A brief history of the Thornton Award, a fake trophy for best debut with a new team

It’s summer and nothing’s happening. Let’s make up another fake award.

We did this last summer, when we introduced the Pollock Trophy for a season’s best trade. Prior to that, we’ve also done the Carson Trophy for best sophomore season, as well as the Bourque Trophy for best final season. None of these actually exist, but they should, and that’s enough for our purposes.

For today’s award, we’re going to create the Joe Thornton Award for the best debut with a new team.

A couple of quick rules: Rookie debuts have their own award, so they don’t count – a player has to have previously played for another NHL team before joining a new one. Unlike most awards, we're taking the playoffs into consideration. And finally, a player has to have played at least half the season with his new team, because I don’t feel like figuring out how to rate deadline pickups. Other that that, the field is open – we can be looking at trades, free agent signings, waiver pickups or whatever else.

We’ll cover the cap era, starting with a 2006 recipient. It’s Slow News Summer, let’s argue about an award that doesn’t exist.

>> Read the full post at The Athletic

(Want to read this post on The Athletic for free? Sign up for a free trial.)

Getting a new CBA without a lockout is bad, actually: The Contrarian returns

It’s late-July, we’re two months away from games that matter, and NHL GMs have apparently taken the rest of the summer off. Let’s get Contrarian.

This is the feature where you send in your most obvious takes, and I tell you that you’re wrong, whether I believe it or not. In the past, we’ve made the case that Mark Messier was a great Canuck, Ray Bourque’s Cup win was bad but Brett Hull’s crease goal was good, and Bobby Orr’s flying goal photo is overrated. Last time, we made the case for Alexander Ovechkin being an overrated bum, and also for Alexander Ovechkin being an underrated legend, because we’re flexible like that.

This time, we’ve got a new CBA, an old legend, and everything in between. Let’s dive in.

>> Read the full post at The Athletic

(Want to read this post on The Athletic for free? Sign up for a free trial.)

The minor playoff rule change that altered NHL history, including 4 Cup winners

During the 1986 offseason, a very strange thing happened in the NHL: The league made a rule change that nobody got all that upset about.

That was rare, even back then, because fans like to complain about things. But this change was so simple, and so obviously the right decision, that there really wasn’t anything to complain about. Or so we thought.

The rule had to do with the playoff format, and the league’s ongoing attempts to have one that made sense. Since 1974, when the league added a fourth round to the playoff tournament, the first round had always been shorter than the others. Originally it had been a three-game preliminary round, later increasing to five games. In 1986, the league decided to expand the first round to seven games, the same as the others. And everyone went “Sure, that makes sense”. Maybe a few of us complained that the extra games would make the season longer. But the extra playoff hockey, and the extra revenue it would generate, was an easy sell. And so the change was made, and then nobody thought of it again.

Until today. Or in my case, until a few weeks ago, when a reader named Andrew asked a question: How much does hockey history change if the first round had stayed best-of-five?

The answer, as it turns out, is “a lot”. So today, we’re going to go back to that decision from nearly 40 years ago, and work our way through an alternate version of NHL history that could – fair warning – make some of you sad.

>> Read the full post at The Athletic

(Want to read this post on The Athletic for free? Sign up for a free trial.)

Help me become a better contrarian

Hey folks…

Thinking of doing another edition of The Contrarian. You send in a statement that you think is obvious or inarguable, and I’ll try to come up with the contrarian view.

We've done a few of these, and the ones that work best find that sweet spot of feeling difficult but not impossible. "Mark Messier was a bad signing for the Canucks" and "Ray Bourque's Cup win was good" worked great. Stuff like "Connor McDavid is good at hockey" or "The Leafs have a bad playoff record", not so much.

Send me your sure-thing statement via email at dgbcontrarian@gmail.com.

The Crimsion Chin? SchaefDaddy? The Finnish Fettuccine? Nickname Court is in session

Hockey nicknames are terrible.

We all know this. But some of us might be too young to know that it wasn’t always like this. There was a time when hockey nicknames ranged from decent to outright cool, back in a distant time before we just started putting “-y” or “-er” at the end of a guy’s name and calling it a day.

Why did this happen? I got into that in this column from a few years back, but I’m not sure it matters. The point is that the hockey nickname world is a mess right now, and the bigger question is: Can it be fixed?

I think it can, and there are two paths to that. One is to just let the weirdos at hockey-reference take over, because those guys will take absolutely anything and call it a nickname. The second option is to turn it over to you, the readers. That’s what we’re going to try today. Welcome to the first, and very possibly the last, edition of Nickname Court.

A few days ago, I put out a call for submissions, and you responded with lots of entries. Were they good entries? Eh… we’ll get to that. But the idea was that you could submit any nickname you wanted us to pass judgement on – already existing ones you weren’t sure about, or ones you had made up on your own. I’ve tagged in Peter Baugh and Scott Powers to help me pass judgement on a dozen of your most interesting ideas.

Convince at least two out of three judges, and your nickname becomes official and legally binding gets the stamp of approval.

Modern hockey nicknames are terrible. Let’s see if your ideas are any better.

>> Read the full post at The Athletic

(Want to read this post on The Athletic for free? Sign up for a free trial.)

1980s Alberta vs. 2020s Florida: Which two-team dynasty was more impressive?

At the start of 2025, I worked with Eric Stephens on a post that asked the question: Which state has been the NHL’s best of the cap era, California or Florida? It was a fun debate, and at the end we let you have your say in a reader survey that came out almost exactly 50/50.

Then the Panthers rolled to yet another Stanley Cup, and kind of ruined the bit. Finally, a valid reason to dislike that team.

But it’s fine, because now it’s Slow News Summer and we can get a little more eccentric. So today, I’m going to tackle a question originally posted by a Puck Soup listener a few weeks ago: Has the 2020s state of Florida passed the 1980s Alberta dynasty?

It’s a tough one. It’s also, you could argue, four years early, which is a fair point in Florida’s favor. Still, you never know what the future will bring. And it’s not like our arbitrary end points don’t hurt Alberta too, since they lose the 1990 Cup by a few months, the Flames were still in Atlanta until the summer of 1980, and the decade’s first few years are basically a write off.

So let’s do this. It’s basically a battle of Old School Canada vs. New Era Southern Markets, which means everyone should be very chill and reasonable about it. Off we go…

>> Read the full post at The Athletic

(Want to read this post on The Athletic for free? Sign up for a free trial.)

I'm looking for your submissions to Nickname Court

I'm thinking of trying a new mailbag-type feature over the summer that I would call Nickname Court. As we know, modern NHL nicknames are terrible, with most of them either just being a player's name with an -er or -y ending tacked on, or something based on player initials that features zero creativity. Let's fix that.

Basically, readers would send in nicknames for players (or lines or pairings or whatever), and a small group of us would rule on whether they were good or not.

I think we'd be looking for either of two kinds of submissions: - Brand new nicknames that you came up with, or that are percolating in a fan base but haven't fully caught on yet - Actually nicknames that are in use but need a ruling on whether they work or not

I'd love to get some entries to mull over. Please be clear on where the nickname came from, if anywhere, and who it would apply to. Send your submissions to dgbmailbag@gmail.com and let's see where this goes.

Which team makes the best lineup with no repeated initials? Slow news summer returns

It’s summer and nothing is happening. Let’s play some weird roster games.

This one comes from reader Darryl F., who tweeted it at me five years ago. Yes, the “weird ideas” list goes back that far. Much further, actually. Look, you probably don’t want to know some of the stuff that’s been sitting there for going on a decade, but I can’t guarantee you won’t find out by mid-August.

For now, the game is simple: Make the best six-man starting lineup possible for your favorite team, without repeating any initials. So if you want to use Joe Smith, that’s your J and your S spoken for, meaning you can’t also use John Williams, or Tommy Simpson.

Easy enough, right? But first, a few ground rules™:

- We want three forwards, two defensemen and a goalie. No other positional requirements.

- You get credit for whatever that player did on that team. If the Blues want to use Martin Brodeur, they get seven games, not four Vezinas.

- In cases where there’s confusion over what a player’s actual name was, we’ll go by whatever hockey-reference uses. So it’s Maurice Richard (not Rocket), but Gump Worsley (not Lorne).

As always, we’ll do about a dozen teams and then hand it over to you in the comments to fill out any others. We’ll start with the team that’s become our unofficial leadoff hitter for these sorts of things…

>> Read the full post at The Athletic

(Want to read this post on The Athletic for free? Sign up for a free trial.)

Let's get old: Five things I miss about how the NHL offseason used to work

It’s mid-July. It’s too hot, my neighbor isn’t keeping his lawn in shape, they don’t make smart summer movies anymore, and all these kids who are off school should be out doing something productive instead of staring at screens all day.

In related news, I am old.

How old? Old enough to have a bunch of opinions about how things I miss from the ancient days. And you’re going to hear a few of them right now, because it’s time for the return of Let’s Get Old, the column where I (blows out entire lumbar region by sneezing wrong) ah you’ll figure it out.

To be clear, this isn’t even the typical “old man yells at cloud” thing where I think things were better back then. I’ll fully acknowledge that the NHL and the sport of hockey have improved over the decades. But that doesn’t mean I can’t miss stuff like faceoffs in random locations and officials climbing the glass, or baggy nets and big moments punctuated by flash photography. Was it better back then? Not really, but also sort of, which is the type of confusion you should expect from an old man like me.

Today, we’re going to focus on the offseason. Here are five things that my old and deteriorating sports fan brain misses about who things used to work.

>> Read the full post at The Athletic

(Want to read this post on The Athletic for free? Sign up for a free trial.)

NHL 2024-25 prediction contest results, where playing it safe (finally) paid off

July 1 has come and gone, marking one of the most important dates on the entire NHL calendar.

Free agency? Extension? The start of the new league year? Yeah, I guess that stuff matters a bit. But I’m talking about the truly big stuff: The end of the annual prediction contest.

Yes, with the first day of free agency over with, we can officially close the book on the 2024-25 contest. It was the fourth time we’ve run this thing, and scores have been increasing every year. In theory, you guys are getting better at this. In reality… well, we’ll get to that.

As usual, the gimmick here is that the questions are easy, but you take a zero if you offer even one wrong answer, so the risk-reward can get tricky. If you missed out on the contest, or could use a refresher on how it all works, you can find the original post here. An initial summary came a week later, in which we learned that nobody believed in Sam Reinhart. Correctly, as it turns out. I’m sure he’ll be crushed once he and the rest of his teammates sober up. If they ever do.

The good news is that unlike last year, there was no tie at the top this time. There was one winner. Was it you? Maybe! (No.) Let’s go through the questions and see how this played out.

>> Read the full post at The Athletic

(Want to read this post on The Athletic for free? Sign up for a free trial.)