EP Rinkside 3 Stars: Pacific whim

Not really sure why this is the case, but a lot of the interesting goings-on in the league right now are in the Pacific Division.

The Vegas Golden Knights, Vancouver Canucks, and Los Angeles Kings don't seem to be able to lose. The Edmonton Oilers, Calgary Flames, and San Jose Sharks only seem to be able to lose. The Anaheim Ducks and Seattle Kraken are… right around .500 I guess.

But man, leaving aside whatever the next Ottawa Senators fiasco du jour ends up being, how many other big storylines are coming out of any other division?

There are always outliers, but all the teams most people expected to be great are looking great. Most of the teams in all the other divisions that people expected to be bad are bad. A lot of the teams people expected to be mediocre are mediocre.

And the Pacific is pure chaos. Pretty cool.

Let's go:

3. Runaway horses

Can't help but notice, ahhhh, the Oilers lost again last night.

And sure, they lost to the Dallas Stars, one of the best teams in the league, and outshot them 49-27. That's a step in the right direction. But they're now just 2-6-1 from their first nine games and, given the start the Canucks have had (more on that in a moment), five points leaves them deep, deep, deep in the hole when it comes to competing for a playoff spot.

Even leaving aside teams that are off to incredibly hot starts, this is a real list of Western-Conference teams with more points than them: the St. Louis Blues, Minnesota Wild, Nashville Predators, Seattle Kraken, Winnipeg Jets, Arizona Coyotes, and Chicago. Not one of those teams is above .500 and they have more points than the Oilers. Were it not for the disaster a few hours south in Calgary, this would maybe be the biggest story of the year. "The Oilers stink."

Connor McDavid looks decidedly human (only nine points in seven games?), Leon Draisaitl can't do it all himself, Evander Kane has been borderline bad, and somehow, Ryan Nugent-Hopkins isn't playing at a 100-point pace again this season. The power play is a little above average in terms of results, and a little below it in terms of underlying numbers. They're also not really drawing any penalties.

Oh, the goaltending is bad, too? Well, jeez, that was a predictable outcome. If you bought into the Jack Campbell redemption arc in the preseason, I have some property in the oil sands to sell you.

But the really worrying thing, I think, is that if this doesn't turn around starting, basically, tomorrow night against Nashville, the door is probably closing pretty fast. MoneyPuck still has them at almost 70 percent to make the playoffs, but here's the problem: Vegas is first in the league at nearly 92 percent. LA is second at 88.5 percent. Vancouver is fifth at 86 percent. So basically, the goal here is to be a Wild Card team. LA is already up nine points on Edmonton.

And look, it's easy to see where these guys get white hot and go on a big run — they seem to do it every year around Christmas. The way things have gone this year, they need to do it at least a couple weeks before U.S. Thanksgiving. Because only one or two teams in the league tend to make the playoffs after getting to Nov. 1 below .500. Right now, there are a lot of worse-on-paper teams than the Oilers that are comfortably ahead of them in that race. How many can they overtake?

2. Eating cupcakes

One of the signs of a good team, I always say, is the ability to not just beat bad teams, but to also make those bad teams look really, really bad.

And as much as I think this start for the Canucks is a bit of a mirage, you can't say they're not absolutely annihilating every bad team they play lately. Okay, leave aside that 10-1 win over the San Jose Sharks — that's gotta the latest any team has given up as many goals in one game as they've scored all season. Obviously, that's gonna happen to San Jose anytime they play a team with a guy who can skate backwards. But in the last week, the Canucks have outscored the Blues, Rangers, and Predators by a combined score of 13-6. Yeah, they lost to the Rangers in overtime, and there was frankly too much whining about the refs (what else is new?), but crucially, they also outshot their opponents this week by 22, and that's all you can really ask for against four bad teams.

Again, I don't think it's telling tales to say the Canucks aren't this good. They have a plus-24 goal difference and a minus-30 shot difference, but they're winning and, more recently, they're convincingly beating the rotten teams on the schedule.

Those are basically the two things you can reasonably ask from a team that isn't really considered a Cup contender. And they're doing it. Great performances from their best players are carrying them right now, and all you can do is win games. So that's better than they've done at any point in the last decade, basically.

1. Wising up

Love the idea that this Flames start made all sides go, "Hold on, maybe we don't want to commit to re-signing our pending UFAs after all."

For the pending UFAs, of course the idea of looking to get out of there makes plenty of sense. But for the Flames, it's like, "Oh yeah, you think it's not a good idea now?" Man, this team was bad last year, and if your entire hope of turning things around is vibes-based, I straight up don't know what you're doing as an organization.

If you're Craig Conroy coming into the general manager's job, and your belief in the team was so strong based on one coaching change and a couple of small personnel moves, that you were willing to re-sign Mikael Backlund and then get into talks with guys like Noah Hanifin, Christ Tanev, and Elias Lindholm, then a dozen or so bad games shouldn't be able to shake you. Is your view of the roster that fragile? "Well, we had a bad month, never mind on those new deals!"

Now, look, if I were Conroy, I'd have spent the entire summer trying to deal these guys as I did with Tyler Toffoli (the right move!). This team is on a dead-end street. They have guys who are like 29, 30, 33 who are signed through the end of the decade. Still more are signed through at least 2026 to big-money deals. And very few of them are on the right side of that age-30 cutoff.

The results for these guys were never going to get all that much better. We can, perhaps, see now that the strong results a couple years ago were mostly driven by two wingers who wanted to get out of town very, very badly and took the first opportunity to do so. Remind me again how many goals Lindholm scored with those two MVP-calibre talents, and how he's done since they left holes in the side of the Saddledome trying to get out of there.

In a way, this start is saving the Flames from themselves, but this also feels like a team that's never going to accept the need for a complete rebuild. If they were gonna be Going For It back 12 or so years ago, there's little reason to expect them to change the approach now.

It's honestly kind of unbelievable that their faith was so shaken by these early results, just because results have tended to not factor into these kinds of decisions, historically, across multiple GMs.

But if the negotiations freeze is at all player-driven, you gotta say those skaters are doing their club one more favour on the way out of town.