Every NHL team wants a strong start, but these are the 10 teams that need one

We’re five games into the 1,344-game NHL season. Have you torn up you preseason predictions and completely changed your view of a few teams yet?

You should have. After all, that’s your job as a fan, not to mention what makes the first few weeks of a new season so much fun. We watch a team play a handful of games, and then we re-evaluate. And by re-evaluate, I mean we all freak out.

It works that way for every team. But some have even more riding on the first few games this year. The narrative comes for us all, but it spends more time chasing some teams than others. And that’s true no matter how many smart people remind us about small sample sizes.

So let’s mark the start of the new season with a look at 10 teams who have the most riding on a strong start to the season. We’ll cover all the narratives – the ones the team is facing to open the year, the one they’ll hear if they start strong, and the one that will haunt them if they don’t. And we’ll even sneak a peek at their starting schedule, to see if it offers any clues about which side the early-season coin might land on.

In no particular order, here are 10 teams with a lot on the line over the next few weeks.

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It's time to make ridiculous and oddly specific NHL predictions for all 32 teams’ seasons

The prediction game can be a thankless one.

You know the drill. When a writer puts their predictions for the season out into the world, like I did last week, there’s one of two ways any particular pick can go. If they’re wrong, they’re an idiot, and should have to hear about it all year long. But if they’re right, well, big deal – everyone knew it was going to play out that way.

It’s rough. But over the years, I’ve come up with two ways to counter it. The first is the reader contest, which launched last week. That gives you a chance to make your picks, which gives me the chance to make fun of you when you’re wrong. Remember, you don’t get to dunk on my picks if you didn’t enter the contest. (Which you still have time to do before it closes this afternoon.)

And then there’s today’s column: The annual set of oddly specific predictions. These are the picks where I get so ridiculously precise that it flips the script. If I’m wrong, well, of course I was. But if I successfully predict a 30-year-old defensive defenseman’s first career goal in the exact game it happens, then you’re never going to hear the end of it. (I did that, by the way. Did you know that? It happened. It was years ago, sure, but it still happened.)

Or at least, that’s the idea. You’ll probably still dunk on me. Just know that if any of these hit, I will be insufferable about it.

One oddly specific pick per team, in alphabetical order. Here we go…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But first… it’s contest time.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The offseason is over, and at least for a few teams, things got weird. How weird? We’re about to find out.

Yes, it’s time for the annual offseason rankings, in which we blow the dust off our trusty bizarro-meter and feed it each team’s summer headlines. After a few bleeps and bloops and flashing lights and occasional puff of toxic smoke, we’ll get back a rating out of 10 that answers the question: Just how weird did things get?

As always, we start with an important caveat: “Weird” doesn’t mean bad. It doesn’t mean good. It doesn’t necessarily mean busy, or quiet, or anything in between. This isn’t meant to be a traditional evaluation, so much as a look at which teams surprised us. Think of it as a rating of how often a team made us go “What the heck?”, with perhaps some other words occasionally slotted in instead, as ranked on a subjective scale of 1 to 2013 Maple Leafs.

We’re defining the offseason as everything that happened between a team’s last game of the 2025-26 season and today, and everything is on the table: roster moves, hirings and firings, extensions, and anything else that made news. In some cases, the stuff that didn’t happen is even weirder than what did, and that counts too.

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Long-shot NHL award picks: Zach Werenski for Hart? Stuart Skinner for Vezina?

With the NHL’s 2026-27 season almost upon us, it’s time to make some award picks.

Easy, right? Connor McDavid for the Hart, Cale Makar for the Norris, Porter Martone for the Calder, and all the various other favorites. Maybe a Macklin Celebrini here or a Nikita Kucherov there if you want to be different.

So sure, easy. Too easy. For today at least, we’re skipping the favorites and aiming a little higher. It’s time for our annual attempt to nail some true longshots.

We’ve been trying this for years. Do we get any right? Eh, not necessarily. But we’ve had some impressive near-misses, including last year when Gentille was sniffing around the Celebrini offensive outburst before just about anyone. But when we’re wrong, we’re really wrong. That’s part of the point – to look back a year or more later and realize how random a lot of this can feel.

We’ll be using the odds posted by Bet365 as of early this week. (Note that odds can change over time.) To be clear, the idea here isn’t to encourage you to be on anything – we already have every intermission report on every TV broadcast to handle that. But the oddsmakers are a good measure of where expectations have been set, in a mostly objective way.

For our purposes, we’re looking for odds of at least +2000, which is to say longshots of 20-to-1 or more, with the “we” being Sean Gentille, Sean McIndoe and Dom Luszczyszyn. If we hit one, you’ll ever hear the end of it. If we whiff on everything, at least we’ll know we took the bat off our shoulder.

Let’s find some plausible longshots.

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