Welcome to slow news summer, let's play a time-wasting roster-building game

It’s mid-July. All the best free agents have signed, all the trade talk has cooled off, the draft is in the rearview mirror, and nothing is happening. Half the hockey world has already taken off to a cottage or golf course, cell phones turned off. Welcome to the dog days of summer.

Or, as we call them around here, pretty much the best time of the year.

Yeah, it’s time to get weird. This is the time of year when my boss is on vacation and there’s no hockey news to get in the way of me torpedoing your productivity with random trivia and time-wasters.

It’s not for everyone. If you’re looking for in-depth analysis of line rushes from prospect camp, I can’t help you. And if you’re the sort of person who likes to stomp off to the comment section to grumble “Slow news day?”, let me answer you in advance: No, dummy, more like slow news month, consider having some fun with the whole sports fan thing for once in your life.

See? I just called some of my readers dummy. You can’t get away with that stuff in February when people are paying attention. Hockey summers are the best.

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NHL 2023-24 prediction contest results (or how the Devils ruined everything)

July 1 has come and gone and we’re officially into a new year of the NHL calendar, which means it’s pencils down on the 2023-24 prediction contest. Let’s see how you did.

First, the background for any newcomers out there. This was year four of the contest, in which you answer 10 seemingly simple questions about the upcoming season with as much or as little confidence as you can muster. More answers means more points, but even one wrong answer means a zero for the question, so in theory there’s a balance to be found.

This year’s contest had a little over 2,000 entries. You can find the original contest post here. We went through those initial entries to figure out what they told us about the coming season. And we had a midseason check-in to see how you were doing.

As always, while the idea here is to get the highest possible score and win, the real fun is in looking back at the entries and seeing how smart (or dumb) the wisdom of the crowd really was. With that in mind, let’s look at each of the questions, and just how “simple” they turned out to be.

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The 10 type of NHL offseasons, from "The Big Swing" to "At Least You Tried"

Did you enjoy the NHL offseason?

OK, so it’s not technically over. But it feels that way, because in one week we went from crowning a champion to draft weekend to free agency day. Now the trade talk is mostly quiet, the big boards are pretty much bare, and Pierre has left for the cottage. So… have a good summer, everyone?

Well, maybe not quite yet. There are still a few names left on the trade block, a couple of jobs still to fill, and we’ll get the usual trickle of “oh right that guy” UFA signings. But for the most part, much like your neighborhood Fourth of July party, the fireworks are already over.

So what kind of summer did your team have? Let’s take a look at the 10 types of NHL offseasons, why they happen, and what they usually lead to. Bonus points if you can figure out which current teams I was thinking of when I wrote each summary.

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The playoff prediction contest was supposed to be impossible. Then things got weird

Two months ago, I launched a new prediction contest. After a few years of running the regular season contest and watching you all fail miserably, I figured we could double our fun by adding a playoff edition.

It was a simple contest, with just one question: List as many or as few playoff teams as you’d like, in order of how many games they'd win during the postseason, from most to fewest. And I taunted you with the promise that you’d still get it wrong.

And then, a funny thing happened.

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10 lessons learned from a wild first day of NHL free agency

The initial wave of the annual free agent frenzy seems to have slowed down, so let’s take a breath and ask the big question: Class, what have we learned today?

The NHL delivered on the promise of a busy market, with names flying off the board all day long. There was plenty of movement of unrestricted free agents, several big extensions, and even a handful of trades. Let’s recap the day with ten lessons we can pull from a frantic day. That won’t be enough to cover each and every signing or even every team, but we’ll try to hit on as many as we can. And we’ll do it quickly, before something else happens and renders all of this irrelevant.

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