NHL weekend rankings: Offseason regrets, Lightning surge, and are the Habs good?

The holidays are done, you’re sitting in a home surrounded by all your new stuff, and you’re probably thinking: I don’t need some of this junk after all. I hope I kept the receipts.

A few NHL teams know how you feel.

We did this last year, and it’s interesting to go back and look at that list. I think it holds up fine – there aren’t any obvious cases where a player turned it around and made the doubters look bad. But what stands out is that even with a couple of honorable mentions slipped in, only one name from the list is still on the same team. That would be Anaheim’s Alex Killorn and his long-term UFA deal that everyone thought was too expensive. But the six other names had all found new homes by opening night, including three – Pierre-Luc Dubois, Joonas Korpisalo and Ryan Johansen – who were traded, despite having contracts that felt unmovable. I guess there’s some optimism to be found there if you see a guy on your favorite team on the list below.

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