Podcast Ombudsman Report for Blueshirt Bandwidth Ep. 62

Welcome back to the Blueshirt Bandwidth Podcast Ombudsman Report. Each week, Charlie Vidal will listen to the latest episode of the podcast and correct the record on anything Joe and Eric get wrong. If you aren't already, you can listen and subscribe to the podcast here.

Episode 62

Carl Hagelin is best remembered for being very fast, winning the 2012 fastest skater competition at the NHL All Star Game:

He also eliminated the Pittsburgh Penguins in overtime in 2015:

Vegas

Although Joe and Eric are not ones to complain about the officiating costing the Rangers a game, I’ll provide this link to a video of the play in question at the beginning of overtime when Mitch Marner tripped Matthew Robertson and was not called for a penalty. Per MoneyPuck it was a pretty even game that the Rangers would be expected to win 44% of the time:

Quinn Hughes Trade

Joe and Eric talked a lot about the Quinn Hughes trade rumors, although they said that there was nothing to suggest that he’s coming to the Rangers. Hughes was ultimately traded to the Minnesota Wild on Friday for a package centered around Marco Rossi. I’m sure that Joe and Eric (Editor's note: It's Eric and Chip this week.) will discuss this more in-depth on this week’s podcast, but I’d like to point our readers to two differing perspectives on the Rangers:

Over at The Athletic, friend of the podcast Vince Mercogliano wrote that the Rangers do not have the pieces—be it draft picks, young players, or prospects—necessary to make a big splash.

Over at ESPN, Rachel Kryshak and Greg Wyshynski reported that the Canucks were interested in a package involving some combination of Alexis Lafrenière, Gabe Perreault, Will Cuylle, Noah Laba, and Braden Schneider but the Rangers declined to step up and make a sufficient offer.

Eklund

Eklund was one of the most prominent members of early hockey blogging. He was the pseudonymous lead of HockeyBuzz, a website that is somehow still online and was posting rumors over the summer. In 2011, Adrian Dater wrote the definitive overview of Eklund and HockeyBuzz for Sports Illustrated. At the height of his popularity, Eklund was not considered a reliable source, instead focusing on putting out juicy rumors for clicks. The PWHA refused to admit Eklund as a member due his refusal to use his real name and low accuracy rate. In 2008, a website studying HockeyBuzz found that for every one rumor that was true, 30 did not come to fruition, giving them an accuracy rate of 2.3 percent.  

Eklund devised the famed “E1” (this is a rumor that comes from a single reliable source not in any way directly connected to the players or teams involved) to “E5” (this rumor comes from source telling Eklund the deal is 100% done and just has not been announced yet) system for rating hockey rumors, but ultimately most of his rumors were considered to be wild speculation or made up.

Phillip Danault

Phillip Danault, who is somehow getting trade buzz, still leads the league in minutes played by a forward who is yet to score a goal, with Peyton Krebs in a close second. While Conor Sheary found the net and mercifully removed himself from this list, Brett Berard has crept up to 21st:

Trocheck Trade Possibilities

Joe dismissed the possibility of a Vincent Trocheck trade, saying “logistically, they don’t want to piss off Miller by trading Trocheck.” Chris Drury joined the New York Rangers front office in 2015. In 2018 the Rangers traded captain Ryan McDonagh, and just last year Chris Drury himself traded captain Jacob Trouba after sending a group chat message that made the team sad and caused them to quit for six weeks.

Worst Team in Hockey

During the discussion of who the worst team in hockey is, Eric suggested the Buffalo Sabres as a team that is consistently worse than the sum of their parts.

On a related note, over the weekend The Athletic’s Sean McIndoe, better known on Twitter as @DownGoesBrown, wrote a list of the worst GMs in NHL history to keep their jobs for more than five years. Kevyn Adams rated as the third worst.

Over the weekend, I was texting about this piece, being somewhat surprised that Adams kept his job. One point I made is that when Jack Eichel requested a trade due to disagreements with team management, the right thing for Terry Pegula to do would be to fire everybody and let Jack Eichel pick the next coach.

Of course, Kevyn Adams was fired as I was writing this piece on Monday morning:

In 2021, the Rangers were allegedly hot in the running to land Jack Eichel for package allegedly centered around Pavel Buchnevich after he requested a trade. Unfortunately, a competing Rangers podcast that shall remained unnamed purchased a billboard in Buffalo mocking Eichel’s trade request. Since then, Terry Pegula has seemed unwilling do any significant business with the Rangers.

Olympic Ice

As you all know, a standard NHL rink is 200’ x 85’. This year’s Olympic ice rink was supposed to be the same size, but Europe uses the metric system so it will be 196.85’ x 85.3’. That is 60 meters by 26 meters, and I guess that the IOC isn’t able to do math in freedom units.

Guy Who Tried to Buy the Islanders

John Spano is the man who fraudulently purchased the New York Islanders and gained control of them for a few months in early 1997. Big Shot is the ESPN 30 for 30 documentary about the incident.

Notre Dame Football

Eric started the show off with an off-topic rant about Notre Dame football that wasted 11 minutes of everybody’s time. Eric correctly noted that Notre Dame could not afford to start the season 0-2 and still make the playoffs,

Let’s compare the resumes of the teams that were in consideration for the final at large bids, Alabama, Notre Dame, and Miami:

(All ranking numbers taken from the Sagarin ratings)

Notre Dame lost the head to head matchup with Miami, so even with similar resumes (although you can see that Miami beat slightly better teams than Notre Dame) you have to give the nod to Miami. As for the comparison with Alabama, it isn’t even close. Notre Dame has one win against teams ranked higher than 30th, Alabama has seven, including a win over the sixth rated and second seeded Georgia Bulldogs. The SEC is much deeper than every other conference, and in the process of going 7-1 in conference and having the league’s top seed for the Championship game, Alabama racked up more quality wins than Notre Dame even had a chance to.

Eric said that Alabama was the only team to lose their conference championship game and not drop a spot. This is not true. In 2022 TCU lost a heartbreaker in overtime to a Kansas State team that they had already beaten in October in the Big XII Championship game and remained in the three seed.

Ultimately, while I agree with Eric’s assertion that the College Football Playoff committee is a joke largely because of how they ranked the teams in the (now apparently) meaningless weekly TV specials, Notre Dame ultimately did not deserve to be in the playoff over any of the other at large teams.

Eric called this year a “transitional year” for Notre Dame with the real focus on 2026. (Editor's note: Actually, Eric relayed from The Athletic's Pete Sampson that while no one internal would call this a transitional year, everyone said next year was the season they were looking towards.) If you look at Notre Dame’s 2026 schedule, they better run the table because there are three games against teams that finished this season rated in the top 40 (SMU, USC, and Miami).

Finally, as a reminder, Notre Dame actually lost their games against CFP at large teams Miami:

...and Texas A&M: