Puck Daddy Power Rankings: Bad mascot, San Jose Sharks and insufferable Canadians

[Author's note: Power rankings are usually three things: Bad, wrong, and boring. You typically know just as well as the authors which teams won what games against who and what it all means, so our moving the Red Wings up four spots or whatever really doesn't tell you anything you didn't know. Who's hot, who's not, who cares? For this reason, we're doing a power ranking of things that are usually not teams. You'll see what I mean.] 

9. Bad mascots

Farewell and adieu to Scorch, mascot for Calgary's AHL affiliate in Glens Falls, N.Y., who was SNUFFED OUT before he ever even had a chance to catch on like WILDFIRE. A CANDLE blown out too soon. … torch?

And so on. Make all the fire puns you want. But boy there really hasn't been a mascot this poorly rolled out in a long, long time. What was his official lifespan, six days from unveiling to mothballing? That's amazing, isn't it?

Look, the Flames have long been an organization known for stepping in dog turds, no matter how many signs were flashing “Don't step in these dog turds right here where all these arrows are pointing,” and obviously the big club didn't have anything to do with a minor-league mascot rollout, but how typical is this of everything going sideways for this franchise?

Further, let's even take the extraordinarily courteous leap of forgetting the fact that a fire was a major tragedy for the local market over a century ago (but also: haha that too). How on earth does anyone with even the slightest background in marketing sit in a room and say to their bosses, “Yes, I believe that it would be wise for our new mascot to murder a first responder in a promotional video.”

Fortunately for Scorch (ROAST in peace), someone else in the organization was able to draw a little FIRE away from him this week...

8. Trevor Gillies

Speaking of embarrassments to the Flames, the fact that this brainless, dangerous clod even had employment in professional hockey should be a major point of embarrassment. If you were to draw up a list of things Trevor Gillies might have done to earn a 12-game suspension from the AHL — which, by the way, is a ludicrously small number for someone with his track record of trying to kill people on the ice — “bouncing some prospect's head off the ice after he tried to fight him, was rebuffed, and started throwing bombs anyway” would have come in among the top-five most believable, for sure. I'd have pulled up just short of “threw his stick like a javelin through an opponent's leg” because I don't think he's really mastered concepts like simple tools quite yet.

But Gillies does have a job in professional hockey, and if you were to draw up a list of the top-five teams most likely to employ a knuckle-dragging human embarrassment such as him, would you be able to come up with anyone more plausible than Calgary? Of course you wouldn't.

Trevor Gillies should not be allowed to play hockey after an incident such as this, which can't be interpreted as anything other than an attempt to smash open his opponent's skull like a coconut on a rock so that he may feast on its contents. Instead, he'll continue to draw a paycheck from the one organization in hockey that will continue to encourage him. Not that they want him to bounce anyone's skull off the ice, but when you employ Gillies, you basically say that you value your opponent's health and safety even less than your own credibility.

7. The Bruins' offense

Well through the first four games of the season, the Boston Bruins, reigning Presidents' Trophy winners, have scored twice, once, zero times, and once again. By my math that's four goals in their first four games. It is therefore surprising that they've even one any games at all. But they did.

This has, as you might imagine, led to a certain amount of fretting among the Bruins media, fans, and media fans. “What's going on here?” they all want to know. “What happened to the Bruins?”

What happened to the Bruins is that they have continually traded premium scoring talent or simply let it walk in free agency. Remember all those people who said, “Oh hey, the Bruins can just replace Jarome Iginla's 30 goals no problemo!” as recently as a month ago, as though Peter Chiarlelli could just flip over any rock in the nearest forest and scrounge up another top-six winger? They're just baffled.

At some point, there are diminishing returns, right? Have to be. There are only so many quality wings available to any one NHL team. I mean, look at what Claude Julien is putting with Milan Lucic and David Krejci so on: Seth Griffith and Ryan Spooner. Yeah, shocked they couldn't make that work. And that fourth line of Dan Paille, Bobby Robins, and Craig Cunningham? Boy it's weird they're getting pushed around. Simon Gagne is going to sort everything out though, don't you worry.

And their defense, too, is suffering, almost as though trading your No. 3 guy is in some way detrimental to your ability to win. When you can't even push around Colorado at home, you have big problems just about everywhere in the lineup.

With all that having been said, the Bruins aren't going to shoot less than 4 percent forever (and when they start scoring again whoever's on the Krejci line is going to find himself in line to cash in big time when their contract is up. Because that's how that kind of thing goes in Boston.) The Bruins will be fine. But not as good as they have been the last few years. People don't want to accept either of those things right now.

6. Being “fancy”

Weird that when you go looking for problems to which one could attribute the Avalanche's ongoing problems — two goals in their first three games — to being “fancy” and not “bad.” Their corsi share through their first three games is actually worse than it was last year (dragged down, no doubt about it, by that dreadful opening-night performance). It is of course tough to draw too many conclusions from just three games, only one of which they won, and by the flukiest of fluke plays.

That said, the Avs seem to be doing more or less the same thing as last year, except they're also generating fewer shot attempts as well (46.4 per 60 at evens, compared with last year's 51.1) as getting shelled as per usual.

But yeah, beating Boston at TD Garden with 0.4 seconds left is totally repeatable.

5. Tyler Myers' time in Buffalo

The Sabres are, to the surprise of no one, a disaster of Michael Bay-like proportions. They're on pace to give up a ludicrous number of shots (130 conceded in their first three games, or a pace for 3,553 in 82 games!!!) and their poor coach is already shuffling the deckchairs as passengers on the lido deck start to notice the water in their bath is really cold and also in the dining room.

And out of this impending and totally foreseeable nautical disaster comes word that at least one promising player, former Calder winner Tyler Myers, might find his way to a lifeboat. Rumors of his possibly maybe potentially one day perhaps being traded have been out there forever, but if you're gonna start selling off pieces anyway, why wait? Myers is one of the few the Sabres have that anyone would want, and the asking price for a tall, occasionally physical, right-shooting, former Calder winner who's not even 26 yet is going to be sizable. If the Red Wings, just to pick one team that has been repeatedly connected to every right-shot D in the league over the last year-plus, were to acquire him, they'd pay through the nose. Which is all Buffalo wants at this point.

The benefits, meanwhile, are tangible for Myers. He's out of an awful situation with some of his dignity intact, and people go on thinking he's the defenseman who can reliably put up a 101-plus PDO. The dirty secret on him is that he was never all that good; even his “stellar” rookie year was driven by an on-ice shooting percentage (10.36, by far the highest of his career) that proved unsustainable.

Buffalo may be selling a little low given that he's not now, nor will he ever be, Rookie Tyler Myers again, but they're selling this asset while it still has a lot of perceived value.

So Sabres fans shouldn't think of this as an end to a good relationship (one they likely think is better than it has been in actuality) but rather an opportunity to start fresh with some prospect they'll take mid-first round in the 2016 entry draft, and maybe a couple other pieces. Oh well, they're that much close to Connor McDavid anyway.

4. Patric Hornqvist

Playing with Sidney Crosby sure is a lot of fun, isn't it? Not that I ever thought him playing with Crosby was any kind of appreciable downgrade from James Neal-with-Evgeni Malkin or anything, but it's nice to see Hornqvist succeed playing alongside the unequivocal best player in the world. He's 2-2-4 in two games with hilariously good possession numbers.

Hopefully this dispels the myth that Crosby, or any other great player, is “hard to play with” because they are clearly not.

3. The Predators

Hornqvist's old team, the Nashville Predators, meanwhile, seem to be getting along just fine without him. Travis Yost had a good analysis of what they're already doing differently under Peter Laviolette, and specifically how they bottled up that high-flying Dallas offense to the point where they barely even registered as a nuisance.

Again, one can't be of the belief that a team with this little on-paper talent (especially up front) is actually this good or anything like that, but if they can keep stamping out neutral zone play anywhere near as effectively as this for a good portion of the season, and Pekka Rinne doesn't come down with a weird tropical disease, then Laviolette is going to be in the running for Jack Adams.

2. The Sharks

You want to talk about a team that came out of the corner throwing haymakers, San Jose is once again looking deadly. And they didn't even have to demote Joe Thornton to the fourth line to do it.

The thing is that the Sharks were always going to be good because their roster is absurdly loaded with talent pretty much throughout. Even having the team go out and actively try to find untalented players did little to change the fact that they're going to dominate teams most nights. This is so smart by Doug Wilson.

Scenario No. 1: Sharks dominate, as they have. Here, Wilson can say, “See, stripping Thornton of the captaincy woke everyone up, and now they're playing great. Raise please.”

Scenario No. 2: Sharks are middling, which could have happened out of the gate. Here, Wilson can say, “Well, it takes time to adjust to new paradigms but we have faith in our talent level and maybe I'll just fire the coach if things don't work out, but I bet they will. I'll figure it out.”

Scenario No. 3: Sharks are bad, which was basically impossible. Here, Wilson can say, “Yeah, the situation is toxic. Better burn it all down. I tried to tell everyone and they wouldn't listen. You have to keep me on now. Wait, who's this McLellan guy you're talking about? Never heard of him.”

Again, Wilson actively made his team worse in a number of ways this summer, and he's going to be praised endlessly if the Sharks continue to have the success they were always going to have. It's brilliant.

1. Insufferable Canadians

With the Coyotes ownership situation now kinda maybe sorted out, the pointing and laughing among paternalistic Canadian This Is Our Game-rs at the team in the Southern U.S. with the bad record and worse attendance had to shift elsewhere.

The Florida Panthers were more than happy to step into the crosshairs, apparently.

Attendance in the four digits is a bad look, no doubt about it. And I'm not even going to make the apologies for it that Greg did yesterday. I don't care if it's a midweek game in August against a junior B team: An NHL team, even if it's had 38 losing seasons in a row, has to draw more than 10,000 fans a night to be considered legitimate. No explanatory defense can convince me otherwise.

With that having been said, the Panthers have to have known this was coming. All this stuff about “it's unacceptable” is silly. Because it's also the only thing that was ever going to happen here. Maybe not to this extreme, of course, but if you stop papering the building, you draw fewer fans. Pretty simple.

And so now that specific type of Canadian gets to be giddy about this whole thing again. Which is awful. Because they're the absolute worst.

(Not ranked this week: Concerns over Steven Stamkos's leg.

Just in case you thought he might not be all the way 100 percent with that broken leg, the goals he scored to put together a hat trick Monday night were pretty much definitively not of the “Stamkos bombing it in from the Stamkos Spot which he could do with two broken legs anyway” variety. Netmouth scramble, breakaway, off-wing bomb. It's great to see him killing it again. He is a true pleasure to watch.)

MORE NHL ON YAHOO SPORTS