The 84-game era starts with a nod to hockey’s oldest grudges. When the 2026-27 season opens Tuesday, Sept. 29, two of the night’s five games are Original Six meetings: the Canadiens visiting Toronto at Scotiabank Arena, and the Rangers in Boston. That’s not an accident of the calendar. The league built its opening-night tripleheader around them, and it’s a fair signal of how much weight these matchups carry in a season that’s been restructured.
The restructuring matters more than the marketing. The jump from 82 to 84 games came by adding two divisional games per team, which means the Atlantic’s Original Six trio — Boston, Montreal, Toronto — plus Detroit see each other more often, not less. Familiarity is what turns a rivalry from a nostalgia package into something with edges. More divisional hockey means more line-matching, more bad blood carried from game to game, and more standings consequence attached to every result. By February, a Leafs-Habs game that looked like a marketing item in September will likely be a four-point swing.
Detroit’s slate is the one to mark up. The Red Wings open at home against the Rangers on Oct. 2, and on Nov. 18 they’ll host a Centennial Celebration Game marking 100 years since Detroit’s first NHL contest — against the Bruins, the same opponent from 1926. Anniversary games can be hollow. This one isn’t, partly because Detroit’s arc as a team finally has stakes attached again.
There’s also a roster subplot worth tracking. Patrick Kane is back in a Blackhawks sweater, which reconnects Chicago’s present to its last dynasty and gives a rebuilding team something to sell beyond draft picks. Whether that holds up over 84 games is another question, but the Blackhawks are no longer a neutral entry on anyone’s schedule.
One caution before reading too much into September. Camps are compressed this fall, and the short preseason runway leaves little room to sort out goaltending and bottom-six roles before real games start. Expect the first Original Six meetings to be messy, high-event, and not especially predictive. They’ll still be worth watching — rivalry games rarely need polish to be compelling.
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[…] to build local TV and gate interest. Those matchups don’t have a century behind them the way the Original Six pairings do, but manufactured proximity has worked […]