The Montreal Canadiens are set up to feast on tired teams next season, and it is not close.
NHL insider Jason Gregor posted the numbers on Thursday, breaking down how many times each club faces an opponent on the second half of a back-to-back.
Montreal sits at the top of the whole list with 19 of those matchups. Nobody else in the league is up to that number.
Anaheim comes in second at 18. Is that a coincidence, or does the schedule-maker just have a favorite this year?
Toronto and Winnipeg sit dead last, tied at just 5 games against a tired opponent all season. That is like showing up to a poker table four chips short before the cards even get dealt.
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Toronto finished last season at 32-36-14, a minus-46 team that needed every advantage it could find, not less of one.
Winnipeg was not much better, going 35-35-12 with a minus-29 rating, and now gets stuck with the league's thinnest slate of worn-down opponents too.
Jim Hiller inherits a brutal schedule in his first season in Toronto
New Maple Leafs coach Jim Hiller was hired on June 17. He walks straight into a scheduling setup that already ranks dead last in the league.
Jets coach Scott Arniel deals with the same problem, minus the fresh-start excuse of a brand new bench boss.
Call it what it is. This is a lopsided setup that hands Montreal a real competitive cushion while two teams already fighting uphill get squeezed even tighter.
Martin St-Louis already had a group that won 48 games and finished plus-27 in goal differential under GM Kent Hughes. Now that same group gets to feast on tired legs 19 separate times.
Nobody builds an 82-game schedule to be perfectly fair. But when the gap between the best and worst spot sits at 14 games, somebody in Toronto and Winnipeg is going to ask why.
Should the NHL fix a schedule that gives Montreal 19 tired opponents and Toronto only 5?
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