Biggest question for every NHL team as training camp begins

It is a pretty important question. The Ducks were the worst offensive team in the league last season, bought out Corey Perry, lost Ryan Kesler to injury and did not really add anything else to their roster. Ryan Getzlaf is another year older, and they are just simply short on talented forwards to help drive the offense. The Ducks are going to need John Gibson and Ryan Miller to steal a lot of games in net this season for them to have a chance to even be in the discussion for a playoff spot. 

The Coyotes desperately needed a player like Kessel, a star forward who can impact the game offensively and help draw fans to the building. His acquisition from the Pittsburgh Penguins already made a huge impact at the box office. (Season ticket sales skyrocketed.) Now we have to see what he can do on the ice. He turns 32 this season and will not have Evgeni Malkin as his center, but Kessel has never needed an elite center to produce. A big year from him could help Arizona get back in the playoffs. 

After reaching Game 7 of the Stanley Cup Final, there are not many questions that need to be answered in the short term. This is a great team with no real weakness anywhere in the lineup. The most pressing issue might be what it does with Torey Krug long term. He is an unrestricted free agent after this season, one of the team's top players and wants to stay in Boston. Can the Bruins afford him under the salary cap though?

The loyal fans of Buffalo deserve better than what they have been given. The Sabres enter the season riding an eight-year playoff drought, and they really haven't been close in any of those years. Jack Eichel and Rasmus Dahlin are the foundation, but two players cannot do it alone. The Sabres had a solid offseason with the additions of Colin Miller and Marcus Johansson, but they are in a brutal division with some of the league's best teams. A ninth straight non-playoff season looks possible if not likely. 

The Flames' rise to the top of the Western Conference standings was a bit of a stunner, and a lot of things had to go right for them to get there. Elias Lindholm had an unexpected breakout year, Mark Giordano looked ageless in winning the Norris Trophy, and David Rittich emerged out of nowhere to help solidify the goaltending spot when Mike Smith struggled. We know Johnny Gaudreau, Matthew Tkachuk and Sean Monahan are going to be great, but the Flames need all of those secondary things to work in their favor again. 

The signing of Jake Gardiner gives the Hurricanes one of the league's best defenses. They have a strong collection of young, talented forwards all in the prime of their careers and will hopefully be getting a breakout year from Andrei Svechnikov. They just need the duo of Petr Mrazek and James Reimer to play well in net. If they do, this is a Stanley Cup contender.

The Blackhawks have missed the Stanley Cup Playoffs two years in a row, and last year's issues were mostly attributed to what was the league's worst defense. The Blackhawks attempted to fix that this summer with the additions of Olli Maatta and Calvin de Haan. Those additions, along with the signing of Robin Lehner in goal, will need to work out if the Blackhawks have any hope of competing. 

The Avalanche are setting up to be a true Stanley Cup contender in the Western Conference thanks to their young core and added depth up front this summer (Nazem Kadri, Andre Burakovsky and Joonas Donskoi). The real intrigue will be with their defense where youngsters Cale Makar and Sam Girard will have to play major roles, especially after the departure of Tyson Barrie. The talent is there. Now it is time to see if they can maintain over a full season. 

One of the NHL's best (Sergei Bobrovsky) left them in free agency, and they have two unproven starters ready to fight for the top spot in Elvis Merzlikins and Joonas Korpisalo. Korpisalo is a career backup and while Merzlikins has talent, he has never played in the NHL. Their season will depend on one of these two being able to play at a high level. 

The top of the Stars lineup is as good as any other team in the league, with three elite forwards, two top-pairing defenders and a franchise goalie. The problem was the lack of talent around it. They tried to address that over the summer with the additions of Joe Pavelski and Corey Perry. Pavelski should still be great, but Perry is a huge wild card given his age and rapid decline over the past two years. Will these two veterans be enough?

The Red Wings are bringing back almost the exact same team that has been one of the league's worst the past few seasons, so expectations shouldn't be high. Steve Yzerman has a lot of work to do to rebuild this team. That process will get helped along if 2018 first-round pick Filip Zadina is able to emerge as a young impact player. 

McDavid, Leon Draisaitl, and Ryan Nugent-Hopkins are the three players this team has going for it and the ones who will have to carry almost all of the load offensively. McDavid, injured at the end of the 2018-19 season, may be limited a bit at the start of camp and the regular season. We know the rest of the team isn't good enough to compete, but if McDavid is anything less than 100 percent, it is going to crush whatever small chance the Oilers have. 

With better goaltending the Panthers may have been a playoff team a year ago. They had two of the top scorers in the NHL (Aleksander Barkov and Jonathan Huberdeau), a solid defense and a pretty promising young core. Goaltending rendered all of it meaningless. Enter Bobrovsky, one of the league's top goalies over the past seven seasons and a two-time Vezina Trophy winner. If he plays like he did in Columbus, there is no reason this cannot be at least a wild-card team this year. 

There were almost no positives for the Kings during the 2018-19 season. Even the players who were expected to be good all kind of fell off, including the big three of Anze Kopitar, Drew Doughty, and Jonathan Quick. Even though they are all getting older, they should still have productive years ahead of them and all should be able to rebound from uncharacteristically down years. Will that be enough to make this team competitive?

The top of the Wild lineup is loaded with big-money players on the wrong side of 30. For the most part, they are still pretty good and should be able to continue to produce. The question is whether any of the young players can emerge to help carry the load offensively, specifically some of the players left behind by former general manager Paul Fenton. If players like Ryan Donato or Kevin Fiala pan out, his one-year tenure may not look like a total mess. 

Weber can still be a great player and impact defender when he is healthy. That has been the problem for Montreal over the past two seasons where Weber, now entering his age 34 season, has been limited to just 84 total games. The Canadiens do not have a lot of depth on their blue line to begin with and need their top player to be there every night. 

After finishing 31st (that would be last in the NHL) during the regular season, the Predators followed up that dreadful power play performance by going 0-for-the-series in their Round 1 loss to the Dallas Stars. They have to find a solution for that. Will Matt Duchene be enough to help it? And how much will they miss P.K. Subban from that group? 

The Devils were one of the big spenders this offseason with the additions of P.K. Subban, Nikita Gusev and Wayne Simmonds. They also hit the lottery by getting Jack Hughes with the No. 1 overall pick. There is a playoff or bust mentality with the Devils, and they may need to reach the postseason to convince their best player — Taylor Hall — to re-sign with the team after the season. He has known nothing but losing his entire career and will probably never have a better chance at a big contract. 

The Islanders exceeded all expectations a year ago and not only made the playoffs after losing John Tavares but also advanced to Round 2 thanks to a sweep of the Pittsburgh Penguins. They didn't have a great offense and relied heavily on goaltending to win, and that might be a tough recipe to repeat. Can Semyon Varlamov replace Robin Lehner in net? Will they find some additional offense that they might need? 

The Rangers added several impact players to their lineup this summer with Artemi Panarin, Jacob Trouba, Adam Fox and Kaapo Kakko all joining the organization. Combined with 2018 first-round pick Vitali Kravtsov the Rangers rebuild has rapidly accelerated. They will be better, they spent a ton of money and expectations will no doubt be high. But are they too high? Even with all of the additions, there are still flaws and question marks. The playoffs would be great, but they may be just out of reach in that division.

At this point that is really all Senators fans can hope for. The franchise has been stripped down, the roster is still bad with almost no long-term commitments beyond this season and they still have the same owner who does not seem to care. Best they can hope for with this team is that the young players (Thomas Chabot, Brady Tkachuk, etc.) continue to develop. 

In his first few months as general manager, Chuck Fletcher has made a LOT of changes to the Flyers roster, but none of them really seems to do much to change the overall outlook of the team. It is still kind of mediocre on paper. What might change that is the development of goalie Carter Hart. He is the player who is supposed to fix this long-standing trouble spot and he will probably be the one player who makes or breaks this team's season. 

We could have gone with Evgeni Malkin's bounce back season, but it seems likely he will be better. So let's focus on the defense. The front office is happy with this unit, but it is hard to justify the optimism when you look at it on paper and the way it played a year ago. Kris Letang and Brian Dumoulin are great on the top pairing, but everything after that is a huge question mark. The only change to the unit over the summer was trading Olli Maatta to the Chicago Blackhawks for forward Dominik Kahun.

This was the Sharks' biggest question throughout the 2018-19 season, and because they are bringing back the same duo who was the league's worst a year ago it will be their biggest question again. Even without Joe Pavelski (signed in Dallas) this is still a championship-caliber hockey team...IF it gets the goaltending. 

Repeating as Stanley Cup champions is extremely difficult, and it's not because teams spend the entire summer partying it up and not preparing for the next season. It's mostly because the team just played nine grueling months of hockey, has a ridiculously short offseason and has to do it all over again. The Blues didn't make many changes to their roster, and it is possible, if not likely, they finish with a better regular-season record but don't go as far in the playoffs. 

Over the past five years, the Tampa Bay Lightning have played in the Stanley Cup Final, made three Eastern Conference Finals and won the Presidents' Trophy by tying a league record with 62 regular season wins. The one thing they have not done is actually won the Stanley Cup, and this latest postseason disappointment (being swept in Round 1 by the Columbus Blue Jackets) was the most disappointing of them all. This offseason they traded J.T. Miller and found a couple of free agent bargains in Pat Maroon and Kevin Shattenkirk. Shattenkirk has a chip on his shoulder after his New York experience went south, while Maroon is coming off a championship run in St. Louis. 

He almost has to be, right? Babcock is the league's highest-paid coach, the most highly regarded, has a roster that is full of stars, a core that is supposed to be a championship contender...and all he has to show for it is a bunch of third-place finishes in the Atlantic Division and three consecutive Round 1 exits. Going back to his time in Detroit. he has made it out of the first round just once in the past eight seasons. His team has to do more this year. 

In each of the past two seasons, the Vancouver Canucks have had a Rookie of the Year candidate emerge (Brock Boeser two years ago; Elias Pettersson a year ago). They should have another one this season in defenseman Quinn Hughes. Hughes appeared in five games at the end of the 2018-19 season and made a strong first impression. The Canucks need him to hit his ceiling not only because they need more young impact players on the roster but also because they need a young, top-pairing defender to emerge. 

This may not seem like a huge deal, but he is going to turn 35 this season and is coming off a season where he played just 61 games. He has been a mostly durable goalie throughout his career, but at some point players hit a wall and it might be in the Golden Knights' best interest to manage his minutes a little better to make sure he is at his best come playoff time. The question is whether Malcolm Subban can give the team strong enough play to justify giving him more playing time. 

In the short term the Capitals don't really have a ton of question marks. The roster is set, the team is good and it will once again be the favorite to win the Metropolitan Division and compete for a championship. But two of Washington's most important players (starting goalie Braden Holtby and center Nicklas Backstrom) are entering the final year of their contracts. Is there enough salary cap space to keep both? And if not, who do you let go if you are the Capitals? 

After losing Jacob Trouba, Tyler Myers and Ben Chiarot this summer and bringing in only Neal Pionk (acquired for Trouba), the Jets have a LOT of minutes to replace on their blue line. Dustin Byfuglien is still an elite point producer from the blue line, and Josh Morrissey was signed to an eight-year extension, but the depth of this unit looks to be dangerously thin entering the season.