Seven unexpected trends defining the NHL season so far

Hockey is a notoriously chaotic sport in which you need a large sample of games to know what's real versus what's just noise. For instance, it is estimated that it takes the entire 82-game NHL season to give us as much information about team quality as just 32 NBA games -- or less than half the regular season -- do.

So it's always risky to draw grand conclusions from what we see over the first month of play on the ice. But that can't stop us from finding interesting trends emerging from the early portion of the schedule.

Here are seven initial developments that have taken us by surprise in 2024-25 so far:

1. Ovechkin's comeback against Father Time

One of the biggest storylines heading into the season was Alex Ovechkin's pursuit of Wayne Gretzky's goal-scoring record, with the Great 8 starting the season trailing The Great One by 41 scores.