(Hello, this is a feature that will run through the entire season and aims to recap the weekend’s events and boils those events down to one admittedly superficial fact or stupid opinion about each team. Feel free to complain about it)

Every year, many NHL teams will grant a small number of teenagers the requisite maximum nine-game tryout before sending them back to junior or, in some cases, to the AHL.

This gives the teams the chance to evaluate where those players are in their development paths, and where they stand relative to both expectations and actual NHL talent. It also gives players to show off their skills and potentially impress their way onto the full-time roster.

It is, however, exceptionally rare for teenagers to stick around with their NHL teams, because in the vast majority of cases, they simply aren't ready for the rigors of playing 82 games against grown men who happen to be the best in the world at what they do.

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But it's usually nine games and that's it. Perhaps as it should be. For one thing, the vast majority of these guys likely need more seasoning, and for others who might be on the borderline, it often makes more sense for their teams to slide the contracts by keeping them down in junior for as much time as possible, as long as it isn't detrimental to their development.

How rare are teenagers in this league? Since 2007-08, only 123 teenagers playing their first seasons have gotten into any games at all, and if you extend that out to guys who played more than their nine-game tryout, the number drops to 78. Obviously the latter number will go up in a few weeks when tryouts start expiring and guys who are clearly ready stick with their teams. But that is still an extremely small portion of the league's 690 roster spots going to teenagers.

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The above graph doesn't include guys like Sam Bennett, who suffered injuries which limited their games played to fewer than 10 in the regular season, but those cases are extremely rare, as you might expect.

Meanwhile, there were another 168 guys who played their age-20 seasons in the NHL, so it's obvious this is the age at which many teams are more than comfortable easing guys into the lineup (in a lot of cases, that probably also has a lot to do with the fact that they've already opted to slide the ELC once and probably don't really care to do it again).

This year, however, it feels as though the league's crop of rowdy teens is perhaps better than ever.

Perhaps it's the Eichel/McDavid hype playing a role, and therefore there's some “top-end” feel to the action where there often hasn't been in previous years. What's interesting, though, is while we're talking about guys who “stuck” in their teens, and usually a little less than 10 per year make the cut, there are only eight first-year teenagers being used in the NHL this year at all, down significantly from the usual average of more than 14, and the lowest number since 2007-08, when there were 12.

That number doesn't include guys who are still teenagers, like Aaron Ekblad, who has last season under his belt, but again, those guys are very, very rare. Almost all rookies come spend the majority of their first years at 19, not 18. For instance, Jack Eichel will turn 19 in a little more than two weeks, and Connor McDavid does the same in mid-January. Of the eight teenagers currently looking to make their clubs in their first year, only Daniel Sprong, who's no guarantee to make the Penguins but whose chances are bolstered by the predictable prolonged absence of Pascal Dupuis, will still be 18 by early February.