Handicapping this race may be harder than we thought.
Often times hockey is a very scripted sport. If you’ve followed the sport for a few years you start to pick up on the patterns of things, both on ice and in the transactional machinations. To call it predictable is probably a bridge too far but you can venture educated guesses about many things and come out correct a shade over half the time.
Hockey is also a very tradition-oriented sport. In a lot of ways, old world thinking holds back the game when GMs and other front office staff are often composed of the same handful of North American white men.