The NHL column: The year 2022 – blue and white border on Colorado’s title, the super individual reached new heights, but the league plunged into a moral abyss

The year began with the NHL snubbing the Olympics. Still, that was only the beginning of the league’s moral darkness. In the rink, on the other hand, there was sunshine, as Colorado’s charm offensive lasted all the way and one player brought thoughts to the 20th century.

The NHL podcast ends the year with a look back. Autumn’s best and worst are picked out – and as usual, everything has not gone as the snack-loving duo expected before the start of the season.

From a blue-white perspective, Artturi Lehkonen may be the symbol of the best of the NHL year 2022. Colorado brought in the hugely committed two-way winger just before the transfer window closed in March and it was veni, vidi, vici all the way.

Lehkonen, who a spring earlier scored the goal that sent the Montreal Canadiens to the Stanley Cup Final, repeated the feat for Colorado in the conference finals against Edmonton in overtime of Game 4.

Lehkonen’s status as a big-moment specialist (he scored the golden goal for Frölunda in 2016) rose to near-mythical heights in the finals series against the reigning champions Tampa Bay Lightning.

Artturi’s 2–1 goal in the sixth final became the winning goal of the match and the final series. Jari Kurri was until then the only Finn to decide the Stanley Cup. Lehkonen also scored the winning goal in final number two. Not bad: “Lehky” decided three of Colorado’s last seven goals.

Colorado’s biggest Finnish star in 2022 was still Mikko Rantanen. “The Moose” constantly has to find Nathan MacKinnon and Cale Makar elevated to a class of their own, but in practice, seen through results, Rantanen has proven to keep pace with the super duo.

In the 21–22 season, he was first in the “Avs” internal scoring in the regular season and second in the playoffs – still first in the final series. When the year ends, Nousisbjässen leads the champions internally and has every chance to reach 100 points and 50 goals. Teemu S. is the latest Finn to do so.

A superstar in the NHL’s reigning champion team who, when the whole squad is cool, plays the best hockey in the entire league. Mikko Rantanen is this year’s Finnish NHL king.

The crown princes don’t give up either. Juuse Saros’ 21-22 season earned him a Vezina nomination, Roope Hintz’s fall season has confirmed the Dallas player is among the league’s center elite, and his teammate Miro Heiskanen has started to produce at Norris levels.

Sebastian Aho and Aleksander Barkov have such high expectations for themselves that the year 2022 was just one in a row. The performances did not stand out in the same way as those of the other mentioned Finns.

Individual best since Mario Lemieux

Speaking of individual achievements: Edmonton’s superstar Connor McDavid has clearly proven in the past year that he is the hockey world’s greatest individual. Not since Mario Lemieux’s prime has a player accomplished such solo feats as Edmonton’s captain.

The NHL is the league where basically all players maintain a really high individual level (compared to other leagues). Beyond that, every player on every team knows that the player with the 97 on the back is the guy you have to stop to beat the Oilers.

Nevertheless, McDavid repeatedly drives through almost the entire opponent’s five. He creates a dangerous scoring chance almost every time he controls the puck in the offensive zone and almost never leaves the rink without a point these days.

In the playoffs, he scored a somewhat insane 10+23 in 16 games – and for the first time managed to be unstoppable in the playoffs as well. It resulted in the conference finals, where since Colorado’s abundance of talent could no longer be taken by surprise without depth and breadth.

In the playoffs, however, the Oilers’ other superstar Leon Draisaitl kept pace with McDavid (7+25) and was the other big reason why Edmonton won two playoff rounds.

During the fall season of 2022, we still got to see an even more astonishing McDavid. At the time of writing, he has a gap of ten points in the points league ahead of second-placed Leon Draisaitl.

McDavid has produced monsters at a rate no one dreamed of during the current millennium. With 31+36 in 36 games, the 97 is on his way to around 70 goals and over 150 points. The last player to exceed 150 points is Mario Lemieux in the 1995–96 season.

The others

Besides McDavid and his gun-toting Draisaitl, Auston Matthews’ 60 regular season goals, Cale Makar’s Bobby Orr-like dominance and Igor Szhestjorkin’s 93.5 regular season save percentage were the big individual exclamation points in the season that ended in June.

During the autumn, a couple of new names have entered the sharpest elite with capital letters. Third and fourth in the scoring league as of this writing (Dec. 29), Jason Robertson (24+27) and Tage Thompson (26+24) are headed for superstar status.

So you can’t overlook an old acquaintance either: “the world’s best Karlsson”. The two-time Norris winner Erik K. has scored 13+35 in 36 games and will go over 100 points without injuries. Only five NHL defensemen have done it.

The spring and autumn teams

Ice hockey is still, as you know, a team sport and the fact is that Cale Makar is the only active player mentioned in the individual part of this text with the name engraved in Lord Stanley’s coveted dent. Something Edmonton’s GM Ken Holland in particular should think about.

The Colorado Avalanche was of course the success story of the first half of the year. Super hyped Avalanche had all the pressure on them and managed the steak.

Guys like Lehkonen, Valeri Nitjuskin and Nazem Kadri made sure the superstars didn’t have to pull the load without strong support. The NHL’s best team won the Stanley Cup.

Speaking of the best team: the star of the fall is the Boston Bruins. After changing coaches, getting a Czech veteran back, relying on an undrafted Swedish card between the posts and overcoming injuries, the Bruins are at their current pace on their way to over 60 wins in the regular season.

When the year changes, it will be up to the other top teams to try to take the title of “clear Stanley Cup favorite” away from the Bruins.

Big plus on the annual rating also for the Tampa Bay Lightning who made it to the third straight Stanley Cup final with sheer will and again look like a team no one (not even Boston) wants to face in the playoffs.

Under the bar – from January to December

Unfortunately, it wasn’t all sunshine and sunshine during the past year. In 2022, the disappointments on the ice were completely overshadowed by events outside the rink. A moral one annus horribilis.

The year began with the NHL fulfilling the decision made two days before Christmas Eve 2021: the world’s best players did not participate in the Winter Olympics.

When it emerged that the NHL’s decision was based on deliberately inflated threat images of covid-infected stars who would not be able to leave Beijing until several weeks after the Olympics were over, the aftertaste was as nasty as it gets.

The dazed players only protested when the race was over and as usual there wasn’t a soul among the NHL journalists in North America who questioned the drivel served up by the league’s decision makers.

Getting kicked out of the Olympics was just the beginning

What then followed was something far worse.

As we know, Russia was swiftly banned from most international sporting events until further notice after its war machine attacked Ukraine. This also applied to the IIHF’s operations, and the hockey community set its sights on the NHL.

The world’s best hockey league is in a unique position when it comes to Russian athletes. Ice hockey is the only team sport where the world’s leading professional league has loads of Russian stars.

At the same time, ever since the Cold War, ice hockey has been the Kremlin’s favorite sport and the national team was and is a popular propaganda weapon for the Russian decision-makers. As the best Russian players today are in the NHL, those in power are more than happy to bask in the stars’ glory.

For example, superstar Aleksandr Ovetchkin was a front man for Putin’s 2018 presidential campaign, and near-equal star Yevgeni Malkin was featured in the same project. This, then, after the annexation of Crimea and when Russia was already waging war in eastern Ukraine.

Against this background, one would have thought that the NHL would have done its part to protest Russia’s full-scale offensive war. That is to say, demand that the Russian players take a stand against the war – in case they want to continue carving dollars in the NHL.

Nothing came of it. The league has offered a variety of explanations for its actions, none of which are worth repeating.

In fact, the League does not care one bit about its potential power to try to influence the attitude of the Russian people towards the war. At the moment, every Russian NHL star who has not condemned Russia’s attack is a propaganda victory for Putin’s regime. The NHL knows this, but ignores it.

Instead, the NHL and the media that follow the league celebrate almost every day an old man who poses with Putin on his Instagram profile picture.

Ice hockey in the NHL has no counterpart in the hockey world – but the actions of the league and the NHL media outside the rink lack all morality.

Not to end the summary in the darkest darkness: finally in the last days of the year, reputable NHL watchers both in Sportsnet as in New York Post aimed their verbal swords at Aleksandr Ovetchkin.

Thank you for reading.