Observations, expectations, flat-out guesses… call them whatever you want, but every year it’s only natural to have some takes on what we expect from the season ahead.
Sometimes they come through, like the year St. After Louis won the Cup, I wrote a Harvard-level thesis “Why this is the year a weird-ass team wins the Stanley Cup.” Sometimes they don’t, which has obviously never happened to me, nope, definitely don’t Google anything else I’ve ever written.
So here we are once again, at the hockey calendar’s natural place to throw a few things at the wall.
More than ever, this is anyone’s year
That piece on a “weird-ass team” winning the Cup was written on the eve of the 2019 playoffs, so for this year I’m rolling it back to the start of the season. (It’s the perfect prediction really – vague but can be retconned as accurate.) The point is this: I don’t see a group of clear favorites like I did before just about every season.
The Avalanche are the defending champs and the team favored by gambling odds to win the Cup again, but I don’t know: they got at least a little worse this off-season in losing Nazem Kadri and Darcy Kuemper, didn’t they? Their D may be the league’s best, but there are holes up front and the crease is a question mark. Tampa Bay should be really good again, and probably Carolina too. But I mean “quite good” and not unbeatable (Tampa certainly didn’t get better in losing Ondrej Palat, Ryan McDonagh and Jan Rutta).
Who else is in the group of true contenders? Maybe the Rangers, the Oilers, the Leafs? Calgary, Minnesota? The Blues, Vegas, maybe Boston and Florida? How many teams can I go here before you say “no chance?” Would you be shocked by the Penguins, or the Capitals, or the Islanders, or Nashville? There are just so many teams with a legitimate chance this season, and I don’t see a handful of teams that are so far away from the pack that the rest can’t catch them. This is by and large thanks to years of a flat cap forcing good teams to frankly, get less good.
Unless you’re rooting for a handful of teams – maybe Arizona, Chicago, Montreal, or Philly – it feels like there’s an awfully good best case scenario on the table for your team this year.
The opposite is there too, of course. But we don’t need to talk about that during Optimistic October.
Goals per game should stay high
The NHL hadn’t seen a goals-per-game total like the one from 2021-22 since 1995-96, with teams averaging a total of 3.14 goals per game, for a combined total of nearly 6.3 goals per game. The early-to-mid-’90s was the end of the highest scoring era of hockey, and arguably one of the most exciting ones. As you can see, goals have been ticking up over the past 10 years, and really in just the past five or six:
It’s not a fluke. Today’s players have grown up with great stick technology and only known goaltenders who were excellent. They’ve had to pick corners from day one. There was a weird transition as goalies got way better fast with improved technique, and shooters couldn’t keep up. They can now. There’s tight officiating (a crackdown on slashing in 2017-18, then cross-checking last year), there’s less roster space for fighters, and all told it’s left us with a pretty electric game. Some stats from the 2021-22 season:
• 42 percent of games saw comeback wins. The days of falling behind and the game being over are no more.
• 10 percent of games saw multi-goal comebacks.
• 17 percent of games saw third period comeback wins (in the 100-plus year history of the NHL, that’s tied for third for the highest rate ever).
A lot of that spilled over to the playoffs, too – 42 percent of those games saw comebacks as well. There were the most comeback wins in a season since 2010, and craziest of all: 9 of 15 playoff series winners trailed their best-of-seven at one point.
There are some teams with ridiculously big ranges
This is obviously tied to the first point where I mused that a team might win a Cup that isn’t a part of the pre-season front-runners, but man: look how big some of the ranges are for some of these teams.
If Vegas were excellent or … just kinda bad, I don’t think anyone would be shocked? Same goes for a long list of teams (some of which I already mentioned): the Islanders, the Bruins, the Jets, maybe even the Blues and if we want to stretch it, the Panthers. You couldn’t surprise me with 30-point ranges of outcomes for most of them, depending on things breaking just right.
The point here: when a league is as tight parity-wise as I expect the 2021-22 season to be, health and luck are massive factors in team success. That doesn’t help coaching staffs – “Just cross your fingers and hope, boys!” – but for fans, the wild uncertainty is fun. (And if you’re a bettor, taking the longer odds in the early season where you can get them probably makes sense.)
What this all means is…
We can expect to see a lot of a certain style of trade
Nobody has any cap flexibility, so when they want to get better, just about the only thing they can do is trade a negative contract and a positive asset for a decent player. Teams willing to take on bad deals with their extra cap space in the season ahead should have a massive card to play at the negotiating table. Cup-contending teams are just about the only type that make trades for good players in-season under these conditions, and almost every single team will be smashed up against the cap. It doesn’t make for the sexiest moves, but teams will be forced to get creative.
I also expect the coaching guillotine to stay busy
It’s not like there haven’t been ample coaching changes over the past couple years (the last season post-bubble was fairly busy), but I feel like the things I mentioned above – just about every team save for a few can squint and see. a good season ahead – combined with the slackening of all things COVID-related, are making for high expectations with no excuses.
If your team falls short this season, no coach can hide behind “playing in the bubble” or canceled games and too much make-up hockey or anything, really. It’s a proper hockey season. You either have success, or teams will find someone who will.
I expect the Connor McDavid Season of Record
I know everything this man has done so far has been reasonably baffling, but this year, boy, the table is set. He’s prime-aged, and more than that, his team around him is the best it’s ever been. He’ll be picking up points on goals that other people create – which may feel bizarre for him – and it’s all come together at the perfect point in his career.
The highlight reel goals will continue to come, but I expect even gaudier totals than ever – if he’s healthy, could he get up to 130 or 140 points, could he threaten 50 goals, could he have one of those games that makes people tune in to the third to see if he can catch Darryl Sittler’s record? It’s that season for McDavid.
More than anything, the normalcy should make it great
I realize the season has already “started” (congrats to Nashville on their hot start overseas), but Tuesday things really kick off. The Eastern Conference kings in Tampa Bay play the team they beat in the conference finals last year, the Rangers. The Vegas Golden Knights and LA Kings pit their high expectations against each other right out of the gate.
Have fun everyone, I’m looking forward to taking it all in together.