THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
The NHL’s 2025-26 season got underway on 7th October, with rubber hitting ice for three top tilts, marquee-ed by the Florida Panthers – fresh off back-to-back Stanley Cup wins – playing host to the storied Chicago Blackhawks. The champs’ thrilling 3-2 win watered the seeds of hope in the hearts of Panthers fans, giving them consent to indulge in the dream of an elusive ‘three-peat’. Fast forward a couple of months, and the season has settled into a rhythm, ebbing and flowing with the thrills, drama, beauty, and brutality unique to the fastest sport played on two legs. As always, the NHL has endless storylines on offer to engage fans, but a few are deserving of closer analysis.
Winning two Stanley Cups in a row is one thing, especially in the salary cap era. Achieving a three-peat is something else entirely.
Three teams have brought home the Cup in back-to-back seasons over the past decade – the Pittsburgh Penguins (2016, 2017), the Tampa Bay Lightning (2020, 2021), and the Panthers (2024, 2025) – but the last three-peat took place way back in 1982, when the New York Islanders swept the Vancouver Canucks from their first-ever shot at the Cup. For good measure, the Isles hoisted the trophy the following season, and remain one of only three NHL teams to win three (or more) championships in a row.
The extremely exclusive group is rounded out by the Toronto Maple Leafs (1947-49, 1962-64) and the Montreal Canadiens (1956-60, 1976–79). In case you missed the maths, this makes only three teams in NHL history – going back to 1917 – to win three straight Stanley Cups.
Will the Panthers earn entry to this elite cohort? The door remains open – a feat in itself – but the team will need to stop flirting with .500 hockey to have any chance of keeping it from slamming shut. With a goal differential in the red (-5), the task is simple: score more goals and give up fewer. For a team that’s spent the better part of three seasons solidly in the green, the recent shift is concerning – if unsurprising, given the tendency for league champions to suffer from the dreaded ‘Cup hangover’ in the ensuing season. To push the metaphor to its limits, a hangover is bad enough; a hangover following back-to-back nights of imbibing is exponentially worse. Will the Panthers’ offense – led by Brad Marchand, Anton Lundell, and Sam Reinhart – rediscover their groove to give franchise goalie Sergei Bobrovsky the breathing room he needs to reinstall himself in the league’s top-ten in goals-against and save percentage? For the three-peat to remain in play, the answer will need to be a resounding ‘yes’.
Only three NHL hockey players have scored more than 800 regular-season goals in their career: Gordie Howe (801), Wayne Gretzky (894), and Alexander Ovechkin (902 and counting). On 5th November Ovechkin, the Washington Capitals captain, beat St Louis Blues netminder Jordan Binnington with a nifty backhand, making NHL history as the league’s first-ever 900 goalscorer. Bizarrely, Binnington attempted to hide the history-making puck in his gear – Google it for yourself – but the refs quickly reunited the puck with its rightful owner: the greatest goalscorer in the history of the NHL.
The feat has raised the spectre of two questions for the Capitals: to what extent will Ovechkin manage to pad his record, and will the team figure out how to translate their captain’s history-making, individual success into collective triumph? The team’s second-last position in the Metropolitan division hints at the negative for the latter query, but who knows? There’s still plenty of time for the Capitals to begin the long climb up the league’s ranking ladder, and with Ovie at the helm, anything is possible.
Economics is based on the law of supply and demand – except when it’s come to NHL participation in recent Olympic Winter Games. Despite fans’ fervent demand for the Olympics to include the world’s best players, the global tournament hasn’t featured NHLers since its 2014 iteration in Sochi, Russia. Why the twelve-year gap? Good question. Thanks to geopolitics, geography (the last two Winter Games were hosted by South Korea and China), and money (duh!), the answer is complicated, but the powers-that-be have reversed course and greenlit the NHL’s participation in Italy’s hosting of the latest event, Milano Cortina 2026.
Hockey lovers worldwide will have their eyes set on Milan, Italy in February, but the Olympics doesn’t have a monopoly on the NHL’s investment in international play for the 2025–26 season. In the fifteenth run of the league’s hugely popular Global Series, two regular season games – between the Nashville Predators and Penguins – were transposed to Stockholm, Sweden in November, the eighth time the city had hosted the initiative in an attempt to showcase NHL hockey to the wider world. The enthusiasm generated by the games – which saw the Preds down the Penguins 2-1 in overtime on the Friday evening, and then the Pens bounce back for a 4-nil shutout two days later – suggests that the NHL’s focus on cross-the-pond play is here to stay.
What’s going on in Pittsburgh? Despite its ever-aging roster – especially among its leadership – the team has managed to extend its remarkable success of the past decade to remain in the top-ten tier for the current season. Sure, you won’t find the squad’s biggest names – Sidney Crosby, Evgeni Malkin, Kris Letang – atop the points ladder, but they’re never far from the mix. Coupled with the goalie duo of Arturs Silovs and Tristan Jarry, who continue to share netminder duties to potent effect, the team hasn’t just avoided slipping into irrelevance; it’s managed to maintain its status as a top-tier team.
Will the Penguins lose their generational duo of Crosby and Malkin after the current season? Rumour – and common sense – suggest that the answer is a clear-cut head-nod. Nothing lasts forever, just as nothing stays the same. Even if the team manages to retain one of their franchise players, the likelihood of shielding both of them from trade or retirement – and let’s not overlook the Letang variable – seems slim. Either way, the Penguins are sure to face the ending of an era.
Will they accept the turning of the page and commit to writing a brand-new chapter via a roster rebuild? Or will they resist the chapter’s end and resort to editing, tweaking, and rejigging the story they’ve already written – an error that countless dynasty teams have made in the past?
It’s a fair question – just one of many that have emerged during the opening months of the NHL’s 109th season of play. The answers will come in the spaces between every additional puck-drop and final horn, and in the meantime fans can delight in the unknowing.
