It's the NHL Grab Bag, featuring way more Blue Jays than it probably should

Welcome to my weekly monthly very occasional NHL Grab Bag, a feature that, it may surprise you to learn, has tended to focus on the NHL.

In theory, I should continue that trend this week. But that would involve a level of dishonesty, because I’d be implying that hockey’s been the top sport on my mind lately. And as all my fellow good Canadians know, that’s just not the case.

No, we’re all about the Toronto Blue Jays up here, as they sit one win away from an unlikely World Series championship. With the World Series up for grabs in Toronto tonight, it's been hard to focus on much of anything else. But I'm going to try, which means this is my promise to you: This week's Grab Bag will feature some hockey, and I'll only bring it around the Blue Jays in like three or four sections.

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Let's get spooky, with the roster for this year's Scary Start team

Friday night is the scariest night of the year. Call it spooky season, or call it fright-fest, or whatever else you might want, but it’s the one night where everyone huddles up and lets cold shivers race up and down our spines.

Yes, it’s October 31 – the last night for NHL teams to get within four points of a playoff spot before Elliotte Friedman’s fabled Curse of November 1st kicks in and all but officially starts eliminating also-rans from the playoff race.

Oh, it’s also Halloween, if you’re into that sort of thing.

Either way, it’s time for our annual roster of the NHL’s scariest starts, relative to expectations. As always, we do the full roster plus an extra goalie, with a limit of one player per team. That means 11 teams will get away unscathed, which will somehow upset their fans even though it’s mostly a good thing. That's OK, this time of year doesn't have to make sense. The bones are the skeletons' money, in their world bones equal dollars.

Where were we? Rigbt, it’s spooky season. Time to yell “boo!”

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NHL weekend rankings: Wild, Penguins, and 5 early surprises I'm starting to buy

We’re three weeks in and it’s still early, but there are some storylines taking shape that look like they could have legs. Last week, we looked at five early surprises I wasn’t buying quite yet. This week, let’s flip the script and come at this from the other side: Five early stories that I didn’t expect, but that I’m starting to think might be the real deal.

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Sugar Boo? Fishy? The Springfield Rifle? It's another weird nickname quiz

 Big Dumper, we hardly knew ye.

Yes, I know I’m a hockey columnist, and we’ll get to that. But the big news up in Canada these days is all about baseball, with the Blue Jays dramatic Game 7 win over the Mariners on Monday sending them to the World Series, which starts tonight in Toronto.

It won’t shock you to learn that I’m a Blue Jays fan and have been since I was a little kid, so I’m obviously thrilled to see the team make it back to the top of the mountain after three decades. But I have to admit that part of me was sad to it happen at the expense of the Mariners, a team that entered the league alongside the expansion Jays way back in 1977 and has never made it to World Series. A long and agonizing championship drought, you say? It's possible that some of us up here can relate.

But there’s another reason to love the Mariners: Their nicknames. I’ve always loved a good nickname, and baseball is unquestionably the greatest nickname sport that there is, with the Mariners having had plenty of near-perfect ones. Ken Griffey Jr. as “The Kid”. Randy Johnson as “The Big Unit”. Felix Hernandez as “King Felix”. They even had a guy nicknamed “Death to Flying Things”, which was admittedly recycled by is still an all-timer.

And then there’s arguably the best of them all: Cal “Big Dumper” Raleigh, their slugging catcher who earned the nickname because… well, you can probably figure it out. As far as widely used nicknames go, is “Big Dumper” better than anything the NHL has to offer today? I’m pretty sure that it is.

Of course, you caught that “widely used” qualifier, which brings us to today’s quiz. Yes, as I find myself on the verge of being overwhelmed with envy for Raleigh’s Big Dumper, I think it’s time for another round of “ridiculous nicknames that you’ve probably never heard of but that hockey-reference insists are real”. The go-to site for hockey research added nicknames a few years ago, and let’s just say they’re not especially picky. If a nickname is famous, like The Great One or Mr. Hockey, they use it. If it’s something nobody has ever actually used, like calling Sidney Crosby “Darryl”, they still use it.

We had some fun with this two years ago, with current players. Last year, we were back at it with some historical greats, including the immortal Satan’s Wallpaper that made its way to an episode of Jeopardy. Today, we’re back to the present, with 20 more current stars.

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The 24 Wikipedia pages for NHL rivalries, ranked by their single wildest passage

I love a good hockey rivalry. The sport has been blessed by some absolute beauties over the years, and there’s nothing quite like watching two teams square off in a matchup soaked in history, trash talk, and bad blood.

I also love a good Wikipedia entry, which I’ll admit is an odd thing to say. But if you go deep enough down the rabbit hole, you can usually find some weird stuff that some agitated editor has managed to slip into the record, quite possibly after months of debate with a different agitated editor. That’s my favorite part.

Today, let’s combine these two passions by reviving an old gimmick: finding the single weirdest sentence on hockey-related Wikipedia pages. I’ve tried this before, with NHL team and NHL arenas. Today we’re going to try NHL rivalries, which has a main page here which then links off to two dozen that have been granted the honor of having their own page.

Yes, there are 24 rivalries that have earned their own Wikipedia page. That simultaneously feels like too many, and also not enough, because some solid matchups like Habs/Sens, Sabres/Leafs and Sharks/Golden Knights don’t make the cut. If this bothers you, and you’re someone who has figured out how to edit Wikipedia, then you know what to do.

I’ve gone through each of our 24 options and pulled out a single passage that really captures the spirit of the thing. Then I ranked them from least to most weird, because sports lists that aren’t ranked are the  coward’s playground. Let’s do this.

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NHL weekend rankings: Five surprising early stories I'm not buying quite yet

You have to love the early weeks of an NHL season. One week ago, in our first rankings of the year, we had the Panthers in the top spot because they were 3-0-0, were wondering if anyone could beat the Bruins, and were trying to figure out if the Sabres would ever score again.

Things can change quickly, you might say. And every night of NHL action is trying to tell us something. The question is how much of it is real, and how much we should ignore. This week, let’s use our bonus five to plant a few flags in that latter territory.

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DGB Mailbag: The worst and most perfect metaphor for being a Leafs fan, and more

We’re two weeks into the season, and it’s too early. Too early for panic, too early for trades, too early for rankings, too early for conclusions. In fact, it’s too early for everything but a Friday mailbag that will distract you from doing work you weren’t going to do anyway. Let’s do this.

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William Nylander was a fluke and the Jets are weird: Prediction contest lessons

We run a prediction contest for our readers right before every regular season, and it results in two of my favorite posts of the year.

My very favorite comes at the end of the season, where I reveal the final results and laugh at you for being wrong. (This is not to be confused with my weekly power rankings, which run all season long and result in you laughing at me for being wrong.) But my second favorite is this one, where we dig into your answers and try to see what they tell us about what the hockey world’s smartest fans – i.e. my readers – are thinking about the coming season.

If you missed the contest post, you can find it here. The contest involves 10 simple questions, covering everything from team success to coaching and front office hot seats to individual awards. This year, we also worked in an Olympic question. And of course, there’s the all-or-nothing bonus questions, which gives you the chance to risk your entire entry for the extra points that might push your entry into the winner's circle.

We had well over 1,100 entries this year. This isn’t a poll with a random sample size, of course, and contest strategy could in theory result in some incentives for weird picks. But we can still learn some interesting things from who was named in your entries, and who wasn't. let’s dive in.

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Early season mailbag?

Hey folks...

Hockey's back, so let's try a mailbag.

I'm looking for your questions, comments, rants and hypotheticals. Clever is good. Straight down the middle is good too, so don't feel like you have to steal the show if you'd rather ask something simple. Anything can work.

Send your stuff via email at dgbmailbag@gmail.com.

Thanks,
Sean

NHL weekend rankings: It's too early to know anything, except maybe in Buffalo

Welcome back to the weekend rankings. By my count, this is the eighth year of this column’s lifespan at The Athletic, and it had a few different homes before that. How long is eight years? Put it this way, in that debut edition on this site way back in 2018, the very first team to be listed in the Cup contenders section was the San Jose Sharks. They’d just acquired Erik Karlsson, you see, and we all knew there was no way that trade wouldn’t work out great.

That’s a long time ago. But that fits with the theme, because these are the long-range rankings. That makes them a bit different from most of the power rankings you’ll see out there – we’re not trying to measure who had the best week, or who’d win a game between two teams right now. Instead, it’s about trying to unravel the future, and figure out which teams are best positioned for a Cup run, and which are headed towards the bottom of the standings.

And yes, that means that your favorite team can win a few games against contenders and not immediately rocket past them in the rankings. I know that’s very upsetting for some of you, but we have resources available in the comment section to help you work through your feelings. (Those resources are other commenters, who will make fun of you.)

It also means that this is way too early to be ranking much of anything, because not enough has happened to really alter our preseason predictions. That’s never stopped us before, and it won’t stop us today. Maybe it will backfire – last year’s first rankings had the Rangers in the top five. Maybe we’ll be a bit too slow to catch on to teams like last year’s Caps or Jets, or a surprise team like the Habs.

Recency bias isn’t always wrong, and if you’d prefer a bit more of it in your rankings, Dom and Other Sean will have you covered with their version on Fridays. My advice would be to read both, and then see how (or if) they converge as the season goes on, but it’s not my job to tell you how to live your life. Have you had any water today? Drink some water.

Enough preamble. Let’s get to a very weird weekend in the NHL, which saw a night off on Friday, just one game last night, and the rare full-32 schedule in between.

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The 2025-26 NHL All-Intrigue roster: One name from each team to watch this season

It’s time to build our annual all-intrigue team, a collection of the most interesting names heading into the season. Some will make the list due to sheer star power, while others are more about circumstances, or just morbid curiosity. Either way, they’re the names worth watching, many of whom will go a long way to deciding their team’s fate.

The rules, as always: We’re building a roster of 12 forwards, six defensemen and three goalies, plus a coach and a GM, and then enough honorable mentions to get every team one representative. And just to juice up the difficult, we won’t allow any repeats from last year’s post. (Sorry Mitch Marner, we know you love the media attention.)

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Every banner-raising ceremony of the salary cap era, ranked purely on spite

Why have a ceremonial banner-raising? You’ve already won the Cup, and spent the summer celebrating it. Some would argue that the traditional opening night banner-raising is the perfect chance to close the book by taking a final look back at that ultimate victory, sharing the moment with fans and teammates before embarking on the difficult journey of defending that title.

Wrong. The point is to make the other team feel bad.

OK, I may be alone on this. It’s probably at least a little bit about that other stuff. But I’ve always been fascinated with the banner-raising tradition, and more specifically with the selection of the night’s opponent. After all, that team is part of the event. Sure, they might hide in their dressing room until the ceremony is over, they know what’s happening out there. They know why the game is delayed. They can hear the roar of the crowd. And they know that it’s not for them.

It's a great opportunity to make that team and their fans feel sad. In a perfect world, the champs would raise their banner in front of an arch-rival. Or maybe a team that they had to beat on their way to the Cup, especially if it was a hard-fought and/or controversial series. Having a few former players or coaches or executives on the other side helps too, especially if they left on bad terms. And if all else fails, it should at least be a team that hasn’t won a recent Cup of its own, preferably with a snotty fan base that should be forced to watch your party instead.

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Oddly specific NHL predictions for all 32 teams’ 2025-26 seasons

Have you had enough predictions yet? It’s possible, given that just about everyone who covers this league has spent the last few weeks trying to tell you what’s about to happen. We even gave you a chance, in the annual reader contest. Everyone is getting their predictions out there.

Just not like this. It’s time to get oddly specific.

This is one of my favorite annual columns, in which I try way too hard to get way too specific about predictions that are way too unlikely. Do they ever come true? Sure, sometimes. And when they do, I never shut up about it.

So let’s do this. We’ve got 32 teams, and 32 predictions to get through. This is your final spoiler warning, don’t read any further if you want to be surprised.

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Enter the NHL prediction contest that’s so easy it’s completely impossible

Its time.

With the start of the NHL season just a few days away, you’ve read all the previews and predictions. So, so many predictions, by so many so-called experts, none of whom have any idea what they’re talking about.

Now it’s your turn to be wrong.

Yes, it’s prediction contest time, our annual reminder that an NHL season is basically impossible to project. I give you a series of very easy questions. You decide how confident you want to be, and what the optimal strategy looks like. Then we sit back, enjoy the season, and watch it all fall apart.

No big changes to the rules or format this year, although we’ve swapped out one of the traditional questions. Here’s how this works:

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From Stanley Cup contenders to bottom feeders: Predicting the 2025-26 season

We’re less than one week from meaningful hockey, and yes, you’ve seen a million previews. But what if I told you this one was going to be accurate?

It won’t be, for the record. Probably not even close. But what if I told you that? Let’s pretend that I just did.

It’s time for the annual four-division gimmick, one that’s so old it stretches back to a time when the NHL having four division was considered news. The rules have stayed consistent ever since. I get four divisions: The bottom-feeders, the middle-of-the-pack, the legitimate Stanley Cup contenders and then the teams I just have no idea about. And because I enjoy making my own life difficult, that eight teams per division rule is mandatory.

Sounds simple enough. And in theory, it is… as long as we pretend that an NHL season is ever predictable. Let’s start from the bottom and work our way up.

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