NHL: These 15 players need to bounce back next season
By Simon Vacca
As the NHL offseason operates in full swing, we take a look at 15 players who shall look to bounce back in the 2019-20 campaign.
Looking back, the 2018-19 NHL season was one of expansive success for many of hockey’s franchises.
The St. Louis Blues gave us a storybook ending, winning Game 7 of the Stanley Cup Finals against the Boston Bruins in an electric TD Garden — an especially noteworthy accomplishment when considering that the team was in last place in the NHL on Jan. 3 of this year.
The Carolina Hurricanes reached the Eastern Conference Finals in Rod Brind’Amour’s inaugural season as head coach of the organization. It was the first time that the club had been active in the playoffs in ten campaigns.
The New York Islanders — a team that faced particularly low expectations after its captain, John Tavares, departed to fulfill a childhood dream to play for the Toronto Maple Leafs — finished second in the Metropolitan Division, a process that accumulated with a first-round sweep of Sidney Crosby and the Pittsburgh Penguins.
And the Arizona Coyotes, one of the sport’s sometimes forgotten gems, finished just shy of qualifying for the Stanley Cup playoffs — this, in spite of a broad range of injuries dominating the talk circuit of the franchise’s coverage throughout much of its most recent campaign. You can bet that they’ll be back next year, firing on all cylinders, to say the very least.
Yet to overlook the diverse network of trying tales that were also staples of the past season is to garner an assessment of the short-sighted variety. Who failed to usher forth a measure of demonstrably favorable results? And who did not deliver when it mattered most?
With that, let’s explore 15 players who shall look to bounce back in the 2019-20 campaign.
(Please note that statistics appearing over the course of the article are reflective of a player’s numbers in the 2018-19 season. They are followed by the individual’s career averages in brackets.)