Left Wing Tiers/Rankings
Plus Doughty, Jumbo, and the best player I ever played against
Let’s talk Drew Doughty. Over the weekend, Doughty got upset because TSN apparently didn’t have him on the projected roster for the next Canadian Olympic team. Doughty asserted that any suggestion that he has declined is only media related, that his peers and coaches have never said that to him.
I believe that they haven’t said that to him. Unfortunately, that has no bearing on whether or not rumors of Doughty’s decline are true. As Micah noted, Doughty signed an 8-year, $88 million contract in the summer of 2018.
The Kings have been outscored by 29 goals in the past two seasons with Doughty on the ice. That’s not all on him, of course, but the Kings are outshot by more with Doughty on the ice than when he’s on the bench. That’s something that wasn’t the case earlier in his career. When Doughty was in his prime, the Kings outshot and outscored the opposition when he was on the ice. The Kings had better results with Doughty on the ice. Now they don’t. Now they have better results when he’s on the bench and, on top of all that, they are hooked into a long-term $11 million contract that appears to be one of the biggest albatross contracts in the league.
Now, Doughty is young enough that he may still have some Fs left to give and if he plays like that it’s entirely possible that he could be very good once again. But if the excuse for poor results is that he hasn’t cared enough to play his best while on a bad team…well that’s not really any excuse at all, is it?
There are lots of analysts dunking on Doughty’s performance in recent seasons. I would be fascinated to really know what Doughty thinks about it. Not the bravado for public consumption bit, but whether or not, when he’s driving home after another loss, does he recognize that he’s not performing like he did at his peak? He’s still getting paid either way (until he gets bought out) but, judging by Doughty’s reaction to the mock Team Canada roster, he cares about his legacy, about being recognized as a great defenseman. He can’t possibly see what has happened in the past two seasons and still think that he’s a lock for Team Canada, can he? See, this is why I think it would be fascinating to really know how his mind has processed this decline in performance.
Hamonic to the Canucks
Another veteran right-shot defenseman is moving this offseason and it’s Travis Hamonic, who is joining the Vancouver Canucks on a PTO, which leaves him open to be signed by Vancouver when Micheal Ferland is placed on Long-Term Injured Reserve. Hamonic has been a top-four defenseman for virtually his entire career and, at times, has played quite well, though he has been on the wrong side of shots and goals in three of the past four seasons. In Vancouver, Hamonic has a chance to add stability to their blueline.
Jumbo Joe Thornton starting on left wing with Matthews and Marner.
I don’t know if it will last but Thornton is one of the best passers of his generation. If he can keep up, having him feed Matthews could work. It might not. He’s 41. But Jumbo on the wing feeding the best young goal-scorer in the league isn’t some impossible dream. Would I be jumping up to get Thornton in fantasy? No, but he’s probably worth a late-round flier, as is just about anyone who gets to ride shotgun with Matthews and Marner. There are some lines that are automatically appealing – that’s one of them.
LEFT WING Tiers/Rankings
Tier 1
Alex Ovechkin, Artemi Panarin, Brad Marchand
It says something about the talent on the board that this isn’t just Ovechkin alone, where he’s been for a decade or more. He still deserves top spot, in part because not only is he the top scorer in the game and an elite shot generator, but the man still hits like a freight train and those hits, from a player that never gets hurt, secure Ovi’s fantasy value. Panarin is coming off the best season of his career, 95 points in 69 games, and he has proven he can score with just about anyone on his line. He’s also plus-99 in five NHL seasons. Marchand is a pest but is a pest who, in the past four seasons, is averaging 34 goals, 89 points and plus-21. That will get you in the top tier.
Tier 2
Jonathan Huberdeau, J.T. Miller, Johnny Gaudreau, Taylor Hall, Jake Guentzel
Huberdeau is great, bordering on the top tier, and he does have 170 points in the pats two seasons. Miller is coming off a career year for Vancouver, and if he’s a legit point per game guy now that would really help. Given his previous track record, it’s fair to pump the brakes just a little bit. It’s kind of going in the opposite direction for the next two. Johnny Hockey had a career year in 2018-2019 then had a career-low 58 points last season. The expectation has to be that the Flames stars will be better this year. Taylor Hall is now two seasons removed from winning the Hart Trophy and has played a total of 98 games in the past two seasons but he can still be effective when he’s healthy and if he is skating with Jack Eichel this season, there is a chance for great production. Guentzel is another one coming off an injury but he’s put up 119 points in 121 games over the past two seasons. He rides shotgun with Crosby, and that’s still a good place to be.
Tier 3
Brady Tkachuk, Matthew Tkachuk, Kyle Connor, Claude Giroux, Mike Hoffman, Evander Kane
The Tkachuk brothers are rising stars. Matthew is the better scorer, easily, but Brady may be more valuable in fantasy because he is a more physical player – more than 300 hits and 100 PIMs last season – but you’ll be happy with either one of them. Connor has three straight seasons with more than 30 goals and everything has been moving up, more ice time, more points every year. He doesn’t get you any hits or blocked shots but the scoring numbers are pretty easy to like. Giroux’s production dropped off last season, so maybe this is a touch early for him but maybe a little respect for the guy who had a point per game over the previous eight seasons.
Tier 4
Gabriel Landeskog, Jonathan Marchessault, Teuvo Teravainen, Filip Forsberg, Max Pacioretty, Ryan Nugent-Hopkins
Tier 4 is still a strong group. Landeskog does a bit of everything, though his value is obviously stronger when he plays with Nathan MacKinnon. Marchessault is a decent scorer and a stealth hitter – 99, 98, 99 hits in the past three seasons! Turbo Teravainen has 139 points in the past two seasons, Forsberg is a great talent, albeit one that has never scored more than 64 points in a season – that’s fine, there are lots of players who don’t score more than that, but Forsberg has the skill to produce more. Pacioretty is coming off a tremendous season, with 66 points in 71 games, the best per-game scoring rate of his career. It might be asking a lot for him to duplicate that season though. Nugent-Hopkins kind of can’t lose in Edmonton – he either ends up with Connor McDavid or Leon Draisaitl. Well, it’s possible that Nuge gets stuck if those two play together but that hasn’t really been the plan lately.
Tier 5
Kirill Kaprizov, Jamie Benn, Anders Lee, David Perron, Tomas Tatar
Kaprizov is a rookie, and I don’t want to overtout rookies, but he comes with a strong scoring track record in the KHL, which includes 113 points in 114 games over the past two seasons. Benn is getting broken down by years of playing a hard physical game but he fills the categories across the board. Anders Lee is a power forward who can score and hit but his power-play production dried up last season, just 2 PP goals after scoring 33 in the previous three seasons. Perron is a feisty veteran winger who had the second 60-point season of his career last season. He plays a huge role on the Blues power play, where he scored 27 points last season. Tatar has rebounded nicely after he flopped in Vegas, putting up 119 points in two seasons with the Habs.
Tier 6
Chris Kreider, Nikolaj Ehlers, Alexis Lafreniere, Dominik Kubalik
Kreider has more than 20 goals in five of the past six seasons, more than 100 hits in seven straight years. Valuable player, wonder if he loses any time to Lafreniere, the top pick in the draft who appears to be ready to play and produce at this level. Ehlers is a better real player than fantasy player but he has more than 55 points in three of the pats four seasons. Kubalik was a revelation as a rookie, tallying 21 goals in his last 41 regular season games and opening the playoffs with a five-point game. Will he still be sniping if the Blackhawks don’t have their full complement of centres this season?
Tier 7
Blake Coleman, Rickard Rakell, Jaden Schwartz, Jason Zucker, Jakub Vrana, Zach Parise, Nikita Gusev
Coleman has back-to-back seasons with at least 20 goals and three seasons in a row with at least 190 hits. Rakell is a two-time 30-goal scorer who has slumped in back-to-back seasons. Schwartz has produced at least 55 points in five of the past seven seasons. Zucker should benefit from his move to Pittsburgh (had 6 G, 6 A in 15 GP for Pittsburgh last season). Vrana busted out as a goal-scorer last year but doesn’t have a big power play role in Washington and that holds him back a bit. Parise is 36 now but has back-to-back seasons with at least 25 goals. Gusev started slowly but came on down the stretch, producing 30 points in his last 37 games.
Tier 8
Jeff Skinner, Zach Hyman, Nick Foligno, Tyler Bertuzzi, Anthony Beauvillier, Jake DeBrusk, James van Riemsdyk
Lots of risk-reward plays here. Skinner trends up and down from year to year, so this should be a bounce-back season but it’s not easy to trust him after 23 points in 59 games. Hyman is a tireless worker who has had back-to-back season with 21 goals but he’s heavily dependent on a top-six role in Toronto to have fantasy value. Foligno is a hitter, which helps his value and he should be in a scoring role this season, giving him a shot at better production. Bertuzzi is a quietly productive winger on a bad team. Beauvillier is still just 23 and there is potential for a break out, especially if he finds his way to Mathew Barzal’s line. Jake DeBrusk has been a second-line left winger in Boston and he and David Krejci have been waiting for the right fit on the right side. Craig Smith or Ondrej Kase should lock it down this season and that ought to help DeBrusk. JvR had 19 goals and 40 points last season. He’s 31, so he may still have some goals left in the tank but he could be slowing down some, too.
Tier 9
Tanner Pearson, Boone Jenner, Alex Killorn, Ondrej Palat, Brandon Saad, Frank Vatrano, Alex Iafallo
By this point, beauty is in the eye of the beholder…and none of these guys qualify as fantasy beauties. Pearson, Killorn, and Palat are solid secondary contributors. Saad is a strong 5-on-5 player who doesn’t have a power play role. Jenner is a wildcard because he is a hitter so if he scores a little, there’s a chance that he could have value. Vatrano is a depth winger who does generate some shots. Iafallo is a speedy winger who had a career-high 17 goals and 43 points last season.
Tier 10
Brandon Tanev, Jonathan Drouin, Anthony Duclair, Andreas Johnsson, Andre Burakovsky, Jesper Bratt, Adrian Kempe, Ryan Donato
Tanev actually has value for hits and blocked shots but doesn’t score a ton. Drouin is hard to trust when it seems like the Habs don’t. Duclair just keeps moving from team to team but is getting a shot on Florida’s top line. Johnsson should benefit from his move to New Jersey – his teammates won’t be as good as he had it in Toronto, but he should get more ice time. Burakovsky had the best year of his career for Colorado last season. Bratt is an intriguing sleeper pick – talented player who is still looking for a contract. Donato is another possible sleeper – didn’t play much for Minnesota but he has shown he can generate shots and if the Sharks give him enough playing time, he should be able to give them secondary offense.
Tier 11
James Neal, Ilya Mikheyev, Oskar Lindblom, Andrew Mangiapane, Max Comtois
Pretty much wildcards down here. Neal rebounded from a disastrous 2018-2019 season but 19 goals and 31 points isn’t moving the needly. Mikheyev had a solid rookie season, at least at evens, before getting hurt. Lindblom is returning from a season cut short by a cancer diagnosis – he was a promising player before that, so maybe…Mangiapane finished strong last year (13 points in his last 12 games) and Comtois could be something if he can score a little because he plays a physical game. Wildcards, remember.
Cam Robinson of Elite Prospects asked, “Who is the best player you have ever played against?” The thing is, I wrote an article about this a while back when I was at TSN. The answer for me was Chris Pronger. Not everyone played against a Hall of Famer.
Here is the text of that article - some of the information is dated by now but a fun trip down memory lane.
It looks like the end of the career is near for the best hockey player I ever played against.
(It may not be. Maybe there is still a happier ending to the story, but it caught my attention in this first week of the NHL season, when his NHL team could desperately use him.)
Every Canadian kid that played a reasonably competitive level of hockey growing up has stories about someone they played with or against that went on to fame and fortune. This is mine.
Hockey is such a pervasive part of Canadian culture that there are countless intersections between okay players (like me) and the really special players who become household names.
We play on youth teams, in summer leagues, shinny at local arenas, maybe junior hockey, whatever, but we all pretty much have at least the faintest connection to someone who has lived the dream of making it to the NHL.
Sometimes we also find out that being a special player as a teenager isn’t what makes a player special later on but, if you’ve been around the rink long enough, there are too many examples of players that seemed destined for greatness that never made it and, conversely, some that didn’t have high expectations, yet somehow persevered enough to make it big.
Growing up in Kingston, I played youth hockey with and against some guys who were eventually NHL prospects, but didn’t quite pan out, like Brandon Convery.
In various minor hockey tournaments, we would cross paths with players that went on to bigger and better things. As a kid who was always into stats I seemed to take note of names and numbers more than most (if not all). I recall, after moving back to Kitchener, playing against Andrew Brunette and his Rayside-Balfour team in the finals of a Midget tournament in Prescott, Ontario.
Our university team (Wilfrid Laurier) went 21-2-1 one year and still finished second in our division because Steve Rucchin was a force at Western Ontario.
Our Midget AAA coaches told us that a young defenceman on our team would reach the NHL. He was, indeed, a first-round pick in the NHL, but Nick Stajduhar‘s career (two NHL games) probably didn’t pan out the way he or the Edmonton Oilers had hoped.
I’m pretty sure Jason Dawe chipped my front tooth in a summer tournament. It wasn’t an incident, not even deserving a penalty, but these things happen, you know?
At my high school in Kitchener, Ontario, Cam Stewart was a local legend, having scored 138 points (with 174 penalty minutes) in 46 games in his final year of Junior B competition with the Elmira Sugar Kings, before getting drafted in the third round by the Boston Bruins and earning a full ride to the University of Michigan. Cam played a couple hundred NHL games as a hard-hitting checking forward before injuries cut his career short.
When I started playing in that same junior Junior B league, our Kitchener Dutchmen team was comprised of mostly local kids, moving up from the Midget AAA Greenshirts. We did win the Sutherland Cup (All-Ontario title) in my second season and had a handful of guys grab scholarships, but that first year we were mostly just a collection of guys while other teams in our league had some players that went on to more prosperous hockey careers.
Scott Walker, a smooth skater who would fight anyone, played for the Cambridge Winter Hawks and played more than 800 NHL games mostly with Vancouver, Nashville and Carolina. Rem Murray was a skilled scorer on a powerhouse Stratford Cullitons team and skated in 560 NHL games with the Oilers, Rangers and Predators. Greg de Vries played nearly 1,000 regular season and playoff games in the NHL and won a Stanley Cup with Colorado.
But the real draw for scouts in our league that year was a trio of 15-year-olds: Chris Gratton in Brantford, Todd Harvey in Cambridge and Chris Pronger in Stratford. In a league in which most players ranged in age from 17 to 20, these highly-touted kids turned heads in every rink.
Gratton was playing on a veteran-laden Brantford team that was full of big bruisers and Gratton already had the size and strength to fit in. He didn’t wreak havoc like some of his teammates, but the older guys made sure that he wasn’t messed with either.
Harvey was a different animal. He played in the league the year before (as a 14-year-old!) and was both a big scorer and scrapper. That he went on to play more than 700 NHL games (including playoffs) wasn’t a surprise. The surprise turned out to be, given all the hype he received as a 14 and 15-year-old, that he was a grinder in the NHL instead of a star.
But Pronger, he stood out. For one thing, he was 6-foot-5 and about 160 pounds, so he was as rail thin as any hockey player I’d ever seen (and if anyone knew about rail-thin hockey players, it was yours truly), but Pronger was also extremely poised with the puck and an excellent skater, especially for a kid who could have been a gangly mess given his size.
Stratford was a perennial powerhouse in the Midwestern Junior B League in that era, with future NHLers like Ed Olczyk, Nelson Emerson, Rob Blake, and Bryan Smolinski among those that played there before it was Justin Bieber’s home town.
Their team that year was no different, and I recall them lighting us up at least once for a dozen goals, but it was easy to see why everyone was so enamored with Pronger.
While he wasn’t as aggressive as, say, Harvey, Pronger was already quite liberal in his use of the lumber (something that carried through to his pro career), in some ways reflecting what hockey was like 20 years ago, when obstruction, hooking and slashing were accepted parts of the game.
He was also doing what it took to survive when playing against guys who had to hit him as often as possible if they were going to have any hope of containing him.
It was easy to see why scouts loved Pronger. With that frame, skill and disposition, he was surely going to be a great pro if he stayed on track (and maybe put on a few pounds).
He moved on to the Peterborough Petes of the Ontario Hockey League and was the second overall pick in 1993, behind Alexandre Daigle.
There have been challenges along the way, including a wake-up call with a trade to St. Louis after some poor off-ice decisions in his first couple years with the Hartford Whalers and he’s still none too popular in Edmonton after demanding a trade following their run to the Stanley Cup Final in 2006.
But, Pronger has played 1167 regular season NHL games, plus 173 more in the playoffs (which is the most among “active” defencemen by a wide margin; Sergei Gonchar, at 125, ranks second), has won a Hart Trophy, Norris Trophy, a Stanley Cup, two Olympic Gold Medals (representing Canada four times at the Olympics) and is a lock to get into the Hockey Hall of Fame when his time comes for induction.
I’ve been at TSN long enough that I’ve seen NHL careers begin and end, seeing players go from fresh-faced teenagers to grizzled and worn-down veterans in that time, and the sporting world serves as an accelerated reminder about the cycle of life.
Time stops for no one, least of all those who make their livelihood in such a physically-demanding pursuit.
Word hasn’t been good on Pronger ever since he suffered a concussion in November, 2011. Nothing has been made official about his status nor does it need to be anytime soon. Maybe there is still a comeback possible, some way to put a happy ending on his playing career, but that doesn’t appear to be the most likely outcome.
His brother, Sean Pronger, recently commented, in a chat on www.Deadspin.com, “I don’t think he’ll play again but what do I know” and, combined with the fact that Chris Pronger is 38-years-old and hasn’t played in more than a year, well, it’s entirely reasonable to think that he has played his last game in the NHL.
If that’s the case, it’s sad news for the Flyers, who miss his presence as a top pair defenceman and it’s a day-to-day challenge for the Pronger family, as they deal with post-concussion effects that can be long-lasting and have an immeasurable impact on everyday life.
Most definitely, it would be a sad way to end an illustrious career, one which I was fortunate enough to cross paths with, if only for the briefest of moments.
In response to my mention of Pronger, one of his teammates on that Stratford team, Jason Mervyn, passed along a team photo. Mervyn was some kind of scorer, too. The next season, he scored 79 goals in 48 games.