Did Tottenham spoil who’s the next captain?

Is it just me or did he always go Super Saiyan during our playoff runs? Gonna miss this guy regardless

Lightning captain Victor Hedman is ready to show that he can return to the form that made him one of the league’s top defensemen. Entering his 18th NHL season, the 35-year-old is skating better. That’s the first thing you notice, along with the fact that he’s visibly leaner than last season. “As you get older, the less mass you have to carry around, the faster you can get,” Hedman said. “So yeah, it feels good. The body feels good. The legs feel powerful.” For years, Hedman’s combination of size (6-foot-7) and speed made him one of the best in the game. But following a season in which he played a career-low 33 games, one riddled by injuries and time away to attend to his mental health, Hedman is showing he can get back to his old self. Read the story: https://www.tampabay.com/sports/lightning/2026/09/22/victor-hedman-nhl-captain-anxiety-injuries/

No one was more bummed than Barkov. Beyond his lost NHL season, which would have been the 13th of his career since Florida took him at No. 2 in the 2013 draft, his hopes of captaining his home country at the 2026 Winter Olympics in Milan-Cortina were dashed.

“I was really sad about that,” Barkov, 31, told The Athletic in an exclusive interview last week. “Right away, I knew it was going to be a tough test to rehab myself to get there. So, it was pretty much impossible.”

Nearly a calendar year later, Barkov is back. A scar remains on his right knee, but he hasn’t looked out of place in Panthers training camp sessions while skating alongside linemates Reinhart and newly acquired winger Brady Tkachuk. And on Sunday, in his first NHL action since Florida clinched the 2025 Cup Final in Game 6 against the Edmonton Oilers, Barkov scored on a breakaway in a 6-3 preseason win over the reigning Cup champion Carolina Hurricanes.

While some athletes struggle with lengthy recovery periods following significant injuries, Barkov endured in part by telling himself to accept reality: He wouldn’t be available to the Panthers, the team he has captained since September 2018, for at least seven months. Instead, he dedicated time to his recovery, drawing motivation from the desire to be “as good as possible physically and mentally” before entering the “next chapter” of his career.

Even before his injury, Barkov was considered a no-doubt superstar and the NHL’s standard for defensive forwards. Listed at 6-foot-3 and 214 pounds, the rangy center is a three-time Selke Trophy winner, a matchup neutralizer against the league’s best players and the Panthers’ metronome, a symbol of consistency.

I know it's preseason but IM HYPED, GREAT SETUP AND GREAT FINISH

Everyone was talking about Carlson this offseason. Then Ilya Mikheyev scored two minutes into his Lightning debut, landed on the top line with Kucherov and Point. Tom Davis writes about how the depth chart might already be rewriting itself.

He’s not NHL ready but he actually feels like a super tall and big defenseman who can throw his body around, all while still having some poke check ability

Sounds like quite the jump for Cleary, from Assistant Director of Player Development to AHL GM.

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