Predicting the 2026-27 NHL season, from Stanley Cup contenders to bottom-feeders

With days left before opening night, I have come up with a brand-new gimmick where I try to predict what will happen during the season.

No? You’re saying that absolutely everyone does this, including people who put a truly impressive amount of work into each and every team preview? Interesting.

But that’s just all the more reason for me to join in. After all, if you’re going to read my thoughts on the season as it happens, you should have some idea of where I started from. Is it possible that I’ll just embarrass myself with dumb predictions? Absolutely. It’s pretty much guaranteed. But that’s part of the fun, and at least it means that a few fan bases will get to dunk on me all year long.

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Enter the 2026-27 NHL prediction contest that’s so easy it’s almost impossible

One week from now, you’ll have watched meaningful NHL hockey.

The season starts next Tuesday, which means by this time next week we’ll all be mad about something that happened, even madder about something that didn’t happen, and completely revising all of our predictions based on the games we watched and/or highlights we caught and/or just the whole general vibe, dude. I can’t wait.

But first… it’s contest time.

Most of you should know the drill by now. This is somehow Year Seven for the annual prediction contest, a concept that debuted back when we were all going mad from lockdown and gearing up for an extremely weird and shortened season. A look back at that year’s contest reminds us that it was only eight questions long instead of ten and it didn’t have The Dreaded Bonus Question™, but it otherwise looked a lot like today’s version.

If you’re new, the basic idea here is that you’ll be asked to make ten very simple predictions about the coming NHL season. We’re talking easy stuff here, the kind of questions that it feels like you’d really have to try to mess up. You’ll post them in the comments of this very post, hit “submit”, and feel good about your chances. Then the season will happen, and we’ll all be horribly, tragically, comically wrong.

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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.

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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…

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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