This morning, I headed over to UBC’s hockey rink (scene of all my own greatest hockey triumphs and tragedies, if such terms can be applied to me scoring a few goals and then falling and cracking a bone in my finger during scrimmage in the UBC Ladies’ Beginner Hockey classes) to watch the Canucks’ rookies in action. Yes, the Canucks. Well, I live in Vancouver, and I have to work with what’s available.

But anyway: rookie camp! You know what this means. Hockey season is almost upon us! In fact, it is one week from today that the Senators will be taking the ice for their first pre-season game against Wade Redden and the New York Rangers.

Yesterday I did one of those fan surveys for NHL.com. It asked me a bunch of questions about how often I listened to games on the radio last season, which was pretty much all the time, due to my geographical situation. This season, I plan to avoid the radio by ordering Center Ice Online. Not only will I be able to watch the Sens to my heart’s content, I will also have the option of watching just about any other game I want to. It’s going to be like an all-you-can-eat hockey buffet!

I’m excited about it, because there’s a few teams other than the Sens I’d like to keep an eye on this year, for various reasons — because the Sens can’t play every day and I have to get my hockey fix somewhere, but also because some of these teams have players I like, some of them look like good young teams whose development will be interesting to watch, and one is a team I could not possibly avoid, even if I tried really, really hard.

Five Teams to Watch This Season on the Sens’ Days Off

Rick Nash and his wacky spaceman hockey suit want you to watch the Blue Jackets this season!

Columbus Blue Jackets: Oh, the Blue Jackets. One of those weird expansion teams no one really knows much about. They entered the league in 2000-2001, and have still never made the playoffs. I think that right there is actually a pretty good reason to watch them: they’ve got to make the playoffs someday (don’t they?) and maybe this year will be their year. It could be quite exciting to watch. The Jackets made some fairly big changes during the offseason. They also gave coach Ken Hitchcock a three-year contract extension, and seem to be building the team around his style of play. Will this plan work? Can goalie Pascal Leclaire, fresh off signing a three-year deal worth almost $12 million, match or better last season’s performance? Was the R.J. Umberger we saw with the Flyers during the playoffs last season the real R.J. Umberger? Will Mike Commodore do better in Columbus than he did in Ottawa? These are all things I’ll be watching for. But even without all that intrigue, I would still have one excellent reason to watch the Blue Jackets, and that reason can be summed up in two words: Rick Nash. My love for him is on its own enough to make the Blue Jackets my number one hockey destination when the Sens are off doing whatever they do when they’re not playing hockey.

Chicago Blackhawks: This one is a no-brainer — anyone who follows the NHL knows the Hawks are one of the most exciting-looking young teams out there right now. There’s an extremely strong chance they’ll make the playoffs this season, led by two fantastic young players: 2007-2008 Calder Trophy winner Patrick Kane (19) and his fellow Calder nominee Jonathan Toews (the Hawks’ newest captain at just 20 years old). Dustin Byfuglien (23) and my personal favourite Patrick Sharp (the old man of the group at 26) aren’t exactly chopped liver either. On defence, the Hawks were of course the winners in the Brian Campbell sweepstakes this summer: as an old 67’s season ticket holder, I’m a longtime Campbell fan and I’ll always keep an eye on him. Duncan Keith and Brent Seabrook are two other Chicago D-men of interest. Aside from all that, there’s also the annual Martin Havlat Injury Watch and the debut of The World’s Most Expensive Goaltending Tandem, with Nikolai Khabibulin ($6.75 million) and Cristobal Huet ($5.625 million) both still on the roster, to keep things interesting in Chicago.

Edmonton Oilers: With the Canucks and the Avalanche looking mighty bad and the Wild seeming to have taken a step backwards, I think the race for the Northwest this season will be between Calgary and Edmonton. It should make for some very entertaining Battle of Alberta games! I like both Alberta teams, and so the question arises: which do I root for in what will no doubt be an intense struggle for Northwest supremacy? My gut tells me I will be cheering on the boys from Edmonton. I was really rooting for the Oilers to squeak into the playoffs last season, and will be shocked if they don’t see some post-season action this year. They’re a fun team to watch, and a likeable one too. Beyond my somewhat random love of Shawn Horcoff, I admit that I have no reason for this preference of Oil over Flame. The Flames thus get an honourable mention on my list of teams to watch, too.

Phoenix Coyotes: The Coyotes haven’t made the playoffs since 2002, but I think they have a good chance of ending that streak this year. They’ve got a strong goalie in Ilya Bryzgalov, a great captain in Shane Doan (he is one of my favourites), and, in Todd Fedoruk, the always entertaining Daniel Carcillo, and our own Brian McGrattan, they’ve also got more enforcers than you can shake a stick at, though I don’t know that shaking a stick at an enforcer would ever be a good idea anyway unless you wanted your face broken. With that lineup, the Coyotes might just be trying to scare the rest of the Pacific Division into submission. But with young talent like Peter Mueller and Kyle Turris, who should be making his NHL debut this season, in the lineup along with new addition Olli Jokinen, they may not have to.

Vancouver Canucks: Vancouver Canucks? Shouldn’t it be Vancouver Ca-sucks? Zing! This team is going nowhere but down. With the departures of Markus Naslund, Trevor Linden, and Brendan Morrison this offseason, the Canucks lost three longtime players and important team leaders — Naslund had been the team captain since 2000 and Morrison was an alternate, while Linden, though he played only 59 games last season, was one of the greatest Canucks ever and no doubt took on a huge leadership role for the team. New GM Mike Gillis has replaced these guys with, er, Steve Bernier, Pavol Demitra, Kyle Wellwood, and Nolan Baumgartner. That doesn’t exactly seem like a step up, and with this loss of offense, Vancouver fans seem destined to have to watch an even more boring brand of Alain Vigneault defensive hockey than they saw last year. The Canucks’ one ace in the hole is Roberto Luongo, who can undoubtedly carry the team when he’s playing well. But Luongo did not seem happy last season, and I wonder how long he’s willing to stick around if this team doesn’t start winning. Which it won’t. So why am I going to be watching them, you ask? Simply put: they’re the only thing on TV. I get Sportsnet Pacific. Pacific! It’s not even Sportsnet West! It’s a channel with one audience: British Columbians. Their only job during hockey season is to cover the Canucks! It is wall-to-wall blue and green and orca logos out here, and because of the sad depth of my hockey obsession, I am incapable of looking away. It’s like a particularly nasty form of self-imposed torture.

As you can see, all the teams on my list are in the Western Conference. This is partly because most of the Eastern teams I don’t hate with a fiery passion are either really bad or incredibly boring, and partly because I am first and foremost a Senators fan, and I am really too invested in their fortunes to want any other team in the East to do well. However, if I were to pick a backup Eastern team, I would go with the Washington Capitals. I developed a soft spot for this bunch as I watched them systematically dismantle the Sens four times last season. Yes, it was truly horrifying and embarrassing, but at the same time I had to admit that, wow, those guys were good. Once the Sens had been eliminated from the playoffs, I was prepared to make the Caps my Eastern team in the second round … until they didn’t make it through. This season, they should only get better. There is, of course, the brilliant Alex Ovechkin to watch (bonus: the Ovechkin factor ensures that a lot of Caps games will be televised nationally), and add Alexander Semin, Nicklas Backstrom, and Mike Green to the list of great young players in DC. Though I can’t say I hope they win the conference, I will at least not actively be hoping for the Caps to fail.

If I do manage to follow through on my plan to watch as much hockey as is humanly possible this season, you may see posts about some of these teams in this space. But rest assured — I’ll be thinking of the Sens the whole time.