Remembering your favorite team’s worst postseason by goals differential

 What was your favorite team’s worst postseason?

Probably this one, at least for now. Nobody has fun in the playoffs, at least until they’re over.

But let’s try to find a more objective answer. We could just point to any time that your team was swept in the first round, since going four-and-out is about as bad as it comes. But if we did that, we wouldn’t be able to use every team. (Yes, that was a stealth trivia question: Name every team that’s never been swept in a first-round best-of-seven. Answer down below.)

So instead, let’s go with team stat that a reader recently asked me about: playoff goals differential.

I haven’t run it by Dom’s supercomputer quite yet, but I’m going to work from the assumption that scoring goals is good and giving up goals is bad, and giving up way more than you score is a sign that things haven’t gone great. So today, let’s find each team’s single worst postseason by goals differential, and dig up those miserable memories. Let’s remember some sighs.

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Which playoff year produces the best roster of overtime goal scorers?

We’re a week into this year’s playoffs, and there hasn’t been enough overtime.

There’s been some, sure, but it hasn’t been enough. That’s because it can’t be. It’s not possible. Playoff overtime is the best thing in sports, always, unless it’s your team playing, in which case it’s the absolute worst, right up until it’s maybe the best again. Cocaine, helicopter, you know the drill.

And of course, in those big moments, you expect the sport’s biggest stars to shine the brightest. Overtime is a canvas on which great artists create their masterpieces. It’s the stage for the biggest names to leave their marks for generations to come.

Names like Alex Ovechkin. And, uh, Simon Benoit.

Yeah, overtime is weird that way. So today, I’m going to dig into a question that a Puck Soup listener sent in a while ago: Which seasons had the best collection of overtime goal scorers? In other words, what’s the best all-star team we can build using only a given year’s sudden death heroes?

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Out with the old, in with the new? Remembering 10 classic Battle of Ontario moments

This post is about the Senators and Maple Leafs, but first I need to tell you a story about the Colorado Avalanche and Detroit Red Wings.

It comes from a game played late in the 1995-96 season. The Wings would go on to win a 7-0 blowout, so you can imagine that the players on both sides were already agitated. At one point, Detroit’s Keith Primeau had his stick slashed out of his hand as he went to the bench. Colorado’s Mike Ricci tried to slide it away, at which point Kris Draper slashed his stick out of his hand. Primeau picked up Ricci’s stick and intentionally broke it. In return, Ricci grabbed a water bottle and tossed it at Primeau, hitting him in, uh, a sensitive area.

It was all very funny, and if you saw the highlight at the time, you probably joked about it with your hockey fan friends for weeks afterwards. It was, we all assumed, one of those memorable hockey moments.

Two months later, some other stuff happened between the Avalanche and Red Wings. And then later, a lot more. And then even more. And these days, when that rivalry comes up, nobody really talks about broken sticks or water bottle tosses.

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Who wants to win vs. who has to win? It's the 2025 NHL playoff pressure rankings

We’re a few days into the playoffs. Have you had a chance to unclench yet?

Probably not. And you probably won’t for a while yet, because this is the time of year when everything that happens feels massive. We watch a game, or a period, or a shift. We overreact. And then something else happens, and we either double down or swing all the way in the other direction. It’s both the best and worst part of the playoffs, all rolled into one.

In one word: Pressure. It’s unbearable. And that’s just for us, as fans. Imagine what it’s like for the teams in the middle of it.

Of course, that pressure isn’t divided equally, and some teams are facing significantly more than others. So today, let’s do our annual Pressure Rankings, as we count down from the teams that don’t want to lose to the teams that absolutely can’t.

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2025 Old Guy Without a Cup rankings: Brock Nelson, John Tavares, Ryan Suter and more

It’s tough times for OGWAC fans.

I won’t sugarcoat it. It’s been a bumpy year for us here in the OGWAC world. For those of you who are new, that would be Old Guys Without a Cup, the beloved NHL playoff trope that’s served up classic stories like Ray Bourque, Teemu Selanne and Lanny McDonald. Everyone loves an OGWAC story – especially one that ends with a Cup.

It happened last year, with Kyle Okposo. He won his first Stanley Cup at the age of 36, in what would turn out to be the final game of his 17-season career.

But while seeing Okposo get his lap with the Cup was a great moment, it’s been largely downhill since then for the OGWAC community. We lost Joe Pavelski, the patron saint of active OGWACs, to retirement. We’ve also said goodbye to Zach Parise, Sam Gagner, Blake Wheeler and Mark Giordano. And this year’s playoff field means we can’t root for names like Chris Kreider, Anders Lee or Tyler Myers.

That said, change can be good, even when it comes to old guys. All those absences should clear the way for some new names on this year’s list, and maybe a few older ones that we haven’t seen in a while. Let’s see where this takes us.

The criteria remans the same as previous years: A player is “old” if they’ve been in the league for at least 10 seasons and will be at least 33 when the Cup is awarded. The older the better, and while we’ll consider everyone, we prefer OGWAC stories that feature players who are actually contributing, preferably to a legitimate contender. Bonus points if the player has had an agonizing near-miss or two in their past.

I went into this wondering if all that turnover meant we’ve even be able to find 20 names, but that didn’t turn out to be a problem. Let’s start the list, and see who earns the top spot that Pavelski held for the last few years.

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