My 🔥 Burning Questions 🔥 for the Second Half of the NHL Season
My 🔥 Burning Questions 🔥 for the Second Half of the NHL Season
The 2023-24 season has a lot left to answer between now and the playoffs.
The NHL All-Star break has come and gone, and that means the fun and games are officially over for the 2023-24 season. Now it’s time to focus on the stretch run, the trade deadline and, of course, the arduous Stanley Cup journey that will follow. With all of that in mind, here are five huge questions occupying my headspace as we look ahead to the remainder of the schedule.
🏒 Which contender(s) will separate themselves by the playoffs?
For a number of reasons, t’s been a very strange year for handicapping the Stanley Cup race.
First, many of the teams with the best title odds were not necessarily supposed to be this good — think of the Vancouver Canucks, Winnipeg Jets, or even the Florida Panthers. (Yes, Florida made the Finals last year, but they have had a deeply confusing arc these past few seasons.) Also, many of the teams that appeared to belong in that group at different times have proven to be inconsistent; the L.A. Kings and New York Rangers stand out as early favorites with up-and-down trajectories ever since, while the Edmonton Oilers, Carolina Hurricanes and Tampa Bay Lightning struggled early but have been more their usual selves recently.
(And then there are the Toronto Maple Leafs, who are only a couple of games over .500 and have done it in just about the streakiest way possible.)
Maybe that simply leaves us with the old reliable preseason powerhouses to bank on, like the Boston Bruins, Colorado Avalanche, Vegas Golden Knights and Dallas Stars — each of whom have largely maintained business as usual this season despite facing their own challenges. But with 13 different teams checking in with at least a 1530 Elo rating (i.e., the 25th-percentile Elo for Cup winners since 1993-94) at the halfway point of the schedule — the most at midseason in the past 30 years — this is one of the most wide-open Cup races in recent memory.
🏒 Will a Canadian team FINALLY hoist the Stanley Cup again?
As part of that wide-open group, this season’s crop of Canadian squads also looks like it has a much stronger chance to end the nation’s three-decade-long Stanley Cup drought than usual:
Chief among those contenders are the Canucks, who own the NHL’s best record and check in at second in the meta-forecast with 10% Cup odds. Vancouver boasts the league’s top goal differential across the entire season (+62), and this team has pretty much everything you could want from a championship club: An MVP candidate in defenseman Quinn Hughes; elite goaltending from Thatcher Demko; plenty of high-scoring forwards in J.T. Miller, Elias Pettersson and Brock Boeser; a strong power-play (No. 6 in the league); and a coach who seems to push all the right buttons in Rick Tocchet. Perhaps it’s fitting that in a strong year for Canadian contenders, the franchise that has come the closest to ending the drought (twice!) would be leading the way.
But don’t discount the Oilers, whose early slump — and the firing of coach Jay Woodcroft in favor of Kris Knoblauch — has given way to the league’s best team by far (with a +1.52 goals-per-game differential) ever since. Connor McDavid is back to playing like the best in the world (boy, is he ever), they’re actually getting above-average goalie play out of Stuart Skinner and Calvin Pickard, and they nearly tied the record for the NHL’s longest-ever winning streak. Edmonton could very well find itself carrying the banner for all of Canada in the Finals this spring.
With apologies to Montreal, Ottawa and Calgary (who, it should be said, is playing well recently), the other two Canadian squads with a realistic chance to win the Cup are the Jets and the Leafs. As always, Toronto has the top-end talent of a champion, but is underachieving — they merely sit in wild-card position right now — and is a soap opera waiting to happen. More surprising, perhaps, is the potential of Winnipeg to break the drought, since they had spent the previous five seasons seemingly squandering the promise of their 2018 conference finals run, only to suddenly rediscover it this season. Any team with a goalie of Connor Hellebuyck’s caliber in net is a threat to make a deep postseason run.
🏒 Who needs upgrades at the trade deadline?
This season may offer an abnormally deep well of contending teams, but most of them still have at least some flaws. (Nobody looks like, say, the Bruins did last regular season.) That means the March 8 trade deadline looms as the last opportunity for a top team to address its weaknesses — moves that could pay more dividends this year than usual.
By Goals Above Replacement (GAR), the biggest hole for any team with at least a 2.5% chance of winning the Cup belongs to the Hurricanes in net. Led primarily by Pyotr Kochetkov and Antti Raanta, the Canes have been the NHL’s worst goaltending team by GAR this season and rank third-to-last in save percentage. I suppose you could say the duo has improved recently — they’re up to 22nd in SV% since New Year’s — but Carolina should at least be kicking the tires on an upgrade if possible.
The same could be said about the Colorado Avalanche. Alexandar Georgiev saved the 2022-23 Avs’ season when everything else crumbled around him, but he has regressed back to his previous career form this season, and backup Pavel Francouz is on IR. Colorado at least needs better depth in net ahead of the postseason.
Looking outside the nets, the the Kings rank 24th in offensive production from the blueline and should be searching for a D-man who can take pressure off of Drew Doughty to produce, especially on the power play. (Similarly, the Golden Knights rank 21st in offensive GAR from defensemen, badly missing the injured Shea Theodore’s production.) The Leafs should be looking to improve their 21st-ranked D corps in general, as only Morgan Rielly and Jake McCabe are on pace for more than 3.1 GAR this year. And at forward, the Jets, Rangers and Panthers could use more offensive punch from their depth lines, while the Lightning, Leafs and Stars could stand to add another penalty-killer and/or defensive forward.
🏒 Which playoff bubble teams have the edge?
According to the meta-forecast, six teams — the Penguins, Red Wings, Flyers, Devils, Predators and Blues — have between a 30% and 80% chance at the playoffs, with another three — the Kraken, Islanders and Flames — sitting between 20% and 30% (we’ll round Calgary up from 19.7%). Among those, let’s break them down by conference and discuss why they will/won’t make it.
East: Right now, Philadelphia is third in the Metro, with Detroit clinging to a wild card spot and the Islanders, Penguins and Devils sitting on the outside looking in. But the Wings and Pens have been significantly better by SRS rating this season, and Flyers starting goalie Carter Hart is out because of his alleged role in the 2018 Hockey Canada sexual assault scandal. The big arguments for Philly are a four-point buffer over the wild-card cutoff line and an easier remaining schedule by Elo (23rd-hardest) than Detroit (5th), Pittsburgh (11th), New Jersey (12th) or New York (14th).
The Devils are interesting because they have more ability than they’ve shown, just based on last season, but they’re also furthest out of the playoffs of any team in the group we’re highlighting. The odds favor Detroit to hang onto its wild card and for the Penguins to leapfrog the Flyers and Isles (who have a shaky goal differential) in the Metro.
West: This is a fascinating logjam because none of the teams listed above are particularly likely to make the playoffs — Nashville leads the group at 32% — but at least one of them has to make it, even if the Kings hang onto the other wild-card spot.
Out of our group, the Flames have the best SRS but the worst odds, because they’re buried so deep in the standings. The Preds are a better bet because, while negative, their SRS isn’t that bad — and they face the league’s fourth-easiest remaining schedule. The Blues have a tough road because they face the hardest schedule of the teams in our group, and they have the worst underlying possession metrics. But the Kraken are an intriguing team to keep an eye on; they have the league’s 13th-best goals-per-game differential since New Year’s, and they face the sixth-easiest remaining schedule.
🏒 Who will win MVP (and other big awards)?
As befits a season with so many teams vying for favorite status, the MVP picture is also not completely clear. According to FanDuel’s odds, Colorado’s Nathan MacKinnon is the favorite — and at -135, the only choice better than even-money to win. But among the betting options with better than +10000 odds (sorry, Connor Hellebuyck), only about 4.5 goals per 82 games separates the top seven players by adjusted GAR:
Even though it is MacKinnon’s race to lose, any of the players at or near the top of this list could swing the race by having a monster 10 weeks.
And then we have to briefly touch on the absolute chaos that is the Rookie of the Year battle. Things were looking sewn up for Chicago Blackhawks wunderkind Connor Bedard as recently as early January, but a broken jaw sent him to injured reserve and opened up the race to the field. Bedard remains the odds-on favorite (-190) to win, but even if we toss out goalies Joseph Woll and Lukáš Dostál — as netminders seldom win the award — Bedard has been passed in adjusted GAR by four other RoY candidates: Brock Faber, Luke Hughes, Connor Zary and Marco Rossi.
The preconceived notion that Bedard should win is strong, and he will have a chance to pile up more stats once he returns (which is looking like it might happen in a month or so), but there is at least a chance that an outcome which seemed unthinkable earlier in the season — someone other than Bedard claiming the Calder Trophy — might end up happening.
Filed under: NHL