Welcome to a weekly blog post of thoughts and observations from the past few days and/or decades of NHL hockey.

The Three Stars of Comedy

Recognizing the three moments or personalities from around the league that produced the most comedic fodder for fans this week.

The third star: Mike Gillis
Just as the Washington Capitals are reaching rock bottom thanks to surprisingly terrible goaltending, Vancouver's GM randomly shows up to take in a game on a “scouting trip” (even though the Canucks won’t play any Eastern Conference teams during the regular season). Predictably, everyone freaks out and starts churning out “Roberto Luongo–to–Washington” rumors, which both teams immediately deny. That’s some high-level GM trolling by Gillis right there. I can’t wait until he shows up in Toronto and spends the whole game shining a laser pointer in Dave Nonis’s eyes.

The second star: Max Pacioretty
The Habs winger underwent emergency surgery to remove his appendix last Saturday, sidelining him for three to four weeks. Showing he hadn’t lost his sense of humor, he made a funny joke about returning to the lineup eight days later that was hilarious because he — wait, he what? Really? Oh. Wow.

Welcome to a weekly blog post of thoughts and observations from the past few days and/or decades of NHL hockey.

The Three Stars of Comedy

Recognizing the three moments or personalities from around the league that produced the most comedic fodder for fans this week.

The third star: P.K. Subban attempts to nickname himself “The Subbanator”
It’s hard to describe the crushing disappointment of finding out that a player generally considered one of the coolest and most charismatic in the league is actually a “tries to give himself a nickname” guy. How did it go over with Subban’s teammates? About as well as you might expect.

The second star: Alex Burrows has a unique take on the spinorama

Yes, fine, we covered this already. To make up for the repetition, here’s an adorable photo of Alex Burrows as a child, presumably at the exact moment he invented that move.

After an exhaustive six-hour training camp, the NHL makes its long-awaited return Saturday. And while it’s been easy to forget over the past few months of lockout negotiations between grim-faced men in suits, hockey is a sport played on ice by actual hockey players.

Let’s take a look at some of them now. Here are 10 players who’ll be especially interesting to keep an eye on over the next few months: