Appreciating Patrice Bergeron, best vs. worst NHL front offices and is Rob Blake

Thanks again to everyone who submitted questions to the July reader mailbag. As promised, I’ll answer as many as possible until vacation beckons in early August. Besides, there were a handful of fun queries that came in late that I didn’t want to ignore. So once more, with feeling, let’s dig in.

How about a horrible contract lottery? Each team enters a player, then gets to inherit someone else’s disaster. Of course, this lottery will involve ping pong balls … — David W.

Points to David W. on two fronts. First, to come up with an original idea — or certainly not one that I’d ever heard before — and then second, for actually creating a possible solution to a vexing, ongoing problem. Naturally, there would be issues with its implementation, primarily because too many of the NHL’s horrible contracts are also complicated by limited or complete no-move clauses. Even if you’re just playing a hypothetical game, you’d probably have to disqualify them. Makes it less intriguing.
But the germ of the idea remains interesting because often, what a player needs more than anything else when trying (and failing) to live up to the promise of a bloated contract is a second chance to get a fresh start somewhere else.

And of course, it’s a hard thing to do in real NHL life because nobody wants to take on a horrible, bloated contract unless there’s something in it for them — like Montreal getting a first-round draft choice from Calgary for taking on Sean Monahan’s deal. With Arizona, there are too many examples to count where it took on an unwanted player and received a sweetener to do so. But the Arizona example perfectly illustrates the point of how that sort of accommodation can help resuscitate a player’s career.

Just look at what happened with defenseman Shayne Gostisbehere. Philadelphia gave Arizona a second and a seventh-rounder to take him on. Gostisbehere found his game again in Arizona, and Arizona then traded him at the deadline to Carolina and got further compensation (a third-round pick) for its troubles. And then Detroit signed him as a UFA this summer to a one-year deal.

Similarly, Nick Bjugstad thanked the Coyotes for his career revival when they swapped him to Edmonton at the 2023 trade deadline, and this summer he returned to the Coyotes on a new two-year deal.

If you invented a bad-contract lottery and made it mandatory for every team to enter, it would potentially check two boxes. It would give the players involved a necessary second chance, and it might even help teams fill an organizational void. Let’s say you’re too deep at forward and you enter your overpriced forward in the lottery. Maybe, when your number comes up, you get help in goal and/or on defense, where you have a greater need. We all understand that since the NHL is a no-fun league, it would never happen. But wouldn’t it be something if it could?

Is Kings GM Rob Blake nuts or a genius? — Scott V.

Genius. Though maybe the…