No. Vegas, Colorado, Tampa, Boston, Carolina, and Washington are all clearly better, and then there are a ton of teams that have an argument for being better. I think we'll make the playoffs more than likely, but that's going to be the height of our success this year IMO. Don't think we have the defense nor the goaltending to truly compete with the top teams.
Disagree on a couple of those, especially Boston and Washington.
Boston lost Krejci and are replacing him with Charlie Coyle. Their new #3C is Eric Haula. That's two guys who have been 35 point players over the last 3 seasons as their middle 6 center group. Neither has managed 17 minutes a night for any of those 3 seasons and Haula is on team #5 in his last 3 years. I'm not sure that the Bergeron is better than ROR at this point in their careers, but even if he is it certainly isn't by a big enough margin to even come close to erasing the gap between the 2C and 3C groups. The top line is stupid good, but I'm not completely convinced that Pasta, Marchand, Hall, Foligno, Debrusk and Smith is a better top 9 wing group overall than Buch, Perron, Tarasenko, Saad, Kyrou and whoever wins that other 3rd line wing spot. I'll absolutely give them the nod defensively, but let's see how they look in net without Rask. I'm not sold that UIlmark/Swayman is anything close to the tandem that Rask/Halak (or Rask/Swayman) was. I won't be shocked if Boston is a contender, but I think it is pretty far from clear. And our contender status is judged in part because we have to go through Colorado, well they have to go through Tampa.
Washington is replacing their #4 and #5 D men with two warm bodies (some combo of Kempny, TVR, McIlrath, Irwin or prospects). Jensen likely goes from #6D to #4 or #5, but I'm not sold that will be an upgrade over Dillon/Chara. The forward group stays the same, but you have 6 guys on the wrong side of 30 who just got another year older. I like their forward group and I don't think that this is the year age causes their core to crash. But I'd take our D group over theirs and Samsonov wasn't the NHL-ready young stud they were hoping for last year. I'm not confident I know which goalie will be in net for game 1 of the playoffs for them. They haven't won a playoff round since winning the Cup (and letting their coach walk) and they have won the same number of playoff games as us in the last 2 seasons. They were definitely a better team than us last year, but they got slightly worse in the summer while we got noticeably better. I don't think they have any fewer questions than we do and I'm unaware of any prospects that are knocking on the door to potentially answer those questions in a positive way. I can't say that Carlson/Orlov/Schultz is notably better than Parayko/Faulk/Krug as a top 3 D group and their bottom 3 D have as many or more question marks than ours.
I like Carolina a lot and put them ahead of the Blues. But I am interested to see what the loss of Hamilton does to their D group, how Tony Deangelo fits in the locker room and most importantly what the Freddy/Raanta tandem in net looks like. They could be right up their with Tampa/Colorado if things break right but I could also see their goaltending being an injury-riddled bottom 10 tandem that pisses away their season. Freddy has been a middling goalie the last 2 years and has had numerous injuries that suggest the stupid-hard workload in Toronto wore all the tread of the tires. Raanta has always had injury issues and has started 12 or fewer games in 2 of his last 3 years. These guys could absolutely be fully washed.
Vegas belongs ahead of us in the rankings, but I'm starting to agree with Marek's assessment that they are too weak down the middle to win 4 rounds. I also think there is reason to worry in net. Fleury/Lehner was a top 5 tandem in the NHL and Fleury dramatically outplayed Lehner. Lehner is a good goalie, but he wasn't great last year and he hasn't started more than 43 games since he was in Buffalo. Can he be a top 5 starter with a 50+ start workload? Can Brossoit continue to be an above-average backup starting twice as many games as he did behind Hellebyuck? I see a pretty significant downgrade in net by swapping the reigning Vezina winner and replacing him with a clear backup. Using those savings to sign a one dimensional winger in Dadonov doesn't do much for me. They've hit scoring issues in the playoffs the last couple years and now I feel like the margin for error is smaller without 2 starting caliber goalies to turn to. I expect them to easily make the playoffs in a bad division, but I'm not sold that they can get over the hump.
