With 70 NHL games played as of the morning of October 14, we are well into the “Why is scoring up?” season of hockey narratives. This will shortly be followed by “When will the coaches tighten it up and ruin the fun?” season, and I’ve seen the first hints of that along with the fall colours. Later on, we’ll all confidently discuss how the coaches ruined the fun of hockey and maybe we should make the nets bigger to compensate for this horrible over-coaching.
We had a particularly strong “Coach ruined the fun.” season last year in Leafs Land because the Leafs happened to go on a really hot run early, winning almost as many games as they have this year, and then they sagged back to a much more modest points pace.