NHL Opens With Five Games, One Tripleheader, and a Cup Champion at Home

RALEIGH, N.C. — The National Hockey League got its 2026-27 season started today with five games, a national tripleheader on ESPN, and a defending championship team at home that raised its banner, dropped the puck, and spent the entire evening in the position of having to defend the thing the banner says.

The defending Stanley Cup champion Carolina Hurricanes hosted the Florida Panthers at 5 p.m. Eastern, a matchup that has been described by the league’s television partners as “a rivalry” and by the Panthers’ fans, who are available to be quoted for a living, as “the reason the thing exists.” Carolina raised its championship banner before the first faceoff, a tradition the team described as “meaningful” and the players described, in the post-practice interviews available to reporters, as “we are aware of it, yes.”

The rest of the opening night slate unfolded across the afternoon and into the evening: Toronto at home against Montreal at 7 p.m., a game the two franchises have played, in some form, every year since the league was a younger league with a younger map, and Chicago at home against the Vegas Golden Knights at 10:30 p.m., the league’s usual practice of putting its most competitive teams in the slot that no one’s asleep for.

The tripleheader structure, three games on one network on one night, has become a fixture of the modern NHL season, a scheduling artifact of a league that has more television partners than it has good television slots and solves the problem the way a household solves a problem with too many appliances: by running them all at once and hoping the breaker holds.

"We're aware of it, yes."

The league, for its part, described opening night as “a rollicking start,” which is the hockey word for “five games on a Tuesday,” a day of the week that has, in the history of the sport, been associated primarily with the practice of playing hockey and, in the history of American television, with the practice of playing hockey at 5, 7, and 10:30 so that no one who wants to watch all three can.

The standings, as of the final buzzer of the final game, will show five wins and zero losses across the league, which is what the standings always show on the first night of the season, a fact that has not stopped anyone from calling the evening “the start of the race,” which is the same thing every first night of every season is, in the way that every person is “born” on the day they are born.

At press time, the five games were done, the standings were 5-0 league-wide, and the league’s season-long schedule was one game into a season that the league has described, in its own press materials, as “a long one,” which is the hockey word for 82 games, which is the number of games in a season, which is what the league has been doing, in one form or another, for a very long time now.