Who wins, a team of Canadians who played in Canada or Americans who played in America?

There’s a concept in international best-on-best hockey that some causal fans may not be completely familiar with, mainly because I made it up just now: The double player.

It’s a player who’s represents his country both internationally and in the NHL. A double Canadian is a Canadian player who plays on a Canadian NHL team. A double American is an American player who plays on an American NHL team.

Jack Eichel is a double American. Matthew Tkachuk became one when he forced his way out from Calgary to Florida. Connor McDavid is a double Canadian, at least for now. Mitch Marner was, but not anymore. And Mario Lemieux, as great as he was, never earned the double distinction. So far, neither has Auston Matthews, Sidney Crosby or Cale Makar. But Quinn Hughes just did, a few days ago.

Cool. So who wins, a team of Double Canadians or Double Americans?

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NHL weekend rankings: A wild Friday shakes up the league, and our Top 5

December can be a boring month in the NHL. Opening night optimism is a faded memory, the deadline is still months away, the playoff picture is jumbled, and not much is happening.

And then, every once in a while, we get a day like Friday.

We got one of the biggest midseason blockbusters in years, with the Quinn Hughes trade to Minnesota. We got the long-awaited Oilers goalie trade, with Tristan Jarry coming over from the Penguins. Oh, and before those two deals dropped, we also found out that the Sabres might be on the verge of a front office shakeup.

Other than all that, pretty quiet day.

Let’s dig into those two big trades, with a few lingering thoughts…

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Which of the teams that are .500 or worse will find a way to make the playoffs?

The other day, I had a question I was wondering about: How often does a team that’s .500 or worse in December manage to still make the playoffs?

And I was surprised by what turned out to be the answer: All the time.

No, literally, it happens every season. Going back to the 2013 lockout (and excluding the COVID season that didn’t start until January), at least one team that was .500 or worse in December has made the playoffs each and every season:

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Who was the worst NHL GM to keep his job for five years or more?

 I’m a big fan of sports questions that seem simple but are actually more complicated than they appear, which is how I’ve managed to waste huge chunks of my life on questions about jersey numbers or building rosters of terrible contracts that are still somehow cap compliant. Today, we’re going to try another one.

Which GM had the worst long stint with a team, meaning five years or longer?

You can already see the problem. There are lots of GMs in NHL history who’ve held the role for a particular team for a long time. And there are lots of GMs who didn’t do an especially great job. But those two groups aren’t supposed to overlap. This is supposed to be one of the most important jobs in a relentlessly results-oriented league – if you’re not having success, shouldn’t your team replace you with somebody else who might?

You’d think so. And sure enough, most of the GMs who are remembered poorly fall short of our five-year cutoff, often by a lot. Even guys that stuck around longer than fans might have wanted, like John Ferguson Jr. in Toronto, Ron Hextall in Pittsburgh, Ned Harkness in Detroit or Peter Chiarelli in Edmonton didn’t get to the five-year mark. Five years is a lot.

But every now and then, for a variety of reasons, a team sticks with a guy well past the point that results would dictate. Those are the guys we’re interested in today, as we count down the ten worst GMs to get at least five years with the same team.

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NHL weekend rankings: Naming and shaming the (many) fake .500 teams

If you’re a sports fan, you know what “.500” means. In general, it means you’re average. Mediocre. Just OK. And specifically, it means you’ve won as many games as you’ve lost.

The exception: The NHL. Since 1999, the league has given out points for losing, which is dumb but we’ve been over that. In the NHL, we rank teams based on their points percentage, and because of those loser points, you can have a percentage north of .500 even if you’ve lost more than you’ve won.

Most years, it’s annoying. This year, with the loser point being well and truly out of control, it’s messing up the standings even more than usual. So this week, let’s take a look at five teams that are fake. 500 – which is to say, they’re sitting at .500 or better even though they’ve lost more games than they’ve won. We’ll name and shame those teams here, and rank them from least to most fake.

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Six Patrick Roy-inspired Oilers trades for a goalie that get increasingly demented

Thirty years ago today, there was a very good team with one crucial flaw.

They had an excellent roster, one that included two of the very best centers of their era. The forward depth was good. They had a decent blueline, one anchored by one of the better young offensive defensemen in the league. They had a good young coach. But the flaw was in goal – they had some decent goalies, but nobody who could be The Guy,  the sort of stud who could steal a playoff series or two on the long road to a championship.

Stop me if any of this sounds familiar, Oiler fans.

You know how the story ends. Our team is the 1995-96 Colorado Avalanche, and tomorrow marks the thirty-year anniversary of the biggest transaction in franchise history. On December 6, 1995, the Avalanche acquired Patrick Roy from the Canadiens in a five-player trade, and the rest was history. They won the Stanley Cup that very year, followed not long after by another. Joe Sakic and Peter Forsberg went to the Hall of Fame with multiple rings. And it all happened because Colorado’s front office recognized a problem, and took the biggest swing possible to fix it.

Could this year’s Oilers do the same?

The short answer: No, of course not.

We all know why. There’s a salary cap now. Trading is too hard, especially during the season. The price would be too high. Great players are almost never traded these days. And there’s also the not-very-small detail that Roy had basically walked out on his team a few days earlier, forcing Montreal to make a lopsided deal they wouldn’t otherwise have made. No elite goalies are doing that these days.

OK, sure. This year’s Oilers can’t take a big swing. It’s impossible to land a Roy-sized talent, or even anything close, even if it would be the last piece of a Stanley Cup puzzle. We have to be realistic, and we all know that when the Oilers eventually make their move, it will look a lot more like the 2024 Avs than the 1995 version – which is to say, they’ll try to find a Mackenzie Blackwood or Scott Wedgewood, then hope for the best. Or maybe they won’t do anything at all, and just roll the dice on yet another Stuart Skinner playoff run. But a blockbuster? Never going to happen.

Fine. But what if it did?

Today, on the eve of the anniversary of the Patrick Roy trade, let’s indulge in a little but of make-believe. Let’s pretend we live in an alternate NHL world where a team that was one star goalie away from a championship would actually, you know, go get a star goalie.

Which goalies could be the Oilers’ Patrick Roy? I have six suggestions. None of them are remotely realistic in today’s NHL. This is just a little Friday fun, a thought experiments to take you into the weekend. We'll go from the most to the least plausible.

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Don't set your mascot on fire: One reason to say "no thanks" to all 32 NHL teams

 I tried to be nice.

I really did. Last week, I wrote a whole long piece in which I offered thanks to all 32 NHL teams. It was pure positivity, nothing but puppies and rainbows. Was it out of character? Maybe, but we’re allowed to try new things. And I was trying something very new: Going a whole article without complaining.

And as I should have known would happen, a whole bunch of you responded with: Cool, now flip the script and do the negative version.

Fine. You win. Here’s one reason to say “no thanks” to every team. See if I ever try to be nice again.

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NHL weekend rankings: Early offseason lessons, plus the Wild, Oilers and Sharks

It’s December, which means it’s not too early anymore.

At least, for some things. For example, if a team is struggling to hit .500 at this point, it’s not just a case of a slump or a run of bad luck. That team is bad. There’s still time for them to get good again, absolutely. But right now? There’s no more pointing at the calendar and pretending everything’s OK.

I’m not as convinced that it’s not too early to pass judgement on the offseason. But we’re doing it anyways, so here we go…

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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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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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Long-shot NHL award picks: Quinn Hughes for Hart? Jack Hughes for Art Ross?

One of my favorite things to do each year is check the betting odds for all the various awards. Not because I want to actually wager on any of them, but because it’s always fascinating to see what kind of consensus is forming around who’s likely to win what – and who isn’t.

Despite all the effort and analysis that goes into setting those odds, it’s not unusual for a longshot to come out of nowhere and win a major award. Leon Draisaitl was 22-to-1 to win the Hart in 2020, Adam Fox was 35-to-1 to win the Norris in 2021, and Linus Ullmark was 80-to-1 to win the Vezina in 2023. Were the oddsmakers dumb? Not really. It’s just that the NHL is incredibly unpredictable, and the awards odds are just another reminder of that inescapable fact.

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NHL Bizarro-meter 2025: Which Western Conference team had the weirdest offseason?

Yesterday, we took the bizarro-meter out of storage and brushed off the cobwebs to start our annual search for the NHL’s weirdest offseason. We covered the Eastern Conference in that post, which you can find here, with the Sabres and Penguins leading the way.

Now it’s the West’s turn. Can one of these 16 teams sneak in and steal the crown? Spoiler: Yes, although maybe not the way you’d expect…

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Bizarro-meter 2025: Which Eastern Conference team had the weirdest offseason?

With camps finally opening, we can say goodbye to the 2025 offseason. And that can only mean one thing: It’s time to fire up the bizarro-meter, and figure out which teams had the strangest offseasons.

We’ve been doing this on various sites since all the way back in 2013, when the David Clarkson signing nearly shattered the bizarro-meter on its very first use. Ever since, we’ve used the gimmick to rate each team’s offseason, which we define as everything that happened since their season ended – transactions, hirings and firings, and anything else that made headlines.

Here’s a quick spoiler: This year’s offseason was not all that bizarre.

Yep, the weirdest thing about the 2025 offseason is that it wasn’t all that weird. Oh, it had its moments. But after years of a stagnant cap finally gave way to a summer where everyone had money to spend, we were expecting some serious fireworks. Instead, we mostly got business as usual. Let’s just say the Ottawa Senators and their infamous 10/10 rating from 2018 don’t have to worry about anyone stealing their thunder.

Still, we solider on. Today is the East, while tomorrow is the West. Let’s fire up the trusty bizzaro-meter and see what it has to say about a summer of leaky roofs, angry dads and accidental retirements.

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Which season produces the best lineup of stars who played their final NHL game?

Slow News Summer has drifted into Some News September, and pretty soon this space is going to be well and truly in regular season countdown mode. We’ll have the usual previews, oddly specific predictions, and the annual reader contest. Just this morning I took the bizarro-meter out of storage and fired it up, just to see if it would last us another season. We’re almost there.

But not quite yet, so today let’s check one more reader question off our offseason to-do list. This one was first asked about five years ago – yes, sometimes it takes that long for the muse to visit – and was simple enough: Which season produces the best six-man roster of players who played their last game that year?

We can do this. Three forwards, two defensemen and a goalie, based on players who saw their final NHL action in a given season. That’s the sort of question that combines history, research, and remembering some guys, all of which are some of my favorite things.

But I’ll admit I had one concern heading into the project: I was pretty sure I already knew the answer. It would end up being 2003-04, because that was the double-cohort year caused by the lost lockout season that produced one of the greatest Hall-of-Fame classes ever. So we had already had our winner, and any suspense would come from seeing who could come the closest.

Except, spoiler alert, the 2003-04 season makes the list, but doesn’t win. We’ll get to that.

For now, we’ll dig back to the dawn of the expansion era in 1967-68, and try to find the 20 best lineups of players who said goodbye to the NHL. Let’s start with…

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Who wins: A roster of NHL stars with unique first names, or two first names?

We’ve made it past Labor Day, which I suppose means it’s no longer Slow News Summer. But without much going on in the NHL world quite yet, I hope you’ll forgive me if I squeeze in a few more entries from my list of weird ideas.

Today’s question: Who wins, a team made up of players who have unique first names, or players who have two first names?

In other words, we’re looking for a team full of guys who are the only player in NHL history to have a specific first name, and another full of guys whose last name is also a common first name. It should be simple enough, as long as you’re not the poor sap who has to do all the research. Which as luck would have, you are not.

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Please tell me I’m not the only fan who does these weird things when watching hockey

I’ve been watching hockey for roughly four decades now, and I can’t shake the feeling that I’m doing it wrong.

Well, not wrong, necessarily. But weird. Whenever I’m watching a hockey game, especially one I’m emotionally invested in, I find myself doing some odd stuff. And I’ve always wondered how much of it might be going on with other fans too.

For the record, I’m not talking about all the stuff I do that’s I know is pretty much unique to me. I’m well aware that most of you aren’t buying a good luck bag of chips for the playoffs or having your kids construct small shrines for international tournaments. And that’s fine, because I'm sure that when it comes to that level of fan angst, you have your own strange habits and traditions, so I don’t feel bad.

I’m talking the much more run-of-the-mill stuff that’s weird. Or maybe it isn’t, and we all do it, and we just don’t talk about it. I’m genuinely not sure, which is why I put together today’s post. Maybe we’ll find out that we all have a lot more in common than we think. Or we might find out that I’m an unfortunate outlier, and you’ll all side-eye me while awkwardly shuffling away.

Either outcome seems fine, so let’s give this a try. Here are five weird things I do when I watch hockey; let me know if any of them sound familiar to you.

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“Fix The NHL” draft: Franchise tags, fun uniforms, 3-point games, and… relegation?

Today, four of us are going to fix the NHL. Or at least, we’re going to try. And then you’re going to tell us who did the best job.

Oh, you don’t think the NHL needs any fixing? The league, as currently run, is just about perfect? Cool, always fun to meet a satisfied customer. This post isn’t for you, feel free to click back and find something else Gary er, random reader.

For the rest of us, who believe there’s always room for improvement… welcome to the Fix the NHL Draft.

 

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Let's build the worst possible roster of contracts that's still somehow cap compliant

Six years ago, I wrote a post based on a premise that I thought was stupid, bordering on pointlessly absurd. If you know my work, that’s really saying something.

A few days earlier, I’d tried to build a roster using the best players and contracts that I could fit under the salary cap, which is not as especially dumb idea and was actually kind of fun. But then, somebody asked me to flip the script, and build a cap-compliant roster of the league’s worst contracts. At first, that seems fine. But then you get into it and realize that “bad contracts” and “cap compliant” don’t work together at all, as you find yourself being priced out of some of the very worst deals because you don’t have room for them. The whole thing didn’t make one bit of sense.

Needless to say, I did it anyway, the readers made it one of my most popular posts of the season, and lately some of you have been bugging me to do it again. Fine, why not, it’s August and nobody will remember this ever happened.

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Do Elias Pettersson and Jusse Saros have bad contracts? NHL Cap Court returns

Let’s do another round of Cap Court. You know the drill by now: Five players, five dicey contracts (from a team perspective), and five arguments over whether the deal is actually bad enough to be “bad”.

Today, we’ll cover a perplexing goaltender, a one-time sure thing who may have peaked as a rookie, and two players recently traded away by the Senators. But we’ll start with what I believe may be the single biggest contract in terms of total dollars that we’ve ever tackled in this column…

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A brief history of the Thornton Award, a fake trophy for best debut with a new team

It’s summer and nothing’s happening. Let’s make up another fake award.

We did this last summer, when we introduced the Pollock Trophy for a season’s best trade. Prior to that, we’ve also done the Carson Trophy for best sophomore season, as well as the Bourque Trophy for best final season. None of these actually exist, but they should, and that’s enough for our purposes.

For today’s award, we’re going to create the Joe Thornton Award for the best debut with a new team.

A couple of quick rules: Rookie debuts have their own award, so they don’t count – a player has to have previously played for another NHL team before joining a new one. Unlike most awards, we're taking the playoffs into consideration. And finally, a player has to have played at least half the season with his new team, because I don’t feel like figuring out how to rate deadline pickups. Other that that, the field is open – we can be looking at trades, free agent signings, waiver pickups or whatever else.

We’ll cover the cap era, starting with a 2006 recipient. It’s Slow News Summer, let’s argue about an award that doesn’t exist.

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Getting a new CBA without a lockout is bad, actually: The Contrarian returns

It’s late-July, we’re two months away from games that matter, and NHL GMs have apparently taken the rest of the summer off. Let’s get Contrarian.

This is the feature where you send in your most obvious takes, and I tell you that you’re wrong, whether I believe it or not. In the past, we’ve made the case that Mark Messier was a great Canuck, Ray Bourque’s Cup win was bad but Brett Hull’s crease goal was good, and Bobby Orr’s flying goal photo is overrated. Last time, we made the case for Alexander Ovechkin being an overrated bum, and also for Alexander Ovechkin being an underrated legend, because we’re flexible like that.

This time, we’ve got a new CBA, an old legend, and everything in between. Let’s dive in.

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The minor playoff rule change that altered NHL history, including 4 Cup winners

During the 1986 offseason, a very strange thing happened in the NHL: The league made a rule change that nobody got all that upset about.

That was rare, even back then, because fans like to complain about things. But this change was so simple, and so obviously the right decision, that there really wasn’t anything to complain about. Or so we thought.

The rule had to do with the playoff format, and the league’s ongoing attempts to have one that made sense. Since 1974, when the league added a fourth round to the playoff tournament, the first round had always been shorter than the others. Originally it had been a three-game preliminary round, later increasing to five games. In 1986, the league decided to expand the first round to seven games, the same as the others. And everyone went “Sure, that makes sense”. Maybe a few of us complained that the extra games would make the season longer. But the extra playoff hockey, and the extra revenue it would generate, was an easy sell. And so the change was made, and then nobody thought of it again.

Until today. Or in my case, until a few weeks ago, when a reader named Andrew asked a question: How much does hockey history change if the first round had stayed best-of-five?

The answer, as it turns out, is “a lot”. So today, we’re going to go back to that decision from nearly 40 years ago, and work our way through an alternate version of NHL history that could – fair warning – make some of you sad.

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Help me become a better contrarian

Hey folks…

Thinking of doing another edition of The Contrarian. You send in a statement that you think is obvious or inarguable, and I’ll try to come up with the contrarian view.

We've done a few of these, and the ones that work best find that sweet spot of feeling difficult but not impossible. "Mark Messier was a bad signing for the Canucks" and "Ray Bourque's Cup win was good" worked great. Stuff like "Connor McDavid is good at hockey" or "The Leafs have a bad playoff record", not so much.

Send me your sure-thing statement via email at dgbcontrarian@gmail.com.

The Crimsion Chin? SchaefDaddy? The Finnish Fettuccine? Nickname Court is in session

Hockey nicknames are terrible.

We all know this. But some of us might be too young to know that it wasn’t always like this. There was a time when hockey nicknames ranged from decent to outright cool, back in a distant time before we just started putting “-y” or “-er” at the end of a guy’s name and calling it a day.

Why did this happen? I got into that in this column from a few years back, but I’m not sure it matters. The point is that the hockey nickname world is a mess right now, and the bigger question is: Can it be fixed?

I think it can, and there are two paths to that. One is to just let the weirdos at hockey-reference take over, because those guys will take absolutely anything and call it a nickname. The second option is to turn it over to you, the readers. That’s what we’re going to try today. Welcome to the first, and very possibly the last, edition of Nickname Court.

A few days ago, I put out a call for submissions, and you responded with lots of entries. Were they good entries? Eh… we’ll get to that. But the idea was that you could submit any nickname you wanted us to pass judgement on – already existing ones you weren’t sure about, or ones you had made up on your own. I’ve tagged in Peter Baugh and Scott Powers to help me pass judgement on a dozen of your most interesting ideas.

Convince at least two out of three judges, and your nickname becomes official and legally binding gets the stamp of approval.

Modern hockey nicknames are terrible. Let’s see if your ideas are any better.

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1980s Alberta vs. 2020s Florida: Which two-team dynasty was more impressive?

At the start of 2025, I worked with Eric Stephens on a post that asked the question: Which state has been the NHL’s best of the cap era, California or Florida? It was a fun debate, and at the end we let you have your say in a reader survey that came out almost exactly 50/50.

Then the Panthers rolled to yet another Stanley Cup, and kind of ruined the bit. Finally, a valid reason to dislike that team.

But it’s fine, because now it’s Slow News Summer and we can get a little more eccentric. So today, I’m going to tackle a question originally posted by a Puck Soup listener a few weeks ago: Has the 2020s state of Florida passed the 1980s Alberta dynasty?

It’s a tough one. It’s also, you could argue, four years early, which is a fair point in Florida’s favor. Still, you never know what the future will bring. And it’s not like our arbitrary end points don’t hurt Alberta too, since they lose the 1990 Cup by a few months, the Flames were still in Atlanta until the summer of 1980, and the decade’s first few years are basically a write off.

So let’s do this. It’s basically a battle of Old School Canada vs. New Era Southern Markets, which means everyone should be very chill and reasonable about it. Off we go…

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I'm looking for your submissions to Nickname Court

I'm thinking of trying a new mailbag-type feature over the summer that I would call Nickname Court. As we know, modern NHL nicknames are terrible, with most of them either just being a player's name with an -er or -y ending tacked on, or something based on player initials that features zero creativity. Let's fix that.

Basically, readers would send in nicknames for players (or lines or pairings or whatever), and a small group of us would rule on whether they were good or not.

I think we'd be looking for either of two kinds of submissions: - Brand new nicknames that you came up with, or that are percolating in a fan base but haven't fully caught on yet - Actually nicknames that are in use but need a ruling on whether they work or not

I'd love to get some entries to mull over. Please be clear on where the nickname came from, if anywhere, and who it would apply to. Send your submissions to dgbmailbag@gmail.com and let's see where this goes.

Which team makes the best lineup with no repeated initials? Slow news summer returns

It’s summer and nothing is happening. Let’s play some weird roster games.

This one comes from reader Darryl F., who tweeted it at me five years ago. Yes, the “weird ideas” list goes back that far. Much further, actually. Look, you probably don’t want to know some of the stuff that’s been sitting there for going on a decade, but I can’t guarantee you won’t find out by mid-August.

For now, the game is simple: Make the best six-man starting lineup possible for your favorite team, without repeating any initials. So if you want to use Joe Smith, that’s your J and your S spoken for, meaning you can’t also use John Williams, or Tommy Simpson.

Easy enough, right? But first, a few ground rules™:

- We want three forwards, two defensemen and a goalie. No other positional requirements.

- You get credit for whatever that player did on that team. If the Blues want to use Martin Brodeur, they get seven games, not four Vezinas.

- In cases where there’s confusion over what a player’s actual name was, we’ll go by whatever hockey-reference uses. So it’s Maurice Richard (not Rocket), but Gump Worsley (not Lorne).

As always, we’ll do about a dozen teams and then hand it over to you in the comments to fill out any others. We’ll start with the team that’s become our unofficial leadoff hitter for these sorts of things…

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Let's get old: Five things I miss about how the NHL offseason used to work

It’s mid-July. It’s too hot, my neighbor isn’t keeping his lawn in shape, they don’t make smart summer movies anymore, and all these kids who are off school should be out doing something productive instead of staring at screens all day.

In related news, I am old.

How old? Old enough to have a bunch of opinions about how things I miss from the ancient days. And you’re going to hear a few of them right now, because it’s time for the return of Let’s Get Old, the column where I (blows out entire lumbar region by sneezing wrong) ah you’ll figure it out.

To be clear, this isn’t even the typical “old man yells at cloud” thing where I think things were better back then. I’ll fully acknowledge that the NHL and the sport of hockey have improved over the decades. But that doesn’t mean I can’t miss stuff like faceoffs in random locations and officials climbing the glass, or baggy nets and big moments punctuated by flash photography. Was it better back then? Not really, but also sort of, which is the type of confusion you should expect from an old man like me.

Today, we’re going to focus on the offseason. Here are five things that my old and deteriorating sports fan brain misses about who things used to work.

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NHL 2024-25 prediction contest results, where playing it safe (finally) paid off

July 1 has come and gone, marking one of the most important dates on the entire NHL calendar.

Free agency? Extension? The start of the new league year? Yeah, I guess that stuff matters a bit. But I’m talking about the truly big stuff: The end of the annual prediction contest.

Yes, with the first day of free agency over with, we can officially close the book on the 2024-25 contest. It was the fourth time we’ve run this thing, and scores have been increasing every year. In theory, you guys are getting better at this. In reality… well, we’ll get to that.

As usual, the gimmick here is that the questions are easy, but you take a zero if you offer even one wrong answer, so the risk-reward can get tricky. If you missed out on the contest, or could use a refresher on how it all works, you can find the original post here. An initial summary came a week later, in which we learned that nobody believed in Sam Reinhart. Correctly, as it turns out. I’m sure he’ll be crushed once he and the rest of his teammates sober up. If they ever do.

The good news is that unlike last year, there was no tie at the top this time. There was one winner. Was it you? Maybe! (No.) Let’s go through the questions and see how this played out.

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Should Leaf fans view Mitch Marner as a hero or villain? A debate with myself

It’s official. The Mitch Marner era is over in Toronto, with the Leafs executing a sign-and-trade deal that sends him to Vegas Golden Knights hours before Monday's midnight deadline. (add link)

Leaf fans, how are we feeling about all of this? More specifically, how are we feeling about Marner himself?

Let’s put the question even more simply: When he makes his first trip back to Toronto, are you booing him? Does he get an ovation? Something in between? No reaction at all?

I think I can guess where the majority might be leaning today. I’m also pretty sure that it’s far from unanimous. So today, let’s debate the subject with arguments, from two different types of fans, both of whom are me.

In one corner, my sports fan brain – logical, rational, and not especially susceptible to easy narratives. In the other, my sports fan heart, which is not quite as rational, but is also the main reason I’m here.

It’s worth pointing out that the last time we broke out this gimmick for a Leafs debate, it was 2022 and we were still doing the “run it back” dance with this team. Back then, my head said to stay the course, while my heart said to blow it all up. If you look back at that post today, well, I think it’s fair to say that the heart won, or at least it should have. We’ll see if that holds true today.

Mitch Marner is an ex-Leaf. Are we mad at him? Should we be? I’m not sure, so let’s drop the gloves and square off.

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The NHL tried something new with how this year's draft worked. It got awkward

For decades, the NHL had a unique approach to their annual draft. While other leagues used a decentralized approach, with teams drafting from various war rooms around North America, the NHL brought everyone to one host city for a days-long celebration of the future. Aside from 2020 and 2021, when COVID forced a fully virtual draft, it’s been an everyone-invited event for decades. It was a rare case of hockey doing something cool and unique.

And so of course, this year, they said: Nah, let’s just do it the way everyone else does.

Back in 2023, we reported on the reasons behind the potential change, but we’ll summarize here: It was expensive for teams to fly their entire front office and scouting staffs in to the draft,  the travel was a pain, the draft floor was too crowded for making trades, and there wasn’t enough time to get everyone back home before free agency opened.

You could argue that all of those complains are reasonable. You could also point out that absolutely none of them have anything to do with the fans, or the viewers at home. The NHL is ostensibly an entertainment product, but they tend to forget that minor detail roughly (checks notes) all the time. Is saving a few bucks worth it if one of your biggest nights looks worse as a result?

Maybe not, but that’s only if it looks worse. Maybe it could be fine. Heck, maybe it would even be an improvement – it’s not like the old way got rave reviews each and every year. Then again, last year’s Sphere experience would be a tough act to follow.

I didn’t love the change when it was first announced, but I was intrigued, especially after reading Julian’s piece about how it would all work. I wanted to give it a fair shot. Here are my thoughts on the good, the bad, and everything in between from Friday’s night’s opening round.

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Which team can build the most impressive starting lineup of cap era draft busts?

It’s draft weekend in the NHL. A time for renewal, and replenishment, and metaphors about fresh sheets of ice. Optimism, you might even say. This may be the one day of the year where every team and their fan base can legitimately feel like their situation is about to get better.

We can’t have that. Let’s make everyone sad instead.

Today’s post is simple: We’re going to go around the league and try to assemble the best six-man lineup of draft busts from the cap era. That’s three forwards, two defensemen and a goalie that were good enough to be worth a high pick, but for whatever reason just didn’t work out at the NHL level. We’re limiting this to first-round picks for the skaters, and to the first three rounds for goalies (who rarely get picked in the first).

Sound fun? No? Good, that’s the whole point. Let’s remember some whiffs.

As usual, we’ll do about 10 teams and then turn it over to you in the comments to suggest other contenders. Let’s start with the Bruins, if only because all their fans know what’s coming and we might as well rip the bandaid off right away.

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Mitch Marner UFA power rankings: Who needs him, what's funniest and where does he land?

We’re less than a week away from free agency, and the big name is Mitch Marner. You may have heard about it. It’s been kind of a thing.

And as you’d expect, several teams have emerged as potential destinations, while others are likely happy to lurk in the background. As of today, there’s no clear favorite. That feels like a good reason to break out the trusty Power Rankings gimmick, and see what kind of different lenses we can look at the situation through.

And yes, we’ll end with a prediction. You should probably ignore that part, because I’m bad at this. But first, let’s start with the obvious category…

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Longevity vs. peak: The Hockey Hall of Fame debate, and 5 players who define it

What kind of Hall-of-Fame fan are you?

With the HHOF committee meeting tomorrow to pick the class of 2025, and a stellar crop of first-time candidates added to some impressive holdovers, it’s time to have the Hall debate. After all, half the point of a sport having a highest honor is for fans to argue over who deserves it and who falls just short.

When we talk about which kind of Hall a fan wants, we usually default to the old “small hall” debate, which basically amounts to just how high you want to set the bar, and inevitably ends with a fight over Bernie Federko. But there’s another way to look at it, and it’s the one we’ll focus on today: Which matters more, a player’s short-term peak or their long-term consistency?

Obviously, the ideal answer is “both”. But the players who are truly great for an extended period aren’t the ones we typically argue over. Joe Thornton and Zdeno Chara both had MVP/Norris peaks to go with long careers of sustained excellence. Both are also getting in on the first ballot, so there's no debate to be had. It's the fringe cases that usually force us to pick one side or the other. So, who you got?

Let’s look at this as a sliding scale, with five stops along the way.

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What your favorite UFA is up to right now, some Canadian pride, and more: Grab Bag

We’re just days away from free agency. Do you know what your favorite pending UFA is up to right now? My spies have been busy finding out, and reported back with this list of what a dozen of the biggest names on our UFA board are focused on right now.

Mitch Marner – Preparing his list of key questions to ask potential teams, including “You’re not the Leafs, right?”, and “No but seriously, you’re not the Leafs?” and “Actually no I don’t have any other questions for you, but since we’re on the subject, are you positive you’re not the Leafs?”

Nikolaj Ehlers – Exactly what every Canadian fan thinks pending UFAs are doing these days: Repeatedly googling state tax rates a dozen times a day.

Jake Allen – Building a new addition onto his house every time an Oilers fan gets around to looking up what this summer’s free agent goalie crop looks like.

Jonathan Toews – Saying “Oh absolutely, it’s always been my dream to play for my hometown team in Winnipeg” to a delighted Kevin Cheveldayoff before covering the phone and giggling into his Colorado Avalanche jersey.

Brad Marchand – Signing autographs, shaking hands, building nests, chewing through wires, damaging crops, spreading disease, miscellaneous scurrying.

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A history of the award for biggest playoff loser, which does not exist but should

We like to make up awards around here. Over the years, we’ve introduced the Carson (for best sophomore season), the Bourque (for best final season), and of course the Conned Smythe (for making the trade that decided a championship). Is it kind of dumb? Sure, but no dumber than the Mark Messier Leadership Award, so off we go.

This time around, I want to introduce a team award, which will be presented to the NHL team that has the worst and most painful playoff performance in any given year.

In theory, that would mean a first-round exit, preferably in as few games as possible. But it’s not just about whoever had the shortest run, because not all sweeps are created equal. We’re looking past the cold hard numbers here, and instead trying to find the true pain. And often, that means getting a team’s hopes up before crushing them. In theory, you could even win a round or two before crashing and burning in such spectacular fashion that you never want to speak of it again.

Expectations matter. Opponents matter. And of course, there’s plenty of room for artistic impression. We can even use the benefit of hindsight to find the especially painful special circumstances. The point is that anyone can lose, and 15 teams do every year. But which losses really leave a mark? Which ones brutalize a fan base, scarring them for generations?

This sounds fun.

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Where do the Oilers and Panthers rank among the greatest repeat Cup final matchups?

Are you enjoying the rematch between the Panthers and Oilers? I’m guessing you are, since it’s already getting some buzz as the one of the greatest finals of the cap era. This comes one year after our own Chris Jonhnston ranked the 2024 edition as the best final of the era before it was even over.

So yeah, it’s far to say these two teams work well together. Sometimes, with the right matchup, that just happens. Where it’s Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, Robert De Niro and Martin Scorsese, or Bret Hart and Steve Austin, some pairings just make magic together. And that can be true even if it takes a little while to get them back together.

As luck would have it, the Oilers and Panthers are the tenth time that the same two teams have met in multiple Stanley Cup finals since the start of the expansion era in 1968. So today, let’s put together a ranking of all ten of those pairings, from worst to best, based on how entertaining the resulting series were.

The Panthers and Oilers are at a disadvantage here, since their second series hasn’t ended yet. But I’m guessing they’re still going to rank pretty high, and might even end up taking the crown. Let’s find out…

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How well do you know your Cup-winning goalies? Take the Who Didn’t He Play For quiz

In the Stanley Cup playoffs, it’s all about the goalies. The team that gets the better goaltending always wins, except for the times that they don’t, but it’s always better to have a big-name star, unless it’s one of those years where the winning team can just throw anyone back there. Glad we cleared all that up. Let’s do a quiz.

I’ll give you 16 goaltenders who have their name on the Stanley Cup, plus four teams for each. You tell me which one of those teams that goalie never played a game for. Nice and simple. I’m sure you’ll do great.

Complete the quiz below, then scroll back up to see how you did using this handy scoring chart:

16 correct: You are Ken Dryden, and can basically win the Cup whenever you feel like it.

12-15 correct: You are Patrick Roy, owner of multiple Conn Smythe trophies.

8-11 correct: You’re Jonathan Quick, saving your best for when it’s needed.

4-7 correct: You’re Henrik Lundqvist; you had your moments, but couldn’t get a ring.

1-3 correct: You’re Playoff Freddie Andersen. Hey, it could always be worse.

0 correct: You’re Connor Hellebuyck on the road.

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Who says no to these trades (involving things that cannot actually be traded)?

In the NHL, you can’t trade coaches. There was a time when you could, and it happened back in 1987, when Rangers’ GM Phil Esposito sent a first-round pick to Quebec for head coach Michel Bergeron in a surprise swap. It was a creative move. It also didn’t work, with Bergeron lasting less than two seasons, and the league quickly moved to make sure it wouldn’t be tried again. These days, coaches are one of many assets a team is not allowed to trade.

Or are they? After all, we occasionally see coaching quasi-trades, like when John Tortorella and Alain Vigneault essentially swapped teams after being fired in 2013. More recently, the Rangers and Penguins didn’t actually pull off a Mike Sullivan and David Quinn for Dan Muse trade, but it kind of worked out that way.

Let's use that as inspiration. We've got some time to kill between Stanley Cup final games, so I put out a call to readers: Send me your "who says no?" trade proposals involving things that cannot actually be traded. And you sure did. Can we pull off a blockbuster, or will just be too complicated to make a trade in the cap era NHL? Let's find out.

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The road to the Stanley Cup Final: Ranking the 14 playoff series that got us here

We’re two games into a Stanley Cup final that already seems like it could be headed for classic status. But before we get too far ahead of ourselves, let’s take a moment to look back at the 14 other matchups that brought us here, with our annual ranking of every series that led to the final.

All in all, it’s been a mixed bag of a postseason. We avoided having even one sweep, which is impressive. We also had half the series end in five games, which generally isn’t. It’s a top-heavy list, but having gone through it all, I’m not sure we can really complain about what the hockey gods served up. Let’s start at the bottom and work our way up...

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I want your trade proposals (involving things that cannot be traded)

We all love a good “Who says no?” trade column. Readers send in their proposals, and writers figure out which ones makes sense, and which teams would or wouldn’t be interested. It’s a great gimmick, which is why you see it show up so often.

Let’s try it with a twist. I’m asking you for your trade proposals involving anything that teams aren’t actually allowed to trade. That is, I don’t want to hear about players or picks or signing rights or retained salary. Instead, I want you to hit me with everything else – coaches, front offices, mascots, media, anthem singers, you name it.

Get creative, come up with a trade you think would work for both teams, and send it in. Then I’ll take those ideas and… actually, I don’t know. This probably won’t work. But it would be fun if it did, so no harm in trying.

One tip: Keep your trade offers small and specific. One team's coach for another's GM would work way better than something involving vague concepts like "Team A trades their fans to Team B for low taxes".

Update: OK seriously stop sending proposals that involve tax rates.

Email your trade proposals to dgbmailbag@gmail.com and let’s see where this goes.

The Mitch Marner UFA villainy rankings: Which destination would hurt Leaf fans most?

Mitch Marner’s run as a Maple Leafs is all but over, with all signs pointing to his departure as an unrestricted free agent on July 1. That reality raises all sorts of questions, including how it came to this, whether a breakup is really the right move for either side, and whether this all could have been avoided. But the more pressing question right now is: Where does he wind up?

James Mirtle took a crack at that question a few days ago, ranking all 32 potential landing spots from most likely to maybe to probably not. If we’re being honest, James was probably being kind on the “probably” for that last group, none of whom seem like realistic fits. Still, almost half the league appears to at least theoretically be in the running, which you’d expect for a player with as much talent and upside as Marner can offer.

Great. But all that analysis is leaving out the most important part of any great drama: The villain.

If Marner truly going to betray a Toronto fan base that never had a bad word to say about him – don’t search any social media, just go with it – then he might as well embrace the heel turn. Really kick Leaf Nation through the barbershop window, you know? There may even be a very small minority of you out there in other fan bases who’ll be rooting for it to happen.

OK, so let’s figure this out. Today, we’re going to rank Marner’s potential destinations based solely on how much it would twist the knife on his former team and its fans. I’ve used Mirtle’s list as a starting point, and taken all the teams that he ranked as having at least a quasi-realistic shot at landing the best UFA the league has seen in years. That leaves us with 16 candidates; let’s count them down from least to most painful for Leaf fans.

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Oilers or Panthers (again)? An updated rooting guide for 30 other NHL fan bases

I can’t speak for every hockey fan, but one of the reasons I enjoy this time of year in part is that there’s a pleasant sense of familiarity. The postseason story is winding its way to a conclusion, hitting most of the usual beats along the way. We’ve hit on all of the mandatory controversies. My favorite team is, of course, already out. And most importantly: We can crack open the file folder labelled “recurring bits”, which makes life easier for everyone. Well, for me. I guess I’m mainly concerned about me here.

But here’s the thing about that comfortable familiarity – you can have too much of a good thing. This year’s playoffs are getting a little too familiar, and it’s messing things up.

There’s already been one causality. For the first time in a while, I didn’t bother with the “lessons from the final four” post this year, because three of the four finalists were the same as last year. And now it’s happened again, with the hockey gods serving up a rare Stanley Cup final rematch.

Look, we all love a good sequel, and there are plenty of juicy narratives to sink into over the next few weeks. But a rematch threatens to ruin one of my favorite gimmicks, the annual Cup final rooting guide for the 30 other fan bases. We already did Florida vs. Edmonton, this time last year.

What’s a grizzled sportswriter to do? The answer is obvious: Come up with some new ideas for once you hack Double down. So today, we’re doing Oilers vs. Panthers, the sequel. But this time there’s a twist – I’m going to try really hard to switch up the picks, or at least the reasoning, for as many of the 30 teams as possible.

Hey, when has a strategy of running it back every failed anyone in the past? Let’s do this.

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Canada vs. USA: Two fans forced to watch each country’s worst 2025 NHL playoff ads

Every year, there's one post that more people ask me about than any other. Which is weird, because it has next to nothing to do with hockey.

That would be this post, of course -- the annual "bad ads" piece, in which two Seans from different countries create an international exchange program for annoying commercials. You know the ones; the kind you see once or twice and maybe aren't too bothered by, right up until you realize that they're going to keep popping up constantly as you try to enjoy the NHL playoffs. That's when the annoyance begins to build. Sometimes, it grows into rage. Or despair. Or whatever that was that "Tara Tara look at her go" made us feel.

We first tried this back in 2020, and it's become an annual tradition. This time around, in a year where relations between our two countries have been strained, to put it mildly, it feels more important than ever. After all, we may have our differences. But at least we all know how to pronounce the word "liberty", and buy a proper cantaloupe. Here we go...

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