[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. ]7. The KHLReasonable observers of the hockey universe have known for some time now that the KHL was a gigantic joke of a league, propped up by the worst kind of plutocrats, and in which Russians could feel their particular brand of national pride about luring away one actual good NHL player ever. Current points leader in the KHL: Alex Radulov, who is an NHL washout. No. 2: Ilya Kovalchuk, who is that aforementioned actual good player. No. 3: Stevie Moses, who is... who?No, you don't know who Stevie Moses is, unless you saw a lot of middling college hockey teams three or four years ago. Moses's career high in points at the NCAA level was 35 in 37 games for UNH; in the KHL this year he has 28-18-46 in 40 for Jokerit. He also went 2-0-2 in his only eight games at the AHL level several years ago. What I'm saying is the KHL is a Good League. It's been said that the Russian economy is not so much an actual economy but rather an infrastructure built on the power of the nation's oil exporting business. And now that the oil industry has gone to pot, and the Western sanctions against Russia for the invasion of Ukraine have really taken hold, the ruble has collapsed, losing close to 50 percent of its value against the U S dollar over the course of 2014. And all of a sudden, lots of teams aren't able to pay their players any more; at least, not in any way resembling their original agreements. Players who were dumb enough to take their pay in rubles have seen the value of those checks , as you might expect, meaning that even if they're getting paid the same number of rubles, they're making potentially hundreds of thousands of actual dollars less per year. That's if they're getting paid at all. A number of teams have been forced to waive or trade players, even good ones, due to financial concerns that threaten their very existence. Three teams or more may be on the verge of bankruptcy. This week the league's president, Dmitri Chernyshenko, announced that the league moving forward would exist mostly to support the Russian national team (that is, “tell foreign players to take a hike”) and examine just how many teams it should actually have if some can't be financially stable (that is, “fold clubs that are losing money”). There are only 28 teams in the league, and 15 have negative goal differentials, so maybe that's not such a bad idea. But that has to more or less officially end the idea that this league has ever or would ever pose a real threat to the NHL. They got Ilya Kovalchuk, though. Gotta give 'em a lot of credit. 6. Mike SmithWhen Mike Smith signed his six-year, $34 million extension with Arizona two summers ago, it came as a big surprise. “The Coyotes are spending money?” was not an uncommon thing to hear, though one supposes they'd just locked down some, ahem, certainty with regard to their ownership situation. A lot of people, though, also suggested that this might not be a very good idea. Smith was coming off a. 910 season at the time, and while he'd posted. 930 in 2011-12, he also went. 899 and. 900 the two years before that, so this, perhaps portended some bad news. But he went. 915 last season, which was a little better than league average, and only a few points above his career numbers as well. The Coyotes were awful and everything, but that wasn't on Smith. The hope was he could continue to play at something resembling that level. Instead, he's collapsed harder than the ruble. As of this writing, Smith is an. 884 goaltender for the Coyotes, and Devan Dubnyk is presenting t

• published: 25 Dec 2014
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