When Demidov, Reinbacher, Slaf and others will be on their prime, what will be the situation of other teams? How will be the Bruins, Bolts, Leafs, Wings, Sabres and Sens? This is just our division. How about the Rags, the Panthers, the Canes and the rest? In 2-4 years, will we be part of the top of the NHL teams? Or not?
That's a question. Maybe too soon to answer.
Yeah it's not easy. I'm certainly not arguing we should just tank forever until we magically jump 50 points in the standings, nor am I opposed to making moves to improve today's roster as long as those moves also help us in the future.
I think our window is going to start opening with next offseason where we'll have a better understanding of where Reinbacher and Hutson are, and we'll have Demidov on the way to North America. That will coincide with Armia, Dvorak, and Savard's contracts ending and Gallagher + Anderson being a lot easier to dump or buy out with just two years remaining (we might get lucky and have Gallagher go on LTIR soonish too).
Tampa has probably stretched their window and Florida has a good core in place, but I think the aging curves should help us there as both of those teams are built around late 20s to early-mid 30s cores at this point. If things go right we'll be on the upswing as they're starting to sputter and stagnate like the Capitals/Penguins have been recently. Boston also has a great core but I think they're going to slowly fade relative to us over the next few years unless they land Draisaitl or another big time superstar. Toronto is tough to say until we know how the Marner and Tavares situations end up. Toronto will stay good but to be a contender they kinda need a retool, or they need to do some Florida-style wheeling and dealing next summer IMO.
Ottawa and Detroit are broadly similar to us but I think we have the advantage over both (Ottawa doesn't have our depth on D or a two way guy like Suzuki, and Detroit doesn't have a Demidov). Buffalo probably has the best core of the Atlantic rebuilders but I think they have a serious ownership red flag now and might struggle to attract players. If Buffalo was any generic team I'd be very concerned about how we'd match them, but I just don't know when they're ever going to fix the defence and goaltending and Tage Thompson might not age as gracefully as other top youngish players.