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Just a quick bit on the Vesa Toskala deal, which is taken apart by Jean Lefebvre here. I’m hard pressed to find any way in which this deal makes any sense from a business perspective.

Curtis McElhinney costs $110,880 for the rest of the season. Vesa Toskala costs $829,800. McElhinney is to be paid $570,000 for next season. If the Flames decided to do the most expensive thing possible with him - bury him in the minors - their total cost would be $680,800. If they bought him out, the total price drops to $490,800, with a cap hit of $190,000 or so in 2010-11 and 2011-12.

So basically, Calgary spent at least $150,000 to install Vesa Toskala rather than McElhinney behind Mikka Kiprusoff. The consensus amongst Flames followers seems to be that Toskala will play two games from here to the end of the season, both as part of back-to-backs.

You can actually reason through this and conclude that the upgrade isn’t worth it. The Flames allow an average of 29 shots per night. If Toskala’s a .900 goaltender (.897 since the lockout, with horrific results in Toronto during the past few seasons), you’d expect him to allow 5.8 goals in those games. If McElhinney is an .885 goalie (below his career average), you’d expect him to allow 6.7 goals in those games. So call it a one goal difference between the two of them - personally, I don’t think that Toskala, as presently constituted, is any better than McElhinney, but I’ll extend Sutter every benefit of the doubt.

One goal is a third of an expected point. The difference between these players is so vanishingly small that I can’t imagine how it possibly makes $150,000 worth of sense to make this move. I don’t know if Darryl Sutter ever has to account for himself to the Flames’ owners but I’d be interested to hear his explanation for the move. It’s simply bizarreand not even the worst move he made yesterday.

This clip is close to the end of my list of good memories featuring Ethan Moreau. It’s been a long four years. That little look and shared smirk with Staios…good stuff. When I finally succeed in blacking everything after June 5, 2006 from my memory, I’m glad that I’ll still have this.

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Elliotte Friedman has a lot of discussion about “expiring contracts” in his otherwise excellent 30 Thoughts today. I don’t get the fascination with the idea. Here’s the gist of it:

To understand why Olli Jokinen is so valuable right now, you must understand this: former Toronto Raptor Tracy McGrady makes $23 million US this season. He played just six games before being sent home, Houston basically labelling him a cancer.

But, as the NBA trade deadline approaches, the Rockets would have no problem dealing McGrady, although they also would be perfectly happy to keep him.

Why?

Because he’s got an enormous expiring contract. Whichever team drops McGrady at the end of the season will have $23 million US worth of cap room. That’s a lot of freedom to fix your problems. That’s why he’s a valuable asset, even though he’s having zero impact on the court.

The New York Knicks benched a player named Larry Hughes, who wants to be traded. Probably won’t happen, because his expiring contract is worth $14 million.

I haven’t paid much attention to the NBA since the late 1990’s, so I have no idea what goes on there. My last recollection of thinking about it was when the NBA had its lockout and there was some discussion amongst friends of mine as to having a pool in which we attempted to predict what charges which NBA player would face as a result of the spare time - one guy wanted “Allen Iverson, for treason.” The NBA might have had some image problems at the time. In any event, I’m not familiar with the intricacies of the NBA salary cap but am vaguely aware that it’s a soft cap and that there’s a luxury tax threshold. It’s quite different from the NHL’s arrangement.

Anyway, back to my main point. The thrust of Elliotte’s piece is that fellows like Jokinen, whose deals are expiring at the end of the season, have some value because they disappear at the end of the year. This doesn’t make any sense. If a team like the Rangers could add Jokinen without having to clear other salary, well, then they already have that salary cap room. The Rangers aren’t getting cap relief because Jokinen’s contract is expiring - they’d be getting cap relief because Darryl Sutter is eager to spend his savings on Phaneuf on Ales Kotalik. I’m hardpressed to understand how this makes Jokinen a valuable commodity - he’s bringing in something that the Rangers are desperate to give away anyway. The cap relief doesn’t come from his contract expiring, it comes from Sutter inexplicably deciding he wants to pay Kotalik.

This might seem like semantics but the distinction matters. Jokinen isn’t extra valuable because his contract is expiring. The cap space will be cleared because Calgary would take on a lousy deal.

From NHL.com:

“We went from first in the League (in goals-against during the 2005-06 season) to 23rd (in 2008-09),” Darryl Sutter said, “and were, quite honestly, fortunate to be a playoff team.”

The GM has been at it with a vengeance this summer in an effort to restore the Flames’ reputation as defenders of the faith. And landing the cream of the free-agency crop, blue-chip blueliner Jay Bouwmeester, was the biggest piece of the puzzle.

“We want to get better defensively. It’s obviously something Darryl and I stress, and something that I believe in as a coach,” Brent Sutter told NHL.com. “You need to play well defensively, and that involves more than how you play in your own zone. It’s also puck-possession time. It’s about how you forecheck. It’s about the things you do as a group. It’s about getting the puck back as quickly as you can.

“Yeah, defense is how you play without the puck, but good defense also means having the puck a lot, too, because that means less time chasing the other team.”

…

Up front, the Flames — who have made four consecutive first-round playoff exits — were unable to make major changes, partially due to salary-cap constraints.

Brian McGrattan was signed as the club’s enforcer and Nigel Dawes was plucked off waivers from Phoenix, but there was no replacement for Michael Cammalleri, last season’s 39-goal scorer who left for Montreal.

Sutter isn’t concerned with filling that hole, pointing to forwards Rene Bourque, Curtis Glencross and David Moss, who all blossomed in the scoring department last winter.

“(Scoring) will take care of itself,” he said. “You’ll always score enough goals … you’ve just got to make sure you don’t give up as many.”

Memo to NHL writers: You’re not going to be able to quote both Darryl and Brent in a story this winter and then refer to “Sutter” saying something, particularly if Brett Sutter has a big night or something. Two fun points in an otherwise dreary summer for Oilers fans from this.

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When the NHL and NHLPA were engaged in their death struggle during 2004-05, I read a lot about salary caps and their likely impact. My view was that the NHL was probably going to end up with an economic structure like the NBA. I’m probably not even enough of an NBA fan to qualify as a casual fan but my understanding is that the NBA’s middle class has largely disappeared and teams have a few guys making incredible amounts of money, a small middle class and a large number of guys earning around the league minimum. Looking at the numbers in hockey though, that’s not what’s happened in the past four years.

Whenever you’re looking at this stuff, you need to have a little context. I’m comparing player cap hits in 2005-06 with the cap hits in 2008-09. I’m using the adjusted cap hits, so it allows for players spending part of a season in the NHL. For the 2005-06 data, I used NHLSCAP.com; for last season, I used nhlnumbers.com.

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I wasn’t all that impressed with the banal Pat Quinn/Tom Renney introduction conference today; there just wasn’t a whole lot that interested me in it. The press conference in Calgary though, was a lot more interesting. It featured some of the classy behaviour that characterizes Darryl Sutter’s press conferences (in response to a question about why the Flames waited four days to have a press conference, Sutter responded: “Very simple, I don’t work on your timeline Jock, first. That’s important…”) as well as a lot of discussion about coaching. Sutter went on at some length about the past few years in Calgary:

The year after the lockout, this is how I look at it, I was the general manager and the coach and the team had the best record that they’ve had in the past 15 years. That’s nothing to do with Darryl, right, that was our team and we responded well to the rules and all that stuff everybody talks about, right? I thought our leadership, those top guys, those star players on our team were ready for that, for a coach like Jimmy. And obviously, they weren’t. I thought Jimmy Playfair is an excellent head coach and I still think he’s going to be a head coach in the NHL. That’s why I offered him the position in Abbotsford.

So then we brought in Mike and I thought last year was awesome and it did start to move back towards what it takes to be successful in the playoffs and then I think it slipped this year. Quite honestly, the standards are very simple…I don’t base it on losing in the first round…if we’d have lost in the second round, we were still standing here doing the same thing, alright. It’s about going forward. My goals, our goals are the very same.

The way you get to the top of the heap, the way you stay successful for a long period of time is to be a very well rounded hockey club. Quite honestly, the year after the lockout, we were number one in team defence. The general consensus after the year was, you guys gotta score more goals. Well, that’s not really the case. We went from first in the league in team defence to 23rd and, quite honestly, were quite fortunate to be a playoff team when you look at that we were thirteenth in the conference in goals against and that’s against what I believe in and that’s against what successful organizations do.

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Lowetide responded to my lament about the Oilers division by writing:

‘Tis true, and yet there’s a trail of Winnipeg Jets fans who could have written the same article 20 years ago had Al Gore gotten off his ass and invented the internet sooner.

Now on the one hand, the easy response to that is that, although the Jets had to deal with Calgary and Edmonton, they also got lots of games against LA and Vancouver, who were just awful. As fans (even recent ones) of the Oilers and Flames know though, the really exciting part of being a hockey fan is a lengthy playoff run. The Jets were able to eke out a couple of second round appearances because the Flames were committed to choking like dogs whenever they had the slightest sniff of an opportunity to do so.

From 1982-83, when they joined the Smythe Division and 1989-90, the final year I think you can make any sort of an argument that the Smythe Division was dominant, the Jets managed to finish above third just once, in a year where they slid past the Flames despite being +26 to Calgary’s +61. The Flames and Oilers were dominant teams at that time, there’s no doubt - they won five out of the eight Stanley Cups awarded and appeared in six out of eight Stanley Cup Finals in that time - they may have won/appeared in more but for the 1985-86 and 1988-89 Stanley Cup Finals having been cancelled. Was Winnipeg good enough, relative to the rest of the conference, that they’d have a legitimate complaint that they were screwed out of some second and third round appearances by the division and setup at the time?

I’d forgotten this, but in those glorious days of the Original 21, the Smythe, Norris and Adams Divisions played everyone in their division 8 times and everyone else 3 times. The Patrick Division teams played everyone in their division 7 times and everyone else 3 times. Apparently air travel was free and nobody got tired or, more likely, the NHL was run by a bunch of nearly sentient monkeys with perpetual suntans. In any event, having two teams like the Oilers and Flames in your division could really screw you over - the divisional schedule was intense and it wasn’t like other teams were having to play them.

I’ve put together a chart with the Jets’ overall GD, their GD against Calgary and Edmonton and their GD against the Norris Division for the years in question.

From 1982-83 to 1984-85, I can maybe buy that the Jets had a bit of a legitimate complaint. They were kicking the hell out of the Norris (keep in mind, that’s over just fifteen games) and then getting destroyed by Edmonton/Calgary. The problem I have with any sympathy for the Jets is that they still did get a couple of Division Finals out of the whole thing. They pretty clearly sucked against everyone from 1987-88 on. At their best, they were the third best team in the conference for three years and in a perfect world, they’d probably deserve some Division Finals appearances. Which they got - they got one in 1986-87 when they pretty clearly weren’t a great team but the Flames spit the bit.

If anyone got hosed by the setup in the 1980’s it was probably Calgary. A better time the Jets, they had just two decent runs despite probably being the second best team in the Conference. Then again, it’s Calgary, so I’m not going to shed any tears. All in all though, I don’t think that the Jets have much of a complaint.