This week on “The Athletic Hockey Show”, Max Bultman and Corey Pronman were joined by Scott Wheeler and FloHockey’s Chris Peters to discuss which of the bottom 10 teams from last season are most likely to lift a Stanley Cup in the next decade.
A partial transcript has been edited for clarity and length. The full episode is available on the “The Athletic Hockey Show” feed on Apple PodcastsandSpotify.
Max: I want to start with an exercise Corey suggested about which of the bottom 10 teams from last season are most likely to win a Stanley Cup in the next 10 years. We’re going to use last season because those results are final. There are going to be some teams like Detroit, Philadelphia and Buffalo that were not in the bottom 10 last year that maybe belong in the same conversation. If people want to mention those in their answers, I don’t have a problem with that. But just to keep some boundary on it, we are going with the bottom 10 from last year. Which, just to refresh everybody’s mind, was San Jose, Chicago, Anaheim, Columbus, Montreal, Arizona (now Utah), Ottawa, Calgary, Seattle and New Jersey. From that pool, Scott, give me your number one team to win a Stanley Cup in the next ten years.
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Scott: I’ll go with the San Jose Sharks. I’ve been really excited by what they’ve done this year, despite how poor they’ve been in the standings and the goal differential. Macklin Celebrini is a transformational player for them. Will Smith has played at a very high level over the last two or three months and has me excited about his ongoing potential to be an upper-echelon point producer in the NHL. Very different conversations, but kind of the Leon Draisaitl to the Connor McDavid or the Mikko Rantanen to the Nathan MacKinnon kind of thing. I think Will Smith has a chance not to be a Hall of Famer like those guys are going to be, but to be a high-end offensive talent. And I’m excited about what they have coming elsewhere in the organization. Yaroslav Askarov is a stud. Sam Dickinson is a stud. And they’re going to add another player of that Sam Dickinson, Will Smith caliber in this year’s draft by drafting again in the top five. It’s not going to be a Macklin Celebrini addition to that group, but I would fully expect they’ll add another high-end piece. If they spend their money well when the time is right — and if they strike in free agency — of the teams that are in a true rebuild and relying on their youth right now like Montreal, Anaheim and Columbus, I think they’ve got the best chance to strike when the iron is hot in a more advantageous way than those other teams do.
Max: Chris, how about you?
Chris: I also went with the San Jose Sharks. It’s really for one reason and one reason only, that’s the centerpiece — Macklin Celebrini. You look at the teams that have won Stanley Cups in recent years, they have that core player. They have that guy who has been part of the organization and has made a difference. You look around the league and see the players that have come in through the draft over the last couple of years, I don’t think we’ve seen a player as complete and as good a building block as Celebrini, notwithstanding guys like Connor McDavid and others. But you see what he is, and you get that feeling that he is what Nathan MacKinnon became for Colorado. Even more so than some of the other guys like Connor Bedard, who we think is going to be a centerpiece for Chicago for a long time to come, and the best is yet to come in his career. But when you have that central figure, and when I think about teams we’ll talk about later, like Montreal or Ottawa — although with Ottawa you can argue whether it’s Tim Stutzle or Brady Tkachuk — there are teams in the bottom 10 that have that core player, but not a single one of them will match what Macklin Celebrini’s ultimate upside is going to be.
Then, as Scott mentioned, they have these other pieces. Will Smith can be the Patrick Kane to the Jonathan Toews. That Batman and Robin scenario that eventually flip-flopped over time, even though I don’t think that’ll necessarily happen between Smith and Celebrini. The fact that they have Yaroslav Askarov as well is interesting to me. As we’ve seen, teams can win without centerpiece goaltending and elite goalies. It helps when you have it, but it doesn’t necessarily preclude you from winning the Stanley Cup because it’s much more about building the rest of that team. But with Celebrini at the forefront and this year’s draft, they’re adding those pieces. There’s more work to be done for the Sharks among those other teams. But to me, the cheat code is Celebrini. You can’t win hockey games with one player, but you can’t start a rebuild without a cornerstone, and they have it.
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Max: I tried to do mine based on replaceable pieces, or pieces that would be impossible to find otherwise, and Celebrini certainly fits that definition. I also love where San Jose is positioned, as Scott alluded to, to get another key piece in this draft. Whether it’s Matthew Schaefer, Michael Misa or Porter Martone. They’re going to get another premium piece, so I also have them at one. Is it a clean sweep, Corey?
Corey: This is the tough thing with these kinds of exercises, because again, I love Macklin Celebrini. He’s an elite player and has a good chance to be a top 10, top five player in the league when he really hits. The problem is where they are at this point right now. To get from where San Jose is right now, which is still an exciting young team from a talent perspective, but as an NHL team, they’re quite poor. To get from there to win a Stanley Cup is a giant climb. Think about the last 10 or 15 years, how many times we’ve said we’re excited by the young talent in Buffalo, or excited by the young talent in Columbus? And the real marginal progress those teams took. It can be really tough. So I’m not going to put San Jose at one because I think they have so much room to go to become a playoff team, let alone a contender. A lot is going to need to go right. Yes, we’ve liked the development of the young kids. But is Will Smith going to become a star? Is William Eklund going to become a star? Will Sam Dickinson become a star? Will Yaroslav Askarov become one? Maybe. But there’s so much uncertainty there. It’s why the team I have at one is actually one of those organisations I just named, who we said we’ve always been excited about, and I’m starting to get excited about them again — that’s Columbus.
Why Columbus? They’ve fallen off a little bit lately in the standings, because they were in a playoff race, but they’re slipping away from the race right now. But I look at this lineup, both the current lineup and where I think this team is going. One, I see the elite pieces. Zach Werenski is in the MVP discussion this year, so they have the elite player. The way he’s playing this year, I also think Adam Fantilli is going to get to that elite level. I don’t think he’s going to get to Macklin Celebrini level, but I don’t think he’s going to be dramatically off. This guy looks like he’s emerging as a star number one centre in this league. He’s gotten comfortable one and a half years into his NHL career. You also look at the talent around him. Kirill Marchenko has elevated, Kent Johnson is having a fantastic year, and Denton Mateychuk looked very promising as a rookie pro. The rebuild hasn’t gone perfectly, i.e. David Jiricek. But again, not all rebuilds are going to go perfectly, there’s going to be misses. But I think they are a lot further along. They are around 12th in the league in goals this year, and yes, they’ve got to shore up their goals against. But I think there’s a lot of promise there. They have the elite pieces, they have the quality of young depth, and I see a path if things continue to go well for them to build an elite team.
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(Top photo: Christian Petersen / Getty Images)
