Biggest lessons of the Stanley Cup playoffs so far...

playGary Bettman: Current NHL playoff format works well (1:23)NHL commissioner Gary Bettman joins "The Pat McAfee Show" to discuss the current format of the NHL postseason. (1:23) The 2026 Stanley Cup playoffs began nearly a month ago. Six teams remain in the tournament, and 10 teams have been cast into the abyss. There are lessons to be learned from this intense, remarkable postseason, about teams and players and what we expect from the NHL. Here are six hard lessons from the Stanley Cup playoffs: Dallas Stars general manager Jim Nill has worked in NHL front offices since 1991. He has rarely experienced a season this exhausting. "In all my years in hockey, this was probably one of the most demanding regular seasons I've ever gone through," he said. "That's the whole league. It's not only us, but the whole league with the scheduling travel and the injuries." The NHL's return to the Winter Olympics meant compressing the 2025-26 schedule to compensate for the multiweek break in February. That was coming off a compressed schedule at the start of last season to compensate for the 4 Nations Face-Off. "We have to have a compressed schedule," NHL commissioner Gary Bettman told the New York Post. "We have to take into account that NHL teams send various amounts of players to the Olympics. Teams like Tampa and the Panthers send 10 players each, and we've got some teams sending one or two players. Teams are going to come back in a different place in terms of how they are than when we left. The fact of the matter is some teams are going to have a good chunk of their roster a little more tired and banged up." According to NHL Injury Viz, which tracks roster absences, there were 8,160 man-games lost to injury this season in the NHL. At the high end was Florida with 540 games, which included the 82 games Aleksander Barkov missed and Matthew Tkachuk being limited to 31 games. The Panthers missed the playoffs. Then again, so did the Detroit Red Wings, who had an absurdly low 86 games lost to injury, the fewest in the league. There was also an injury cost for players going to the Olympics. After Boston's Charlie McAvoy and Florida's Matthew Tkachuk were injured at 4 Nations, the Winter Games resulted in the Los Angeles Kings losing Kevin Fiala for the rest of the season and the Stars' Mikko Rantanen tearing an MCL, which might help explain why he had just one even-strength point in six games this postseason. Both the Kings and Stars were one-and-done in the playoffs. For many teams this season, the question was when the true crunch of the condensed schedule was going to hit. "When did it happen to you? Early? Some teams got crushed by the schedule in the middle of the season. Other teams got clobbered by it when they were pushing for the playoffs," one NHL general manager said. Case in point: The Columbus Blue Jackets. They rolled into the Olympic break as the NHL's hottest team, going 10-1-0 after Rick Bowness was hired to replace coach Dean Evason. They were four points out of a playoff spot. The Jackets would end up missing the playoffs thanks to a late-season spiral that saw them go 2-8-1 in their last 11 games. Bowness infamously torched his players after a loss in their season finale: "These guys, they don't care. Losing is not important enough to them. It doesn't bother them." Rick Bowness was not pleased with his team's effort down the stretch of the 2025-26 season. Photo by Jason Mowry/Getty ImagesAnother theory: Maybe they were just exhausted because they got crushed at the wrong time. Columbus played 17 games in March, the most of any NHL team in a single month this season. That included three back-to-back games and only one break of more than one calendar day. "It was a grueling schedule," Columbus GM Don Waddell said. "We barely could practice in March because we were playing so many games." From March 26 through the end of the season, they won twice. Watch your favorite events in the newly enhanced ESPN App. Learn more about what plan is right for you. Sign Up Now Bowness questioned the mentality of his players toward the end of the season. Frankly, that's the most underreported aspect of the condensed schedule. "Some players had really big struggles with mental health or anxiety just because they could never get a breath," an NHL general manager said. One veteran NHL player told ESPN the condensed schedule impacted how players recovered from adversity. "If you have a bad game, and then you have another bad game right away, you're playing so many games in a short period of time that it snowballs," he said. "The coach is on you because he's feeling the pressure on him. There were so many more meetings and not as many days off. There weren't as many opportunities to get away from the game. "I'm sure for a lot of the young guys that haven't been around a long time and haven't been used to that, it was just different." Next season, the NHL will expand the regular season to 84 games, but with

Biggest lessons of the Stanley Cup playoffs so far...

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