For Your Ice Only Trivia Quiz

Answer: Marc-Andre Fleury

Fleury attempted to engage in a fight with a fellow goalie multiple times, going as far as dropping his gloves, but all his attempts were foiled by referee intervention. In the 2025-26 season, Shesterkin and Markstrom, Swayman and Vasilevskiy, and Nedeljkovic and Bobrovsky all successfully tussled with each other.

However, none of them served their own penalty minutes from the fights--goalies almost never do, with a skater substituting for them instead.

Answer: Nick Bjugstad

Bjugstad's nickname on the Panthers was 'Rotisserie Chicken', but he landed in hot water when, playing on the Utah Mammoth, he commented on his teammate Mikhail Sergachev's chickens. Sergachev, a goalie (of course!), raised chickens and gave eggs away to his teammates. Bjugstad's comments about Sergachev's chickens potentially having the bird flu were understandably not well received.

Answer: Daniel Brière

Perhaps the highest AAV NHL offer sheet up to that point, the offer sheet would also, if accepted by the Ducks, have resulted in the Philadelphia Flyers giving up four first-round picks to the Ducks. The Ducks, however, decided to match the offer sheet and retain Carlsson.

(And if all these words mean nothing to you, don't worry. It's complicated! The tl;dr: an offer sheet allows a GM to offer a contract with an AAV (annual average value) they think is fair to a Restricted Free Agent (RFA), a player who is not under contract after an Entry-Level Contract but for whom a team retains rights. If the player signs the offer sheet, the GM of the player's current team has to choose to either match the AAV of the offer sheet or give up the RFA player to the other team, receiving draft picks commensurate to the contract AAV in return.)

Answer: Jacob Tierney

The show, Heated Rivalry, is a steamy romance featuring hockey players Shane and Ilya, and was a smash hit. In the NHL, the Canadiens and the Senators have run collaborations with the show, including inviting Heated Rivalry actors to Pride Nights and playing the show's trailer on their jumbotron. Even the NHL commissioner claimed he binge-watched the show.

Answer: Brad Marchand

Marchand was traded to the Panthers after he and the Bruins couldn't agree to terms on extending his expiring contract (let the snowbird jokes fly). Marchand had initially wanted to stay in Boston, according to interviews, but after winning the Cup with the Panthers decided to stay on and sign an extension with them instead.

(Not so fun fact: Boston hockey lost not one but two captains that year--the Boston PWHL team, the Fleet, lost their captain Hilary Knight after leaving her unprotected in an expansion draft.)

Answer: Connor McDavid

The scene was captured by Amazon's NHL documentary, FaceOff: Inside the NHL, which also exposed McDavid's strong aversion to ketchup. McDavid twice went all the way to the Stanley Cup championships only to lose the Cup, both times to the Panthers. McDavid subsequently signed a short-term low-value contract with his team, the Edmonton Oilers, instead of extending long-term as many expected he would.

Despite winning the Four Nations tournament the previous year, McDavid's Team Canada also lost to Team USA in the Olympic gold medal game in 2026, so a bit of frustration's understandable, eh?

Answer: Gavin McKenna

McKenna, at the time playing with the Penn State Nittany Lions, was arrested for assault in January 2026 after allegedly punching a man and breaking his jaw. Details later emerged alleging that McKenna's mother was insulted and harassed by the person McKenna went onto assault. McKenna's mother was also charged with providing alcohol to minors, so the details of the case remain complicated.

Answer: Brady Tkachuk

After Brady Tkachuk won an Olympic Gold medal in 2026 with Team USA, he waived his no-trade clause (NTC) to play with his brother Matthew, an alternate captain for the Florida Panthers. The trade shocked many people, as Brady was at the time the captain of the Ottawa Senators, who were considered a young team of Cup contenders.

Brady and Matthew's father Keith Tkachuk also made comments about the Senators goalie Linus Ullmark's mental health which some considered controversial, further leading to bad blood between Brady and Ottawa fans. (In fact, the Senators facilitated a jersey exchange event to appease fans, as did the Ottawa Titans baseball team, catchily named Chuck Out the Old Jersey and Forget Brady Day respectively.)

Answer: Quinn Hughes

Hughes was traded to the Minnesota in December 2025. He was the captain of the Vancouver Canucks.

Rumors of locker room issues surrounded the team, with players who left later speaking vaguely of displeasure about team dynamics (the complaints were primarily focused on coaching, culture, and management, not Hughes' captaincy), including J.T. Miller and Teddy Blueger, as well as rumors of a feud between two star players on the team, Elias Pettersson and Miller. The trade itself wasn't shocking but the destination was--many fans and analysts expected him to be traded to the New Jersey Devils where his brothers Luke and Jack already played.

(Hughes' tendency to 'zone out' during games, media session etc lead to running jokes on social media bout him seeing ghosts. Hughes has joked about these memes, saying "Sometimes you hear some funny stuff out there, but yeah ... as the people say, I'm usually seeing ghosts, so I'm usually focused on myself.")

Answer: Evgenii Dadonov

Dadonov submitted his no-trade list to his former team, the Ottawa Senators, who later traded him. However, his no-trade list was not mentioned in trade conversations, and his new team, the Vegas Golden Knights, then attempted to trade him to the Ducks, who were on his no-trade list. The trade was voided, but Dadonov didn't stay with the Knights long-term, instead being traded to the Montreal Canadiens and the Dallas Stars before signing a contract with the New Jersey Devils.

Perhaps the most long-lasting impact of the trade was that changes were said to have been made to how NHL trade information was handled.

Answer: Mitch Marner

Marner signed an 8-year contract with the Toronto Maple Leafs before being immediately traded to the Vegas Golden Knights, a move called a 'sign-and-trade' (previously occurring with, for example, Matthew Tkachuk's move to the Panthers). This allowed Marner to get an extra year on his contract, as only players who sign with their existing teams can sign for the full contract duration, which at the time was 8 years. The Leafs for their part were able to gain a return on a player who otherwise would have 'walked', i.e. become an unrestricted free agent.

Marner and the Leafs were rumored to have many issues towards the end of his time with the team despite playing for the Leafs being Marner's childhood dream, according to reports from reputable analysts such as Sportsnet's Elliott Friedman. The media pressure certainly didn't help matters--at some point, his home address was leaked; fans dumped trash on his front lawn and his family allegedly received threats.

Answer: Will Smith

Will Smith and Macklin Celebrini's bromance went viral. They made joint TikToks, forced a teammate to join them for a sleepover, swapped jerseys for bets, and in general took the Internet by storm. Don't be fooled by their online presence, though--they're also lethal on the ice.

They combined for 174 points in the 2025-26 season despite Smith being injured for over a month. As of August 2026 they had the second most points ever scored on the same goal in the NHL before age 21, behind just Patrick Kane and Jonathan Toews.

Answer: Cale Makar

This one's for the Puckpedia fans--this rapid increase in AAV was due to a corresponding increase in the NHL's salary cap, the total amount of money per team to be split between all rostered players. The cap jumped about 25% between the 2023-24 season and the 2025-26 season.

This was after a few years of the cap being 'flat' (unchanged) during COVID with minor increases before and after the pandemic.

Answer: Aaron Ekblad

Ekblad was suspended for 20 games in spring 2026 after failing a random drug test. Ekblad said he'd taken a substance to help him recover from recent injuries without first clearing the substance with medical personnel. The 20-game suspension was at the time standard for a first offense.

The NHL has not historically suspended players for taking PEDs very often--he was the first player to be suspended since Nate Schmidt in 2018 for violating the PED ban.

Answer: Jeremy Swayman

Swayman decided not to report to training camp and Swayman's agent and Boston Bruins GM Cam Neely made differing public statements, usually a very rare occurrence during NHL contract negotiations. However, both parties were eventually able to agree to terms and Swayman signed an 8-year contract before the start of the season.

Swayman opted not to go to arbitration after his experiences the previous season. He said of his previous experience with arbitration, which lead to him signing a 1-year contract: "Hearing you're not worthy of what you think you're worthy of, that was hard to hear. You don't forget what was said."