Much has been made in the world of hockey—North America’s most marginal, insular, and socially retrograde big-league sport—of the need to “grow the game.” Far more dependent on gate revenue than its direct competitors, the NHL means “grow” literally: The league is laying endless sheets of concrete, soon to be topped with smoothly Zambonied layers of ice, across the Sunbelt and devising increasingly convoluted European activation events. But the architect of the hot-state-cold-sport revolution, Commissioner Gary Bettman, invokes this motto in a more profound way too, raising a thought problem we might dub Bettman’s Folly: How do you grow the game when a decisive bloc of your most loyal fans, not to mention your players, are among society’s most reactionary, buffoonish, and self-marginalizing man-children—man-children who have no desire to have their game grown?
This past season, this uncomfortable question intruded upon the idyllic boys’ club of hockey. First there was Heated Rivalry, a Canadian smut miniseries aping prestige TV that captured the hearts of millions of “nontraditional” hockey-fan demographics. Heated Rivalry’s barely softcore gay fan-fictionalization of hockey’s noxious culture was, for Bettman, a “wonderful story” to binge in a single night, even if the Pride-shy NHL couldn’t quite land a coherent or convincing spin on the HBO phenomenon. A couple months later came Team USA’s gold medal at the Milan Olympics—the first to feature NHL stars since Sochi 2014—a triumph quickly overshadowed by the players’ frat house antics with Kash Patel and his boss. Each time Team USA members were asked to account for their volunteer duty as Trump propagandists and for their public disrespect of their female counterparts (who also won gold), they stumbled, hemming and hawing as if they didn’t understand the question. And on some level, they truly didn’t: Comfortably ensconced in the little cocoon world of hockey since junior high, these athletes are unwilling and uninterested in taking on the responsibility that greater cultural reach entails.
Thankfully, Bettman’s own machinations would rescue him from the conundrum posed by his relentless pursuit of market growth without unwanted change, instability, or disruption. The NHL’s much-derided regular-season standings and playoff seeding formats, stridently defended by the commissioner as means of maintaining competitive balance—or parity, as Bettman likes to call it—delivered a historically strange, bad, and often simply very boring year of hockey, topped off by a Stanley Cup Final contested by the Las Vegas Golden Knights and the Carolina Hurricanes. Secure against wider renown and the criticism that comes with it, the NHL safely crawled back into its small-media-market hole, just in time for another summer of golf.1
The 2026 Stanley Cup Playoffs were, to my mind, the worst in living memory. I could make this case as a homer—my team didn’t get in, let alone embarrass themselves like they usually do—but I speak as a true ecumenical fan of the sport. Self-hating sicko that I am, I still watched a good forty-odd hours of playoff hockey, my humiliatingly high level of sports media consumption never wavering. (I learned to my horror this past December that I was among the top 5 percent of Spotify listeners of Sportsnet’s 32 Thoughts: The Podcast with Elliotte Friedman and Kyle Bukauskas, a stat I can only hope is distorted by the listenership’s split across streaming platforms.) I may be biased, but I’m not uninformed.
The 2026 Playoffs had the fewest seven-game series since 2007 and featured four sweeps, one shy of the all-time record. The goaltending in particular was record-breakingly bad, the worst in the salary-cap era, part of a general downswing among goalies due in part to a change in the calculation of save percentage and in part to shooters shooting more and better.
Competitiveness is hard to quantify, but if anything, Bettman’s much-touted quest for league-wide parity may be exactly why this season was so disappointing. Last year’s regular-season and Cup winners (Winnipeg, Florida) crashed and burned while neophyte upstarts (Utah, Anaheim) stumbled into playoff position. The fact of the matter is that many of this year’s playoff teams had no business lacing up after mid-April. There are no ties anymore, so a regular season game can end in five ways: a win in regulation, two points; a win in sudden-death overtime (eight minutes of three-on-three), two points; a win in the shootout (three players per team take a penalty shot, ergo a glorified coin flip), two points; an overtime or shootout loss, one point; a regulation loss, zilch. As a result, teams that do their best to rack up loser points pad their way into playoff spots, while those that genuinely play to win—and as a result, sometimes lose—get knocked out.
The 2025–26 season saw the number of overtime games skyrocket to nearly 30 percent. Nearly half of those games ended with a shootout instead of a real goal, resulting in a whopping 335 loser points (64 more than last season) doled out to the league’s least deserving teams. By season’s end, Vegas won their eight-team division with thirty-nine wins and forty-five losses, thanks to seventeen of those losses coming after sixty minutes; the Los Angeles Kings slunk into the playoffs with fewer regulation wins than nine non-playoff teams. This statistical chicanery royally screwed my Capitals, who had a better record than five of the sixteen playoff teams, but they were hardly alone: The league’s best teams were concentrated into two gauntlet divisions, while the other two were so weak as to be dubbed a “pillow fight” by Edmonton’s weary Connor McDavid, whose individual superstardom has proven more and more insufficient to overcome the absolute trainwreck his team has become.
Why all this should happen now, given that the playoff system is two decades old, is harder to say. The Olympics-crunched schedule certainly didn’t help, and the subsequent injuries seemed to come faster and harder than usual, perhaps leading to an epidemic of safe, low-pace games. Or maybe the dip in goaltending meant more “just good enough” play all around. The going is not good when you’re praying for regression to the mean.
I have already apologized for being a bitter homer. Now, I must apologize for my predictions too. This time last year, I danced on the Pittsburgh Penguins’ grave, and they made me pay for it with a completely unexpected swan-song season from their aging core. Fine, let them have it; so long after the height of the rivalry, I almost feel fondly for the Pens, as sick as the Crosby gladhanding still makes me. And so when Pittsburgh got embarrassed in the first round, proving themselves to be the frauds I knew they were, I couldn’t even really enjoy it, their drubbing coming at the hands of the even more fraudulent Philadelphia Flyers.
The Flyers would be embarrassed in turn, summarily swept out of the second round by Carolina, who had already swept a flailing Ottawa Senators team. Out west, the Kings would also be booted in four games by the league-best Colorado Avalanche, a juggernaut of a team who made it until early January with two—two!—regulation losses. Reveling in their first-ever playoff series, the Utah Mammoth won a couple of entertaining games before Vegas took care of business and sent them home, while McDavid attempted to play on a fractured ankle in a disappointing first-round loss for the back-to-back runners-up to the younger, fresher Anaheim Ducks. If I’m leading with the bad and the mid, it’s because there truly were only four, maybe five good series this whole postseason.
Two were due to the one great story of 2025–26: Buffalo. The Sabres entered the season with a fourteen-year playoff drought, tied with football’s Jets for the longest in North America. But through a decade and a half in the wilderness, Western New York’s hockey loyalty never wavered: Buffalo consistently puts up the third highest Stanley Cup Final ratings of any major metropolitan area, exceeded only by the cities actually playing for the Cup. By 2025 the Sabres’ failures could no longer be chalked up to a decade-long rebuild; losing had become a culture in its own right. And then, in early December, the Eastern Conference–worst Sabres suddenly realized that they didn’t have to suck, and went on a league-topping hot streak for the rest of the season.
I’d always had a soft spot for Buffalo, and a more obvious bandwagon has never presented itself. When the puck dropped for the Sabres’ first-round matchup against Boston, it looked like the roof was going to pop—both at the KeyBank Center and in the Bills bar on Fulton Street in Brooklyn where I found myself, Labatt in my hand, surrounded by “the Sabrehood” waving their plastic gametime giveaway Beer Sabres in the air. Storyline aside, however, this particular series didn’t have all that much to recommend it, the Sabres dominating offensively while the Bruins depended on Jeremy Swayman’s heroic goaltending to eke out two wins and lose in six. More exciting were the crowd shots as the Sabres stormed back from a two-goal deficit to take Game 1in Buffalo and continued onward “on the warpath,” roller-blading Sabres fans cruising the streets of the Queen City, crashing TD Garden in Boston, and drunkenly boxing a mannequin in Bruins gear outside the arena.
Elsewhere in the Atlantic Division, a first-round collision between the Montreal Canadiens and the Tampa Bay Lightning laid the narrative out on a platter: Aging champions square up with their future-past selves. Watching Montreal, I learned a lot about growth. Every player seemed to have taken a great leap forward since last season, from towering superstar goalie Jakub Dobes to diminutive all-world defenseman Lane Hutson. Tampa, for their part, had once again proved my predictions wrong and remained in contention, overcoming a slew of injuries with bargain-bin additions from their minor-league team in Syracuse—previously and still mostly unheard-of names like Darren Raddysh and Charle-Edouard D’Astous—and vintage performances from the likes of Nikita Kucherov and Andrei Vasilevskiy, reminding everyone why they’ve won two Cups this decade. Unfortunately, Tampa also reminded us why they’ve had three first-round exits in a row, by racking up a fourth. As the series marched on, I found myself rooting for Tampa, if mostly out of sympathy for their frustration—the Lightning were doing everything right and still losing. Montreal, an aggravating squad and fanbase at the best—i.e., for them, the worst—of times, was beginning to smell distinctly Pittsburghish: outplayed, outstrategized, and outperformed, some kind of ice-borne voodoo (plus great goaltending) was nevertheless powering them to wins they didn’t strictly “deserve.” In the decisive Game 7, the Lightning had twenty-nine shots on goal while the Canadiens managed a measly nine, but two flukey redirections found their way past Vasilevskiy and sent Montreal on to the second round. The olé’s will be ringing out for years to come—time to start stocking up Ibuprofen.
The Montreal–Buffalo series was easily the high-water mark of the postseason, much like Niagara Falls is the high-water mark above Lake Ontario. Both teams are young, fast, talented, raw, sloppy, nervy, electric; any number of clichés you could throw out would be more or less apt. The Sabres’ rush system in particular had been disparaged as “river hockey,” much to the chagrin of Buffalo’s antediluvian coach Lindy Ruff. (Ruff’s own motto? “Everybody ropes, everybody rides.”) Unfortunately, this high-octane matchup was exactly when the Sabres’ luster started to fade; neither of their streaky, rotating goalies, in-house Finn Ukka-Pekka Luukkonen and unheralded journeyman Alex Lyon, could quite match up with the Canadiens’ Dobes. It didn’t help that the Sabres kept taking needless penalties in the offensive zone, handing Montreal deadly power-play opportunities to pounce.
For all the Canadiens’ tremendous talent, Buffalo lost the series for themselves with inexcusably sloppy play and an exasperating inability to win at home. Still, it was within their grasp until the very end. The Sabres overcame a two-goal deficit to take Game 7 to overtime before, for the second series in a row, Montreal got the bounce, with Alex Newhook jumping into the rush and firing a humdrum goal past a till-then exceptionally locked-in Luukkonen. I resented this, and not only because of my temporary Sabrehood residency. I can already tell that these Canadiens are going to haunt me for years, Dobes in particular, and there’s not a single thing I can do about it. Leaving the bar, I mumbled that there’s no shame in a second-round exit, but no one seemed to find my words believable, let alone comforting, myself least of all.
Meanwhile, in the West, two of the best teams in the league met in the first round, as they do every year. The Dallas Stars and the Minnesota Wild had been on a collision course since basically November, as it only became clearer with each passing week that neither had any chance of catching the Avalanche at the top of the division. This was familiar territory for Dallas, who’ve made it to the Conference Finals for three years running, though not for Minnesota, who hadn’t won a playoff series since 2016. But this year Wild general manager Bill Guerin was “pushing all his chips in” and “rolling snake eyes,” the commentariat’s gambling metaphors growing more hackneyed with each big move. In September, Guerin signed Russian superstar Kirill Kaprizov to an eight-year, $136 million contract extension, then the most valuable in NHL history. Two months later, Guerin flipped half of Minnesota’s prospect pool for Vancouver Canucks captain and top-tier defenseman Quinn Hughes. The Hughes acquisition, plus the emergence of blue-chip rookie goalie Jesper Wallstedt, cornily dubbed “the Great Wall of St. Paul,” transformed a dangerous if underperforming playoff team into a legitimate contender overnight. (Guerin had another lucky number this year too, managing Team USA to Olympic gold in Milan.)
Entering the postseason, the Wild did two things right: they started Wallstedt in net, rather than his more established fellow Swede Filip Gustavsson, and they hammered an already badly banged-up Stars team. The disproportionately Finnish Stars were missing speedy forward Roope Hintz entirely, and Miro Heiskanen and Mikko Rantanen were clearly playing hurt. But taking advantage of opponents’ weakness is what winners do, and Minnesota’s domination at five-on-five and edge in goaltending won them the series, despite Dallas’s power play converting at a mind-bogglingly high 40 percent. Having defeated a bona fide Cup threat, however, the Wild were rewarded with the Colorado Avalanche and promptly got trucked.
The Avalanche’s regular season dominance cannot be overstated. A hot goalie tandem of Scott Wedgewood and Mackenzie Blackwood, nicknamed the Lumber Yard, and an unbelievably deep roster that seemed to have more top-line centers than half the league, powered Colorado to the fourth-best season record this century. (Their play early in the year was so unparalleled that only a pedestrian final few weeks kept them from smashing those records entirely.) Then they squashed the Kings like a bug, and then squashed the Wild like a slightly larger, more unruly bug, disposing of them in five games. The Lumber Yard, however, was starting to get termites. The Wild’s high-powered offense forced a switch from Wedgewood to Blackwood and then back to Wedgewood, with Minnesota ultimately only overcome by Colorado’s even-higher-powered offense. Cracks notwithstanding, all was still going more or less according to plan, everyone having penciled the Avalanche into the Final for months.
That the Conference Finals were disappointing is hardly surprising. Bettman’s playoff system2 is explicitly designed to make the early rounds more competitive (the more TV markets are still in play, the more exciting the play must be), based on the assumption that, depending on their allegiances, fans will either keep watching or won’t as the playoffs drag on, on-ice product be damned. Well, he’s largely right.
Las Vegas entered the Western Conference in 2017–18, the league’s first expansion team since the millennium. The Golden Knights were given extremely favorable expansion terms, but they also did exceptional business, fleecing the league and taking a motley crew of an original roster, the “Golden Misfits,” all the way to the Stanley Cup Final, where they lost to the Capitals. At the time, this was widely described as a Cinderella story; I would propose that Vegas is better described as a Berezovsky story, their wily manipulation of a bunch of yokels’ (NHL GMs’) business ignorance catapulting them to a position of unrivaled power. Since 2018, Vegas has missed the playoffs only once, returning to win the Cup in 2023. The organization is utterly dedicated to winning and utterly ruthless and unsentimental with its players and personnel in service of victory. Also, Nevada has no state income tax, and you can golf all year (even at night!), making it a perennial destination for tradable stars.
Throughout 2025–26, however, Vegas was reeling, sunk by horrendous goaltending and a noxious locker room atmosphere. As a result, the Knights went out and made two quintessentially “fuck you” moves: First they signed disgraced former Flyers goalie Carter Hart, reinstated by the NHL after being dubiously acquitted in the Hockey Canada sexual assault trial, and then they fired Bruce Cassidy with eight games left in the season, replacing him with the infamous John Tortorella, a coach who loves to scream. Bafflingly and infuriatingly, both moves worked, the team finishing the rest of the season 7–0–1 and waltzing to the Finals. That Vegas was able to methodically out-hustle young and inexperienced Utah and Anaheim teams in the first two rounds was hardly a shocker—but the Knights’ equally methodical out-hustling of the Colorado Avalanche was something truly nobody saw coming.
A sweep is always humiliating; a sweep at the hands of your rivals, even more so; a sweep deep into the playoffs, worse still; a sweep at the first real sign of adversity you’ve faced all year might be the most damning defeat of all. For the first time since their 2022 Cup run, the Avalanche had looked like a deep enough team that they could win without the individual efforts of Nathan MacKinnon and Cale Makar. Vegas almost immediately proved otherwise. With Makar injured in the last game of the Minnesota series, Colorado started slow and never caught up, losing the first two games at home. This seemed salvageable, if suboptimal, but losing Game 3, after leading 3–0 after the first period, sounded the alarms far too late. By the waning minutes of Game 4 the Avalanche’s downfall had come to seem as ordained and inevitable as their surefire victory a few weeks earlier, a historic season made even more so by a truly unprecedented choke.
In the East, things went about exactly as expected. The Carolina Hurricanes dropped a sloppy, discombobulated Game 1 to Montreal after eleven days off, the longest break between playoff games since 1919 (that Cup Final was later halted and declared a tie thanks to the Spanish Flu), before regaining their equilibrium and suffocating the Canadiens in four straight games. Say what you will about Bettman, his Gnostic appreciation for human duality is indisputable: two short Conference Finals, two lopsided results, two pretty boring, noncompetitive series, yet one the epitome of predictability, the other an upset to end all upsets. The demiurge himself was at work.
Vegas–Carolina was a matchup devised in hell. A clash of wills between two of the league’s angriest, most stubborn bench bosses, Tortorella and Carolina’s own Rod Brind’Amour, two men who will avoid adjusting the lineup or tweaking their respective strategies—Vegas’s tightly structured, defense-first team that limits opportunities and grinds down its opponents, and the Hurricanes’ belt sander of high-volume, low-danger offense and relentless man-on-man coverage—sounded about as appealing as a plate of nails and glass. I wasn’t alone: An exasperated groan echoed through iceplexes across the continent as everyone outside of Raleigh, Vegas, and the TV studios (the media has always had a fawning, tabloidish infatuation with Vegas, despite or perhaps because of the organization’s flagrant disdain for press) settled in for one of the most boring Stanley Cup Finals since the Dead Puck Era.
Once again, I was wrong. In Game 1, both teams exploded offensively for a dynamic back-and-forth slugfest that the Knights just barely won, 5–4. The Canes’s Danish speedster Nikolaj Ehlers scored the fastest opening goal in Finals history, at which point Vegas tied, took the lead, lost the lead, took the lead back, and lost the lead again, before the heretofore extremely snakebitten Tomas Hertl finally won it in a crazed end-to-end sequence with less than four minutes to go. The flipside was the horrendous goaltending. Carter Hart was enough of a non-liability to be a difference maker for Vegas, but he is simply not a very good goalie, and Carolina’s other Dane, Freddie Andersen, was exhibiting alarming symptoms of his annual meltdown. Andersen has done this every year for a decade, as an Anaheim Duck, a Toronto Maple Leaf, and now a Hurricane, his tremendous talent undercut by a lack of durability, one or two rounds of excellence routinely giving way to a cascade of stinkers to end the postseason.
Andersen was back in the net for Game 2, only to see Vegas up 2–0 before the clock was halfway done, both goals improbably scored by Brett Howden. I was getting ready to turn the game off when Carolina’s Logan Stankoven dragged his team back into the fight, scoring unassisted off a shoving match against the boards, despite being 5’8” and 165 pounds. Vegas later seemed to take the lead back before Ivan Barbashev’s goal was wiped out for blatant goalie interference. Tortorella boldly, foolishly challenged the call, lost, and promptly gave up a power play goal. But then, just before the horn, Knights captain Mark Stone tied the game again—madness! Overtime saw Hertl’s Grecian story arc conclude, a needless tripping penalty setting up another Carolina power play goal and sending the series to Sin City all tied up.
Before Game 3, I was beginning to admit I had been too dismissive of the possibilities this Final entailed. What I couldn’t countenance, however, was the Disney on Ice bullshit the Knights staged before puck drop, an anthropomorphized witch-woman “hurricane” threatening “the Fortress” (T-Mobile Arena) before some guy in real-looking armor skated out to defend it, as drummers wearing LED headlamps were hoisted into the air above the arena. Hockey may not be a very dignified sport, but it doesn’t deserve this. More to my taste was the shoutout for Vegas defenseman Brayden McNabb, who had taken an eighty-seven-mile-per-hour slapshot to the face last game and was already back in the lineup, sporting a full-cage helmet and a new nose—this is what hockey is all about. And somehow the game was even crazier, as the Knights absolutely blew past a now clearly ailing Andersen to take 4–0 lead, and Mitch Marner—one of the few Knights I could bring myself to root for, alongside beloved former Capital Nic Dowd—scored the first natural hat trick in Finals history. This time I actually turned the game off, only to get a text alerting me to the fact that Carolina had swapped Andersen for backup Brandon Bussi and scored three goals in thirty-nine seconds, threatening to tie the game. In the Finals, this had never been done; a playoff comeback of this magnitude has only ever happened once, during the 1982 Miracle on Manchester, when the Kings stunned the Oilers with six unanswered goals at the old Los Angeles Forum. The TV was humming again in time for the till-then disappointing Andrei Svechnikov to tie the game. “Wow,” I exclaimed to no one but myself. Still, the excitement wasn’t quite enough to carry me past a full period of overtime. I went to sleep confident it would be some fluke bounce that won it and awoke to learn that Vegas d-man Shea Theodore’s double-OT slapper had done just that.
Vegas might have won, but coughing up a four-goal lead seemed to break something in them. Each successive game felt more and more like a prototypical Carolina game, as Bussi—a waiver-claim workhorse getting his first real shot—settled in and the Brind’Amour system started to really click. This also meant that each game became increasingly predictable. Most of the drama came from Tortorella, who dismissed a query about Hart’s reliability as “the stupidest question I’ve ever heard.”3 When Carolina clinched the series in a shutout Game 6, even my Canes fan friend didn’t seem that hyped up. Ultimately, this was neither the “Best Stanley Cup Final Ever,” as some breathless commentators started declaring halfway through, nor the absolute snooze the rest of the playoffs had foreshadowed; it was just about fine. The Hurricanes undoubtedly had one of the easiest paths to the Cup in recent history, but going on a 16–3 run is still a very impressive feat. Kudos to Rod the Bod (a factor, as player or coach, in all but two of Carolina’s all-time playoff wins, not counting the largely ignominious Hartford years), to Canes GM and former nanotech scientist Eric Tulsky, and to the players themselves, but I hope we can watch something else next year.
While the game looks to be about the same size as ever, recent off-ice machinations across the league suggest that Bettman’s simultaneous promotion of parity and market expansion—two goals as irreconcilable as fusion and entropy—have laid the groundwork for an ever-more ossified hierarchy of competition. In the mind of a player, it’s simple: Winning is good. Money is good. Sunshine is good. Golf is good. Losing is bad. Taxes are bad. Frenzied scrutiny from Canadian media is bad. The Sunbelt, which now hosts about a third of the last thirty-odd Cup winners, is conveniently low-tax, high-golf, and home to soft beat reporters and forgiving fans. And at the Olympics, a swath of pedigreed Team USA players on losing teams got their first taste of winning without nearly satisfying their appetite for it. Pair this with the NHL’s shortsighted reliance on no-trade clauses in contracts to drive down prices (245 NHL contracts have trade protection, compared to 35 in the MLB, 8 in the NFL, and 2 in the NBA), creating conditions of maximum player control, and you have a perfect storm for a self-interested superstar exodus to a small pool of elite teams, most of them down south, which is exactly what has happened.
Quinn Hughes’s move to the Wild proved to be the Canuck in the coal mine; the Finals weren’t over before Red Wings captain Dylan Larkin demanded a trade, fed up over another late-season collapse. (Buffalo’s turnaround now leaves Detroit in possession of the longest playoff drought, eleven years and counting.) His list? Florida, Vegas, Minnesota. Then Ottawa captain Brady Tkachuk informed the team he wouldn’t extend, gave them the exact same list plus Carolina, and was promptly traded to his older brother’s Panthers, now poised to jump back into contention after an injury-riddled down year.4 If the rumors are to be believed, Winnipeg’s Connor Hellebuyck and Columbus’s Zach Werenski are soon to follow. And then there are the have-nots, franchises like Seattle, whose $14 million and $15 million per-year respective offers to Artemi Panarin and Jason Roberston were summarily spurned; the Kraken—who bungled their 2021 expansion process as thoroughly as Vegas aced theirs—remain too hopelessly far from contention for stars to deign to play there. Entering an era of super-teams and diva stars who insist on winning now and getting maximally paid (an offer-sheet fiasco resulted in Anaheim’s 21-year-old Leo Carlsson briefly surpassing Kaprizov and netting the NHL’s highest-ever annual salary this offseason, only to be one-upped later in the summer by San Jose’s more legitimately generationally talented Macklin Celebrini), the NHL is more and more reminiscent of the NBA at its worst: A hypermediated, personality-driven PR event masquerading as a mostly noncompetitive sports league. Bettman is getting what he wanted—the game grown, at least in dollar value—and the result looks pretty damn ugly.
But ultimately the good old boys’ club of hockey may be too infatuated with failure to let the depredations of modernity creep too far into the sport. The Toronto Maple Leafs’ dismal season and choice of Wendy’s franchise owner and “total fraud” John Chayka for new GM was promptly rewarded with an improbable draft lottery win and first overall pick Gavin McKenna, over and above needier, more futureless franchises like Vancouver. And the Oilers, hellbent on ignoring the fact that they’ve wasted the better part of Connor McDavid’s career, have decided that the best means of competing before the superstar shoves off is a desperate bid to hire the most disgraced ex–head coach in hockey, Mike Babcock. Babcock, most recently fired from Columbus in 2023 for demanding access to his players’ phones and personal pictures as part of a perverse sports psychology bonding scheme (just the latest in the long list of depredations), was dragged out of the crypt only to defiantly refuse to apologize, instead essentially blaming his wife for his last resignation in his introductory presser. Hockey is changing, but it won’t be changing all that much.
Granted, this still was the most-watched Stanley Cup Final since 2019 (Blues–Bruins, better and more exciting days), and the demographics that hockey’s biggest stars tried their hardest to alienate were more tapped in than ever: Compared to last year, 807,000 more women tuned in. On the other hand, imagine how much higher that viewership might have been for teams not from North Carolina and Nevada. ↩
Tortorella had already been fined $100,000 and cost his team a second-round draft pick after abstaining from a mandatory press conference to protest a completely justified one-game suspension for a concussive hit Brayden McNabb delivered against one of the Anaheim Ducks. ↩
Brady’s time in Ottawa—a true circus of a franchise even by Canadian standards—was riddled with drama beyond the captain’s control, but he certainly didn’t help things by sitting there silently as his father, ex-NHLer Keith Tkachuk, trash-talked Brady’s own teammates as a guest on the Tkachuk brothers’ podcast, calling Ottawa’s goalie Linus Ullmark’s debilitating mental health issues “disgusting.” Ullmark, despite having the worst regular season of his career, acquitted himself admirably in Ottawa’s brief playoff appearance, in which Brady Tkachuk failed to put up a single point. ↩
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