Remembering the most unlikely overtime hero in each NHL team's history

Ah, playoff overtime. It’s the best. Just pure adrenaline and/or terror, depending on your perspective, a universal experience so good that it inspired one of history three or four good tweets.

And then it ends. That’s part of the fun, especially if it’s a great goal scored by a worthy superstar. So far this year, we’ve had winners from big names like David Pastrnak, Artemi Panarin and Connor McDavid. We’re used to seeing that, with some of the most famous overtime goals in NHL history were scored by superstars like Bobby Orr, Brett Hull, Steve Yzerman and Wayne Gretzky.

Then again, not everyone gets to experience the thrill of being an overtime hero. Mario Lemieux never had a sudden death playoff goal. Neither did Gordie Howe, or Marcel Dionne, or Mark Messier, or (so far) Alexander Ovechkin.

That’s what makes it so beautiful when somebody you wouldn’t expect gets to join the club that Super Mario and Mr. Hockey never could. Today, let’s celebrate a few of those guys with a simple question: Who was the most unlikely overtime goal scorer in each team’s history?

Let’s remember some guys, who also happened to be OT heroes.

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Who’s the frontrunner for the Conned Smythe, for worst trade with a Cup contender?

With just four teams left, the battle for the Conned Smythe Award is really heating up.

Yes, that’s the “Conned” Smythe, not to be confused with the far less prestigious Conn Smythe for playoff MVP. The Conned Smythe is a team award. Specifically, it goes to the team that made the dumbest trade with the biggest impact on the Stanley Cup winner. That trade could have been recent or a decade ago, but it had to have directly delivered a player who’s about to help the team win it all. (Deals for future picks and non-trade transactions are ineligible, a rule we passed because Wild fans were already sick of hearing about the Brayden Point thing.)

I’m not sure any of the four remaining teams can give us as many options as last year’s champs could, but there are some intriguing scenarios in play that would fit well with history’s other winners. I’ve got ten teams that are in contention for the honors, and we’ll count them down from weakest to strongest case.

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The 2024 NHL playoffs all-disappointment team: Mitch Marner, Elias Pettersson, more

We’ve made it to the conference finals, with four teams left and a dozen playoff losers already sulking on the sidelines. It’s time to let them all know that we’re not mad, just disappointed.

Well, that’s not completely true – we’re also mad, about everything, all the time, because that seems to be how the league likes it. But today, we’re going to focus on the second half of the equation, as we build out a 21-man roster of playoff disappointments.

As always, we’ll have a few ground rules. We’ll place a limit of two players per team, because I know you guys get mad when I write a piece that’s all about the Maple Leafs. And we’ll have a mandatory one-player-per-team rule, including the four that are still active. That’s always tricky, since it means there’s a good chance that somebody we call a bust will have a hat trick and the OT winner in their next game. Hey, not guts, no glory. (Yes, I do consider sitting on my couch and calling professional athletes disappointments to be a form of glory, thanks for checking.)

We’ll build from the net out, always a crowded field at this time of year, which is why we give ourselves a third slot. But I’m not sure anyone will disagree with our first pick…

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The playoffs’ final four teams: Lessons to learn (and what to avoid)

We’re down to four teams in the NHL playoffs, which means it’s time for the copycats to get to work.

We’re constantly told that this is a copycat league, one where teams look to the contenders to see what’s working, then steal that plan. Plagiarism for the win, or at least the .500 record. Yesterday, Shayna had some suggestions for what teams can learn from this year's success stories.

From a fan's perspective, that’s all well and good, as long as teams are borrowing the right ideas. That’s where we come in, with our annual attempt to guide the conversation in the right direction. As fans, we don’t mind a little bit of copying as long as it’s the fun ideas that are being stolen. What we don’t want is for teams to learn lessons that make this league more boring.

So today, we’ll continue our annual tradition of looking for three fun lessons from each of the remaining teams. And we’ll also find one that isn’t as much fun, and try to shoot it down early. We can’t stop NHL teams from copying off each other’s papers, but we can at least try to steer them in a more fan-friendly direction.

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Revisiting the good, bad and awful from my oddly specific 2023-24 NHL predictions

Every year, right before the season starts, I get to write one of my favorite columns of the year: My oddly specific predictions. That’s the piece where I try to predict what will happen with alarming and frankly unnecessary specificity. I lay out one call for every team, some of you take notes and others just laugh at me, and a good time is had by all.

Do I ever get any right? Well, about that…

Somewhat surprisingly, I’ve had a few hits over the years. Not a ton, but at least enough that I can still show my face at the end of the year. Back in 2021, I called a season-opening two-goal game for a guy coming off a season where he’d had only one goal all year. In last year’s predictions, I told you the specific game that would see the Kings get their only misconduct of the year. And nothing will ever top my 2022 column, in which I predicted that a guy with zero career regular season goals would finally get his very first, then told you the exact game he’d do it in.

Those were all cool. Let’s not talk about the roughly 100 other predictions from those years.

As always, I’ll hold myself accountable by going through each and every prediction I made in this year’s column, which you can go back and read here. Will it be pretty? No. But will it be an embarrassing oh-fer? Only one way to find out…

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