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NHL loser points vs. Offside reviews, what’s worse? World Cup lessons? DGB mailbag

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Happy holidays, assuming they’ve started for you. If you’re at work today, no you’re not. You might be physically in the building, but we all know you’re not working, so let’s waste company time with a midseason mailbag.

Note: Submitted questions have been edited for clarity and style.

If you could get rid of one of these items but the other becomes permanent as-is, which do you change: Loser point or offside reviews? — Bill M.

No. Pass. I refuse. This is like asking me which one of my kids I love the most, only the exact opposite.

But if I had to… I mean, the loser point is the one that has to go. I’m not even sure it’s close.

Offside reviews are awful, for a million reasons, and have made the NHL product less fun in ways that most fans don’t even fully understand. It’s the skate-in-crease rule all over again, and that debacle was so stupid that we all swore it could never happen again. Reviews are a bad idea, they slow the game down, they sap excitement out of buildings, and the process itself is flawed. They’re terrible.

But! As much as I hate offside reviews, at least they don’t directly impact how the game is played. No team is out here changing its strategy around the existence of offside review. Teams aren’t making roster decisions based on those fuzzy freeze frames. When we finally get rid of reviews, future generations will wonder what took us so long, but other than a whole bunch of missing goals in a league that was desperate for offense, the experience won’t leave too much of a scar.

The loser point, by comparison, is a genuine problem of competitive integrity. It encourages teams to play for ties, which is incredibly boring to watch. It lets the league’s most delusional teams sell fake success that they haven’t earned. The league openly lies about why the rule exists. And when we finally get rid of it, we’ll be left with years’ worth of standings that don’t make sense, and that can’t be easily ret-conned to fit with other seasons.

The NHL’s replay process is broken, but at least that doesn’t make the league especially unique in today’s sports world. But giving out points for losing, for no real purpose other than stroking the egos of insecure GMs? We’re all on our own with that one. It has to go.

The World Cup was decided by a shootout, which despite the excitement felt unfair because the rest of that game was incredible.

What did you think? And is there anything for hockey to learn from that? (Other than a worldwide best-on-best tournament is kind of a good idea…) — Matthew D.

Yeah, you’ve hit on the main one: Best-on-best international competition rocks, and the NHL’s inability to make one happen is making it look more and more ridiculous. I’m with Elliotte, if we can’t do a traditional tournament, let’s at least figure out a way to do a Team USA vs. Canada head-to-head series. Something, guys, anything.

As far as what the NHL can learn from the World Cup final itself, I’ll put my cards on the table: I’m not a soccer guy. Never have been. I don’t have anything against the sport (OK, other than all the diving), but I only have so much room in my sports fan brain and soccer’s always been on the outside looking in. So I’m hesitant to sound like I’m criticizing how the sport works, because it will be coming from a place of ignorance. I know how infuriating it is when that happens to hockey, so I’ll tread carefully.

That said, I don’t like penalty kicks, but I get it. The game has to end at some point, it’s an undeniable spectacle, and there’s a legacy-defining characteristic to it all that just doesn’t translate to a hockey shootout. The part that I don’t get is the extra period not being sudden death. We saw that on Sunday, when both teams scored in overtime to extend the game. You’ve already played your full 90 minutes. Why not go next goal wins after that? The World Cup used that system for a few years, but then went back to the current method. And I don’t get it.

Sudden death is so much better than playing out the full overtime. You can convince me that most of what I don’t get about soccer is just my own ignorance, and I’ll concede that you’re probably right. But on this one, I don’t see the other side. And that means that for once, the lesson for hockey is not to change a thing, because we’re actually on the right side of something for a change.

Why is everyone getting the Conn Smythe renaming debate wrong? There’s only one good answer: Reggie Leach. Only skater to ever win it from the losing side. Still holds the NHL record for playoff goals and goal-scoring streaks, both set pre-Gretzky and still standing (Jari Kurri tied the former but needed more games). That included a five-goal game that was achieved on seven shots, included a natural hat trick in a single period, and were consecutive for his team. All-time performance to drag the Flyers back to the Final. Plus the Riverton Rifle is one of the great nicknames. — Cody M

Leach is an underrated star of the era who deserves more respect than he gets from modern fans. But naming the Conn Smythe after him? Sorry, not when we have multi-time winners like Patrick Roy and Mario Lemieux available (not to mention Sidney Crosby if we wait a bit). Even among the one-time winners, I’d go with a Jean Beliveau, Joe Sakic or Steve Yzerman. Leach doesn’t even have his own number retired by the Flyers, let’s not go naming prestigious awards after him.

Besides, while I agree that the nickname is a plus, it’s not quite as good as The Chicoutimi Cucumber, and we’re not going around naming awards after Georges Vezina.

Who had the longest hair ever in an NHL game? As an unofficial historian of weird hockey minutiae you’re probably the best person to answer this. — Shane H.

Huh. This is a tougher one than you’d think. Hockey has a long history of celebrating long hair, from Ron Duguay to Jaromir Jagr and a million mullets in between. But the longest hair? That’s thrown me off a bit, because a classic hockey haircut usually doesn’t get past the collar.

I think my answer is Chris Simon, who was one of the only guys to ever take the ice with a long, straight flow. I think he probably edges out Sharks-era Mike Ricci, although it’s close. I’m opening the floor to other nominations, though.


Chris Simon. (Jamie Squire/Allsport)

Who is the best player to have never received a single vote for any end-of-season award? — Terry H.

Good question. We’ll keep this to the modern era, since there just weren’t that many votes back in the day (and they weren’t always recorded accurately.)

My first thought was Bernie Nicholls, who famously scored 70 goals and 150 points without getting a Hart vote in 1988-89. But Nicholls got Lady Byng votes that year and the next. Vincent Damphousse is another underrated member of the 1,200-point club, but he also showed up on Byng ballots one year, and also finished fourth for the Selke one season. Dino Ciccarelli never got an All-Star vote, but did get a handful of Hart Trophy mentions. And Glenn Anderson just misses, thanks to a single Calder vote.

In theory, defensemen might make for easier territory since we don’t have to worry about those stray Selke votes, and they rarely get Lady Byng love. But the flip side is most of the good ones get a Norris vote somewhere, even if it’s a lifetime achievement award down the line. I checked underrated guys like Eric Desjardins, Brian Rafalski, Mathieu Schneider, and even our old pal Reed Larson, but none came particularly close. We could get cute with goalies by dipping back into the era where the Vezina wasn’t voted on, but even then the All-Star votes get us for just about everyone worth considering.

In the end, I think we need a power forward. Somebody who racked up enough PIMs that they’d never get a Lady Byng vote, without having the defensive reputation to get Selke support. We also want a classic 40-goal guy, good enough to rack up big career numbers without popping 50 and risking an All-Star nod.

I think I’ve got our guy: Pat Verbeek. He had 500 goals and 1,000 points to go with 2,900 PIM. He topped 40 goals in four seasons and had 30 in four others. He was the original Little Ball of Hate, before Bruins fans tried to steal his nickname. And according to Hockey Reference, at least, he never got a single award vote. Can anyone come up with a name that beats Verbeek?

Leaving out players who died tragically, who wins: A lineup of the worst players with their numbers retired vs. the best players to never be recognized by any team. — Robert R.

One last roster game to take us into the holidays. Let’s do this.

First, a few quick ground rules. I’m going to disqualify honored numbers on both sides, meaning neither team has access to those guys. We’re obviously not counting active players, or anyone who just retired and the team just hasn’t gotten around to it. And anything that’s already been announced will count.

My prediction before I start: Team Unretired will win this, because NHL teams are so weird about this stuff that I bet we’ll be able to build an All-Star roster. But let’s see…

We’ll start with Team Retired. To be clear, I’m not arguing that any of these guys don’t deserve to have their numbers retired. (Some of them might not, I’m just not arguing that here.) But it seems like we can get off to a pretty good start if we just look for guys who aren’t in the Hall of Fame, and then narrow that down. list down.

Here’s what I wound up with:

Team Retired Numbers

Forward lines

Vincent Lecavalier, Shane Doan, Adam Graves,

Brian Sutter, Milan Hejduk, Jere Lehtinen,

Vic Hadfield, Bill Goldsworthy, Neal Broten

Bob Nystrom, Stan Smyl, Chris Neil

Defensive pairs

Yvon Labre and Al Hamilton

Glen Wesley and Ken Daneyko

Chris Phillips and Lionel Hitchman

Goalies

Mike Richter

Mike Vernon

So… yeah. Looks, that’s a perfectly solid roster of likable players, most of whom you’ve even heard of. You could win a few games with that group, even without a single Hall of Famer in the mix. And the goaltending is solid. But beyond that, let’s just say that I feel like the door is open for Team Unretired. Let’s see what they can do…

Team Unretired Numbers

Forward lines

Sergei Fedorov, Mark Recchi, Dave Andreychuk,

Jacques Lemaire, Aurele Joliat, Steve Shutt

Jeremy Roenick, Theo Fleury, Alexander Mogilny

Pierre Turgeon, Petr Bondra, Steve Larmer

Defensive pairs

Brad Park, Chris Chelios

Doug Wilson, Jacques Laperriere

Larry Murphy, Phil Housley

Goalies

Bill Durnan

Gerry Cheevers

Yep, that’s a good team. Thanks to teams like Montreal, Detroit and Chicago who are weird about retiring numbers from certain eras, plus a handful of guys who bounced around a little too much, we’ve got a ton of options. We end up with a top six made up of Hall of Famers, followed by a bottom six of guys who could all get it someday. Our entire back end is also made up of HHOFers, including two all-time “Wait, how has nobody retired them?” guys in Park and Chelios, as well as both goalies. Sorry everyone, you had nice careers but you’re just not as worthy as Wayne Huizenga.

This one isn’t close. Team Unretired wins the series in a sweep, and is probably resting guys by the end of it.

(Photo: Julio Aguilar / Getty Images)

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