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Yes, the Tampa Bay Lightning just played in three consecutive Stanley Cup Finals. But the NHL in the salary cap era remains known for its parity, at least when it comes to which teams make the playoffs every year. The carousel moves quickly and violently. The Montreal Canadiens went from 2020-21 Cup finalists to the third-lowest points percentage of their 104-season history in 2021-22 and the No. 1 pick in the 2022 NHL Draft.
Partially because the league switched from its COVID-necessitated geographical division structure back to its traditional divisions, we saw quite a bit of playoff turnover between 2020-21 and 2021-22.
Going from out to in:
Calgary Flames
Dallas Stars
Los Angeles Kings
New York Rangers
Going from in to out:
Montreal Canadiens
New York Islanders
Vegas Golden Knights
Winnipeg Jets
So one quarter of the NHL’s postseason field changed year over year. Will we see a similar effect in 2022-23 when the playoff carousel spins again?
With a lot of the offseason’s major roster makeover work done, let’s project which teams could climb back into the playoffs after missing in 2021-22, and which teams could slide out of the picture. With two of the main unrestricted free agents, Nazem Kadri and John Klingberg, somehow still on the market, the picks here have potential to change, of course.
MISSED 2021-22 PLAYOFFS, COULD MAKE 2022-23 PLAYOFFS
Detroit Red Wings
Detroit only spiked its points percentage from .429 in 2020-21 to a modest .451 this past season, but it was still improvement, and what made it particularly promising were the specific players contributing to the rise. Moritz Seider was already one of the league’s best all-round defensemen in his rookie season and won the Calder Trophy in a walk. Slick-mitted Lucas Raymond flashed excellent scoring touch and two-way intelligence. Top-line center Dylan Larkin had one of the best seasons of his career.
And GM Steve Yzerman evidently decided he saw enough promise to reward his young core with some veteran help. In a flurry of early-offseason activity, he traded for goaltender Ville Husso to form a tandem with Alex Nedeljkovic; signed forwards David Perron, Andrew Copp and Dominik Kubalik, and added defenseman Ben Chiarot. It remains to be seen if these were the right players to target for long-term contention but, in the short term, the Wings are undoubtedly better now than they were a year ago — while almost every other Atlantic Division team has gotten worse on paper this summer.
Ottawa Senators
The other Atlantic team that has clearly improved itself — as much as any team in the NHL — is Ottawa, of course. Adding Alex DeBrincat and Claude Giroux to a top-six forward group that already included Brady Tkachuk, Josh Norris, Drake Batherson and Tim Stutzle makes Ottawa’s offense formidable. New addition Cam Talbot shores up the goaltending, too.
While the Sens have question marks about their D-corps, they have a horse in Thomas Chabot and, in Jake Sanderson, a rookie who could make an impact similar to Seider’s. Sanderson’s all-around potential is that significant. Ottawa is a much tougher out going forward. This should be its most competitive squad since the group that reached Game 7 of the Eastern Conference Final in 2016-17.
New York Islanders
The stingy Islanders reached the final four of the 2019-20 and 2020-21 playoffs, losing to the eventual-champion Tampa Bay Lightning both times, and returned mostly the same group for 2021-22. What happened? Their new arena construction happened, along with the 13-game, season-opening road trip it necessitated, during which they went 5-6-2. Later in the year, COVID-related reschedulings forced them to play their final 50 games in just 99 days. The schedule alone, which will be much fairer next season, is reason to expect a turnaround.
It’s true that GM Lou Lamoriello and the Islanders have been one of the league’s quieter teams this offseason, largely because they swung and missed on Johnny Gaudreau. But we’re still likely to see the Isles make at least one significant upgrade before the season starts, assuming they can find a way to straddle the line between using their cap space to get better and using it to re-sign RFA defensemen Noah Dobson and (newly acquired) Alexander Romanov.
The Isles aren’t flashy but they’re deep and have a tremendous goaltending tandem in Ilya Sorokin and Semyon Varlamov. And despite the coaching change from Barry Trotz to Lane Lambert, the team’s stingy, scrappy identity should remain intact given Lambert worked under Trotz.
Vancouver Canucks
The Canucks under Travis Green last season: 8-15-2, .360 points percentage
The Canucks under Bruce Boudreau last season: 32-15-10, .649 points percentage
A .649 points percentage would’ve been good for second place in the Pacific Division over the course of a full season in 2021-22. The Canucks found new life under Boudreau, perhaps none more than Elias Pettersson, who exploded for 21 goals and 44 points in 34 games after the All-Star break. Looking up and down Vancouver’s lineup, there’s plenty of exciting talent there. Quinn Hughes is one of the game’s most dynamic young blueliners. Thatcher Demko has a Vezina Trophy ceiling. As long as Brock Boeser and J.T. Miller are Canucks, they bring significant talent to the forward corps, which also added Ilya Mikheyev and KHL star Andrei Kuzmenko.
The Canucks need to improve their team defense, but, as currently constructed, possess some intriguing firepower and a goaltender who can bail out their lapses — not to mention a coach for whom they delivered playoff-level hockey for two thirds of a season.
MADE 2021-22 PLAYOFFS, COULD MISS 2022-23 PLAYOFFS
Boston Bruins
The Bruins are by far the easiest pick for the “could miss” list. They will be without top left winger Brad Marchand and No. 1 defenseman Charlie McAvoy for a significant chunk of time to start the 2022-23 campaign and aren’t guaranteed to have D-men Matt Grzelcyk and Mike Reilly back healthy by October, either.
Even with Patrice Bergeron expected to return rather than retire and David Krejci rumored to be coming back from the Czech Republic, Boston’s losses greatly outweigh its gains so far this offseason. Trading for Pavel Zacha does not move the needle all that much, and many of the teams below Boston in the Atlantic have improved.
Nashville Predators
The good news: Nashville locked up star left winger Filip Forsberg on a long-term deal before he made it to market as a UFA. He and defenseman Roman Josi should hold many franchise records by the time they retire.
The bad news: Nashville has added little aside from gritty but aging defenseman Ryan McDonagh and swapping in some depth players like Zach Sanford and Mark Jankowski while swapping out others like Nick Cousins and Luke Kunin. So a Predators team that slipped into the playoffs in the final week of the regular season goes into 2022-23 not looking all that different. That’s a bit scary considering the Preds got a career-best season from center Matt Duchene, who almost never strings consecutive good years together, not to mention resurgent campaigns from Ryan Johansen and Mikael Granlund. Considering their efforts were enough to just barely get Nashville into the playoffs, what happens if their play regresses even 10% next season?
The Predators should remain competitive, armed with a great goaltender in Juuse Saros and a dependable D-corps led by Josi, McDonagh, Mattias Ekholm and Dante Fabbro. But there doesn’t appear to be much margin for error. They could be a bubble team again.
Washington Capitals
The Caps played .610 hockey last season in a strangely top-heavy Eastern Conference that pretty much had every playoff seed locked up by Christmas, but they quietly backed in as the No. 8 seed. They enter the 2022-23 season as, at the moment, the oldest team in the NHL, with an average age of 29.84, according to Elite Prospects.
The Caps will start next season without two of their top-six forwards. Center and longtime franchise stalwart Nicklas Backstrom had hip resurfacing surgery and is expected to miss a significant portion of 2022-23. First-line right winger Tom Wilson had surgery to repair a torn ACL in May, and his six-to-eight-month recovery timeline could easily cost him half the season.
The Caps did make some noteworthy additions this offseason, signing center Dylan Strome and right winger Connor Brown as stopgaps and overhauling their goaltending to install Darcy Kuemper and Charlie Lindgren as a duo. But are they better than last year’s eighth-seeded team? Not as long as Wilson and Backstrom are out. And while Kuemper’s regular-season track record suggests he’s a nice upgrade over Vitek Vanecek and Ilya Samsonov in goal, Kuemper was mediocre during the Colorado Avalanche’s run to the 2022 Stanley Cup, so he might not be quite as large of an improvement as perceived.
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