Celebrate recycled coaches by taking our "Who Didn't He Coach For?" quiz

NHL teams sure do love to recycle coaches. Sure, you can always make the case for somebody with a fresh set of eyes and a different, maybe even more modern approach. But when a GM is choosing the hire that could make or break his team’s chances, the temptation to go with an experienced hand who’s been around the league will always be there.

We saw that this week in Columbus, where the Blue Jackets moved on from Dean Evason. They replaced him with 71-year-old veteran Rick Bowness, who’s been behind benches since the 1980s and is now making either his seventh or eighth stop as an NHL head coach (depending on whether you correctly believe that the Jets are the Jets.)

That many stints from one coach is rare, even in the NHL. But we’re used to seeing coaches get multiple chances to ply their trade. So today, let’s break out our favorite quiz gimmick – “Who didn’t he play for?” – and flip it around on the guys in suits.

I’ll give you 16 coaches, and four teams for each. Your job is to tell me: Who Didn’t He Coach For?

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We were right doubt to the Jets, and other midseason lessons from the prediction contest

One of my favorite posts of every year is the annual prediction contest, in which I give you ten simple questions about how the upcoming season will go, and you get them wrong.

I love that for us, for two reasons. First, it helps me feel better about all of my own bad predictions. (The New Jersey Devils: maybe not elite Cup contenders after all.) But more importantly, it’s a way to remind us all about just how unpredictable the NHL has become. It’s easy to look back at any given season after its over and shrug about how nothing was all that surprising. That gets a little tougher when you have over a thousand fans putting their predictions on the public record.

Will this season be another collective swing-and-miss? Probably, although we’re not there yet. But now that we’ve crossed the halfway point of the season, it feels like a good time to check in and see how we’re doing.

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NHL weekend rankings: The Senators, and other tales of Eastern Conference misery

Last week, I committed a grave violation of the eastern sportswriter protocol by talking about the Pacific Division. Specifically, how comically bad it was.

Apparently, some Eastern Conference teams were jealous. And like a toddler who hasn’t quite grasped the distinction between good attention and bad attention, they responded by making a nasty mess all over the floor. Is that chocolate? I really hope that’s chocolate.

OK, fair’s fair. Let’s talk about a few of the utter disasters unfolding

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Ranking the 10 best NHL matchups we haven't seen yet so far this season

We’re officially hallway through the NHL regular season schedule, and given that each team plays every other team at least twice, that means you might expect to have seen every possible matchup at least once by now. Of course, that’s now how the schedule works – things aren’t spread out quite so evenly, with some matchups frontloaded into the first few months and other making us wait.

For example, you could probably stump your friends by asking them to name the only two teams that have already played each other four times this season. That would be the Senators and the Bruins, two divisional rivals who’d already finished their entire season series by the holiday break. (If you use that in a bar bet and win a free beer, you have to send me a sip in the mail. I don’t make the rules.)

For today’s post, we’re going to look at the other extreme: The teams that have yet to face each other even once so far this season. By my count, there are 70 such pairings still on the table out of a possible 496, the vast majority of which are interconference tilts. Not all of those are exactly marquee matchups; I’m guessing there aren’t too many fans out there begging to see the Devils finally square off with the Kraken. But some of the pairings we haven’t seen yet are good ones, and today we’re going to rank them.

Here are my picks for the ten best matchups that the schedule has yet to offer us as the season heads into its second half.

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11 NHL teams riding statistical droughts that feel impossible but apparently aren’t

One of my favorite streaks in all of sports was in serious danger this weekend, but just barely survived: The Chicago Bears have still never had a 4,000-yard passer.

(Yes, I know you think you clicked on an NHL article. Don't worry, you did. We’re just going to use the NFL as a jumping off point. Give me a few paragraphs and we’ll get to the hockey, I promise.)

The thing about passing for 4,000 yards in an NFL season is that while it’s certainly not easy, it’s also not especially rare. Six players did it this year. Same with the year before. Ten did it the year before that, which was one off of the record for the most in a single season. All told, it’s a mark that’s been reached 238 times in league history.

Just never by a Chicago Bear. And that’s weird, because the Bears are one of the league’s oldest teams. But for a variety of reasons, ranging from injury to identity to (most often) ineptitude, they never seem to have a quarterback who can get to 4,000 yards. Even when they shuffled their way to a Super Bowl in 1985, they didn’t come close. This year, recent first overall pick Caleb Williams went into the season’s final game needing 270 yards to finally end the drought; he wound up with 212, good enough to break the franchise single-season record, but not to get to 4,000.

I love “never” stats like that – the ones that feel like they shouldn’t be possible over a long enough timeline, but somehow are. So today, let’s look back at 11 common stats and milestones that specific NHL teams have never hit, or in a few cases at least have an impossible-seeming drought hanging over them.

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