Welcome back to the weekend rankings. By my count, this is the eighth year of this column’s lifespan at The Athletic, and it had a few different homes before that. How long is eight years? Put it this way, in that debut edition on this site way back in 2018, the very first team to be listed in the Cup contenders section was the San Jose Sharks. They’d just acquired Erik Karlsson, you see, and we all knew there was no way that trade wouldn’t work out great.
That’s a long time ago. But that fits with the theme, because these are the long-range rankings.