Parity has reached its cap in NHL
You can put away the talk about parity for a moment.
An expansion team might have fluked its way into the Stanley Cup final last year. But any lessons learned from the Vegas Golden Knights and how their blue-collar roster of third-liners and castoffs was able to topple the goliaths of the NHL appear to have fallen on deaf ears.
Starting this season, the NHL is entering the era of the super teams.
Technically, it started at last year’s trade deadline when the Tampa Bay Lightning added Ryan McDonagh and J.T. Miller to a team already stacked with multiple all-stars. The Toronto Maple Leafs upped the ante this summer by signing John Tavares.
Now this: Erik Karlsson is a member of the San Jose Sharks.
A team that went to the final in 2016 and already has Brent Burns and Marc-Edouard Vlasic on the back end just added a two-time Norris Trophy winner who was regarded as a top-three player in the world at this time last year. And the best part was they gave up the equivalent of a handful of magic beans for him.
If you’re Edmonton’s Connor McDavid or Calgary’s Johnny Gaudreau, the path out of the Pacific Division became a lot more difficult.
“It’s extremely rare that players of this calibre become available,” Sharks general manager Doug Wilson said in a statement. “The word ‘elite’ is often thrown around casually, but Erik’s skill set and abilities fit that description like few other players in today’s game. With Erik, Brent Burns and Marc-Edouard Vlasic, we feel we have three of the NHL’s top defencemen and stand as a better team today than we were yesterday.”
Indeed, the only roster players the Sharks lost in Thursday’s trade were a third-line centre (Chris Tierney) and third-pairing defenceman (Dylan DeMelo). They still have forwards Evander Kane, Joe Pavelski, Logan Couture, Tomas Hertl and Joe Thornton, as well as a goalie in Martin Jones who won 30 games and had a 2.55 goals-against average last season.
This wasn’t supposed to happen when the NHL introduced the salary cap in 2005. Having a fixed budget was supposed to prevent teams from loading up with the best players.
Instead, it’s interesting to see how the stars keep lining up these days. From Tavares joining the Leafs to Karlsson now ending up in San Jose, the league is quickly being divided between the haves and have-nots. Even Vegas has gotten into the action, signing Paul Stastny in the summer and trading for Max Pacioretty last week.
And we’re just getting started. While Tyler Seguin re-signed in Dallas Thursday, next year’s crop of free agents is a who’s who of all-stars, award winners and future Hall of Famers. Columbus’ Artemi Panarin and Sergei Bobrovsky could be available, so too could Ottawa’s Mark Stone and Matt Duchene and Nashville’s Pekka Rinne, along with Karlsson if he does not re-sign with the Sharks before then.
If they’re not already talking among themselves, they should.