Filling in the roster for the 2023 playoffs all-disappointment team

It’s the third round of the NHL playoffs, still, thanks to a Dallas Stars team that doesn’t seem to want to quit. With the Golden Knights wobbling and the Panthers resting up, we’re almost at the finish line.

Are you feeling disappointed yet?

Probably. Only three teams remain, which means 29 fan bases are experiencing mandatory misery. Certainly, fans of the 13 playoff teams on the sidelines will be looking for someone to blame.

That’s where we come in. Every year, right around this time, we like to assemble an all-star roster of playoff letdowns. It’s our chance to shine a spotlight on some of those players who were curiously absent from the highlight reels when they were needed most.

As always, we’re not mad, just disappointed. We'll be taking at least one player per playoff team. And we’ll build from the net out, the way all great sad teams do.

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Goaltenders

Andrei Vasilevskiy, Lightning

Goaltending is weird, man. After spending the better part of a decade as the NHL’s most bankable big-game goalie (including three straight years with long playoff runs where he put up a .920 save percentage or better), Vasilevskiy posted the worst numbers of any playoff goalie with at least five starts. I guess that’s just what happens when you’re facing an offensive juggernaut like the playoff Maple Leafs.

Linus Ullmark, Bruins

From the sounds of things, they’ve already engraved his name on the Vezina. Luckily for him, that award is based entirely on the regular season, because Ullmark became the story of the Bruins’ shocking first-round loss. That’s not entirely him – he was hurting, and fatigue was clearly an issue, so Jim Montgomery probably should have swapped in Jeremy Swayman for a game earlier in the series. Instead, the Bruins rode Ullmark until he started to sputter in Game 5, then let him get shelled in Game 6 before benching him with the season on the line.

It didn’t work, and combined with last year’s performance that saw him lose the starter’s job after just two games, it has to create at least a few questions about how reliable Ullmark can be in the postseason.

Stuart Skinner, Oilers

We always have a third goalie on this team, if only because we’ll probably need one. The Oilers may have wished they had a third option too. Skinner was a great story this year, winning the starter’s job as a rookie and even making the all-star team. But he stumbled in the playoffs, especially against the Golden Knights; it got so bad that some Oiler fans were even asking for Jack Campbell to take over. Goaltending wasn’t the only reason they lost, but it was sure one of them, so we'll give him this spot in a narrow decision over Vitek Vanecek.

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The Athletic Hockey Show: Draft day

On this week's episode of The Athletic Hockey Show:
- The latest on a confusing and scary situation with Kirill Kaprizov
- Kris Letang's extension breaks as we're recording
- Lots of draft and trade speculation, most of it already out of date
- The story of the worst draft year any team has ever had
- This week in history, three hockey writers get lost on the way to a party, and more...

The Athletic Hockey Show runs most days of the week during the season, with Ian and I hosting every Thursday. There are two versions of each episode available:
- An ad-free version for subscribers that you can find here
- An ad-supported version you can get for free wherever you normally find your podcasts (like Apple or Spotify)

Weekend rankings: The Canadiens’ spot slips away, while the Central race is down to two

Look, we’re not saying it’s going to happen. We’re not even saying it’s likely to happen.

Still, you’re a little nervous about missing the playoffs, right Habs fans?

OK, probably not. Being “a little nervous” was two weeks ago, when the Habs were refusing to close this thing out even as the Flames were spiraling and the Canucks were sidelines. By last week, we were asking how worried the Canadiens should be, and the answer their fans kept offering was “A whole lot, but thanks for asking, really glad you brought that up right now”.

Here’s where we’re at in the North. The Leafs just took two from the Jets in games that saw Winnipeg pull its star goalie and bench its best forward, so even though we’ve been here before, it’s feeling pretty safe to say Toronto will finish first unless they collapse. That will give us an intriguing Jets/Oilers matchup in the first round, with lots of old-school Smythe Division baggage to unpack.

So who gets fourth? For most of the second half, that’s been Montreal’s spot to lose. It still is, but man, they’re working on it. They’ve won three of their last 11, they can’t score, and Carey Price and Brendan Gallagher are both out. They can’t use Cole Caufield because they don’t have cap space, and they don’t have cap space because of how Marc Bergevin approached the deadline, and here we are.

But despite it all, they came into this week with an opportunity to put the whole thing to bed. A five-game Alberta trip featuring three against the Flames was a chance to knock out Calgary with a win or two, at which point it would just be about holding serve long enough to outlast the Canucks.

Instead, the Habs split two with the Oilers and then dropped the first two of the Calgary series, both in regulation. That moved the Flames to within six points, which is still a big gap, and if Montreal win the finale tonight then that’s probably about it for Calgary. But if the Flames finish the sweep, hoo boy.

Meanwhile, the Canucks are lurking, even with Elias Pettersson unlikely to return this year. They’re ten points back but with five in hand, including two more this week against the Senators. Dom has Vancouver’s odds at 19% and the Flames at 11%, which leaves the Habs sitting well north of “probably” but nowhere close to “sure thing”.

The bottom line is that Montreal is still running this show. They’ve got ten games left including tonight and if they win, let’s say six of them, we’re pretty much done. Winning six of ten isn’t too much to ask. It’s pretty much the baseline expectation for a playoff team.

Is that what the Canadiens are? We’re not sure. We’ve got ten games to find out.

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Friday Grab Bag: The worldwide leader returns

In the Friday Grab Bag:
- My spies have found some top secret details about the new ESPN TV deal
- Introducing the concpt of Fake .500
- An obscure player who was brieflythe Kirill Kaprizov of the mid-90s
- The three comedy stars
- And a YouTube look back at ESPN's attempt to hype on of the worst games in NHL history

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