Pacific division predictions

2.  Vegas Golden Knights

Boy oh boy does Jack Eichel ever have a great story to his career after last season. Never gets a sniff at the playoffs with the Sabres, the franchise pisses him off so he demands a trade, gets traded to Vegas, and in his first trip to the playoffs with the Knights wins the cup. You can’t make this stuff up.

But why am I predicting Vegas will slip? Well, Edmonton and Vegas are the best teams in the Pacific by far so whoever leads the division will cause the other to slip to second.

I think there will be a cup hangover for Vegas, as there usually is for any team that wins the Cup. Playoff hockey takes a lot out of NHL players, which is a big reason why they’re so disappointed when they fall short and why they are so exhilarated when they win the Cup. No matter how hard players train, this fatigue is still present to an extent the next season, which is why you so rarely see teams repeat as Cup winners. It’s very hard to go through the physical grind of a long playoff run two seasons in a row. Why do you think Tampa Bay was so gassed against the Maple Laffs last season? They were bucking the odds already, it was only a matter of time before the chickens came home to roost. I don’t think Vegas will be any different.

Vegas has been known to buck the odds before (no pun intended in this case) but even then these are long odds and teams like Tampa Bay or the late 90s Red Wings are the exception, not the rule.

Then there’s the fact that the cup tax has to be paid for any roster that wins the Cup. This is the term for the inflationary pressures teams will feel re-signing players after a cup win. After all their agents can always say “my guy helped you win a cup” – and they’re not wrong.

Then there’s what turned out to in essence to be two transactions that had a profound impact on their roster on paper – trading Reilly Smith as a cap casualty to the Pittsburgh Penguins and giving his money to Ivan Barbashev. Barbashev is a fine player – and both players have good defensive acumen – but Smith has more upside offensively, and even though the offence put up by Barbashev is comparable it’s still less than what Reilly put up last season. Since the NHL is a game of inches, this may impact the season even though both players are comparable.

What really confused me about trading Smith to the Penguins is all the GKs got back was their own third-round draft pick (previously traded away to rent the services of Teddy Blueger, who ended up signing with the Canucks in free agency). The guy scored 20 goals and 50 points and all you could get was one middling draft pick for him? That just seems like the Knights really got fleeced on that one. That player type should be worth at least a second-round pick.

There’s also the penchant of Mark Stone as an injury-prone player – he’s only gotten close to playing a full season once in his career when he played for Ottawa and played 80 games. When he’s out, that’s a key player out of the lineup for long stretches of time.

Nonetheless, Vegas is still a strong team and not to be trifled with. Take a look at their top six and see how dangerous they are. Chandler Stephenson is Vegas’s answer to Leon Draisaitl – underrated and under-recognized to Jonathan Marchessault. Nonetheless, the fact remains they are a fantastic 1-2 punch at center for the GKs – still not as good as the McDrai duo, but certainly comparable in terms of overall play.

They’ve also got pretty good bottom-six forwards, too – take a look at their stats from last season and see how they compare to the line combos posted. Not a weak spot in the bunch from what I can see.

Their D pairings are quite formidable too, but IMO the Oiler’s pairings are a bit better in the top four, with Vegas holding the edge only in the bottom pairing.

The goalies for Vegas did a great job last season but both are facing the same question as Stuart Skinner – can they do it again?

Vegas had a lot of injuries between the pipes last season, and they ended up letting Laurent Broissoit and trade deadline pickup Jonathan Quick walk. Was that the wrong decision? Only time will tell.

When the dust settled what we have is Logan Thompson, who broke out as a 1A last season with similar stat lines to Skinner. But – can he do it again? Or will he be another Jim Carey, who had an outstanding rookie season for Washington only to drop off the map for the rest of his career? His partner will be Adin Hill, who up until last season was known only as a very good backup. Like Thompson, Hill will have to prove last season wasn’t a fluke for him.

If the goaltending holds up, they will provide significant opposition to the Oilers all season long, but still IMO only second best.

All of that being said, with George McPhee at the helm of this team, you can never truly count them out.

3.  Los Angeles Kings

I’m giving the bronze medal position to the LA Kings, who over the last couple of years have shown to be playoff contenders but still have to work to do to become cup contenders.

The Kings are a fine team but there is a blemish they made this offseason that in my opinion is such a big blunder it may cost GM Rob Blake his job in the next couple of seasons.

They traded a huge haul to Winnipeg to acquire Pierre-Luc Dubois, then re-upped him for a maximum of eight years at $8.5 million per year.

For the life of me, I can’t figure out why the Kings made this move – not only did they give away a significant amount of their cap space to a guy they didn’t need because they already had a very good top-six forward group – in other words unnecessarily shoring up a position of strength – but they’ve kneecapped themselves financially now for the foreseeable future roster wise and cap space wise.

For you see, the entry of Dubois onto the roster then pushes Philip Danault down to the third line, which he doesn’t deserve because he put up 18-36-54 in 82 games last season for the Kings, good numbers for a top-six forward. Yeah he finished with a -8. but that’s the first time he’s been a minus player in seven seasons. This trade and sign just reeks of a panic move made for no reason.

Want an example of why this is a bad idea? Just look at how badly Toronto has performed ever since they signed John Tavares to a huge contract. That has been a self-inflicted wound on their cap space, and the team has struggled to improve ever since because they just don’t have the cap space to do anything other than go bargain basement shopping and hope prospects graduate and play.

Now I see LA in the same predicament. Yes, I know that Kopitar is 36 years old, but he’s still under contract for three more seasons and is surprisingly still an effective player. There was no need to replace him in the lineup now, which is the only reason I can think of for why the Kings made that deal.

Now not only are they forced to pay Danault $5.5 million annually to play on the third line – a huge waste of cap space – but they were forced to trade blueliner Sean Durzi – whose stock is only on the rise – to Arizona in a cap dump move because they didn’t have the cap space to re-sign him after this season.

Judging by their cap space they are hoping and praying that rookie Brandt Clarke is ready to replace him. For their sake, they better hope the gamble pays off.

It also took cap space from the goaltending corps and defence and allocated it to an area of need that wasn’t necessary – the forward group.

Now you can see the results of that bad decision when you look at the King’s goalies. Forced to go bargain basement shopping for goalies, they ended up signing a cooked 36-year-old Cam Talbot to a one-year, $1.5 million contract. He was terrible for Ottawa last season, in 36 games only putting up a .898 sv% and 2.93 GAA. That’s terrible. His backup is Pheonix Copley, a career backup who is signed for one year and $1,000,000. Not much better than Talbot, he put up a .903 sv% and a 2.64 GAA in 37 games for LA last season.

What really fries me is they had the opportunity to re-sign Joonas Korpisalo and they let him walk – ironically, he walked to Ottawa where Talbot had just finished up.

As a result of this bad decision, LA will be held back by their goaltending regardless of who is in net, and officially be relegated to third banana behind the Oilers and Vegas, and come playoff time one of those two teams will always eliminate them in either the first or second round until their goaltending gets better.

They shored up the wrong area of their team and failed to improve the area of their team that really needed improving. Yeah, I get that Jonathan Quick was completely cooked and needed to be replaced, but you replaced him with an over-the-hill guy on his last legs who was a failure in Ottawa last season. That’s not an upgrade, it’s a lateral move at best.

I would go so far as to say that LA now has arguably the worst goaltending of any playoff team in the NHL.

Nonetheless, I can’t see another team dethroning LA – on paper, at least – so for now the playoff contenders in LA will remain in third spot until someone else proves otherwise.

They still have a very solid team but their goaltending will hold them back until they can afford an upgrade.

4.  Seattle Kraken

GM Ron Francis is sitting quite securely in his chair and smiling right about now I’m guessing. The Kraken are still experiencing some expansion woes in building a winner but are well on track for their plan. It only took them two years to make the playoffs, as they grabbed a wildcard spot last season. They upset the Colorado Avalanche in the first round and then proceeded to lose against Dallas in the second round, but it was a great first step as the team had a taste of success.

Will the Kraken build on that this season? I’d say they have a chance, but I don’t see them as a top-three team in the division just yet as they are a bit lacking in top-end talent. Nonetheless, this is a good and scrappy team that may not have a lot of sexy names but is a team based on depth.

It certainly doesn’t hurt that the reigning Calder Trophy winner Matty Beniers is on your roster too.

Surrounding Beniers are Jared McCann, Jordan Eberle, Andre Burakovsky, Jaden Schwartz, and Alex Wennberg. Solid if unspectacular top six six-forward group – although Jaden Schwartz really should practice better defensive play as he’s been below -10 the last two seasons in a row. You’d really expect better from a veteran of 668 NHL games who’s making $5.5 million for the next three seasons.

The bottom six forward group are no slouches either. If you checked the first link you’ll see ex-Oiler Kailer Yamamoto has been signed by the Kraken to play fourth-line RW.

The D corps are very solid too. Vince Dunn finished second on the team in scoring – and 10th in the league amongst blueliners – in scoring with an eye-popping 64 points in 81 games all while maintaining a +28 – that’s huge. Expect some regression next season, however, as he finished with a shooting % of 9.4%, 2.5% above his career average.

Ex-Oiler Adam Larsson had a rough first season defensively in Seattle but rebounded in a big way last season with a +27 and a career-high 33 points in a full season played.

The second pairing isn’t quite as impressive, but still solid as Jamie Oleksiak had 25 points last season and his partner Will Borgen had 20, the former in 75 games and the latter in the full 82.  Those are career highs for both players, but again shooting %s plays a part in those numbers so don’t necessarily expect improvement. A now 33-year-old Justin Schultz anchors the third pairing, and he thrived in his downgraded role putting up 34 points and a +4 in 73 games for the Kraken last season. His partner is 31-year-old former Pen Brian Dumoulin.

The departure of Carson Soucy to Vancouver may have an impact on this lineup yet, we’ll see.

What will prevent the Kraken from making their way up the standings appears to be between the pipes as they don’t have a great option in either a starter or 1a/1b situation. Both Philip Grubauer and Martin Jones – the latter of whom has since departed for Toronto – finished with sv%’s below .900 and GAAs above 2.5…..ouch.

Third-stringer Joey Daccord has shown some promise, but in five games played he only finished with a .900 sv% and a GAA of 3.14, so don’t expect him to make the team on the regular without a major turnaround. Chris Dreidger is signed as well but he put up relatively the same numbers as Jones and Grubauer last season.

Expect Seattle to run in place until they get more high-end talent on their roster and – like LA – improve their goaltending.

5.  Calgary Flames

And now we get to the subpar portion of the division. The Flames are running a bit dim these days. Firing Darryl Sutter was addition by subtraction, even if was overdue and on the heels of a player revolt. In his stead, they have promoted Ryan Huska from assistant coach to head coach. The jury is out on whether this will actually accomplish anything, though, or whether it’s merely putting lipstick on a pig as the Flames roster has a lot of dysfunction and holes in it.

Their goaltending is the poster child for the roster as a whole – Jakob Markstrom has been a massive failure as a signing and Dan Vladar has also been a failure, just at a lower cap hit.

Tyler Toffoli already said he won’t sign an extension to play in Calgary and has since been traded to New Jersey. Andrew Mangiapane, Elias Lindholm, and Noah Hanifin have all followed Toffoli and said they won’t sign extensions in Calgary. That’s about half their core players who want out of Calgary – and really who can blame them? The Flames are a complete and total joke. They had a great opportunity with the Matthew Tkachuk trade to get a huge amount of futures and start a rebuild, and instead chose to trade for two warm bodies that frankly at this point I would expect will want out in trade as well – and they just got there last season.

This is a franchise that throughout its entire existence save for the 80s and 2004 has basically been crying out for a rebuild as there is no plan for a vision for this team or a plan on how to get out of the current funk they’re in. They never have any consistent success, always making the playoffs and then not, then making the playoffs again and then not. They’ve never embarked on a full rebuild in the team’s history as the owners remind me very much of Harold Ballard and Rocky Wirtz – who cares how the team is doing on the ice as long as they’re generating $$ for us?

New GM Craig Conroy has his work cut out for him, but the biggest red flag is he’s also a favourite pick of ownership, which means he’s a company man who probably won’t risk rocking the boat and asking for the green light to do what needs to be a done – a complete and total rebuild of the team. Probably building the scouting department from scratch is a good idea too as the Flames have had a rather spotty drafting record for years – shown by the fact that all of their division rivals that are superior to them have more homegrown draft picks on their roster than the Flames do.

How long is it going to be before Huberdeau and Weegar go out? Probably not long, at this rate. Nazem Kadri won’t be far behind them, count on it.

Heck, the Flames only have eight draft picks on their roster – the Oilers have 10. 11 if Raphael Lavoie makes the roster as expected at training camp.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – the Flames will never have any success until they blow up their scouting department and remake it with competent scouts as well as rebuild the roster, painful as that may be in the short term.

After all, you have no more Matthew Tkachuks to trade to Florida anymore.

6.  Vancouver Canucks

The Canucks existence as a franchise has been an exercise in hard luck. They seem to go through multiple rebuilds which cultivate in a Cup finals appearance once a decade only to fall short and lose the series then fall off the map again. Seriously, check it out. They’ve made the finals three times – once in 1982, once in 1994, and once in 2011, only to lose to the Islanders dynasty, Rangers, and Bruins respectively. Buffalo is the only team that’s been around about the same amount of time they have and not won a Cup.

The current iteration of the Canucks can best be described as trying to clean up the mess that previous GM Jim Benning made. I don’t envy his successor in Patrik Allvin – Allvin has a LOT of work to do to bring this franchise back to relevancy. And Benning didn’t make it easy on him – the Canucks have the dubious distinction of being the NHL team utilizing their cap space in the worst possible way. They have the third-largest player payroll in the NHL but have nothing to show for it.

Nonetheless, Allvin has shown some smarts in his first season as GM of the Canucks. He bit the bullet and corrected a huge mistake Jim Benning made by buying out Oliver Ekman-Larsson despite the fact it will result in a dead cap hit of over $4.7 million at peak for the 2025-26 and 2026-27 seasons. What Jim Benning was thinking I’ll never know as before he made that trade he had a number of bottom-six forwards whose contracts were up after that season and whose cap hits added up to $10 million.

He dealt all of those forwards to Arizona in the OEL trade, so he saved himself $2 million in year one and then promptly cost the franchise $8 million or so after that. That math just doesn’t work.

After Bo Horvat revealed to the team that he wouldn’t sign an extension, Horvat was shipped to the New York Islanders in exchange for a prospect and Anthony Beauvillier. He matched his 9-11-20 boxcars in fewer games for the Canucks after the trade so that’s got to be a bit of a silver lining.  Allvin inherited Conor Garland as well in the OEL trade with Arizona which I suppose also provides some hope for the future. They succeeded in convincing KHL star Andrei Kuzmenko to sign with them last year and he promptly went out and scored 39 goals and collected 74 points in year one.

So I’d say that turned out well for them. Allvin also signed Teddy Blueger, a useful bottom-six piece. He signed promising young free agent Sheldon Dries. They also have useful forwards Nils Hoglander and Pius Suter.

He traded for Filip Hronek from the Wings, who will replace OEL in the lineup and has a much higher ceiling as a player.

He made a bit of a risky move by signing Carson Soucy to play on the top pairing with superstar Quinn Hughes. Soucy was best known as a third-pairing d-man who did spot duty in the second pairing.  IIRC he never really played top pairing minutes in Seattle, and not every NHL player can handle the higher minutes and tougher competition up there, so whether or not Soucy can handle it remains to be seen. I get the wisdom in grabbing a player who is on the upswing, but Soucy has no such track record of playing the top pairing. I’m assuming he used Cody Ceci as a comparative seeing as how they have identical $3.25 million cap hits, but Ceci had a year of top pairing work under his belt before coming to the Oilers. Soucy has no such track record.

Allvin better hopes it works out otherwise he has signed a guy for three seasons who has an NTC for the first two years. I’m sure Allvin would love to have Tyler Myers off the roster as well as he’s been underachieving for some time, but fortunately for him this contract is up after this season, so that should give Allvin a nice boost of $6 million in cap space.

And then of course there’s Thatcher Demko, a starter-caliber goalie who had an off-year last season. I would expect his stats to improve once the team in front of him gets better.

So, it’s a bit of a good news/bad news scenario in Vancouver. The bad news is Allvin has to rebuild the rebuild that Jim Benning was doing. The good news is a lot of the talent and pieces are already in place, so he won’t have to do a wholesale rebuild per se.

Don’t be surprised if the Canucks leapfrog over the Flames this season.

7.  Anaheim Ducks

And now we get to the dregs of the division.  The Ducks are in the midst of a rebuild so there isn’t much to say about them at this point. They have some good building blocks in place talent-wise with a first line of Adam Henrique-Trevor Zegras (who still needs to be signed as an RFA)-Troy Terry and a second line of Alex Killorn-Mason Mctavish-Ryan Strome.

It will be interesting to see how Alex Killorn – a cap casualty of Tampa Bay last season – will perform on a rebuilding Ducks team as he’s only played on stacked Lightning teams his whole career.

That being said, scoring goals isn’t the problem for this Anaheim team, it’s playing defence. They finished with the worst GA in the entire league last season with 338. Check it out – literally only three players – THREE – finished at or over the 0 mark in +/- – and none of those guys played more than 20 games for the Ducks last season.

As for their defence? They turned over four out of six blueliners so that should tell you all you need to know about them. Third-pairing rough-and-tumble blueliner Radko Gudas was signed to play on the second pairing, that’s another big tell.

As for the goaltending? Look at what I wrote about the Kraken’s goaltending and you have basically the same situation.

The Ducks should easily be able to overcome the Sharks this season, but other than that expect more rebuilding.

8.  San Jose Sharks

And now we get to the last-place team in the division – the worst of the worst. New GM Mike Grier has just started a rebuild so his teams will be very bad for the next few years.

On the plus side, at least he succeeded in trading away Erik Karlsson, and hopefully, he learned his lesson about not trading more than the market wants to offer him. Well, they got a first-round pick from the Pens and a whole bunch of assets in the Timo Meier trade to New Jersey, so hopefully that helps.

Again, not much to say about San Jose. I picked them for last place for a reason – they’re bad. They managed to sign Mikael Granlund, Mike Hoffman, and Anthony Duclair as free agents – not long-term, but it’s something. Grier’s next moves – ideally – would be to trade away Logan Couture, Tomas Hertl, and Mark Edouard-Vlasic, but that will be a tall order as all three have some form of NTC or NMC in their contracts. Also, in the case of the pickle man, his contract goes until he’s 38. That’s going to be a tough sell to get rid of without a 50% retention. Would these players waive their clauses to leave a rebuilding team? Possibly, but you’re at the mercy of the player.

What’s also going to hurt is the Sharks have retained salary on both Karlsson and Brent Burns which totals over $4.2 million for the next two seasons, and buyouts on Rudolf Balcers and Martin Jones taking up an additional $3.2 million in cap space for this season – at least that goes down to $1.67 million after this season, so that’s some relief anyway. But that’s almost $7.5 million in dead cap space for this season…..ouch. GM Grier clearly needs to get out from under MEV and his $7 million cap hit ASAP. That’s going to hold the team back for a long time.

This is another GM chair I’m glad I don’t have.

For now, Grier’s choice is clear – keep trying to unload veterans and assemble draft picks to continue building up the talent level.