Quote:
Originally Posted by Calgary4LIfe
That's not how I quite see it, personally, for two reasons.
1) I think the Flames will finish in the high 50s/low 60s.
2) I think the bottom shifts quite a lot over 5 year blocks.
Most of the teams that have been at the bottom have seen improvements. We will see what happens over a full season, but I argue that every team in the bottom 5 of the standings on average in the last 3 seasons have improved, except the Flames. The Flames are also about to get worse (Andersson).
I think the bottom of the standings will look more like the 2018--19 season to be honest.
https://www.nhl.com/standings/2019-04-06/league
We will see of course, but my thinking is that the bottom 5 teams this season will have a lot more points combined than the bottom 5 teams last season. There are less 'bad teams' this season. I even think that Nashville will improve on their current points percentage as well. Might be some 'fallers' this year - Vancouver looks like a candidate from what we saw tonight, right? But they also had a lot of key injuries. Toronto isn't doing well (and it is great to see!), but I can't imagine that they will be so bad.
I think it is a two-horse race between Calgary and Nashville. |
To some extent, sure. However 2019 was a pretty weak draft year. With a projected franchise player in McKenna coming up and an otherwise strong draft, there will be other teams that will actively start racing towards the bottom at some point.
Are we still going to be bad enough then? I can very easily see this team still fighting hard for points late in the season when others have already checked out, moving up the standings enough to once again miss out on the top picks. It just seems like that's the Flames way.