We are fifteen games (or so) through the NHL season. It’s hard to make power rankings this early so I thought a fun exercise, mainly meant for newer hockey fans, would be to go through who we know are good teams and who we know are bad teams. A simple exercise but one that can help us shed light on a week to week league at this point.
Whose good
The Nashville Predators: The Preds continue to show they have one of the deepest cores in the entire NHL. Even during a brief injury stint of Pekka Rinne, the team’s star goalie, the team was still able to rack up wins. The Predators have only allowed 37 Goals this season. That leads the league, and with scoring up across the NHL it is a very good sign.
Tampa Bay Lightning: The Lightning are the best team in the east. What do they and the Predators have in common they are both backed by solid goaltenders. Andrei Vasilevskiy is having a very good year with 2.30 goals against average. It doesn’t hurt to have three nearly 20 point scorers in your top 3 lines as well in Nikita Kucherov (18), Brayden Pointe (19), and Yanni Gourde (17). The Lightning have 7 players with 12 or more points, with that kind of depth it’s hard to see them slowing down.
Toronto Maple Leafs: The Leafs are one of the highest scoring teams in the league. They place fifth in the league with 58 goals scored in just 17 games. That’s about 3.4 goals a game. Lead by all-star John Tavares’s 10 goals the leafs have survived the last few weeks without young star Auston Matthews, who is slated to return from injury later this month. Only four players on their roster, who have started 13 games or more, have not scored a goal.
Whose bad
At the moment the NHL is pretty even outside of the three aforementioned teams and shifts week to week. I would say the only outwardly bad team is the Los Angeles Kings. The Kings are without starting goalie Johnathan Quick, but honestly, I don’t think it would make much of a difference if they had him. This team just isn’t equipped for the newer, faster, younger NHL. The teams leading scorer is 35-year-old Ilya Kovalchuk for god’s sake. This team needs a complete rebuild their core is old and slow.