While the attention of many Canadian sports fans will be squarely focused on Yankee Stadium and the Toronto Blue Jays this week, the National Hockey League slides into view when its 109th season begins Tuesday.
Although Canadian clubs won’t take the ice until Wednesday – when the Toronto Maple Leafs ‘welcome’ the Montreal Canadiens to Scotiabank Arena, and the Edmonton Oilers and Calgary Flames renew hostilities – it’s a season with more storylines than usual, as an Olympic tournament, a potential championship three-peat and Canada’s ongoing quest to end its three-decade-plus Stanley Cup drought are all on the horizon.
Famed for his leadership – in both NHL and international arenas – the former Chicago Blackhawks captain returns to the league after two years out tending to his health. Now 37, the Winnipeg-born centre signed with his hometown club on an incentive-laden contract to get the reigning Presidents’ Trophy winners over the postseason hump. For a team that lost a little explosive offence when Nicolaj Ehlers signed with Carolina, there is hope that Toews can chip in up front as well as in the dressing room.
Assuming Toews’s health can hold up – he’s already day-to-day entering the season – the three-time Stanley Cup champion will combine with 97-point scorer Kyle Connor, and Hart and Vezina Trophy-winning goaltender Connor Hellebuyck to drive the NHL’s oldest – average age of 30.17 years – and most experienced – 13,000-plus regular-season games – roster deeper into the playoffs.
It’s always tough to get over a breakup, and the departure of the fifth-highest scorer in the history of the Toronto Maple Leafs was exactly that, with the winger engineering a sign-and-trade that saw him land in Las Vegas for the next eight years. While head coach Craig Berube is happy that he doesn’t have to hear the words ‘Core Four’ any more, the theme for this year’s Leafs team is addition by subtraction.
No one can doubt Marner’s regular-season impact, from his special-teams play to his club-leading 102 points, but a trio of newcomers – Nicolas Roy, Dakota Joshua and Matias Maccelli – cost a combined US$9.675-million under the cap, which is US$1.2-million less than Marner’s salary last year. That added depth will help Berube to further instill his north-south philosophy in his second year at the helm.
The Leafs will also need a bounceback year from captain Auston Matthews, who managed a ‘paltry’ – by his standards – 33 goals due to injury last year, while William Nylander – who led the team with 45 goals – will need to maintain his level of offensive wizardry.
Back-to-back Stanley Cup final losses would scar any player, but as the heart and soul of the Oilers, Connor McDavid seemed to take the defeats harder than most. The Edmonton captain is fully aware of his place in the sport’s history, and knows that he needs at least one ring – preferably more – to assume his place on hockey’s Mount Rushmore. McDavid will also be cognizant that no team since the Original Six era has made it back to a third straight final after losing the first two.
Connor McDavid puts the Edmonton Oilers on notice – be good or else
But after inadvertently playing on the anxieties of the Oilers faithful all summer long, the 28-year-old decided that Edmonton is indeed the best place to continue to chase that elusive championship – for the next three seasons anyway – by signing a two-year extension on Monday. That he did so for US$1.5-million less annually than teammate Leon Draisaitl – and US$4.5-million less than Minnesota’s Kirill Kaprizoff – shows that winning is truly the only thing that matters to him.
However, given the inconsistency in net, and the loss of veteran players – Evander Kane, Corey Perry and Connor Brown have all moved on – Edmonton will be hard-pressed to make it back to the Cup final, let alone win it.
Having ended an eight-year playoff drought last spring – before falling to the Maple Leafs in the first round – some of the pressure will be off in the nation’s capital. But that brief stint in hockey’s limelight will have served as a consequential appetizer for some of the young talent on this roster.
Having spent years looking up at the likes of the Maple Leafs, Florida Panthers and Tampa Bay Lightning in the Atlantic Division standings, captain Brady Tkachuk and leading scorer Tim Stützle will be confident that the team’s outlook has been altered. Goaltender Linus Ullmark certainly added some poise on the back end, while blueliner Jake Sanderson used last season as his coming-out party, highlighted by his overtime winner against the Leafs in the playoffs.
Much of the talk this off-season has centred on the chatter around the possibility that the three Hughes brothers – Canucks captain Quinn and New Jersey Devils pair Jack and Luke – might one day skate together in the NHL. Given that Jack and Luke are both on eight-year deals – the latter signed his just last week – and Quinn is an unrestricted free agent in just two years, the prudent money would be on the Canucks star heading east.
While Vancouver can do little to persuade its captain to stay if he has his heart set on a family reunion, it does have two more seasons in which to state its case. A good start would be to avoid the soap opera of last year, when a feud between star centres J.T. Miller and Elias Pettersson led to the jettisoning of the former. That chaos all added up to missing the playoffs, and saw head coach Rick Tocchet walk out the door to join the Philadelphia Flyers, with Adam Foote taking over behind the bench.
The Canadiens’ well-advertised rebuild finally bore fruit last year, with the club making the playoffs for the first time in four years. Despite a minus-20 goal differential on the season and sitting second-last in the NHL in early December, Montreal rode a furious finish to get across the line, taking 65 per cent of the points available to them in March and April to become the last team admitted to Lord Stanley’s spring dance.
While that will have eased pressure on head coach Martin St. Louis slightly, it’s also heightened expectations in Montreal, where the dream of adding another championship banner is never far away. The Habs will benefit from the arrival of Noah Dobson on the blueline, while up front, a full season of rookie Ivan Demidov already has the Bell Centre faithful salivating, with hopes high of him giving the team back-to-back Calder Trophy triumphs after Lane Hutson took home the hardware in June.
There’s no doubt that the rise of the 24-year-old goaltender was the biggest success story in Calgary last season. The California native finished runner-up to Hutson for the Calder Trophy, and even received one third-place vote for the Vezina Trophy after winning 29 of 53 starts in his rookie campaign. But it wasn’t enough to get the Flames back into the postseason. Despite finishing with more points than two Eastern Conference playoff teams, Calgary lost out to St. Louis on a tiebreaker.
In the ultracompetitive Western Conference, the Flames will be hard-pressed to get any closer this season. Only five clubs scored fewer goals than them last year – and the team had the NHL’s second-worst shooting percentage – so barring an influx of more accurate forwards, Wolf will be relied upon to be even better than he was last year for the team to have any shot.
Around the leagueOpen this photo in gallery:
Former members of Canada’s 2018 World Juniors hockey team, from left, Alex Formenton, Cal Foote, Michael McLeod, Dillon Dube and Carter Hart. The players, who were acquitted in the Hockey Canada sexual-assault trial, are all eligible to sign with NHL teams from October 15 .Nicole Osborne/The Canadian Press
Hockey Canada Five
The five players who were acquitted in the Hockey Canada sexual assault trial in July are all eligible to sign with NHL teams from Oct. 15 – with a return to play from Dec. 1. The teams which once employed Carter Hart, Dillon Dube, Michael McLeod, Alex Formenton and Cal Foote have all decided against revisiting those relationships, with some talking about “fresh starts” for their former players.
Olympic ideal
While last year’s season was interrupted by a return to best-on-best hockey in the form of the 4 Nations Face-Off, this campaign will finally end the NHL’s 12-year absence from the Olympics. Next February’s Games in Italy should add a little spice to the season’s early going, with a few dozen players – maybe more in Canada’s case – out to prove their worth in the eyes of their national federation. It should also make for something of a compressed schedule, with more than two-thirds of the NHL season taking place between now and Feb. 4, when the league breaks for the Games.
Florida Panthers’ Aleksander Barkov tore knee ligaments during a practice last month, which may see him sit out the entire regular season.Matt Slocum/The Associated Press
Critical injuries
Speaking of compressed schedules, the season hasn’t even begun and already some of the league’s biggest names have fallen by the wayside. None bigger than Florida Panthers captain Aleksander Barkov, the reigning Selke Trophy winner as best defensive forward, who will likely be out the entire regular season after tearing knee ligaments during a practice last month. He’s joined on the sidelines by teammate Matthew Tkachuk, who could be out through Christmas if he needs surgery on his adductor injury and hernia, while Dallas Stars captain Jamie Benn will be out the first month after suffering a collapsed lung. It’s a triple dose of medical misery in Winnipeg, with playoff hero Cole Perfetti set to miss the first couple weeks with a sprained ankle, joining captain Adam Lowry and blueliner Dylan Samberg on the shelf.
The Florida Panthers pose with the Stanley Cup after defeating the Edmonton Oilers in Game 6 of the 2025 Stanley Cup final. This season the Panthers take aim at a third consecutive Stanley Cup win.Lynne Sladky/The Associated Press
A rat-trick of titles
While the playoffs are always the most interesting time of the season, the 2026 postseason will feature a team chasing a dynastic legacy, with the Panthers taking aim at a third consecutive Stanley Cup. The rising salary cap helped Florida general manager Bill Zito keep most of his team together – with playoff stalwarts Brad Marchand, Sam Bennett and Aaron Ekblad all returning – and the team will embrace its chance to become the first team to win three in a row since the New York Islanders won four straight in the early eighties.