NHL Bizarro-meter 2026: Which Western Conference team had the weirdest offseason?

The offseason is over, and at least for a few teams, things got weird. How weird? We’re about to find out.

Yes, it’s time for the annual offseason rankings, in which we blow the dust off our trusty bizarro-meter and feed it each team’s summer headlines. After a few bleeps and bloops and flashing lights and occasional puff of toxic smoke, we’ll get back a rating out of 10 that answers the question: Just how weird did things get?

As always, we start with an important caveat: “Weird” doesn’t mean bad. It doesn’t mean good. It doesn’t necessarily mean busy, or quiet, or anything in between. This isn’t meant to be a traditional evaluation, so much as a look at which teams surprised us. Think of it as a rating of how often a team made us go “What the heck?”, with perhaps some other words occasionally slotted in instead, as ranked on a subjective scale of 1 to 2013 Maple Leafs.

We’re defining the offseason as everything that happened between a team’s last game of the 2025-26 season and today, and everything is on the table: roster moves, hirings and firings, extensions, and anything else that made news. In some cases, the stuff that didn’t happen is even weirder than what did, and that counts too.

>> Read the full post for free at The Athletic

Long-shot NHL award picks: Zach Werenski for Hart? Stuart Skinner for Vezina?

With the NHL’s 2026-27 season almost upon us, it’s time to make some award picks.

Easy, right? Connor McDavid for the Hart, Cale Makar for the Norris, Porter Martone for the Calder, and all the various other favorites. Maybe a Macklin Celebrini here or a Nikita Kucherov there if you want to be different.

So sure, easy. Too easy. For today at least, we’re skipping the favorites and aiming a little higher. It’s time for our annual attempt to nail some true longshots.

We’ve been trying this for years. Do we get any right? Eh, not necessarily. But we’ve had some impressive near-misses, including last year when Gentille was sniffing around the Celebrini offensive outburst before just about anyone. But when we’re wrong, we’re really wrong. That’s part of the point – to look back a year or more later and realize how random a lot of this can feel.

We’ll be using the odds posted by Bet365 as of early this week. (Note that odds can change over time.) To be clear, the idea here isn’t to encourage you to be on anything – we already have every intermission report on every TV broadcast to handle that. But the oddsmakers are a good measure of where expectations have been set, in a mostly objective way.

For our purposes, we’re looking for odds of at least +2000, which is to say longshots of 20-to-1 or more, with the “we” being Sean Gentille, Sean McIndoe and Dom Luszczyszyn. If we hit one, you’ll ever hear the end of it. If we whiff on everything, at least we’ll know we took the bat off our shoulder.

Let’s find some plausible longshots.

>> Read the full post for free at The Athletic

The final days of Slow News Summer: Tackling readers' craziest ideas

We’ve made it to the end of Slow News Summer.

Well, almost. There are still a few weeks until the NHL is well and truly back. But my schedule for that period is mostly filled, with projections to make, longshot award swings to miss, oddly specific predictions to miss even worse, and a trusty bizarro-meter to fire up. It’s going to get busy around these parts.

But not quite yet. For one more week, we’re still firmly in Slow News Summer, the annual dead zone where nothing is happening and no idea is too dumb. We started almost two months ago with a post about syllables, so the bar for nonsense has been set pretty high.

How do you beat something as pointless as arguing over how many syllables are in Cale Makar’s name? By asking the readers, of course. So last week, that’s what I did.

>> Read the full post for free at The Athletic

Remembering a time your team got smoked by a some kid making his NHL debut

If there’s one thing every NHL fan agrees on, it’s that anyone who bangs on the glass during play should go to jail. But if there’s a second thing, it’s that our favorite team is always getting lit up by some random rookie playing his first career game.

You know the drill. You settle in to watch a game, only to notice a player on the other team doing the old solo lap initiation. Immediately, you get that sinking feeling. Players making their debuts always seem to have magic powers that turn them into a cross between Bobby Orr and Jacques Plante. But only, it goes without saying, against your team.

Or do they? It turns out that some teams have a stronger claim than others when it comes to this stuff, as I learned by going through all 32 teams and searching for the most productive games anyone had ever had against them in their NHL debut.

A few quick ground rules: These are regular season debuts only, not playoffs or (obviously) preseason. And we’re not counting those first few games in 1917 when the league was brand new and everyone was technically debuting. Sorry, fellow olds.

Other than that, any debut by a skater or goalie is fair game. Let’s find out how bad your team has really had it when it comes to these punk kids.

>> Read the full post for free at The Athletic

Who wins an all-time roster battle of NHL stars based on how Stanely Cups they won?

After a summer spent on failed GM theories, contrarian takes, and blockbuster alternate history, we’re going to keep today’s post nice and simple. It’s an idea that’s been sent in by a few of you over the years, most recently reader Stephen C., and I’ll admit to being surprised we haven’t done it already.

Let’s make some all-time rosters based on how many Cups a player won.

That’s it. Just a nice fastball over the heart of the plate to take a swing at. We’ll go through the best players, check how many Cups they’ve won, and assign them to that team. Then we see which one is best, and then ideally spend the rest of the day arguing about it in the comment section.

>> Read the full post for free at The Athletic