When an NHL team is swirling, all you can hope for is some promise to temper the panic.
On Tuesday night, Connor Bedard — playing as Chicago Blackhawks captain for the first time in his career — returned ahead of schedule from off-season surgery and, with one assist, helped the Hawks to their second win of the season.
Will it be smooth sailing for the Blackhawks from here? Perhaps not, but Bedard’s presence is surely a reason for shaken Chicago fans to slowly back away from the ledge.
Of course, not every struggling team has a guy ready to step in who can counteract the crumminess.
With that in mind, we’re checking the Panic Meter in five NHL cities to get a sense of how worried everyone should be. To be clear, we’re not concerning ourselves with squads that courted misery. Difficult as they may be to watch night after night, the likes of the Vancouver Canucks and Calgary Flames are exactly where they want to be in the standings.
For teams with playoff hopes, however, early-season scuffles bring about a much different feeling. As such, let’s examine the gauge on the Panic Meter for a handful of clubs.
Philadelphia Flyers 9/10
It’s almost as though getting waxed 7-0 on home ice by the Pittsburgh Penguins on opening night broke the Flyers. Even with the rebuilding Flames and Canucks in the league, the Flyers — still in search of their first win after eight outings — have the worst five-on-five goal differential (minus-15) in the NHL (thanks largely to that lopsided loss to Pittsburgh). Philly also has the worst expected goals percentage (34.5 per cent) to match according to Moneypuck.
The Flyers, recall, made the second round of the playoffs last spring and even if we all figured it would be a chore for them to again be among the East’s top eight clubs, nobody thought they’d be buried by mid-October.
You could make a case the only Flyer who is performing the way the team hoped is newcomer Joseph Woll, who’s basically personally responsible for pushing the team to extra time on two occasions and snagging single points in both those outings. Woll has a .914 save percentage in four contests and has received a grand total of six goals support in those games.
Only two Flyers — Christian Dvorak and Matvei Michkov — have more than one goal so far (both are at two) and the team has yet to tally more than two goals in a single game.
It’s about as grim as it can get. The only “yeah but” you can offer is that despite making the playoffs last season, we all understood this team remained a work in progress.
Still, nobody could have imagined this much work had to be done.
Los Angeles Kings 9.5/10
We opened with one winless squad, so naturally it’s time to discuss the other.
About all you can say for the Kings is at least they’re only 0-for-5, as opposed to having whiffed in eight attempts like Philly.
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The difference, though, is that while the Flyers are in some state of organizational build, Los Angeles is old as dirt with no hope on the horizon.
New coach Peter Laviolette was brought in to kickstart the offence, but only three teams — Philadelphia, Calgary and (surprisingly) Dallas — are averaging fewer than the Kings’ 2.20 goals per game. L.A. began the year by putting up four goals in each of its first two outings, but has managed just one goal apiece in its past three showings. Making matters worse, the team is allowing a goal nearly half the time it’s shorthanded (the penalty-kill is only effective 57.9 per cent of the time).
If you want to be extremely kind to the Kings, you could point out four of their games have come against teams — Colorado, Edmonton, Florida and Vegas — that could conceivably win the Stanley Cup.
Maybe when injured winger Kevin Fiala returns and the team gets used to Laviolette’s teachings, the scoring will tick up. But if you were to make a list of teams going nowhere in the near- and long-term future, the Kings might land at No. 1.
Detroit Red Wings 8.5/10
If Bedard’s return brought some calm to the Blackhawks, the Wednesday-morning news that Alex DeBrincat has inked a seven-year extension with the Wings must bring a glimmer of happiness to Detroit.
But one beam of sunlight isn’t much to latch onto.
While one Michigander, in DeBrincat, is staying, it’s still jarring to realize another — former captain Dylan Larkin — has asked out of his home-state team. Throw in the contract standoff with restricted free agent defenceman Simon Edvinsson and it’s easy to lean into the worst fears — that the team is simply mismanaged — in Detroit.
On the ice, the Wings have one win in six tries despite five of those contests coming in their own building. Before the season, the Wings were the one Atlantic team you figured had no hope of making the playoffs and nothing that’s happened so far would move you off that viewpoint.
It looks like it’ll be 10 years and counting without post-season hockey in the Motor City and, quite honestly, a well-performed re-tool is probably in order.
The question is, does Detroit have the people in place to perform that task?
For all the stats we keep these days, the telling metric in Columbus might be how many times coach Rick Bowness puts them on blast.
After taking a torch to the team for its lack of effort at the end of last season, Bowness barely made it past Thanksgiving before laying into the Jackets again. Following Tuesday’s 7-3 home-ice loss to the Panthers, the coach was throwing around the word “embarrassed” in relation to his team’s performance.
Columbus is 2-3-0 out of the gate with four of those contests occurring at home. Like Detroit, much of the drama has come off the ice. To be fair, a couple of those situations came to a quality resolution, with the unhappy Kirill Marchenko shipped out for a good, young player in Matthew Knies, while top centre Adam Fantilli ended a summer-long negation by inking a new deal on the eve of the season.
That said, reining Norris Trophy winner Zach Werenski is anything but a sure bet to remain in Ohio long-term and the club — which has not made the playoffs in an 82-game season since 2019 — really could have used a hot start to the season with a home-heavy schedule.
Instead, we’re hearing more rants from a cranky coach.
Chicago Blackhawks 6.5/10
The Panic Meter was much higher when the Hawks were 0-3-0 out of the gate — outscored 15-5 — and playing with the understanding that Bedard might not see his first game of the year until November. At that point, it felt like Chicago could be dead and buried by Halloween.
Certainly Bedard’s return in a 5-3 win over the Penguins on Tuesday calms things down a little and allows us to focus on some positives, like rookie Roman Kansterov bagging a pair of goals in that game while fellow freshman Anton Frondell has a team-leading six points in seven contests.
Still, there was lots of leap talk in Illinois entering the campaign and, at 2-5-0, the Hawks need to get going to make that a reality.
Perhaps the new captain — surrounded by a pair of promising rooks — can turn the conversation back to something that requires a Hope Meter in Chicago.
