Duhatschek notebook: Why Todd McLellan should get another look, and which goalie should get a No. 1 role (2024)

There are a number of candidates for the last open NHL coaching job — the Columbus Blue Jackets — but my wish is that Todd McLellan gets it. He’s a candidate, according to my colleague Aaron Portzline, and based on McLellan’s track record and the way he coaches — stressing a structured defensive approach — he is probably just what the Blue Jackets need. The only other times they’ve had it — under John Tortorella, Ken Hitchco*ck and maybe way back at the beginning, with Dave King — was when they were most relevant.

Also, if McLellan is the choice, then, for possibly the first time in history, a Washington-Columbus game is going to be must-see TV when teams meet for the first time in the 2024-25 NHL season.

That’s largely because the game would feature the return of Pierre-Luc Dubois to Columbus, the team he originally spurned — and on the opposing bench would be McLellan, who probably lost his previous job with the Los Angeles Kings in part because of Dubois’s indifferent play.

Dubois was the classic square peg in the round hole in Los Angeles — and McLellan, like a lot of coaches before him, couldn’t find the right buttons to push to get Dubois engaged. Good luck to Washington’s Spencer Carbery. He seems an able man, but rehabilitating Dubois is going to take real coaching sleight-of-hand. New Blue Jackets general manager Don Waddell made it clear he wants a coach with experience, who will instill structure, and given that those are the two main priorities, it’s hard to imagine anyone being a better fit than McLellan, among the coaches still looking for work.

Gerard Gallant is probably the next-best option, as he began his coaching career in Columbus in 2003. A lot has changed since then, but would hiring Gallant be too much of a back-to-the-future move? Maybe. McLellan was a candidate in Toronto, a team that eventually hired Craig Berube as its coach.

McLellan’s best work has been done in making teams better. Probably the biggest knock against him, compared to Berube, is that he has yet to get a team over the finish line, although one could argue he hasn’t had the players to do that anywhere he’s coached (San Jose, Edmonton, L.A.).

In Columbus, the finish line is a long way off. If the goal is to see the team gradually climb the NHL standings, that’s right up McLellan’s alley.

Whatever the outside perception may be, Columbus is attractive in many ways. Good young players coming through the pipeline. A supportive crowd. A hands-off owner. Nowhere to go but up. Resolving the Patrick Laine situation in a way that brings either value or cap relief (or both) to the organization is a priority. So is bringing Johnny Gaudreau back to life. Figuring out what to do next in goal will probably have the greatest short-term impact on results. Two 34-year-old goalies found homes on Thursday — Darcy Kuemper landed in L.A. and Jacob Markstrom in New Jersey. Increasingly, it looks as if Juuse Saros is staying in Nashville. That leaves Boston’s Linus Ullmark and Anaheim’s John Gibson as the next best experienced options.

Of all the possible landing places for Gibson this offseason, is Columbus so outlandish? Ideally, Gibson would like to go to a contender — admittedly, the Blue Jackets won’t be that for a bit. But solid, consistent goaltending will get them a lot closer to contention. Columbus isn’t far from Pittsburgh, where Gibson was raised. It’s a team that feels a little further ahead than Anaheim on the development curve. Get the right coach, the right goalie and value back for Laine, and the Blue Jackets could be a surprise team next year.

As for Pascal Vincent, the former coach who was let go on Monday, when things had gone as sour for as long as they had in Columbus, it was probably inevitable that he wouldn’t survive.

How can you sell that you are turning the page on what happened before and then retain the coach who had to try to salvage what was an almost impossible situation? Vincent got the job at the 11th hour after the Mike Babco*ck fiasco and then had to put out fires all season. The long line of injuries didn’t help, either. It would have been a miracle if it had gone any other way. But you can’t promise change and then turn back to the same voice behind the bench. It might not be fair, but it was the sober, practical solution.

Is Dan the man?

Just about every assessment of the Markstrom-to-New Jersey trade focused on the player going out the door for Calgary, and how Markstrom’s departure might affect the heir apparent, Dustin Wolf. The reality is that the key figure in Calgary’s goal next season is almost certainly going to be 26-year-old Dan Vladar, who was acquired from Boston in a trade in July 2021.

Vladar became expendable after the Bruins signed Ullmark as a free agent to be their starter. At different times early in his Calgary career, Vladar showed signs of potentially evolving into a No. 1 goalie. Last year wasn’t that year. He muddled along with an injury, which ultimately required hip surgery and forced him to miss the remainder of the year. If you look at Vladar solely through the lens of 2023-24, it doesn’t look good. If you stand back and assess, though, and assume he’s healthy, it’s a brighter picture.

Collectively, in his first two seasons in Calgary, Vladar went 27-12-7. He’s 6-foot-5, 207 pounds. Markstrom is 6-foot-6, 209 pounds. Very similar in terms of body types and just the opposite of Wolf, who is listed as 6-feet, 166 pounds — small by the standards of modern goalies.

Trading Markstrom paves the way for Vladar to emerge as, at the very least, someone who can play in a tandem with Wolf. I’ll go out on a limb and predict that he will be the team’s Day 1 starter. Wolf has been excellent at every stage of his development, but he is still 23, undersized and probably not ready for a full NHL starter’s workload. In short, they don’t want to throw Wolf to the wolves too soon. (Sorry, couldn’t resist.)

Vladar had drawn interest a year ago from several teams, including L.A. as a possible starter, but the Flames were only interested in moving him if a team were willing to pay a premium. No one did. One thing about Markstrom that limited Vladar’s possible impact: He wanted the net practically every game, and the Flames were prepared to give him that. Now, with Markstrom out of the picture, there’s no longer anyone standing in Vladar’s way. If he can emerge, as so many other goalies do in their mid-20s, as a legit starter, then they don’t have to do too much to replace Markstrom.

If you go back a year, to when New Jersey and Calgary made their first trade — the Devils getting Tyler Toffoli for Yegor Sharangovich and a draft pick — that’s six quality contributing players that have been traded by the Flames: Toffoli, Nikita Zadorov, Elias Lindholm, Noah Hanifin, Chris Tanev and Markstrom. Three of the five were defensem*n. Their absence puts more pressure on goaltending. Accordingly, it’s not unreasonable to think that the play of Vladar and Wolf will be the most interesting, scrutinized area to monitor this year for Calgary — and also to answer the question, who is Vladar, really, and can he be an NHL No. 1?

Interestingly, Markstrom is 34 and didn’t really emerge as a true No. 1 until the year he turned 27. It had been an up-and-down journey for him before that. Goaltending is like that. Unpredictable. In a 32-team league, there are only 64 netminding jobs available, but every year, someone emerges from the shadows and asserts their place as a legit starter. Who knows who that might be? Calgary, for one, hopes it’ll be Vladar.

Shark watch

The San Jose Sharks made two small but valuable tweaks to their roster this week, adding Barclay Goodrow on waivers from the New York Rangers and trading with Dallas to acquire Ty Dellandrea. It’s the first step in building a supporting cast around Macklin Celebrini, who will be drafted first overall in a week. Both players represented cheap easy pickups and smart management, in a lot of ways.

Goodrow started his career in San Jose as an undrafted free agent who earned a contract out of a rookie camp and spent two years in and out of their minor-league system before getting to the NHL full-time. He returned a first-rounder in 2020 when traded to Tampa Bay, where he won the Stanley Cup twice. In New York, he cashed in on his success with a six-year, $21.85 million deal, which has three years to go.

The Rangers cleared him off the payroll by putting him on waivers, to get more financial flexibility. San Jose, meanwhile, gets a veteran presence to flesh out the still-early stages of their rebuild. They could afford to take on the full salary on Goodrow because they have plenty of cap space.

As for Dellandrea, the cost was a fourth-round pick in 2025 that originally belonged to Winnipeg — the Jets flipped it last year to the Sharks for Vladislav Namestnikov. Dellandrea was a fourth-line forward in Dallas who saw action in only six playoff games for the Stars this spring. The chances of him seeing an increased role were probably minimal, given that the Stars want both Logan Stankoven and Mavrik Bourque on the NHL roster next season. On the plus side, Dellandrea is only 23 and did go at No. 13 in the 2018 draft. Although he hasn’t produced offensively in the NHL, he had 70 points in 49 games for Flint in his final year of junior, and in 2022, with the AHL Texas Stars, he managed 50 points in 68 games. So, there is a potential upside, depending upon his usage.

And finally

NHL award season is just around the corner, with the final five awards to be announced in Vegas next Thursday ahead of the draft. In a break from tradition, the NHL announced the winners of some of the smaller awards during the playoffs. We know, for example, that Aleksander Barkov is the Selke Trophy winner, Rick Tocchet is coach of the year, Jim Nill is GM of the year, etc.

The biggies — Hart, Norris, Calder, Vezina and Ted Lindsay — are still to come. What this year’s scattered award season taught us is a) not all awards are created equal, and b) if the NHL truly wants the awards to be equal, then they need to add one for best defensive defenseman, to bookend the Selke, which goes to best defensive forward. The Selke was introduced in 1977, relatively late compared to some of the other important hardware, and the theory behind the award was that defensive play matters in winning hockey but it’s hard for someone who exclusively plays a defensive game to win, for example, the MVP award.

In the first 15 years of the Selke, with the exception of the one year that Bobby Clarke won, the trophy went almost exclusively to defensive specialists. That changed in 1993, when Doug Gilmour won, and it changed forever in 1995, when Ron Francis won it. Francis is the NHL’s fifth all-time leading scorer. Recently, and until his retirement, the Selke was almost exclusively the domain of Patrice Bergeron, who was the Bruins’ unquestioned No. 1 center and also pretty great defensively. Anything but a defensive specialist, in other words. And if Bergeron wasn’t winning, it was the Kings’ Anže Kopitar, a two-time winner, who is also a true No. 1 center.

Way back, the argument for not honoring a defensive defenseman specifically was that it wasn’t necessary. Officially, the Norris is awarded “to the defense player who demonstrates throughout the season the greatest all-around ability at the position.” That might have even been a reasonable argument back when the job of a defenseman was mostly just to play defense.

But that hasn’t been the NHL reality for decades now, and so it means a generation of defensem*n who focus on — and excel at — defense always get short shrift.

Does it matter? Well, for purposes of Hockey Hall of Fame balloting, major awards do count. And that’s why it’s so hard for defensive defensem*n to make it to the Hall. Serge Savard was one, though his offense was pretty good. For a time, Rod Langway became the placeholder for a defensive defenseman (he won the Norris in 1983 and 1984).

But that awareness only lasted a few years. Mostly, it’s now the offensive whiz kids who win the award.

Zdeno Chara was a one-year exception. He’s eligible for the Hall in 2025, and he feels like a first-ballot winner and his primary claim to fame was his defensive work. Nicklas Lidstrom’s all-around game made the topic something less than hot for a while, because Lidstrom simply did it all.

But there’s a generation of retired players who do what Jaccob Slavin of Carolina does today — play a responsible, steady defensive game that doesn’t draw a lot of attention.

Historically, that’s been the case with lots of others, too, including Brad McCrimmon, Niklas Kronwall and Niklas Hjalmarsson, all of whom would have warranted consideration for a best defensive defenseman award had there been one.

And while I’m at the front of the line when it comes to saying the NHL has too many awards, the reality is, some of the corporate ones just seem unnecessary. For sure, the Mark Messier Leadership Award is a curious anomaly. What does it mean exactly? Why is it chosen just by a single individual? And doesn’t it essentially duplicate the King Clancy Memorial Award, which is for a player who demonstrates “leadership on and off the ice”? This year, the Islanders’ Anders Lee won the King Clancy and the Rangers’ Jacob Trouba won the Messier. If you made just one change to the awards landscape, and added a trophy for the best defensive defenseman, that would balance the awards scales, which frankly have been out of whack since 1977.

(Top photo of Todd McLellan: Dave Sandford / NHLI via Getty Images)