Oh hockey: Welcome back

By Andrew Nowel, Editor-In-Chief

Oh hockey… wait, isn’t there a column called oh honey? Anyway, the National Hockey League (NHL) season starts next week, and if you aren’t watching this brand new 84–game season, what are you doing?

Hockey season drops the puck in early October every year, but this season, the NHL has expanded it by adding two more games, meaning the league had to push the start of the season up to late September. Sept. 29 to be exact as the Florida Panthers, with their new addition of the other Tkachuk brother, travel to Raleigh, N.C. to take on the Carolina Hurricanes. If you know nothing of what I just said, now is the time to stop reading, but only to look up who Brady Tkachuk is.

The former captain of the Ottawa Senators was traded to the Panthers during the summer, and now plays with his brother, Matthew, in the Sunshine State. For those of you who know football or really just the Buffalo Bills, it’s like Stefon Diggs leaving Buffalo to eventually go to New England. The Senators were a team that has been building their talent over the last couple of years with wildcard appearances while the Panthers had won the Stanley Cup back–to–back years before the Hurricanes won it last season. The Panthers are a powerhouse team, the Kansas City Chiefs of the NHL for example, while the Senators, well, are not. With the addition of Brady, the Panthers not only regained their powerhouse status but they gained another bruiser.

Brad Marchand is notoriously known around the NHL as a player who will retaliate with dirty hits with the intent to injure. When he was on the Boston Bruins, there would be games that the players of the opposing team would specifically have to watch out for Marchand. Going to Florida in March 2025, he continued his gruesome presence on the ice. A nickname for Marchand is “The Rat,” a nickname shared by longtime NHLer Ken Linseman, who also played for the Bruins as well as the Philadelphia Flyers, a team notoriously called the “Broad Street Bullies.” 

How this relates to the Tkachuk brothers and the Panthers is that Matthew and Brady are both players who don’t take any nonsense. Adding Brady to Florida, along with the return of Radko Gudas, has built the Panthers into a team of hard–nosed, tough players who don’t play clean. Gudas himself ended Toronto Maple Leafs star Auston Matthews in mid-March with a hit along the boards that tore Matthews’ medial collateral ligament (MCL).

Now that you know the backstory of the Florida Panthers and Brady Tkachuk, I would understand why you would question why hockey is something that we should all watch. It’s because every season has a storyline, and each year, it gets better and better. Yes, the Panthers have a bit of a modern “Broad Street Bully” core, but there are also star players like Alexander Ovechkin and Sidney Crosby who round out the greatest generation of NHL players. The next generation of Connor Bedard, Macklin Celebrini and Matthew Schaefer will never be the players that Ovie and Sid were, but that’s just more of a reason to watch them. In 10 years, we might sit here and say that Celebrini is one of the greatest players to ever lace up the skates, but that requires us to watch him play to be able to defend such a statement.

With the NHL season ready to drop the puck, turn on the TV and watch a game. Even the Buffalo Sabres aren’t bad anymore, so it’s now worth watching more than ever. Who knows, you might just get hooked like former Editor–in–Chief Mikayla Boyd.