The next NHL championship opens again without clear favorites

The next NHL championship, which starts today, is not much different from the previous ones from the point of view of the situation. In any case, he has preserved his main attractive feature: in this league, with its “Russian component” colossal in scale and brightness, it is very difficult to outline even an expanded circle of candidates for ultimate success, and the capabilities of many clubs are a huge mystery.

The days before the start of any NHL season are a haven for North American hockey experts in the sense that you can frolic to your heart’s content on the prediction field. And this season is no exception. It is not difficult to discern in it a whole bunch of intriguing moments of different scale, forcing ESPN, TSN, Sporting News and other prominent media resources to enthusiastically come up with topics for discussion and predictions concerning both individual players and more general trends.

The debate is heated. For example, regarding how young prodigy Connor Bedard, who was acquired in the summer by the Chicago Blackhawks, will show himself in his debut NHL season, who will try to push off the bottom with his help: a “hype” newcomer has not appeared in the league since the middle of the last decade, when “ The Edmonton Oilers were lucky enough to draft his namesake, Connor McDavid. The buzz surrounding Bedard has already helped Chicagoans generate a ten percent increase in ticket sales for regular-season home games, but there are cases where 18-year-old boys are not able to immediately get used to the tough men’s hockey, in which no one gives a damn about their junior records, because no less than cases with their immediate adaptation.

Or the controversy over how close Alexander Ovechkin will be at the finish line of the regular season to the best NHL sniper of all time, Wayne Gretzky.

There are currently 72 goals between them, but among several ESPN analysts who recently tried to guess the performance of the Washington Capitals forward in the opening season, there was no one who would risk suggesting that Ovechkin, at thirty-eight, would suddenly give up and hit the goal under three dozens of times. But there were those who thought that he could find himself very close to the great Canadian: time seems to have almost no effect on the hockey titan.

Alexander Ovechkin is, of course, not the only Russian hockey player whose name appears in this debate about potential heroes.

The “Russian component” in the NHL does not become more modest from year to year – neither in terms of quantity nor in terms of quality. Today there are fifty domestic players in the league.

At least a third of them are extremely important figures for their clubs, at least a dozen have exceptional significance for them – about the same as Ovechkin has for Washington, some – younger than the Washington veteran – are seen among the hunters for prestigious individual prizes. To a lesser extent, this applies to forwards – Nikita Kucherov from the Tampa Bay Lightning, Kirill Kaprizov from the Minnesota Wild, Artemi Panarin from the New York Rangers, since there is also Connor McDavid with his phenomenal scoring numbers, which are unlikely to go anywhere something to evaporate. But without Panarin’s teammate Igor Shesterkin and Ilya Sorokin, who plays next to him in the New York Islanders, not a single top three best goalkeeper in the league can do. Moreover, in most ratings it is one of them at the top. Andrei Vasilevsky from Tampa would also be in the company with Shesterkin and Sorokin, but after surgery for a herniated disc, he will have to miss a couple of months. And this is a serious minus.

With attempts to outline at least an approximate circle of clubs aiming at the Stanley Cup, to single out one as being incredibly similar to its future owner, everything, as usual, is even more confusing. The instability of the hierarchy and alignment is a signature feature of the NHL. And here in the fall of 2023 there is nothing unusual. Almost every strong club is a huge mystery, woven from questions. How will the Boston Bruins, who won the previous regular season by an overwhelming margin, cope with multiple summer losses, including core centers Patrice Bergeron and David Krejci? Will the Buffalo Sabers, Detroit Red Wings, Ottawa Senators, and New Jersey Devils, who have been actively hinting at a real breakthrough for some time now, finally be able to achieve it? Was the management of the Pittsburgh Penguins right, which in the spring, together with Washington, flew past the playoffs when they risked trading from the San Jose Sharks to join their “dinosaurs” who still define the face of the club: Sidney Crosby, Evgeni Malkin and Kris Letang another veteran – Erik Karlsson, albeit with a freshly won prize for the strongest defenseman in the NHL? Will Tampa, which won the Stanley Cup in 2020 and 2021, and the Colorado Avalanche, who took the trophy from them in 2023, who have been constantly losing strong fighters recently, be able to return to their previous level? Will the Toronto Maple Leafs and New York Rangers, with their strong prospects, be able to shake off their softness and tradition of being eliminated in the early rounds of the playoffs?

Of course, the bet on the current owner of the Vegas Golden Knights prize looks more or less reliable. Tight salary caps tend to force league champions to clean up their payroll after a triumph, parting with valuable personnel to give their teammates a raise.

“Vegas” strangely managed to avoid this sad fate, retaining, in fact, all the key hockey players, including Russian striker Ivan Barbashev. But it still doesn’t look like a monster club that can handle anything.

In perhaps the most representative poll about the outcome of the fight for the Stanley Cup in the upcoming championship – the one conducted by the Hockey Writers Association – Vegas, by the way, turned out to be much lower than the two leading clubs, which collected the same number of votes – almost a quarter. These clubs were the Carolina Hurricanes and the Edmonton Oilers. And the reasons to believe in them are quite clear.

“Carolina” was distinguished by its balance last season, which was disrupted by the injury of Russian forward Andrei Svechnikov, which prevented him from playing in the playoffs. In it, the team came up against the Florida Panthers in the semifinals. Now, after a series of good summer deals to upgrade the roster, which, for example, brought Svechnikov’s compatriot, defenseman Dmitry Orlov, to Carolina, there is even more balance. And everyone thinks about Edmonton that once a club with such an amazing attack, with McDavid it should make a leap. With the caveat, of course, that he is not guaranteed to anyone in the NHL. And in it, “Boston”, still with Bergeron, Krejci and Orlov, after a fantastic “regular season”, can be eliminated in the first round of the playoffs by “Florida”, which barely made it there, which will then reach the final in order to lose in it not so much and the one that stood out, strictly speaking, was “Vegas.” Such a scenario as the league has created in the spring of 2023 is much more typical for it than a scenario with victories for “paper” favorites, and the field of forecasts in it is densely strewn with insidious mines.

Alexey Dospehov