Summers in the NHL can be slow. We have the draft, we have free agency, and we have a few trades here and there, but as the action relaxes, we get the chance to sit back and observe the major (or, let’s be real, minor) changes teams make to try and improve their club’s outlook.

Something that has a massive influence on what those changes look like is the Stanley Cup Final. Decision-makers are watching the league’s two top dogs duke it out for the ultimate prize, and because all decision-makers are human, they often sit and wonder what those teams have that they don’t.

Let’s take a quick trip down memory lane. When VGK won their first cup, some dialogue started around whether or not the big-ticket goalies were worth it, and we also finally kiboshed the “you can’t win with a $10M player” narrative. When FLA won their back-to-back cups, veteran presence had a renaissance moment, and GMs started looking at who could be their Matthew Tkachuk.

Regardless of whether Lord Stanley makes an extended trip to Nevada or North Carolina this summer, I feel like we’re in for some interesting conversations. Let’s dive into some of the most prevalent themes we might see.

(And to stay connected to the theme of our newsletter, each theme will invite a question that competing teams may ask… to which there is likely no right answer.)

Until this year, it felt like Groundhog Day watching the modern Carolina Hurricanes begin their NHL post-season journey every year. Perennial high seed getting bounced before the cup final. Nothing to see here.

It felt like the same problems were leading to Carolina’s downfall each year. In a case like this, I think a lot of teams would have taken drastic measures — big deadline swings, huge off-season splashes — to try and get over the hump. But the way I describe Carolina’s roster management in the 2020s is “calm”, and I mean that in a complimentary way.

This year, Carolina had a quiet deadline, but going into the post-season, in my opinion, they had the best roster on paper they’ve had in this core’s era. They didn’t push all their chips in on whoever the most expensive player available was this March. They gently regrouped after a playoff exit last year, addressed key areas of need with acquisitions like Nikolaj Ehlers and K’Andre Miller, and proceeded with business as usual.

This is only possible because Tulsky and co. have treated their roster with great care. They’re living proof that you can be good for multiple years, and then really, truly get better before you get worse. So I wonder if Carolina’s success will have more teams asking, if we still like as many of our pieces as we do, should we run it back again?

In a completely separate vein, there are few teams that have acquired players in the way that Vegas has.

Like every team, their roster is composed of a healthy mix of drafted players, à la Pavel Dorofeyev, traded players, à la Jack Eichel, and signed players, à la Dylan Coghlan. However, some of these groups are more well-represented than others, and there’s a secret fourth thing that is very prevalent in their roster construction.

It’s fitting that the Sin City hockey club would enjoy taking gambles, but I’m actually a big fan of how Vegas has tried its luck on the trade market. High-impact pending UFAs are expensive, but the trade route has traditionally been one of Vegas’ most successful avenues of talent acquisition. So they keep doing it. But the issues are, said high-impact pending UFAs are (1) always acquired, by Vegas or otherwise, at a premium because of the market they’re being dealt in, and (2), only contributing to your team for 20 games. With a relatively even starting point of draft capital assets to trade, teams can’t afford to pay TDL prices and acquire in TDL windows every time they want to bring in a player.

So what has Vegas done? They’ve taken a chance on themselves. Instead of the traditional route of buying said pending UFA, making a push, and then letting them walk, Vegas has managed to turn around and re-sign a lot of their pending FAs. On the trade market, they’re still paying the 20-game (albeit jacked up) price for a player, but when they go on to successfully extend the player in question, they actually paid that price for multiple seasons of a player they like, à la Ivan Barbashev and Tomas Hertl.

Not every market has as winning a record, as warm a climate, or as non-existent a state income tax as Vegas, but their success still begs the question: should we be trying to treat our short-term trades as long-term solutions?

If you ever want to get me going on something, start a conversation about forward deployment in the NHL.

Because we’re human and we like categories and structures and boxes, we want to assign players to roles. He’s the middle-six power forward. He’s the top-six scoring winger. He’s the fourth-line energy guy. But I think the Carolina Hurricanes are approaching things in a little bit of a different way.

Instead of assigning players to archetypes and creating lines based on that, Rod Brind’amour has seemingly figured out that certain players’ skillsets and behaviours work better together than others. He’s optimizing player compatibility instead of role compatibility. And it’s kind of working.

For most of the playoffs, here’s how Carolina’s forwards stacked up:

All of these lines, especially in the top 9, embody traits of every type of traditional line a coach might try to put together in hockey. What you don’t have is a proper [insert definition here] line going over the boards in a curated situation. What you do have is an efficient version of Sebastian Aho, Taylor Hall, and Jordan Martinook that you may not see otherwise… and none of them are playing together.

What do you think the Carolina Hurricanes would look like if Rod wanted to pigeonhole his players into fitting onto a top line, second line, checking line, and energy line? I don’t think you’d be seeing a better version of Jackson Blake, that’s for damn sure. We’ve seen innovative conversations about forward pairings and skill alignment from lots of great hockey minds, but I think Rod’s forward deployment could inspire a really important question.

If we assigned our players to other players instead of to jobs, would our collective output increase?

There’s no long paragraph here. There’s no insightful narration of this question.

If the Vegas Golden Knights win the Stanley Cup, John Tortorella will have led them to this accomplishment having only coached eight regular-season games with the club.

We’re all familiar with the coaching bump teams often experience once they’ve had a few games to adjust to a new bench boss. However, for a million reasons that made so much sense to us three months ago, you don’t usually see that coaching bump begin in game 75.

But leave it to Kelly McCrimmon and George McPhee to be the ones to try it anyway… and of course, have it work in their favour, because it’s Vegas and this sport isn’t fair.

This is one of the most drastic changes a team can make… and also an action that can be applied to literally any of the 32 NHL teams as soon as next season. So of course, your GM has to at least be wondering: might the eleventh-hour coaching change work for us, too?

The last thing I want to touch on heavily applies to both of these hockey clubs. It makes me sound like a bit of a conspiracy theorist, but walk with me for a second.

Do you remember when Johnny Gaudreau broke onto the scene? He was one of the early catalysts in the 2010s movement around small, fast players. You’d watch him tear it up in whatever league he was in and quietly ask yourself, “does size really matter if no one can catch him?” This is a newsletter topic in itself, but it was a revolutionary time in hockey. It dared to ask the question: at what point does a competitive advantage become powerful enough to erase deficiencies?

However, equilibrium came soon after. The next question we asked was a bit less philosophical. What if big guys could also be fast? The modern NHL reminds us that you don’t have to be just one thing. Having a unique identifier is cool, but if you think about some of the most iconic modern “one-trick-pony” stars like Alex Ovechkin, they actually aren’t limited to just one thing at all. Ovechkin is known for his shot, but the goal-scoring record doesn’t exist without his unicorn-esque power forward play style.

Hey Lyss, get to the point. What I’m trying to say here is that I think the view of small, fast guys might become relevant to high-octane, offensive guys. I started thinking about this in more depth when Canada announced their forward group for the Olympics. Suzuki, Wilson, Hagel, Reinhart, Cirelli… it felt like a meeting of the minds if the minds were all Selke-level all-stars.

If we can learn anything from Mitch Marner, Jack Eichel, Sebastian Aho, and Seth Jarvis, it’s that you don’t have to be a black hole defensively in order to be an elite offensive contributor (though these playoffs have been a bit quieter for the aforementioned jerks). You can do it all. And I wonder if there’s a shift on the horizon, as players like Macklin Celebrini become the role model, towards understanding that offensive contribution doesn’t inherently have to come at the expense of defensive contribution.

That’s not to say that there aren’t players on both of these teams who are much better in one zone than the other. All of these players are different. That’s cool and that matters. But it’s just some interesting food for thought as we look at how the game is evolving, and who’s emerging as a real superstar along the way.

So I guess, staying on theme, we’ll sum this up into a really challenging question that could force some tough conversations: do our best forwards actually have to be bad at defense?

It would be a miss on my part if I didn’t also add that both of these teams have several high-impact Manitobans, but I won’t take a victory lap on you guys too hard.

As a parting shot, I do want to quote my Lord and Saviour, Billy Beane, and remind you that if we try to play like the Yankees in here, we will lose to the Yankees out there. Every NHL team is different, and though it is a copycat league, there are too many variables that make a championship team what it is, and plugging one or two onto your team likely won’t turn you into them.

Some of these might be the perfect solution for your hockey club. Most of them probably aren’t. But it’ll be interesting to see if any of these replicable traits of successful hockey teams will have any influence on what yours does this summer… and then, of course, how that’ll look in the fall.