The NHL season drops the puck this week, which means the race for the Stanley Cup begins now for a handful of teams.
With the new NHL season now upon us, the race for the Stanley Cup has begun for another year and there are a handful of teams that are going to be separating themselves from the pack almost from the start. Last year at this time, picks like Los Angeles, San Jose and Washington were sexy picks to win the Stanley Cup but only one of those three teams made the playoffs.
Los Angeles is the most likely team that missed the playoffs last year to bounce back, as the addition of Milan Lucic this summer cannot be overstated. Los Angeles is only as good as Jonathan Quick will allow them to be, and that’s going to be a question mark the entire season. As for teams that weren’t in the playoff picture that might take a Minnesota Wild type leap forward, keep an eye on the Edmonton Oilers and the Dallas Stars out west.
Neither of those two teams are locks for the playoffs, but the Oilers have enough young talent across the board to finally develop into contender that might hang around the West for years to come. That’s easier said than done though, as Edmonton has been an utter disappointment in the last few years and they need to earn the respect of being a playoff contender on the ice.
Here’s a look at how the NHL Playoffs will she out this year — probably but not really.
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Minnesota has progressed to the point where this is either going to be the year they make the push to the Stanley Cup or it will be the year that Mike Yeo loses his job. That’s the point we’re at, as the Wild can’t keep being a team on the cusp of something special, they need to actually do something now or risk regressing on the ice and in the eyes of critics.
Colorado missed the postseason least year in the West, but people forget how dominant they were in 2013-14 when Nathan MacKinnon wasn’t injured and had a full season to play. If the Avs get that version of their young star back, Colorado will be a team to watch once again as a serious threat in the Central.
Out East, it’s a ride open field from top to almost bottom. Teams like the Rangers, Lightning and Senators are as capable of grabbing top seeds in the conference as much as they are falling out of the postseason altogether. Ditto for Washington, who seem to always enter the season with so much hope and talent but never seem able to put it together in the end.
But with the addition o T.J. Oshie and Justin Williams, all the Caps ned to do is stay steady in net and they’ll blow teams away with a high powered offense. Montreal is still the team to beat, but a Washington-Montreal Conference Finals might be one of the most fun series we’ve seen in the postseason in a while.
We don’t know how the playoffs will stack up, but right now the contenders are making themselves known and it’s up to the teams themselves to either prove us right or wrong.
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