These non-playoff teams could make it in 2023-24 – and these playoff teams could miss

Embrace the chaos. The NHL teaches us to do so almost every season, but it took the lesson to hyperbolic levels in 2022-23. The Stanley Cup winner, the Vegas Golden Knights, didn’t even make the playoffs the season prior. The New Jersey Devils went from 28^th overall to third overall in the NHL standings. The Boston Bruins set an NHL single-season record with 65 wins and were, naturally, bounced in Round 1 of the postseason.

In the 2022-23 standings, we saw five of 16 playoff teams, or 31.25 percent, turn over from 2021-22. In came the Golden Knights, Devils, New York Islanders, Seattle Kraken and Winnipeg Jets. Out went the Calgary Flames, Pittsburgh Penguins, St. Louis Blues, Nashville Predators and Washington Capitals.

We’d thus be foolish to expect anything less than significant playoff turnover again in 2023-24. As the NHL’s offseason roster activity completes its peak and the league power balance shifts, which non-playoff teams from this season might claw their way back into the Big Dance? Which playoff teams from this season might slide out of contention?

It’s time to play my annual game: Three In, Three Out.

MISSED 2022-23 PLAYOFFS, COULD MAKE 2023-24 PLAYOFFS

Buffalo Sabres

The Sabres were already knocking on the door this past season, missing the playoffs by a single point. With Tage Thompson exploding into superstardom, they iced the league’s No. 3 offense and No. 9 power play. They’ve upped their points percentage from .330 to .457 to .555 in their first two seasons and changed under coach Don Granato. The Sabres have one of the most exciting young lineups in the NHL and should continue to improve with the likes of Matt Savoie, Jiri Kulich and Zach Benson eventually on the way. With some small defensive gains, they should halt their NHL-record playoff drought at 12 years. Owen Power and Rasmus Dahlin’s progression on ‘D’ alone should continue to make a difference, but a full season with promising prospect Devon Levi in goal could alter the Sabres’ fate in a big way. The Sabres could certainly use another veteran shutdown player, especially at forward, but their time is almost here.

Columbus Blue Jackets

Columbus? After finishing with the 30^th-best record in the NHL? Hear me out. Take a team with roughly 550-man games lost. Add a full season of healthy No. 1 defenseman Zach Werenski. Graduate mega-prospect David Jiricek to the NHL full-time. Add Ivan Provorov and Damon Severson to your blueline via trade. Draft center Adam Fantilli third overall and have him turn pro. It will be virtually impossible for this team to not improve significantly based on how different its opening-night lineup should look from the one that closed out 2022-23. How many people picked the Devils and Kraken to make the playoffs this past season? Some team comes completely out of nowhere to crash the party every year. Maybe it’ll be Columbus this time.  

Pittsburgh Penguins

Just because I don’t think the Penguins should be trying to make the playoffs doesn’t mean they won’t. New team president of hockey ops Kyle Dubas set out to make immediate improvements and give Sidney Crosby, Evgeni Malkin and Kris Letang a chance to compete following Pittsburgh’s first playoff miss in 16 years, and Dubas has pretty clearly done so. Noel Acciari and Lars Eller provide some desperately needed forward depth. Ryan Graves fortifies the D-corps. The Pens, like the Sabres, missed the playoffs by a single point in 2022-23. On paper, they’ve done enough to improve by a point or more, even with Jason Zucker and Brian Dumoulin on the way out. And it’s possible Dubas isn’t done. Paging Erik Karlsson.

MADE 2022-23 PLAYOFFS, COULD MISS 2023-24 PLAYOFFS

Florida Panthers

We heard it first from coach Paul Maurice when he said his team would “have a hell of a time making the playoffs next year” following its loss to Vegas in the Stanley Cup Final. The Panthers are a candidate to start next season slowly as top-four blueliners Aaron Ekblad and Brandon Montour recover from respective shoulder surgeries. Superstar Matthew Tkachuk is also working his way back from a laundry list of injuries including a broken sternum. Rugged D-man Radko Gudas and veteran Marc Staal left as UFAs to boot. General manager Bill Zito brought in veterans such as Oliver Ekman-Larsson, Nikko Mikkola, Mike Reilly and Dmitry Kulikov for patchwork on the blueline, but two of those four were just bought out. They weren’t exactly hot commodities. The Panthers will be weakened to start 2023-24 and, don’t forget, made the 2023 playoffs by a single point. They’re also not guaranteed to get all-world goaltending from Day 1 out of the perennially inconsistent Sergei Bobrovsky, who was invincible for three rounds before reverting to Bad Bob in the Cup Final.

New York Islanders

The Islanders, like the Panthers, barely squeaked into the 2023 playoffs, doing so by a two-point margin. What is more concerning is while other teams in the Metro, from Carolina to New Jersey to Columbus to Pittsburgh, made meaningful offseason adds, the Isles made headlines simply by re-signing Ilya Sorokin, Ilya Samsonov, Pierre Engvall and Scott Mayfield, the latter two on head-scratching seven-year deals. Other than that? There’s nothing coming in so far from GM Lou Lamoriello, virtually no tangible improvements made to a team that was on the bubble in 2022-23. That’s a risky game to play when your direct divisional competitors are working hard to adjust their lineups. And the Isles, owners of an incredibly weak prospect crop, don’t have a single slam-dunk youngster expected to improve them from within this coming season.

Winnipeg Jets

Typically, when I do this exercise, I try to balance the ‘in’ and ‘out’ teams by conference. But I have no Western Conference team as my ‘in’ at the moment. None of the non-playoff teams from 2022-23 have improved enough for me to be bullish on them. That said: surely one of them will put the heat on the Jets, who have said goodbye to two of their top six forwards this summer in Pierre-Luc Dubois and Blake Wheeler. The pieces coming from the Los Angeles Kings in the Dubois trade, Gabe Vilardi, Alex Iafallo and Rasmus Kupari don’t combine for a net gain. And it’s still possible we see the Jets deal top goaltender Connor Hellebuyck and No. 1 center Mark Scheifele before the summer is up, albeit the odds seem to be decreasing. At the moment: a team that had to fight tooth and nail just to make the playoffs has downgraded itself significantly and might remove more core pieces before next season. That puts the Jets on shaky ground.