Sabres to the Penguins: The full spectrum of NHL team trajectories

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

Some teams are in the rebuilding and player development phase; others are icing more veteran rosters, chasing shorter-term glory. Available talent and league economics dictate much of where a team is in its trajectory; the rest is filled in by sober evaluations of future productivity by front offices.

We spend so much time talking about rebuilds and retools and building championship contenders that we sometimes lose the forest for the trees. I’m certainly guilty of that. So, I wanted to take a step back and look at all 32 franchises based on where they are in the cycle of development, with player ages being the focus area.

Player ages tend to be a fantastic gauge for where teams are in their cycles – the NHL’s youngest teams give us little confidence as to their performance floor, but also give us a lot of confidence about future upside. The NHL’s oldest teams operate in reverse: we have a firm idea of what we are getting for baseline performance, but incremental performance gains from players are fleeting.

Let’s divide the 32 franchises into three categories:

• Early-Stage Teams, which skew young across their lineup 
• Mid-Stage Teams, where roster ages consolidate around peak performance years  
• Late-Stage Teams, where roster ages skew towards twilight years of NHL careers

Each team’s constituents include (a) every player who has logged at least one NHL minute in 2022-23; and (b) injured players. The average NHL roster is about 27.3 years old, with a standard deviation of 1.0 years. That gives us appropriate age categories for the three groups and will also show us where the seven Canadian teams fall.

Let’s start with our early-stage teams. Here, we are looking for one standard deviation below league average age. The Buffalo Sabres have the youngest roster across hockey, but notably, this group includes one Canadian team – the Vancouver Canucks:

It’s hard to think of Vancouver as a young lineup, considering the playoff expectations surrounding the team and the extreme cap duress they’re under from a series of poor roster decisions over the years. But a number of their most important players – starting with Elias Pettersson and including names like Quinn Hughes and Vasily Podkolzin – are still very early in their respective careers. Notably, very few Canucks players are knocking on the retirement door. If we bin Vancouver's roster into three categories (in which early-stage players are designated as under 24; and late-stage players designated as 30-plus-aged skaters), they stack accordingly:

The mid-stage category is broader and spans 17 teams. You have a lot of diversity in this group because of the size of it – Canadian teams like the Ottawa Senators and Montreal Canadiens skew heavily towards the younger side of things and are still looking at healthy amounts of upside, whereas regular Western Conference powerhouses like the St. Louis Blues and Vegas Golden Knights are teetering on being called old.

The Edmonton Oilers, Toronto Maple Leafs, and Winnipeg Jets all sit near the league average – inside of their prime, with about an equitable number of players aging into the lineup as they have aging out of the lineup:

I want to focus on two rival teams in the Ottawa Senators and Toronto Maple Leafs. They are a fascinating contrast in that one team is just entering the period where expectations should be higher – the Senators rebuild is over and most of the core they chased through player acquisitions and at the draft are playing healthy minutes. This is no longer a super young team:

For virtually the entirety of Ottawa’s rebuild (2017-22), Toronto iced a contender that ripped through most regular seasons. If Ottawa has the hallmark signs of an early-stage team that’s transitioning, Toronto has the hallmark signs of a team that should be contending now:

Compare both of those rosters to that of Pittsburgh, who ices the oldest lineup in the league (thanks to Mark Giordano for making a mess of Toronto’s distribution).

The late-stage team list is just seven deep, and if I asked you to name those seven teams before showing you the list, I bet consensus opinion would be very close to reality. The Penguins and Washington Capitals are icing the oldest rosters you will find in the league, and that makes sense – both organizations have tried to keep the Sidney Crosby and Alexander Ovechkin competition windows open for as long as possible.

Here are those seven teams, including the Calgary Flames:

The Flames don’t ice a particularly old lineup, but they have effectively zero young players occupying meaningful roster spots right now. Forward Dillon Dube (24) is the youngest player of materiality on the roster – for comparison’s sake, the Sabres can ice 13 players 24 or younger right now.

Here’s Calgary’s stack, for reference:

Carolina is interesting to juxtapose against Calgary. Unlike the Flames, the Hurricanes do have several roster spots occupied by young and developing players, including Andrei Svechnikov, Jesperi Kotkaniemi, Martin Necas, and Seth Jarvis. But they have also filled in the rest of their roster with players chasing glory near the end of their career. Just this off-season, Carolina added Paul Stastny (36) and Brent Burns (37), and are rotating a pair of mid-30s goaltenders in Frederik Andersen and Antti Raanta:

While both Carolina and Calgary have the requisite roster composition to deliver high-performance teams today, our confidence in Carolina being able to sustain it is higher than that of Calgary. The Hurricanes have players to replace over the next couple of years, but help is readily available. Calgary will be turning to their prospect pipeline – a pipeline that appears relatively barren on NHL-ready talent.

Hope you found this as fascinating as I did!

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