Happy Opening Day hockey fans! The first month is usually the most exciting time of the year for fans until the playoffs roll around. Everything is fresh and almost every team has a shiny new toy to show off or a sense of hope with everyone on an equal playing field. By November everything becomes a little more mundane. The playoff picture starts to take shape around Thanksgiving. The new faces on every team are fully part of the day-to-day operation by now and everything becomes more systematic. That isn’t to say I take the season for granted because the midnight hour over the summer isn’t the same without a random Western Conference game that starts as background noise but pulls you in once the score gets close with two minutes left.
There just seems to be more apathy towards the regular season now than I can ever remember. The biggest high I felt as a Hurricanes fan was the race to the playoffs in 2019, breaking the decade-long drought. Every game down the stretch felt like do-or-die and the clinching game is still a hallmark moment for the franchise. Little did we know this would be the standard going forward. The team does its business in the first three months of the season, usually going on a winning streak before New Year’s and making the playoffs hasn’t even been a question since then.
The cynicism around their regular season and even their playoff series wins is something I understand but also get annoyed with. The wins during the doldrums of the year obviously don’t compare to the soul-crushing defeats in May and even winning a couple playoff rounds doesn’t do much for some of the fanbase because we’ve been programmed to know where the finish line is. Once they’re comfortably in the top three of the Metro Division, we start to pick at flaws why their usual playoff demons will come back to haunt them and how they don’t stack up to the elites (which was really only Florida last year).
Again, I understand this line of thinking because winning it all should be the goal for everyone, especially when you’re on a streak of making the playoffs. It just feels like there’s a large portion of the fanbase & hockey fans in general that don’t seem to enjoy watching the games anymore because they're preparing for the heartbreak in late Spring. I’m not gonna tell anyone how to enjoy sports, but as someone who covers it & interacts with fans it’s always a little depressing to see how some don’t get any joy from just watching the games.
Sometimes even I have to take a step back on the days where I have 10-12 games to track or post about because there is a lot that blends in. I’m doing a lot of work on those days but sometimes it feels like the bare minimum with just getting the data tracked and not providing much further analysis. There is a limit on how much you can retain and it limits the creative side of the A3Z project sometimes. About once a week I’ll see some fans have a conversation using the statcaps from some mundane Wednesday night game. It’s always nice to get that reminder that fans still do care about the regular season & I’m not just yelling into a wall until April starts.
This is why I’m always excited to see the new teams that break into the playoff picture. Montreal & Ottawa’s runs to the post-season were fun to watch and so was Columbus’ surge to the final week even though they just missed. Utah kind of has that buzz around them this year, making a couple of big moves after finishing just outside the wild card picture. This is the weird situation the playoff format has us in where there’s more interest in hockey after January if you’re a bottom-feeder rather than a contender. Florida winning their second Cup in a row without home ice advantage will make you not care about seeding & matchups.
So what am I looking forward to this year? The Hurricanes gave me no shortage of material to work with over the summer, bringing in Nikolaj Ehlers and continuing to restructure their defense corps with K’Andre Miller coming in from the Rangers. The addition of Alexander Nikishin is also very exciting. He looks like someone put Cale Makar in the body of an NFL strong safety in his KHL highlights and expectations for him are higher than any Carolina rookie that I can remember.
The landscape of the Eastern Conference could also drastically change depending on how Florida adjusts to the brutal Sasha Barkov injury. The past two seasons Florida felt inevitable for any team in the East, regardless of how much they struggled down the stretch. It’s a team that suffocates offense to the point where trying to play from behind against them is just an exercise in frustration until they break you and are trailing 3-0 by the end of the first period. Barkov is such a key cog in their defensive fortress with tiling the ice & killing plays that it will be interesting to see if Florida changes anything with how they play. Anton Lundell is a great young player, but a different mold than Barkov, so they have a year to adjust to life without their captain. They’re still the standard until proven otherwise.
The Oilers don’t feel like an inevitability despite back-to-back Cup Final appearances. This could just be baggage from years of being the Oilers and self-sabotaging, but the Western Conference always appears more treacherous. Dallas basically has to flip their team building philosophy from how to win to “how do we beat the Oilers?” Which seems easy on the surface until you remember the gauntlet they have to run through in their own division. Vegas added Mitch Marner and the Jets always seem to stay competitive, so there are more teams gunning for Edmonton’s spot at the top. The one thing Edmonton has going for them is they’ve gotten close despite a lot of things going wrong, some by their own doing. They managed to get close with Stuart Skinner posting numbers comparable to a 17-year old backup in the OHL last year along with other roster holes. It should be some motivation for them to really go for it while McDavid gave them an increased budget on his new contract.
The last point kind of ties into the bigger picture issue that I’m interested to see over the next few years. The rising cap means it’s becoming more of a “pay what you want for who you want and figure out the rest later” type of league. The Wild are certainly trying this method with the contract they gave Kirill Kaprizov while also having Boldy, Faber and Gustavsson under contract long-term. Are we going to see more top-heavy rosters like this or will it be more balanced? Especially with salaries for middle of the roster players going up along with the cap. Even the defending champs have to address this issue because a big reason why Florida’s stayed as good as they are is because of the number of guys they had on cost-controlled deals. They’ve paid most of those guys now with only a couple of cap casualties, so they have one run with this group sans Barkov and we’ll see how the core fights off the aging curve after this.
As for roster building & tactics I’m watching for, the Panthers have created somewhat of a battle of how to build out your defense corps. Some teams rolled out the bank trucks to pay for bigger defensemen or keeping the ones that they have (hi Kevin Bahl). Carolina somewhat falling into this mindset with the Miller trade, adding size to what was one of the smaller defense corps’ in the league. On the flipside, you have Lane Hutson taking the league by storm (and due for a massive payday), Cale Makar winning another Norris & puck-movers like Josh Morrissey or Quinn Hughes adding more to their team’s ceiling. I feel like there’s going to be an interesting roster building dynamic here over the next few seasons with how teams fill out their defense corps. Michael Clifford did some work with the zone exit/retrieval data & it showed more of a correlation to offense rather than preventing goals. Basically that a failed zone exit isn’t a death sentence anymore like it was a few years ago. Maybe teams have gotten better at protecting the house & recovering after a botched breakout. Shot blocking now is different than it was a decade ago, as you don’t completely take yourself out of the play to sellout for a block now.
It is harder to score from within the offensive zone than it is off the rush, even after a turnover & Florida showed us in the playoffs how hard it is to break through when you can only score on the forecheck. The part that gets missed is that Florida had an element of rush play as one of the best counter-attacking teams in the playoffs and they were an above-average team on controlled zone exits, despite having the lowest Carry-in% in the league. They picked their spots better than any other team (this is where the Lundell line feasted), and where botched/failed exits hurt you is your own ability to create in transition. This isn’t an issue when you’re playing with a lead (although it can have a snowball effect if it’s a close game), but it’s a balance teams have to be careful of going forward if they’re going to go all-in one strategy of team-building.
There’s other things I’m excited to track. Macklin Celebrini’s sophomore year and how much he can carry this Sharks roster out of rebuild hell. The Anaheim Ducks young core, Ivan Demidov in Montreal and if Connor Bedard can break into that elite tier now that some other young players are raising the bar. I really just want to be more interactive with fans this year, so I’m going to try to write more articles throughout the season, even if they’re just short-form ones. Just to engage myself a little bit & show off some of the micro-level details of the A3Z project now that we’ve got three years worth of rush data to work with.
I’m going to start with a post for paid subscribers here tomorrow (for more info on that go here) on the Leafs that I’ve been working on the past few weeks. If that’s something you’re interested in. As always, you can support my work on my website or through Patreon. The Bedard & McDavid Tiers from last year are still up if you’re interested in me following your team for an entire season (NHL or AHL). Just fill out the survey after so I know who to follow.