What I’m most excited about in this new NHL season: A 2024-2025 (late) preview of sorts

Off of perhaps the most exciting ending to the Stanley Cup ever, the NHL is back. In calendar installments. Just like this week-and-a-half-late preview. Let's go.

If all four main American sports were all played a 17-game-long regular season, I would like hockey the best. That’s something I conclude when every now and again I find myself ranking my preference of sports. My specialty has always been football, soccer, but it lives in a world so kind of distant to the American “Big Four” that it feels like something different to me. In a way, football is more of a job, where I’m a little more serious and rigorous, following it day-to-day, whereas the American sports are little more akin to fandom. For as involved as I am in the Real Sociedad universe nowadays, I don’t exactly have “a team”. But on the other side of the pond, it’s always been the Chicago teams (not you, White Sox). But even with this “purer”, less filtered and reflective way of consumption, I still like to dissect things to some extent or another. We all do in some way, right? But which one I like best of the big four has always been an interesting mental exercise to do.

Growing up in Spain, the most popular by default, was the NBA; the most shown, the best understood, basketball being the most socially relevant of the four sports. But then there was the other three, with the NFL having it’s whole-day (or whole-evening/night in Spain) on Sundays. And hockey and baseball were also shown on the sports channels of the country’s main satellite television provider Canal Plus. They all kind of percolated, they all had somehow a slight omnipresence when channel surfing. Although baseball, for example, isn’t something I thoroughly stopped and followed until the 2013 World Series. But I (although somewhat diffusely) remember the 2007 Super Bowl, where the Chicago Bears lost to the Indianapolis Colts. I don’t remember a whole lot but I remember Devin Hester from that game.

I remember the 2007 NBA Finals, LeBron James’ Finals debut, between the eventually swept Cleveland Cavaliers and the sweeping San Antonio Spurs. And I remember the 2007 Stanley Cup final between the Anaheim Ducks and the Ottawa Senators. The next few years fluctuated in how closely I followed each of the leagues, until reaching 2013ish. Since then, I have a good enough recollection of the finals of all of them. American Football always stands out because it’s a then-16-now-17-game regular season and a one-off final game to decide the winner at the Super Bowl. MLB, NBA, NHL all offer the series format. The best-of-X number of games. In some ways, the series format lends itself to being more iconic than a Super Bowl. It lends itself when it’s good, that is. It has more potential to be so because of the added layers of twists and turns. But where a maxed out best-of-7 resolution to the Stanley Cup, NBA Finals or World Series can be the most memorable, what’s for sure is that the Super Bowl is more recognizable, more instantly recollectable. It’s one game, it’s “winner takes all”, it’s culturally a big deal in the States whatever the teams, whatever the year, however good the actual game was or wasn’t.

After I moved to the U.S. I became actively but also passively infatuated with the NFL. From Spain it has a certain allure, of course, as the ultimate contemporary American sporting spectacle. But when you live there, it’s an everyday ever-presence. And I’ve always very much enjoyed the sport. Maybe it’s because I caught it young enough, but I am not able to recall a moment in time in which I couldn’t understand it or easily figure it out. So it’s always been up in the ranking preference. But the thing which makes it so good is also what gives it an unfair advantage, which is its short, violence-forced, regular season. Of course it’s more exciting than the rest of them, there’s way more at stake at every single game. Which is why baseball’s regular season will always lose out; it’s 162-long, for crying out loud. But because of how suspenseful they are, how much of a psychological thriller quality it all has, the baseball playoffs are always appointment viewing. Because all of a sudden, the 162-game season is now superseded by a sequence of best-of-3, best-of-5 and best-of-7 series. I follow the playoffs so much more closely than the regular season that I feel almost more familiarized with the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Houston Astros, by virtue of them having been non-negotiable postseason mainstays for the past decade, than I do with my own team the Chicago Cubs.

The playing field will never be even in judging and raking them. But interesting findings can still be extracted. And because of how its calendar is laid out, and how it aligns with the first half of the NFL’s season and with the opening-season games of the NBA and NHL, the MLB Playoffs I have watched more of in these last few years than the NBA Playoffs, even if I know many more basketball players off the top of my head and feel more connected to the day-to-day of the NBA (because no league is a more social-media pop-culture league than the National Basketball Association). But I’ve found myself watching more of the MLB Playoffs than the NBA Playoffs because the NBA Playoffs go head-to-head with… the NHL Playoffs. Where casual NHL fans but more ardent NBA fans have expressly lamented to me that their playoffs coincide, I find myself in the opposite conundrum; I’d like to watch the NBA Playoffs but… the NHL Playoffs are on. And when I put it against the by then long-gone NFL in my head, I just find myself concluding that I’d take hockey as my favorite sport. How the NHL Playoffs unfold year after year, even in the down times of sweeps and lopsided duels, just brings a level of unrelenting excitement that to me even the NFL can’t match.

Which finally, about a thousand words in, brings us to a look at what to look out for in the newly inaugurated NHL season. There’s one monster team looming large over the whole league. Not the champions but the finalist, the runners-up, the subchampions, as they’d say in Spanish. They are the biggest story going into this new season because they lost maybe the best Stanley Cup final ever played. They came back from a 3-0 series deficit, staring at the prospect of a humiliating 4-0 sweep, they rallied all the way back to an astounding 3-3. And then they, the Edmonton Oilers, got beaten by the slightly better Florida Panthers, who in turn entered that Game 7 facing the biggest, brightest, most inexcusable humiliation the sport would have seen in decades. Would have. It didn’t come to pass as they were able to let go of that monumental pressure and won and let the Oilers die one step away from heaven.

Not as brutal as it would’ve been for the Panthers to lose that Game 7, because nothing supersedes giving up a 3-0 series lead in a Stanley Cup, but the scenes inside the Oilers locker room in that hot Florida night were jarring. The specific kind of devastation that only sports can give. Knowing that you gave everything you had to give, that you were just a couple of goals going the other way away from the most colossal win your sport has maybe ever seen — and how that wasn’t, in the end, enough.

Which now leaves us with the best Stanley Cup-chasing story in the NHL. No one has a more visceral wrong to right in this league right now than the Edmonton Oilers. Lead by perhaps the most talented player to ever lace-up a pair of skates not named Wayne Gretzky, Connor McDavid, this team also can be proud of having in their ranks a perhaps top-5 player currently in the NHL, Leon Draisaitl. But last year they finally had with them the sense of a complete-enough team to actually win the Cup. Even through goalkeeping trials and defense tribulations, they proved they were the real deal, a true and legitimate contender to become champion. In that same sense of redemption that led the San Antonio Spurs to avenge their soul-shattering loss in the 2013 NBA Finals — funny enough, a loss that also happened in South Florida — no one has a clearer destiny to fulfill right now in the NHL than these Oilers. We don’t know if head coach Kris Knoblauch will have done the Gregg Popovich bit of showing his 2013 Spurs team the video of their loss against the Miami Heat over and over to light the fire underneath them and capture the following championship title. But this team might not even need it. (They do need it, they are the Oilers and of course they’ve already gotten up to a 0-3 start to the season, getting beaten by even basement dwellers of the league like the Chicago Blackhawks and the not much better than them either Calgary Flames.)

Far from the only contenders, and especially in a sport like hockey in which the best player on the team will hardly play more than a third of any given game, the Oilers will have their work cut out for them. Perhaps by the reigning champions. The Florida Panthers feel like they had half their roster with contracts up for renewal in the summer. And in a league with a hard salary cap, you can’t keep everyone. Three, it’s probably fair to assess, of their top-6 best outfielders needed a new contract to sign. All three logically demanding hockey’s signature 8-year in length contract. They kept forwards Sam Reinhardt, Carter Verhaeghe and let defensemen Brandon Montour leave for the furthest away corner in the country Seattle. So that, along with Cup hangover, the difficulty of going back-to-back in winning titles, makes it feel overall like the Panthers will be in contention for the Cup but not quite as ferociously as last year. This year’s Oilers are last year’s Panthers, who lost in the Stanley Cup final the previous season, thus going to back-to-back finals and, in their case, finally becoming the champions. Chips on shoulders is the name of the game.

Or chirps over your shoulder, more like, whenever you’re playing Florida Panthers star Matthew Tkachuk. One of the most skilled, most fun, most infuriating if you happen to be rooting for the opponents, but overall one of the league’s most valuable cornerstones. So imagine how good Finnish-man Sacha Barkov is for Tkachuk to be considered only second-most important on this team. They should be at least half a step lower of a dynamo this year but should remain as fun and fierce as ever under the direction of head coach Paul Maurice. And judging from the season-opening game dismantling of the Boston Bruins, you might need to forget about them not being just as good.

In the mix for the title it will be exciting to see how far the Dallas Stars, the Colorado Avalanche, the Vegas Golden Knights, the Toronto Maple Leafs, the New York Rangers, the Carolina Hurricanes, the Boston Bruins and others can push the envelope. Narratively speaking, of all those, the most boring are the 2022 Stanley Cup winners Avalanche and the 2023 Stanley Cup winners Golden Knights. They don’t have this existential duty/horror to win it. They’ve won; they’ve made their peace. But they still want more. Vegas, though, do feel a little bit discombobulated but as hockey journalist Pete Blackburn recently said on All City’s “What Chaos!” podcast, they probably feel like that because they are the team that assemble their roster the most during the actual season as opposed to during the summer, like normal people. They are that city’s team after all.

Up in the mountains, the Colorado Avalanche are living the same rare reality of contenders that have already won. They want more but it doesn’t weigh like a giant mountain rock on them. What will start to weigh is Nathan Mackinnon’s generational greatness. Because when you have a guy as good as him, you want to win, you want to have something to show for it; a tally of trophies that correlate with his hockey grandiosity when it’s all said and done. But right now there’s something pretty “Boston Bruins-y” about the way they feel. A team that won the big one early-to-midway through their stars’ careers and then went on to a decade-plus of perennial Stanley Cup contendership without ever being able to capture another title, in the case of Boston, with Zdeno Chara, Patrice Bergeron or, so far, Brad Marchand. But there’s time ahead. In very little time the Avalanche went from bottom of the league to Stanley Cup champions. A remarkable feat that illustrated their marvelous work. Let’s see if there’s enough in them for a mountain-high coronation or if the playoffs will prove another rocky proposition for them after their very rocky 0-4 start to the year.

What makes, however, everyone else more interesting is the scarcity of triumphs, the defeats, the failures, the suffering to be overcome. Colorado went from worst in 2017 to best in 2022. The Maple Leafs, the Hurricanes, the Bruins, the Stars (not the Rangers, but in New York time passes in such a way that 5 years ago is like 50 years ago) were all playoff teams five years ago. A lustrum later, all they have accomplished is a lot of winning hockey but instead of Stanley Cups, a trophy cabinet filled with trauma on top of more trauma and a harrowing sense of beautiful heartbreak.

No one does, indeed, break it better than the Leafs.

“So I'ma break your heart but I'll break it so good
Break it so good, I'll break it so good
Yeah, I'll break it…” as Ontario native Avril Lavigne would sing once upon a time, almost in the voice of the Maple Leafs themselves. No one has more monstrous expectations on their shoulders than Toronto year after year. A weight comparable to the whole country of Canada itself. Sat up there, on their shoulders. This year, another shot. Another chance to finish 3^rd in their division, play 2^nd-placed Boston in the first round of the playoffs, and lose one more time in Game 7 at the TD Garden. Or some new kind of traumatic horror.

The most frustrating team in all of North American sports right now because they’ve been good for almost a decade now. They’ve made the playoffs each and every single year since 2016. They’ve not lost in the first round of the playoffs once in eight years. All of it alongside, fueled by, the best American-born player in the world Auston Matthews, whose debut season marked the beginning of these 8 absurd years. And just like the Edmonton Oilers, but more devastatingly so, they’ve seen poor offensive performances when they needed something to work; they’ve suffered crippling defensive mistakes and have been in search for a good enough goaltender for all of Matthews’s career. Seeing them, with their “Big Four”, with marvelous but yet-to-fundamentally-breakthrough under the brightest of Toronto lights William Nylander, John Tavares and especially Mitch Marner, they hope this time it will be different. But not with just blind hope, after having switched general managers last year and having switched head coaches this year, with the hiring of 2019 Stanley Cup winner Craig Berube, there’s at least a new voice to guide and, hopefully, yes hopefully, make them play their hockey notes, so to speak, correctly. But they will still be in front of hockey’s most demanding crowd. The psychological thriller, one way or the other, will be guaranteed come playoff time in Toronto.

Fate can be cruel as the Maple Leafs have shown plentifully, but irony can be cruelest considering Carolina’s NHL team is called the Hurricanes. I didn’t even think about it until reaching this point in the writing. So is the University of Miami’s team in American sports, but being called the Hurricanes in Carolina must absolutely suck right now after the devastating rainfall that’s destroyed the western part of the state. A sick kind of perpetual reminder. But with time, hopefully for all of them, it will pass.

Will it do so for the team with a Stanley Cup in their arms, raised above their heads? It feels terminally unlikely, despite how good of a team they’ve proven capable of being. They are a sort of a “mini Toronto”, with more playoff success in recent times, but not enough oomph either when the opponents are best, the air is thinnest and pressure is highest. But invertedly from the Leafs, they are a team whose overperformance takes them farther than they actually should rather than perpetual underperformance tale not taking them as far as they should. They’re a team, unlike Toronto, that is built from their head coach outward. Rod Brind’Amour is the living heartbeat of that franchise, as the guy who lifted their first and only Stanley Cup back in 2006 as a player and as the captain. He should probably win Coach of the Year every year if Coach of the Year wasn’t code for “the coach of the team who most improved their previous season’s record”. But even though Raleigh, North Carolina isn’t Toronto in terms of pressure and expectation, at some point the dissatisfaction of always reaching the playoffs but never winning the Cup will likely lead to an amicable parting of ways, most likely by RBA stepping down from his position than by being fired. But that feels more probable after a 4-2 series loss to the New Jersey Devils in the second round of the 2027 playoffs than it does for this year.

To (a little more) briefly round up the rest of the contenders, the New York Rangers are the reigning Presidents’ Trophy winners (they finished 1^st in the NHL’s regular season last year, for those who might not speak “hockey”). They’re really good, they’re really solid, they have the best goaltender in the Eastern Conference amongst the most obvious contenders and where that’s something’s (not having a goddamn goaltender) has ailed Toronto and Carolina year after year, the Rangers feel like they don’t quite have that cutting edge quality when going in the direction of scoring that will make things fall their way all the way to a Cup. They are kind of similar in that way to a Carolina who don’t feel like they have that overwhelming quality in attack either (again, god bless RBA for his work), but for two straight years now, all the best players on the Rangers (except for goaltender Igor Shesterkin) felt like they all fizzled out as the going got all the more demanding and the energy faded deep into the playoffs. But when Chris Kreider, who is not “the” guy, who is not the most purely skilled player on your team (and who looks so much like a friend of mine who doesn’t usually like his face revealed all that much so I can’t show) can step up as colossally as he did during the last playoffs, it might just take a little bit extra from everyone else to be Stanley Cup champions.

The Boston Bruins were that in 2011 the last time. They’ve been great ever since, but seeing great opportunities slip by them, such as a 2-1 goal-lead in a Game 6 with 1:17 to go that ended up seeing the Chicago Blackhawks flipping the score and winning the Stanley Cup on the night in 2013; such as losing Game 7 of a new Stanley Cup appearance against another midwestern team as were the St. Louis Blues, at home in Boston, as the better, superior team in a night in which the ignition never got the engine going. And then in the first round of the 2023 playoffs, after a legendary, record-breaking regular season, letting slip away a 3-1 series lead that they had over the Florida Panthers with a poisonous cherry of an overtime goal in Game 7 in Boston to top one of the most devastating sporting loses I have ever witnessed. After all that, they are still gonna be the same old Boston Bruins, but their ultimate edge, in quality and in spirit, might be lost for quite some time yet.

And there’s the Dallas Stars. A team that was heavily favored to beat the Edmonton Oilers in last year’s Western Conference Final and that, despite being outplayed by the Northern Canadians, feel as good as ever. Yes, they’ve lost mid-to-long-time stalwart Joe Pavelski to retirement. But as a shell of himself down the last stretch, that was barely able to make a positive dent for the team in these past playoffs, his subtraction feels a tad bit overstated if still somewhat justified in terms of leadership and how worshipped he was by his team. But filled with talent, a lot of it still up-and-coming, still coming into their own, growing into becoming aces of this league like Jason Robertson, Nokia native Roope Hintz or favorite-to-win-rookie-of-the-year Logan Stankoven, all that seems like will be left are ethe small details, the subtle edges of the postseason that will have to be mastered — so it will be once again interesting. And for no one more so than for their head coach Pete DeBoer. He’s an incredible paradox of a coach that never loses a Game 7, where everything is on the line and pressure couldn’t be higher, being able to boast a flooring, perfect 8-0 record. He’s so good at Game 7s, he’s now onto Game 9s. But he’s never won the Cup. This is a fact that by necessity breaks the brain of the people who look at these things through the lens of who’s a “winner” and who’s a “loser”. The most “clutch” guy in the history of the sport doesn’t have a Lord Stanley in the cabinet. Try to make sense of that. And truth is, not an insignificant number of people pointed towards DeBoer when assigning blame for losing 4-2 to Edmonton in last season’s WCF. The sense that he didn’t have enough adjustments for his team to resort to and thus revert the flow of the series, but no one seems to better coach his team when it’s a one game duel, win or go home. He’s been great throughout his career, building teams up, honing them, taking them to the next level but never quite the next next level. I am fan and he seems like a great guy on top of a great coach. But this seems like a year in which Mr. Game 7 will have to become Mr. Game 4, 5 & 6.

Now, other miscellaneous fun. A small bunch of other things outside of the main Stanley Cup contenders. Of course, we could keep going down the ranks to sort of take a look at whether or not each of the subsequent teams have a shot of producing a season-long upset and take the ultimate prize in the sport. But sports leagues are not just about who wins them any given year. That’s the most important, but it’s not the only thing.

The only thing, though, keeping the Arizona Coyotes in the desert was a worn-down single thread. In an arena down by the river, playing in a college hockey rink after their previous arena kicked them out to be able to host more concerts and make more money, the Coyotes were bouncing around like inside a Death Valley themed pinball machine, hoping, expecting, ultimately praying for a new arena project to get approved somewhere in the vast and modernly absurd Phoenix metropolis. A prayer that was never answered; the Coyotes thus draining down the sewer. There are very few more resilient types of animals in existence than coyotes. So it seemed incredibly fitting for a team refusing to die in its bottomless Arizona blackhole. The franchise that would just not go away. Until it finally did. Failing to win a land auction in which to build that desired new arena proved to be the final nail in the coffin. A hardly trustworthy owner and the confirmation that there will be no new arena in sight, the NHL pulled the plug on sight; more pertinently, Gary Bettman, the league’s commissioner, one of the biggest believers in the concept of the so called first-Phoenix-then-Arizona Coyotes.

The rumor had it that being doomed to live in such a petite and small-time arena was something Bettman just couldn’t stomach having as part of the league. And there came the Coyote-killing, arena-saving Ryan Smith, the owner of the NBA’s Utah Jazz. Goodbye Arizona, hello northern Utah. From the sand to the salt. But as only had ever been done with the original Cleveland Browns in the NFL being moved to become the Baltimore Ravens — but all of the history’s intellectual property, so to speak, staying behind to be later revived in Cleveland — Utah has taken all the players, staff and place inside a 32-team NHL. The Coyotes name stays tied to Arizona in NHL purgatory ‘til god knows when. But born is now the Utah Hockey Club, in waiting for a prospective new name (likely seems the “Utah Yeti”). In the meantime, they began the iced Salt Lake era by beating the Chicago Blackhawks, in an arena packed with excited new fans and old Arizona traveler fans, holding on to the idea of their hockey team. It’s a complicated existential reality, to be explored further some other day, but the years of a snail-speed team rebuild might finally bear their fruits in Utah.

The fruits that will be borne in the future thanks to what is happening in Seattle only time will tell — but one feels like they could be plentiful. Want something exciting? The Seattle Kraken hired this summer the first woman assistant coach in the history of the NHL. A team that already had a swag and a coolness factor rivaled by very few in the league. A cool city, a cool arena, a cool logo, a dorky but cool name… a team cool by virtue of being new and refreshing (this new season is only their 4^th ever year in the NHL) and now a very cool two-fold story behind the benches. On one hand, you have head coach Dan Bylsma. A former Stanley Cup-winning coach with the Pittsburgh Penguins, his career faded through a couple of different stumbles by way of Buffalo and Detroit all the way down to the AHL. Hockey’s main minor league. North America’s second division of hockey, in practice. But there, finally, his rebuild as a coach was finally able to take place. In Palm Desert, California, of all places. Coaching the Coachella Valley Firebirds. While writing this I discovered that a “phoenix” and “firebird” aren’t mythologically the same thing, but the visual of bird of fire rising remains a funnily apt theme here for Bylsma. And his return to the NHL has now happened alongside the even brighter part of this story, NHL first-timer Jessica Campbell.

An enthralling and captivating figure that is making history, trail-blazing, giving off a sense of belonging as powerful as what she’s representing: A historic moment in time. Watching a mini documentary, a “couple of days in the life of” type of film, her charisma, her comfortableness, her hockey expertise, her confidence just jump off the screen. And the fact that a former Stanley Cup champion, former NHL Coach of the Year Award winner and still the quickest guy to ever reach 200 wins as an NHL head coach, has taken this type of chance on someone like her feels like the perfect scenario for Campbell to flourish even further. Someone with all the hockey credibility in the world in Bylsma not even flinching when hiring her in Coachella and now taking her with him in his big chance back in the big time speaks volumes. They will be working with a roster that is far from a Stanley Cup contender, as aren’t most rosters who see a coaching change over a summer like the Seattle Kraken saw, but in a wide-open Pacific Division, with a team that actually did make the playoffs two years ago, Bylsma on his redemption tour and Jessica Campbell with a history-making opportunity on her hands, the Kraken will be one of the most compelling and exciting stories to follow.

And speaking of following, the Chicago Blackhawks. The only thing that they can cling onto right now, that they can decidedly follow, is future MVP in the making Connor Bedard. Those might be disproportionate expectations. But that is how good the kid feels. They pulled it out of thin air, out of not great Draft Lottery odds, but they got the number 1 pick. They got the number 1 guy last year. Which makes a rebuild an otherworldly easier endeavor. There’s an atrocious team but a precocious star. A hope among a dead land. It might be fumbled or ruined in the end because only good subsequent roster-rebuilding decisions will allow these Blackhawks to enter a new era of winning. In a sport like hockey, one man isn’t what one man is in basketball, to use the easiest example. It will take many more jewels, but the crowning one, that is what will allow them to run on ice again. Even without the playoffs, even if they’re just a handful of wins better than they were last season, Bedard will make it all much less hard for the Blackhawks. That is something that’s exciting.

And from the new to the old. Whereas Bedard is just entering, Alexander Ovechkin is on his way out. But before he exits, he wants to do so as the greatest goal scorer in the history of the sport. After Wayne Gretzky came and left as the best hockey player of all time, in his wake laid a series of seemingly unbreakable records set by the man himself. No one will ever be able to score 894 goals again. Right? Well, we don’t know anymore, because perhaps the best puck sniper to ever lace a pair of stakes, Alex Ovechkin, is on pace to do it. No one thought he’d be able to maintain such an ice-breaking rhythm. Yet here we are now. On the verge of hockey history. A complex figure, with complicated implicit political ties for a man that’s made his career in the (northern) Western hemisphere, but a guy that’s put the Washington Capitals on the map. Arguably the best athlete in D.C. sports history. A true sport icon. A guy that just scored and scored and scored and might now beat out The Great One, Wayne Gretzky. It’s astonishing even if we always knew how phenomenal Ovechkin was.

Drafted alongside forever-rival Sidney Crosby in 2005, in a league sputtering out of control, out of a full-length lockout season, him and Crosby didn’t save the sport from dying. But they did save it from falling way deeper into irrelevancy when it needed a forceful breath of fresh air. Two generational talents that built a signature rivalry between the Capitals and the Pittsburgh Penguins. Both finally won titles, Crosby by his 4^th year in the league, Ovechkin by the 13^th. Time by which Crosby had another two to his name. But Ovechkin’s, by the very nature of accumulated heartbreak, of pain and suffering, of feeling like he may never do it, had an epicness to it probably unmatched by that of his hockey archnemesis’. A total of 4 Stanley Cups between the two is still an insultingly low number that in no way reflects their playing greatness. But now both have grown old, in teams that have faded into mediocrity and have not been able to regenerate on the fly. But for the Russian there is still one last thing to do. In a team drifting in a melting ocean of ice, not great nor helpless, all we can hope for is for the record to not be broken, if it does indeed get broken, in a lackluster 5-2 loss to the New York Islanders or something. But one way or another, this is it. 853 goals scored at the time of writing. 41 left to tie, 42 to break. This record is all he has left now. Will Ovechkin leave the NHL the Ovechking of goals scored? Now that will be exciting to find out.

This article has been dedicated to the memory of Johnny Gaudreau. Tragically killed this past August by a drunk driver, the tributes that have poured out of all different corners of hockey since his passing have been as heartbreaking as they have been beautiful. A star of the Columbus Blue Jackets, an amazing hockey player and an even better person. To Johnny Gaudreau.