The National Hockey League calendar goes eerily quiet every August. For many, it’s a brief respite in anticipation of another lengthy hockey season. At TSN, such a break is the perfect opportunity to spend some time dissecting rosters in finer detail.
Starting today, we will unveil a multi-piece series grading every team’s lineup across the positional groups in tiered fashion. We will analyze the depth charts across all positions and create talent tiers for all 32 franchises. For the opener, we will start at left wing. A few housekeeping notes before we get into the piece:
-The tiered approach is meant to bucket teams with similar talent profiles at a given position.
-Position changes (intra-year and during off-seasons) are rather common in the NHL, and in one season, a left wing may see more minutes at centre or vice versa. We scraped the depth charts of two public databases (CBS and CapFriendly), reconciled them against positional usage in prior seasons, and in a handful of cases, made some forecast changes or educated guesses in anticipation of what coaching staffs may do in the upcoming year. Positional volatility only impacts the forward group, so we will manage through each carefully.
-Player contributions will be measured in Goals Above Replacement, which isolates player performance into the following pertinent categories: value added offensively and defensively at even-strength, value added across special teams play (if applicable), and value added by way of drawing and taking penalties. Last year’s leaders, for your brief sanity check, include Johnny Gaudreau, Toronto’s Auston Matthews, and Edmonton’s Connor McDavid.
-We will use a weighted system for 2022-23 expectations. Top-six wingers generally play about 62 per cent of all available minutes; bottom-six wingers play the remaining 38 per cent of available minutes.
Let’s get started:
Tier 5, In Trouble: Chicago Blackhawks, Los Angeles Kings, Philadelphia Flyers, San Jose Sharks
You could call this tier the ‘we were dominant franchises a decade ago and are now in the throes of a multi-year rebuild’ (San Jose and Chicago), ‘pretending we aren’t but are’ (Philadelphia), and ‘emerging’ (Los Angeles). Across the sixteen expected regular left-wingers within these four teams, we have reasonably high expectations for two of them: Chicago’s Andreas Athanasiou, and San Jose’s Timo Meier.
With how much talent exists league-wide at the position, these depth charts are relatively very weak on offensive firepower, and there are a bunch of penalty magnets within the bottom-six that force their teams into penalty killing situations more than their head coach would like. The saving grace for a team like the Kings is they have plenty of strength around the rest of their lineup, which offsets an obvious positional weakness. For the other three teams, it’s a primary reason why they’ll struggle all season long. Oh, and I did I mention Meier is a restricted free agent at the end of the year?
Tier 4, Underperform: Anaheim Ducks, Arizona Coyotes, Buffalo Sabres, Montreal Canadiens, Pittsburgh Penguins
There is certainly less fat within this group relative to your tier five teams, but noticeable missing is still the top-end firepower. We have seen electric seasons from Anaheim’s Adam Henrique (always productive, but with availability concerns), Arizona’s Clayton Keller (fresh off a point-per-game season), and Pittsburgh’s Jake Guentzel (40 goals last year!) in prior seasons, but it feels like this small group of players are carrying the lion’s share of production at the position for their respective teams.
I think one of the interesting depth charts to follow in this group heading into next season is Montreal. The Canadiens continue to rave over Cole Caufield and his shooting ability, and Evgenii Dadonov…
Read More: Travis Yost: Grading every NHL team’s left wing depth