The NHL has barely gotten itself properly dressed for the 2026-27 campaign, and already the leaguewide verdict is coming in: the early hockey has been messy. Not scandalous, not disastrous, just messy in the way only opening-week NHL hockey can be — rushed decisions, loose structure, and enough scramble to make even the sharpest executives wince.
That is the uncomfortable thread running through the latest roundtable discussion involving Don Waddell, Steve Staios and Bill Armstrong. One general manager sees a game that is more loosey-goosey than usual. Another sees the first five, 10 games as a stretch where teams are still finding themselves. And Armstrong sees something else entirely: a better, stronger, faster generation of players pushing the league upward. All of those things can be true at once. But the first-week evidence suggests the NHL is still shaking off the rust in a hurry — and not always elegantly.
Loose early hockey is becoming the story
Waddell did not dress it up. He said the play around the league has been more scrambly than usual and suggested timing may be part of it, with fewer preseason games potentially leaving teams a step behind. That is a pretty fair description of what fans have already been watching. The Florida Panthers and Carolina Hurricanes went 64:55 before the first goal of the season was scored, which tells you plenty about how deliberate, or how disjointed, the opening night rhythm was. Then, 48 hours later, the Edmonton Oilers and Vancouver Canucks produced a 9-7 game with 16 combined goals. In other words: one end of the spectrum was sleepwalking, the other was chaos.
That is the issue with early-season trend-spotting. You can see structure disappearing before you can see structure settling in. Waddell’s point was not that the league is broken. It was that the league looks unsettled, and that matters because unsettled teams tend to make bad reads, bad line changes and bad mistakes. It is not exactly a shocking revelation, but it is useful when the league is trying to understand what kind of game it has created right out of the gate.
Shorter camps, fresher bodies and a different kind of player
Staios added a different layer to the conversation by pointing out that the first five or 10 games are usually about teams finding their game, and that his own club had extra time to prepare because it was one of the last to start. He also made the case that shorter camps can leave players feeling healthier going into the season. That is the trade-off the league keeps living with: a cleaner physical baseline may come at the cost of early sharpness. If the product looks a little sloppy to start, there is at least a logical explanation for it.
Armstrong, though, pulled the discussion in a more optimistic direction. He said the skill level of players is changing in a positive way, and that younger players are arriving better, stronger and faster than ever because of the work they do before they even reach the NHL. That is not marketing spin. That is the new normal. The league is deeper, more skilled and more demanding than it was years ago, and that should eventually show up in better hockey. The question is whether the early season is exposing the growing pains that come with it.
And that is where Spencer Stastney fits into the wider picture, because this is exactly the kind of league environment where details matter and where teams cannot afford to be casual about the margins. When opening-week hockey is loose, the teams that survive it are the ones that clean up the little errors fastest. That is the job now. Not to marvel at the chaos, but to get ahead of it.
The good news for the NHL is that these are fixable problems. Waddell even acknowledged the play could change as teams get more games under their belts. Staios said time will tell. Armstrong believes the skill level will keep rising. So the overall picture is not bleak. But the first week has done what the first week always does: it has reminded everyone that promise and polish are not the same thing. Right now, the league has plenty of the former and not enough of the latter.
