Avalanche Journal: Biggest disappointments in the NHL so far this season

No team has won more games or collected more points than the Boston Bruins since the day they hired Jim Montgomery as their head coach.

And yet the national championship-winning coach at the University of Denver is no longer employed by the Bruins after being fired Tuesday. If we’re curating a collection of the biggest disappointments from the first quarter of the 2024-25 NHL season, the Bruins, and the dismissal of Montgomery, are an easy choice to top the list.

One thing that shouldn’t be a surprise in the NHL is the general level of inertia. One of the biggest misnomers of the early days of the salary cap era was that franchises would rise and fall quickly, more akin to the NFL. Contention windows have been longer and declines have often been delayed for longer than pundits have expected.

The Bruins are a great example of a franchise that has been a contender for nearly all of the cap era, through several coaches and multiple iterations of what was always one of the strongest cores in the league. Boston’s roster is not what it once was, and some of the moves to build around the core have not worked.

And yet, even as big of a disappointment as the start has been — enough to get a recent Jack Adams-winning coach gassed after 20 games — the Bruins were tied for the last wild-card spot in the East the day Montgomery was let go.

If the playoffs started Thursday morning, 12 of the 16 participants from last year would be back in the dance. The Bruins and Islanders would have been left out because of tiebreakers, while the Avalanche would have missed by one point despite an apocalyptic level of bad injury luck.

The last time Boston fired a successful coach (Bruce Cassidy), he quickly found a new job and finished the next season lifting the Stanley Cup with Vegas. The Bruins will hope history doesn’t repeat itself.

Here’s a look at the other top disappointing storylines in the NHL so far:

2. The offseason champion Nashville Predators

You might have noticed that 15 of the 16 playoff teams from a year ago were referenced a couple of paragraphs before this. The one participant in the 2024 postseason that has a long way to go to get back is the one who made arguably the splashiest additions over the summer.

Nashville added Steven Stamkos, Jonathan Marchessault and Brady Skjei. What the Predators didn’t add was a center, or improved defense depth beyond swapping in Skjei for Ryan McDonagh. They were 31st in the league standings on Thursday morning, and look woefully short at center and on defense behind Roman Josi. This can’t be what Stamkos had in mind.

3. The injuries  

Two of Nathan MacKinnon’s toughest competitors for the Hart Trophy last season — Connor McDavid and Auston Matthews — have already missed time with injuries. Mark Stone was off to a turn-back-the-clock start but is back on injured reserve. Aleksander Barkov, No. 1 pick Macklin Celebrini, Robert Thomas, the list of star players who have missed time has been too long …

… and then there is Alex Ovechkin. The 39-year-old icon was off to the hottest start of his incredible career with 15 goals in 18 games. His pursuit of Wayne Gretzky’s career record was in overdrive. His leading the league in goals at this point in his career offered a pair of storylines literally for the ages.

Then the Russian Machine finally broke. Ovechkin has never missed more than six straight games in his career but is expected to miss 4-6 weeks after sustaining a broken leg in Utah. After scoring five goals in the five previous periods.

4. The perpetual rebuilds 

One side effect of NHL teams being able to build a Stanley Cup contender and extend the contention windows? It’s way, way harder to break into that club than it was in the early days of the cap era.

The Penguins may finally be done as a potential contender after nearly two decades. The Bruins appear to be trending that way. The Capitals, even with Ovechkin’s injury, may have found a way to reverse their decline, at least for a year. Where does that leave the teams that believed “this is the year” — specifically Detroit, Ottawa and Buffalo, the three teams with the longest playoff droughts?

None of them look close to being a contender. The Sabres are the closest to maybe breaking the postseason dry spell, but they also look like the most vulnerable team in the East if a current non-playoff team gets its act together.

5. The young guns 

The spoils of being a bad hockey team during a rebuilding project are high draft picks, which offer the best opportunities to land the next MacKinnon, McDavid or Matthews. While it has become much tougher for teenagers to make the same impact as those guys in recent seasons, there are a lot of top young talents who aren’t quite living up to the hype this year.

Connor Bedard has not had a breakout sophomore season, despite Chicago adding more talent around him. Anaheim’s Trevor Zegras, Mason MacTavish and Cutter Gauthier combined for six goals in the club’s first 18 games. Seattle’s Matty Beniers and Shane Wright had combined for 12 points in the Kraken’s first 20 contests.

Dylan Cozens, Jack Quinn and Zach Benson have all started slow for Buffalo. Ditto for Adam Fantilli in Columbus, Luke Hughes in New Jersey and Juraj Slafkovsky in Montreal. There’s still time for them to find a new level, but a significant chunk of the league’s most touted U-23 players are taking a while to reach their potential.

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