On Tuesday, we had some fun with the idea of overreacting to the season’s first week. It’s a silly thing that hockey fans tend to do, and we usually end up looking back in a few months and wondering what all the fuss was about.



But every now and then the hockey gods like to smack us on the nose with an opening-week game that’s so lopsided, we wonder if they’re trying to tell us something. It’s one thing to lose a game or two. It’s another thing entirely to see your team get blown out of the water. That’s when it’s time to worry.



Or is it? I fired up the hockey-reference play index to see how many teams had been blown out by five goals or more in one of their first three games of the season during the cap era. It turns out to be rare, but not overly so, happening about twice a year on average. And as it turns out, some of the teams on the wrong end of those lopsided scores turned out just fine.



So today,...