I point that out all the time and how the whole stink with Aubut could have easily been avoided if the NHL just did what they'd always done and would always do again.

Because one of the best NHL stories had to happen where the Nordiques traded Lindros twice. Couldn’t have happened in San Jose. It was part of the script. It’s also an essential piece to prevent the Rat Panthers from winning in 1996. The state of Florida already has too many cups with 3.

@@justletmecommentprzleafs fan clearly

SJ didn't even get the 1st pick

Lindros probably would have also snubbed the Sharks, but he could have been traded for a package of players like the Avalanche got (from their time in Quebec City.) Who was the player they got instead of Lindros? Pat Falloon. At the end of his career, he was so out of shape his teammates called him "Fat Balloon."

Yeah, the North Stars didn't want any of the players Quebec had exposed for the draft, so they played a little dirty there.

There is so much more talent today that guys buried in the bottom 6 can be stars when put into bigger roles. Mccann was never going to be a 40 goal scorer in Pittsburgh. He was buried in the lineup and Sullivan wanted to keep putting him in situations that didn't fit his abilities. He was a natural goal scorer being used as a bottom 6 grinder because they already had guys in their top 6 who were well established.

For real I agree with this sentiment. THG makes hockey accessible for everyone and opens the gates for new fans. That's how hockey and sports bring people together

Clearly Bettman gave Vegas Stephenson for a 5th round pick; no other team was allowed to do that. Or Martinez for 2 2nds, Amadio off waivers, Whitecloud undrafted, signed Pietrangelo as a free agent, Barbashev for a meh prospect, etc. Somehow no other teams have also figured out that as long as you don't sign guys to unnecessarily long contracts, you can just let guys walk for free/trade them for next to nothing when they show signs of decline... because you get cap space back to just sign other free agents. Vegas has made out like bandits not anchoring themselves to players in their twilight years; they only have Lehner's potentially dead weight contract and at worse it's two more years of dead weight.

​@@brianhum8765I'm expecting them to trade that to Eris-Zona soon, from what I'm hearing they need another dead contract to backfill after Ladd's deal expires and puts them back below the floor...

@@BeastOfMetal1989 Right; Arizona loves collecting HoFers. Once they’re washed.

​@@brianhum8765 You know I was making compliments to Vegas, they've managed the roster really well. No doubt about it! Short contracts are way safer than 8 years 8mil contracts. Point with some teams getting scammed by the draft rules is situations like Pitt and flower where they got dealt a really bad hand. Vegas has also made it's misses with it's signings if were are being honest. Stastny, Patches, Schipachyov, Tatar, Dadonov didn't really work out did they? Yes they got rid of them, so they salvaged the situation and now are the champions.

Brian Bradley 32 goals before the all star stretch was ode nasty

I’m ngl it seems like he also jinxed the lightning finishing above .500 because after the shutout win against the weak expansion senators (1-15-1 atm) the team would never hit NHL .500 again. Funny expansion team stuff

What do you mean exactly?

This might be the only other factor in the changes to expansion team success in the NHL that Shannon didn't mention. I agree and have said many times that players coming up now are light years ahead of 20 years ago and there are way more quality skaters.

I often cite Vegas's run to the finals in their inaugural season as proof that the NHL today is not "watered down" as much as fans against expansion wanted to argue otherwise. William Karlsson and several other players had career years that season now that they finally had the opportunity to show they can be go-to players.

Rule changes too. Like in football. Both games rules have changed to protect health of players and so athlete body types change since they don't have to be so bulky to protect themselves with muscles. This means faster and leaner athletes and that eventually leads to more scoring

As a lifetime lightning fan I feel your pain. Don't think he was whitewashing it just doing a nice job of laying out all the factors. There is no doubt recent expansion teams got a much much better deal

Um the talent is also just better in general plus in this expansion draft teams purposely exposed guys due to their bad contracts or in marchessault's case, the gm Dale Tallon and the assistants he called "The Computer Boys" that the owner had hired a couple of years before against his wishes were fighting and he knew the computer guys liked marchessault so he purposely exposed him. No real gm in their right mind would expose a guy who was coming off a season where he scored 30 goals and he carried a cap hit of only $750,000. He chose to protect nick bjugstad, mark pysyk, alex petrovic, and keith yandle over reilly smith and marchessault. What gm in their right mind is doing that? He got fired in 2020 thanks to his actions.

In Minnesota they chose to give vegas erik haula and alex tuch in exchange for not picking matt dumba. They then to protect dumba in the seattle expansion draft decided to put themselves in dead cap hell by buying out suter's contract instead of simply asking him to waive his no movement clause. There was no way seattle was taking suter at his age. Now Minnesota is hitting the worst dead cap hell in league history, matt dumba just had the absolutely worst season of his career, so bad they couldn't get anything for him at the trade deadline and now his contract has expired, the majority of the current core is in their primes right now or are nearing the end of theirs, they have hardly no cap space, no number 1 center, and erik gustavsson who they thought they would let walk after this season just finished 2nd in g.a.a. and save percentage and was huge for them this year. If you ask Bill Guerin if he would do anything different he says he would do it all over again. The guy is a moron.

NDA with Bettman 😂

Better if he stays independent. You don't want some suit telling Shannon what topics he has to concentrate on. I definitely agree that his content keeps me coming back.

he’s better off being independent. i want to see how much the pat mcafee show falls going from independent to ESPN

​@@UserName-ts3spthey get to keep control of the topics. Pat worked it out so basically they get to be aired on espn, and espn takes over production side of it which costs them a crap ton of money. Espn gets to then sell mcafee show stuff. Pat offered to tone down on the cursing but I'm sure his first day on espn he will say the word damn or fuck within the first minute to try and prove the show isn't changing like everyone claims.

ESPN only talks football and LeBron.

That and to help keep Pittsburgh from moving.

it more so had to do with keeping star players contracts lower priced... The nhlpa never wanted a cap!

Wings fans love to say we're the reason the cap happened xD but we all know it's more complicated than that

The Cap was put into place like it was in football to create competitive balance. If your management is solid you have a chance to win. If your management is stupid with the same pool of money, you won't be.

They were upset in the 1st round by LA in 2001. Then they signed Hull, Robitaille, and Hasek that off-season and won the Cup in 2002. Yeah, it was getting absurd.

People forget because of a damn Rat killing.

And yet managed to acquire notable pieces for playoff series vs DET by 2004, SJ 2006 and 2007 and proceeded to tell Balsillie to 🖕 himself in 2007 before having to sell off/part with Hartnell, Timonen, Kariya, Vokoun, and Peter Forsberg to drive ticket sales again for local ownership groups to secure them in Nashville. A success by all accounts, and aside from the 2005 lockout, 2009, 2013, 2014, and 2023, a consistent playoff presence since 2004. Preds have just never had the dynamic offensive talent to drive the team forward with its all-star defense and vezina-caliber netminders.

Thanks for this comment. They talk about parity in the NHL, what a joke !

At least he was the first Norwegian to be a regular in the NHL. Björn Skaare was *the* first though, as he played 1 game for Detroit in 78/79.

Florida really said that if you take Smith we won't protect Marchessault. Vegas said bet and both will likely have their jerseys retired alongside Karlsson. Marchy has become what everyone hoped Fleury would have been in terms of THAT guy and from what I gather Smith is very active in the community (I live outside of Vegas).

@@TheForeverRanger I'm sorry but Marchessault and Smith getting their jerseys retired?? 😂😂Only jersey for Vegas that should be retired is Fleury but with how disrespectfully Vegas treated him that's not happening.

we made you guys take karlsson. gave ya a first and change to take him and david clarkson’s contract

Yeah and Gary's phone is innocent here of course...

@@XSharkdarkX My guy why would Gary Bettman just make sure Vegas gets a good team right off the bat?? Why wouldn't he do that with say Nashville or Minnesota or Columbus or Seattle for their first year?? Why just Vegas?? Don't try to use the "oh well the Raiders would be there in a few years" it doesn't matter those who like Football will watch it regardless, same with Hockey it's not a valid argument.

Mabye. But Hill was the backup. Thompson had better stats during the regular season but got injured. So mabye Vegas would have been better.

You have no ability to scout a goalie. The knights had 5 goalies in the reg season and none had a losing record. Even a washed up Quick had a winning record. Laurent Brossoit was 7-0 in the reg season. The Knights team defense carried their backup goalies to victory.

I can still hear James Patrick dinging the iron.

Still don't like how vegas treated fleury after the fact; promised he'd retire a knight, then didn't even give him heads up and traded him for nothing.

@@CozyToad I don't like it either but Fleury's agent really wasn't helping matters.

If Columbus' front office didn't make continuously stupid decisions with talent on the ice and coaching, the CBJ would be further along as a franchise by now. (Fellow CBJ fan here.)

Unfortunately they probably wouldn’t get a team back if they did that

@@humblelad well this is a hypothetical where we get the team back. But also, Columbus is a much more desirable market now than when we actually got the team in 1997

Doug McLean killed the jackets with his drafting.

thats what im "worried" about. i bet many teams are thinking starting a franchise now is a highway to happiness. even places like detroit or new jersey or kings who recently had good success might think dumping their entire roster and picking new one from other teams might be the faster route. at worst it could lead to some long standing franchises to go bankrupt. i mean an expansion team shouldnt be last but when kraken had a shot at the finals this year you know its not just vegas being an insanely successful project. so when the next expansion happens they need to allow the existing teams to protect a couple more players. or something

minnesota and columbus passed on martin st louis

You obviously haven't seen urinatingtree's video on this subject. Well here is what happened. Ottawa hired a former goon to lead their expansion draft. Day of the expansion draft, someone forgot to charge the battery on their laptop. The plug in at their table didn't work. They forgot to make a paper copy. So they started drafting guys based off of their memories and usually picked tough guys but didn't really pick any skilled guys except like 2. They also tried to pick guys from teams that had already lost 2 players which was the max a team could lose. They did that multiple times because they didn't have any notes or anything. They screwed themselves big time lol. They had to multiple times go on stage and apologize for their mistakes. It was an embarrassment.

Brian Hayward !

Take a second and look at the board THG has erected...look at all those magnets! Now, tell me there needs more teams? There's already too many teams with attendance issues or stuck in a decade or even decades of mediocority - Ana, Ari, Buf, CLb, Cgy, Det, Min, Mtl, Nas, NYi, Phi, SJ... I'd also include Tor (haven't won a Cup since '67) & Flo (this yrs Cup run was an aberration). When was the last time most of them were really good? That's 13 or 14 teams that have been consistently poor, or failed to make playoffs with great regularity - meaning the on ice product has been unsatisfactory - to poor - to borderline pathetic for a decade, decade and a half, or more. Why more teams? It's gonna be 34 teams, then 36, then for sure 40. Add another 3 or 4 teams who will be crap. There's so many things people can do besides having their eyes glued to screens or watching a group of grown men in their 30s fling pucks in person.

@@mannyoliveira776 QBC will never have attendance issues. Even if you shrink league half or more must miss playoffs. It’s the nature of pro leagues. Unless you limit contracts to like 3 yrs and players have to shuffle around.

LOL Sure

it’s not going to happen unless the league is desperate. like how winnepeg got the thrashers

@@UserName-ts3sp Jets should move to QBC

nashville definitely isn’t a failure. they’re in a smaller non-traditional market yet have entrenched themselves. they don’t have quite the on-ice success as tampa but they’re still a solid franchise. minnesota… two contracts have haunted the franchise for the last decade plus. the parise and suter deals made the wild a good team, but not good enough to take down the kings or blackhawks at their peak. now the wild found a legit superstar, but they can’t build around him because of the remnants of those deals. other than that they’re not failures. it’s pretty hard to screw up a hockey team in minnesota from a business perspective columbus… i don’t know honestly. management has mostly been terrible, especially early in the franchise’s history. they have solid ownership tho. and a solid fanbase… for now

Yes

@@kfnwuwbw9s The floor is part of a cap. If you’re going to cap salaries, you need to guarantee a minimum payout

@@kfnwuwbw9s They could still stockpile bad contracts for draft picks though. However the modern expansion rules surrounding player selection are so much better that I don’t think it would make sense for any expansion team to go full rebuild mode from the start

I fell for the trap being a cubs fan for years. Loving the "lovable losers" , if it wasnt for bad bounces, bartman, and curses we would of won, lol. I realized the year after bartman when I moved next to Wrigley in hope that this was the year, only to watch the players implode on each other and the announcers and still see the stands packed and the fans having fun and dealing with another losing season like its ok because "we are the Cubs, we cant win, have another beer." I realized the ruse and left my childhood favorite team and go all in with my second favorite team, the White Sox that fall. Lol, they just so happen to win the World Series and I enjoyed every minute of it along with my other departed fan that year, my favorite former cub announcer Steve Stone. I never looked back, even after the Cubs won the series, hard to describe but felt like an ex girlfriend that was cheating on you for years and leaving her for better person, haha.

as a columbus fan incompetent management ran the franchise into the ground for the first decade plus

its the fact that they keep expanding in the states and never in canada like quebec city, bettmen is absolutely stealing the game from canadians and canadian teams just cant compete with the american expansions.

@@retroblue69696 It also has a lot to do with the tax situation; players make a LOT less net salary if they play for Canadian teams vs American teams and the disparity is even worse in states with no personal income tax like.... oh hey, Nevada and Florida so Canadian teams have to overpay.

⁠@@retroblue69696why would they take in smaller canadian markets when there’s bigger untapped american markets? im sorry but you have significantly less potential with hamilton and quebec city vs phoenix and miami. there’s already a lot of NHL fans in quebec city and hamilton. they’re not going to draw as many new fans as riskier american markets. plus if we look at tv deals, in the states you’re losing quite a bit not having massive markets where you don’t really add much with canadian markets