If physical ticket stubs were still a thing, Tuesday’s Pittsburgh Pirates game would be one of those games where you would be hanging on to your ticket stub to prove you were there. It wasn’t a playoff game, or a pivotal regular season game that earned a playoff spot, and it might just end up being one game out of 162 in an otherwise mediocre season. But anytime somebody sets a single-game record for a 145-year-old franchise, it is definitely something worth remembering.

That is exactly what Ryan O’Hearn did with his three home run, 10 RBI performance in the Pirates’ 12-4 win over the Atlanta Braves.

He is just the 16th different Pirate to ever hit three home runs in a single game, while his 10 RBI set a franchise record.

Think about that last part for a second and the significance of it. While RBI did not become an official stat until 1920, just stop and think about the players that have worn a Pirates uniform since then and did not accomplish such a single game feat.

Clemente. Stargell. Bonds. Kiner. Waner. Parker. Vaughn. McCutchen.

None of them ever did it.

O’Hearn not only did it, he did it in six innings and earned himself a mid-game curtain call from the fans.

He finished just two RBI shy of the MLB record, and had a chance to do it when he came to bat in the bottom of the eighth inning with a runner on base and a position player facing him on the mound.

He ended up hitting a single and being removed from the game for a pinch-runner, giving the fans one more chance to salute him.

At one point it seemed as if O’Hearn was going to have a shot at the home run cycle. He was halfway to it with a grand slam and three-run home run by the end of the third inning, needing just a two-run homer and solo homer to complete it. Then he ruined it by hitting another three-run home run.

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It was a wild game to be at.

In the hundreds upon hundreds of Major League Games I had attended prior to Tuesday, I had only ever witnessed a three home run game one time.

April 17, 1994, Los Angeles Dodgers against the Pittsburgh Pirates at Three Rivers Stadium. The Dodgers won 19-2. Cory Snyder, at the time a backup catcher for the Dodgers, clubbed three home runs as part of the rout. This game became legendary in our household growing up, and was the measuring stick for whether or not a game we had attended, in any sport, was a bad loss.

“At least it wasn’t 19-2.”

Even as a 10-year-old I have a vivid memory of the few thousand fans that stuck around until the end, giving this random guy from the other team a standing ovation as he trotted around the bases. It’s an enormous accomplishment.

Even two home runs in a single game is hard enough. Just ask Paul O’Neill.

This game was a lot more fun to be at as a Pirates fan, and it just added to an otherwise strong atmosphere in the stadium. Because a lot of weird things were happening.

The day started with an ominous vibe.

The Pirates announced before the game that starting shortstop Konnor Griffin is going to be sidelined again, and is expected to miss 8-10 weeks with a finger injury. It is a potentially crushing blow to the infield and takes away a rising star from the lineup. It also puts Jared Triolo back in the lineup, which might be even more damaging than simply losing Griffin to another injury.

Then there was the concern over Paul Skenes and his recent slump, resulting in the Pirates losing each of his previous nine starts. His 25-pitch first inning, including an early run against, did not really improve the vibes.

What did improve, the vibes, however, was O’Hearn’s first home run (the grand slam) in the bottom of the inning to put the Pirates ahead.

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I started the game out in outfield, but decided this was going to be a roam around the park night, which is one of the great things the Ballpark Pass gives you. Just taking in different vantage points and checking out the atmosphere in different parts of the park. Sometimes you just pick a spot along a drink rail in the outfield and post up at one of the stools out there. Sometimes I will tip an usher and sit in a good seat. Sometimes I like to just go up to the far reaches of the stadium down the lines in the upper deck and grab a seat in the open sections. That is also an enjoyable experience, and that is where I ended up for the middle innings. On nights like this where it’s a smaller crowd, there’s usually a few dozen people that make their way up to the sections in the upper deck down the lines, and just scatter themselves throughout. A small group of friends here. A couple there. One random person, probably with a BallPark Pass, just finding an empty seat. It’s a good way to watch the game, not have to deal with a lot of people, and get a great view of the field, the river, and the city.

Sometime around the fourth inning, just after O’Hearn hit his second home run of the night, it began to form.

The “tarps off” section down the left field line.

It started with a small handful.

It was at this point that a group of dudes, probably in their late-teens/early 20s, that were occupying a row up behind me, decided that they needed to join.

“We have to get over there,” one of them shouted.

So they did.

They not only did, they sprinted down the steps of the section and out into the concourse.

For two innings I sat and watched from a distance as groups of dudes sprinted up the left-field rotunda, sprinted across sections, and sprinted up the steps. As each group arrived, the cheers greeting them grew louder. And louder. And louder.

I’ve obviously seen this trend build at college football games, and now baseball games, and I’m not really sure how I feel about it.

I think I view it like I view the wave. It’s not my thing. It’s objectively probably kind of dumb. But it also seems like harmless fun, and who am I to yuck somebody else’s yum. It also brought some energy to the stadium, and they were clearly invested in the game given the chants that were being directed at the field.

It was just wild to watch it organically grow from an empty section, into … whatever that was.

It grew so much that the Pirates in-house host introduced the seventh-inning stretch and Take Me Out To The Ball Game by joining the section and removing his shirt.

They were at one point chanting for the Pirate Parrot to join them, but the bird never made it up there.

The mental imagine of a shirtless parrot waving its jersey above its head does make me laugh, however.

Meanwhile, while swarms of dudes were taking the shirts off and twirling them over their heads in left field, something else random was unfolding down the right field line.

One of the between-pitch sound effects the Pirates blare over the PA system is a clip of Freddy Mercury hitting some crazy note, and fans trying to mimic it. Well, there was one fan in particular that was putting everybody to shame. I would bet some amount of money the fan in question is some level of opera singer. And every time the Pirates played the clip, she would stand up, turn around, hold her arms out, and absolutely belt out an unbelievable sound that echoed throughout the upper deck. She did this no fewer than six times, and every time she stood up, she hit the note more times, and for longer, to the applause of everybody within ear shot.

The juxtaposition between that, and whatever was happening down the left field line, was really something to behold. PNC Park turned into a Shakespearian theatre, with high-class society was intersecting with the peasants.

Overall, pretty fun night at the park.

There was a franchise record and a flirtation with a Major League Baseball record.

Weird antics in the stands.

Paul Skenes pitched his best game in a month.

The Pirates lineup continues to mash even without Oneil Cruz and Spencer Horwitz (and now Konnor Griffin) for the time being.

They already have as many home runs by July 8 as they had for the entirety of the 2025 season. It might legitimately be one of the best offensive clubs the franchise has ever seen. At least it is on pace to be that.

Still not sure what to make of them overall, and they at some point have to string together a bunch of wins over an extended period of time to really establish themselves as being in the playoff race. Adding a couple of arms would really help that. But they are a lot more fun and interesting to watch than they have been. You felt all of that on Tuesday at the park.

A quick recap of the proceedings so far:

• Defensemen John Carlson, Jacob Trouba, Olen Zellweger and Radko Gudas are no longer on the roster. Carlson, Trouba and Gudas were free agency departures, while Zellweger was traded for a second-round pick and prospect Anton Wahlberg. No other outside defensemen have, at this point, been added to the roster.

• The only major outside addition to the NHL roster is the signing of depth forward A.J. Greer, for what was almost certainly too many years and too much money.

• Forward Mason McTavish was traded to the St. Louis Blues for two first-round draft picks in 2026 (Nos. .

• Their best young player, and their top center, Leo Carlsson was signed to a five-year, $90 million offer sheet in restricted free agency by the Philadelphia Flyers this past week. The Ducks have less than a week now to either match the offer, or let Carlsson go for four first-round draft picks.

• While all of that was going on, there was the threat of another offer sheet to restricted free agent defenseman Pavel Mintyukov, resulting in the Ducks needing to sign him to a five-year, $36 million contract extension, paying him like a top-pairing defenseman when he has not yet demonstrated the consistent ability to be that level of player.

• They still have to deal with their other major restricted free agent, forward Cutter Gauthier, and make improvements to a roster that has done nothing but subtract this offseason and that already had major flaws to it.

Given the context of where the Ducks were coming into this offseason, the salary cap situation they had at their disposal, and the progress they had made in recent years, these are all astonishing developments.

When it comes to the defensive departures I don’t really have a problem with a lot of what happened here. The Ducks were not at all good defensively in 2025-26, so I can’t fault them for not bringing back the people that mostly contributed to that. They shouldn’t have overpaid for Trouba. Nobody needs Radko Gudas for the six-year contract he signed in Florida. Carlson would have been nice to have back, and maybe they were a little premature in moving Zellweger, but they should have still been in a position where they could have done something to upgrade the defense.

Especially with the trade assets they had and accumulated.

I also don’t really fault them for the McTavish trade. I get it. He hadn’t panned out as hoped, and a fresh start was probably best for everybody.

Where Verbeek and the Ducks dropped the ball was with the position they left themselves in with Carlson and Mintyukov, their outdated negotiating practices, and a complete lack of preparation for where the NHL offseason — and the NHL in general — was headed in a rising cap environment with few impact players actually available.

To fully understand the issue here all you need to do is look back at the way Verbeek and the Ducks have handled some of their most recent and most prominent restricted free agent negotiations.

You also need to look at where the NHL has slowly been heading over the past couple of years.

Let’s talk about all of that.

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So let’s just take a quick stroll around the league and share some quick thoughts on what all 32 teams have done so far.

No grades.

No report cards.

No winners or losers.

Just some quick thoughts and analysis on what we have seen and, if so, what else still needs to be done.

Anaheim Ducks

• General manager Pat Verbeek’s mindset of playing hardball with his restricted free agents and dragging out negotiations as long as possible has really come back to bite him in the ass. Now he is facing the very real prospect of losing his best young player, Leo Carlsson, for four first-round draft picks, or putting a major dent in his salary cap situation while also having to deal with new contracts for Cutter Gauthier and Pavel Mintyukov. What the hell are you doing here, man?

• He has to match the Carlsson offer sheet. He just has to. There is almost no way the Philadelphia Flyers are going to be bad enough over each of the next four years to make those picks worth it. Especially with Carlsson on their roster. The draft picks are not worth it. Not for a 21-year-old, two-way center that is a rising star. You have to spend the money.

• The defense was bad in 2025-26 and a major question mark, so I am not going to crush them too much for letting a lot of the players go that contributed to that. But where is the improvement coming from? You set aside cap space to match a potential offer sheet and not make other moves, but you still have to stock a defense. And you still let the offer sheet come in. Again I ask, what the hell are you doing here, man?

Boston Bruins

• I like the addition of JJ Peterka, and I like the way he fits here. He’s not going to drive a line on his own or be a cornerstone piece, but he’ll score 25 goals and bring some scoring punch to a team that could still use a little bit more of it.

• I don’t love what they did on the defense by adding Will Borgen and Connor Clifton. The Bruins had some of the worst 5-on-5 defensive metrics in the NHL last season and were 30th in expected goals against per 60 minutes of 5-on-5 play. Jeremy Swayman bailed them out. Their solution to that was to sign Connor Clifton and trade for Will Borgen. Out of the 295 defensemen that logged at lest 500 minutes of ice-time over the past three seasons, Borgen and Clifton ranked 183rd and 185th in expected goals against per 60. Swayman better be an MVP-level goalie again.

Buffalo Sabres

• They are pushing a lot of the right buttons right now. They didn’t give in and pay Alex Tuch too much money over too many years. They capitalized on a desperate GM and turned one year of Bowen Byram into the No. 4 overall pick and Olen Zellweger. (They acquired Zellweger from the Anaheim Ducks for the No. 45 overall pick which also came over from Chicago in the Byram trade). Zellweger is Byram-lite without the insane long-term contract, with the added bonus of also helping bring them the No. 4 pick.

• I still feel like they need another big move here. I don’t trust the goaltending, and I don’t trust everything working out as well as it did a year ago.

• Is Connor Hellebuyck in their future?

Calgary Flames

• They accumulated a ton of draft pick capital over the past few years, and that gave them a lot of opportunities to make some moves. Is trading two of them for Simon Nemec the move that makes the most sense in that regard? Ehhhhh. I don’t know. Maybe in this current trade market where teams have started to understand the actual value of first-round draft picks. Nemec has flashed some good offensive potential, and he is still young enough to fit into their rebuild, but there are a lot of questions still surrounding him. That’s a big price to pay for a guy with a lot of questions.

Carolina Hurricanes

• Quiet. A little too quiet. They have too much salary cap space, too many draft picks and too much of a win-now mentality to be this quiet. Keep your eyes on them. They’re like that guy in the Pretzel episode of the Simpsons that is just standing there, waiting to do something. And you know when they do whatever it is, it’s going to be good

• I would be skeptical before I engage them in trade talks for Alexander Nikishin. I want to like Nikishin’s upside as a player, but if Carolina doesn’t feel he is worthy of what he is asking for, and are also looking to move on from him as a result, there is probably a reason for that. Do you want to be the team that gives up something good to find out what that reason is?

Chicago Blackhawks

• The Bowen Byram trade just reeks of desperation. Is he good? Yes. Will he make an awful defense better. Absolutely yes. Or at least probably yes. He should. He better. Will he move the needle enough to justify giving up the No. 4 overall pick (and the No. 45 pick, and another young player) and making him a $12.5 million dollar per year player over the next six years? Probably not. Good player. Wrong player, for the wrong team at those investments. When you give up a top-5 pick and pay a guy $12.5 million per year you are not doing so with the “hope” he will be a top-pairing defender. You are doing it with the knowledge that he is not only a top-pairing defender already, but that he is also a No. 1 defenseman. Nothing in Byram’s resume to this point suggests he is. If there was, he would not be on his third team before his 27th birthday. Young, No. 1 defenseman are too important for teams to keep giving up on them.

• They haven’t really done anything else of significance, which is concerning given how bad the team still is. It still stinks. Just sitting back and waiting for your prospects to develop is very likely going to end very poorly. They can’t be done with adding to the roster. They can’t be. It would be organizational malpractice if they are.

Colorado Avalanche

• They were one of the few teams that actually had a real salary cap crunch this offseason. In that sense, Jaden Schwartz is some tidy business in free agency at $3.25 million per year over the next three years.

• But does that make up for losing Ross Colton, Jack Drury and Valeri Nichushkin off the roster? On paper, no. They are still going to be contenders, but are they better today than they were in May? No.

Columbus Blue Jackets

• Zach Werenski really took them on a roller coaster, but there are still some big unanswered questions about what his future here looks like. Will he re-sign in two years? Is there going to be a trade demand at some point in the future? They have two years to prove something to him. And it’s actually probably less than that if we are being realistic about it. There is similar uncertainty around star forward Kirill Marchenko who also may not want to sign here long-term.

• Valeri Nichushkin is a nice add given how little compensation he cost them in a trade, and it’s a good thing in the short-term that Werenski is sticking around, but there are some major, major questions here about the direction of this team and its ceiling is going to be.

Dallas Stars

• Pretty much everything is on hold here until they figure out what is going on with Jason Robertson.

• If it were me? I’d pay him and trade somebody else. Trade Thomas Harley. Trade almost anybody that isn’t Wyatt Johnston or Miro Heiskanen. Don’t let a top-15 player get away because you’ve set a self-imposed cap on what you think you should pay him. Do not overthink this. Do not be stupid here.

Detroit Red Wings

• Similar to Dallas, pretty much everything is on hold here (at least as far as analyzing the offseason goes) until there is some closure on Dylan Larkin’s trade request. Will Steve Yzerman give in? Will Larkin expand his list of teams? What kind of return can Yzerman get for his captain?

• I actually really like the Viktor Arvidsson move and think that’s a good value signing. Getting a first-round pick for a goalie (Sebastian Cossa) that has not established himself as an NHL player is also strong value. But the team’s still pretty much the same as it’s been, and that’s simply not good enough. What happens with Larkin, and what they get for him, will dictate a lot.

• This team still has $18.6 million in salary cap space this offseason and is riding a 10-year playoff drought, coming off yet another late season meltdown. Somebody poke this team and front office with a stick and get it to do something.

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In this edition of Talking Baseball we are looking at….

• The long-standing baseball tradition of yesterday’s players hating the players of today.

• My love-hate relationship with the 2026 Pittsburgh Pirates.

• Old baseball video games.

Over the past week I have been watching Ken Burns Baseball documentary and I have been absolutely loving it. It’s a perfect combination of 1) Ken Burns usually doing great work, and 2) My love of baseball and learning about the history of the game and seeing how much it has evolved over the years.

One of the funniest things that has stood out to me is that for as much as the game has changed from the dead ball era, to the modern era, to the steroid era, to whatever era today is, there are still a lot of things that ultimately remain the same. And I’m not even talking about the rules or style of play.

I’m mostly talking about how much the players of yesterday absolutely loathe current players and the way they play.

The best example of this was Ty Cobb (who no one could stand when he was alive) hated the way Babe Ruth and Lou Gehring played because, in his view, the power game was a “lazy” way of playing baseball. It didn’t rely on the smart-thinking, strategy and small-ball approach of Cobb’s era.

This was in the 1920s and 30s.

Fast forward to 2026 and the same things are being said.

It usually involves somebody like Goose Gossage gathering whatever New York media members will listen to him yell at clouds every spring training. He will then spend 25 minutes screaming how today’s players are softer than baby shit because relievers don’t throw more than one inning and because base-runners aren’t allowed to steamroll through catchers anymore. Of course, nobody has ever bothered to tell ole Goose that Christy Mathewson and Cy Young would have thought HE was soft for only being a relief pitcher and not throwing 500 innings every year.

But we had another example this week when former New York Yankees catcher (and should-be-Hall-of-Famer) Jorge Posada said he hates watching the modern game because people strike out too much, don’t play small ball enough, and rely too much on formulas and analytics.

It’s especially maddening coming from Posada because he was the perfect player for 2026 and was far ahead of his time.

In fact, if he had played in this era he probably would be viewed even more highly than he already is.

He struck out .. a lot.

He also walked a lot and got on base.

He also hit for power.

He rarely stole bases (20 in his career0, hit sacrifice flies or bunted (one sacrifice bunt in his entire career).

He was everything the modern baseball player is, and he was damn good at it. And he was doing it as a catcher, which made it even more impressive.

His Yankees teams never asked guys like Posada to bunt, steal, or hit-and-run because it would have been non-sensical and a waste of what he was good at. His value was in hitting the ball out of the ballpark or into a gap for multiple bases and multiple runs.

This is, of course, nothing new.

Hall of Fame second baseman Joe Morgan would go on ESPN every Sunday night and rail against anything analytical even though he might have been one of the greatest analytical players ever. Everybody in his time knew he was great and one of the best players of his era. The numbers and people’s understanding of those numbers only shined an even brighter light on him.

Go back even further and look at Ted Williams’ philosophy on hitting. Everything he did, everything he preached and believed at the plate is pretty much exactly what modern hitting coaches preach to their players.

• Wait for your pitch and do not swing at pitcher’s pitches (walks are good).

• Short, quick swing with an emphasis on generating hard contact (exit velocity).

• The slight “upswing” that he felt gave the bat a batter trajectory to the ball approaching the plate (launch angle).

Along with that, there were instances of teams defending Williams (a dead-pull hitter) by shifting their fielders to the right side of the infield because they knew he was trying to pull the ball and hit it hard.

As much as the game has changed, it’s still largely the same.

Sports have a way of matching society, and there is always a societal belief that the younger generation coming after us is more screwed up and dumber than our generation. Athletes live the same way. Even if they are largely the same.

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The 2025 Pittsburgh Pirates were one of the worst offensive teams in the league, wasting what should have been a pitching staff that was good enough to compete.

To their credit, they spent the offseason doing quite a bit to address that area and improve it.

• They dug into their pitching depth and traded Johan Oviedo for Jhostnyxon Garcia.

• They continued that purshit by trading Mike Burrows for Brandon Lowe, Jake Mangum and Mason Montgomery.

• They spent some actual money in free agency by signing Ryan O’Hearn to their first multi-year free agent deal in over a decade, and then brought in Marcell Ozuna to be the DH.

• They aggressively moved shortstop Konnor Griffin through the minor league system and made him the highest-paid player in franchise history, bringing a potential superstar onto the Major League roster at the age of 20.

• Esmerlyn Valdez is getting a serious look making the most of it. He is still only 22 years old.

Some of those moves have worked out better (Lowe, O’Hearn) than others (Ozuna), but there is a noticeable improvement. Add in bounce back seasons from Oneil Cruz and Bryan Reynolds, not to mention another strong year from Spencer Horwitz and the potential emergence of Endy Rodriguez, and the Pirates suddenly have one of the most formidable lineups in baseball.

They entered play on Tuesday third in all of Major League Baseball in runs scored, second in on-base percentage and second in OPS.

It is not just a good lineup, it is objectively speaking one of the best lineups in baseball.

In 2025, if they fell behind 2-0 or 3-0 in the first couple of innings, the game was over. There was no point in even watching it anymore. It might as well have been 200 runs or 300 runs. Now? They can fall down by five runs and still have a fighting chance. They might even come back and win as they did on Monday night against the Philadelphia Phillies.

If they had this lineup a year ago, they easily make the playoffs.

That is where the frustration comes in, because for as good as the hitting has been, every other aspect of the team has rapidly gotten worse.

The cost of improving the lineup has been piecing together a below average defensive team, while almost every major pitcher on the roster has significantly regressed from a year ago, while some of them (Paul Skenes, Mitch Keller and Carmen Mlodzinski) have all seen at least one MPH come off of their fastball velocity on average.

Braxton Ashcraft is really the only starting pitcher that has matched or exceeded expectations (and even he has shown some signs of regressing a little in his recent starts), while the bullpen has been a season-changing and season-ruining disaster.

• They lead the league in blown saves.

• They have lost 11 games when scoring six runs or more, the second-highest total in the league behind only the 12 games that the Colorado Rockies have lost.

• They have lost seven games when scoring at least seven runs, tied with the Los Angeles Angels for the most.

• They have lost at least six games where they had a win probability of 88% or higher in the eight inning.

If this team had even three more wins going into Tuesday they would be in a wild-card spot.

Five more wins would still have them in serious contention for the division.

It’s a multi-layer problem.

When it comes to the bullpen, that has to rest entirely on the front office and general manager Ben Cherington. He came into this season without really any proven, reliable arms (as much as those things exist in the bullpen) and has sat back and done nothing while that group continues to sabotage the season.

When it comes to the starters (and perhaps even some elements of the bullpen), it’s not hard to ask what new pitching coach Bill Murphy is actually doing when pretty much every returning pitcher is worse across the board.

The table below shows every Pirates pitcher on this year’s team that also threw at least 25 innings on last year’s team, as well as their ERA and FIP (fielding independent pitching) in each year. A red difference means they are worse.

That is a lot of red.

One or two guys getting worse is bad luck.

Three guys getting worse is annoying.

Nearly everybody getting worse is worthy of some serious questions.

It is easy to want to buy into them and believe in them because of the offense. They are in every game and can out-hit most teams. But we are now more than halfway through the season and they are still a .500 team that multiple games out of a playoff spot with several teams ahead of them. At some point they are going to need to start putting together a big winning streak, or a stretch where they win 10-out-of-14 or something similar. Given the upcoming schedule they have before the All-Star Break (it is brutal with Philadelphia, Washington, Atlanta and Milwaukee all looming), as well as the current state of the pitching staff, it is really hard to see how that happens.

In some ways this season is even more frustrating than the ones where they just suck from the beginning with no hope. This just feels like a tease.

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It is hotter than balls outside right now and the heat wave actually triggered a core childhood memory for me.

I don’t know WHY I have this memory, but I vividly remember being somewhere in the neighborhood of 11 or 12 years old and a similar heatwave rolling through in the summer. It was during that summer (and probably a few summers in that age range) that I would play pick-up baseball games in an empty lot with several kids in the area, and they were games that would go on for HOURS.

We played with tennis balls and aluminum bats, which created some hilariously far hits for our age range.

This particular heat wave was so bad that my mom said something along the lines of, “it’s too damn hot to be running around outside, I’m taking you to blockbuster and you’re renting some video games.”

I remember getting World Series Baseball 95 for Sega Genesis, and I remember playing that game for what seemed to be 36 hours straight. I not only stayed inside that entire week, I don’t think I ever left the TV. It was probably the appeal of being told, “yes, it’s okay to sit inside and play video games all day.”

That memory then sent me down a rabbit hole of my favorite baseball video games, with World Series 95 being near the top of the list.

The graphics at the time were mind-blowing. It had the actual stadiums. It had the actual rosters. It kept track of your stats throughout a season. When you hit a home run, you could taunt the opposing team by doing cartwheels around the bases and swinging your cap around.

Incredible game.

My other shortlist of favorite baseball games includes (and this not meant to be a ranking of the best games; just the games I personally enjoyed for one reason or another)…

Bases Loaded. Just an iconic game for the original Nintendo. It didn’t have real teams. It didn’t have real players. But it had legends. None bigger than Paste, the iconic No. 3 hitter for Jersey. The 1-5 in the Jersey lineup of Ryder, Becker, Paste, Bay and Ford was a video game version of the 1927 New York Yankees Murderer’s Row.

It also had that ear-worm song that played throughout.

What I especially loved about this game was the little things.

If you struck out with the bases loaded, the umpire would say, “You bum! Out!”

Every team also had one player in its lineup where if you would hit them with a pitch, it would prompt the hitter to charge the mind, get into a fight, and get ejected from the game.

This was great if you were playing against the computer in a full season mode (which this game had! Which was unheard of for the time and the system).

This was also chaotic if you were playing against a person and had to deal with their frustration over losing their best player. I think I got punched in the arm at least once over this.

MVP Baseball ‘05. It was all about the franchise/dynasty mode. You could play for 120 seasons. You could edit/build stadiums. You had three minor league teams to draft and develop talent. You could set ticket and food prices. You were basically the owner of the team. Every hitter and pitcher had their real-life batting stance and pitching delivery. The only exception to this was the fact Barry Bonds would not give his name to the game and was instead turned into a generic white guy by the name of Jon Dowd.

Jon Dowd remains one of the best video game athletes ever.

I probably played more hours of this game than any other baseball game. The only one that ever came close was …

Triple Play 98. It wasn’t the best game. It had good, but not great graphics. It was glitchy in terms of saving it. But I loved the game play, and I loved the presentation, including the intro for every game at every stadium.

That lack of top-end talent, combined with a rapidly increasing salary cap, is going to make the next week a potential minefield for teams and general managers to navigate, and there’s a good chance a lot of bad mistakes are going to get made.

That may have already started with the Toronto Maple Leafs trading for Darren Raddysh’s free agent rights and signing him to an eight-year contract extension, and the Washington Capitals doing the same with forward Alex Tuch.

They were supposed to be the two best players remaining on the open market, and now they are already off of it.

In the short-term, I don’t hate either deal for either team because they both fill big needs and should at least give their new teams a few years of strong hockey. I’m not sure Raddysh is going to move the needle a ton for Toronto, and neither contract is likely to age well over the duration of them, but I can see the vision in both spots.

The Capitals needed more goal-scoring in their top-six. The Maple Leafs needed a top-four defenseman and somebody that can help the power play.

For now, both teams got it.

It’s just matter of whether or not those contracts age like milk or wine.

Given the recent history of long-term contracts in free agency, there’s a good chance it’s the former.

Back when I was covering the NHL for NBC Sports, I wrote this about long-term free agent contracts and how they typically result in a trade or a buyout. Because that article was written SEVEN YEARS AGO (what in the actual the hell) I thought it would be worth revisiting with some more recent free agent signings.

They did not turn out much better.

For this date range I looked at UFA contracts between the 2018 and 2022 offseasons that were five years or more in length, and what happened with the player by the end of that contract. Did they stay with the team the entire time? Did they get traded? Did they get bought out? Are they still currently with the team?

This is only looking at UFA signings. It is not taking into account RFA contracts or players re-signing with their teams.

In total, there were 26 contracts that fit the criteria.

Out of that group, only six players played out the entire contract with the team that signed it (so far), and only four still remain with the team that signed it. And that number could still drop.

At best it would only a 38 percent success rate of the player actually finishing the contract with the same team.

That is not great, though it is a little bit higher than the original look I did several years back.

Let’s look into it a little more and talk a little more about it.

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In most years, the trade speculation that precedes the deadline and NHL Draft week produces an emphatic dud where almost nobody of consequence or interest gets moved.

But this week we saw some actual player movement with the likes of Brady Tkachuk, Jordan Kyrou, Pavel Dorofeyev, JJ Peterka, Bowen Byram, William Eklund, Mackie Samoskevich, Simon Nemec, Valeri Nichushkin, Ross Colton and Mason McTavish, among others, all get moved.

There could be more seismic moves on the horizon as the Detroit Red Wings deal with Dylan Larkin’s trade request, while the Columbus Blue Jackets (Zach Werenski and Kirill Marchenko) and Winnipeg Jets (Connor Hellebuyck) figure out what they are going to do with disgruntled stars that might want out sooner-rather-than-later.

And then there is potentially the biggest name of them all in Jason Robertson, and whether or not the Dallas Stars can figure out how to get him signed as a restricted free agent or if they move him out.

In other words:

The one thing that stands out about a lot of the trades that have already happened (and some that almost happened), is the ferocity with which teams are willing to trade multiple first-round picks. Or, in some cases, picks that would have previously never been put on the table in potential trade talks.

Just consider the picks and trades we have seen over the past few days:

• The Chicago Blackhawks traded the No. 4 overall pick to the Buffalo Sabres for defenseman Bowen Byram. That was the first time a top-five pick had been traded, when both teams involved in the trade knew a pick would be in the top-five, since the 2008 NHL Draft. And even in that instance it was a trade up/down situation, not a straight up trade of the pick. This was a pure “pick-for-player” trade. This never happens with picks that high.

• The No. 9 overall pick was traded two different times this past week, going from Florida to Ottawa in the Brady Tkachuk trade, and then going from Ottawa to San Jose for William Eklund.

• The No. 7 overall pick would have been traded from Seattle to Dallas had Robertson been willing to re-sign with the Kraken.

• The Utah Mammoth traded the No. 23 overall pick in the draft to the Detroit Red Wings for goalie Sebastian Cossa, a 23-year-old goalie that has played one NHL game. That is an almost unheard of trade for a completely unproven goalie.

• Tkachuk, Peterka, Nemec, McTavish and Dorofeyev were all traded in deals that included MULTIPLE first-round picks, including the Tkachuk deal that saw three first-round picks change hands.

All of these types of moves are, to some degree, relatively unheard of in recent years.

But I want to especially focus on the latter point as it relates to multiple picks moving for one player. And sometimes (as is the case with Nemec and McTavish) it is for one player that is still largely unproven and/or not actually that impactful.

Going back to the 2025 NHL Trade Deadline there have already been eight trades made where one team gave up multiple first-round picks as part of the deal.

The aforementioned five trades this offseason (Tkachuk, Peterka, Nemec, Dorofeyev and McTavish) as well as last year’s trades involving Oliver Bjorkstrand (Seattle to Tampa Bay), Noah Dobson (New York to Montreal) and Mikko Rantanen Carolina to Dallas).

That’s eight in a little over a year-and-a-half.

For perspective: As far as I can find (and if you think of any or find any that I may have missed, please let me know) between 2005 and the 2025 NHL Trade Deadline, a span of 20 years, there were only eight trades made that involved a team giving up multiple first-round picks in a single trade for a player.

The list of players acquired in those trades:

• Brandon Hagel (Chicago to Tampa Bay in 2022)

• Seth Jones (Columbus to Chicago in 2021)*

• Matt Duchene (Ottawa to Columbus in 2019)

• Erik Karlsson (Ottawa to San Jose in 2018)

• Brayden Schenn (Philadelphia to St. Louis in 2017)

• Phil Kessel (Boston to Toronto in 2010)

• Chris Pronger (Anaheim to Philadelphia in 2009)

• Chris Pronger (Edmonton to Anaheim in 2006)

*The Jones trade is also a little misleading on this list because it involved Chicago and Columbus swapping first-round picks in one year, with Columbus only actually gaining one first-round pick as a result of the trade.

Even so, it was not only nearly unheard of for a team to deal multiple first-round picks in a trade for one player, on the rare occasion that it DID happen prior to 2017 it was only happening for guys like Chris Pronger (two times), Phil Kessel and Erik Karlsson.

Not Simon Nemec and Mason McTavish.

The real line in the sand here was around 2017 with the Schenn trade. You saw a few similar moves in the years after that before the recent surge this past offseason.

So what’s with the sudden increase in teams being willing to move out multiple first-round picks for one player? And is it worth it?

When it comes to the first question, It might be the perfect storm of salary cap flexibility, knowledge, and smarter general managers taking advantage of that knowledge.

As for the second question? It probably is.

Let’s talk about it.

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1. Salary cap flexibility means a lot for both sides of a trade

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It should be a good rule of thumb that if the head coach you are thinking of hiring requires an investigation by both the NHL and the NHL Player’s Association just to see if he is allowed to coach, then it is probably not a good idea to be pursuing that person.

The Edmonton Oilers did not care about any of that.

They officially went through with it on Tuesday and hired Mike Babcock to be their next head coach. It is move that can only be described as a last desperate act to try and win a Stanley Cup with Connor McDavid before he eventually gets tired of the Edmonton circus and moves on.

And McDavid was reportedly one of the people pushing hardest for Babcock to get the job.

All of this seems like a bad idea. As does everything the Oilers have done recently.

The issues with the Babcock hiring are extensive, and begin with the way he has treated his players over the years.

• When he was with the Detroit Red Wings, he drove Johan Franzen to a mental breakdown on the bench and in the locker room, prompting Franzen to later call Babcock the worst person he has ever met. The treatment of Franzen was so bad that his former teammate, Chris Chelios, perhaps the poster child for hockey toughness and manliness, called it “the worst thing” he had ever seen in hockey. That dude played 26 years in the NHL at a time when there were seemingly no rules. Think about what he’s saying when he says THAT is maybe the worst thing he ever saw in the NHL.

• When he was with the Toronto Maple Leafs he made a then-rookie Mitch Marner rank the work ethic of his teammates, and then shared Marner’s ranking with said teammates in what can only be described as a purely fucked up mind game to play on a rookie. That was one of the things that eventually led to his dismissal from the Maple Leafs (aside from the playoff failures, which we will get to).

• Despite all of that, the Columbus Blue Jackets were still desperate enough for a splash head-coaching hire in 2023-24 and hired Babcock to try and turn their franchise around. He never even made it to training camp. During his initial meetings with players, word surfaced that Babcock was trying to pry into the personal lives of his players and look at pictures on their phones. Babcock eventually resigned given the allegations, with the Blue Jackets later calling the hire “a mistake.”

There is an even more extensive list of individual players across the league that have spoken out for their distrust and dislike of Babcock. Former NHL defenseman Mike Commodore was banging this drum long before any of this stuff become public. Former Maple Leafs defenseman Frank Corrado recently spoke out about the power dynamics Babcock likes to utilize within the organization, and while also saying he is nothing like another in-your-face style coach in John Tortorella. In Corrado’s words, Tortorella will say everything, good and bad, to your face and be the first to offer encouragement.

“Torts says it to your face, good or bad, and he’s the first guy to come down to the bench and pat you on the back when you do something good. He’s the first guy to give you reassurance when he thinks you deserve it or you need it. So as much as Torts can be prickly, Torts cares about the individual. Babs cares about Babs,” he said.

He added: “I wouldn’t hire him. I wouldn’t want anything to do with him.”

Babcock has not coached in the NHL since the Columbus incident.

Technically speaking, he has not actually coached a game since the 2019-20 season when he was fired by the Maple Leafs.

The toxicity of his hire is especially troubling when you consider the general manager making the decision, Stan Bowman, has his own disturbing background given his role in dealing with the Kyle Beach situation with the Chicago Blackhawks, one of the most disturbing scandals in league history.

(He also needed to be cleared by the NHL for the Oilers to hire him … there is a trend here.)

It’s just bad look for the organization.

It’s not about being a cutthroat team that hires tough people that want to win. It’s legitimately hiring bad people that had either abused their positions of power (Babcock), or not used their positions of power to protect a vulnerable player (Bowman).

All of that is bad enough.

But there’s another, even dumber layer to all of this: These people aren’t even good at the jobs their supposed to be doing.

Not that being good at the job would justify any of this, but it would at least make it easier to understand the thought process, as fucked up as that line of thinking is.

At the time of Bowman’s departure from Chicago he was actively ushering that franchise into the NHL’s basement through comically inept management. It was not the start of a rebuild. It was not only because of core players getting older. It was because he was a bumbling doofus that got everything wrong.

His brief tenure so far in Edmonton has been more of the same. He has gotten pretty much every major move wrong and only made their biggest weaknesses worse.

He allowed Dylan Holloway and Philip Broberg to be poached away as restricted free agents.

He gave Trent Frederic a horrible seven-year contract that is aging like milk.

He tried to fix the goalie issue by taking on all of Tristan Jarry’s remaining contract, and giving up good assets to do it.

When neither McDavid or Draisaitl were on the ice during 5-on-5 play the Oilers were outscored by a 55-86 margin with only a 48.1 percent expected goals share. It was some of the worst depth they have had during the entirety of the McDavid-Draisaitl era.

The same problems that have always existed not only still exist, they are in some cases even worse.

And that now brings us to Babcock.

Not only does he carry immense baggage with him and bring terrible optics to the franchise, he also has not even been a successful coach in a decade-and-a-half.

Since the start of the 2010-11 season a Babcock-coached team has won just one playoff series.

He has not won a playoff series since the first round of the 2012-13 playoffs.

For some perspective on that: There have been 40 coaches in the NHL that have won at least one playoff series since Babcock last won one, including 17 coaches that have won at least one playoff series with MULTIPLE franchises. Two of those coaches, Lindy Ruff and Pete DeBoer, have won at least one playoff series with THREE different franchises.

This is the list.

But hey, sometimes playoff success can be flukey and noisy. Sometimes it can be about some luck, player health and injuries, just getting the right matchup or even the quality of the team. Surely there is at least some serious regular season success to be had here? Maybe a Presidents’ Trophy? Maybe the top spot in the conference? At least a division championship of some sort?

No.

None of that.

Since Babcock last won a playoff series his teams have never finished higher than third place in its own division.

The last time one of his teams finished higher than third place in its own division was the 2010-11 season. As a coach, that is nine straight years of third-place (at-best) finishes. In terms of real time, it is 15 years.

In the context of the rest of the league, here’s where his teams have finished in the league-wide standings since that 2010-11 season: 9th, 12th, 14th, 11th, 30th, 13th, 7th, 7th. He was fired in the ninth season where his team was 9-10-4 and near the bottom of the Eastern Conference standings and 21st overall in the league.

What is the appeal here?

Does he develop young players? Not really.

Is he the type of person you want as the face of your franchise? You probably shouldn’t.

Has he had anything that even resembles success lately? Absolutely not.

I am not really sure what we are doing here.

If the Oilers wanted a Stanley Cup winning coach that could push people be a hard-ass, there are actually several of them sitting there available right now.

Craig Berube fits that mold and is still sitting out there.

John Tortorella still wants to coach.

Would they be good hires? Not necessarily. But they would probably be better than whatever this is.

The Oilers reportedly wanted to talk to Bruce Cassidy (who also would have fit that mold) only to have the Vegas Golden Knights reject them. Nothing you can do about that, but you can at least try to find a better alternative than this.

This just screams of desperation. And based on recent history it’s probably not going to end well. The best hope here is that it just ends with some losing and not complete and total embarrassment for the franchise.

At least not anymore than it is already experiencing.

Now let’s talk more about the 2025-26 Oilers, what went right, what went wrong, and what happens next after a wildly disappointing first-round exit in the Stanley Cup Playoffs.

What went right this season

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It’s the first truly blockbuster move of the offseason.

So let’s break out the old report card and grade that move, as well as the other major moves of the past week to get the NHL’s offseason officially rolling along.

The trade: Brady Tkachuk goes to Florida

• Florida gets: Brady Tkachuk

• Ottawa gets: 2026 first-round pick (No. 9 overall), 2026 first-round pick (No. 25 overall), 2027 second-round pick, and a 2029 first-round pick (top-10 protected)

The Florida side

When the Panthers traded Mackie Samoskevich earlier in the day on Sunday for the No. 25 overall pick (we’ll get to that one in a minute) it was pretty obvious they were accumulating assets and setting the stage for an even bigger blockbuster move. Given the lack of a goalie on the roster I figured they would be going all in for Winnipeg Jets goalie Connor Hellebuyck, given that a goalie is probably the final missing piece the roster currently needs.

Maybe Dylan Larkin.

While I figured the Panthers would eventually be a destination for Brady, I wasn’t convinced it would happen THIS SUMMER.

And then it did.

In terms of raw cost and value, the Panthers probably overpaid a little. Three first-round picks, including a top-10 pick, is a steep price for an outstanding player that’s probably not quite a franchise-building block. He’s the No. 2 or 3 guy on a team. Not the No. 1 guy.

Fortunately for him and Florida, he doesn’t have to be the No. 1 guy.

He doesn’t even have to be the No. 2 guy.

Even with the high cost, even with the fact he’s now probably their third-best player (and maybe even fourth depending on how strongly you feel about Sam Reinhart, Anton Lundell, or one of the defensemen) I still absolutely get it for the Panthers, and it’s still a good move for them.

This is a win-now team with a chance to win another Stanley Cup in the very near future. There’s no need for them to hoard draft picks, and those picks are going to be far more valuable to them as potential trade chips than actual picks. There’s a very good chance that none of those draft picks, including the No. 9 overall pick this year, never equal the player that Tkachuk currently is in the NHL.

The only pick that MIGHT come back to haunt them is the 2029 first-round pick, but even then it comes with top-10 protections.

So how valuable is it REALLY going to be?

Still, this move wouldn’t have made sense for a team, like, say, the New York Rangers, or a team that’s trying to find a player to build around, or a mid-level contender that’s still a couple of pieces away.

But this team? This circumstance? I get it. It’s worth it. The Panthers didn’t take a step backwards last year because they suddenly became bad. They took a step backwards because their best player missed the entire year, their second-best player missed half of the year, and the rest of the roster was decimated by injuries by the end of it.

The only thing I’d potentially quibble with here is if they could have used those first-round picks to get an even better player that doesn’t happen to share the same last name as one of their other top players. Perhaps even a goalie. But they still have four second-round picks over the next two years to use as trade chips. They can still find a goalie.

They better, at least.

Panthers Grade: A-

The Ottawa side

The consensus I was seeing on Sunday regarding this move is that it was a kick in the teeth for Senators fans that came through an extensive rebuild and watched as their captain got traded away for nothing but draft picks.

On the surface, yes.

Absolutely.

I get that sentiment, and on paper, as we sit right now on June 22, 2026, that is absolutely how it looks.

But this trade is going to ultimately be defined by what the Senators can do with those picks.

Like I said the other day, even without Tkachuk this is a team that still has high-level talent on its roster. Tim Stutzle is a better scorer than Tkachuk. Jake Sanderson is rapidly turning into a top-tier defenseman. Their overall defensive structure and possession-driving play was elite this past season.

There’s still SOMETHING here.

And now they have some newfound salary cap space and two extra first-round picks this year (as well as their own first-round pick at No. 32) to work with. They should be aggressively shopping the No. 9 and 25 picks as much as possible over the next few days to see if they can get immediate help.

There’s also the more subjective element of no longer having to deal with a captain that is counting down the days before he can leave, and not having to listen to his brother and dad talk shit about the way you’re using him.

It’s over. You can move on. Maybe you can position yourself to still be in good shape.

But that ultimately comes down to whether or not the front office can actually pull that off … and find somebody that wants to stay in Ottawa.

If they can’t, and just end up making the picks … it’s a little more underwhelming.

That path can change the grade a full letter grade in either direction.

Ottawa Grade: B-/C+ (for now)

This wasn't the only major move of the past week. Let’s talk about the trade that help preceded this move, Toronto taking an expensive gamble on Darren Raddysh, Seattle’s continue infatuation with middle-six forwards and San Jose making a solid under-the-radar move for a defenseman.

(I also wrote some stuff about this trade over at Yardbarker, including the trend of players forcing their way out of Canadian teams and onto American teams that win. You can check those out here and here)

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Jeremy Swayman did not get enough love in the NHL Awards voting this year.

I am not necessarily going to argue that he should have won the Vezina Trophy (as the league’s best goalie) and Hart Trophy (as league MVP), but he had strong arguments for both. If nothing else, he was probably deserving of more than two first-place Vezina votes from the NHL’s general managers, and was almost certainly deserving of more than just two fifth-place votes in the MVP race from the PHWA, even in a year where there were a lot of worthy contenders.

When it comes to the MVP, his teammate, David Pastrnak, was one of those worthy contenders and finished a few spots ahead of Swayman in the voting.

But with all due respect to Pastrnak, a truly wonderful and dominant player, Swayman should have been the higher of the two Bruins MVP candidates, and I am not sure it should have been close.

He was not only one of the best goalies in the league, he was arguably the single biggest reason an otherwise average Bruins team even made it into the playoffs and won as many games as it did.

As I’ve said many, many times before, if you are holding the MVP award to the “value” standard, it should probably go to a goalie every year. And even if it doesn’t go to a goalie, goalies should be far more represented at the top of the voting because nobody, and no single position, impacts teams more over the course of a full season, both positively and negatively.

Swayman’s bounce-back year pretty much saved the Bruins season. This team still has a LOT of problems, and especially as it relates to its defensive play.

In the Patrice Bergeron-Zdeno Chara days the Bruins were one of the gold standards for shutdown defensive play, and were routinely one of the league’s toughest teams to generate offense against. As players like Bergeron, Chara and the rest of that core moved on and retired, the Bruins haven’t really been able to recapture that.

All you have to do is open the hood and look at the numbers beneath the surface to see just how impactful Swayman was, and how badly the team played around him defensively.

First, the Bruins’ 5-on-5 defensive numbers and ranks. All numbers are per 60 minutes of 5-on-5 play:

• Total shot attempts against: 59.8 (27th)

• Shots on goal against: 27.2 (23rd)

• Scoring chances against: 27.2 (22nd)

• High-danger scoring chances against: 12.5 (28th)

• Expected goals against: 2.93 (30th)

• Overall expected goal share: 46.6% (28th)

Brutal numbers, and really no way to sugarcoat them. This was a bad defensive team. It was a bad team in terms of out-chancing its opponents and pushing play during 5-on-5 play. It was a bad team in terms of suppressing chances against.

No playoff team had a worse expected goal share than the Bruins.

They were one of only two teams that ranked lower than 18th in the league in expected goal share that actually made the playoffs (the Montreal Canadiens at 23rd were the other).

The play of Swayman is what allowed them to overcome all of that.

Thanks to his .907 all-situations save percentage he saved 18.2 goals above average, the seventh-best mark in the league.

His 28.8 goals saved above expected (via MoneyPuck) was the second-highest mark in the league, trailing only the 29.3 goals saved above expected from Washington Capitals goalie Logan Thompson.

Add 29 more goals to the Bruins goals against total and they go from 14th in the NHL to 28th. Hell, add just 10 more goals against and they go from 14th to 23rd.

For a team that played 38 one-goal games, and went 20-8-10 in those games, those saved goals on the fringes almost certainly added up in a big way.

Without Swayman playing the way he does, this team does not likely sniff the playoffs.

And that’s an easy thing to say because we saw it play out a year ago.

After holding out throughout the 2024-25 preseason and training camp and eventually signing an eight-year contract that made him one of the highest-paid goalies in the league, Swayman never really found his game and had one of the worst seasons of his career. It was an important year for him not only because of the contract and the tumultuous negotiation that preceded it, but also because it was his first full season as the unquestioned starting goalie in Boston.

There was no more tandem with Linus Ullmark.

No more split net.

No more favorable matchups or rest throughout the season.

It was all on Swayman, and initially it did not go well. Part of that may have been the adjustment from platoon starter to full-time starter, and part of it may have been the fact he missed training camp and the preseason. But the end result was a season where he finished with an .892 save percentage and was minus-9.1 in goals saved above expected.

The Bruins were tied for the worst record in the Eastern Conference and finished 26th in the league in goals against. And that was with Pastrnak having a 43-goal, 106-point season.

The shift from the 2024-25 Swayman performance, to this season’s performance, was a 37-goal shift in goals saved above expected.

Think that wasn’t worth a few extra wins and a few extra points in the standings?

It is the sort of thing that presents a good news/bad news scenario for the Bruins going into the offseason.

The good news? They have a goalie that can elevate them, change games and carry the team when the rest of it is not working.

The bad news? Teams with that level of goaltending have a tendency to ignore problems that are lurking beneath the surface because they are either not paying attention to them, or just put too much trust and faith in the goalie. It rarely works.

The Bruins can not allow that to happen.

Let’s talk about that a little more, as well as everything that went right and wrong for the 2025-26 Bruins.

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What went right this season

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There might not have been a bigger sleeper team entering the 2025-26 Stanley Cup Playoffs than the Ottawa Senators.

If there was a dark horse team to be picked in the Eastern Conference, and one that could have pulled off an early upset and made a run, Ottawa was probably the sexiest pick in that regard.

It was not hard to see why.

They were the “hot” team that was “peaking at the right time” going into the playoffs, owning a 21-6-4 record over their final 31 games, the second-best mark in the NHL over that stretch run. The results were outstanding, as was the process behind it. They were playing lockdown defense, allowing just 2.37 expected goals per 60 minutes of 5-on-5 play (fourth best in the league), had the third-best expected goal share (behind only Vegas and Colorado) during that stretch and just seemed to be clicking on all cylinders.

It seemed like a team capable of making some real noise.

Maybe with a different first-round opponent they would have.

But when the playoffs actually began, they ran into a Carolina Hurricanes buzzsaw that swept them in four games, despite starting goalie Linus Ullmark owning a .932 save percentage in the series and allowing just nine goals. It was a testament to how good that Hurricanes team was (and is), and it should have been a wake-up call to everybody else in the league that it was going to be their year.

All of this leaves Ottawa with a few big questions to ponder going into this offseason.

1. Were they a good team and borderline contender that just simply ran into a bad matchup and played a bad four games?

2. Or was that “bad matchup” just an indicator of how far away they still are from being a serious Stanley Cup contender?

It was probably a little bit of both, but I would be at least a little concerned about question No. 2.

But there is another question that is going to need to be settled in the coming months and years regarding one of their top players.

What, exactly, is the future of Brady Tkachuk, and what is his future with the team?

And more importantly, what SHOULD it be?

And what role can he play in helping them make the improvements they need on the roster?

On an individual level there was probably not a single player that underwhelmed in that playoff series more than he did. His most impactful moment was a fight off the opening face-off of the series with Hurricanes captain Jordan Staal, and he then proceeded to be a non-factor the rest of the way. At least as it relates to the scoreboard.

Zero points.

A couple of truly bad penalties.

Outscored 3-0 when on the ice during 5-on-5 play.

No real tangible impact.

To be fair, there was also probably some element of small sample size noise and bad luck to it. He was, after all, among the Senators’ leaders in individual scoring chance and expected goals created, posting numbers that were very close to his regular season rates.

Sometimes star players go quiet for a few games in the playoffs, and that is where it becomes essential for your team to have the scoring depth to help make up for it to buy the star players more time.

But the penalties, at times out-of-control temper, and overall bad vibes were all concerning developments. He almost seemed to be too interested in trying to play like a caricatured version of “Brady Tkachuk” instead of just playing good, winning hockey. The fight off the opening face-off just seemed like a desperate attempt to replicate that 4 Nations game from a couple of years ago.

It didn’t work here.

None of it worked.

Tkachuk’s name had already been surfacing in trade speculation for the better part of the past year due to his contract (which has two years remaining) and questions about his willingness to re-sign with the team. To this point Tkachuk has remained firmly committed to the Senators with all of his public comments.

He also now has a no-movement clause and would need to okay any trade.

But with speculation flying about more players around the league potentially requesting trades this offseason, and the Senators coming off another short spring, it’s worth wondering if he might still end up being one of the players that wants a fresh start.

Especially after that podcast incident earlier this season with his brother and dad complaining about his lack of ice-time.

Potential hot take alert: I am not sure that would be the worst thing in the world for the Senators.

It’s not that I don’t like Tkachuk as a player. It’s not that he doesn’t have value. He is an objectively excellent hockey player that is probably one shooting percentage binge away from scoring 40 goals (or more) in a season. It could absolutely happen. He does do a lot of really good and outstanding things on the ice.

In most cases I don’t really buy into the “think of what you could get for this guy?” narratives. Generally speaking, I think teams should do everything they can to keep their cornerstone, franchise players, especially when they are in the prime of their careers.

But I am not sure he is that type of foundational, cornerstone player, even if he is a really good and really important player.

Even if you believe that he IS that type of player, I think there are some exceptions that can and should be made in this discussion.

Those exceptions:

• If the team believes, or knows, there is little chance of that player re-signing.

Or…

• If that player’s perceived value around the league begins to exceed their actual on-ice value.

The first point remains to be seen.

I think there might be something worth debating when it comes to the second point, especially when Tkachuk might not even be the best overall player on this particular Ottawa team.

(That, again, doesn’t mean he’s bad or not valuable.)

If I am Ottawa, I am looking at the fact that the Tkachuk name carries a ton of cache in the sport right now. Every time Brady or his brother, Matthew, do anything on the ice it gets hockey people into a lather and forces them to lose their collective minds whether it’s a meaningful contribution or not.

There is no shortage of general managers in the NHL that would crawl across hot coals and probably give up a family member to acquire one of these guys for their team.

The thing is, for as good as Brady is, he’s not Matthew. And if there is any lingering doubt about his willingness to stay in Ottawa beyond the next two years, or if he comes to you and asks to move on, you should be trying to capitalize on every other team’s desperation to get a player like him.

Don’t force a trade.

Don’t trade for the sake of trading.

But keep an open mind.

Let’s talk about that a little more, and everything that went right and wrong for the Senators this season.

What went right this season

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They busted a lot of narratives about how you have to win and how you have to build a winner, and also showed there is a path forward for teams that are not consistently picking at the top of the draft or going through a full-scale “tanking” rebuild.

You do need to draft well in other areas.

You do need to develop your players well, even if it’s just to give you more trade assets to get the players you ultimately win with.

You do need to collect and stockpile a lot of assets.

You do need to be smart with your talent evaluation and salary cap management.

Every team needs to do that to some degree. That is not unique here.

But you also need to be fearless in your aggressiveness and not be afraid to take a chance or make a mistake.

You have to be bold and not really care what outside voices think.

The latter two areas are where Carolina really shined. It all traces back to one move that set off a chain reaction of corresponding moves that ultimately turned the Hurricanes into a champion.

It may not have been the way they originally drew it up, and it may not have been the original plan, but being willing to adapt is also a necessity.

Not every team or management group has that sort of confidence or vision.

This Hurricanes roster did not have a true “superstar” anywhere on it, at least not in the traditional sense of a top-10 or-15 scorer in the NHL.

What they had instead was the deepest, most well-balanced roster in the league that had zero weaknesses that could be exploited. No defense pairing was vulnerable. No forward line was a liability. They had multiple goalies they could trust and were not afraid to play.

This isn’t to say they didn’t have high-end players. Because they do. And they have a lot of them. There just wasn’t a McDavid, Crosby, Ovechkin or Kucherov level scorer or name here. Even the Vegas team they beat in the Stanley Cup Final had the more individual star power at the top of the lineup in Jack Eichel and Mitch Marner.

But there was no line or pairing in Carolina that offered any opponent a break during a 60-minute game or seven-game series.

A lot of times in the playoffs, success (and failure) is not necessarily determined by what you have and what you do well, but instead by what can be exploited and what will hold you back. In a best-of-seven series teams and coaches are scouting harder and more in-depth than they do for run-of-the-mill regular season games, and they are going to find something that will expose itself and become a liability over seven games.

There was nothing here to be exposed. Nothing to be exploited. They just steamrolled over every team they faced and nobody had an answer for any of it. That is a testament not only to the players and head coach Rod Brind’Amour for the system they implemented and played, but also the front office for constructing the team in the manner in which it did.

And I am still fascinated by the way this team was constructed.

We have talked about playoff team roster construction in this space a lot this postseason, and now that we have the championship team it is worth looking at again.

They didn’t “tank” in the traditional sense, even going back to the years prior to this run starting. They were very much a “mushy middle” team for a few years, and when you look at the playoff roster there was only one player on the team that Carolina itself selected with a top-five pick — Andrei Svechnikov at No. 2 overall in 2018.

And even in that instance, it wasn’t the result of a full-scale tank or massive teardown. They finished with the 11th-worst record in the NHL that season (mushy middle) and simply had a tremendous amount of lottery luck on their side to move up nine spots.

Luck is a massive part of a championship team, and it comes in a lot of different forms. Sometimes it is the bounce of a puck during a game. Sometimes it is the bounce of a lottery ball.

Some of the best players on the roster came from the second-round (or later), and were the result of strong scouting, even better player development and great coaching.

They complemented that core group with smart free agent signings that did not break the budget or carry bad contracts, and perhaps most importantly, they became extremely aggressive in recent years when it came to trades.

The most important of those trade sequences came in the middle of the 2024-25 season when they acquired Mikko Rantanen from the Colorado Avalanche, and then shockingly turned around and traded him 13 games later.

When the initial trade was made there was a belief that the presence of Rantanen was going to be the move that put them over the top and get them a championship.

In a very indirect way it sort of was … but only because it gave them Rantanen to use as a trade chip.

Between 2018-19 and 2024-25, the Hurricanes were objectively one of the most successful organizations in the NHL. Their regular season success was nearly unmatched. They routinely advanced beyond the first round of the playoffs and found themselves playing in the second and third rounds. But while they kept getting to the front door of the Stanley Cup Final, they were never able to kick it in. There was always something holding them back. Every year that “something” always seemed to be a lack of goal-scoring in the later rounds against the small handful of teams in the league that were on their level.

They worked tirelessly to try and remedy that.

At the 2024 trade deadline they acquired pending unrestricted free agent Jake Guentzel from the Pittsburgh Penguins. He was a tremendous fit and delivered everything Carolina expected from him in his brief time with the team. But the Hurricanes still exited in the second round, and then watched as Guentzel turned down a long-term contract offer and eventually signed with the Tampa Bay Lightning.

It was a good swing, but it ultimately missed.

The next year they took another massive swing, with another pending unrestricted free agent, and acquired Rantanen from the Colorado Avalanche as part of a three-team trade.

Only this time they knew ahead of time that Rantanen was not going to re-sign. Rather than take one all-or-nothing run with him and risk losing him for nothing after the season, they decided to take the PR hit, re-trade him before the deadline, and get a massive haul back that directly led to them adding Logan Stankoven, K’Andre Miller and Nikolaj Ehlers on to the roster the following offseason.

It is one of the biggest factors that put them over the top and has also help set them up for what should be a run of success.

They may not have to wait another 20 years for their next championship.

Let’s talk about that, the aftermath of the trade, the roster construction in general and what lessons can be taken from how they did it all.

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Just about one week after Dylan Larkin’s trade request with the Detroit Red Wings became public, word has come out of Edmonton that veteran defenseman Darnell Nurse has also requested a fresh start.

This one is not as surprising, mostly because Edmonton would almost certainly like a trade as well.

But what exactly is the market for him going to be?

And what sort of trade are we looking at here?

Is there an actual hockey trade to be made? Is Edmonton going to have to eat some of his remaining salary? Is it an exchange of bad contracts? Is Edmonton going to have to give up something of value to entice another team to take him and his contract?

Are you tired of all of these questions?

I can see all of these situations being completely within reason.

Nurse still has four years remaining on an eight-year, $74 million contract extension that began with the 2023-24 season. That comes with a $9.25 million salary cap number per year, which accounted for more than 11 percent of the salary cap the year he signed it. That is a lot. It is excessive given the player he has been and currently is.

He capitalized on one big breakout year that was perfectly timed for a contract negotiation, and then never really built on it. If anything, he regressed.

On one hand, the biggest issue with his contract is that it’s just simply been a bad value, especially under what was a mostly stagnant salary cap that was not increasing on a year-by-year basis. He was being paid like an elite defenseman when he was not really ever an elite defenseman.

On the other hand, he isn’t necessarily a BAD player that has no on-ice value. He’s an acceptable NHL player that, again, has simply had a bad contract.

But is there enough there for another team to want to take a chance on him?

Some things to potentially consider here:

• With the salary cap rapidly increasing in the coming years, we need to recalibrate what contracts look like and what good and bad salary cap numbers actually are. A $9.25 million salary cap number in 2026-27 is not even close to the same thing as it was during the 2023-24 or 2024-25 seasons. Just consider the percentage of the cap his contract will be over the next two years:

• 2026-27: $104 million cap — 8.8 percent

• 2027-28: $113 million cap — 8.1 percent

• Assuming the cap keeps increasing, the 2028-29 percentage will be starting with a seven.

• If Nurse had signed a contract for 8.1 percent of the cap in 2023-24 his salary cap number would have been about $6.7 million per year. We probably would have looked at him a LOT differently in recent years if he were making something like THAT, as opposed to 10 or 11 percent of the cap.

• We are also looking at an offseason where somebody like Darren Raddysh, an extremely boom-or-bust player on the free agent market, might be looking at a contract in the $10 million per year range (or higher depending on the bidding wars). Do you feel better about THAT investment? (I do not.) Teams have salary cap space, contract values are changing under the rising cap, and that money has to be spent on SOMEBODY.

• Nurse can still provide some offense. His underlying numbers from an expected goal perspective are passable and usually above 50 percent. The biggest red flag number is the goal-differential. I would wager at least some of that comes from Edmonton’s consistently bad goaltending, overall poor 5-on-5 play, and the lack of a regular quality defense partner for him. When it comes to the latter point, his most common defense partners the past three years during 5-on-5 play have been Cody Ceci and Troy Stecher. That’s not ideal for anybody.

• Basically, I think you’re looking at a passable top-four player with a top-pairing contract. You can work with that on a short-term basis. That is the good news.

• The bad news, aside from that being a less-than-ideal investment, is the amount of term still remaining on the contract, as well as his age. He is going to be 31 years old this season with a contract that is going to run through his age 35 season. While he might still be playable now in the right role, it is not a stretch to suggest that his best hockey, such as it was, is already in the rear-view mirror. How is he going to age over the remainder of that term? Will you still get something close to a return on that investment? If we were talking about a one-or two-year commitment I think the trade discussion is a lot easier. But four years of that, at this age, and at this stage of his career? That becomes a harder sell for a prospective team. That is where you might need to start talking about retained salary or Edmonton potentially having to give up a sweetener to take him.

There are a lot of layers to this, and it creates a wildly uncertain trade market.

There are a couple of different directions this can go, and the wild-card in all of this is the guy making the decision for Edmonton — general manager Stan Bowman — has an absolutely awful track record in dealing with potentially problematic contracts.

Sometimes making a good trade isn’t necessarily about finding the right player or even having the right talent evaluation.

Sometimes it’s simply about finding the right sucker to take advantage of.

Bowman is often times that sucker.

Let’s talk about that, as well as some thoughts on the NHL’s Award winners and the voting behind them. This award season continued the NHL’s mildly annoying trend of confusing single-season awards with career achievement awards.

It happened again.

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The NHL’s head-coaching recycling program, as well as the Los Angeles Kings head-coaching carousel, continued to roll on this week when they hired Peter Laviolette to replace D.J. Smith behind the bench.

Smith took over on an interim basis late in the season when the Kings fired Jim Hiller, less than two years after he was hired to replaced Todd McLellan.

That means when Laviolette coaches his first game next season that will be four different head coaches since the start of the 2023-24 season.

The results have not really changed through any of it, and it’s hard to imagine them changing much with Laviolette.

That’s not necessarily a knock on Laviolette. He’s a fine coach. He’s had a lot of success in the NHL, winning a Stanley Cup with Carolina and taking two other teams (the Philadelphia Flyers and Nashville Predators) to the Stanley Cup Final. He’s climbed the league’s all-time wins leaderboard and has made his fair share of playoff appearances with his six previous teams (yes, the Kings will be his seventh-different head-coaching job. That is 22 percent of the league).

As far as the NHL’s recycling bin goes, you could certainly do worse. It’s not like you’re doing something idiotic and shameful like, say, trying to hire Mike Babcock in 2026.

It’s just not exciting.

It doesn’t move the needle.

It doesn’t generate a buzz.

It’s like the Pittsburgh Steelers hiring Mike McCarthy.

Yeah, it’s a big name that people know and you’ll probably be somewhat competitive, but you’re not really going anywhere.

Which pretty much describes the current state of the Kings beyond the head coach.

The bigger problem for the Kings is the organization simply has no juice of any kind at the moment. They came out of their rebuild sooner than anticipated, and they have made the playoffs five years in a row. That’s something. But they have yet to advance beyond the first round in that time, and they have run into the same problems that other rebuilding teams have experienced — not all of their best young prospects or players panned out as they hoped.

Some did. But not enough, and not enough of them.

Not only is the NHL team lacking in impact players as a result, their prospect pool is alarmingly thin and lacking in high-ceiling players.

All of that has lowered the ceiling for what the team can do and how far it can go.

When it comes to the playoff losses, they had four in a row to the Edmonton Oilers between 2022 and 2025. They followed it up this year by barely sneaking into the playoffs and getting swept in four games by the Colorado Avalanche, representing a pretty big step backwards for the organization in its first year under the leadership of general manager Ken Holland.

You can also put together a pretty compelling argument that they were one of the worst playoff teams of the salary cap era.

• They won just 35 games overall.

• Their 22 regulation wins were tied for the second-fewest in the entire NHL, ahead of only the Vancouver Canucks and tied with the Chicago Blackhawks.

• Their minus-22 goal differential was the worst among this year’s playoff teams and one of the worst marks of any playoff team in the salary cap era.

Making matters worse, Anze Kopitar is retiring, their most dynamic offensive player (Artemi Panarin) is going to be 35 years old when this season begins, and the roster is still loaded with questions when it comes to its overall depth.

It’s as middle-of-the-road as a team can be.

It’s going to take some creativity to get out of that.

But is that something the current management team has? The early indications are not promising.

Let’s get a little more into that, as well as an additional recap to the 2025-26 season.

What went right this season

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• The franchise now has the longest active playoff drought in the NHL at 10 seasons.

• He has been the general manager for seven of those seasons.

• The past few seasons have seen the Red Wings look to be on a solid playoff footing in the second half only to watch as the team completely melted down in the stretch run.

• The 2025-26 season was arguably the worst of those meltdowns. On Jan. 24, with only 29 games to play in the regular season, the Red Wings were in first place in the Atlantic Division, tied for the most points in the Eastern Conference, and were 12 points clear of the conference’s non-playoff teams. It should have been nearly impossible for a team in that position to miss the playoffs. They not only missed the playoffs, they finished in sixth-place in the Atlantic Division and were seven points behind the two wild-card teams. They were 14 points behind the third-place team in the Atlantic Division.

If the Red Wings were treating Yzerman like a normal general manager and not a franchise icon that everybody wants to love and believe in, his seat would not only be scorching hot, he probably would have already been fired. If not prior to the 2025-26 season, then certainly after it.

But he is still in the general manager’s chair, and he seems to be pretty secure in it.

Even so, it’s really time to poop or get off the pot here. It was already going to be a complicated offseason. It became even more complicated this past week when Dylan Larkin, the team’s captain and longest-tenured player, requested a trade out of Detroit.

It’s a devastating blow to the Red Wings and the Yzer-plan.

And while it’s certainly a surprise, it’s not really shocking.

Consider it from Larkin’s perspective. He’s spent more than a decade playing with one team and has only appeared in five playoff games, all of which came during his rookie 11 years ago.

He was already mad after the 2024-25 season when he felt Yzerman and the Red Wings front office didn’t do enough to help the team at the trade deadline.

Since then, Larkin got a taste of winning as a part of the United States Gold Medal Olympic team, got a chance to have teammates that have won big, and then returned to the grim reality that has been the Red Wings situation and watched as the team (including himself at times) wilted down the stretch. Again.

At some point a soon-to-be 30-year-old veteran is going to want to do something to change his situation if the situation around him is not going to change.

I get that.

On some level (emphasis on some), I can respect it. In fact, I do respect it. People want to win.

That’s where the trade request comes in, and it’s a damning indictment of what the Red Wings have become under Yzerman’s watch. How do you look at this situation as Red Wings ownership and see your longest-tenured player, your captain, and a player that is from Michigan demand a trade away from your team because he feels he can’t win there and seemingly doesn’t see eye-to-eye with your general manager?

It’s brutal.

While there are some good players here, this team is not close to contending given some of the major holes that still exist.

This can’t be what anybody signed up for when Yzerman was hired.

That alone is a big enough headache.

But then came the report on Monday that Larkin, who has full no-trade protections in his contract and can dictate where he goes, has submitted a three-team list to the Red Wings on acceptable teams.

Long-time Red Wings writer Helene St. James speculates that list includes the Vegas Golden Knights, Minnesota Wild and Florida Panthers.

• Three teams that should be contenders next season.

• Three teams that have players Larkin won with as a member of Team USA.

• Three teams where he would not have to be the focal point or do the heavy lifting.

• Two teams in states without state income tax.

Assuming those are the three teams, it would put Yzerman in an almost impossible spot, and one that could result in a very lengthy and messy resolution.

It’s also not the first time he has faced a situation like this.

So let’s talk about his options, how he might play it, how he has played it in the past, and what this says about everybody involved.

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The Nashville Predators are the last of the non-playoff teams in this series, and it just so happened that by the time I got to them they were hiring a new general manager.

So that makes things easy here.

The Predators announced on Tuesday that they were prying Chris MacFarland out of the Colorado Avalanche organization, ending a month’s long search for their general manager position.

The Predators job has been up for grabs since the middle of the 2025-26 regular season when Barry Trotz announced that he would be stepping down from the role.

It is a decision that is probably for the best.

While Trotz has a fantastic resume as a head coach, he did not seem to transition well into a front office role and left the Predators in a really awkward situation for his replacement.

MacFarland brings a strong management resume with him into Nashville, having helped build a powerhouse Colorado team and serving as its general manager through this year’s Presidents’ Trophy (and Western Conference Finals run) season. While there is a lot to like about this job and opportunity, he is still going to have a tough task in front of him. The first step is going to be figuring out which direction to take his new organization.

The past two years have seen the Predators become one of the most objectively “mid” teams in the league.

They finished the 2025-26 season with 86 points, having missed the playoffs by four points in a watered-down Western Conference.

Their overall record in the league? 23rd.

Their overall goal-differential? 22nd.

Their 5-on-5 goal-differential? 27th.

Their 5-on-5 expected goal share? 19th.

It was only slightly better than their 2024-25 performance where they ranked 30th in the league standings, 30th in goal-differential, 32nd in 5-on-5 goal differential and 14th in expected goal share.

It’s just not great. Not awful. But definitely not great.

It’s also a team that has a shockingly older core. Their average age was the seventh-oldest in the league this past season, while eight of their top-10 scorers were over the age of 30. That includes five players who were over the age of 34.

Also not great for a team that has missed the playoffs two years in a row and three of the past four.

But Nashville is also in a pretty intriguing situation, especially for a new general manager.

While the core of the roster is older and on the wrong side of 30, the Predators do have a deep farm system with a couple of potential high-end players. Brady Martin, the No. 5 overall pick in 2025, and Matthew Wood, the No. 15 pick from 2023, are at the top of that list. Both players saw some NHL action this season, with Wood scoring 17 goals as a 20-year-old. They also have Ryker Lee, Yegor Surin and Cameron Reid starting to knock on the door.

Along with that, Nashville enters the offseason with $27 million in salary cap space and a massive pile of draft assets that includes multiple picks in the second, third and fourth rounds in each of the next three drafts. There is a lot you can do with that sort of draft capital and salary cap space, not to mention the prospect pool.

But MacFarland’s first big task is going to simply be determining what direction he wants to take this team.

Is there something he can win with here?

Does he have a potential star in his farm system that can be “the guy” in the near-future?

Does he need to tear it all down to the ground and begin a full-scale rebuild? If he decides to go in that direction, he still has some pretty significant veteran pieces that should have some serious trade value, especially going into an offseason where the free agent pool is grim and there are not many other teams looking to sell.

There would be a massive market for Ryan O’Reilly given his production, two-way play and cheap contract.

Filip Forsberg and Steven Stamkos are coming off 40-goal seasons, with Forsberg continuing to be one of the top goal-scorers in the league.

Roman Josi can still provide some big offense from the blue line when healthy.

Trotz probably would have kept trying to win with these guys.

MacFarland may not be as optimistic about that and may see an opportunity to begin building something with a clean slate.

We will learn a lot about all of this in the coming weeks and months.

Let’s talk a little more about that, as well as the 2025-26 season and what went right, and what went wrong.

What went right this season

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The early 1990s unleashed a wave of kid-centric baseball movies that touched on a lot of different emotions.

Angels In The Outfield tried to make you believe in something.

The Sandlot was a nostalgia bomb that wanted to take you back to a simpler time in your life.

Rookie of the Year was just an absurd fantasy about an uncoordinated, untalented dork-ass kid that broke his arm and, somehow in his recovery, gained the ability to throw fastballs that no Major League player could touch.

And then there was Little Big League.

Little Big League was not only the best of this group of movies, it is also, in my completely unironic opinion, one of the best baseball movies ever made.

It is a baseball movie masterpiece.

It touches on all of the elements that the other movies focused on, but it also delivered a slightly more believable plot (a kid has a better chance at successfully managing a Major League Baseball team than he does playing for one) and had some of the best baseball-playing scenes in any baseball movie I have ever seen. The latter point was primarily because they focused their casting on people that could actually play baseball, and in many cases they went with actual baseball players. Former Pittsburgh Pirates shortstop Kevin Elster was one of them.

Aside from the somewhat sensible plot, as well as the stunning visuals, it also featured some of the best baseball discussion and baseball writing that has appeared on the big screen. The situations and tendencies scene was 25 years ahead of its time, and a scene that I still go back to every time a team tries to bunt with one of its best hitters.

But for today’s purposes I am going to focus on a different scene in that movie.

It was when kid-manager Billy Haywood has to deal with disgruntled pitcher Mike McGreevey.

(I’M GOING SOMEWHERE WITH THIS, STICK WITH ME)

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McGreevey is unhappy with his role playing on a team managed by a 12-year-old, and is plotting not only his exit from the Twins, but also sabotaging the season to embarrass Haywood into quitting.

When the pitching coach, Mac, threatens to bench McGreevey for his attitude and poor play, Haywood steps in and says no, we’re going to pitch you when its your turn, and you’re going to take the mound and do your job.

McGreevey, in his normal foul mood, says he might “forget” some of the scouting reports and not make his best pitches, so it might not be a good idea to play him.

It is at that point that Haywood asks Mac, “Hey Mac, what’s the going rate for absent-minded pitchers that can’t get anybody out?”

That served as a wake-up call to McGreevey, who promptly put his bullshit aside, instantly became a team-player again, and started getting people out.

I was thinking about this scene this week as the Pirates had to figure out how to deal with an obviously disgruntled Carmen Mlodzinski.

Mlodzinski was the odd-man out in the Pirate rotation when Jared Jones made his return, getting sent back to his previous role in the bullpen. The Pirates made this move despite the fact Mlodzinski has exceeded expectations this season, and despite the fact Bubba Chandler has struggled to find any sort of consistency and produce any sort of positive result.

If we are just looking at this strictly from a results oriented angle, Chandler would have been the guy to go.

He was not.

Mlodzinski was clearly frustrated over the move, giving a rather bizarre answer the day the move was announced, and then informing the Pirates he was not ready to pitch in his new role on Sunday. That led to the Pirates placing him on the restricted list, and both general manager Ben Cherington and manager Don Kelly trying to polish the turd and paint Mlodzinski in the best possible light without actually saying what everybody already knew — this guy’s being a giant diaper baby and didn’t want to pitch.

That’s what they COULD have said.

But they didn’t.

They were more professional about it.

I understand every layer of this.

• I understand why the Pirates want Jones back in the rotation. He is coming back from surgery, is a starter by trade, has a starter’s arsenal of pitches, had a strong rookie year with flashes of dominance, and has some real long-term value as a starter. It makes sense to build him back up as a starter.

• I understand why they want to keep Chandler in the rotation despite his inconsistencies and lack of results. Like Jones, he has a starter’s arsenal of pitches and electric stuff. The upside of those two guys is extremely high, and you want them to figure it out. You need them to figure it out. In Chandler’s case, there also wasn’t really a good option. Keeping him in the rotation is a risk. His lack of control makes him a terrible option for the bullpen. Going to Triple-A might help him produce better results, but it might not fix his actual issues. Triple-A hitters will chase his stuff out of the zone and he will miss bats. But it may not be in a good way.

• I understand why they want Mlodzinski in the bullpen. The bullpen has been a mess all season, and despite his strong start Mlodzinski’s best (and most valuable) place is almost certainly in a relief role. He’s pitched better in that role over his career, he struggles to get through opposing lineups a second or third time, and his fielding independent pitching metrics are … concerning.

• I also understand why he is mad about all of this. He sees himself as a starter. He has pitched well. There is in his mind (I am guessing) a significant financial advantage to being a starter versus a reliever. I get it. I am not mad about him being mad. He should be mad. He should be disappointed. He should be frustrated. You don’t get to the highest level of professional sports without having that sort of mindset and competitive drive. All understandable.

What I DON’T understand, is doing what he did on Sunday.

It was pretty clear the Pirates wanted him to piggyback off of Braxton Ashcraft’s start to start limiting Ashcraft’s innings a little bit. It was a solid plan. And then Mlodzinski informed the Pirates he was not ready to pitch in that role, despite having not pitched in a game since Monday.

There’s only one reason why a guy would be put on the restricted list for not being ready to pitch after five days of rest.

It’s because he didn’t want to pitch.

That’s when you go from being legitimately disappointed (and maybe even disgruntled) to a potential problem.

That’s when you’re not just sticking it to the decision-makers, you’re also sticking it to the other 25 guys in your locker room that had nothing to do with the decision being made.

The thing about this situation is Mlodzinski is still going to have opportunities to prove his worth and pitch in a LOT of big innings.

He is still going to have opportunities to make spot starts.

He is still going to get a lot of bulk innings where he can show that he is potentially more than just a reliever.

When you look at the current state of the Pirates rotation, both Mlodzinski and Wilber Dotel are going to become extremely important players for the Pirates in that bulk role.

• You have one guy in Jones that is coming back from major surgery and is pitching big league games for the first time in a year-and-a-half. He is not only going to have some short outings due to pitch and innings limits, he is also going to have some starts like his debut game this year where he struggles.

• You have another guy in Ashcraft that, for as dominant as he has been, is going to see some of his innings cut down here at some point to keep him on a more reasonable trajectory in terms of workload.

• You have another guy in Chandler that is just wildly hit-and-miss.

There are going to be opportunities for both him and Dotel to pitch, and pitch a lot.

And do you know what teams, both the Pirates and elsewhere, are going to value?

A guy that demonstrates he can effectively pitch in a lot of different roles and situations just like that.

Do you know what is going to be a giant red flag for teams?

Whatever it is Mlodzinski did this week.

The role of pitchers is rapidly evolving into the point where there is a somewhat blurred line between what a starter and reliever even is anymore. I mean, yes, the guy that starts the game is “the starter,” but openers and bullpen games and bulk relief roles are becoming more and more common. We are at a point now where starters rarely go beyond five or six innings. We are at a point where high-leverage relievers are extraordinarily valued. We are at a point where guys coming out of the bullpen are relied on for multiple innings.

Hell, look at a guy like former Pirates relief pitcher Clay Holmes. He spent years pitching out of the Pirates and Yankees bullpens, and eventually become so effective in that role that the New York Mets paid him a ton of money to become a starter.

Over the next few months Mlodzinski is going to have ample opportunity to pitch multiple inning stretches and go three, four or five innings in a lot of games.

Just pitch well. Pitch well in your role, whatever it is. People will see it. People will value it. The opportunities that he is looking for will still be there for him in terms of role and finances in the future if he pitches well.

Nobody’s going to value the guy that quits on his team.

He has a chance to make everybody forget about this by doing his job. But it’s on him to actually do it.

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Going to baseball games is always going to be my happy place. There’s just nothing better in Adam Gretz’s world than a comfortable spring or summer night, having a beer, wandering around a stadium and watching baseball. It’s just perfect. I especially like when it involves me meeting other people that enjoy the same thing.

A couple of weeks ago when the Pirates were hosting the Philadelphia Phillies, I encountered three guys in LSU gear that were out in the left field standing room area watching LSU-product Paul Skenes pitch.

I jokingly looked at them and asked, “are you guys from Louisiana?”

They immediately answered in the most Cajun accents that you could imagine and began immediately talking my ear off. They were in town for business and just happened to see that not only were the Pirates home, but that Skenes was also pitching.

We spent four innings talking about baseball and even discussed former Pirates second baseman and LSU legend Warren Morris, which is a player I had not thought about in at least 25 years. It was a true “remember some guys” moment, and it made the experience that much more fun.

At one point they invited me down to the Bayou and told me to come to a night LSU football game and they’ll feed me.

At the next home game, an emphatic 12-1 win over the Chicago Cubs, an older gentleman wearing a white jersey that simply said “Ballparks” across the front set up shop at a table in the concourse behind third base with a beer and two hot dogs. I noticed his jersey was covered in team patches, and on the back he had the No. 30 with “Chasing” in the nameplate. It was obvious he is counting down all 30 ballparks across Major League Baseball.

I also knew I had to ask him what his favorite was.

He did not hesitate to answer that it was Petco Park in San Diego, before adding “but fuck those guys, I’m a Dodgers fan.” He then begrudgingly told me that San Francisco was his second favorite, before again adding “but fuck those guys otherwise.”

His name is Mark, and he was visiting the east coast and hitting up a bunch of stadiums. He told me he was in Toronto over the weekend, made the trip down to Pittsburgh for the Tuesday night game against the Cubs, was driving up to Cleveland the next morning and then eventually making his way to Detroit.

He was also trying to figure out which ballpark had the best hot dog (to the surprise of no one that has had a PNC Park hot dog …. it did not score well).

I was living vicariously through him at the moment, and then told him about my baseball trip adventures, shared my favorites, and told him about how I have spent years putting a perpetual jinx on Shohei Ohtani every time I have gone to watch him play. He politely asked that I stay away when the Dodgers visit next week (I will do no such thing).

I have found over the years in my baseball park travels that if you see a person walking around the stadium in a random jersey that doesn’t involve any of the team’s playing, it’s generally a safe bet to strike up a conversation with them. They usually welcome it. They are not only the type of person that is almost certainly a true baseball psycho that just wants to talk baseball, but they are also probably wearing that random jersey because they WANT the attention and WANT somebody to mention it.

That’s why my Montreal Expos T-shirt is generally my “I am a random fan at a neutral ballpark” attire.

It always generates a discussion. It is usually enjoyable.

This type of thing just doesn’t really happen at other sporting events. Usually because other games don’t present the type of atmosphere where there is so much down time, or an atmosphere that is conducive to just wandering around.

This is also why I love going to baseball games even when your team’s ownership has been a perpetual stain on the sport. Yeah, I get not wanting to support them or give them your money. But you can’t let some shithead billionaire rob you of the things you love. You have to find some happiness.

Go to a baseball game. Talk to a guy in a Kansas City Royals jersey while you’re watching a Yankees-Orioles game. It will probably be fun.

The introduction of the ABS challenge system is the first step toward fully automated strike zones.

From a practical standpoint, I could take it or leave it.

I like accuracy.

But I can also deal with a little bit of the human element here.

Do it. Don’t do it. Just pick a lane and go with it.

Still, there is one aspect of a fully automated strike zone that is wildly appealing to me, and it would be the end of pitch-framing as we know it.

I think my oldest man take on baseball right now is that I absolutely hate the entire idea of pitch-framing, and everything that goes into the practice of it.

I am tired of watching catchers jerk their mitt halfway across the strike zone to try and full an umpire.

I am tired of the massive increase in catcher’s interference calls that are a direct result of catchers positioning themselves closer to the plate in order to try and steal more strikes.

I am tired of that keeping badly inferior hitters in the lineup.

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Some quick rapid takes around the league.

• Credit to Ben Cherington where it is due, but the Spencer Horwitz trade is looking like a steal. Horwitz is the definition of “professional hitter.” More walks than strike outs. Showing power. Getting on base. He is built for PNC Park.

• After having the worst offense in the Major Leagues a year ago, with only one above average hitter (Horwitz), the Pirates now have a top-five offense in runs scored. A year ago Horwitz was the only player with an OPS+ over 100 (100 being a league average hitter), and they didn’t have anybody over 120. Entering play this week they have SEVEN players over 100, including five over 120 and four over 130. It is a legitimate, contending lineup. Horwitz? Been outstanding. Ryan O’Hearn? Outstanding. Brandon Lowe? Outstanding. Bryan Reynolds? Underrated season and mostly outstanding. Oneil Cruz? Maybe not the superstar you wanted him to be, but still outstanding. Konnor Griffin is figuring it out. Nick Gonzales, even though I am not sold on him long-term, has been productive. It’s a good lineup. They still need some better bench options and depth, but the starters are fantastic.

• The National League Cy Young race is setting up to be tremendous. While I would anticipate Paul Skenes pitching his way back into the race, it is currently a three-pitcher race between Cristopher Sanchez (Philadelphia Phillies), Jacob Misiorowski (Milwaukee Brewers) and Ohtani (Dodgers). I am not sure I can confidently separate one of them from the other at this point. Sanchez has been especially dominant and is on one of the great all-time runs, having pitched 44 2/3 consecutive shutout innings.

• Speaking of Cy Young pitchers, it’s going to be maddening when the Detroit Tigers trade Tarik Skubal to the Dodgers. I mean, that’s where this is going to end up, right?

• When did Ben Rice become the better hitter in baseball? I don’t know if he will continue it, but right now he simply is.

• Not sure there is going to be a funnier moment this season than the Tarps Off dudes in St. Louis having their “overrated” chant at Pete Crow-Armstrong get thrown back in their faces. The home run was funny enough. The failed attempt at throwing the ball back onto the field was the icing on the cake.

• Not sure there is going to be a weirder injury this season than Toronto Blue Jays outfielder Jesus Sanchez leaving a game after being hit in the wrist by a ball thrown by a fan. It was reported that a young fan thought Sanchez wants to play catch with him during a stoppage, so the fan threw the ball to an unsuspecting Sanchez only to have it smack off his wrist and force him out of the game. The good news: not a major injury.

• The Chicago White Sox: American League Central Division champions? I am starting to buy it.

It was a controversial decision.

The argument against it was that you can’t go 10 days without playing a meaningful game, it would disrupt too much momentum, and they would come out flat in their playoff series against the Philadelphia Flyers. The thing is, they didn’t go 10 days without playing a meaningful game. They still played the three games, and while a lot of players sat for one or two of them, everybody played at some point. It didn’t matter. The debate still rolled on.

When they fell into a 3-0 series hole, the criticism and debate only increased.

But that’s ultimately not why the Penguins lost. They lost because they simply did not play well enough, lost their composure at times, and lost the goaltending battle early on. If anything, as the series progressed, the Penguins decision to rest people seemed to be (in my view) validated because they became the stronger team with each passing game. They were playing better. Philadelphia was wearing down. Had it not been for Flyers goalie Dan Vladar standing on his head in a 1-0 Game 6 overtime decision, they would have been playing a winner-take-all Game 7 in that series back in Pittsburgh.

This brings me to the Carolina Hurricanes, who are now one win away from reaching their first Stanley Cup Final since the 2005-06 season after taking a commanding 3-1 series lead against the Montreal Canadiens on Wednesday night.

The thing about the Hurricanes is they actually did go 10 days (12 to be exact) without playing a game (of any kind) coming into their Eastern Conference Final matchup. Not only did they sweep their first two opponents, Montreal had to play a second consecutive seven-game series, creating a wild disparity where the Hurricanes were going in having played the minimum number of games for a Conference Finalist (eight) and the Canadiens playing the maximum number of games for a Conference Finalist (14).

That meant a nearly two-week gap between games.

That meant a big discussion on what sort of impact the rest would have on them, if it would hurt them, if rust would break their momentum, and if that layoff was just too much.

Through four games they are answering all of those questions. Emphatically.

The rest mattered more.

And it wasn’t just about the rest. It was also about the fact they played so many fewer games than the Canadiens did going in. That six-game disparity going into the Conference Finals was the biggest disparity since the league went to the four, best-of-seven series format. I wrote about this briefly at YardBarker (you can go back to it here) but the basic, most important numbers were:

• Since 1990 no Conference Finals matchup had more than a four-game disparity in games played. There were two matchups that had a four-game gap.

• In both of those instances, the team that played fewer games won.

• There were eight matchups with at least a three-game gap.

• The team that played fewer games won seven of those series, and the only one that did NOT win was a Montreal Canadiens team that lost starting goalie Carey Price in the first game of the series to an injury. Had he been healthy, they very likely win that series as well.

• In 33 instances of a two-game gap, the team with fewer games played won 26 times.

There is a chicken or egg situation happening here in the sense that, did these teams win because they were more rested, or because they were simply better teams? Better teams will tend to win series, especially early in the playoffs, faster than other teams. The answer is probably somewhere in the middle and that both factors play a role.

Either way, Carolina is one win away from adding another checkmark into the “rest” column.

And while Carolina IS a better team, and even though this Montreal team is still a somewhat unfinished product as part of its rebuild, the gap wasn’t that big during the regular season. Montreal was able to hang with this team, winning all three regular season matchups, including two games in late March just before the start of the playoffs.

But right now, in this series, there is a clear gap starting to surface, and the fact Carolina came into this thing completely fresh, healthy and rested is only adding to it.

Carolina has not only won each of the past three games, it has done so while allowing the Canadiens to generate just 43 total shots on goal. And that is with two games going to overtime. It is the worst three-game stretch of shot generation in NHL history (regular season or playoffs), and when you add in the extra time with overtime it only adds to the absurdity of it.

Carolina had 43 shots on goal in Game 4 alone.

The one area where you are really seeing it start to show itself is late in games as the series progresses. Specifically in the third period and overtime.

Just look at the numbers from those situations over the past two games:

• Carolina has a 70-26 total shot attempt advantage. That is a 72.9 percent share.

• Carolina has a 32-5 shots on goal advantage. That is an 86.4 percent share.

• Carolina has a 4.7 to 0.5 expected goal share. That is a 90.3 percent share.

That is over 50 minutes of hockey. Just complete domination. Montreal has nothing left in these games.

I am not going to completely dismiss the idea of Montreal coming back and still making this a series. Jakub Dobes is playing well enough that he could steal a couple of games here. But even if that happens we are well beyond the point of rust from Carolina playing a factor.

I also know this is not exactly an apples-to-apples comparison with the Penguins example I made at the beginning, mainly because those teams were coming in with an equal number of games played and Montreal was coming into this having played an entire series worth of extra games, but the main point remains the same: Rust is temporary and short-lived. Rest, especially when it comes to the playoffs, is massive if your team is good enough to take advantage of it.

If the Stanley Cup Playoffs are the physical, grueling grind hockey people love to tell us that it is, there is no way rest like this is not important.

The Penguins were not good enough to take advantage of it.

Carolina is.

The biggest reason Carolina is good enough is a deep, balanced, talented roster. One of the best players on that roster in the playoffs has been defenseman K’Andre Miller, who was the focal point of one of the offseason’s biggest trades.

Let’s revisit that and take a look at Miller’s impact in the playoffs

If you have not already done so, it might be time to put him on your Conn Smythe watch list.

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It has been a pretty wild four-year run for the Washington Capitals.

A quick recap:

• During the 2022-23 season they finished with 35 wins and only 80 points, making it their worst season since Alex Ovechkin’s first two years in the league. If you are keeping score at home, that was nearly two decades ago.

• The next year they bounced back, somewhat slightly, and ended up getting back to the playoffs with what was arguably the worst playoff team of the salary cap era. Maybe even further back than that. They had just 91 points, were outscored by a staggering 37 goals and did not do anything even reasonably well or above the league average. It was, for the most part, a fluke to end up in the playoffs. It was a classic case of “good results, bad process.” They were unceremoniously swept out of the first round. As they should have been.

• To the front office’s credit, they knew the season was a fluke, and instead of just sitting back and hoping for it to repeat itself, they went wild the following offseason and completely overhauled the roster by adding Pierre-Luc Dubois, Jakob Chychrun, Matt Roy, Logan Thompson and Andrew Mangiapane. Combined with some emerging young talent in the organization, a full season of Rasmus Sandin after acquiring him at the previous trade deadline, as well as some holdovers from the previous championship core (specifically Alex Ovechkin, Tom Wilson and John Carlson) they came back the next year (last year), won 51 games, finished with the second-best record in the NHL and made it to the second round of the playoffs. It also didn’t seem to be anything flukey with strong underlying numbers, a solid 5-on-5 performance and excellent goaltending from Thompson. It was an objectively good team across the board. A really good team.

• That created reasonably high expectations for this season, only to watch them fall short and take a small step backwards. But was it? I mean, yeah, objectively it was. They won fewer games, had fewer points, and missed the playoffs while trading several veterans at the deadline, including Carlson. But they still won 43 games and finished with 95 points. In most years 95 points is a secure spot in the playoffs. They won more games and had more points than they did in their playoff year two years ago. Even more than that, they are the only team with at least 43 wins and at least nine overtime/shootout losses to miss the playoffs in the salary cap era. They are the only team in the salary cap era to have a goal differential of plus-23 or better and miss the playoffs. They are one of just eight teams with at least 95 points to miss the playoffs in the salary cap era. The team two years ago probably shouldn’t have been a playoff team. This team probably should have been a playoff team.

This team had a lot going for it. It won a lot. It had solid underlying numbers. It had a good mix of veterans still performing at a high level and young players starting to emerge.

It is easy to look at a team with an older core (in some places), coming off a non-playoff season where it finished in the middle of the standings, and say that it needs to dramatically rebuild and tear it all down.

I am not sure that is the case here.

Especially when you look at why this team ultimately failed and what it still does well. It was not a hopeless situation. It is not a hopeless situation going into the offseason.

It does need to take care of a couple of things this offseason, and it does need to make one big addition.

Given the salary cap flexibility, the young players in the organization, and the draft pick capital at their disposal this is a team that should be willing to take a big swing in the trade market.

Let’s talk about it.

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What went right this season

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A team wins with speed? We have to get faster.

A team wins with size and physical play? We need to get bigger and stronger.

A team wins with youth? We have to get younger.

A team wins with veterans? We need to get more experience.

The thing of it is, there is no one way to do it. There is no one way to play. There is no one way to build your roster, either through a short-term outlook or a long-term outlook. There is more than one method to this, and if you start chasing after something just because you see everybody else doing, it you’re probably already behind. That team at the top is probably already thinking about the next evolution it can make.

That brings me to the four teams that are still playing in this year’s Stanley Cup Playoffs.

There’s really nothing about them that they have in common outside of the most obvious (and most important) factor — they simply have good players. A lot of them.

There might be things you can take from a systematic and X’s and O’s standpoint that can be implemented elsewhere. Neutral zone tactics. Power play alignments. Penalty kill strategies. But when when it comes to the type of players teams are looking for, there is no magic formula here outside of “get good players.”

If you’re dumping a player, or chasing a player, just because they fit some measurable in terms of age, height, weight or anything else along those lines you’re, probably propping up or valuing the least important elements of what makes a player useful.

Colorado is one of the oldest teams in the league. Its playoff roster has an average age of 30.1 years old. It is also one of the smallest teams in the league in terms of both average height and weight.

Vegas isn’t far behind in terms of age (also over 30 on average), but possesses a bigger roster in terms of average height and weight. They are one of the tallest and heaviest rosters in the league.

Montreal is, quite literally, the youngest team in the NHL. The Canadiens are also one of the shortest teams in the league, but a little above average in terms of weight.

Carolina is quite literally in the middle of the pack in all of these categories (age, height and weight).

The common denominator is simply good players. Old. Young. Big. Small. It’s oversimplifying it to say it this way … but just be a good player.

There might, however, be something to learn regarding how each team acquired those good players.

Let’s talk more about that, as well as some other significant potential trends ranging from what statistical areas (if any) seem to matter the most, if going into the playoffs hot actually matters, and the unpredictable, volatile nature of playoff goaltending.

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Lou Lamoriello hasn’t had a hand in running the New York Islanders in over a year, but they still made a very Lou-like move late in the 2025-26 NHL season when they fired head coach Patrick Roy with four games remaining and replaced him with Peter DeBoer.

It was a chaotic move, but it also made a lot of sense.

The Islanders were rapidly fading and letting a playoff spot was slip through their fingers. It also gave them an opportunity to get ahead of the game and secure what was probably going to be one of the top head-coaching candidates of the offseason before anybody else really had a chance at him.

DeBoer has always been a fascinating coach to me, and I can’t decide if he’s a good bad coach, a bad good coach, or something in between.

On one hand, he’s had a lot of success in a lot of different places.

He’s taken two different teams to the Stanley Cup Final (New Jersey and San Jose) and two other teams to the Conference Finals (Vegas Golden Knights and Dallas Stars). His 97 career playoff wins are the fifth-most among ALL NHL head coaches in the history of the sport, and the second-most among active coaches, trailing only Joel Quenneville.

He wins. A lot. And a lot of teams want him whenever he becomes available. Even more than your typical NHL head-coaching recycling bin exercise.

Those same teams also get pretty tired of him, pretty quickly, and for as often as he gets hired, he also gets fired. Even when he wins.

The Islanders are his sixth-different head-coaching stop since the start of the 2008-09 season.

The only one he’s lasted four full seasons with is San Jose.

He made it to year four with New Jersey before being fired in the middle of that season.

Florida, Vegas and Dallas moved on from him within three years. And it’s not like there was a lack of success in most of those places. The team’s were generally good, and generally really successful.

He’s had some rocky relationships with goalies.

His benching of Marc-Andre Fleury in Vegas produced one of the funniest hockey memes in recent memory when Fleury’s agent, Allan Walsh, posted a photoshopped picture of his client being stabbed in the back with a giant sword that had DeBoer’s name on the handle of it.

His throwing of Jake Oettinger under the bus in Dallas following a Western Conference Finals appearance was the tipping point for that change. It was also a change that came after he went three-for-three in reaching the Western Conference Finals during his tenure.

He can be a demanding and incredibly structured coach. And while that can produce good results, it also creates a shelf-life that reaches its expiration date pretty quickly.

The good news? The recipe usually taste pretty good before it spoils, and it’s usually an immediate success.

With the exception of his time in Florida (his first head-coaching job), every team that DeBoer has coached has reached at least the Conference Finals in his first year on the job, while also seeing a dramatic improvement in its on-ice process.

Just to give an idea of what that looks like, here is what each team did in his first full year behind its bench, compared to what it did in the full year before he took over.

Every team improved by at least four wins in the standings.

Each of the past three teams also saw a pretty significant increase in their expected goals share.

Vegas was a little unique because he initially took over late in the 2019-20 season (which was cut short due to the pandemic), while his first full season was the 2020-21 season which only lasted 56 games. All of the point numbers for those seasons are projected over a full 82-game season.

Either way, his team’s generally improve when he shows up.

That should be good news for the Islanders, because for as promising as their 2025-26 season turned out to be, they still need some improvement.

They finished the season with a respectable 91 points, but were positively terrible in most process-driven, underlying metrics.

They were 25th in 5-on-5 expected goal share.

They were 25th in scoring chances against per 60 minutes, 30th in high-danger scoring chances against pr 60 minutes and 30th in expected goals against per 60 minutes.

In other words, they were consistently getting caved in defensively and nothing about their 5-on-5 play was playoff worthy. The two biggest things that kept them in the race as long as possible was the rapid development of rookie defenseman Matthew Schaefer and another strong season from starting goalie Ilya Sorokin.

Given the process behind their results, DeBoer would seem to be the perfect coach to get the most out of them.

But he’s also going to have his work cut out for him given the flawed nature of the roster.

He has a great goalie. That helps. He has a young superstar entering year two of his career. That also helps.

But there is a serious lack of impact talent at forward, not a lot of depth to work with and an awful lot of players that are on the wrong side of 30.

He is going to need a lot of help from his front office, and that front office is going to have to find some ways to be creative to work through some of this mess.

Let’s take a little more of a look at where things went right and wrong for the Islanders in 2025-26, and the situation DeBoer is taking over.

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What went right this season

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