Glass Half Full Or Half Empty: Toronto, Montreal, Vegas & Chicago Are Struggling
We’re nearly two weeks into the season and fans around the league are either planning Stanley Cup parades or slamming the panic button.
It’s probably a bit early to draw any conclusions, but let’s take a look at a few of the teams in that latter category and decide whether they should be panicking or not.
Toronto Maple Leafs
What are your thoughts on fans throwing their jerseys on the ice at NHL games?
A. They buy a ticket, they buy a jersey, their money, they can do what they want
B. Disrespectful, shouldn't do it.
If "other" tell us how you feel 👇 pic.twitter.com/JCfI0lnHFM
Drama in Leaf Land? Who could have guessed! Toronto is 2-3-1 on the season after getting drilled 7-1 by a Penguins team that didn’t have Sidney Crosby, Evgeni Malkin or Kris Letang in the lineup on Saturday.
Glass Half Full
Though the results haven’t been there, the Leafs have some strong underlying numbers that suggest better times are around the corner.
Per Natural Stat Trick, Toronto ranks third in the league in even-strength shot attempt differential and it’s ninth in terms of expected goals for percentage. Surely there’s no way that a team that features Auston Matthews, Mitch Marner and John Tavares is going to operate with a 5.9 shooting percentage for the entire season.
William Nylander is the only big gun firing right now, but the other three should get rolling eventually.
Glass Half Empty
The Leafs play in a good division and there isn’t much room for error.
The Florida Panthers look amazing early on, the Tampa Bay Lightning and Boston Bruins are always contenders, and the Detroit Red Wings, Buffalo Sabres and Ottawa Senators don’t look as weak as many expected they would.
If the Leafs’ miserable start continues, climbing back up the standings won’t be easy.
Another cause for worry is this team’s track record. The Leafs blew a 3-1 series lead against the Habs in the first round of the playoffs last spring and are notorious for folding under pressure. Maybe all of the playoff letdowns have gotten into their heads and this is the year the Leafs implode.
Montreal Canadiens
The Canadiens, at 0-5 to start the season, have tied the worst start in NHL history for a team that just went to the Stanley Cup Final the previous season. Hat tip to @SNstats for finding that.
— Eric Engels (@EricEngels) October 22, 2021Remember when the Habs reached the Stanley Cup Final? That seems like ages ago now. Montreal is 1-5-0 to start the season and the Canadiens look lost without Shea Weber and Carey Price.
Glass Half Full
This actually isn’t an easy one.
When other teams are struggling with top players on the shelf due to injury, we can say ‘oh yeah, things will turn around when they’re back.’ That isn’t so simple with the Habs.
Weber is more than likely never going to play again because of the numerous injuries he’s been playing through and Price has stepped away from the team due to mental health issues and there’s no saying when he’ll be ready to return.
Those are two players who are nearly impossible to replace.
The best glass-half-full approach I can come up with for Montreal is that they have a handful of new players in the mix (Mike Hoffman, Christian Dvorak, and Mathieu Perreault) and it’ll take them some time to gel.
Glass Half Empty
The Habs really weren’t all that good last year and they were bound for regression.
Montreal barely squeezed into the playoffs in a weak division with a 24-21-11 record. They reached the Stanley Cup Final due largely to an incredible performance in net from Price and rekindling that magic over the course of an 82-game schedule was always going to be borderline impossible.
There’s no doubt that the Habs miss Price and Weber, two key leaders on and off the ice. But they also miss players like Corey Perry and Phillip Danault who brought an energy and intensity to the team that clearly isn’t there right now.
The Habs are no longer the team they were during their run, and that was a team that was overachieving in the first place.
Chicago Blackhawks
The word you would use to describe Jeremy Colliton handing over the whiteboard to his players to draw up their own play is ____________? pic.twitter.com/20LefQkEOJ
— DailyFaceoff.com Hockey (@DFOHockey) October 25, 2021The Blackhawks made some big moves over the offseason, adding Marc-Andre Fleury and Seth Jones to stabilize their net and blue line. A 0-5-1 start is not what they had in mind.
Glass Half Full
*Crickets*
There’s no way that Chicago’s additions can be this bad, right?
Fleury, who won the Vezina Trophy last season, has a .839 save percentage in four games. Jones, who was in Norris Trophy talk a couple of years ago, has a minus-nine rating.
As with the Habs, the best thing I can come up with for the Hawks is the team is struggling to gel with all of the new faces the team has in the room. Fleury and Jones will surely improve as they start to settle in Chicago.
Glass Half Empty
Oh man, this one really is a mess.
The Hawks are digging themselves a massive hole and it isn’t going to be easy to climb out of it.
They play in a loaded Central Division in which the Arizona Coyotes are the only team without any sort of playoff aspirations. The Predators, Stars, Wild, Blues, Avs and Jets are all solid teams and Chicago will have to jump over at least three of them to find themselves in a playoff spot.
The worst part of all of this, though, is their big picture.
The Blackhawks have been outscored 11-2 with Jones on the ice at even-strength. He’s been among the league’s worst defenders thus far and his massive $76,000,000 contract hasn’t even started yet.
Oh yeah, and Chicago doesn’t have their first-round pick in 2022. The Blue Jackets do because of the Jones trade. Yikes.
Vegas Golden Knights
Bruce Boudreau breaks down the Golden Knights defensive struggles. #NHLNow pic.twitter.com/Az3J9JmQDw
— NHL Network (@NHLNetwork) October 22, 2021Is this the Golden Knights’ first-ever cold streak? They joined the league in 2017, hit the ground running and haven’t really stopped. Vegas is 1-4-0 so far this year and it’s probably the worst the team has ever looked. In fact, the last time the Golden Knights lost four in a row in regulation prior to the current streak immediately preceded the firing of head coach Gerard Gallant in January 2020.
Glass Half Full
The Golden Knights have been decimated by injury thus far.
The team is currently without its two top forwards, Mark Stone and Max Pacioretty, after they both got banged up in the same game last week. Alec Martinez, one of Vegas’ top-pairing defenders, is also currently on the shelf.
Once the team is healthy, they’ll get rolling. Everyone is going to struggle without its top two scorers and one of its top defensemen.
The other thing Vegas has going for them is a relatively weak division. The only other contender in the Pacific Division is the Edmonton Oilers, so, even with a cold start, the Golden Knights won’t have much trouble climbing up the standings.
Glass Half Empty
The one concern about the Golden Knights is their goaltending.
Vegas moved Marc-Andre Fleury as a salary cap dump in the offseason shortly after he was awarded the Vezina Trophy. Fleury has been a key part of Vegas’ success since day one and he was right in the middle of the Golden Knights’ best regular season in franchise history last year.
While Robin Lehner is a very good goalie in his own right, rolling with Lehner and Laurent Brossoit isn’t the same as rolling with Lehner and Fleury. If things are going to come unglued for Vegas this year, I would bet it’s because of goaltending.
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