The "get me out of here" all-stars, a full roster of NHL stars who forced trades

The big story in the NHL over the first days of camp is a pair of pending trades. The situations involving Connor Hellebuyck and Dylan Larkin are playing out in different ways, with Larkin reporting to camp in Detroit (but not taking the ice due to injury), while Hellebuyck sits at home rather than join his teammates in Winnipeg.

Two different scenarios, but both are part of the same bigger story: Star players who want out. We already saw it play out to some degree with Brady Tkachuk’s exit from Ottawa, and Zach Werenski was about to do the same in Columbus before changing his mind. It’s all led to a lot of talk about the NHL’s new era of player empowerment, where stars aren’t shy about forcing their way out a situation they don’t want to be in.

It’s an important development. But is it really all that new?

From a near-term view, it is. It’s rare that we see a player try this sort of power play these days, let alone multiple stars at once. But zoom out a bit and you realize that in the bigger picture, these sorts of stories aren’t all that rare in NHL history. In fact, they’re pretty common.

How common? Let’s find out by building an all-time roster of stars who forced trades.

>> Read the full post for free at The Athletic

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

After a weekend off to cool down, apply some security patches, and reassure it that the whole “Mike Babcock to the Oilers“ thing was not a joke, the Bizarro-meter is back.

Every year, we like to try to figure out which NHL teams had the weirdest offseason. On Friday, we ran through the Western Conference, featuring a record-smashing offer sheet, a blockbuster that wasn’t, and some Pacific Division coaching shenanigans. When the dust settled, the top score in the conference went to the Oilers, with an impressive 9.1 out of 10.

Will anyone in the Eastern Conference beat that mark? Let’s find out…

>> Read the full post for free at The Athletic

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