This Week In The NHL Bubble: Let The Trades Begin

“This Week In The NHL Bubble” is a weekly post dedicated to highlighting the week’s most interesting stories, stats, highlights, and much more.

Time for Some Trades

The Maple Leafs and the Penguins were the first teams out of those eliminated from the playoffs to decide to make a trade, with the Leafs sending Kapanen to the Penguins along with some other pieces for the 15th overall pick and some other pieces. Kyle Dubas has started to morph the Leafs into what they need to be competitive and cap compliant. Per Pierre Lebrun, the Ducks were one of the teams involved in discussions for the Kapanen. While I think acquiring Kapanen would have been a mistake for the current Ducks roster due to him being a good third liner, I think that Murray talking to Dubas could be a sign of things to come. The NHL offseason will be a short one, lasting about a month from the cup being awarded to training camp opening, so it would behoove Murray to start putting out feelers now. This Ducks roster needs some major reconstruction and that simply cannot be done in a month.

Let’s Take a Break

The NHL and NHL Players’ Association announced yesterday that in the wake of the shooting in Wisconsin this past weekend, all games yesterday and today would be postponed. Regardless of your belief of if this is the right decision or not, or if this was done too late, this was the NHL players making a statement that enough is enough. My question is what does the league and its broadcast partners do to follow up on the statement made by the players? My suggestion is instead of airing a random movie or rerun of a show in the time slot the games would have been in, shed a light on players of color, promote things like the You Can Play Movement, or show an old NWHL game during that time slot to give the platform to a league that desperately could use the eyeballs. There is plenty of good that can come from the players stepping back for a few days, but it is on everyone involved with the NHL to create that..

Dallas Proving People Wrong

Dallas was without a doubt the underdog in this series, with all three of us at Crash The Pond picking Colorado and CJ going as far as to pick Colorado in 4. Colorado made short work of an overmatched Coyotes team in the first round and looked like they would blitz through a Dallas stars team. Well, Dallas took that narrative and flipped it on its head by going up 2-0 in the series, and showing that Colorado was going to have to go through some adversity if they were going to move on. The Avs answered back with a win in Wednesday nights exciting game 3, but in two of the three games in the series, the Stars held the xGF% edge, so the 2-1 lead for the Stars is no fluke. If they continue that type of performance, we could have an upset special on our hands.

The Canucks Stars shine bright in game 2

Elias Pettersson had a goal and two assists in Vancouver’s game 2 victory over the Vegas Golden Knights and put a marker out that he should be viewed as one of the most skilled players in the league. Vancouver was outplayed at 5v5 by Vegas, which is to be expected, but the high skill level of Pettersson at both 5v5 and on the PP was the difference-maker. Pettersson for your reference had an xGF% of 58.38% in that game the next best Canucks center had a 38.47 xGF%, which reveals just how much better the Canucks are with Pettersson on the ice vs without him on the ice. The Canucks only chance in this series is for Pettersson to continue to perform as he did in game 2. The playoffs are a small sample size and elite talent can win the day vs better teams.

The Beast in the East

The Tampa Bay Lightning appear to have woken up and everyone should be scared. The Lightning team that pummeled the rest of the league last year, might be putting it all together in the postseason without their star goal scorer and captain, Steven Stamkos. Tampa has dominated a very good Bruins team so far. They have the better of the shot quantity and quality in each game so far, and even though they lost game one you could see that they were the better team. I for one am very excited that we could see one of the best teams of the past few years finally find a bit of luck and win the Stanley Cup.

Let us know in a comment below what your takeaways from the past week were!

*All stats per naturalstattrick