Weekend NHL rankings: Red Wings fade, Capitals keep pushing and a new villain emerges

Who are the most hated teams in the NHL?

I feel like if you’d asked that question at most points during the last few seasons, you’d get three main answers. The Blackhawks, both due to their off-ice issues and their continuing overexposure. The Maple Leafs, because they’re the Leafs. And the Golden Knights, due to the perception that they’ve had too much success too soon, much of it due to alleged salary-cap shenanigans.

At various points, you’d have probably put the Penguins in there somewhere, but based on their second-half implosion, it feels like their own fans have that covered. And yes, of course, there’s your favorite team’s rival, who is dirty and mean, even though nobody sees it but you. But mostly, it’s the big three.

Is there room for a new contender, though? After all, the Hawks are in Year 4 of being terrible. The Leafs keep flopping in the playoffs, and as much fun as that is for some of you, you can’t be Thanos if your pants fall down every time you try to snap. As for Vegas, well, it’s possible that resistance is futile.

I think we have room for a new NHL villain, one that can unite us all in hatred, or at least mild annoyance. And as we discussed a few weeks ago on the new pod (now featuring 100 percent more Seans), there’s a strong candidate emerging: The Florida Panthers.

It’s been a bit of a journey to get here. Just two years ago, the Panthers were my easy pick as the league’s most bandwagon-able playoff team. But since then, they’ve been pulling off a slow-burn heel turn, a real masterclass in long-term booking that’s led us here. Not convinced? Here are five reasons I think the Panthers may be the league’s best villain.

Bonus five: Reasons the Panthers could be the NHL’s new love-to-hate team

5. They’re really good — Let’s start here, since it’s no fun to hate a team that’s struggling. That just feels like picking on someone who can’t defend themselves. “Oh, I can’t stand the Sharks.” Yeah, neither can Sharks fans, join the club. You can’t be a super-villain unless you’ve got the “super” part down pat, and right now the Panthers do. They may be the best team in the league.

4. They’ve been really good for a while now — It’s been uneven, granted, but we’re essentially now into Year 3 of the Panthers kicking in teeth. In 2021-22, they had 122 points and won the Presidents’ Trophy before winning their first playoff series in 26 years. Last year, they started slow but then caught fire, eventually rolling all the way to the Stanley Cup Final. This year, they might be better than both of those teams. The point here is that a few years ago, the Panthers were lovable underdogs. We can debate the lovable part, but they’ve clearly left the underdog half of the equation far behind.

3. The Nick Cousins factor — This would be factor No. 1 for a lot of people these days, as Cousins has firmly established himself as the league’s most hateable player. That’s true for his fellow players, who all want to punch him. It’s true for the media, or at least some of them. And it’s clearly true for fans, too, especially after nonsense like this.

Nick Cousins just respawned pic.twitter.com/ye1WVEdVwu

— The Hockey News (@TheHockeyNews) February 28, 2024

2. The league is rigged for them! — Hey, you can’t hate a team without a good conspiracy to back it all up. And sure enough, if you squint just right, you can find one for the Panthers. They’re second in the league in penalties taken, which proves they’re dirty. But they’re also first in penalties drawn by a wide margin, which proves the refs are in their pocket. Wouldn’t want Paul Maurice to have to hold up his fingers again, would we?

Besides, all real fans know the Panthers are yet another one of Gary Bettman’s southern charity cases. After all, they had low attendance for a few seasons and once put a piece of plywood up to replace some broken glass 10 years ago, so shouldn’t this team have been moved to a real market in Canada by now? (Please don’t ask how things are going in Winnipeg right now, just go with it.)

1. We made it all this way and haven’t even mentioned Matthew Tkachuk yet — Wasn’t he supposed to be the league’s No. 1 rat? Now he’s a distant second on his own team, and maybe even further back depending on how you feel about Sam Bennett. But give it time, and Tkachuk will eventually do something that will have the rest of us going full Drew Doughty.

The counter-argument: Last year, the Panthers made fans in Boston and Toronto really sad, and that has to be worth something. But this year, when they’re putting the boots to the Red Wings or Islanders or whichever other plucky Eastern underdog has grabbed a wild-card spot, you’re going to start to feel something burning deep inside of you. I suggest you go with it. This league is way better when there’s a great villain waiting as the final boss.

On to this week’s rankings …

Road to the Cup

The five teams with the best chances of winning the Stanley Cup.

No Canucks in this week’s top five yet again, but anytime you’re setting records for a 50-plus-year-old franchise with 14 games left to play, that’s pretty good.

5. Boston Bruins (40-14-15, +41 true goals differential*) — They’re still hanging around that top spot in the Atlantic, partly because their frequent trips to OT mean they rarely leave a game without at least a point. They’re still on track to become the first team to ever have more OT losses than regulation ones.

4. Carolina Hurricanes (42-20-6, +50) — They’ve been hot, scoring a dramatic comeback win over the Leafs on Saturday and then cruelly toying with the Senators last night. But that 1-0 loss to Igor Shesterkin and the Rangers looms as a worst-case scenario once the second round arrives.

3. New York Rangers (45-19-4, +43) — Maybe the letdown game against the Lightning was inevitable after the Carolina win, but they sure had some fun against the floundering Penguins.

They followed that with another win yesterday, this one over the Islanders. Meanwhile, their fans are leaning into the “nobody’s talking about us” angle, which is always a little rich coming from New York but may not be completely wrong.

2. Colorado Avalanche (43-20-5, +51) — Yep, I’m with pretty much everyone. More, please.

Also, please another COL/EDM series. Seven games. All the overtimes.

— Shayna (@hayyyshayyy) March 17, 2024

1. Florida Panthers (45-19-4, +58) — I’m keeping those hateable Panthers in the top spot, but this week was a reminder that it won’t be easy. The Bruins are right there, and in fact, ahead of them in total points (but not points percentage). And while they outplayed the Lightning badly on Saturday, they still lost, which was a fun tease of a potential first-round rivalry matchup.

*Goals differential without counting shootout decisions like the NHL does for some reason.

Not ranked: Detroit Red Wings — So, how are the vibes now, Red Wings fans? Still immaculate or not so much?

Woof. What had been arguably the league’s most rootable story has taken a sharp nosedive since a six-game win streak that made the playoffs feel inevitable. The Wings had lost seven straight in regulation, including some real stinkers, heading into what felt like a crucial weekend back-to-back against the Sabres and Penguins. They snapped the streak against Buffalo in a 4-1 win, all but knocking them out of the race. But last night saw them give that ground back by laying an egg in Pittsburgh, losing to a team nobody loses to anymore.

They’re not out of it, and maybe this is all just the scriptwriters getting a little heavy-handed with the adversity right before the big triumph. But it’s been ugly, top to bottom, for just about everybody except the Wings fans who are always muttering about how the rest of us underestimate Dylan Larkin. Yeah, apparently he was a Hart candidate all along, who knew? But other than that, yikes.

On February 28th Detroit was riding a six-game winning streak and were eight points up on 9th place New Jersey. They were 14 points ahead of Buffalo. Fast forward to tonight… Wings are now in 9th and only three points up on Buffalo thanks to a seven-game losing streak. Ouch. pic.twitter.com/uHNKmKQegQ

— Jason Gregor (@JasonGregor) March 15, 2024

How bad has it been? In the other rankings, the guys summed it up as “giving early 2010s Leafs,” which is way meaner than anything I could come up with.

It’s hard to do a “so, what’s the deal?” section when a team is still in the midst of a season-defining slump. But it’s at least possible that at the end of this, the Wings will still be right where a lot of us figured they’d be: a little bit better than fake-.500, right around the wild-card bubble, playing meaningful games down the stretch even as nobody really considers them a legitimate playoff threat.

The tragedy here, if there turns out to be one, will be in the timing. If the Wings had gone without points in seven straight over the first half and then fought back to get in the race, we’d all be cheering them along. Instead, this feels like the sort of collapse that has to Mean Something. Were they just not ready? Did Steve Yzerman’s quiet deadline demoralize them? Were they always punching above their weight, and the bounces have just evened out? Nobody knows. (We do, it’s the last one, but let’s lean into the mystery for now.)

There are still 16 games left, the Islanders are beatable again, the Lightning still look old sometimes, and every team chasing Detroit has been awful at various points. This isn’t over. But we thought it was over, in the good way, just a few weeks ago. And that makes the Red Wings quite possibly the league’s most fascinating team down the stretch.

The bottom five

The five teams that are headed toward dead last, and the best lottery odds for Macklin Celebrini.

All the best to Martin St. Louis with whatever’s going on with his family. In brighter news, it was great to see a recovering Lanny McDonald make a surprise appearance in Calgary.

5. Arizona Coyotes (28-35-5, -25) — According to Elliotte Friedman, relocation could be well and truly on the table if they can’t push their arena plan forward at the upcoming auction.

4. Columbus Blue Jackets (23-34-11, -47) — There haven’t been a ton of positive stories in Columbus this year, but Alex Nylander seems like he could be emerging as one. He’s on his fourth team at the age of 25, and you wondered if he was running out of chances, but he’s got eight goals in 12 games since coming over from the Penguins.

3. Anaheim Ducks (23-42-3, -78) — Barring something really strange happening, the Ducks are basically locked into 30th overall, with little if anything to play for down the stretch except the possibility of building up some (potentially dangerous) optimism for next year. Meanwhile, I enjoyed Eric’s piece from last week on how the era of deadline selloffs needs to end soon.

2. Chicago Blackhawks (19-44-5, -92) — Last night’s comeback win over the Sharks would have been an absolute banger in a Gold Plan world, wouldn’t it? Ah well, instead we have the NHL’s system, with two fan bases hoping their team would lose in regulation, and Hawks fans now cursing a stretch of four wins in six games.

1. San Jose Sharks (16-44-7, -116) — The rematch with the Hawks is next Saturday, by the way.

Not ranked: Washington Capitals — So, here’s the deal. In a typical NHL season, every team has a role to play, and it’s very important to stick to that script. Some teams get to be the powerhouse contenders, others are the rebuilding bottom-feeders, and a few get to be the plucky underdogs who win us over with a season-long playoff push, even if they fall just short.

This year’s Capitals had a very clear and well-defined role: The aging team coming off a playoff miss that was headed downward, who’d fight valiantly against the inevitable before serving as a reminder that Father Time is undefeated. Also, they had Alexander Ovechkin chasing the goals record, which would be a far better sub-plot than most teams get. But otherwise, they’d be forgotten by midseason, reemerge briefly to sell at the deadline, and then move out of the way so the more interesting teams could have the spotlight.

With a month to go, it’s become alarmingly clear that the Capitals have missed the memo. Not all of it, mind you, since they apparently got the part about selling at the deadline. With Anthony Mantha, Joel Edmundson and Evgeny Kuznetsov shuffled out for picks, they played that role just about perfectly.

The part they may have missed was about fading away, because the Capitals are still somehow right in the thick of the Eastern playoff race. After a six-game losing streak seemed to have sunk them, they’ve gone a valiant 10-5-2 to regain some ground, including Saturday’s win in Vancouver. As of today, they’re just one point back of a wild-card spot with games in hand, which isn’t amazing but also isn’t where they’re supposed to be.

A big part of that is the Eastern wild-card race itself, which has turned into a multi-team turtle derby. We’ve spent the last few weeks talking about the Islanders, Sabres and (just now) the Red Wings. But the Caps are there too, and at times they even look like a good bet. And don’t forget, they don’t just have the wild card to aim for, since the Flyers are well into month three of doing the “He’s spinning the ball on his finger, just take it!” gag from The Simpsons with third place in the Metro.

Can the Caps grab a spot? Maybe. Probably not, if we’re being honest, although Dom’s model had them up to 31 percent yesterday. That’s not a favorite. It’s also not the 5 percent they were sitting at by the end of that losing streak, so here we go.

At some point, we’re going to have to start hearing Spencer Carbery’s name in the Jack Adams conversation, because you’re not supposed to be in the playoff hunt when Charlie Lindgren is your best goalie and Dylan Strome is your leading scorer. You’re not supposed to be all that close. That’s what the script says, right here next to the illustration of the 22-wheeler going off a cliff. At some point, the Capitals have to get with the program. Or they don’t, and they can rewrite this lost season into a very different story, one that almost none of us would have seen coming.

(Photos of Patrick Kane, Alex Ovechkin and T.J. Oshie: Jeanine Leech / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images and Derek Cain / Getty Images)