NHL temperature check: Which teams will stay cold?

After how last season unfolded, the Stars are certainly no strangers to slow starts offensively. The difference between this season and last are the expectations they entered with and the lack of elite goaltending to carry them on the nights when they’re coming up empty on the score sheet.

Even after back-to-back wins (including the NHL equivalent of an uncontested slam dunk, which is a home game against the Ottawa Senators), their production across the board is stunningly anemic. For the season they are:

29th in five-on-five shot attempts

29th in five-on-five shots on goal

29th in five-on-five goals scored

28th in five-on-five expected goals

29th in all situations shots

31st in all situations goals

25th in all situations expected goals

While it’s great that Roope Hintz has lived up to his own preseason buzz and scored six goals already, it’s alarming that it’s also the same number of times that Tyler Seguin, Jamie Benn, Joe Pavelski, and Alexander Radulov have scored combined.

This team has too much talent to continue being this inept offensively, although it’s worth noting that they weren’t all that much effective last season on that end of the ice. But unlike last season, the goaltending hasn’t been able to bail them out; it’s fair to wonder whether it’s even reasonable to expect it to do so. Ben Bishop and Anton Khudobin each had dream campaigns, combining to stop 93.5% of the five-on-five shots they faced and 92.3% of the overall shots they faced over the course of the 2018-19 season. Both of those figures were second best to only the Islanders, and the difference between this situation and the one on Long Island is that Barry Trotz and Mitch Korn aren’t walking through the door.

The Stars need to quickly figure out what type of team they’re going to be and their most realistic path toward turning their season around. Despite all of the success they had doing it last season, it seems bizarre to try to win every game 2-1 when you have the personnel they do. Only the Devils are currently playing at a slower pace than the Stars at even strength, which is unacceptable given the prolific talent they have at their disposal.

If the Stars are going to be unable to replicate the type of goal suppression they had last season, they’ll need to compensate for it on the other end of the ice by opening things up and pushing the envelope offensively. The problem is that it’s tough to do so on the fly and in-season, especially when you have a system designed to do just the opposite. While the Stars appear to have the horses for it on paper, the elephant in the room is whether they have the right coach to make that kind of a philosophical change.

The bad news: Based solely on their early results, you wouldn’t really know that the Panthers shelled out $70 million to try to address their most glaring need this summer. Here’s how their goaltending and goal suppression numbers compare early on to what they did last season:

Five-on-five goals against: 28th last season, 29th this season

All-situations goals against: 29th last season, 27th this season

Five-on-give save percentage: 30th last season, 31st this season

All-situations save percentage: 30th last season, 30th this season

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The good news: You wouldn’t know it based on those numbers above, but it looks like Joel Quenneville actually has sorted out a lot of the other stuff that plagued them defensively from the net out. They’ve cut down the rate at which they’re conceding unblocked shot attempts, shots on goals, high-danger chances and expected goals against. Unlike last season, when they were completely hanging their goalies out to dry, the Panthers’ defense appears as if it’s actually giving them a chance — they’re just not getting the requisite saves.

While it’s fair to be critical about how Sergei Bobrovsky and the investment the Panthers made in him will age in the years to come, it’s unfair to slam the door shut on the experiment after just a handful of shaky games. Mostly because it’s highly unlikely that he suddenly forgot how to stop the puck overnight. If anything, his performance early on has been eerily similar to last season, when he got off to a slow start by stopping just 88.2% of the shots he faced in seven October appearances for the Blue Jackets. He turned it around in November, bouncing back up to a .932 save percentage in 10 appearances, and he really got hot down the stretch during Columbus’ spirited late-season run.

If the play in front of Bobrovsky has legitimately improved for good and he can finally start living up to his hefty contract, this Panthers team should be a pretty potent one moving forward. Especially since the Panthers only need reasonably competent goaltending, given how many goals they’re capable of putting on the board themselves.

The Jets entered the season with a litany of obvious red flags following their summer from hell, at least organizationally. The first couple of weeks have done nothing to assuage those concerns. They’ve won just five of their first 11 games while posting a minus-6 goal differential, and if anything, it feels like they’re lucky that the results haven’t been worse based on their underlying numbers.

We don’t want to beat them up too much considering what they’re going to battle with, but we also understate how big of a mess their defensive depth chart is at the moment. Of their eight most frequently used defensemen last season, coach Paul Maurice has only had two of them — Josh Morrissey and Dmitry Kulikov — at his disposal thus far this season. The real issue is that unless Dustin Byfuglien has a sudden change of heart and returns in peak form, it’s hard to see how it gets much better at the moment.

The forwards haven’t been much better themselves. Nikolaj Ehlers is having a nice bounce-back season, but there’s only one of him to go around. Maurice is in a tough spot with how he chooses to arrange his chess pieces in the top six, because he has been trying to have his cake and eat it too, which hasn’t been working.

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The duo of Mark Scheifele and Blake Wheeler haven’t been good without Ehlers this season, which is unacceptable given how much they’re being paid and how important they are to the team’s overall success. But Maurice is reticent to give the role to Ehlers full time, because he also wants to get Patrik Laine going offensively by giving him regular minutes next to what should be his top two players. They need to sort that out, because unless Laine is going to get back to scoring goals at a top-flight rate like he did in his first two seasons, it’s fair to question how much actual value he brings to the table. It doesn’t help that the power play, which was one thing they genuinely did remarkably well last season, hasn’t gotten going yet, either. At least in that case there’s reason for optimism, because they won’t keep converting south of 10% of their looks given all of the shot-making talent that’s on the ice.

Put it all together and you have a team that’s near the bottom of nearly every single important performance indicator. At a deeper five-on-five level, they’re 20th in total shot attempts, but only 25th in unblocked attempts and 28th in actual shots on goal. Only the Red Wings, Rangers and Islanders have a lower shot share than the Jets’ current 46.2% rate. On a more superficial level, they’re 26th in shots for, 27th in shots against, 27th in goals for and 23rd in goals against.

The only person who really has shown up and held up his end of the bargain consistently has been goaltender Connor Hellebuyck, who has fortunately bounced back after a shaky 2018-19 campaign in which he was outplayed by his backup for the majority of the season. If it weren’t for his .929 save percentage and 4.4 goals saved above average, things could be really ugly right now in Winnipeg. Relying solely on that will take the Jets only so far, until all of their other underlying issues become completely insurmountable.

It feels silly including these teams in the “cold” section, because it’s much more of a byproduct of high expectations that aren’t immediately being met than it is any actual concern about them moving forward. The panic might not be justified, but it is understandable. Both the Lightning and Leafs entered the season with realistic beliefs that they could run roughshod on the rest of the league en route to winning the East, and that hasn’t been the case in the early going.

At the risk of being an armchair psychologist, the Lightning must be in an awfully weird spot mentally when it comes to how to approach this regular season most productively. They pretty much did everything humanly possible last season:

They won 62 games

They outscored their opponents by 98 combined goals

They had the top ranked offense at five-on-five, on the power play and overall

Their best player scored 128 points and won the MVP

Their second- and third-best forwards each scored 40 goals

Their goalie won the Vezina Trophy

Their best defenseman finished as a Norris Trophy finalist

And it was all ultimately viewed as an unsuccessful season in many ways because of how it ended, with the lasting image being one of disappointment to the umpteenth degree when they failed to win a single postseason game.

So with that in mind, it makes sense that the Lightning stumbled out of the gate in the early going as they figure out how to proceed accordingly. For the Lightning, while it’s still imperative that they try to finish first in the Atlantic Division and stay out of a first-round matchup against either Boston or Toronto, the long game is ultimately what matters most. They’re going to use this time to figure the best possible forward line and defense pair combinations, as well as manage the minutes of their top players closely to avoid burning out too early.

We’ve already seen Jon Cooper experiment with just that. Once Brayden Point came back from injury, he tried out stacking Point, Nikita Kucherov and Steven Stamkos on one mega line, playing the three of them together more at five-on-five already than he had all of last season. Most recently, he has pivoted to splitting them up, instead opting to disperse each of them on three separate lines. I imagine we’ll be seeing a lot more of that kind of tinkering and lineup experimentation for the next couple of months, as they try to line everything up for what they surely hope will be a happier ending.

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The Leafs are in a slightly different position. While it still feels like they’re similarly laying in the weeds and biding their time because they ultimately have too much talent not to eventually figure things out, they have a few more questions right now. Whether positive or negative, everything tends to get overblown in that market, which makes it hard to decipher how much of the angst is warranted and how much of it is just a byproduct of the spotlight that’s on them.

In this case, it does feel like there’s a bit of a snowball effect, because it’s been a while now since the team has had the type of results that we would expect. It goes back even further than just what we’ve seen so far this season: Since Jan. 1, they’re just 25-21-8 with a plus-4 goal differential, which is an 82-game pace of just 88 points.

Coach Mike Babcock has had much of the blame laid at his doorstep for both another early playoff exit at the hands of the Bruins last spring, along with this current malaise. While it’s unclear how much of it is his own doing and how much of it is a general team philosophy, there’s certainly some fair questions that are being raised about his handling of various players.

Why do Auston Matthews‘ minutes continue to be managed so closely given his age and ability? Why is Cody Ceci playing so much and being allowed to drain Morgan Rielly‘s effectiveness by osmosis like the Monstars did in Space Jam? They’ve basically been forced to sit Frederik Andersen a couple of times because of the inordinate number of back-to-backs they’ve already had on the schedule, but why does he keep playing so many games during a time when all of the smart teams are trending toward 50-50 splits in net? And on a related note, why can’t they seem to find a backup netminder that can reliably take some of those starts off his plate and still give them a chance to win points on Andersen’s nights off?

The Leafs eventually are going to be fine because they have too much young talent not to be, but it’s certainly not an ideal situation for them to be in at the moment. Even when everything isn’t being optimized, they still have enough firepower to outscore their problems and win games against lesser-skilled opponents. It’s just strange that these same problems that we’ve been talking about for ages continue to linger and that they haven’t been addressed by a team that presumably has loftier expectations than what they’ve accomplished to date. When nitpicking between the best teams in the league at the end of the day, these are the nuances that can ultimately be important differentiators.

Unlike the Lightning and Leafs — who aren’t living up to their lofty norms but are still good by normal standards — this start to the season in San Jose has been genuinely alarming for the Sharks. These are not the numbers one would associate with a Stanley Cup contender:

High-danger chances against: 30th

5-on-5 save percentage: 28th

All-situations save percentage: 24th

5-on-5 goal share: 30th

5-on-5 expected goal share: 30th

All-situations goal share: 22nd

All-situations expected goal share: 21st

The defensive woes and inability to keep the puck out of their own net is nothing new, because it similarly plagued them all of last season as well; however, they have made their decision that Martin Jones is their goaltender, and these are the results of that decision.

The big difference between previous seasons and this one is that their offense has dried up and isn’t nearly prolific enough to cover for their deficiencies on the other end of the ice. Whereas they were fourth in five-on-five offense and third overall last season, those figures have dipped to 17th and 20th, respectively. Their puck-possession game also has dropped, as they’ve gone from first all the way down to 19th. The only thing that’s really been going for them the way we would expect is their power play, which has been doing much of the heavy lifting of late.

Put it all together and you have a team that has won just four of their first 10 games, posted a minus-6 goal differential and has spent more time trailing (nearly 50% of its total time on the ice) than any ever team this season.

The Sharks lost quite a bit of important talent and depth this summer because of cap ramifications, but they still have enough good players to be better than they’ve shown in the early going. You would think the offense eventually will start to click and cover for some of the personnel and system issues defensively. But the margin for error undoubtedly has shrunk as compared to the past. They’re suddenly asking a lot of players that are either on the wrong side of 30 or have put a ton of miles on their bodies over the past number of years.

The Bruins are exactly who we thought they were. They have their formula for success down to a science at this point, which bodes well for their chances yet again this season considering that it was good enough to carry them to within one home win of a Stanley Cup title last season.

They’re one of the stingiest defensive teams in the league, showing up in the top five of goals against and save percentage at both 5-on-5 and in all situations. Their top line is second to none in terms of territorial dominance, controlling 63.1% of the shot attempts, 66.6% of the shots on goal, and 59.5% of the high-danger chances when they’re on the ice together. And their power play is absolutely devastating, converting on a league best 37.5% of opportunities and scoring 14.1 goals per hour (second best behind the Islanders).

David Pastrnak is the common thread tying those last two things together, and he is on some kind of special run right now. After coming out of the gate somewhat slowly, he has been in another stratosphere over the past seven games. He has scored 10 goals, assisted on another seven (with six of those as the primary assist), and he has put 29 pucks on net while attempting 50 shots in total. With him on the ice in that time, the Bruins are outscoring the opposition 9-4 at 5-on-5, and 18-5 in all situations.

While it’s not surprising that their power play is as good as it is considering the weapons the Bruins have, what is interesting is how they go about their business. Much like last postseason when they were similarly effective, they’re once again making a point of striking quickly before the opposing penalty kill can get set in its defensive shell. Here’s how long it has taken them to score their 10 power-play goals thus far, and how they got there:

13 seconds, zone entry
8 seconds, zone entry
14 seconds, faceoff win
7 seconds, faceoff win
13 seconds, zone entry
7 seconds, faceoff win
19 seconds, zone entry
30 seconds, zone entry
15 seconds, zone entry
6 seconds, zone entry

In terms of reproducibility for opposing teams, it’s easier said than done. It helps having Patrice Bergeron to win draws cleanly whenever he seemingly wants to. It helps having puck movers like Brad Marchand and Torey Krug to crisply fling the puck through traffic and on target. And it certainly helps having Pastrnak teeing up from the left circle.

But the strategy itself is something that fundamentally makes a lot of sense. Rather than methodically holding onto the puck along the boards and passing it around the perimeter for two minutes at a time, the Bruins are trying to force the issue by attacking quickly and hoping that the helter-skelter nature of the puck movement will force opposing penalty killers to make a mistake and create a chance for them to pounce. More often than not, that’s exactly what happens. The talent level itself is one thing, but combine it with aggressive tactics catered to their strengths and you get one of the most devastating man advantages in recent memory.

It’s amazing to be able to say this about a player who has already won nearly every single thing imaginable on both an individual and team level, but the legend of Sidney Crosby continues to grow well into his 15th season in the league. He strapped the Penguins onto his back and carried them to the postseason last season, and it looks as if he’s in the process of doing it again in 2019-20.

If anything, they’re now more reliant on Crosby than they’ve ever been with the litany of injuries they’ve endured up front in the early going. They’ve gotten only a little over 100 minutes of ice time out of Evgeni Malkin, Nick Bjugstad and Alex Galchenyuk combined. Jared McCann has been in and out of the lineup, and Bryan Rust has yet to play a single game.

But you wouldn’t know any of that just by looking at the results, because Pittsburgh hasn’t missed a beat. The Penguins not only just rattled off a five-game winning streak, but are top 10 in both goals for and against for the season.

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The reason they’ve been able to keep producing despite all of the man games lost is because they take after their best player, who himself continues to chug along without missing a beat, regardless of what’s going on around him. At this point it’s fair to wonder whether Crosby is even human or if he’s just a hockey-playing robot, because that would actually explain his ability to keep doing what he’s doing.

The 13 points in 10 games are obviously excellent, but the sheer workload he’s shouldering might be even more impressive at this point. At age 32, he’s playing 21:27 per game, which is the most he has averaged since the 2013-14 season. Of that total, the 16:43 he’s eating up at 5-on-5 represents the most he has ever played in his career, which is unheard of as he approaches game No. 1,000 later this season. But it’s not just the quantity of minutes, because it’s the quality too. With Crosby on the ice at even strength, the Penguins are tilting the ice on their opponents by controlling 56.5% of the shot attempts, 52.9% of the shots on goal, and outscoring them 9-6.

Based on their current roster, there’s no real reason why the Penguins should be doing as well as they’ve been doing thus far. Except for the fact that they have Sidney Crosby, and their opponents don’t.

The hockey world was quick to write off the Blue Jackets this summer after their talent exodus in free agency, but I was skeptical that things were actually going to be as bleak as people were making it out to be. The big thing for them is that it’s not as if they were ultimately being forced to start from square one again, because they still had a number of key building blocks in place.

The front-line players were gone up front, but one thing Columbus has an abundance of is legitimate NHL depth to cover for some of that loss. They certainly don’t have anything resembling Artemi Panarin‘s game-breaking talent, but they also don’t really have any black holes eating up regular minutes. Being able to constantly compete without giving away any freebie minutes to opponents is a subtle yet massive advantage over the course of a full season when opposing teams are dealing with fatigue and injuries. On the blue line, they have the two foundational cornerstones in Seth Jones and Zach Werenski, but beyond that, they boast quite a bit of lesser known talent.

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They don’t have any proven commodities in goal, but the elephant in the room is that it’s not as if their goaltending was that good last season. Joonas Korpisalo and Elvis Merzlikins got off to shaky starts by giving up 11 goals in their first two games, but since then they’ve given up only 18 combined goals in their next seven games (which includes a pair of unfortunate overtime bounces, which tend to happen amid the craziness of 3-on-3 hockey). Both are unknowns at this level, but at least the door isn’t closed on them being solid NHL netminders given enough time and reps. There’s enough theoretical talent there that the Blue Jackets should stick with this duo until we can say with any certainty whether they are the answer.

The best thing this team has going for it is an established identity: This is an incredibly difficult team to play against. The Blue Jackets are tenacious, they’re relentless, and they don’t give you time to take your foot off the pedal and relax. They’re going to struggle to score because they don’t have anyone who can consistently create easy offense for themselves and others, and we’re seeing that manifest itself already in the form of low shooting percentages and ineffective power-play conversion rates. One way to compensate for that is to increase the raw volume of opportunities, which is exactly what they’re doing — they’re firing the seventh-most shot attempts in the league, and only four teams are getting shots on net at a higher rate.

Each of their past seven games have been decided by one goal, with four of them needing overtime to settle things, and that’s a trend that’ll probably continue all season. It won’t always be pretty in Columbus, but it’ll always be competitive. That’s perfectly fine considering the other alternatives.

It’s tough to say whether the Rangers have been disappointing based on their preseason hype or exactly what we thought they’d be based on the questions that lingered despite all of their offseason acquisitions. I’m leaning toward the latter, because this is what we were expecting from them in the watchability rankings prior to the season:

“Their defense and depth down the middle beyond Mika Zibanejad is still highly suspect, so it’s fair to wonder just how much of those trendy moves will translate to immediate results, but there’s no question that they’ll be incredibly exciting to watch.”

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They’re played fewer games than any team that didn’t start their schedule in Europe, and yet they’ve already shown us all of those highs and lows in full doses. The new combination of Zibanejad and Artemi Panarin has been just as electrifying as we expected, dazzling us with breathtaking sequences in the offensive zone. Zibanejad kicked his season off with a pair of four-point efforts, and appears to have taken his game to the next level thanks to the help of his new running mate. Meanwhile, Panarin has already shown that he was worth every single penny the Rangers spent on him this summer.

But as fun as they’ve been to watch with the puck, all of those concerns about the team’s ability to hold up defensively without it have likewise proven to be warranted. There’s no way to sugarcoat their performance in their own zone; they’ve been completely listless, constantly skating around with seemingly no coherent plan for what to do. The breakdowns have been frequent, and both the quantity and quality of looks they’ve been surrendering reflect that:

Shot attempts against: 30th

Shots on goal against: 31st

High-danger chances against: 31st

Expected goals against: 30th

Goals against: 29th

The Rangers will be fun to watch and there’s still plenty of reason for optimism moving forward considering all of the talent they’ve added throughout their system in such a short period of time. But for now, we need to temper our expectations for how much of that is going to translate into on-ice team success this season. It’s pretty amazing that Henrik Lundqvist still looks as good as he does, because this kind of stress would’ve started to show on the faces of most regular human beings by now.

It’s a big season for the Islanders, as they look to not only continue their surprising success from 2018-19, but prove to people that their formula is a sustainable one moving forward. While they might not ultimately hit the same milestones they did last season simply because of how many things need to come together to have those types of results, the duo of Barry Trotz and Mitch Korn have been spinning this yarn long enough now for us to believe that they know what they’re doing.

Despite switching from Robin Lehner to Semyon Varlamov as Thomas Greiss‘ running mate in the crease, the defensive numbers once again look quite similar for a team that already has held the opposition to two or fewer goals in six of their eight games thus far (all on a per-hour-of-play basis, via Natural Stat Trick):

Shot attempts against: 42.0 last season, 42.9 this season

Shots on goal against: 30.5 last season, 32.1 this season

High-danger chances against: 11.26 last season, 9.74 this season

Goals against: 2.30 last season, 2.47 this season

Expected goals against: 2.59 last season, 2.50 this season

5-on-5 save percentage: 93.66% last season, 93.81% this season

All situations save percentage: 92.47% last season, 92.31% this season

Given how stingy they are defensively, the bar they need to clear to give their goalies enough support is quite low. But the question with this team is ultimately going to be about how and from whom they’re going to generate a steady supply of offense. It’s impossible to know what their power play is going to do this season, because they’ve somehow had a stunningly low 12 opportunities to date. In those few chances that they have had, they’ve managed to create a couple of timely goes. Considering that no team currently has a lower rate of both actual and expected 5-on-5 goals created than they do in the early going, it’ll be imperative that they continue to produce on the power play.

While the aforementioned 5-on-5 results haven’t been there offensively, one encouraging development is that Trotz finally appears to have fully taken the training wheels off of Mathew Barzal. He’s averaging 17:22 of ice time per game at 5-on-5, which is not only a significant increase from the 13:58 he was playing in that situation last season, but is the highest for any forward in the league at 5-on-5 at the moment. If they are going to score, it’ll likely flow through his gifted stick. Let’s just say that it’s no coincidence that he had four goals and six points during their recent four-game winning streak.

Note: Stats updated through games of Oct. 22.

After the inspiring playoff run they went on last season, the Avalanche entered the 2019-20 season as arguably the most hyped team in the league. The only two primary reservations we had about them realizing those sky-high expectations were their ability to produce enough secondary scoring behind the Nathan MacKinnon–Gabriel Landeskog–Mikko Rantanen line, and how their unproven goaltending would be able to hold up behind that high-octane offense. So far, so good on both fronts.

The “New Guy” line of Nazem Kadri, Andre Burakovsky and Joonas Donskoi has been terrific in the early going, outscoring the opposition 6-3 at 5-on-5 and providing the Avalanche with the second forward unit they can confidently throw out there when their stars require a breather. They’ve already squeezed 10 combined goalies out of those three, and there should be plenty more to come. The third line hasn’t really gotten going yet because of J.T. Compher‘s brief absence, but Tyson Jost‘s hat trick on the road against the Lightning was an encouraging sign that better days are ahead for that group as well. After what appeared to be a gruesome looking lower-body injury for Rantanen, the Avalanche will need that supporting cast to step up even more than was initially expected.

The goaltending wasn’t necessarily a concern as much as it was a question mark. Philipp Grubauer was terrific down the stretch last season and has performed well whenever he’s gotten the opportunity, but this is also uncharted waters for him because he’s never entered a season as the goalie who would start the majority of his team’s games. After starting seven of Colorado’s first nine games, he’s on pace for 64 starts, which would nearly double his previous high of 33 (last season). If he does sputter at any point, his backup looks awfully interesting as a candidate for more action.

Pavel Francouz is a relative unknown in NHL circles considering that he’s a 29-year-old who just started his first NHL game this month, but his track record suggests that was because of opportunity and not his ability. You never really know how to translate success in other leagues to the NHL because of the talent gap, but for goalies, the ability to stop the puck at every stop along the way is typically a good sign of future results. And Francouz has done just that regardless of where he’s played:

.924 save percentage in 164 Czech League games

.945 save percentage in 83 KHL games

.918 save percentage in 46 AHL games

He’s continued to show off those skills in his limited action thus far, posting a .949 save percentage in his four NHL appearances. His most recent performance against the high-powered Lightning was littered with jaw-dropping saves, as he stopped 44 of the 46 shots he faced. He looked every bit the part of an experienced goalie who’s traveled the world and performed at a high level wherever he’s landed, looking completely unfazed as the league’s most devastating offense peppered him with high-danger shots from all over the ice. The team will still rely on Grubauer to do most of the heavy lifting, but it’s quite a luxury to have a second option like Francouz on whom to fall back.

The Ducks are a classic example of a team that has to really convince people that it might be good — or at least not as bad as it was expected to be.

Anaheim finished 24th overall last season and was a punching bag for much of it. Its roster was ravaged by injuries, and its chances of competing on a nightly basis were decimated by questionable coaching. Both of those issues appear to have been addressed — with Dallas Eakins taking over behind the bench — and it’s time to start embracing the possibility that the fundamental change in process could lead to legitimately improved results.

Unlike last season, when the Ducks similarly started off with a 5-1-1 record before the wheels came off, this appears to be an entirely different set of circumstances that are driving their early success. In those first seven games last season, the Ducks controlled a league-worst 41.5% of the shot attempts and 42.1% of the shots on goal, which indicated that there was no real substance to that team beyond goaltender John Gibson. He put up an admirable fight, doing everything humanly possible to steal games they had no business winning as he was barraged by shots. But once he got banged up and came back down to Earth, everything around him crumpled. Here are the underlying numbers for the 2018-19 campaign:

5-on-5 shot attempt share: 46.9% (27th in the NHL)

5-on-5 shot on goal share: 46.9% (28th)

5-on-5 expected goal share: 45.4% (29th)

5-on-5 high-danger chances against per hour: 12.3 (28th)

All situations shot attempts against: 58.5 (30th)

All situations shots against: 29.0 (21st)

All situations expected goals against: 2.56 (29th)

All situations high-danger chances against: 13.5 (30th)

Here’s how they compare in each of those categories under Eakins thus far:

5-on-5 shot attempt share: 50.4% (15th)

5-on-5 shot on goal share: 50.3% (14th)

5-on-5 expected goal share: 49.2% (17th)

5-on-5 high-danger chances against per hour: 8.35 (9th)

All situations shot attempts against: 53.8 (8th)

All situations shots against: 29.5 (7th)

All situations expected goals against: 2.34 (9th)

All situations high-danger chances against: 8.2 (3rd)

Despite the improvements, there are still legitimate concerns about whether this team has enough offensive firepower to keep up with the best teams in the league. That’s one of the main reasons we shouldn’t expect them to keep winning six of every 10 games and staying ahead of teams like the Golden Knights, Sharks and Flames in the Pacific Division standings.

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But it’s all relative. At the very least, there appears to be a certain baseline level of competence with the Ducks this season, and that shouldn’t be discounted. When you have a goalie as good as Gibson is, the threshold you need to clear to give yourself a chance to be competitive is quite low.

He’s never finished in the top-5 of Vezina Trophy voting, but Gibson is a rock star in net, with his play unquestionably warranting recognition ever since he entered the league. What he needs in front of him to not only give the team a fighting chance but also finally start get himself some credit in the discussion for best goalies in the league is quite reasonable — keep the shots and chances against him to a manageable level, and provide the bare minimum for offensive support.

The Ducks weren’t able to clear that low bar last season, but it appears they now have a chance under a new coach and a collection of young players who should only continue to get better as the season progresses.

There were two big stories involving the Coyotes last season: their almost comically anemic offense, and how good Darcy Kuemper was in carrying them nearly to the playoffs despite it. Both of those trends are once again in the spotlight, but they appear to be aligning in the same direction, making Arizona a dangerous team.

The team’s ability to generate goals this season has been in stark contrast to last season, when no player reached either the 20-goal or 50-point threshold. It’s still too early to project individual paces because one strong game here or there can change the entire outlook, but it’s worth noting that the Coyotes have scored four or more goals in four of their past six games, a benchmark they hit only 27 times in 82 games last season. They’ve also scored five goals twice already, which they did only five times all last season.

In the first few games it looked like it was going to be the same story again after they were shut down by Gibson and the Bruins’ Jaroslav Halak, but since then, they’ve feasted against less stingy competition. Here’s a look at that improvement across the board, sorting their league rank offensively by game state:

Last season: 31st at 5-on-5 scoring, 26th on the power play, 27th overall

This season: 18th at 5-on-5 scoring, 10th on the power play, 14th overall

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The two biggest driving forces have been the addition of Phil Kessel and the fact that the group is finally healthy and intact. The Coyotes haven’t really started turning their looks into goals quite yet at 5-on-5, but the top line of Kessel, Derek Stepan and Clayton Keller will if it keeps dominating like it has thus far. They have just two goals to show for their work, but they’re controlling 61.5% of the shot attempts, 65.1% of the shots on goal and 70.0% of the high-danger chances. That’s a recipe for success, and it appears that Arizona is getting the shot in the arm it hoped for when it traded for Kessel.

Kuemper’s ascension as he approaches 30 is quite the development, becoming the latest example of how seemingly random the goaltending position can be. While everyone salivated at the idea of Antti Raanta finally being healthy enough to soak up a full workload, Kuemper has quietly sneaked into the Coyotes’ crease and taken the job for himself based on his play. It’s fair to say that it’s been a surprising turn of events at this stage of his career, considering that he’d never really shown himself to be anything more than a league-average backup before last season:

From 2012-2018: 114 starts, .912 save percentage, minus-22.7 goals saved above average

Since the start of last season: 61 starts, .927 save percentage, plus-15.4 goals saved above average

We’re ultimately going to need to see more of these trends continuing before we can say with any real confidence that the Coyotes should be considered a threat at the top of the Pacific Division. But if they can prove to be simply competent offensively, that should be enough to win plenty of games when paired with this kind of goaltending.

These two franchises seem to always be inextricably linked. They’ve been the dregs of the league for the better part of the past decade — which peaked in the epic tank battle for the Connor McDavid sweepstakes — and they’re now each sitting atop their respective conferences in a stunning turn of events to start the season.

In a way, they’ve also followed a similar formula for their early success: strong goaltending, a lethal power play and their best players doing a lot of the heavy lifting. The Oilers are fifth in save percentage, their power play has generated the third-most goals per hour, while Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl are second and fourth in league scoring while north of 1.5 points per game. The Sabres are fourth in save percentage and fourth in goals per hour on the power play, and Jack Eichel has been playing like a man possessed this season, with 14 points in 10 games.

If we have to pick between the two, the Sabres’ success appears to be more sustainable. They’ve been the superior 5-on-5 team, hovering around the 50% mark in all of the shot-based metrics. (They’re at 50.0% in shot attempts, 50.2% in shots on goal, 54.8% in high-danger chances and 51.1% in expected goals.) That represents a marked improvement from where they were last season, even when they were on their big 10-game winning streak. The various renovations they made to the lineup this summer have paid immediate dividends, significantly increasing their floor by removing many of the black holes, and turning their blue line from a liability into a net positive.

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The case for the Oilers’ continuing this level of success seems flimsier. They haven’t been nearly as good as a group at 5-on-5, relying more heavily on those other aforementioned strengths. They’re currently squeezing every remaining ounce of juice out of their goaltending, which doesn’t seem very likely to continue for much longer based on the players involved. The duo of Mikko Koskinen and Mike Smith have stopped north of 92.5% of the total shots they’ve faced to this point, which is a figure that’s going to inevitably dip down to something around 91% (if not lower) if the past is any indication. We saw this kind of a strong start for Koskinen last season before he crumpled, while Smith has been on the wrong side of the hill for long enough now that we should know better than to buy into a couple of strong games strung together.

Dave Tippett’s system has historically gotten the most out of its goalies (including Smith himself once upon a time in Arizona), and it wouldn’t be the first time that a team’s goalies got hot and stayed hot. But it’s important to maintain some perspective and evaluate situations like this based on the larger sample size, because save percentages over a short period of time can mask a lot of underlying deeper rooted flaws. It’s truly remarkable what a hot goalie will do for changing the overall perception of a team as a whole. I’m skeptical.

While James Neal‘s goal scoring has been a pleasant surprise, the degree to which this team relies on their top two players is really pushing the boundaries of what’s humanly possible. It’s currently leaning on Draisaitl to play the minutes of a No. 1 workhorse defenseman, and Connor McDavid isn’t too far behind. Here are the leaders in average ice time for the season among all forwards:

Leon Draisaitl: 23:42

Mika Zibanejad: 23:08

Connor McDavid: 22:43

Jake Guentzel: 21:50

Mark Scheifele: 21:43

Nathan MacKinnon: 21:34

Sidney Crosby: 21:27

Patrick Kane: 21:27

Artemi Panarin: 21:03

Dylan Larkin: 20:52

The good news for the Oilers is that these two did this last season, and they did it well. In a way, there’s something admirable about going to battle with your two best players, leaving it all out there, and going down swinging. Everyone knows all about McDavid’s singular greatness, but Draisaitl appears to have taken his game to another level, shedding any lingering concerns that his production is just a byproduct of playing with the best player in the world. He’s been dominant for large stretches this season, and he’s either scored or directly set up half of the team’s total goals.

The bad news is that it still doesn’t seem like an ideal management of your best resources, especially when we’re in the load-management era of optimizing player performance by closely monitoring workload. While they’re going the way they have been early this season, Edmonton will be just fine; but, the margin for error is incredibly thin — if either of McDavid or Draisaitl slows down or gets injured, everything could crumple around them like a deck of cards. That’s a scary place to be in when talking about such a physical and dangerous sport like hockey.

Coming into the season, the Pacific was widely considered to be the weakest division in the league, largely because of its perceived lack of depth beyond the top three teams. But it’s been surprisingly frisky in the early going, with no real obvious bottom feeders presenting themselves. We’ve already highlighted the Ducks and Oilers here, but even the Canucks and Kings are putting together nice little résumés of their own in the first couple of weeks.

No one has been more critical of the Canucks and their seeming lack of a forward-thinking plan when it’s come to constructing their roster than I have, but I’m willing to admit that they already look a lot better than I thought they would following their series of offseason acquisitions. They’ve had the benefit of an awfully light schedule in the early going, but they also just finished off a largely successful four-game road trip and have won six of their past seven games.

Jacob Markstrom looks terrific in net, trying to prove that this level of performance in his new norm as he builds off his impressive play following the All-Star break last season. On the blue line, not only has Tyler Myers formed an excellent top pairing with Alexander Edler, but rookie Quinn Hughes also continues to make something special happen every time he steps on the ice. Travis Green has done a commendable job of properly evaluating what he’s working with up front and putting his players in a position to succeed. He’s divvied up the forward minutes appropriately, burying his bottom-six in defensive minutes in an effort to free his most skilled players for all of the premium offensive minutes they can handle. The de facto top line of Elias Pettersson, Brock Boeser and J.T. Miller has rewarded him, dominating possession when they’ve been out there. It’s still early, but this team has a different feel to it than the ones from the past couple of lackluster seasons.

No team has had higher highs and lower lows than the Kings to start the season. They’re 4-5-0 to date, and will likely be a .500 team for the entirety of the season. But it looks like they’ll get there in a more entertaining path than we figured when we projected them to be the least watchable team in the league in the preseason. They’ve already been walloped by the Canucks by an 8-2 margin and gotten shut out in back-to-back home games by the Hurricanes and Sabres. But they’ve also returned the favor by drubbing the Predators and beating the division-rival Flames twice (while outshooting them in a single period by a 20-3 margin and a 20-4 margin in those two separate meetings).

Despite the losing record, there are a lot of positives to take from their first stretch of games this season. Anze Kopitar looks revitalized, showing major signs of bouncing back after he looked like his best days were behind him for much of last season. The team is playing a lot faster under Todd McLellan, jumping from 25th in pace at 5-on-5 last season to seventh thus far. As a group, they’re top-5 in shot share, shots on goal, high-danger chances and expected goals, which is a significant improvement from the floundering even-strength club they were last season. Some flaws remain with this team, but it’s giving off a dramatically different vibe from the overwhelmingly depressing situation of 2018-19.

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