The Penguins are a playoff team for a remarkable 16 th straight season (the best among all North American pro sports leagues) but with Evgeni Malkin and Kris Letang on expiring deals and a long list of other pending UFAs, it feels like we might be witnessing the end of an era.ĭepth down the middle, the emergence of Adrien Kempe, and the resurgence of Jonathan Quick and Anze Kopitar have the Kings making quick work of their rebuild. Edmonton Oilers (47-27-6): It’ll take more than just one sentence to sum up the rollercoaster season in Edmonton - the starts and stops, streaks and skids, the coaching change, and highs and lows in net - and it would take an entire novel to describe just how excellent the play of Connor McDavid (44 goals, 122 points) and Leon Draisaitl (55 goals, 109 points) have been throughout the entire saga to push this team into the post-season anyway. In Year Two of the Kirill Kaprizov era, the sophomore superstar wrote his name into the Wild’s history books - single-season goals, assists, points, you get the idea - and has turned this club into a real-deal contender that capitalized on its cap space (hello, Marc-Andre Fleury!) for a serious run before the cap crunch comes.ġ0. Some of the cast of characters has changed, but this Cup-winning core looks ready for a three-peat and is heating up at the perfect time to prove it.Īfter being swept by Colorado in Round 1 last spring and held to just seven goals all series, the Blues took a page out of their Central foes’ playbook and have turned up the heat on their own goal-scoring – their 3.77 goals per game is the fourth-best rate in the league and the biggest reason they’re back in the playoffs… and yet, they still feel like they’re flying under the radar as a contender.
It’s tough to decide what the better Blueshirts story is: Igor Shesterkin’s Vezina-worthy backstopping that saw them challenging for the Metropolitan’s top spot by season’s end, or Chris Kreider’s out-of-nowhere scoring spree.
The complete, cohesive success of this Flames team can be boiled down not to one sentence, but one word: Chemistry. It’s been a near-perfect season for the Metropolitan-topping Hurricanes, but the keyword there is near – with late injury troubles for Frederik Andersen and Antti Raanta, Carolina could be placing their post-season hopes on the shoulders of a rookie netminder… hey, that sounds familiar.
#Best team in nhl 21 series#
We could talk about the incredibly clutch success of Nazem Kadri, the stardom of Cale Makar, or try to find the words to describe what Nathan MacKinnon can do, but we’re better off handing the mic over to Darryl Sutter, who said it best when he told reporters facing the Avalanche in the playoffs would “be a waste of eight days.”Īuston Matthews’ 60-goal campaign has been one of the best stories in hockey today, but everyone knows there’s only one definition of hockey success in Toronto: A playoff series win. So, with the 2021-22 campaign (mostly) in the books and as we now look ahead to the field of 16, we’re recapping all 32 teams’ regular season in a single - bracket-filled, comma-riddled, run on - sentence… or at least we’ll try, anyway.įlorida hockey has never been finer, or more fierce, thanks to the dynamic duo of Jonathan Huberdeau (MVP, if not for Auston Matthews’ 60-goal season?) and Aleksander Barkov, who have led this incredible deep squad to the top of the league and could find themselves in another battle for the Sunshine State later this spring. You could fill an entire novel with all the storylines, drama, developments, and historic achievements that told the story of the 2021-22 campaign… or, you could attempt the foolish but well-intended task of summing all that up in a single sentence. It’s our final NHL Power Rankings of the regular season, and what a season it’s been.
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