Today is Thursday, December 5th 2024, which means that this past Monday, each of the rosters for the Four Nations Face Off tournament coming in a couple of months were submitted, and that yesterday, they were officially announced by the NHL. With maybe the exception of Tyler Seguin’s potentially season-ending hip surgery, it’s all that anyone is talking about in the world of hockey.

This will be a shorter post since this week is the Thanksgiving Holiday in the States, and I have a bit less time for silly hobbies like this than I normally would. In any case, it is a good opportunity for me to reflect upon what I’m grateful for about hockey, and the thing I find myself coming back to is the fact that everyone involved in the NHL, but especially the players, are all humans.

The Jets continue to make history with every win. They’re the first team to win 14 of their first 15 games, and 15 of their first 16, and by the time this piece goes live, they may have extended their historic start even further. (Their next games are 11/14 @TB, 11/16 @FLA, and 11/19 vs. FLA). Not only have they been winning, but they’ve been winning convincingly.

Watching the NHL this season, there’s been a trend emerging in the analysis that I’ve seen, heard, and read, which I think has been a trend of all hockey analysis, but feels more prominent in the post-fivethirtyeight world of sports analysis that we live in. The trend is that commentators and analysts fall back on intangible eye-tests and vague concepts like ‘hockey sense’ and things being ‘off.’

I think that by this point, anyone who is following the NHL in any sort of capacity is keeping one eye on the box score any time the Capitals are on the ice. We’re all collectively holding our breaths waiting to see if — although now it feels more like when — the Great 8 is going to break Gretzky’s record for all time career goals.

I can’t not talk about the 32-team night, right? I mean it was a pretty wild spectacle to behold — one night with every team in the NHL playing?

As a Boston fan, I often find myself trying to feel better about nights like this — down 0-2 to a winless Nashville team — by grasping onto the memory of our historic season two years ago.