Biggest Individual Surprises One Month Into The 2026-27 NHL Season

Roughly 30 days into the season, the NHL has already thrown a few curveballs. Some are statistical oddities and record-setting performances that seemed unimaginable. The rest includes more off-ice drama than in arguably any other season. 

Here’s a look at the early individual storylines that have caught the hockey world off guard.

Trade chatter around the Detroit Red Wings captain has been loud, but the market has been strangely quiet. Despite his past production and speculation that 10 teams are on his list of preferred landing spots, only one team seems to have made an offer, and the other team interested is one he’d prefer not to join. 

Only the Minnesota Wild have reportedly pushed hard for Dylan Larkin. That’s actually “wild” when you think about it. How is it that no other team has put together a legitimate package for a top-line center? They rarely become available. 

Does this mean that these teams all know something? Perhaps they don’t see him as the missing piece for a contender. Whatever the reason, the lack of interest surprises many for a player of his caliber, and it leaves Detroit with few options if they truly want to move him.

Perhaps the biggest early-season bomb dropped this week. Reports say Nikita Kucherov wants out of Tampa Bay. For a franchise that built its Cup-winning identity around him, it’s a sudden shift that could change everything in Tampa. 

Kucherov has been the face of the Lightning’s offense for years. He is a legitimate superstar and a top-five player in the NHL. Whatever happened in Tampa isn’t good, and his situation could create an unexpected storm. Kucherov is the reigning Hart Trophy winner. If the Lightning agree to move him – so far, they say they have no intention of trading him – the dominoes that fall for other players could be unprecedented. 

If you needed a reminder that Connor McDavid operates on a different plane, look no further than his scoring rate this season. With 36 points in 13 games, he’s currently on a 232-point pace, a number that sounds more like a video game result than a real NHL season. 

Of course, early-season paces rarely hold, and fatigue, injuries, and tighter defensive matchups tend to bring even the greatest players back toward earth. Yet something about McDavid and the way he’s playing makes 200 points seem almost inevitable. He is playing into rarefied territory, and it’s a reminder to appreciate his greatness while it’s happening.

He’s also created a situation where Evan Bouchard could get 100 points as a defenseman, and Leon Draisaitl could get 150 points, and no one will be talking about it. 

On the negative side, Sergei Bobrovsky hasn’t been good for the Toronto Maple Leafs. He’s a notoriously slow starter, but the Leafs put a lot of faith in him to come in and stabilize the position. Anthony Stolarz has been the much better goaltender of the pairing, and there’s already chatter that the Leafs made a mistake. 

The hope was that an experienced netminder could stabilize the crease. Instead, the early results have been shaky, and the talk is that signing an aged netminder who was trending in the wrong direction was a swing and a miss. 

After the trade that sent Matthew Knies to the Columbus Blue Jackets, the forward has two goals and five points. He scored both goals in his first game of the season and hasn’t scored again since. 

The Blue Jackets traded their top scorer for Knies. He was supposed to be the young power forward that would have made the Kirill Marchenko loss acceptable. Knies has been anything but a star for the Blue Jackets, which is shocking given that he might have felt like he had something to prove after the Maple Leafs traded him away.

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