Buying or Burying 8 NHL Teams off to Tough Starts
The early part of the NHL campaign can be a real meat grinder for teams, and not everyone can fulfill their season dreams of being great right off the hop.
There's a panic button out there for lots of franchises, but pushing it 10 games into the season can be a bit of a hasty decision. After all, the NHL can be streaky for everyone.
Still, some teams are down bad enough to start asking whether the losing is for real or if it's just a bit of a tough time, and the numbers are there to help us to that.
Sometimes advanced statistics can highlight what's going right, or they can illuminate what's going wrong. Other times they can let us know teams may be in bigger trouble than they're already in. Numbers can be deceptive at times, but we'll try to be the lie detectors.
Time to see which struggling teams we're buying low on or heaping dirt upon them based on their chances of reaching preseason expectations.
Buffalo Sabres
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The bar for the Buffalo Sabres isn't to win a Stanley Cup right away, it's to make the playoffs this season. For a team that's still the youngest in the NHL (for the second straight year), there are going to be issues with consistency.
For every 5-1 home loss to the Flyers or 4-3 home loss to Calgary that makes you think Buffalo has a long way to go, there's a 6-4 road win against Toronto or 4-0 shutout victory against Colorado to highlight what makes the Sabres such a potentially dangerous team to deal with.
The biggest thing for a young squad is finding consistency. That much has eluded them early this season, but one of their critical faults last year was their penalty kill. They had the NHL's fifth-worst penalty kill, and while it's early yet, they have the sixth-best penalty kill in the league this year.
Their advanced numbers are right smack in the middle of the pack so far this season, but that leaves the door open for them to find their way forward. The Sabres are a team on the rise because they have oodles of young talent and after missing the postseason by one win a year ago, burying them for an up-and-down start would be foolish.
The Verdict: Buying
Calgary Flames
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A lot of what's messing up the Edmonton Oilers—more on them in a minute—is also what's making life elsewhere in Alberta equally miserable, with the big exception being that the Calgary Flames offense is worse than that of the Oilers.
Calgary is also getting no help from its goaltending. Jacob Markstrom has struggled, going 1-6-1 with an .897 save percentage, and backup Dan Vladar is 2-1-0 with an .844 mark. As tough as those numbers are, they've also only scored 28 goals in 11 games, and when you're allowing 3.6 goals per game, that's the kind of math that sinks a team.
The Flames are trying to find their identity under new coach Ryan Huska, but it's been tough going for them in doing so. Going from the ancient system of Darryl Sutter to what Huska is trying to instill has made for a huge change, and the adjustment is taking time.
Unfortunately for Calgary, it has a host of players, particularly on defense, who can be free agents after this season, and the dreary start to the year could mean all of those players start thinking about playing elsewhere. It's the kind of thing that couldn't be happening at a worse time because it could force new Flames GM Craig Conroy into jump-starting a rebuild.
Then again, prospect goalie Dustin Wolf continues to shine in the AHL, and if he gets a shot in the NHL at some point and continues to play to the level he has with the Wranglers, that could fix one of the Flames' biggest problems. But asking a rookie to do that is a big ask indeed.
The Verdict: Burying
Edmonton Oilers
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Are we really down on the Edmonton Oilers because they've looked terrible? Yes. Are they down bad because they were without Connor McDavid for a week and he missed two games? Well, that didn't help much, but that's not what has sunk them.
The Oilers' struggles are due to goaltending, and no, we're not playing the hits from previous rough seasons or failed playoff runs.
Jack Campbell and Stuart Skinner have been atrocious. Skinner, who stole the No. 1 job last season as a rookie, is 1-3-1 with an .861 save percentage in six games, while Campbell is 1-4-0 with an .873 in five games played. They have the league's lowest save percentage on high-danger chances at five-on-five, and the second lowest in general at five-on-five (via Natural Stat Trick).
The Oilers are used to outscoring their defensive problems, and they've made their hay at doing that over the years since McDavid entered the NHL. What's worse about their troubles in goal this season is the defense is playing well. They've allowed the second-fewest shot attempts against at five-on-five, and their expected goals for percentage is second-best in the league at five-on-five as well.
The fancy stats say this should be a playoff team and a dangerous one to deal with, but the goaltending has been so bad it's hard to look past it. The conventional thought is it can't be terrible all year and that things will turn around, but very few teams are dealing with goaltending this poor.
It's a long season, and the Western Conference is the weaker of the two conferences, so the Oilers may not have as hard of a road to get back into the playoff picture, but man they are not making it easy on themselves at all.
The Verdict: Burying
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Minnesota Wild
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The Minnesota Wild were one of the better teams in the Western Conference a year ago, and although they bowed out of the playoffs in the first round to Dallas, they're a team whose young stars are poised to carry them into the future.
Minnesota has stumbled to start the season with a 4-5-2 record, but it snapped a four-game losing streak on Saturday with a shootout win on the road against the New York Rangers, one of the hottest teams to start the season.
The Wild's offense is outstanding. What's crushed them has been slow starts in goal from both Filip Gustavsson and Marc-Andrè Fleury, but what's worse is their penalty killing. The Wild have the league's worst PK (64.7 percent) and allowed 12 power-play goals. They've had 46 goals scored against them, the most in the NHL, and giving up the most power-play goals against makes it hurt that much more.
Special teams take time to correct, and at some point, a team with the kind of talent the Wild have will turn things around. Both Fleury and Gustavsson got off to slow starts last season and Gustavsson in particular was able to turn things around in a big way. It's a gut feeling, but burying the Wild with the way they have scored so far seems unwise.
Minnesota Wild: Buying
Ottawa Senators
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It would be really easy to be down on the Ottawa Senators. They're struggling to start the year, they've got all kinds of injuries to deal with, and they just parted ways with their general manager after they were busted in the Evgenii Dadonov blunder of a trade that never happened last season.
It's always easy to pile onto a team that's down bad, but this is one situation where a change at the top might be the thing that sparks an eventual turnaround. The writing had been on the wall for some time that Pierre Dorion was going to be out of a job, and the league's decision on the Dadonov situation, which cost them a first-round pick, was the last straw.
New owner Michael Andlauer sounded off about everything surrounding that situation and what's gone on in Ottawa the past few years has been often head-scratching. It's a team that's oozing with talent, and Dorion's ouster has the marks of either being the new lowest moment to rebound from over time...or the one which everyone rallies from to make a comeback.
We're banking on it being the latter of the two and interim GM Steve Staios' ability to right the ship. There may yet still be drama to be had (will coach DJ Smith make it through the season?), but this is a situation that screams out for things to improve sooner than later.
The Verdict: Buying
Pittsburgh Penguins
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There's a lot to like about the Pittsburgh Penguins. Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin are great. Jake Guentzel has shown no ill effects from offseason ankle surgery. Erik Karlsson and Kris Letang patrolling the defense make them electric, and the addition of Reilly Smith to the lineup has been a huge win.
But...consistency has been a major problem, particularly in goal.
Take Tristan Jarry for example. Headed into Saturday night's 10-2 win over the Sharks, he was 2-5-0 with an .893 save percentage and two shutouts. Yes, his only wins had come in shutouts, but in his five losses he's allowed three or four goals in all of them. Fortunately, Alex Nedeljkovic has helped in a pinch as the backup, but with four wins in their first 10 games, it's really hard to buy into what the Penguins are doing.
Some things are better, and their depth is improved, but outside of the top guys and with iffy goaltending, it's going to be a fight for them all season. Luckily, their top guys are mostly future Hall of Famers. Age is just a number and those guys can still play elite hockey.
The Verdict: Buying
Seattle Kraken
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After putting up 100 points and making it to the second round of the Western Conference playoffs last season, the Seattle Kraken have high hopes to build upon that success. So far, it hasn't quite clicked for the newest team in the league.
The Kraken offense has stumbled out of the gate, and while their goaltending has been middle-of-the-pack, it's the lack of overall firepower that's tripped them up.
Seattle's goal scoring is coming mostly from Jared McCann and Jaden Schwartz, and while they've had 13 different players register a goal this season, the scattershot approach that made them one of the most dangerous teams last year hasn't quite gotten them going yet this year.
"Yet" is the key word.
If there's any kind of concern early on it's that their advanced stats aren't popping right now and their regular stats aren't jumping off the page either. Basically, they seem like a team that's trying to work out the kinks before getting back to what made them good last season.
I think that's called "going through the motions." Once Seattle finds its gear, it'll be a pain to play against once again. At the very least, the Kraken play in the West and can find their way back up with some ease.
The Verdict: Buying
Washington Capitals
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It's been tough to watch the Washington Capitals the past couple of seasons.
The absence of Nicklas Backstrom has been hard, and they will continue to miss him in the lineup after he stepped away from the team last week for health reasons. Alexander Ovechkin, 38, isn't getting any younger, and neither are most of their top players such as Tom Wilson (29), TJ Oshie (36) and John Carlson (33).
But the Capitals are around .500 out of the gate—which is good—but also, they have one of the worst offenses in the NHL at 1.90 goals per game, and goalie Darcy Kuemper has been tasked with trying to hold it all down virtually every night behind an aging team that's low on high-end prospects.
It's a situation that, despite the better-than-anticipated record to start, has all the feel of one that's headed to a bad place. They have a minus-nine goal differential to go with their 5-4-1 record, they've scored 21 goals in 10 games and the majority of their offensive production is coming from one of five players: Ovechkin, Carlson, Wilson, Evgeny Kuznetsov and Dylan Strome.
As teams get more settled into their structures across the league, it'll increase the focus and importance on depth—something the Caps have yet to show they've got in a reliable form. Bank the points and enjoy the successes now.
The Verdict: Burying
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