Wednesday, October 30, 2024

Boo! No, really, boo. Celebrate Halloween with some of the NHL's scariest starts

It’s Halloween, which means it’s time to settle in and watch a scary movie. Have you considered highlight clips of your favorite player?

That probably wouldn’t work, at least if your player is someone like Cale Makar or Kirill Kaprizov or Nikita Kucherov. Those guys have been great through October, and other stars are at least living up to expectations. Not everyone is, though, and that means it’s time for our annual team full of starts that are scary, or at least disappointing. We’ll pick a full roster, with a max of one player per team and some honorable mentions to round out the field. (Is it dumb to pretend that every team has a player having a bad start worth singling out? Yes, of course, but you guys get mad when I don't include your favorite teams, so here you go.)

A scary start doesn't doom a season – last year’s list included names like Juraj Slafkovsky, Matt Duchene and Stuart Skinner, and they all ended up having good years. There was even a passing mention of Connor Hellebuyck, and he won the Vezina. Then again, some players never really recovered from a slow first month. And we won’t know who’s who until much further down the road.

For now, let’s get in the Halloween spirit, building from the net out. (Side note: It's also an annual tradition that at least a few of these guys have big games immediately after I write this piece, so feel free to send thank you notes if it happens for your team.)

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Monday, October 28, 2024

NHL weekend rankings: Jets unbeatable, Bruins a question mark, Penguins a mess

If you’re a hockey fan and you love power rankings, you got some great news a few days ago: The Friday rankings have returned.

There’s a common misconception out there that there’s some sort of rivalry between those rankings and these ones. But there isn’t, because we’re trying to do different things. These rankings are the long-term view, while the Friday boys are more of an immediate snapshot. I do my thing, Dom and Other Sean do theirs, and the readers win. A rivalry? Not even close.

They were a few weeks late to the season, though, especially since we’ve already been hard at work on two weeks’ worth of rankings under our belt. I wonder why that was. Let’s see what they had to say about that:

“Sure, we could’ve assembled our little list last week — but there were teams that had only played three games. It felt wrong. Integrity counts, professionally and personally, and some sample sizes are simply too small.”

(Does an extended Kubrik Stare off into the middle distance like Gary Roberts before a playoff game.)

Integrity? Right, screw those guys, a rivalry it is. Here are five issues I had with the first set of rankings from those two Taylor Swift lyric-loving weirdos.

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Friday, October 25, 2024

DGB Mailbag: Thoughts on te red-hot Jets, Gretzky to the Red Wings, and The Amulet

It’s two weeks into the season, and we’re all still trying to get our bearings. When it comes to those questions you might have percolating in your hockey fan brain, there’s nothing better than having a forum where you can ask a well-informed expert. Unfortunately, you have me instead, but ah well, we’ll make the best of it.

It's mailbag time. Which early-season storylines were on your mind? What kind of crazy hypotheticals were you able to dream up for me? Will I be able to make it all the way through without being asked about The Amulet? Let’s find out.

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Wednesday, October 23, 2024

Remembering your team’s worst season start (that didn’t really end up mattering)

We’re a few weeks into a new season, and there’s a good chance your team is off to a bad start. Maybe it’s simply disappointing, or maybe it’s bordering on disastrous – these things come in different flavors. But when it happens, it leads to panic and a sense of impending doom, as you can’t help but hear about looming milestones like November 1 or US Thanksgiving, and how the season will be a total writeoff if your team isn’t back on track by then. A slow start is the worst.

Also, it might not matter.

The “might” is a key word here, because a slow start can absolutely torpedo a season. But it doesn’t have to, as history often reminds us. So today, let’s see if we can calm a few nerves for fan bases in Colorado, Nashville, Buffalo and elsewhere, and maybe rekindle a few memories for others. Let’s look back at your team’s worst start to a season that ended up being just fine, thanks.

We’re going to define a bad start a little loosely here, which allows us to play around with some arbitrary end points, although we want a team that’s at least under .500. For some teams, that cold streak will only last a few games, while others might take months to get going. And of course, the “didn’t matter” part will be in the eye of the beholder – for some of these teams, a few extra points in October could have meant home ice, or a better playoff matchup, or who knows what else down the road. But the larger point remains: Often, a few bad games is just a few bad games, and good teams find a way.

There is hope. You just need to know where to look. Let’s remember some bad starts.

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Monday, October 21, 2024

Weekend rankings: Five early-season storylines I don’t believe in (yet)

We’re two weeks into the season. Do you know what to believe?

Probably not, unless you’re delusional. A typical NHL season doesn’t tip its hand this early, and will even toss a few decoys our way to throw us off the scent of what’s really going on. Nobody should be quite sure what they believe, unless it’s you guys having zero faith in Sam Reinhart. Who leads the league in scoring, by the way.

So no, I’m not quite sure what I’m buying into yet. But I’m starting to narrow down the list, which is where we’ll start with this week’s bonus five.

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Friday, October 18, 2024

Nobody believes in Sam Reinhart, and other lessons from the prediction contest

Every year, right before the season starts, I run a prediction contest for readers. I come up with ten simple questions about what’s about to happen – which teams will and won’t make the playoffs, which jobs are safe, which players will have good seasons, that sort of thing. You send in your answers, and we throw it all into a big database and wait.

It’s one of my favorite posts of the year, for two reasons. The first is that you guys are inevitably terrible at predicting the season, and I get to make fun of you all year for it while feeling better about my own equally terrible predictions. That’s the main reason.

But there’s a bonus to this sort of thing, in that it also functions as a stealth survey of where fans are at heading into a season. I don’t know too many places where you can get this sort of volume of hockey fan opinions. It’s not a truly unbiased poll, because it’s self-selected instead of random and I think we can all agree that my readers are smarter than everyone else’s. But it’s pretty close, and it can be interesting to dig into the data and see what the wider hockey world seems to be thinking.

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Wednesday, October 16, 2024

Do Mark Scheifele or Mika Zibanejad have bad contracts? NHL Cap Court returns

Welcome back to Cap Court, where we put the questionable deals of NHL stars on trial to find out whether they deserve the dreaded "bad contract" label.

As always, we’re viewing “bad” contracts through the lens of the team that’s stuck with them, since that’s ultimately how fans are forced to do it, even though we’d never begrudge a player taking on offer that’s put in front of them. Importantly, we’re also only looking at contracts from this day forward – a deal could have made sense and even provided value for the first few years, but we’re only looking at what’s left on the books.

We’ve been doing this long enough that names like Jonathan Toews, Carey Pruce and Jakub Voracek have been on the docket. Heck, one of the early editions featured Ryan Suter and Oliver Ekman-Larsson, a combined five teams and three buyouts ago. Have all of our calls been proven right? Look, we’ll do the cross-examining around here, thank you very much.

This time around, we’ve got five more names. We'll start with a big-market blueliner...

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Monday, October 14, 2024

Weekend rankings: We’re back, it’s too early, and all the good teams are bad

Welcome back, NHL. And welcome back to the NHL weekend rankings.

If you’re a longtime reader who knows how this all works, feel free to skip ahead to the Bonus Five. But if you’re new, or you could use a refresher, please read the next bit before you rush off to yell at me in the comments.

These rankings are a bit different from some of the others you might find out there. We’re not trying to capture a snapshot of how things stand in the league right now; instead, we’re more interested in trying to figure out how things will end up. The rankings here are based on two questions: Who’s winning the Cup, and who’s going to finish dead last? Simple questions, but hard ones to get right.

So how do we do it? The idea is to take it slow, starting from something that feels like a consensus early on and then gradually adjusting based on what’s happening on the ice. The key there is the “gradually” part; we try really hard not to overreact to a few games here and there. That means that a team doesn’t shoot up the rankings just because they have a good week, or beat the defending champs. And we don’t give up on a preseason favorite just because they stumble out of the gate. Hold that thought.

This way of looking at things isn’t better or worse than the more common approach that other rankings take; it’s just different. The advantage is that we’re less likely to get tripped up by short-term flukes – for example, we never had the Oilers as a bottom-five team last year, even when they had the worst record in the league in mid-November. The main downside is that some of those overreactions are fun, and I get that it’s frustrating when you see your team ranked behind someone they just beat the brakes off of. And yeah, sometimes we’re a little behind on spotting an important trend. As my kids will tell you, that’s not out of character for me.

So that’s it: Think long-term, react cautiously, and don’t expect the rankings to swing wildly based on what happened in the last week. And one more thing: Each week will feature a top and bottom five, plus an extra team in each section that didn’t make the list but feels worth mentioning. That team is not necessarily ranked sixth – if I wanted to do that every week, it would just be a top and bottom six. They’re just a team to talk about. For reasons I’ve never quite understood, this part really seems to trip people up.

Oh, and we also like to throw in a bonus top five based on whatever’s happening. Like this one:

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Friday, October 11, 2024

The 2024-25 NHL All-Intrigue roster: One name from each team to watch this season

The NHL season has started. Are you intrigued?

Probably not, because that's a weird word that only ever gets broken out for gimmicks like this, but whatever. Let's mark the new year with my annual list of names around the league who I'm especially interested in tracking over the coming season.

We’re looking for 12 forwards, six defensemen and two goalies, plus a coach and a GM. One name per team, with enough honorable mentions to get every team a mention. And just to make things a little tougher and spread the intrigue around, nobody from last year’s list is allowed to repeat.

Like all great teams, we’ll build from the net out. Last year’s list started with an American goalie with a new contract who ended up winning the Vezina. Can we make it two years in a row?

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Tuesday, October 8, 2024

Oddly specific NHL predictions for all 32 teams’ 2024-25 seasons

Every year, I write two annual prediction columns. In one, I try to predict where each team in the league will finish where, and which ones are legitimate Cup contenders.

That column ran last week, and I don’t like it.

Not this year’s version in particular. I just don’t like making those basic meat-and-potato type of calls, because the risk/reward just doesn’t work for me. If I’m right, big deal – oh wow, you had Edmonton as Cup contenders, way to go out on a limb. And of course, if I’m wrong about anyone (which I will be), I have to hear about it from the fan base all year long. Where’s the fun in that?

Then you have the second prediction column. This one. The fun one.

This is the annual column where I get way too specific on my predictions for each team. It’s not enough to think something might happen; I’ll give you an exact date. Oh, some player is going to post nice numbers; good for them, but what specific numbers will those be? Anyone can predict the basic stats; how about the weird ones you’re not even thinking of?

And the best part of all: All of these predictions are so oddly specific that there’s no chance any of them will be right. Unless they are, in which case you will never hear the end of it.

I can’t lose. So let’s dive in, as we drill down on one call for every team.

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Friday, October 4, 2024

It's the return of the NHL prediction contest that’s so easy it’s almost impossible

The NHL season has technically arrived, with a European appetizer being served up today between the Devils and Sabres. But the real debut comes next week, with the other 30 teams seeing their first action beginning on Tuesday. That’s when we’ll finally start to find out how teams will look in games that matter, after weeks of the so-called experts telling us what to expect.

But first: it’s your turn.

After all, if me and all my colleagues are going to be forced to embarrass ourselves with bad predictions, then it’s only fair that you get your chance too. And around these parts, that means an entry in the world’s easiest prediction contest.

The concept is simple. I’ll give you ten questions that should be super easy to answer. You decide how confident you’re feeling, and how many answers you want to give. Each right answer means more points, but each wrong one means you take a zero. But you won’t have to worry about that, because again, the questions are super easy.

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Thursday, October 3, 2024

From Stanley Cup contenders to bottom feeders: Predicting the 2024-25 season

Fun fact: In the NHL, the “pre” in preseason stands for predictions. We all have to make them, including you – the reader prediction contest is coming later this week, so be ready. For now, it’s my turn to lay my cards on the table, with my annual division-based attempt to dice up the league.

The rules, as always: I get four divisions, with exactly eight teams each. We’ll have the bottom-feeders, the middle-of-the-pack, the legitimate Stanley Cup contenders, and then the teams I just have no idea about. Because I enjoy making my own life difficult, that eight teams per division rule is mandatory. (Insert your own joke here about the “no clue” division having all 32 teams in it otherwise.)

We’ll start form the bottom and work our way up…

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