The NHL regular season opened on Wednesday night with four games. We’ll have nine more on Thursday, and by the end of the weekend every team will have at least a couple of games under their belts.
This season will include all the usual intrigue – who’ll win the Cup, who’ll be MVP, who’ll by the feel-good underdog story and who’ll get themselves fired. But this year, there are a few more stories worth keeping an eye on. Here are five to watch as the season unfolds.
Subban v Weber
Wednesday 29 June 2016. It’s a date that hockey fans won’t soon forget. Mainly because it was the day that the NHL went completely insane.
Steven Stamkos spurned free agency to resign with the Lightning. The Oilers traded Taylor Hall to the Devils for, well, not much. And in the biggest shock of them all, the Canadiens sent PK Subban to the Predators for Shea Weber.
It’s hard to overstate how big the deal was. Weber was the franchise in Nashville, spending his entire career there as he developed from solid prospect to one of the most respected blueliners in the league. And Subban was a lightning rod in Montreal, a former Norris Trophy winner as the league’s best defenseman who also happens to double as one of the NHL’s most charismatic and entertaining personalities. Seeing either guy traded felt unfathomable; to see them swapped for each other in an old school one-for-one deal was jaw-dropping.
But it happened, and now we get to spend the next few years picking the deal apart to figure out who won. Did Weber just blast one of his patented slapshots through a net? Habs win! Oh, did Subban just go end-to-end? Advantage Predators. Every big hit, brutal giveaway, flashy smile (Subban) or steely-eyed grunt (Weber) will get tossed into the evidence bin for further analysis.
The two teams face each other twice during the season, in Nashville on 3 January and in Montreal on 2 March. But really, Weber and Subban will be facing each other every night this season, and every other season for the rest of their careers.
Who’ll finish last?
The past two seasons have been marked by a furious race to the bottom, with various teams not-so-secretly heading into the year with their sights firmly set on the draft lottery. That made sense – 2015 top pick Connor McDavid was a once-in-a-generation talent, and 2016’s Auston Matthews also projected as a future franchise player. Despite the NHL’s constant denials, fans could see what was going on. Call it strategy, call it rebuilding, or just be honest and call it tanking, but it was clear that teams like Buffalo, Arizona and Toronto were targeting the basement.
But heading into this year, there really aren’t any teams that seem to be playing that game. Rebuilding teams like the Sabres and Oilers are looking to push towards a playoff spot, and even the Maple Leafs are hoping for progress. Add it all up, and that means we may see something this season that we haven’t seen in a while: A team that finishes last, and isn’t happy about it.
Who will it be? The Canucks are a trendy pick, even though management spent the offseason acting like they think they’re contenders. The Blue Jackets are a possibility. And of course, somebody like the Oilers, Sabres or Leafs could always stumble out of the gate enough to wind up back in familiar territory.
We’re not sure who’ll end up scraping the bottom of the barrel. But this year, for a change, whoever it is won’t be secretly high-fiving over it.
The case of the shrinking goalie gear
This is a weird one.
The NHL wants to increase scoring. That’s not exactly news, since they’ve been saying the same thing for over 20 years. But this season, they came up with an idea that might actually work: they’d make the goalie equipment smaller. And not just slightly smaller, the way they’d already tried. No, this time they’d significantly shrink some of the ridiculous gear that’s made NHL goalies look like sumo wrestlers.
Fans were happy. Players were happy. Even a few goalies were happy. The NHL had finally done something right. And then, they messed it up.
It turns out that it’s more complicated than you might think to rework equipment across an entire league, and the new goalie gear won’t be ready in time. The league is still working to get new, slimmer pants in place this week, but the (far more important) chest and shoulder pads haven’t been approved yet.
There’s a good chance that we won’t see any major changes this season after all. But the league is apparently still holding out hope that they can get the new equipment ready within the next few months, which could lead to the bizarre sight of goaltenders having the adjust to the new gear midway through the season. That would be fascinating to watch – you’d have to think that some goalies will be affected more than others, and teams would just have to wait and see who was still good when the dust settled.
If you want to see the league do the fair thing, you’re hoping they hold off until next year, even if that means yet another season of low-scoring games. But if you want chaos – and to see the goaltenders who’ve dominated hockey for two decades finally see what life used to be like back when making a save meant occasionally moving your limbs – then bring on the new gear the day it’s ready. And then pray your team’s goalie isn’t one of the guys who can’t handle it.
Woe Canada
If you get all of the hockey world’s countries (and a few non-countries) together for a tournament, Canada wins every time and they don’t break a sweat doing it. But split all the world’s players up into 30 teams and scatter them around North America, and Canada suddenly can’t remember which end of the stick they’re supposed to hold. A Canadian team hasn’t won the Stanley Cup in 23 years, and last season not a single one made the playoffs for the first time since 1970.
Nobody’s quite sure why this is – there are various theories, including impatient fans, simple bad luck, and a conspiracy by a nefarious American commissioner. But whichever explanation you buy, there’s no question that Canada’s misery is a problem for the NHL, not to mention its billion-dollar TV contract.
So will Canada’s teams be any better this year? Well … probably. Hey, they couldn’t really be any worse.
The country’s best hope at the playoffs is probably the Montreal Canadiens, who made it in 2015 before collapsing last year after superstar goaltender Carey Price was hurt. Price is back and healthy, and if he plays as well as he usually does, he might singlehandedly drag the Habs back to the postseason. Montreal doesn’t look like a Cup contender, but they might be able to win a round, and in Canada they’ll take what they can get.
In the Western Conference, the Flames and Jets have both built strong young teams that have an outside shot at the playoffs if everything breaks right. The Oilers are a question mark; they’ve got a ton of young talent and a new arena, but after ten straight years of miser you can forgive a little bit of cynicism. The Maple Leafs are probably still a year or two away, the Canucks should be terrible, and nobody remembers the Senators even exist.
That’s what we’d call a mixed bag. In the end, Canada will probably improve from last year’s postseason shutout all the way to one or maybe two playoff teams. That won’t be good enough to make us happy, but we’ll be too polite to complain too loudly. (Except for the TV producers.)
Expansion drama
The NHL is adding a new team next year, as the Las Vegas Still-Haven’t-Announced-a-Names become the league’s 31st team. Is that a good idea? Probably not, but it made everyone money, so here we are.
But expansion means an expansion draft, and that’s already thrown the league’s other 30 teams into chaos. The league finalized the rules over the summer, and they’re relatively friendly to the new Vegas entry. Everyone will lose one player, and existing teams can only protect a maximum of 11 players.
That means that some decent talent could be available. It also means that we’re going to spend all season speculating over who will or won’t be protected. And that’s going to create a temporary bizarro-world where nobody’s quite sure how to react to anything. Every obscure player who gets off to a hot start will suddenly be an expansion candidate, so maybe that’s actually bad. Everyone who slumps will hurt their chances of being taken in the draft, so maybe that’s actually good. Good teams will worry about who they’ll lose, while bad teams wonder if they can pluck some bargains at the trade deadline.
If you’re talking to a hockey fan at any point over the next eight months, just listen quietly for a few minutes and then ask “Yeah, but how’s that going to affect the expansion draft?” and watch the color drain out of their face. Hey, it’s Las Vegas. You know that somebody is going to end up making a terrible decision they’ll regret for years.
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