings hover between 2.0 and 2.5. Either way, it’s a drop and it’s because of the lack of a Central Division ratings powerhouse like Chicago and Detroit in the final.

Andre Khatchaturian

The Pittsburgh Penguins missed Evgeni Malkin this season. Their goals per game strongly declined after both Malkin and Sidney Crosby were injured. They will welcome him back this season, and they will get his offensive production back.

However, should they just trade him away this summer? He showed that 2010 and 2011 were not his best seasons. The Penguins’ depth at center is really strong, and they could really use a scoring winger.

So should the Penguins trade Evgeni Malkin?

No, not this summer. But eventually, yes.

Malkin still has three years on his contract. There is no point in trading him right now. He will bounce back from two mediocre seasons and perform like he used to. He is one of the best players in the game, and he is part of the core of the Penguins.

For the foreseeable future, Malkin will be wearing the black and gold.

However, a year and a half or two years from now, it will be very sensible for the Penguins to trade Malkin.

At that time, in two seasons, Crosby’s contract expires. Crosby will be 25, turning 26, during the summer of 2013. He’ll be looking for the biggest contract of his career with as many years and dollars as possible. There is no doubt the Penguins will shell out top dollar to Crosby, and he deserves every penny of it. Crosby should be the Penguins’ top priority, and he probably will be.

So where does that leave Malkin? He enters the last season on his contract, and he probably will be expecting top dollar too. If the Pens want to win Cups, they need to have depth on their roster. It’s not all about the top two lines. Without money to spend, they will not have enough money to spend on role players.

The summer the Penguins give Crosby that huge contract, they should trade Malkin. It’s not foreseeable right now who the Penguins should get for him. But they could get high draft picks and very good young players for him. Perhaps trade Malkin for a Taylor Hall, who will just be getting ready to make money. Any star that will get paid less than Malkin and have fewer years on his contract should be fine.

The reason for doing this is simple.

Evgeni Malkin is going to deserve his money, and he’s going to want it. He’s going to want a long-term contract. It’s his one shot to make big money, and he’s going to use it to his advantage—and he should. The Penguins know this, and they know they will not be able to afford to keep both Crosby and Malkin. (Let’s not forget they need to pay Jordan Staal and Marc-Andre Fleury too.)

So why should the Penguins risk losing him for absolutely nothing? They should trade him away that summer and get some stars and draft picks in return.

This way the Penguins will still be able to compete for a Stanley Cup year in and year out without Geno.

Despite this, Geno will forever be a Penguins legend for his contributions.

NHL surging past the NBA:

June 2004. Vincent LeCavalier and the Tampa Bay Lightning win the Stanley Cup over the Calgary Flames in 7 games. However, there is uncertainty in the NHL’s future. The collective bargaining agreement was expiring, more than half of the teams in the NHL were losing money, and interest in the sport was falling after the faces of the game, such as Mario Lemieux and Wayne Gretzky had retired or aged. The NHL was dormant in 2004-05. Arenas were dark and the NHL’s future seemed darker. Finally, the NHL signed a new CBA in 2005 and it was back in the fall with a new TV agreement with Outdoor Life Network, now Versus, new marketable stars in Sidney Crosby, Alexander Ovechkin, and Evgeni Malkin, and new rules to make the game faster and more appealing to the fans.

Four years have passed. Crosby has won a cup. The Penguins and Capitals have established one of the greatest rivalries in recent memory. Even newer stars keep popping up like Anze Kopitar for the Kings, Steven Stamkos of the Lightning, Steve Mason of the Blue Jackets, and John Tavares of the Islanders. The NHL keeps setting attendance records. Last season, the NHL had 18 teams who had 95% attendance and up. The NBA on the other hand had 16 teams. Media outlets like ESPN continued to bury the NHL and they still do. Some “analysts” said the NHL would never come back. Now they are eating their own words.

It is true that NBA TV ratings continue to dominate the NHL’s. But that is because of the exposure it gets. The NBA is on ESPN which is available EVERYWHERE, but Versus is only available to a fraction of the amount of people that have ESPN. The casual fan sees the NBA because its on the ESPN. They may not even care about the game but they see it because its on ESPN. ESPN also shows more NBA highlights because they televise the NBA and need people to watch it. This also explains why they have started showing soccer highlights. They have the rights to Premier League matches so they show more soccer games and highlights. Years ago, ESPN didn’t even give a damn about soccer, because they didn’t show games.

Versus is doing a great job with the NHL. It’s getting a lot better. But, especially with the DirecTV-Versus dispute, the NHL needs to get back on ESPN in the next decade. Crosby and Ovechkin have not even hit their primes yet. Once they do, and the world sees the great sport we all love, the NHL will hit the roof. The NBA is also coming off a dirty officiating scandal with Tim Donaghy. A lot of questionable calls. People are sick of it. The NHL has players with the best personalities. Most fan-friendly. Watch out NBA!