Kaplan’s latest NHL buzz: Guentzel’s future, Gauthier trade among hot topics
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Emily Kaplan, ESPN
We’re less than two months from the NHL trade deadline and it’s definitely getting busy around the NHL. One huge — and unexpected — trade was already completed this week between the Philadelphia Flyers and the Anaheim Ducks. What else could be in the works? Here are some of the rumblings I’ve been hearing at rinks around the NHL.
ONE OF THE most intriguing storylines is what will happen to Jake Guentzel. There’s a very real chance that one of the most popular and consistently productive Pittsburgh Penguins players gets dealt, and the next few weeks are crucial. “This will get really heated down the stretch,” Guentzel’s agent, Ben Hankinson, told me last week. “It’s going to get interesting.”
Hankinson stressed that he has a good relationship with Penguins GM Kyle Dubas. They talked over the summer and understand the place each side is operating from. Ownership believes the Penguins should try to chase Cups while Sidney Crosby is still operating at an elite level — but the team, which has trended older, is on the playoff bubble yet again. The Penguins also have a depleted pool of prospects and draft picks. That puts Dubas in a precarious position.
Guentzel, 29, is finishing up the final year of a five-year, $30 million deal. He’s likely due for a raise. Hankinson and Dubas have not had substantial talks progressing toward a new contract. Guentzel adores playing in Pittsburgh, but signing a new long-term deal might not make sense for both sides. Other teams I’ve talked to increasingly believe Guentzel will be available. The interest will be massive — and the acquisition cost could be high. Guentzel shows up when it matters most. In 58 career playoff games, the winger has 34 goals and a Stanley Cup.
One undercurrent to all of this: Crosby loves playing with Guentzel. That’s not insignificant. The captain’s voice has serious power within the organization. Crosby quietly campaigned when things weren’t going well with Evgeni Malkin‘s and Kris Letang‘s contract negotiations in 2022. So we’ll see where this goes.
THE CUTTER GAUTHIER story gripped the NHL this week. The Flyers traded their blue-chip prospect to Anaheim three days after he helped lead Team USA to a gold medal at the World Championships, but it was the reasons — or really, lack thereof — that sent the hockey world into a tizzy.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” one longtime front office executive told me this week. “Situations happen. A drafted college player has the right to not sign with a team. It’s happened before. It will likely happen more often given the nature of this next generation. But I can’t remember a team ever getting iced on answers — or a public reaction from a front office like that after.”
The Flyers were understandably miffed. For eight months they knew Gauthier, the No. 5 pick of the 2022 draft, didn’t want to sign in Philadelphia but never could get an answer of why, nor present their case. Gauthier’s agent, Kurt Overhardt, told me he had “several conversations” with the Flyers. But when Gauthier still refused to meet with Flyers GM Danny Briere and president Keith Jones in Sweden, they knew they needed to move on.
In trading Gauthier for defenseman Jamie Drysdale and a second-round pick, Flyers management declared: If you don’t want to be in Philadelphia, then we don’t want you. Considering the passion in the market, it’s no surprise fans galvanized around the rallying cry.
Gauthier still hasn’t revealed much, citing “private family reasons” in a video call with Ducks reporters Wednesday. Gauthier was home in Michigan with his family when the trade went down, which is fortunate because the reaction was overwhelming — and in some instances, nasty.
“We live in a world where everyone thinks they need to know everything,” Overhardt said. “And the truth is, they don’t.”
Overhardt said they will use this as a learning experience. “We’re trying to take the high road here,” the agent said. Gauthier is only 19 years old, with his entire NHL future ahead of him. It’s a dramatic start, but Gauthier is a confident player with incredible promise. He can write his own script now.
“Players like that don’t become available very often,” Ducks GM Verbeek told me. “We didn’t have a player like this in our prospect pool.” Verbeek, for context, was granted permission to speak with Overhardt — who notably also represents one of the Ducks’ best players, Troy Terry — once trade talks intensified.
Verbeek wouldn’t have given up defenseman Jamie Drysdale — a brilliant prospect himself, albeit one with an injury history — without belief that Gauthier’s reasoning for not wanting to play in Philadelphia wouldn’t bite the Ducks later on.
“When I talked to Cutter, he was excited about playing in Anaheim,” Verbeek said. “I see him playing in the NHL next season for sure. He is going back to Boston College where they’re having a great season, and then we’ll take it from there.”
Verbeek said Gauthier is an “elite skater with an elite shot,” specifically his one-timer. The GM foresees Gauthier developing more of a power game, and loves his versatility to play with any of the team’s centers.
Verbeek is still preaching the slow play in the Ducks’ rebuild, but it’s hard not to get excited about their future. Gauthier joins a young forward core of Leo Carlsson, Mason McTavish, Terry and Trevor Zegras. The Ducks have lost 18 one-goal games over the first three months, which will be a focus down the stretch. “I constantly have to remind myself patience,” Verbeek said. “But in terms of culture, work ethic and compete, we’ve made big gains in building the foundation of the house.”
CROSBY PROBABLY ISN’T getting enough credit for how good he has been this season, at age 36. It’s the byproduct of someone who revels in the work. I recently asked Crosby about his mindset, entering his 19th season. “Not too much different. I still love it,” Crosby said. “Having a passion for it helps a lot. Love the game, love learning — that doesn’t change all these years later.”
What does that look like behind the scenes? Frankly, it’s obsessive. Crosby operates on a different wavelength than most. No detail is too minute. Coach Mike Sullivan shared a few examples with me.
Say Crosby misfired on a seam pass on the power play. The next day at practice, he’s arriving 15 minutes early. Assistant coach Ty Hennes will feed pucks from the exact same spot, and Crosby will emulate the exact same scenario. Crosby will take 50 reps of the play he missed the night prior before anyone else gets on the ice.
If Crosby didn’t have a good night in the faceoff circle, same thing with assistant coach Mike Vellucci dropping pucks for him the next day.
Penguins coaches are used to getting late-night texts from Crosby as he watches other games on TV. “Did you see what this team did on their power play? Can we try that?”
Sullivan noted that Crosby’s line often scores on the end of shifts. Crosby takes pride in grinding down other teams. Sullivan tries to manage the workload over the grind of the season. But Crosby is often asking him to incorporate more low battle drills at practice. It’s to say he’s the only player asking for them.
THE DEPRESSED GOALIE market should get moving closer to the trade deadline. Some have wondered whether the Boston Bruins would deal away either Linus Ullmark or Jeremy Swayman, considering it’s an area of surplus for Boston and there’s such a thirst for goaltending around the league. From what I understand, that doesn’t seem like the path they’d choose during the season. In fact, Swayman was eligible for an extension on Jan. 1, and a few people have told me to expect that to get done soon.
The Bruins, despite once again exceeding expectations, are going to feel pressure to do something at the trade deadline to improve their team. It’s just the nature of the organization and the market. I have heard they are scouting middle-six forwards, especially someone who could add a scoring punch.
ONE OF THE BIGGEST areas in which the New York Rangers improved this season is in the faceoff circle. In the past five seasons, they were a bottom-five faceoff team. So far in 2023-24, they rank third.
Talking to a few players, it has definitely been improved by an increased emphasis at practice, fitting with Peter Laviolette’s theme that every time the Rangers get on the ice, it’s a competition. “We’ve definitely been focusing on [faceoffs] more this year than any other season I’ve been here,” Mika Zibanejad told me.
But another secret is a technique that several of their centermen have used. When taking a faceoff in their offside circle, the center will flip the stick around. If you’re a right-handed shot, having your left hand so low on the stick feels awkward at first — and some players don’t think they have the strength or coordination to pull it off. But if you get a hang of it, it can be a major advantage.
Retired center Paul Gaustad was believed to be the first player to try this in the NHL. Nick Bonino picked up the trick from Gaustad when they played together in Nashville, and brought it to the Rangers. Bonino switches his stick most consistently, but Barclay Goodrow and Vincent Trocheck (who is leading the Rangers with a career-best 61.9% in the circle) have been doing it, too. A few other centers have been noodling with it around the league, including New Jersey’s Erik Haula and Detroit’s Dylan Larkin and J.T. Compher. I’d keep an eye on this as a growing trend.
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David Hale
NEWARK, Del. — Russ Crook has a shirt he likes to wear to Delaware football road games. He’s a lifelong fan and the current president of the Blue Hen Touchdown Club, but he knows the jokes, so he picked up the shirt a few years back when he saw it at the historic National 5 & 10 store on Main Street. It’s gray with a map of the state across the chest and the ubiquitous punchline delivered succinctly: “Dela-where?”
Yes, the state is small, though Rhode Island gets the acclaim that comes with being the country’s smallest. In popular culture, Delaware often translates as something of a non-place — cue the “Wayne’s World” GIF — and it’s widely appreciated by outsiders as little more than a 28-mile stretch of I-95 between Maryland and Pennsylvania that hardly warrants mentioning.
It’s a harmless enough stereotype, but Cook is hopeful this football season can start to change some perceptions. After all, in 2025, Delaware — the football program — hits the big time. Or, Conference USA, at least.
“Delaware’s a small state, but the university has 24,000 students,” Crook said. “Many big-time schools are smaller than we are. There’s no reason we can’t do this.”
When the Blue Hens kick off against Delaware State on Aug. 28, they will be, for the first time, an FBS football team, joining Missouri State as first-year members of Conference USA — the 135th and 136th FBS programs.
Longtime Hens fans might not have believed the move was possible even a few years ago, as much for the school’s ethos as the state’s stature. The university’s leadership had spent decades holding firm in the belief that the Hens were best positioned as a big fish in the relatively small ponds of Division II and, later, FCS.
And yet, just as the rest of the college sports world is reeling from an onslaught of change — revenue sharing, the transfer portal, NIL and conference realignment — Delaware decided it was time to join the party.
“Us and Delaware are probably making this move at one of the more difficult times to make the move in history,” said Missouri State AD Patrick Ransdell.
All of which begs the question: Why now?
Many of Delaware’s historic rivals — UMass, App State, Georgia Southern, Old Dominion, James Madison — had already made the leap to FBS, and the Hens’ previous conference, the Colonial, was reeling. Economic conditions at the FCS level made life challenging for administration. The NCAA was making moves to curb future transitions from FCS to FBS, and the school felt its window to make a move was closing.
“We had no choice,” Crook said.
And so, ready or not, the Hens are about to embark on a new era — a chance to prove themselves at a higher level and, perhaps, provide Delaware with a reputation that’s more than a punchline.
“We talk about doing things for the 302 all the time,” interim athletic director Jordan Skolnick said, referencing the area code that serves the entirety of the state. “We want everyone in the state of Delaware to feel the pride in us being successful, and we want people to realize how incredible this place is. It’s not just a place you drive through on 95.”
BACK WHEN MIKE Brey was coaching Delaware’s men’s basketball team to back-to-back tournament appearances in the 1990s, he would often swing by the football offices to talk shop with the Hens’ legendary football coach Tubby Raymond, who won 300 games utilizing a three-back offensive formation dubbed the wing-T. Brey recalls pestering him once about the new spread schemes being run at conference rival New Hampshire by a young coordinator named Chip Kelly. Raymond was a beloved figure at Delaware, and he had helped mentor Brey as a head coach, but he was notoriously old-school.
Raymond huffed, dismissing the tempo offense as “grass basketball,” all style and finesse without the fundamental elements of the game he had coached for decades. The mindset was often pervasive at UD.
“It was in the bricks there,” said Brey, who went on to a 23-year stint coaching at Notre Dame. “Tubby had his kingdom, and nobody was telling him what to do. It was, ‘Leave us alone. We’re good. We’ve got the wing-T.'”
Brey’s contract in those days technically referred to him as a member of the physical education department, and he and his staff had to teach classes during the offseason on basketball skills. Despite Raymond’s retirement in 2001 and an FCS national title in 2003, not much changed. By 2016, when Skolnick arrived to work in the athletic department, a number of coaches were still considered part-time employees, and several programs had to source their own equipment.
But change was brewing.
Old rivals such as App State, Georgia Southern and JMU had left FCS without missing a beat. Delaware had often punched above its weight and churned out genuine stars such as Rich Gannon and Joe Flacco, but the chasm between the haves and have-nots in football was growing. It was clear the Hens needed to invest, though the goal then was to take advantage of the power vacuum among east coast FCS schools.
“I think a lot of people wondered if we’d missed the window,” Skolnick said. “But at that time, the goal was to win as many FCS national championships as we can and resource our teams to be able to compete.”
Delaware football did compete, earning a spot in the FCS playoffs in four of the past six seasons, but another national title eluded the program, and by 2022, with rival James Madison moving up to the Sun Belt, then-AD Chrissi Rawak began to test the waters of a jump to FBS.
The school partnered with consultants who studied the economics of a move, both for the athletic department, which stood to see a $3 to $4 million increase in annual revenue, and for the state, which could enjoy a 50% uptick in economic impact from football alone. Meanwhile, Delaware looked at each FCS school that had made the leap up to FBS in the past 10 years to see how the Hens might stack up. What did Skolnick say the school found? Programs that had already been investing, had a solid recruiting footprint and were committed to football had success.
“We started to check a lot of boxes,” Skolnick said.
There were concerns, of course. The landscape of college football was roiling, and the expense of running a successful program seemed to grow by the day. But the opportunity to generate more revenue was obvious.
In the playoff era, 10 schools have made the leap from FCS to FBS, and nearly all have tasted some level of success. Overall, the group has posted a .548 winning percentage at the FBS level, and seven of the 10 have had seasons with double-digit wins. James Madison, who went from an FCS championship to the Sun Belt in 2022, is 28-9 at the FBS level and enters the 2025 season with legitimate playoff aspirations.
That success, however, is the result of a decades-in-the-making plan, said former JMU athletic director Jeff Bourne. The Dukes kicked the tires on an FBS move as early as 2012 but held steady as the program grew its infrastructure and, when the time came to make a move in 2022, it was ready.
“Before we made that decision, we wanted to prove to ourselves that we could support it financially,” Bourne said. “You had to have the fan base and donor base grow, have our facilities in a place so we could recruit. Looking at it from a broad perspective, it made our move not only prudent but ultimately helped us be successful.”
Off the field, the move has proved equally fortuitous. In JMU’s final year at the FCS level, the athletic department had 4,600 total donors, according to the school. For the 2025 fiscal year, JMU had nearly 11,000. The Dukes have sold out season tickets for three straight years, and high-profile games, including two bowl appearances, have been a boon for admissions.
So, when Conference USA approached Delaware with a formal invitation to join in November 2023, the choice seemed obvious.
“It was pretty clear that, as a flagship institution in our state, we wanted to be aligned with schools that look like us,” Skolnick said. “We want to align our athletic aspirations with our academic ones. Academically we’re one of the best public institutions in the country. Athletically, we’ve had all these incredible moments of success — but they’re moments. They’re spread out. So we felt like this was an opportunity to bring all of it together in a way that will show people — the best way to give people a lens into how special Delaware is, is for our athletic teams to be really successful and create more visibility.”
Brey remembers reading the news of Delaware’s decision to make the jump, and he couldn’t help but think back to his conversations with Raymond nearly 30 years ago. This had been a long time coming, he thought, and yet it still seemed hard to believe.
“I was shocked,” Brey said. “Little old Delaware is finally going for it.”
THERE ARE AMPLE lessons Delaware and Missouri State administrators have learned in the past few months as they’ve worked to ramp up staffing and budgets and add scholarship players for the transition. But if there’s one piece of advice Skolnick would share with other schools considering a similar process, it’s this: Find a time machine.
Delaware announced its intention to jump to FBS in November 2023. Just weeks earlier, the NCAA, in an effort to stem the tide of FCS departures, made changes to the requirements for moving up that, among other things, increased the cost of doing so from $5,000 to $5 million, and Delaware would be the first team to pay it.
That was not a budget line the Blue Hens had accounted for, meaning the school had to raise funds to cover that cost on a tight timeline.
“We had six months to do it,” Skolnick said. “Fortunately, we had people who were really excited about this transition.”
Ransdell took over as AD at Missouri State in August of 2024, just months after the Bears announced their plans to move to Conference USA, and he inherited a budget that wasn’t remotely ready for FBS competition.
“We had to change some things, do some more investing,” he said. “We weren’t really prepared to be an FBS program with the budget I inherited.”
In other words, the buzzword at both schools is the same as it is everywhere in 2025: revenue.
But if budgets have to be stretched with a move up to FBS, there are benefits, too.
Ransdell said Missouri State has sold more season tickets than any year since 2016, buoyed by a home game against SMU on Sept. 13.
Delaware had faced hurdles selling tickets in recent years, thanks in part to a slate of games against opponents its fans hardly recognized. That has changed already, with ample buzz around future home dates with old rivals UConn, Temple and Coastal Carolina. Crook said membership in the booster club is up 10-15% after years of steady declines. This season, Delaware travels to Colorado, and Crook said a caravan of Blue Hens fans will tag along.
On the recruiting trail, Delaware coach Ryan Carty said the conversations are completely different than they were a year ago, and the Hens have been able to add a host of new talent. The Hens’ roster includes 14 transfers from Power 4 programs this year, including Delaware native Noah Matthews, who arrived from Kentucky.
When Matthews was being recruited out of Woodbridge High School, about an hour’s drive down Route 1 through the middle of the state, he never heard from Delaware. It’s not that his home-state school didn’t want him. It’s that, no one on staff believed the Hens had a shot to land a guy with offers in the SEC.
Four years later though, Matthews is back home, and there’s nowhere he would rather be.
“I wanted to come back and show people, this is what Delaware does,” Matthews said. “We can play big-time football, too. After this year, they’ll know exactly who we are.”
For all the hurdles to get their respective programs in a place to compete at the FBS level, the costs are worth it, Ransdell said.
Need proof? Look no further than Sacramento State, a school that has all but begged for an invitation from the Pac-12 or Mountain West, even dangling a supposedly flush NIL fund with more than $35 million raised. And yet, no doors have been opened for the Hornets.
Still, the old guard around Delaware might not be so easily swayed.
Brey has kept a beach house in Delaware since his time coaching in the state, returning the past couple of years to serve as a guest bartender at the popular beach bar The Starboard to raise money for the Blue Hens’ NIL fund. This summer, he was strolling the boardwalk in Rehoboth Beach, chatting with the locals and getting a feel for how fans felt about this new era of Delaware football.
Most were excited, he said, but one — a longtime season-ticket holder — had a different perspective.
“On the first day of fall camp,” the fan told him, “we always knew we could play for a national championship in [FCS]. That’s not possible anymore.”
In other words, Delaware sold its championship aspirations for an admittedly more financially prudent place near the bottom of FBS. And who’s to say FBS football even remains viable as power players in the SEC and Big Ten move ever closer to creating “super leagues?”
“There very well could be a super league,” Bourne said. “There are signs that could happen. But I think when you look at it from the standpoint of your peer group, it’s to be competitive with them. There’s probably going to be a day where there’s a shake-up and you have some existing [power conference] schools that end up being more aligned with [Group of 6] than they are with the upper tier.”
Brey recalls his old friend Bob Hannah, the former Delaware baseball coach who had long been a progressive among the school’s traditionalists, wondering if the Hens might have been a fit in the ACC, had the school just pursued athletics growth in the 1970s and 1980s. The irony, Brey said, is these days, with even power conferences struggling to keep pace with the rapid change and financial strains of modern college sports, that doesn’t seem like such a long shot.
For Skolnick, that’s a worry for another day. Getting Delaware ready for its chance to shine on some of the sport’s biggest stages in 2025 is the priority. Delaware — the school and the state — hasn’t had many of these moments, and it’s an opportunity the Hens don’t want to miss.
“We’ve got to be ready for what we’re moving into, but everyone in college athletics is dealing with change,” Skolnick said. “That part is comforting. It’s more of an opportunity for us to do it our way. We’re too great of a historical and successful and traditional team to not be part of the conversation.”
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