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Ranking the top 2026 Stanley Cup playoff bandwagons

7 hours ago
Ranking the top 2026 Stanley Cup playoff bandwagons

Last week in this space, I ranked

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Ottawa takes on the Florida Panthers on Tuesday, the Sabres on Thursday and the Wild on Saturday. The Red Wings face off with the Pittsburgh Penguins on Tuesday, Philadelphia Flyers on Thursday and New York Rangers on Saturday.

The East wild-card race still feels like it’ll be a photo finish.

The Blue Jackets have a home and home with the Carolina Hurricanes, and those will not be easy points to pick up.

Meanwhile, the Boston Bruins have their Florida trip coming up, facing the Panthers and Tampa Bay Lightning after stepping on the ice against the Dallas Stars on Tuesday — that’s not an easy week either!

Hart Trophy contenders if the season ended today

Nikita Kucherov is making the ordering of this thing extremely tough. Connor McDavid was unseated for a minute in the points race, but he’s back on top.

McDavid remains at No. 1 in my personal poll and also leads the scoring race with 124 points, including nine points in his past five games. Kucherov is trying to build a gap above Nathan MacKinnon and remains in hot pursuit of McDavid with 121 points, including 10 points in his last five.

MacKinnon is third in the points race, with 117, as he leads the team currently atop the entire NHL standings.

I believe it’ll come down to these three as the MVP finalists this season, and it could come down to who wins the scoring title.

What I loved this weekend

I’m the unofficial “ESPN Star Wars sports reporter,” so this one caught my eye. The Penguins’ AHL affiliate, the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton Penguins, had their Star Wars night on Saturday, and once again knocked it out of the park with their jerseys. In previous seasons, they had chief creative officer of Lucasfilm Dave Filoni design the Star Wars night jerseys, so the bar was set pretty high!

This season was a riff of one of Filoni’s previous designs, celebrating “The Mandalorian.” The team added the Star Wars language “Aurebesh” surrounding the helmet. It says “Wiles-Barre Scranton Penguins” on top and “This is the way” at the bottom. Incredible detail:

Social media post of the weekend

One of the highlights of my year is coming up this Sunday — the “Inside Out Classic” — which is Sunday at 7 p.m. ET. It’s a special broadcast of the Washington Capitals-New York Rangers game (on Disney Plus, Disney Channel, Disney XD and the ESPN App), with real-time animation using NHL EDGE and Sony Hawk-Eye Innovations tracking data. We have plenty of goodies coming out this week in anticipation of the big game so be on the lookout for all of that.

But speaking of fun, my social post of the weekend falls in the “haven’t seen it, should” category (shoutout “SportsCenter,” IYKYK). Based on Connor McDavid’s recent “pillow fight” comment regarding the Pacific Division, we staged a pillow fight on the set of our NHL broadcast. This included me tossing pillows at Steve Levy while he was trying to finish his read, and hitting T.J. Oshie before he picked up a pillow and flew at P.K. Subban from the top rope!

Stick taps

Stick taps this week go out to every NHL team that has commemorated Jessi Pierce, either by donating to the GoFundMe set up for her grieving husband and/or by leaving a seat empty in the press box with her name on it with flowers. The hockey community is the best.