Surprise teams at the top of NHL standings, Gritty draws mixed reviews

Photo by Kyle Ross/Icon Sportswire

The NHL season is two weeks in now, with a mixture of familiar teams and surprising early contenders. The reigning winners of the two conferences are the notable absences from the top of the standings, with both the Washington Capitals and the Vegas Golden Knights faltering to start the year.

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Marc Andre Fleury, Vegas netminder, has been off to a cold start, allowing 8 goals over a two game span at the start of last week. This has helped the Golden Knights stumble to a 2-4 start, leaving them 6th in the Pacific Division, which they won last year. The case for the Capitals also has them off to around a .500 start, at 2-2-1. As of Monday, they are on a 2 game skid, yielding 10 goals in those games.

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The Carolina Hurricanes, one year out from missing the playoffs, currently lead the Metropolitan Division, starting off at 4-0-1. The only team they trail in the Eastern Conference is the Toronto Maple Leafs, who have the best offense in the league so far, scoring 4.8 goals per game.

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The offense is led by 21-year-old Auston Matthews, the only player in the NHL to score double digit goals so far. Between Matthews and John Tavares, who was on Sunday tied for the third leading scorer of the NHL, Toronto’s high-powered offense is leading them to an almost perfect start to the season.

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A surprise contender near the top to start the season is the Buffalo Sabres. Rallying from a last place finish in the league last season, the Sabres currently sit at third in the Atlantic Division. Led by Jack Eichel, who has five goals this year, the Sabres have put together an above .500 record in spite of ceding more goals than they have scored.

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Moving to the bottom of the league, the Arizona Coyotes once again reside in the basement of the Western Conference. Off to a slow 1-3 start, having the league’s worst scoring offense and mustering only three goals through four games to this point, the Coyotes start this season looking up at the league with what appears to be a long way to go. Shut out in all of their games, with the exception of a 3-2 shootout win over Anaheim, the team has heavily struggled to start up this season.

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In the Eastern Conference, the Detroit Red Wings and the Florida Panthers remain the only two teams in the NHL to not have a win yet. Both teams have had a majority of their losses come from one-goal games, with all three of Florida’s losses coming in that manner. Only time will tell when the two teams can have enough go their way to finally seal a game.

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To close off this opening piece about the NHL’s new season, one would be remiss not to talk about Gritty. Gritty, the Philadelphia Flyers’ newest mascot, has taken much of the internet by storm, but not in the way the organization would have intended. Gritty has garnered jokes from late night comedians, made an appearance on The Tonight Show, and has been the subject of many memes.

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While much of the world has made fun of the mascot, the city seems to be uniting behind him, with one fan even getting a tattoo of the mascot. Gritty’s entrance to the world can best be summarized by the interaction on Twitter between Gritty and the Pittsburgh Penguins. Gritty opened the twitter account with a picture captioned “It me. #Gritty”, to which the Penguins responded “lol ok”. This prompted a response from the Gritty account that stated “Sleep with one eye open tonight, bird.”