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Which NHL Team Has Had The Worst Off-Season |
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Hello everyone and welcome to another Hotstove! Last time we looked around the NHL at the teams that we each thought had the best off-season. Today we are going the other way and looking at the teams that... didn't.
Whether it is because the moves they made or didn't make, grab a coffee and enjoy myself, Dan Wallace, Karine Hains, and Trevor Neufeld discussing Which NHL Team Has Had The Worst Off-Season.
Sean Maloughney
There is still time for things to change but as of today it has to be the Calgary Flames for me. A year ago the Flames looked like they had cheated death once more, turning the loss of Tkachuk and Gaudreau into Kadri, Weegar, and Huberdeau. Today there are question marks on these new additions, particularly Huberdeau and Kadri that are older than 30 and perhaps past their best hockey years.
Then the snowball effect started to happen. The GM was fired followed by the coach. Lindholm seems uninterested in signing an extension even though the club reportedly backed up the Brinks truck to his door. Backlund and Hanifin have echoed similar thoughts and Toffoli basically said "I don't care where I'm traded as long as it isn't Calgary."
This should have been a blessing in disguise as the opportunity was there for the Flames to finally commit to a real rebuild. Instead, new GM Craig Conroy turned Toffoli into Sharangovich and... that's it. The Flames should have been aiming to move the likes of Lindholm, Backlund, and Hanifin at the 2023 Draft, a very deep draft and set themselves up for future success.
Instead Calgary is heading into August with most other teams looking set with their rosters and right up against the cap, making it tougher to acquire the assets the Flames should be looking for. If the Flames go into the season with the existing roster and cannot find a way to sign these players, it's going to end disastrously.
Karine Hains
Singling out one team who’s had a bad offseason is not an easy task, the candidates are numerous as plenty of organizations are feeling the cap crunch. To an untrained eye, the Montreal Canadiens may be a candidate for the title of team who’s had the worst offseason. After all, the Habs have only signed AHL players in free agency, but right now, that was the right course of action.
At this stage of rebuild, not signing veterans who could hinder his young players’ development was the right move for GM Kent Hughes. Right now, he needs to unload surplus to requirement veterans which were signed to bad contracts by his predecessor. Shifting Joel Edmundson wasn’t hard since there was interest for him around the league, but moving the likes of Armia and Hoffman is more challenging. The offseason isn’t over yet, so before we can say Hughes has had a bad one, we need to see if he’ll manage to further trim his roster.
To me, the team who’s had the worst offseason so far is a team that appears to be in denial when it comes to its current state. The New York Islanders barely scraped into the playoffs and were swiftly eliminated by the Carolina Hurricanes in the first round last Spring, but GM Lou Lamoriello took no real steps to improve his team.
He signed two seven-year deals with defenseman Scott Mayfield and forward Pierre Engvall who were both already with the Isles. Mayfield is a third-pairing defensemen and while Engvall still has room to improve, his floor is a third liner that can contribute in a variety of ways, but these are not franchise cornerstones or players that can change the fortune of a team.
The one great move made by Lamoriello was to move Josh Bailey to Chicago and to ink stand-out goaltender Ilya Sorokin to an eight-year extension worth $66 million, but he then re-committed to back-up Semyon Varlamov for four more years, which was quite surprising given the fact that Varlamov is already 35 years old. Meanwhile, they haven’t resigned forward Zach Parise who did pick-up 21 goals on a team struggling to score last season. Where will the goals come from?
In short, the Isles had a tough season, and their GM seems to have decided to bring everyone but Bailey and Parise back and sign them to contracts with a lot of term which will make them hard to move if things don’t go well. To me, that’s the most puzzling offseason so far, and therefore the worst. Feel free to change my mind Islanders fans...
Trevor Neufeld
The instinct tells us to go for the team saying goodbye to Patrice Bergeron, David Krejci, Dmitri Orlov, Tyler Bertuzzi, Taylor Hall, Craig Smith, Connor Clifton, and Garnet Hathaway. Replacing them with mostly washed vets such as JVR, Kevin Shattenkirk and Milan Lucic.
Saying all of that out loud, alright, maybe Boston should be in a category of their own.
What sticks in my mind is that despite losing all of those great players — the Bruins still have a decent shot at getting into the playoffs. Marchand and Pastrnak continue to push the league meta pertaining to zone entries and play development, the blue line remains rock solid despite losing Orlov, and Ullmark-Swayman can give any goaltending platoon a run for their money.
With that said, my pick for worst offseason is the Florida Panthers.
We start with a team that despite getting hot at the perfect time in the year — only snuck into the playoffs by a mere two points if you count them holding the tiebreaker over Pittsburgh. Then we see two core pieces leaving. Radko Gudas heads to Anaheim and Anthony Duclair to San Jose.
Gudas is the big one. The ruthless Czech doesn’t get much love due to his aggressive style and low offensive production, but his underlying statistics are consistently near the top of the league. He and Josh Mahura outscored the opposition at a 57.6% rate over 762 minutes of even strength — good for 26th among pairings playing 400 or more minutes together.
While real Goals For vs Against is the most important, the pairing’s model-based stats last season look great too. Per Moneypuck’s data, the Mahura-Gudas pairing finished third in expected goals percentage among pairings playing 400 or more minutes together at a whopping 60.6%.
The organization went and brought in Oliver Ekman-Larsson, Niko Mikkola, Mike Reilly and Dmitri Kulikov to not only fill the gap Gudas leaves, but also step in and try to fill top four minutes to start the season. This being due to Aaron Ekblad and Brandon Montour looking likely to miss time out of the gate. Good luck with that.
Florida GM Bill Zito also signed Evan Rodrigues as a replacement in the lineup for the more expensive Anthony Duclair. The jury is still out on that one, but taking a 17th place team, running it through four rounds of a playoff grinder, and replacing two key players with proven assets of lower on-ice quality — might spell a bottom-10 finish to the 2023-2024 season for the Florida Panthers.
Dan Wallace
The team that has done the worst this off-season is the New York Islanders. They were a team on the cusp a few years ago losing out to Tampa in consecutive seasons in the Eastern Conference final.
The team has gotten older and slower since then. GM Lou Lamoriello, makes four signings this summer of his own players.
He re-signed Pierre Engvall, who was acquired at the trade deadline from Toronto, to a 7- year deal. Scott Mayfield also signed for seven years. The signing of Ilya Sorokin was absolutely a no-brainer to lock up their best player for eight years. The head scratcher, was re-signing Semyon Varlamov for four years.
The Islanders now have six players locked up for seven seasons and three locked up for eight. Seven are under contract for six seasons and nine for at least four. This is not a team on the rise by any stretch and in the ultra competitive Metropolitan Division with their next door neighbors, the Rangers and Devils leading the way. Carolina is the team to beat while Columbus is making big strides.
The Pens and Caps are still factors with the Flyers the only non-contender in the division. The Islanders may be irrelevant for many years to come if these moves do not produce over the full length of the contracts, which is highly likely.
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