Very Bad and Painful News: The best in hockey in the world has bein announced death this morning,due to the……………

Most of the great teams of this decade are from the Penguins, Lightning and Capitals, which all have guys I’d consider eventual slam dunks. The Kings have Drew Doughty and the Bruins have Patrice Bergeron, so they don’t work. The 2010-11 Canucks were dominant, but they had the Sedins and Roberto Luongo. And there are some great teams from the Rangers and Ducks and Sharks that get eliminated by Martin St. Louis and Teemu Selanne and Joe Thornton.

This won’t be easy. Which of course is the whole point.

A few teams do jump out as candidates. The obvious one is the 2018-19 Blues, who weren’t exactly a great team during the season but did win the Stanley Cup. At first glance, they seemed like an ideal team for this sort of exercise, one that was more than the sum of its parts and wasn’t driven by a legendary superstar. I don’t think Ryan O’Reilly is on a HHOF track, Vladimir Tarasenko would need a hell of a finishing kick to even get in the conversation and younger guys like Robert Thomas and Jordan Kyrou aren’t on pace yet.

A few teams do jump out as candidates. The obvious one is the 2018-19 Blues, who weren’t exactly a great team during the season but did win the Stanley Cup. At first glance, they seemed like an ideal team for this sort of exercise, one that was more than the sum of its parts and wasn’t driven by a legendary superstar. I don’t think Ryan O’Reilly is on a HHOF track, Vladimir Tarasenko would need a hell of a finishing kick to even get in the conversation and younger guys like Robert Thomas and Jordan Kyrou aren’t on pace yet.

The one name here that could derail us is Alex Pietrangelo. He doesn’t have a Norris, but he’s a three-time all-star with two Cups, and his similarity list is filled with guys like Scott Niedermayer, Doug Wilson and Larry Murphy. I checked Adjusted Hockey, where they use a point system with a standard HHOF cutoff for defensemen of 269. Pietrangelo scores … 269 on the nose. Great. No clarity there, but the implication is that he’s on pace to at least be a strong candidate, so let’s keep looking.

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