I think you maybe underestimate what it takes to be last place. Last place teams don't have a handful of high end players like Buchnevich, Thomas, Kyrou, Parayko and Binnington. They have maybe 1 or two of those guys and not nearly as much depth as we do. Think about a player like Walker playing in the middle six for the entire season. Schenn competing to be your leading scorer. Your top pairing is Leddy-Kessel and the net is shared between a 2 guys that are both backup goalies. That is the type of team to be last.
That's the makeup of those teams in a lot of years, usually when there are multiple teams tanking. You see that a lot when there is a super hyped draft class. 2023 was one of those draft classes that causes multiple teams to intentionally be as bad as possible and we've seen the outcome of that for the last couple seasons.
2025 isn't one of those classes, but 2026 might be. The result is that there aren't teams that are selling everything that isn't bolted down the way multiple teams did for 2022/23. I don't really see any truly putrid teams that are trying to go backwards instead of forwards.
Chicago brought in actual NHL players and will be integrating more of their high end young talent into the mix. Same thing with San Jose and Anaheim. I don't expect any of these teams to be good, but they should be competing in way more nights and a double-digit standings point improvement is very much on the table for all of them.
Montreal has had a disastrous preseason with Laine and Reinbacher both suffering what appear to be long term injuries. But neither of those guys played a game for Habs last season and they were a 76 point team. Utah looks improved following a 77 point season. Ottawa brought in a legit #1 to try and fix their biggest issue and they had 78 points last year. Seattle had 81 points and bought this summer. The Devils had 81 points and made a move to address the atrocious goaltending.
That leaves us with just Columbus and Calgary left out of the teams that finished below a .500 points percentage.
I think Columbus will be awful. However, their coaching situation last year was about as bad as it could get, they added a couple NHL players, and I could see a team like them rally around the Gaudreau tragedy to be a passable NHL team at home. I could very much see them being a 70-75 point team (as bad as they were, they had 66 points last year).
Calgary should be tanking as hard as possible, but ownership is clearly not interested in doing that and they kept targeting/acquiring NHL players as they sold the old core. They aren't going to be good this year, but I could see them being a 70-75 point team.
In 2018/19 the last place team had 64 points and everyone else in the league was 70+. Ottawa is the team that finished in last. They entered the season with Mark Stone and Matt Duchene in their mid-20s, a 22 year old Chabot (who got Norris votes that year), rookie Brady Tkachuk, and a decent chunk of quality vets. I could see this year's last place team looking a lot more like that group than the dogshit teams that have been at the bottom of the league recently.
I expect the Blues to be better than that, but not a ton has to go wrong for us to be around that level.