Trades! Two of them in the week before American Thanksgiving, both intriguing in more than just an afterthought sort of way.
But let’s begin with the fact that officially the NHL’s first quarter will come to an end with the 12th game on Friday’s 14-game schedule. The NHL took Thursday off to celebrate Thanksgiving, an important early-season yardstick because, traditionally, NHL standings don’t move much once you get past turkey day.
Dating back to the first season coming out of the lockout, 2005-06, if you’re in the playoff picture at Thanksgiving, you have a roughly 75 percent chance of being there when the season ends. So, take a bow Devils, Bruins, Golden Knights and Kraken, the four teams with the best reasons to give thanks at this critical juncture – teams that generally didn’t attract a lot of offseason attention or hype.
The Devils’ 13-game win streak came to an end Wednesday at the hands of the Maple Leafs, but it couldn’t overshadow the strides made by New Jersey – a young, fast, confident team that was finding ways of winning games that were hanging in the balance. That’s usually the first sign that a team, committed to a rebuild, is working its way to the next level.
You can talk all you want about winning the summer and making shrewd moves that look good on paper. But then they drop the puck, and all that goes out the window. The league is close, the gap between the good and the bad so narrow that the successful teams eventually need to figure out how to win those close games when you get to the third period.
That’s really the signature of the 2022-23 Devils.
Comebacks have been the story of the season thus far. Every one of the 32 teams has managed at least one come-from-behind win, and 25 of them have two or more. Moreover, there have been 22 multi-goal, third-period comebacks, according to the league. That’s never happened before.
Boston had its seven-game win streak snapped against the Panthers earlier this week, but the Bruins are undefeated at home. Remarkable considering they started the year without two of their five best players. Not only did Brad Marchand and Charlie McAvoy return earlier than expected, but they’re also making an impact.
Health is a critical contributor to the Vegas turnaround as well. Jack Eichel showed signs of life when he finally received medical clearance to play last year, but he’s contributing at a different level this year and that’s galvanized an offense that needed jumpstarting. Seattle is 7-1-1 in its last nine, an .833 points percentage. In that stretch, only New Jersey (.909) is better.
Here’s a sentence I could not have imagined myself in September: The comeback player of the year just could be Martin Jones.
And if there’s an honorable mention amidst all the ‘didn’t-see-that-coming’ storylines to develop in the first quarter, it probably needs to involve the Coyotes because they are not falling off the face of the earth the way so many expected. Instead, they have 18 points in 16 games, despite a massive early concentration of road games, where they are a remarkably respectable 6-7-1. The news got even better this week because both Nick Schmaltz and Jakob Chychrun finally returned to the lineup Monday. Schmaltz had been absent since the opening game of the season. On a team with limited talent, getting back last year’s No. 2 scorer was critical.
Chychrun, meanwhile, is two games into his return and averaging 21:48 in time on ice already, just behind team leader J.J. Moser.
Arizona was involved in one of last week’s two deals, and it involved a defenseman, but that defenseman was neither Chychrun nor Shayne Gostisbehere.
It was Conor Timmins, swapped to Toronto for prospect Curtis Douglas. More on the actual deals in a minute. Let’s talk about Chychrun first because his return to play was the necessary opening step in him finding a new NHL home at some point later in the season. So far, Coyotes general…
Read More: Trades, NHL early-season surprises, what to make of the Hurricanes: Duhatschek