Your team is the best! (At this one very specific stat from the 2025-26 season)

Everybody’s good at something. It’s just a case of figuring out what.

Or at least, that’s how it was explained to me growing up. Granted, those explanations often came from coaches who were cutting me from the team, or concerned teachers whispering to my parents, or over the shoulder of horrified potential prom dates as they sprinted away from me. But the lesson stuck.

And it turns out that it applies to the NHL. Even in a league with 32 teams that range from model franchises to, um, not that, everyone is good at something. In fact, every team in the league is the very best at something. You just have to be willing to dig deep enough to find it.

Digging deep is kind of my whole schtick. So today, let’s go through each team and find at least one positive stat in which they led the entire league during the 2025-26 season.

Your team is the best… in this one extremely specific thing.

>> Read the full post at The Athletic

Let's find three positive thoughts for each of the NHL’s 16 most hopeless teams

You think your team had a bad year. Are you positive?

You should be, because it’s time for our annual exercise in positivity. While half the league enjoys the playoffs, we’re going to look at the other half. For each team that missed the postseason, we’ll come up with three reasons to think positively.

It goes without saying that this is easier for some teams that for others. So we’ll do this countdown style, starting with the easiest team to feel good about and working our way down to the toughest sell of the bunch.

That means our first team should be easy. And as it turns out, it absolutely is.

>> Read the full post at The Athletic

MLB's new ABS replay system is an apparent success. Could the NHL learn from it?

Here’s a sentence you’ve never seen me write before: Replay review is good.

It works. It’s doing what it’s supposed to do. I’m glad it’s there, because it’s making the game better.

Just not in the NHL.

>> Read the full post at The Athletic

Playoff pressure rankings: Everyone wants to win, but who can’t afford to lose?

It’s the postseason, and the pressure is intense. But pressure comes in different forms for different teams in different circumstances. Some teams have regular pressure, while others have capital-P pressure. Some teams go all caps and break out the fancy fonts.

You get the picture. It’s time for our annual Playoff Pressure Rankings, where we count down from the teams that would prefer to win to those that have no other option.

>> Read the full post at The Athletic

Old Guy Without a Cup rankings, 2026 edition: Narrowing down a stacked field

It’s OGWAC time, as we celebrate one of the best running subplots of any NHL postseason: The Old Guy Without a Cup. That grizzled veteran who's done it all over a long career, but has yet to get their name on the sport’s most hallowed trophy. Can they finally win the big one? Will they run out of time? Will they get the first pass from the team captain, and if so, will they cry? Will we all cry?

You know the drill. The greatest OGWAC story ever told was Ray Bourque back in 2001. Teemu Selanne’s was pretty great. So was Lanny McDonald way back in 1989. Then again, we’ve spent years pumping the tires of OGWAC legends like Joe Thornton and Joe Pavelski, and they never got their happy endings. Nothing is promised in OGWAC world.

Our criteria for being “old” remains the same as past years: An old player will be at least 33 years old when the Cup is awarded, and must have at least ten seasons of NHL experience. The older the better, and that’s especially true if the player has had some agonizing near-misses in their history. Ideally, our candidates will be playing an important role for a team with a legitimate shot at winning it all.

We’ll try to work in a candidate for as many teams as we can, and we’ll limit ourselves to a max of three picks from any individual team. We’ll start at 20 and work our way down to year’s best OGWAC.

>> Read the full post at The Athletic