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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