6 NHL Teams That Desperately Need a Good 2025 Offseason

The NHL offseason has started for most of the league's teams, and front offices are putting together their summer plans. Every franchise will have its share of free agents to deal with, trades to make and holes to fill, and unless you are the team that ends the season holding the Stanley Cup, there is going to be big pressure to make all the right moves.

But some teams are going to be under more pressure than others given their recent history, what their free-agency situation looks like or how disappointing their 2024-25 season ended up being.

Here are six that are under the most pressure for a big offseason.

Toronto Maple Leafs

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The Toronto Maple Leafs are always going to be under pressure in the offseason (and the regular season...and the playoffs) just because they are the Maple Leafs.

They play in one of the most demanding markets, have expensive superstar players and have not won a Stanley Cup since the Original Six days.

Every playoff loss with this core builds the anger and outside pressure. It is going to reach a fever pitch this offseason, as the Maple Leafs are not only coming off another humiliating Game 7 loss that showed just how far away they are from being a championship team, but also because there might be serious changes to their core group.

There almost has to be.

While Auston Matthews and William Nylander remain under contract with trade protections, Mitch Marner and John Tavares are unrestricted free agents.

Tavares seems determined to return, and might be willing to do so at below-market price, but Marner's future is a little more unsettled.

Even though Marner is an incredibly talented, productive player, this core has consistently shown it is not capable of elevating its game in the playoffs the way some other teams' superstars are, while the Maple Leafs never have the quality depth to make up for that.

It's time to try something different. Especially when Marner's next contract is going to be significant.

The Maple Leafs’ challenge is clear: If Marner departs, they must convert that cap space into championship-level upgrades.

They have already changed general managers, head coaches and secondary players over the past nine years. The core is the only thing that has not changed. They can not put it off any longer, and they have to get it right.

New York Rangers

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There may not have been a bigger disappointment in the NHL this past season than the New York Rangers.

Going from the Presidents' Trophy and an Eastern Conference Final appearance to missing the playoffs entirely, while looking like a dysfunctional mess in the process, is not what anybody had in mind for their 2024-25 season.

It was not good enough.

It is not good enough.

The Rangers already made one big move this offseason by firing head coach Peter Laviolette and bringing in two-time Stanley Cup champion Mike Sullivan after he left the Pittsburgh Penguins.

When you make a move like that, you are telling the hockey world, "We intend to compete and win this season."

That sort of message is all well and good. But this roster is not built for anything close to that at this moment.

They have a huge hole at center and too many players on the wrong side of 30 making big money. The defense is also a mess when you get beyond Adam Fox.

There is a good chance that starting goalie Igor Shesterkin can put the team on his back and carry it back to the playoffs while masking all of the flaws, but that recipe has a ceiling. And the Rangers have repeatedly hit it throughout the careers of two elite goalies (Henrik Lundqvist and Shesterkin).

That has to change, and a new head coach alone is not going to be enough to do it.

Even with a new contract extension in hand, general manager Chris Drury is going to be under a microscope when it comes to his handling of the defense, how he addresses Mika Zibanejad's contract, what he does with former No. 1 overall pick Alexis Lafreniere, what he does with veteran forward Chris Kreider and what sort of decision he makes regarding their 2025 first-round draft pick (No. 12 overall).

The Rangers have to decide if they are going to keep that pick and surrender an unprotected 2026 first-round pick to the Pittsburgh Penguins, or send this year's selection to Pittsburgh and hang onto next year's pick.

That is a lot of things to fix and a lot of big decisions to make in one offseason.

Colorado Avalanche

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There was a stretch where pretty much every move the Colorado Avalanche made was a home run, and it helped produce a Stanley Cup championship in 2022. Over the past couple of seasons, however, they have seen less playoff success each year.

This year was especially difficult because the Avalanche overturned roughly a third of their roster in-season, including the shocking decision to trade Mikko Rantanen after the two sides were unable to reach a contract extension.

They ended up getting a decent return that was headlined by Martin Necas, but there is no way he is replacing what Rantanen does.

And he didn't.

And then they got burned when Rantanen ended up back in their division after the Carolina Hurricanes traded him to the Dallas Stars. Rantanen played a key role in Dallas' first-round win over the Avalanche, leaving fans—and the team—wondering how the season might have gone if they had taken one more run with their star.

As long as the Avalanche have Nathan MacKinnon and Cale Makar on their roster, they are going to be in the middle of a championship contending window, and they have to try to take advantage of that. But two great players alone are not enough to win, and it is up to management to rebuild the complementary players around them.

That has been an issue for a couple of years now, and they have not yet been able to get the right combination of players around them. It is going to be even more difficult this offseason without Rantanen to give them another top-line star.

Detroit Red Wings

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The Detroit Red Wings have missed the playoffs nine years in a row and all six years of the Steve Yzerman era. They are not really getting any closer to ending that drought, either.

At some point that is going to have to change, and Red Wings fans -- as well as the Red Wings organization -- should no longer be satisfied to just sit and watch losing season after losing season while they keep waiting for prospects to develop.

Is the Red Wings farm system strong? It is.

Do they have a good core of talent at the NHL level they should be able to build around? They absolutely do.

But at some point you have to do something to meaningfully complement those young players and that core and make the team itself better. Every successful rebuild has had to be supported by strong free agent signings and good trades. It's not all about prospect development. You might need the farm system to produce the top four or five players on the roster, but no farm system is going to produce enough to build an entire roster from top-to-bottom.

The Red Wings issue in the Yzerman era is they have whiffed on a lot of their free agency signings and trades, and have not been able to meaningfully address their flaws.

In every year of the Yzerman era -- including this past season -- they have been a sub-par 5-on-5 team in terms of goals and defensive play, they have not been able to find consistent goaltending, and there have been some dreadful NHL-scouting decisions.

Captain Dylan Larkin spoke out after the season about how disappointed the locker room was that more wasn't done to help the team at the trade deadline. That was really the first time you heard somebody within the organization show some frustration about the methodical pace of this rebuild. Enough time has passed that the Red Wings can't keep pointing at the mess Ken Holland left behind as an excuse for why the team is not competing.

It is time to get better.

Buffalo Sabres

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This is just a miserable situation.

Buffalo has missed the playoffs in 14 consecutive seasons, has started and restarted multiple rebuilding phases, and remains one of the worst in the NHL.

The good fans of Buffalo deserve better than this.

Part of what made the 2024-25 season so frustrating is that there just did not seem to be much urgency from the front office or ownership to improve things. They went into the season having missed the playoffs for nearly a decade-and-a-half, knowing fans were getting tired of this, and somehow had nearly $7 million in unused salary cap space on a team that was still very clearly flawed.

How?

Why?

You couldn't have found somebody—somebody—for that money that could have made your team better? A trade? A free agent signing? Anything?

Tage Thompson is great. They have a couple of really good young defenseman. But they need more. A lot more. And Sabres fans probably do not have the patience to withstand another rebuild. There has to be some sort of commitment and urgency to get this team back to relevance on the NHL stage.

They need help everywhere.

Seattle Kraken

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When the Seattle Kraken entered the NHL they were probably facing some unfair expectations.

The immediate success of the Vegas Golden Knights changed the way we looked at expansion franchises, even though there was probably no chance of that success being duplicated. The Golden Knights were a perfect storm of great management, other teams not knowing how to handle the new expansion draft rules, and some luck all meeting at the same place.

Seattle was not as lucky, the league's other general managers learned from their previous mistakes, and the Kraken just .... got a lot wrong.

And it is still getting a lot wrong.

There was no better example of that than this past offseason when they handed out some huge free agency contracts to Chandler Stephenson and Brandon Montour that were never likely to give them a solid return on the investment. Stephenson's contract in particular was one that seemed like a bad idea the moment it was signed.

The Kraken are now entering year five of their existence, have just one playoff appearance and are going to be on their third different head coach in three years. The latter point is never a good sign for the job the front office is doing in building the roster. At some point it is not about the coach.

Seattle needs a big offseason not only to make up for the miss that was last year's offseason, but to also start building a team that can get a new market excited about hockey. The best way to build a consistent and stable fan base is to give the city a reason to care and pay attention. The novelty of a new team wears off pretty fast when there are not any wins. Seattle has simply not had enough wins, and at some point fans are going to get tired of that, the questionable roster decisions and the revolving door of head coaches.