A few thoughts around the NHL at the mid-way point of the 2025-26 season…
1. Goal differential outlier to the extreme
On this date last year, the NHL’s goal differential leader was the Winnipeg Jets at plus-46. That’s 30 goals below where the Avs sit this season, holding a goal differential of plus-76. They’ve failed to pick up points in just four of 43 games this season, and the next-best goal differential team (Tampa Bay, plus-34) could be doing twice as good and would still be eight goals back.
(There is some real weirdness to this, as two years ago the plus-minus leader on Jan. 9 was the Vancouver Canucks at plus-53. Today, just one and two years later, the Jets and Canucks are dead-last and second-last in the NHL standings. I do not see the Avs heading for the same fate, but who knows?)
So yeah, the Avs have even lost a couple games recently, and they’re still on pace to be the best goal differential team we’ve seen since the 1970s. (In 1977, the Montreal Canadiens finished plus-216, which if I may, “lol”.)
2. Parity gone bonkers
I recognize this makes no sense, but according to the NHL standings, only four teams are below .500 and none of them are in the Eastern Conference. Of course, they list “points percentage, so a team like Columbus that’s “won” 18 of 43 games are still listed as .500, but still.
Through half a season, 15 teams in the East are either in playoffs or within five points of the final wild card spot. You can say the same for 13 teams in the West. Almost nobody’s season is “over,” which is just the way Gary Bettman likes things, as fanbases get to think they have a chance for as long as possible and will hopefully stay invested deeper into the year when the NFL is gone and the NHL gets more eyeballs, generally.
3. If every team is average, any of them can get red hot
When everyone is just OK, or “mid” (since our podcast calls it the MidHL), there’s room for randomness. If you’ve spent much time in a casino, you’ll know that in roulette the ball can land on black five or even 10 straight spins. That’s just how randomness works.
In the NHL, you basically need to get healthy and get some saves at the same time, which should come up as a W for you in a mid-vs.-mid matchup. As a result, the Buffalo Sabres won 10 straight games. The Seattle Kraken just won five straight. The Pittsburgh Penguins have won six.
Are they all Cup contenders? Probably not. But they’re at least OK and the spins came up their way for a good run of games. I don’t read a ton more into it than that.
4. We’re in the scheduled portion of the season where non-all-stars can get red-hot too
In the NHL there are general swings in terms of effort and energy built into the calendar. When the season opens, you get a crazy combination of effort and errors. (Playoffs bring effort and fewer errors.) In that early going you get big effort as players jockey for lineup positioning, and teams jockey for early standings success. Everyone is healthy, in shape, and so guys are flying around out there. But because there are also players on new teams with new linemates, mistakes are made. Many goals get scored.
This flawed play with hustle means there’s some randomness early, but eventually team play tightens up and the best players are the ones who’re still able to break through.
There are surges of effort throughout the season as checkpoints come up — trade deadline, end of season, moments like that. But as you get to where we are now, teams are fairly broken. There’ve been injuries, and you can’t keep up the pace of the first week all season long. Schedules have worn guys down, energy is low, and so with thin and tired rosters, this is the time to get your young prospects into the league, or to give more opportunity to some players you’d like to see thrive.
The other night Anthony Duclair got a hat trick, his fifth, sixth and seventh goals of the season. The game is a little slower right now, and so your guys just below the cusp of elite are more liable to have some good games if they’re feeling healthy.
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5. The league has another wave of “face of the league” type players
When I was a boy, it was Wayne Gretzky and Mario Lemieux. Then the torch was handed to Sidney Crosby and Alex Ovechkin. Today, you’ve got Connor McDavid and Nathan MacKinnon. And coming up next, it’ll be some mix of Macklin Celebrini, Connor Bedard, and Matthew Schaefer.
This overtime play by Celebrini is one of my favourites, as he makes the play to get the rush, sorts out the complication of the officials’ skates, and just out-thinks the goalie.
He never looks at the net, always pass, and if you know it’s Celebrini you know he’s not going to telegraph is pass…right? As the goalie, that’s a sure-fire fake-pass to shot, and maybe a no look shot.
Celebrini even starts to leg-kick like he’s beginning to shoot, enough that Darcy Kuemper has to honour a shot for a tenth of a second and freezes his skate, before Celebrini actually passes and never once looks at the net.
Nasty.
6. Hockey players will always be people, which will always provide drama
The couple years I spent working in the Toronto Maple Leafs organization was eye-opening about one thing in particular: so many decisions that confound the public are made for very human reasons.
The Ottawa Senators put out a statement denying allegations about what’s going on with their team behind the scenes (and maybe the situation with Linus Ullmark not dressing). There’s something happening there, we just don’t know exactly what.
We also don’t know exactly why Team USA doesn’t want to take Jason Robertson, or why Canada doesn’t take Mark Scheifele. Certainly we think they’re hockey-based reasons, but we don’t really know.
With the Marlies I was in enough meetings involving both the Leafs and Marlies staff to know how often this personal stuff plays into decision-making. You just can’t tease the things apart, try as you might, and that’s not criticism, it’s life. As outsiders, we can do the best we can to guess at why certain decisions are made, but there’s often more to it than we know.
7. The Olympics loom
I would say there’s just about as much attention on injuries as there is results these days. For Canada, it feels like most people want to get Sam Bennett and Matthew Schaefer on the roster. That said, I don’t think anyone is rooting for injuries to the country’s best players, so there’s this weird sort of watchfulness going on.
OK, Bo Horvat is hurt, but how bad? OK, Tom Wilson is out, when’s his return date? It honestly feels like some of these players will be playing to stay healthy as much as have success over the next few weeks.
But further to this is that everyone’s eyes are on the Milan arena and if it will be a functional rink in time. My gut feeling is the ice and seating and everything will be fine and functional, but the “amenities” and “infrastructure” will be a disaster.
For example, there are pictures of the dressing room for the men where it looks like the early days of Mullett Arena, with just about a month to go before the Olympic tournament. For the women, their first games are in less than a month. Not great, Bob.
8. The Central Division may be the best case to go back to 1-vs-8 in the playoffs we’ve ever seen
I think it’s all well and good that the NHL wants to do the silly thing with the standings where they look tighter than they are (catching anyone is hard because of three-point games). I can tolerate that because typically the good teams still get in the playoffs and the bad ones don’t.
But I truly can’t stand forcing divisional play in the post-season because it’s really, really hard to build one of the elite teams in the NHL, and if you’re one of the top-three in the regular season, there’s no way you should have to face the other elite teams in Round 1.
In fact, the owners who employ Bettman shouldn’t like this either. Why shouldn’t they get the easier path that they’ve earned with a successful 82-game regular season performance? Don’t we want to place more value on those games? If you’ve spent the money to make your team good, don’t you deserve a better chance at reaching the second round?
Right now the top three teams in the league in points and points-percentage are the Avalanche, Stars and Wild, who are all in the Central. They’re first, third, and fourth in goal differential. They’re unequivocally all top-five teams in the league, but I think legit top-three. And one of them will get eliminated at the same time as some one-legged Western team that scrabbles into the playoffs with 90 points and goes out in four games.
Come on now.
If the NHL used a 1-vs-8 playoff formula, these three Central teams would line up against Seattle, San Jose and Los Angeles if the playoffs were today (ordered by total points). And I’d like their odds.
doing the same thing but ordering by points percentage, one of the Central Three would have to face Edmonton, which is in sixth. What’s great about that is it creates real incentive to climb to second in the division, and not just be happy with third.
Using the NHL’s current playoff formula, whether you finish second or third in the division you’ll play the same opponent, so there’s no regular season drama. Let’s go back to 1 vs. 8. It’s time.
