I am just stepping in Dobber's usual spot this week as he had to cover for me last week. He'll be back in this usual slot for his next Ramblings.

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Olli Maatta was traded from Chicago to Los Angeles for prospect Brad Morrison. Morrison is 23 years old and spent last year in the ECHL. In other words, this is a salary dump.

Maatta is an interesting acquisition here. A couple weeks ago, I wrote how the Kings have cap space and two choices ahead of them: run out the contracts of Jeff Carter and Dustin Brown, stocking the cupboards for when they turn over the team to the likes of Kupari, Turcotte et al. That would also mean Doughty and Kopitar – both on the wrong side of 30 already – would be two years older. Conversely, they could make moves to bolster the roster for the next couple seasons, utilizing what's left of the Carter and Brown contracts, and hoping their young kids make enough of an impact to make another run while Kopitar is still under contract. It looks as if the Kings are going with the latter.

This signals to me that the Kings are going to be very busy this offseason. We'll see.

As for Maatta, there isn't much depth here on the left-hand side. He could easily go right to the top pair with Drew Doughty. Maatta has a lengthy injury history, though, so maybe they don't want him playing 20-21 minutes a night, sliding him down to the second pair. In that second case, he'll be about the same guy he's always been, and on a lower-scoring team. There is multi-cat utility here regardless, but in points leagues, he's probably waiver fodder.

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The big new from last week was that the New York Rangers would buy out long-time starter Henrik Lundqvist. The King had one year left on his deal and the Rangers have both Igor Shesterkin and Alexandar Georgiev. Maybe there could have been a Georgiev trade somewhere, but the Rangers thought it best to keep their two young netminders, so here we are.

Lundqvist played over 1000 games for the Rangers, including playoffs. He's the franchise leader in starts, wins, and shutouts. He only had one Vezina Trophy win but finished in the top-3 four other times, and finished top-6 in voting every year from 2005 through 2015. He had a career .921 save percentage in 130 playoff games, including a .923 in the Cup Final in 2014, a series that saw him face at least 40 shots in every game but one. Playing behind a suspect defence was the hallmark of his career, and it's a shame that his Rangers tenure comes to an end as the team is rounding into Cup contending form.

He's a future Hall of Famer, full stop. Cup ring or not, he's one of the two or three best goalies to enter the league in the last 15 years. It's not his fault he was stuck behind Marc Staal and Dan Girardi for their glory years.

As for what comes next, it's up to him. He turns 39 in March, so next season will be his age-39 season. Playoff teams looking for a backup will be interested. It's a matter of whether he wants to keep playing, wants to play somewhere other than New York, and whether he'll accept a backup role. We'll just have to wait and see.

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Just wanted to talk a bit about the playoffs.

One thing out of the gate: Miro Heiskanen is the future of NHL defencemen. Not himself, specifically, but the way he plays the game (though he is approacing the elite). Yes, he's a defenceman, but he's more a rover, in a similar vein to Erik Karlsson at his peak. He has the skills to not only start the rush, but jump in it, and get back in time to cover for himself. I think we're going to see a lot more defencemen like him, and less like, say, Aaron Ekblad, over the next five years and beyond. I also think he was their MVP over Anton Khudobin. Khudobin had a .907 save percentage in the first two rounds and a .910 in the Cup Final. You can say the netminder was the MVP of the Western Conference Final, but Heiskanen was a significant contributor the whole way through.

It’ll hopefully be forgotten by the time the 2020-21 regular season rolls around, but Shea Theodore is a bona fide stud. He had 19 points in 20 playoff games, averaging a mammoth four shots per game. It wasn't like he was playing 27-28 minutes a game, either, as he averaged 22:24 over those 20 contests. The one concern is he doesn't hit and that'll hurt his multi-cat value, but I expect a 50-point, 220-shot season at a minimum from Theodore next year. (Provided we play 82 games, of course.)

I hope other teams are paying attention to how Tampa Bay gave out ice time. Nikita Kucherov and Ondrej Palat were playing 6-7 minutes more per game at 5-on-5 than the fourth line. Teams like Nashville, Philadelphia, and Carolina were somewhere in the 3-5 minute mark between top and bottom. Believe me, I understand that in a grind like the NHL postseason, depth is important. I've spoken at length in these Ramblings throughout the playoffs just how important third and fourth lines are, and how they can put a team over the top. But a team has to get to the top first, and that often requires your top players getting significant minutes to bring everyone else along.

Philadelphia needs to keep building. The pieces are there, but right now they remind me more of Dallas than of Tampa Bay; an aging core that needs to be propped up by young stars, and the young stars (the skaters, anyway) aren't quite elite. Ivan Provorov is good, but he's no Miro Heiskanen. Joel Farabee is probably going to be good, but he hasn't proven much yet. Ditto for Morgan Frost. There are also the concerns about Nolan Patrick's health. If the Flyers really want to get to the next level, all those players need to be not only contributors, but carry the load every now and then. I could see Philly anywhere from outside of the playoffs to in the Cup Final next year, depending how their young guys come along.

I'm not sure where Calgary goes from here. I think Mikael Backlund is showing signs of decline (he has been for years, really) and that's bad news for them. Once upon a time, their top-6 was elite and their bottom-6 an ongoing concern. Well, with the emergence of guys like Mangiapane and Dube, that depth isn't a big issue anymore. What is an issue is the aforementioned decline of Backlund in conjunction with poor seasons from Gaudreau and Monahan. Now, if the latter is a blip, this isn't a big problem because Mangiapane/Tkachuk can probably still constitute a good second line with Backlund. If it's not a blip, this franchise is in dire straits. They have some cap space to make a splash, and what they do this summer will go a long way in telling us how management views the immediate future.

Columbus is a dangerous team. The problem is they don't have cap space and they don't have an Alexis Lafrenière on the way. They aren't good enough to win a Cup as presently constituted, but I also don't think they're far away, either. They need to add middle-six guys who can score. Maybe if they can clear out some money – buying out Wennberg will help a lot in this regard – they can go get someone like Mikael Granlund.

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There has been talk about expanding playoffs and I'm very much against this. As it is, once Seattle enters the league, half of all franchises will make the playoffs every year. We have enough problems with teams tanking year after year. If three-quarters of the teams are in, and teams only need to win 42-43 percent of their games to get in, I think we'll see a lot of franchises stay well below the cap. What's the marginal utility of spending an extra 10M if you're pretty sure you'll be in the playoffs anyway? Why not just wait and add players at the trade deadline if necessary?

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For years, a popular mantra has been that Tampa has only assembled the team they have because of the tax system in Florida. As a counterpoint, I'll introduce an NHL agent explaining why this is so overblown:

I'm shocked at how uninformed this take is-
1. Players in Canada can set up a Retirement Compensation Agreement (RCA) and limit their tax liability to a flat 20%.  With sound tax advisors, a NHL player can actually pay the same or less tax in Canada than he will Florida or Vegas. https://t.co/u9A7SEFbAo

— Allan Walsh (@walsha) September 20, 2020

I would also like to submit another point of data: the Florida Panthers.

The Panthers had Barkov and Huberdeau on team-friendly contracts for years, and have them on team-friendly contracts for at least two more. How close have they been to a Stanley Cup over the last 3-4 seasons? How close are they right now? Is this team a juggernaut because of Florida's tax system, or are they another mid-tier team? How have they performed over the last, say, 20 years? If the tax system in Florida is so advantageous that teams can't help but attract nothing but top talent for cheap all the time, why have the Panthers failed to reach the second round for nearly 25 years?

Is there a cap crunch? Absolutely. But having so much good talent that you can't pay them all is one of the best problems a GM can have. They can pick and choose what the team will look like, and what level of assets they want to recoup by shipping out talent they don't need.

Maybe, just maybe, drafting undervalued players (Kucherov, Point), locking up your young stars before they hit unrestricted free agency (Hedman's five-year deal coming out of ELC, Palat), having good scouts that can find values outside of the draft (Marchessault, Gourde), and making the right trades at the right time (Coleman, Goodrow) are all pieces that fit in a much larger puzzle. Maybe, just maybe, angrily pointing at H&R Block is missing the point entirely.