William Nylander was a fluke and the Jets are weird: Prediction contest lessons

We run a prediction contest for our readers right before every regular season, and it results in two of my favorite posts of the year.

My very favorite comes at the end of the season, where I reveal the final results and laugh at you for being wrong. (This is not to be confused with my weekly power rankings, which run all season long and result in you laughing at me for being wrong.) But my second favorite is this one, where we dig into your answers and try to see what they tell us about what the hockey world’s smartest fans – i.e. my readers – are thinking about the coming season.

If you missed the contest post, you can find it here. The contest involves 10 simple questions, covering everything from team success to coaching and front office hot seats to individual awards. This year, we also worked in an Olympic question. And of course, there’s the all-or-nothing bonus questions, which gives you the chance to risk your entire entry for the extra points that might push your entry into the winner's circle.

We had well over 1,100 entries this year. This isn’t a poll with a random sample size, of course, and contest strategy could in theory result in some incentives for weird picks. But we can still learn some interesting things from who was named in your entries, and who wasn't. let’s dive in.

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Early season mailbag?

Hey folks...

Hockey's back, so let's try a mailbag.

I'm looking for your questions, comments, rants and hypotheticals. Clever is good. Straight down the middle is good too, so don't feel like you have to steal the show if you'd rather ask something simple. Anything can work.

Send your stuff via email at dgbmailbag@gmail.com.

Thanks,
Sean

NHL weekend rankings: It's too early to know anything, except maybe in Buffalo

Welcome back to the weekend rankings. By my count, this is the eighth year of this column’s lifespan at The Athletic, and it had a few different homes before that. How long is eight years? Put it this way, in that debut edition on this site way back in 2018, the very first team to be listed in the Cup contenders section was the San Jose Sharks. They’d just acquired Erik Karlsson, you see, and we all knew there was no way that trade wouldn’t work out great.

That’s a long time ago. But that fits with the theme, because these are the long-range rankings. That makes them a bit different from most of the power rankings you’ll see out there – we’re not trying to measure who had the best week, or who’d win a game between two teams right now. Instead, it’s about trying to unravel the future, and figure out which teams are best positioned for a Cup run, and which are headed towards the bottom of the standings.

And yes, that means that your favorite team can win a few games against contenders and not immediately rocket past them in the rankings. I know that’s very upsetting for some of you, but we have resources available in the comment section to help you work through your feelings. (Those resources are other commenters, who will make fun of you.)

It also means that this is way too early to be ranking much of anything, because not enough has happened to really alter our preseason predictions. That’s never stopped us before, and it won’t stop us today. Maybe it will backfire – last year’s first rankings had the Rangers in the top five. Maybe we’ll be a bit too slow to catch on to teams like last year’s Caps or Jets, or a surprise team like the Habs.

Recency bias isn’t always wrong, and if you’d prefer a bit more of it in your rankings, Dom and Other Sean will have you covered with their version on Fridays. My advice would be to read both, and then see how (or if) they converge as the season goes on, but it’s not my job to tell you how to live your life. Have you had any water today? Drink some water.

Enough preamble. Let’s get to a very weird weekend in the NHL, which saw a night off on Friday, just one game last night, and the rare full-32 schedule in between.

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The 2025-26 NHL All-Intrigue roster: One name from each team to watch this season

It’s time to build our annual all-intrigue team, a collection of the most interesting names heading into the season. Some will make the list due to sheer star power, while others are more about circumstances, or just morbid curiosity. Either way, they’re the names worth watching, many of whom will go a long way to deciding their team’s fate.

The rules, as always: We’re building a roster of 12 forwards, six defensemen and three goalies, plus a coach and a GM, and then enough honorable mentions to get every team one representative. And just to juice up the difficult, we won’t allow any repeats from last year’s post. (Sorry Mitch Marner, we know you love the media attention.)

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Every banner-raising ceremony of the salary cap era, ranked purely on spite

Why have a ceremonial banner-raising? You’ve already won the Cup, and spent the summer celebrating it. Some would argue that the traditional opening night banner-raising is the perfect chance to close the book by taking a final look back at that ultimate victory, sharing the moment with fans and teammates before embarking on the difficult journey of defending that title.

Wrong. The point is to make the other team feel bad.

OK, I may be alone on this. It’s probably at least a little bit about that other stuff. But I’ve always been fascinated with the banner-raising tradition, and more specifically with the selection of the night’s opponent. After all, that team is part of the event. Sure, they might hide in their dressing room until the ceremony is over, they know what’s happening out there. They know why the game is delayed. They can hear the roar of the crowd. And they know that it’s not for them.

It's a great opportunity to make that team and their fans feel sad. In a perfect world, the champs would raise their banner in front of an arch-rival. Or maybe a team that they had to beat on their way to the Cup, especially if it was a hard-fought and/or controversial series. Having a few former players or coaches or executives on the other side helps too, especially if they left on bad terms. And if all else fails, it should at least be a team that hasn’t won a recent Cup of its own, preferably with a snotty fan base that should be forced to watch your party instead.

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