Some odds and ends from the NHL schedule:

Slow Sundays (and Fridays)

The NHL seems to really, really like their current pattern of having Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays with a lot of games, and Wednesdays, Fridays, and Sundays with very few. It’s not clear to me how much of this is because the league office actually thinks it’s a good gameplan, and how much is based on alternating busy days and slow days with the NBA (the NBA is generally a busy Wednesday and Friday, slow Tuesday and Thursday league). I understand why the NHL likes having only a few games on Wednesday, as that’s their TNT doubleheader night and having less games to distract from the ones on TNT might be helpful. But the empty arenas on Friday and Sunday are a bit more puzzling.

Right out of the gate, the first weekend of the season sees 2 Friday and 2 Sunday games. Until the American Thanksgiving weekend, just 2 Fridays and 0 Sundays will have more than 5 games played. The first Sunday of the season with more than 5 games happening is December 10th – brutal for fantasy players, if nothing else. The other strange thing about the league’s Friday schedule is how often the games are overlapping with each other; take for example the schedule on Friday 12/1/23, which features only 2 games (Ottawa @ Columbus, San Jose @ New Jersey), both starting at 7 PM. It feels like a major missed opportunity for people to have no hockey to watch with friends on a Friday night, but Gary Bettman continues to miss this same opportunity every year.

TNT

Last season, there was one small part of the NHL schedule which was a constant source of frustration: The late games picked for the TNT doubleheaders were mostly awful. TNT spent the majority of the year showing 2 games per night on national TV in the United States, and while the games starting at 7 or 8 PM were usually solid matchups, the late night games featured a lot of tanking teams. The 58 point Anaheim Ducks were on TNT 6 times, tied with the Avalanche and two above the Golden Knights and Kraken. To some level, this is unavoidable. That 10:00 or 10:30 EST time slot has to be taken by a team in the pacific or mountain time zones, the NHL only has 7 of those in the US (TNT games don’t have to be between US teams, but there is a clear preference to have at least one for the American broadcasters), and 3 of them, the Ducks, Sharks, and Coyotes, were terrible teams that everyone knew would be terrible when the schedule was made. But the league needs to try much harder to put their best foot forward on these matchups, as the TNT Wednesdays are the only night where hockey is consistently on TV in the US.

The league has not actually announced which games will be on TNT, but it’s usually pretty easy to guess by looking at the Wednesday schedule and matching time slots together. In November and December the slate should look something like: St Louis @ Colorado, LA @ Vegas, Seattle @ Edmonton, Vegas @ Dallas, Carolina @ Edmonton, Buffalo @ Colorado. These are all matchups that should have two good teams playing. There’s been so much focus lately on growing the game and TV ratings and league revenue, and from my point of view the easiest fix for that is to give TNT more competitive games to pick from. Mission probably accomplished?

Sweden Midseason

The NHL is taking a bit of an odd approach to the European travel games this year. For one thing, instead of having 2 teams play a series, there will be 4 teams in a sort of mini round robin. On top of that, instead of having this series be at the start of the season, it’s set for mid-November. The Senators, Leafs, Wings, and Wild will get 2 games each in Stockholm (oddly, or maybe logically, the Leafs are the only team who will not have a “home game” in Sweden, and the Sens are using up 2 home games overseas). Minnesota gets the short end of the stick scheduling wise, having a back to back where they play at 5 PM on Saturday and 2 PM on Sunday. Who knows how much effect this scheduling quirk might have – travelling to Finland a month into the season didn’t hurt the Avalanche at all last year – but it might be something to watch for.

Road Trips From Hell

This season looks to be light on the kind of egregiously long road trips that plagued the Islanders and Flames in recent years due to stadium scheduling issues – Vancouver’s 7 gamer to the northeast US in early January is the longest. Chicago has one after the Christmas break that isn’t terribly long, but is an odd group of cities (in Dallas twice, then to Nashville, ending at the Rangers and Devils but not the Islanders). Minnesota walks away with the most nonsensical bit of scheduling, with their 5 game run of @ NJ, vs NJ, vs NYR, @ NYI, @ NYR.

Late Season Playoff Potential

One fun thing to look for is backloaded matchups between teams you expect to be in the playoffs. Boston and Carolina meet twice in their final six games. Colorado gets both Minnesota and Edmonton twice in the last month of the year. The Devils don’t play their first game against the Leafs until March 26th, and then the two will meet three times in the last three weeks of the season. Seattle gets what looks on paper to be the easiest end to their season: just 5 of their final 14 games are against teams that made the playoffs last year, and one of those is against Winnipeg. It’s hard to predict who will be in a playoff position that late, of course, so here’s to a fun follow-up to last year’s crazy pacific division finish with Vegas, Edmonton, LA, and Seattle all matching up multiple times in March and April.