Behold the Skate Men — NHL Season Preview: Western Conference

Let’s keep it rolling. You can see our Eastern Conference preview from yesterday here.

There seem to be a lot of hockey pundits–a motley collection of humanity if there ever was one–that are getting awfully horny about the Yotes this year. This happens every season, because the law of averages states that the Coyotes have to be good at some point. And this being hockey, just about any team can have some season where every shot goes in (hello, last year’s Kraken) or have a goalie be given the power cosmic or something, and everyone wants to be first in the pool.

Most of this year’s optimism in the desert centers around the team’s ability to convince Logan Cooley to ditch the University of Minnesota after his freshman year, where he was a Hobey Baker finalist, and anyone who manages that in their first year of college hockey is worth taking notice of. 60 points in 39 NCAA games for a real-ass program should have Yotes fans excited.

Except the rest of this roster sucks ass. Clayton Keller wants out, Nick Schmaltz has never scored a point that ever mattered, there’s no representative goalie on the roster, and the defense is a comedy act. They still play in a warehouse filled with drunk college students, and the future of the team will still hang over everything. Something named JJ Moser is on the top-pairing here, and you don’t need to care enough to find out what that is. Cooley will be very good, provide some moments to hang on to…and really come to stardom when he’s playing Houston.

You already know the drill here from my constant bleating. They’re going to be bad, and they’re going to be a whole lot of fun, not only thanks to Connor Bedard. Bedard will flash most nights to make the United Center weak in the knees, but there’s more than that.

Rookie d-man Kevin Korchinksi will be one of the best skaters in the league the minute he steps on the ice tonight in Pittsburgh for the opener. No. 2 center Lukas Reichel has looked dynamite in preseason (which means absolutely nothing but let’s dream).

The Hawks might be bleeding in up to seven rookies into the lineup, which usually leads to disaster. But if Bedard is all that (he is), and Reichel can hold down the No. 2 center spot behind him (he likely can) and if Korchinski vaults himself into looking potentially as a member of the second class of puck-moving d-men behind Cale Makar (likely but not certain), and if goalie Arvid Soderblom can take the job from Petr Mrazek (who knows?!) the Hawks will not be in the running for the top pick or even the top three or maybe even not the top five. They could be a team that’s two steps behind the Sabres in the same kind of arc.

The Avs had the Stanley Cup comedown last year, when everyone got hurt and the duct tape and string-laden outfit that careened into the playoffs was quickly removed by the Kraken. The added rest a team gets from a first-round faceplant is then colored as a good thing by hopeful fans as they come into the next season supposedly fresher than all the other contenders.

Maybe that’s true. The Avs still might have the best top end of a roster in the league, with the leading player in the non-McDavid division in Nathan MacKinnon and Cale Makar, who if he retired tomorrow might still get into the Hall of Fame. Mikko Rantanen is the game’s leading power forward. That’s a whole lot right there.

It’s what’s below that should have Avs fans a little nervous. Jonathan Drouin has somehow conned his way onto the top line here, and he’s never been good or healthy. “Treat Boy” Ryan Johansen was finally relieved of the misfitting label of a No. 1 center in Nashville to back up MacKinnon in Denver down the middle, but Johansen has made a career of being a complete turd in any game that matters. He’s here to cash a check.

The bottom six is itchy, with Miles Wood now here to do whatever it is he does, and Ross Colton centering the third line which could be anything. The blue line still looks great, except it counts on a clean bill of health from Bowen Byram, which has never happened. Alex Georgiev is in net, and he was very good last year, and wasn’t even that bad in the first round, but this is a Cup contender depending on a goalie that has to prove it. Georgiev could easily be good enough to make the rest of the roster’s problems seem minimal, at least until the deadline when they can fix it. That seems the surest way back to the top for the Avs.

The Avs’s main competition again in the Central. They’ll be a cure for insomnia because they’re still coached by Pete DeBoer. They’re filled with young, fast players who you will be sure are all interchangeable. Jason Robertson will score at least 45 goals. Jake Oettinger is one of a handful of goalies, and maybe the only one in the West, who can carry a team through multiple rounds. Wyatt Johnston might break out on the second line this season, and there are reinforcements in the AHL for them should the old part of the roster (and with Jamie Benn, Joe Pavelski, and Ryan Suter, the old part of this roster is OLD) start to creak. Probably another run for the Stars is in the offing, you just won’t enjoy any of it, and they look a half-step short of the top of the class.

The Wild’s entire existence:

Not that they’ll be bad, but they won’t be good in any way that you’ll notice, they’ll go out in the first or second round and you’ll immediately forget they were ever there, and neither will any of their fans because the Gophers are pretty good this year.

Thanks to the presence of Connor Bedard, this is the first hockey season in a while that I’ve been excited to see start. Yesterday, I did come to the realization that the last thing I want to do with my time is watch another goddamn Nashville Predators game. Their weirdly lit arena, their history of signing sex criminals that the hockey press glosses over because they want to get loaded and hit on bachelorette parties on Broadway, that godforsaken goal song, and their litany of annoying players that haven’t ever really won anything and yet they’re always considered a favorite.

Lucky for me, this Predators’ squad doesn’t look like it’s going to be worth watching. Ryan O’Reilly signed here to run out of gas. The blue line behind Roman Josi is awful, old, and slow. Juuse Saros will hold them in a lot more games than they deserve, and maybe that gets them flirting with a playoff spot for longer than they deserve. But more likely this will fall apart and the Preds are headed for a stretch of irrelevance they haven’t had in some time. Good riddance.

The chances of Jordan Binnington wielding a chainsaw at either an opponent or his own teammates is about the only thing worth paying attention to in Missouri this season. Robert Thomas and Jordan Kyrou are nice enough players to build around, though they may be second-line players on a team that has any intention of doing anything. The Blues don’t though. Pass.

One day, GM Kevin Cheveldayoff will have to teach a class at an Ivy League school about how to keep a high-profile job for over a decade without ever proving one actually knows what they’re doing.

It’s hard to know what the Jets are aiming for here, as yesterday they just extended both Mark Scheifele, who has proven to be one of the league’s leading penises, and that he also won’t lead a team anywhere but the toilet, and Connor Hellebuyck, a goalie that would have been the biggest trade chip in the league with which the Jets could have kickstarted moving to their next era.

Instead, they seem determined to hit their ceiling of a wildcard team. And that’s where they’ll stay, because it’s not like there’s a raft, or really any, young players that can then push them beyond this. The Jets under Cheveldayoff’s leadership have never won a division, never gotten to a Stanley Cup Final, and rarely have even been a threat to do so.

So they’ll all be cold, they’ll scrap and claw to get clowned by the Avs or Oilers or Knights in the first round, and then they’ll do it all again next year. Truly amazing stuff from Cheveldayoff.

There are kids worth watching here in Trevor Zegras, Mason McTavish (who we can only hope doesn’t have the same taste for running people over with his car that his dad had), and Leo Carlsson. That will be enviable center depth one day soon. But it is not this day. A lot of lumps are going to be taken at The Pond this year.

We can’t underestimate, nor really calculate, the bounce the Flames could get from not having to play under Darryl Sutter anymore. It’s the hockey equivalent of Dufresne’ing out of that sewer pipe and washing oneself clean in that river. But still, this roster is…unimpressive if we’re being kind. And I’m only being kind because I have a couple of Flames fan friends who at least have some idea of where I live.

They should get a much better year out of Elias Lindholm and Jonathan Huberdeau on the top line, and they still have one of the game’s best two-way centers in Nazem Kadri behind that. Andrew Mangiapane and Mikael Backlund anchor what could be one of the league’s better third lines.

But the defense doesn’t really have anyone you’d consider a No. 1, but it still has Nikita Zadorov. And if Nikita Zadorov is on your team, you can only be so good but you can be way bad. Most of all, the Flames don’t have any earthly idea what they’ll get from their goalies. Jakob Markstrom was awful last year, and has spent most of his career bouncing between great and awful with no pit stops in between. Dan Vladar isn’t going to pick up the slack, and the organization just doesn’t want to turn things over to Dustin Wolf who has dominated the AHL for two years (mostly due to Markstrom’s paycheck).

If Markstrom is good again, or Wolf finally just takes the job from him because he has to, there’s probably just enough here to nab a playoff spot. But there’s also potential for complete disaster here as well, as there isn’t a ton of offensive punch and the defense might not make things easy on whichever goalie is back there. Maybe the biggest unknown in the West.

A lot of people’s Stanley Cup pick, and one that still has Jack Campbell or Stuart Skinner, last year’s playoff meltdown author, in net. So yeah, good luck with all of that.

There’s obviously a lot to like. The game’s best player, another top-five player in Leon Draisaitl, scoring on three lines at least, and a defense that while it might not have a true minutes-eating monster up top has four to five pretty good ones (Darnell Nurse is just never going to be that guy no matter how much I’ve wished for it for years). They’ll have Mattias Ekholm for the whole season this time, and if Vegas nods off at all from their Cup hangover the Oilers win this division in a walk.

But…Jack Campbell and Stuart Skinner. We’re doing this again?

Lots of buzz about the Kings this year after two first-round exits after emerging from their post-dynasty abyss, and then adding Pierre-Luc Dubois. Except it’s not clear what Dubois actually does. The Jackets sucked with him. The Jets sucked with him. Sure, he’ll get to ride in Anze Kopitar’s wake, but Anze Kopitar might start playing like he’s in his late 30s, and then what? PLD just isn’t that guy, and the Kings are about to be the third team to find that out.

But if Kopitar can still be Kopitar for yet another season, and Phillip Danault can take the dungeon shifts, then it will never set up better for Dubois to actually be, y’know, good.

The goalie situation is still ass, and a midseason trade will be necessary if the Kings are going to make serious noise. Drew Doughty is also getting up there, and there isn’t anyone else around to pick up the slack should Doughty occasionally need a walker to get around. Coach Todd McLellan will get the most of whatever’s here because that’s his thing, but if you’re looking for a surprise team to break through the Avs-Oilers-Knights axis, it ain’t here.

See above.

The Kraken’s success last season was built on shooting 10.4 percent at even-strength, and they won’t do that again. There’s a wicked market correction coming for them this time around, which will probably see them not come within hailing distance of a playoff spot. There is one long-term piece in place here in Matthew Beniers, and everyone else is still filler other than maybe Jared McCann. No one wants to say out loud that Shane Wright can’t play. The goalies are terrible. Somehow an expansion team has an old defense, and it wasn’t through signing prime free agents. This is backing up in a serious way.

The most hilarious organization in the league. They have no idea what they’re doing, and they have no idea what they’re aiming for to approach in their have-no-idea-what-they’re-doing fashion. It’s not clear that Elias Pettersson wants to be here. Their second-line center, J.T. Miller, is still the highest-paid player. Brock Boeser has a real Black Crowes problem, in that his first album will always be his best. Quinn Hughes is awesome, but they’re also carrying Tyler Myers who’s been a disaster for 28 years now or whatever. The goalies are bad. There isn’t enough of anything here, and yet they won’t blow it up and will chase a wildcard spot like it’s the Cup itself, and set their organization back another three years. Garbage from top to bottom.

Most of the Cup-winning team is back, though a usual Cup hangover is bad enough. This is a Vegas Cup hangover, which is probably crippling. Mark Stone will get hurt at some point, Alex Pietrangelo was starting to look old last year and now has added another Cup run to the odometer. Can they weave more magic between Adin Hill and Logan Thompson in net again?

Still, there’s more than enough to kind of coast to a playoff spot, especially given the state of the rest of the division. If most of the roster is healthy come April, they’ll be as dangerous as anyone. Even though they don’t have any cap space, we know they’ll make the moves they need to at the deadline. If a team wants to win the Cup, especially the Oilers and Avs or Stars, they probably still have to go through Vegas to do it.

Follow Sam on Twitter @Felsgate and on Bluesky @felsgate.bsky.social