NHL's Biggest Shockers At The Halfway Point Are The Sabres, Rangers And Predators
Peter Laviolette talks to Vincent Trocheck during the New York Rangers' Jan. 4 game.
Geoff Burke-Imagn Images
The NHL is halfway through the 2024-25 regular season. That means it’s a great time to focus on the league’s biggest shocks so far.
The teams below all have stumbled horribly, more or less sinking their Stanley Cup playoff chances and letting down their respective passionate fan bases.
New York Rangers
Full disclosure – we thought the Rangers would be one of the more dominant NHL teams this season. They have one of the best goaltenders on the planet in Igor Shesterkin, a Norris Trophy winner in Adam Fox and a star forward in Artemi Panarin.
But somehow, the Rangers have been less than the sum of their parts, and they’ve fallen to 14th place in the Eastern Conference and 26th place in the NHL, with a ghastly 18-20-2 record.
When the Rangers get a lead, they seem to do a decent job holding it. They're 12-2-1 when leading after the first period and 16-1-0 when leading after the second. But when they trail, they haven't had it in them to catch up. They're 1-13-0 when trailing after the first and are one of four teams to not win a game when trailing after the second, going 0-17-1. Their five comeback wins are only when trailing by one goal, and it's tied for the fourth-fewest in the NHL.
In sum, they’re a gigantic letdown. Unless they have a miraculous turnaround, they’re going to go from winning the Presidents’ Trophy last year to failing to make the post-season this year. That is as stunning and shocking as anything we’ve seen in recent memory, and some people (namely, GM Chris Drury and coach Peter Laviolette) should be held accountable for it – if not by Rangers ownership, then certainly, by Rangers fans and media types.
The bitter taste in their fans’ mouths will not go away anytime soon. The Rangers need an overhaul, and while they’re not going to trade Fox, Shesterkin and Panarin, just about anyone else on the roster should be on the table as a potential trade piece. They can’t allow this performance to be excusable, and that means major change should be coming.
Buffalo Sabres
As we’ve said before, the Sabres entered this season in full “show, don’t tell” mode, as they’ve been disappointing their customers by missing the playoffs every year since 2011-12. And what Buffalo has shown us through 41 games this season is that they’re the worst team in the Atlantic Division, the worst team in the Eastern Conference and the fourth-worst team in the NHL at 15-21-5. To say that’s unacceptable is a massive understatement.
Buffalo tends to start games well, possessing a plus-12 goal differential in the first period. But they fall apart after that. They're a minus-14 in the second frame and a minus-11 in the third.
Sabres ownership recently came out and told Buffalo’s players that the solution to the team’s woes has to come from within the dressing room. That might sound noble to some people, but the reality is that if the players had an answer to what ails them, they already would’ve pulled out of this horrendous tailspin. That hasn’t happened, and their roster needs a considerable shakeup. Even then, too much of the season has passed for Buffalo to rebound and get back into the playoff mix.
This season has been an unmitigated disappointment, and whoever is running things next season has to take out a scalpel and go to work to upgrade the roster for the 2025-26 campaign. The Sabres have many pieces worth continuing to build around, but something big has to happen to change the chemistry and mentality in the room.
Nashville Predators
The Predators were another team many pundits believed would do very well this season. Instead, what the Preds have delivered is a 13-21-7 record – only the hapless San Jose Sharks and Chicago Blackhawks have been worse.
Despite making many veteran additions on offense last summer, Nashville has posted an NHL-worst 2.44 goals-for per game. Every time you’d think the Preds couldn’t get any worse with the puck in their possession, they proved you wrong.
The gambles Predators GM Barry Trotz has made with his lineup have not paid off. Calls for a roster teardown aren’t realistic, as many, if not most, of their veterans have some sort of no-trade or no-move clause in their contracts. Nashville is stuck with their current roster at least through this season.
If there’s a silver lining in the many grey clouds over the Predators at the moment, they may finally wind up with a decent shot at landing a generational player in the next NHL draft. That’s something the Preds have lacked in their history, but to get to that point, Nashville will have to grit its teeth and bear it for the rest of the regular season.
There’s been too much damage done to their playoff aspirations through the first half of the year to repair in the second half and aim for a playoff spot. Now, it’s all about salvaging whatever they can this season and focusing on next season as the place where they can pretend this awful year never happened and try making the playoffs once again.
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