I tried to be nice.
I really did. Last week, I wrote a piece in which I offered thanks to all 32 NHL teams. It was pure positivity, nothing but puppies and rainbows. Was it out of character? Maybe, but we’re allowed to try new things. And I was trying something very new: going an entire article without complaining.
And as I should have known would happen, a whole bunch of you responded with: Cool, now flip the script and do the negative version.
Fine. You win. Here’s one reason to say “no thanks” to every team. See if I ever try to be nice again.
Anaheim Ducks
No thanks for that time you set your mascot on fire. It probably seemed like a cool idea at the time, but mascots are not for grilling.
Boston Bruins
No thanks for no longer posting behind-the-scenes videos of your trades. You did it once, and it was the single funniest piece of hockey content in a decade, and you can’t give us all that kind of taste and then stop. We need Denis Leary narrating every trade the franchise makes, if only so we can see how hard they have to work to keep from laughing whenever they make a deal with the Toronto Maple Leafs.
Buffalo Sabres
No thanks for abandoning your war against drugs. You made at least two videos in the 1980s telling kids not to do drugs.
Since then? Silence. Have you changed your mind, Buffalo Sabres? Are you pro-kids doing drugs now? If not, there’s only one way to prove it: Get Tage Thompson and Owen Power a lyric sheet and some microphones and get filming.
Calgary Flames
No thanks for having the most messed-up system for retired numbers in the entire league. So, let’s get this straight: Hall of Famers Al MacInnis and Joe Nieuwendyk are both “honored” but not retired, even though nobody wears MacInnis’ No. 2, but lots of players get Nieuwendyk’s No. 25. Meanwhile, Mike Vernon and Miikka Kiprusoff have their numbers retired, even though neither was in the Hall of Fame at the time and Kiprusoff still isn’t (and won’t be). Guys, we’ve been over this. Get it figured out, please.
Carolina Hurricanes
No thanks to Rod Brind’Amour for making me feel bad about myself. You go ahead and be “Rod the Bod” at 55 years old, I’ll stick with “Sean the Guy Who Wrenched His Back Reaching for His Seat Belt.” Nobody said nicknames had to rhyme.
Chicago Blackhawks
No thanks for spelling your own name wrong for 60 years, then subtly fixing it in 1986 and hoping we wouldn’t notice. I’ll be honest, I respect it — let’s just say I’ve had a few typos in my day, too. But for some reason, Hockey Reference insists on treating the Black Hawks and the Blackhawks like two different teams, and this bothers me way more than it should. And it’s all your fault.
Colorado Avalanche
No thanks for matching the Ryan O’Reilly offer sheet in 2013, depriving us of what would have been the single greatest transaction in NHL history.
Columbus Blue Jackets
No thanks for that cannon. Specifically, for that cannon during the 2015 All-Star Game, which featured 29 goals. Ten years later, some of us still have nightmares. Did that stupid cannon cause all of my hair loss over the decade to come? I can’t prove it, but it’s a plausible theory.
The cannon in Columbus claimed another victim last night as Jakub Dobes was NOT ready for it and got startled 😭💣 pic.twitter.com/0NkQblbRYT
— Gino Hard (@GinoHard_) November 18, 2025
Dallas Stars
No thanks for the time Brett Hull interfered in a WCW wrestling match. How would you like it if the NWO showed up and interfered in one of your hockey games, Brett? Exactly. Just because Chuck Norris, Herschel Walker and Jean-Claude Van Damme are all doing it doesn’t mean you should do it, too.
Detroit Red Wings
No thanks to Dylan Larkin for cheating to break Mike Gartner’s fastest skater record at the skills competition. OK, “cheating” might be a bit strong, since he followed the rules at the time, which allowed him to get a head start. But we can all agree any honorable man should have declined the record. By the way, that fake record came in 2016 — how many times have the hockey gods let the Red Wings back into the playoffs since that season? Interesting. There’s still time to do the right thing, Dylan.
Edmonton Oilers
No thanks for the single most terrifying mascot in all of pro sports. Mascots are supposed to send little children into fits of giggles, not a lifetime of therapy. If Connor McDavid leaves, this is why.
Happy Leap Day birthday to #Oilers mascot Hunter, the coolest cat in the National League! 😺🎂 pic.twitter.com/DVFPLSqvyo
— Edmonton Oilers (@EdmontonOilers) February 29, 2024
Florida Panthers
No thanks for ruining 1990s hockey by clutching-and-grabbing all the way to the Stanley Cup Final, then blaming it on the New Jersey Devils. Oh, really, the team with arguably the greatest goalie of all time and two Hall of Fame defensemen playing 30 minutes a night is hard to score on, that’s wacky. Now watch this expansion roster of plugs and third-liners beat the Pittsburgh Penguins by tackling Mario Lemieux and sitting on him for three periods.
Los Angeles Kings
No thanks for throwing a live chicken on the ice in the middle of play. Although it was cool to find out that, apparently, a live farm animal on the ice is not an automatic stoppage.
Nice cape though.
Minnesota Wild
No thanks for retiring No. 1 for your own fans before you’d even played a game. Nope. Absolutely not. Completely unacceptable. Take it down right now, or be doomed to finish 13th in the standings every single year until the sun explodes.
Montreal Canadiens
No thanks for wearing those awful barber-pole uniforms. As a franchise that’s drenched in history — did you know that? You never bring it up — you’d think it wouldn’t be that hard to stick to the same basic uniform template. But nope, you have to break out quite possibly the worst uniforms ever worn in an NHL game for a while there.
Nashville Predators
No thanks to Chris Mason, who could have saved us from the debacle that is offside review if he’d just stopped Matt Duchene on that breakaway. Couldn’t you have made one save to prevent a decade of misery? He didn’t even deke! Why are you basically inside your net for the whole play? OK, I get that the answer to that last one is “because it was clearly offside,” but that’s no excuse. Play to the whistle.
All I’m saying is that Pekka Rinne would have stopped that.
New Jersey Devils
No thanks for the trapezoid. You find one goalie who can handle the puck like a defenseman, employ him for roughly two decades, and the rest of us suddenly have to take a geometry class to understand the rules.
New York Islanders
No thanks for that brief period where you had a car parked in the stands during all your games. We get it, arenas are tough business, and sometimes you have to take what you can get, even if it involves weird layouts and obstructed seats. That’s no reason to park an SUV next to the goalie and confuse every fan who’s just trying to relax and enjoy a game without having road hockey flashbacks.
New York Rangers
No thanks for ruining the outdoor game concept by being the team that just had to get two in a week back in 2014. That was the year the league decided to hold a staggering six outdoor games, effectively running the concept into the ground in a way it’s only barely recovered from. Also, stop being so precious about being the visitor in outdoor games. “Oh, the fine print in my lease says I’m not allowed …” Grow up.
Ottawa Senators
No thanks for breaking the Bizarro-meter. It’s one of my favorite gimmicks every year, but any sense of mystery or suspense has been missing since the Senators earned the first and only perfect score in 2018. Nobody has come close since. Nobody ever will. Arguing about worst offseasons is like debating the league’s most annoying goal horns: It’s the Senators, then everyone else fighting it out for second place.
Philadelphia Flyers
No thanks for having the most loser points in the cap era. Absolutely shameful behaviour, and a valid reason for the hockey gods to hate you.
Pittsburgh Penguins
No thanks for allowing this to happen:
You wonder why every second kid today has a peanut allergy? My body would reject peanut butter as well if I’d grown up in a world where Jaromir Jagr might have rubbed it on his groin.
San Jose Sharks
No thanks for that time your mascot got stuck while trying to rappel down from the roof in 1999, delaying the start of the game while you piled gym mats under him. Mistakes happen, but it’s been 25 years; you should really figure out a way to get him down by now. He’s starting to smell.
Seattle Kraken
No thanks for being the counter-example to the whole “teams in no-tax states get all the good free agents” argument. Some of us up here in Canada are getting pretty tired of losing all the time, and we need this. We were a few more discount signings away from getting everyone to actually buy in on all this. But no, you had to give all the money to the shambling husk of Chandler Stephenson and ruin the whole thing. Jerks.
St. Louis Blues
No thanks for going overboard on offer sheets in the early ’90s and basically ruining them for everyone else. Look, we all love offer sheets. But between signing Scott Stevens, then Brendan Shanahan, then Stevens again (in what turned out to be an obvious case of tampering), plus Michel Goulet and Marty McSorley and Petr Nedved and probably me and also you, the Blues pushed the concept to its breaking point. The Stevens debacle is directly to blame for the league’s ditching the player-for-player compensation approach, which was way more fun. I admire the effort, but just a little bit of self-control could have gone a long way.
Tampa Bay Lightning
No thanks for starting the trend of NHL teams going with singular names. Sure, I guess it kind of makes sense for a name like Lightning, but you broke the seal and started the trend, and now we have teams named Wild and Kraken.
Toronto Maple Leafs
No thanks for ruining my life.
No thanks for bringing the All-Star Game to the NHL. When it was a one-time benefit for the injured Ace Bailey, sure, it was a good thing. When it inevitably caught on and became an (almost) annual event, it was still fun for a few decades. Now it is not so fun, and nobody can figure out how to fix it, and everyone wants it to go away except for the corporate overlords, who are the only ones who matter.
Utah Mammoth
No thanks for even considering “Wasatch” as a team name. That’s not even a thing. We get that you were mad because every good name you came up with resulted in somebody immediately suing you, but you can’t just slam your face on the keyboard and call whatever the result is a name.
Vancouver Canucks
No thanks for the time you turned Markus Naslund’s number retirement into the single greatest unintentional metaphor in franchise history.
As per number retirement tradition, let’s remember the time the Canucks raised a big frowny face for Markus Naslund. pic.twitter.com/Xd1oghoyNM
— Down Goes Brown (@DownGoesBrown) January 12, 2015
Vegas Golden Knights
No thanks for hosting the first modern outdoor game over a quarter-century before you were even a team. OK, technically, the Golden Knights had nothing to do with this game, since they didn’t exist yet. Though the Oilers hosted the first Heritage Classic in 2003 and the Sabres got the first Winter Classic in 2008, the first modern outdoor game in NHL history was indeed held in Las Vegas. It featured stifling temperatures, melting ice, crunchy bugs and Wayne Gretzky trying very hard not to blow out his ACL, and it was all, needless to say, completely awesome. We’ve been chasing that high ever since.
Washington Capitals
No thanks for the 1974-75 Capitals, who took one season to permanently end the “worst-team ever” debate in the NHL. When you have three times as many head coaches as road wins, there’s not really a lot of room left for nuance. Fans of every other league get to have the occasional “Is this team worse than any other team?” argument, but nope, not NHL fans. Selfish, really.
Winnipeg Jets
No thanks to Adam Pardy for making that fan give his helmet back.
You know the rules, everyone, it’s finders keepers. When somebody scores a hat trick and the fans throw their hats on the ice, they don’t demand them back. It should be the same deal when a player loses his helmet to a nice gentleman who seems to be very present in the moment.