Trades, traditions, and jean shorts: A reason to be thankful for all 32 NHL teams

It’s Thanksgiving, at least among some of the lesser hockey countries. So today, I’m going to list a reason that I’m thankful for each NHL team.

That’s it. No gimmicks, or clever twists. I promise I’m not even going to do the “Thanks for reminding us it could always be worse” backhanded compliment thing to anyone. Just one sincere, if slightly bizarre, reason to say a quick thanks to every team.

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NHL weekend rankings: Looking at the Kings, Blue Jackets, and Canadian panic

If you’re American, this is Thanksgiving week. There’s a good chance that you’re making plans to see friends and family. You might be travelling, in which case we wish you the best of luck with all that. By Thursday, if all goes well, you’ll have a belly full of turkey and a full slate of NFL games to doze to.

If you’re a Canadian, you’re probably busy panicking about your NHL team.

For our purposes, that second group is more interesting than the first. So let’s take a quick tour around the country and ask the question: Just how worried should you be right now?

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I have stumbled on incontrovertible proof that the hockey gods hate the loser point

 This post was originally going to be about something else. As often happens, I got sidetracked and went down a rabbit hole. And I’m glad I did, because I appear to have found something very important.

I think I’ve discovered a relatively new but immutable law of the hockey universe, and I need to share it with you now because it could have crucial implications for the immediate future of two teams, starting as early as tonight.

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All 29 times the Leafs have traded away a first rounder, ranked from best to worst

I love trades and I love rankings, and I’m a Maple Leafs fan so it goes without saying that I love misery. For today’s post, I figured I’d combine all of those things into one piece, with a ranking of all the times that the Maple Leafs have traded away a first-round pick. After all, it feels like a timely topic right about now.

After some digging, I found there have been 29 separate trades in Leafs history in which they’ve traded away a total of 31 first-round picks, so I did what any normal person would do and ranked them all, from the ones that turned out best to worst.

Two things surprised me about that. First, 29 seems low. The Leafs seem to do this kind of thing a lot. I was pretty sure Brad Treliving had traded away 29 firsts on his own, although I guess the math doesn’t quite work out on that one. Give him time, guys, he’s working on it.

The second surprise was the best-to-worst part, since that implies that some of these trades have worked out in the Leafs’ favor. I didn’t think they’d all be disasters, mind you, because some of these are going to be boring draft floor swaps that nobody even remembers. But finding actual wins? Impossible. Or so I thought.

It goes without saying that we're doing this with total benefit of hindsight, which isn't fair to the GMs but too bad for them. Let's go on this journey together...

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NHL weekend rankings: These teams are who we thought they were (maybe)

The biggest story through the season’s first month or so was that nobody knew anything.

OK, sure, there were a few teams that stuck to the script. The Avs were good. The Predators were bad. But in between, it was chaos. Teams that nobody thought would be all that good were dominating. Teams we thought would be terrible were competitive, or better. And so many presumed contenders were struggling that you could barely hear the goal horns over the sounds of all the windows slamming shut.

It seemed to set up a wild season where you could just the preseason projections entirely. But then, over the last few weeks, something changed. Not entirely, and there are still plenty of surprises playing out. But doesn’t it feel like the hockey gods are trying hard to slam the brakes on this runaway season?

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Remembering five of the NHL's most important "changing of the guard" seasons

 Part of what’s made the first moth of this NHL season so much fun has been the youth movement, with young stars like Macklin Celebrini, Connor Bedard and Leo Carlsson all putting up gaudy offensive numbers that place them near the top of the scoring race.

It’s only been a month, so we don’t want to get too far out over our skis here. But it sure seems like we’re witnessing a shift in the league, with a new generation of forwards staking their claim to superstar status. That doesn’t mean the old guard is disappearing – as just one example, that grizzled old Nathan MacKinnon guy stills seems to be doing OK. But the next generation appears to have emphatically arrived, and that makes for an exciting time to be a hockey fan.

While we wait to see whether this is a more temporary blip or a truly seismic shift, I figured it could be a good time to look back at other seasons NHL history that saw the next generation kick down the door to the league’s top tier. Here are five times we saw what seemed to be a changing of the guard among the sport’s elite players, and whether it stuck.

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A guide to this year's Leafs season for Blue Jays fans who are just tuning in now

If you’re a Toronto sports fan, you’ve had a busy fall. You watched the Blue Jays stumble down the stretch in September, only to find their footing just in time to win the AL East on the regular season’s final day. Then you watched them handle the Yankees in the ALDS before coming back to beat the Mariners in a thrilling Game 7 classic in the ALCS. That led to one of the greatest World Series ever played, with the underdog Jays giving the fat cat Dodgers all they could handle before losing a heart-breaking winner-take-all showdown, literally coming just inches away from a championship.

After all of that, you probably needed some time off to recover. But now the snow has arrived, and it’s time to turn your attention back to that other blue-and-white team that’s still playing. Right, the Maple Leafs, that’s what they’re called. It’s time to start watching them again.

So, you may be wondering: How are the Leafs doing?

Let’s get you caught up, with my special guide to the Maple Leafs season for Blue Jays fans who haven’t been paying attention because of the whole agonizing championship near-miss thing. We’ll do this in a Q+A format, and by the end you’ll be back up to speed on everything you missed.

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NHL weekend rankings: A tale of two Rangers, plus a bottom five shakeup

In the hockey world, any no-talent hack can cry about how bad things are. But it takes true visionary to focus on the positive. And so far this season, there’s been a lot of positive stories to talk about. Since I’m known as a big sunshine and optimism type of guy, let’s take a few minutes to recognize a very solid first month of the seasons.

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The "Rule of Cool"? Loaning stars to other teams? NHL Rules Court is back in session

It’s time for another session of Rules Court, the feature where you make the case for any kind of change that you think would improve the NHL, and a jury of three of us votes on it. Convince at least two of us, and… well, nothing happens, but you get to feel like you’re not quite so alone in the world. That’s important, right? Sure it is.

This time around, we’ve got the usual jury of Shayna Goldman, Sean McIndoe, and Sean Gentille. We have seven of your proposals to consider, plus a bonus suggestion that will show up in today’s newsletter. (Subscribe now!) Last time, you were only able to get two of your proposals through. Will you do any better this time? Let’s find out, because court is now in session.

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Re-evaluating the HHOF cases for John Tavares, Jamie Benn, Corey Perry and more

It’s Hall of Fame induction week, and the class of 2025 is an interesting one. Of the four players on the men’s side, we had two absolute locks (Zdeno Chara and Joe Thornton), plus one guy who was very close (Duncan Keith) and another who should have been (Alexander Mogilny). While you never quite know how the committee will judge a candidate, all four players absolutely felt like future Hall-of-Famers midway through their careers.

Many eventual HHOFers fit that pattern. That said, it’s possible for a player to feel like a borderline candidate in their prime, only to have the sort of finishing kick that flips them to a sure thing. We saw that with Marc-Andre Fleury, who I had as “not there yet” back in 2019 when he was already well into his mid-30s, but who added a Vezina to his trophy case two years later to seal the deal. Fellow goalie Sergei Bobrovsky was “very” close as recently as early 2024, then won back-to-back Cups and is essentially a lock. And in 2019, Shea Weber was a strong candidate who felt like he just needed to close the case – which he emphatically did with the Habs 2021 playoff run, leading to his induction last year.

Then again, some players start off looking like they’re on the HHOF fast track but then fade before the finish line. You never really know until a player’s career is over. And sometimes, we’re not even sure then.

That’s why it’s worthwhile checking in on a star player as their career is still going on. You won’t get a definitive answer, obviously, but there’s still value in a quick temperature check. We’ve been doing that for years, on this site and others. And a few years ago, we went back for another look at some veterans who’d been borderline calls before.

We’re going to do that again today, as we revisit the HHOF cases of six active players who might make for tricky calls.

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NHL weekend rankings: Spiralling Blues, lacklustre Leafs, and a mediocre East

Let's talk about hockey, because other sports make me sad. Who's up for some rankings?

But first, I wanted to touch on something Pierre brought up a few days ago when he quoted a GM: “This is the most competitive balance I’ve ever seen in our league”.

For the uninitiated, “competitive balance” is the term the league seems to prefer to “parity”, for reasons I’m not quite clear on. When they talk about it, it’s always as a good thing. I’m not so sure, and made the case almost a decade ago that there’s such a thing as too much competitive balance. But for today’s purposes, we don’t have to pick a side. You can stay neutral on the parity question and still acknowledge that… man, there is a ton of it right now.

Specifically, there’s a ton of it out east. The Western Conference features a spread of great teams, mediocre ones, and a few that are just awful. One month isn’t a long time, but it’s enough to get some separation, and we see it in one conference. Just not the other.

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