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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The Stanley Cup bandwagon-hopper's guide to the 16 teams you could root for

It took a bit longer that expected – thanks for the suspense, Columbus – but we’ve got our 16 playoff teams. That means we’ve also got our 16 teams that missed, and those fan bases have a choice to make.

Stay neutral, and just root for the best playoff hockey possible? A very valid option. Root against your team’s rivals, and hope they lose in a way that makes them sad? We’ve all been there. Sit on the sidelines and sulk, acting like you don’t even care who wins? A bit unseemly, but understandable.

And then there’s the most controversial option: Pick a new team, just for the postseason. Yes, it’s the dreaded bandwagon pick, a path that some fans find untenable. If that’s you, feel free to check out now. But if you’re open to at least considering a bandwagon pick, you want to at least take the right one. That’s where this post comes in, as we’ll rank the 16 playoff teams from worst to best in terms of the bandwagon-ability.

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Win our prediction contest by getting this one easy question right (you won't)

The NHL playoffs are back, or will be in a few days. And that means its time for the annual playoff prediction contest, an incredibly simple single-question test that you will almost certainly fail.

We tried this last year, and readers seemed to enjoy it. A few of you even did reasonably well. But not many, and that was in a year where the postseason didn’t serve up many surprises. Let’s see how things go this time around.

All you need to do is leave a comment below, with your answer to our single catch-all question.

 

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NHL weekend rankings: A top 16, oddly specific predictions and Gold Plan standings

Welcome to the last Weekend Rankings of the 2024-25 season.

Longtime readers know what that means: You’re getting a Top 16 instead of a Top 5, with every playoff team ranked. We’ll also check in on what the Gold Plan standings would be looking like in the Bottom 5, and we’ll even make a few oddly specific predictions.

When the schedule first came out, I was a little bit nervous about having the season end on a Thursday, since that meant the last rankings would come out when each team still had a game or two left. What if there was a furious race down to the wire, and I couldn’t do a Top 16 because there were 20 or more teams still battling it out for the final spots?

Luckily, the NHL heard my concerns and responded accordingly, delivering an absolute dud of a late-season race in which we basically already know all the playoff teams and most of the matchups. Yay?

We’ll get to the rankings in a bit. But first, let’s make five oddly specific predictions...

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Let's find three positive thoughts for each of the NHL's 15 most hopeless teams

The theme of this post is kindness.

As in, let’s be kind to the fans of the league’s worst teams. It’s easy to forget these days, as some fans watch their teams fight for a playoff spot and others are already thinking about the Stanley Cup, that not all of us are having fun right now. Some of us cheer for teams that are already out of the playoff hunt, and in some cases might have been for months now.

That’s where the kindness comes in. Let’s show empathy and basic human decency to those fans, the ones who have the misfortune of rooting for one of those horrible, embarrassing, miserable loser teams.

I’ll admit that that last sentence could have gone better. Kindness isn’t easy. But it can be instructive.

For example, we did this post last year, featuring 11 teams. Of those 11 teams who were in bad shape, two – the Devils and Senators – have already clinched playoff spots this year. Another, the Canadiens, are about to join them. Optimism can be real.

Um, also one of those 11 teams ceased to exist a few days after the column ran. So sure, a mixed bag. Let’s stay focused on the positive. Kindness, remember.

According to Dom’s model, there are 15 teams that are either eliminated from playoff contention, or that have odds of less than 1%. In other words, they’re done. And they could probably use a kind word or two. Well, we’re going to give them three, as in three positive thoughts in a season of despair.

As always, we’ll do this in order, starting form the easiest team to find positivity for and working our way down to the most challenging.

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With Gretzky's goal mark gone, how many NHL records are truly unbreakable?

And just like that, Wayne Gretzky’s unbreakable record has been broken.

Well, one of them. Gretzky had more than his share. But for hockey fans of my generation, it really is hard to believe that Alexander Ovechkin actually did it. He broke Gretzky’s career goals record. That wasn’t supposed to be possible.

For decades, old-timers like me figured there was just no way that anyone could get to 894. Not in the Dead Puck Era, which eventually gave way to the Only Comatose Puck Era. Not when it meant scoring at a 45-goal pace for 20 consecutive seasons. Not in an era where players were bigger and stronger, meaning just staying healthy was a challenge. Not in a league where forwards were supposed to peak in their mid-20s and then give way to the next generation.

But here we are. So now we have to ask: What other “unbreakable” records could we be wrong about?

We’ve had some fun in the past with unbreakable records, as well as a few breakable ones. But today, let’s look at some of the sport’s marks that have at some point seemed unreachable, and try to figure out if they could actually be in play.

Jesse already took a look at Gretzky’s other records, and I’m mostly on the same page. I’d argue that the nine Hart Trophies is probably unbreakable, given how much modern sportswriters seem to value the novelty of getting new names on their ballots. But I’d agree that the career points and assists records are untouchable, and I like Jesse stopping just short of taking the 92-goal regular season record off the table.

What about the records that aren’t Gretzky’s? Let’s have a look at 15 of the most imposing, and see if we can imagine them being broken someday.

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NHL weekend rankings: Ovechkin breaks the goals record, plus my worst rankings

We’re down to two editions of the Weekend Rankings left, before we run out of regular season runway. Next week is the season finale, which is always fun, because it's when we ditch the Top 5 for a Top 16 (or more), check in on the Gold Plan standings, and make some oddly specific predictions.

This week is not so fun. At least for me – some of you seem to enjoy it. It’s time for our annual look back at the very worst Top 5 and Bottom 5 picks I made over the course of the season.

Look, I never said I was perfect. I also never said I wasn’t, and it’s possible that all of these “bad picks” were really just made ironically, or to see if you were paying attention, or as occasional intentional mistakes that I made in tribute to watching too much Astro Boy as a kid. But whatever went wrong, these picks have not aged well, and I have to take my medicine.

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A goalie and a goalie-hater debate equipment, interference, bigger nets and more

Let us acknowledge the noble goaltender. The last line of defense, tirelessly doing the thankless work of keeping pucks out of the net, sacrificing their own bodies to block vulcanized rubber fired at upward of 100 miles per hour, all the while knowing that they’ll take the blame for the bad and rarely get the glory for the good. They’re hockey’s unsung heroes, doing the hardest job in all of sports without credit or complaint.

Well… unless they’re just big weird oafs in oversized equipment who are ruining the game we love, robotically sucking the excitement out of the sport in between bouts of flopping and crying about somebody barely brushing up against them in what's supposed to be a contact sport.

That’s the debate. Or at least, it will be today, as two of The Athletic’s hockey writers have decided to go back and forth on various topics from the goaltending world. Jesse Granger is our goaltending expert, who both plays the position himself and breaks down its intricacies for the rest of us. Sean McIndoe is an old man who sits on his couch and complains about things, and he loves the very offense that goalies are there to prevent.

Like Patrick Roy in his prime, they’ve decided that the best way to handle a dispute is to skate out to center ice and duke it out. They got together for five mini-debates, presented below.

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A brief history of the second-team all-star goalie being the NHL’s weirdest award

With a just few weeks left before awards ballots go out, we already know how one of the races will go. Connor Hellebuyck will win the Vezina. And if there’s any justice, the GMs who vote on the award will make it unanimous.

Cool. Now let’s talk about the best goaltending award.

Not the award for best goaltender – I mean the award for goaltending that is the best. The best award, as in the most fun, the most interesting, and also the weirdest.

I’m talking about the second all-star team honors.

Yes, this might be something only I’m interested in. But today, I’m going to try to get you onboard.

Each year, PHWA writers vote to create two all-star teams, which are not to be confused with the (far inferior) teams from the actual all-star game in seasons where the NHL forces us to endure one. These postseason all-star awards are a genuine honor, proof that a player was considered among the very best at his position during that season.

Each of the two teams consist of two defensemen, a center, a left and right winger, and a goalie. The highest vote-getters earn first-team honors, which is the very best of the best of any given year. Then comes the second-team, which is… sometimes interesting.

That’s true at all positions, at least occasionally. Sometimes you’ll see a good-but-not-great player earn second-team honors up front, like Thomas Vanek in 2007 or a 39-year-old Ray Whitney in 2012. Sometimes a lesser-known defenseman will earn the honors, like Lubomir Visnovsky in 2011 or Francois Beauchemin in 2013. But for the most part, a look at the second-team all-star squads are pretty much the names you’d expect – the best of the best, with the occasional exception that proves the rule.

Second-team goalie honors? Those get weird. Or at least, they serve up some names that you might generously call unexpected.

It could happen again this year, with Logan Thompson battling Andrei Vasilevskiy for second-team honors. One of those guys has a Vezina, a Conn Smythe and multiple Cup rings. The other is Logan Thompson, who got traded in the offseason for midround draft picks. He’s probably the favorite.

Why? Because goaltending is weird. And apparently, being the league’s second-best goaltender is especially weird. Let’s remember some guys, who had one year where they were very nearly The Guy.

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