Red Light newsletter 🏒 | This is The Athletic’s hockey newsletter. Sign up here to receive Red Light directly in your inbox.

Good morning to everyone except that one lazy bum who showed up to training camp in the second-best shape of his life. We’re well and truly into preseason mode, which means the content tap has been turned to the “firehose” setting. Let’s get into it …

Hitting for the cycle

Be sure to check out Scott and Dom’s work on this year’s Contention Cycle, and where all 32 teams rank. In the NHL, you always want your team to be on the move. Ideally, that means moving up. Occasionally, it means shamelessly tanking taking a strategic step back. The worst place to be is stuck in the middle, with tires spinning furiously but no progress being made.

Most fans have figured that out by now, but Scott and Dom have taken the concept to another level. By plotting each team in terms of how good they are right now vs. how good they project to be down the line, they’ve created a fantastic visualization of the entire league’s progress toward contention. Some teams are there right now – hi there, Dallas fans – and others are on the way. Some are seeing their windows start to close, while others are watching it slam shut.

And yes, some teams are falling into the dreaded mushy middle, where they’re too good to build for the future but not good enough to scare anyone today. Of the four teams listed there, the Bruins feels like they’re passing through, on the way to pulling off the rare feat of going directly from the contender’s corner to the closed window in just one season. Wild fans are probably too busy freaking out about Kirill Kaprizov to worry too much about where they rank. Senators fans had to swim through so much sewage over the last few years that the middle probably still feels like progress.

And then there’s the Blues, somehow just six years removed from a championship and coming off arguably the most heartbreaking playoff loss ever. Other GMs around the league are on the hot seat; Doug Armstrong already knows he’s being replaced next summer. That creates a fascinating scenario for a good-but-not-great team in a brutal division, especially with Jim Montgomery getting a full camp to hammer home his system. Is there a tougher team to predict than this year’s Blues? Maybe a few, but not many.

Chaos on the horizon

We mentioned Kaprizov, and he remains unsigned, as does Connor McDavid. We talked about those players (along with Sidney Crosby and Quinn Hughes) potentially launching a new era of player movement in last weeks’ newsletter, and Mirtle got deeper into the idea earlier this week.

And those aren’t even the only big names who still need extensions, with the Golden Knights’ Jack Eichel and the Jets’ Kyle Connor also in play. Pierre is back from the cottage and had an update on all of the big names, while CJ went long on the McDavid standstill. The short version: Get ready to wait. The Wild aren’t upping their offer to Kaprizov, and McDavid doesn’t seem to be in any hurry with the Oilers.

Mix in Artemi Panarin’s pending free agency, Jason Robertson’s potential availability, the Avs needing to make a call on Martin Necas… I’m really not sure I can remember the last time there were as many big names in play as there could be right now.

And yes, that “could be” is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Let’s be clear, the most likely outcome is that dominoes eventually start to fall and just about everyone stays in place. This is still the NHL, after all. But for now, feel free to imagine the scenario where your favorite teams scoops up at least a few of these guys. After all, your GM is super smart, your prospect pool is way better than anyone realizes, and everyone wants to take a discount to live where you live. McDavid or Kaprizov? Why not both!

Trivia time💡: Speaking of big stars switching teams, Mitch Marner already did over the summer, coming off a season in which he finished fifth in league scoring. But you’d have to scroll a bit to find the next highest-rank scorer to find a new home during the offseason. How far, and who is that player? Find out below.
Coast to Coast

💈 The results are in on our annual players’ poll from the recently completed media tours, with some interesting insight on which team players want to play for most, how much McDavid and Kaprizov will make, the toughest defenseman to play against, and plenty more.

🎣 More poll goodness, as Russo has the players answers on one thing they like and one that they don’t about the new CBA. (Spoiler alert: Quinn Hughes has a point.)

🎙️ The Athletic Hockey Show wraps up its Buying/Selling series this week with Hailey and Other Sean breaking down the Pacific and Central Divisions: Which teams will improve or decline, additions and departures, and more. And check out the Atlantic and Metro Division episodes if you missed them. They’re all right here.

 🥅 The Mammoth are waiving goalie Connor Ingram, as he searches for a fresh start. Jesse has thoughts on where that could be.

🔥Harman has seven players under 23 who need a big year to dodge the dreaded “bust” label … including a No. 1 pick.

Remembering the NHL’s most bizarre offseasons

(Bruce Bennett / Getty Images)

This week was bizarro-meter week. That’s where we haul the trusty bizarro-meter out of storage, blow off the cobwebs, and crank the handle to see if still works. It did, and the rankings of the NHL’s weirdest offseasons are now available. Here’s the East, and here’s the West.

So how weird did we get? Honestly, not all that weird.

You probably saw that coming. For all the excitement heading into the 2025 offseason, with an exploding cap and plenty of big names said to be available, not all that much actually happened. Marner got traded among whispers of tampering, the Capitals accidentally (and it turns out incorrectly) announced Alexander Ovechkin’s retirement, and the Sabres had their usual weird moments. But when the dust settled, it didn’t get all that crazy. It turns out most teams just used that extra cap space to re-sign their own guys, leading to a slower-than-expected UFA market. That led to promises that GMs would have to get busy with trades instead, but that hasn’t happened either.

The end result is that, in what I’m pretty sure is a first, the bizarro-meter didn’t even get into the 8/10 range for a single team. I’ve been doing this column in some form since 2013, and ranking every team at The Athletic since 2018. We’ve never had a year quite this … normal.

If that makes you yearn for weirder times, I’ve got you covered. I went back and found the five highest bizarro-meter ratings since the column moved to The Athletic seven years ago. Here are the five teams that delivered the strangest scores:

5. The 2024 Utah Hockey Club (9.4) – It’s not often that a team gets a high score just for existing, but then you remember that the Coyotes still existed when the 2024 offseason began. A few months later, the team was in Utah, kind of, albeit without a name or a logo or even any history, which the league kept in Arizona.

3 and 4 (tie). The 2021 Canadians (9.5) and Hurricanes (9.6) – OK, maybe they weren’t technically tied, but these two teams will be tied together in history forever. This was the year that the two teams took their offer sheet rivalry to new heights, culminating in Jesperi Kotkaniemi going from Montreal to Carolina, along with a symbolic $20 signing bonus that everyone was super chill about.

2. The 2023 Blue Jackets (9.6) – They earned this score on the strength of the Mike Babcock phones-and-photos debacle, a controversy that simmered for weeks before exploding in mid-September, leaving the organization in chaos and looking for a coach on the eve of training camp.

1. The 2018 Senators (10.0) – The first and still only perfect 10 in bizarro-meter history was earned by… well, you honestly have to go back and read the whole list, because it’s truly impressive that one team packed this much chaos into a single offseason. Maybe even more amazing: While we didn’t know it at the time, those Senators still had yet another mega-controversy on tap, with that whole Uber scandal still to come a few months later.

Trivia Answer

Marner is actually the only player to finish in the Top 50 in scoring last year who switched teams over the summer. The next highest scorer on the list is JJ Peterka, who had 68 points for the Sabres before being dealt to the Mammoth in June, tied for 51st in the league. (Mikael Granlund was tied for 62nd, while Nik Ehlers was tied for 70th.)

📫 Love Red Light? Check out The Athletic’s other newsletters.

(Top photo: James Carey Lauder / Imagn Images)