Sabers to the Penguins: The Full Spectrum of NHL Team Lanes – TSN.ca

From the Colorado Avalanche to the Montreal Canadiens, each National Hockey League franchise has its own path.

Some teams are in the rebuild and player development phase; others freeze more veteran lists and chase short-term glory. Available talent and league economics dictate a lot about where a team is on its trajectory; the rest is filled with sober assessments of future front office productivity.

We spend so much time talking about rebuilds and conversions and building championship contenders that sometimes we lose the wood for the trees. It’s definitely my fault. So I wanted to take a step back and look at all 32 franchises based on where they are in the development cycle, with a focus on the age of the players.

Player age is usually a fantastic measure of where teams are in their cycles – the NHL’s youngest teams give us little confidence in their ability to perform, but they also give us a lot of confidence in the future. The oldest teams in the NHL work the other way around: we have an accurate idea of ​​what we’re getting for baseline performance, but the incremental gains in player performance are fleeting.

Let’s break the 32 franchises into three categories:

• Early-stage teams that skew young people in their roster
• Mid-stage teams where roster ages consolidate around peak performing years
• Late-stage teams, where roster ages trend toward the twilight years of NHL careers

Each team’s constituents include (a) all players who completed at least one NHL minute in 2022-23; and (b) injured players. The average NHL roster is approximately 27.3 years old, with a standard deviation of 1.0 years. This gives us appropriate age brackets for the three groups and will also show us where the seven Canadian teams rank.

Let’s start with our early stage teams. Here we are looking for a standard deviation below the league average age. The Buffalo Sabers have the youngest roster in hockey, but this group features one Canadian team in particular – the Vancouver Canucks:

It’s hard to picture Vancouver as a young lineup given the playoff expectations surrounding the team and the extreme cap pressure they’ve faced due to a string of poor roster decisions over the years. But some of their key players – from Elias Pettersson to the likes of Quinn Hughes and Vasily Podkolzin – are still in the early stages of their respective careers. Remarkably, very few Canucks players are knocking on the door to retirement. If we break Vancouver’s roster into three categories (which label early-stage players as under-24s and late-stage players as over-30s skaters), they stack up accordingly:

The mid-stage category is broader and includes 17 teams. They have a lot of diversity in this group because of their size — Canadian teams like the Ottawa Senators and Montreal Canadiens lean heavily toward the younger side of things and still see healthy upside potential, while regular Western Conference powerhouses like the St. Louis Blues and Vegas Golden Knights are about to be called old.

The Edmonton Oilers, Toronto Maple Leafs, and Winnipeg Jets are all near the league average — within their prime, with roughly a fair number of players aging into the roster as they’ve aged out of the roster:

I want to focus on two rival teams, the Ottawa Senators and the Toronto Maple Leafs. They’re an intriguing contrast as a team is just entering the phase when expectations should be higher – the Senators’ rebuild is over and most of the core they’ve been chasing through player acquisitions and the draft is playing healthy minutes. This isn’t a super young team anymore:

For virtually all of Ottawa’s rebuild (2017-22), Toronto shelved a competitor who survived most regular seasons. If Ottawa shows the hallmark signs of an early-stage transition team, Toronto has the hallmark signs of a team that should be up and running now:

Compare these two rosters to Pittsburgh’s, who ice the league’s oldest lineup (thanks to Mark Giordano for messing up Toronto’s spread).

There are only seven teams on the late-stage roster, and if I were to ask you to name those seven teams before showing you the roster, I’d bet the consensus view is pretty close to reality. The Penguins and Washington Capitals are edging up the oldest rosters you’ll find in the league, and it makes sense — both organizations have tried to keep Sidney Crosby and Alexander Ovechkin’s competitive windows open for as long as possible.

Here are those seven teams, including the Calgary Flames:

The Flames don’t have a particularly old lineup, but they have effectively zero young players currently occupying significant roster spots. Forward Dillon Dube (24) is the youngest Materiality player on the roster – for comparison, the Sabers currently have 13 players aged 24 and under.

Here is Calgary’s stack for reference:

Carolina is interesting to juxtapose against Calgary. Unlike the Flames, the Hurricanes have several roster spots occupied by young and developing players including Andrei Svechnikov, Jesperi Kotkaniemi, Martin Necas and Seth Jarvis. But they’ve also filled the rest of their roster with players striving for stardom towards the end of their careers. Just this off-season, Carolina added Paul Stastny (36) and Brent Burns (37) and switched two goalies in their mid-30s in Frederik Andersen and Antti Raanta:

Although both Carolina and Calgary have the roster makeup needed to deliver high-performance teams today, our confidence in Carolina to maintain that is greater than Calgary’s. The Hurricanes will need to replace players over the next few years, but help is always available. Calgary will turn to its potential pipeline — a pipeline that seems relatively barren for NHL-able talent.

I hope you found this as fascinating as I did!

Data via Hockey Reference, NHL.com, Evolving Hockey, Natural Stat Trick