Ice Hockey Odds and Ends
The Caps add a winger; the NHL Draft is upon us; and hockey's hall gives us a snub
With the NHL Draft set to begin tomorrow night in Las Vegas, the Washington Capitals continued to remake their roster ahead of next season, acquiring 28-year old left wing Andrew Mangiapane from the Calgary Flames in exchange for a second round draft pick in 2025. Like center Pierre-Luc Dubois, who the team acquired last week from the Los Angeles Kings, Mangiapane might look like something of a reclamation project. He set a career high in goals two seasons ago with 35, earning himself a hefty raise and a contract that pays him $5.8 million through next season. But since he signed that deal, Mangiapane’s goal scoring has regressed. The Flames, who are rebuilding under General Manager Craig Conroy, won’t miss his contract.
Capitals General Manager Brian MacLellan has told the media that the team isn’t done improving the roster, and there’s every indication he’ll have the cap room to do it, as long as right wing T.J. Oshie joins former teammate Nicklas Backstron on long-term injured reserve. That would make sense, as Mangiapane’s salary is roughly the same as Oshie’s, although MacLellan seemed to indicate that Oshie and the team training staff are still evaluating his future. Draft day could be busy, as the team has five picks in the top 100, including three in the 3rd round. But I think those picks are just as likely to be packaged to either move up in a future draft, or used in a deal to acquire a player for the team’s top six or first defensive pair that can help right now.
Even if you’re not a hockey fan, you still might want to watch tomorrow’s first round. There’s not any drama about the identity of the top pick. That will be Macklin Celebrini, a center who just finished his freshman year at Boston University (BU), even though he only turned 18 a little more than two weeks ago. As a 17-year old freshman, Celebrini had 32 goals and 32 assists in just 38 games, and won the Hobey Baker Award as the top male player in college hockey. While there’s no mystery if the San Jose Sharks will select him #1 overall, there’s some question over whether or not he’ll go straight to the NHL, as he could opt to play one more season at BU. And given the state of the roster in the San Jose at the moment, you could hardly blame the kid for wanting to spend another year in college and try to win the national championship that eluded him during an otherwise perfect freshman year at BU.
While Celebrini is the star out of hockey’s central casting at the moment, the location and the setting of the draft reveal how much the game has changed since Commissioner Gary Bettman took over the league in 1993. Ever since the NHL held its first awards ceremony in Las Vegas in 2009, one that famously featured singer Chaka Khan, the league has engaged in a successful love affair with the city, a romance that culminated with the NHL awarding Las Vegas a franchise that has appeared in the Stanley Cup Final twice in its first seven seasons.
For all of the hate that Bettman has gotten — the booing of the commissioner as he presents the Stanley Cup to the winning team is hockey fandom’s one unifying moment — expansion to Las Vegas, a move the NHL took before any other major professional sports league, has been a winner. Since the Vegas Golden Knights began play in time for the 2017-18 NHL season, the National Football League Raiders moved to the city, Formula 1 now holds an annual race in the city, and MLB’s Oakland A’s still hope to relocate there.
This year the draft will be held at The Sphere, an entertainment venue near the Strip that seemed to announce that planet Earth was firmly located in the 21st century when it finally opened in September 2023. The videos and pictures from there are truly incredible, and I’m excited to see what the league does with it as the next generation of hockey stars take center stage, even if most draft picks won’t make an impact on the game for many years to come.
The busy NHL calendar this week also included the announcement of the 2024 Hockey Hall of Fame induction class. I don’t have any quibbles with those who were inducted, but I have to make note of a player who was snubbed again, and still can’t seem to crack the lineup in Toronto: retired right wing Alexander Mogilny.
There’s no doubt that Mogilny is a historically significant player. In his youth, he was a star with CSKA Moscow, known in the West as the vaunted Red Army team and the beating heart of the Soviet hockey machine. In 1988, he won a gold medal in for the USSR at the Calgary Olympics where he was the youngest player. He helped the USSR win gold again at the World Championships the following year, and did it again at the 1989 World Juniors. At that tournament, he played on the same line with future Hall of Famers Pavel Bure and Sergei Federov, but he served as Team Captain.
Most importantly, he was the first hockey player to defect from Russia to the West before the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. Before Mogilny, there was no way for Russian players, widely acknowledged to be among the best in the world, to reach the pinnacle of the sport in the NHL, as they were more or less indentured servants of the state. But after Mogilny defected, the pressure on Soviet hockey officials was too much to resist in the era of Mikhail Gorbachev’s “Perestroika,” eventually resulting in players leaving with the blessing of the government.
Mogilny’s defection was an earthquake in Soviet hockey. The Soviets knew that if they didn’t allow their best players to leave, they would simply follow Mogilny’s path.
It was at the end of the World Championships that Mogilny disappeared, got on a plane with a pair of executives from the Buffalo Sabres and defected to the USA. Mogilny was effectively a member of the Soviet military at the time. Had he been caught, he might have been imprisoned and been sentenced to internal exile in Siberia. Others suffered that fate, or worse, for less.
In 1991, Buffalo acquired center Pat Lafontaine from the New York Islanders, forming a deadly combination with Mogilny that torched opposing teams during the 1992-93 NHL season. Mogilny scored 76 goals on LaFontaine’s wing, tied for fifth most in league history. Of the top 20 single season goal scoring performances ever, only two players, retired winger Bernie Nichols and current Toronto Maple Leafs center Auston Matthews, aren’t in the Hall. And for a sports hall that has a reputation for being a lax with induction standards, his absence there is more than a bit glaring.
Mogilny, while he only briefly returned to that rarefied air he dwelled in that one incredible season, still won his share of NHL plaudits. He was a two-time All-Star and won the Lady Byng for his gentlemanly play. And in addition to his international medals, he added a Stanley Cup championship with the New Jersey Devils in 2000.
The Hall is also known as a cliquish place. If a member of the induction committee wants to black ball a candidate, it can keep them out of the Hall for years. It’s apparently kept Mogilny out for 15 years since his retirement. That’s 15 years too long.