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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