Three NHL teams destined to disappoint this season

The 2023-24 NHL season begins on Tuesday night, and while every team has high hopes for the year ahead, some teams are going to be better than expected while others will disappoint. Here we take a look at three teams that are likely to be in the latter group. 

Boston Bruins. The Bruins had one of the strangest seasons in NHL history a year ago, setting a league record by winning 65 regular-season games and then failing to even get out of the first round of the playoffs, letting a 3-1 series lead slip away against the Florida Panthers. 

The bad news for the Bruins is that might have been their chance to win it all for a while. This year's team is going to look remarkably different after an offseason of change that saw the retirement of Boston's top two centers — Patrice Bergeron and David Krejci — as well as some salary-cap cuts that resulted in the departures of forwards Taylor Hall, Nick Foligno and Tyler Bertuzzi, as well as defensemen Dmitry Orlov and Connor Clifton. 

While the Bruins still boast a couple of star players in wingers David Pastrnak and Brad Marchand, defenseman Charlie McAvoy, and a strong goalie duo, it is unlikely that netminders Linus Ullmark and Jeremy Swayman are going to play as well as they did a year ago. If they see a regression in their save percentage, combined with all of the free agency departures, the Bruins' record could take a significant hit. They should still be a playoff team, but they might have a much bigger fight to get in than anybody is expecting. 

Florida Panthers. The Panthers have one of the NHL's best all-around players in forward Matthew Tkachuk, play an extremely fast and exciting brand of hockey, and were just in the Stanley Cup Final this past season (losing to the Vegas Golden Knights in five games) after a stunning run through the playoffs as the No. 8 seed in the Eastern Conference. 

Things might not go as well for them this season.

For starters, they only made the playoffs by getting some major help down the stretch run of the regular season when the Pittsburgh Penguins lost two very winnable games. We were very close to not even seeing them in the postseason. Once they did get there, the postseason success was mostly driven by an incredible performance by goalie Sergei Bobrovsky that he is unlikely to repeat over the course of a full 82-game season. For as good as the Panthers are offensively, they do not defend particularly well, and if Bobrovsky reverts back to the level he has played at the past few years, that could spell trouble for the Panthers. 

Minnesota Wild. The Wild have a really good team with some real star power at the top of the lineup (forwards Kirill Kaprizov and Matt Boldy are outstanding), but they are still dealing with a terrible salary-cap situation due to the buyouts of Zach Parise and Ryan Suter a couple of years ago. Those buyouts mean Minnesota has more than $15 million in empty salary-cap space this season that severely limits what the front office is able to do in building a roster. 

To their credit, the Wild have done a really good job and were still a 100-point team last season, but that lack of flexibility can cause havoc on their depth. The Wild also got a huge, unexpected boost from goalie Filip Gustavsson, who played amazing hockey last season to mask a lot of their flaws. There is no guarantee he duplicates that performance this season. If he does not, that could put the Wild back on the playoff bubble.