Five teams that could finish last in the NHL in the 2024-25 regular season

Credit: Brett Holmes-USA TODAY Sports

We’re not even six weeks away from the start of the 2024-25 NHL regular season, which means folks are starting to debate which teams have the best chance of succeeding the Florida Panthers as Stanley Cup champions.

The most popular answers to that question have generally been the Edmonton Oilers, Colorado Avalanche, Dallas Stars, Carolina Hurricanes, New York Rangers, and Vegas Golden Knights, as well as the Panthers themselves. But today, we’re going to go in a bit of a different direction and ask: Which team will finish last in 2024-25?

The 2025 NHL Draft is widely regarded as being slightly less top-heavy than usual. James Hagens may be the early favorite, but there is no clear-cut No. 1 pick just yet compared to the no-brainer choices in 2023, 2024, and likely 2026 (Gavin McKenna) and 2027 (Landon DuPont). But that doesn’t mean certain teams won’t be eager to draft as high as possible as they continue to build their championship cores of the future.

Here’s a look at five teams who could challenge for last place in the NHL this coming season.

San Jose Sharks

We begin with last year’s “champions,” who are fresh off earning the privilege to select top prospect Macklin Celebrini with the No. 1 pick in the 2024 NHL Draft.

Even with Celebrini and Will Smith slated to enter their lineup this coming season, the Sharks should still be one of the worst teams in the league. As a reminder, this Sharks team just posted 47 points over a full 82-game season. Remember the pandemic-shortened 2020-21 campaign, when every team in the league played in just 56 games? Only three teams — Buffalo, New Jersey, and Anaheim — managed fewer than 47 points that year. The 2023-24 Sharks were absolutely dreadful.

That said, Sharks general manager Mike Grier deserves some credit for making moves to improve his team over the summer. The Sharks made a splash on July 1 by signing top-six winger Tyler Toffoli to a four-year contract, and they also brought in reliable veteran forwards Alex Wennberg and Barclay Goodrow to make their lineup a bit more respectable. On the blue line, the Sharks weaponized their cap space to take on Jake Walman and Cody Ceci, accumulating more draft picks while also stabilizing things a little.

The true X-factor for the Sharks this year will be Yaroslav Askarov, whom they acquired from the Nashville Predators just last week. Askarov is widely regarded as one of the best goaltending prospects in the world and the Sharks clearly hope he can become the heir apparent to Evgeni Nabokov in San Jose. At 22 years of age, Askarov will be given every chance to take starts away from Vitek Vanecek and Mackenzie Blackwood this season.

Chicago Blackhawks

The Blackhawks moved up exactly one spot in the league standings from 2022-23 to 2023-24, finishing 31st last season after occupying the bottom position the year before.

Although they now have a pair of top-two picks in Connor Bedard and Artyom Levshunov, the Blackhawks don’t yet have a complete young core that will allow them to escape the basement in any meaningful way. With respect to the likes of Frank Nazar, Oliver Moore, Sacha Boisvert, and Marek Vanacker, Chicago still lacks that second true star forward who can ride shotgun with Bedard while also potentially anchoring his own line. Maybe one of those players will turn into that guy, but Chicago will probably have to find him in a future draft. Until then, Bedard will be asked to carry a lot of the mail for this Blackhawks team, and if he gets hurt again, all bets are off.

What the Blackhawks do have is an assortment of decent — if declining — veterans to insulate their younger players for at least another year or two. Their biggest move of the offseason was to bring back Teuvo Teravainen, who began his NHL career in Chicago a decade ago before being traded to the Carolina Hurricanes in 2016. Hawks GM Kyle Davidson also brought in Tyler Bertuzzi, Ilya Mikheyev, Craig Smith, Pat Maroon, Alec Martinez, TJ Brodie, and Laurent Brossoit this summer.

Will these additions be enough for the Blackhawks to clinch their first playoff appearance of the Bedard era? Nope! But they might be able to turn just enough 4-3 losses into 5-4 wins so that Chicago continues to inch up the league standings.

Columbus Blue Jackets

With the Arizona Coyotes relocating to Utah, the Blue Jackets have adopted the title of the NHL’s biggest slow-motion car wreck, but there might finally be light at the end of the tunnel for this organization with Don Waddell and Dean Evason taking over its day-to-day operations.

The Blue Jackets do not lack talent. Their forward lineup boasts the likes of Johnny Gaudreau, Adam Fantilli, Kirill Marchenko, Kent Johnson, Cole Sillinger, Dmitry Voronkov, and Yegor Chinakhov, with top 2024 draft pick Cayden Lindstrom potentially joining that group in the next season or two. They also signed Sean Monahan, Gaudreau’s old running mate in Calgary, to a five-year contract this summer. There’s no excuse for a group this talented to finish 25th in the NHL in goals scored, like it did last season.

On defense, the Blue Jackets still have the veteran quartet of Zach Werenski, Damon Severson, Ivan Provorov, and Erik Gudbranson, as well as budding young star David Jiricek and recent trade acquisition Jordan Harris. There’s also a real chance they give Denton Mateychuk an opportunity to show what he can do in the NHL this season. With those players on the blueline, and a decent goaltender in Elvis Merzlikins, there’s no reason the Blue Jackets should allow 300 goals again this year.

But there’s just no getting around the reality that the Blue Jackets have been an absolute disaster on and off the ice over the past couple of seasons. They’re now on their fourth head coach since the end of the 2022-23 campaign. Supposed can’t-miss prospects like Jiricek, Johnson, and Sillinger have experienced more twists and turns in their development than anyone expected. And now, the Blue Jackets have properly cleaned house, with Waddell taking the GM post after working in Carolina for a decade and Evason coming aboard as head coach after previously serving in the same capacity in Minnesota.

All this Blue Jackets team needs to turn the corner is stability and competence. If they can get those things this year, they won’t be on these kinds of lists again for a long time.

Seattle Kraken

One of the NHL’s most aggressive teams this offseason also projects to be one of its worst. The Kraken have spent a lot of money in increasingly alarming ways, opting to allocate more than $93 million over the next seven seasons to a pair of 30-year-olds in Chandler Stephenson and Brandon Montour back on July 1.

Despite being the league’s newest team, the Kraken are already one of its oldest. Eight of their nine forwards making $3.5 million or more are 28 or older, with Matty Beniers, the lone exception, having just signed a seven-year, $7.14 million AAV extension with the team last week. Their defense is almost exclusively comprised of No. 2/3 types at best, and they still have yet to draft a single rearguard in the first round. Stephenson and Montour, their two big UFA signings, are both imperfect complementary players who could end up being in over their heads on a Kraken team that will likely ask them to be its stars.

In their pursuit of becoming the next iteration of the Vegas Golden Knights, the Kraken have instead built a bottom-heavy roster that is seemingly destined to top out at 15th in the league for the next decade to come. But with Beniers coming off a disappointing 37-point season, Shane Wright seemingly always on the outside looking in, and very few other youngsters even on the periphery of making this team out of training camp, it’s easy to imagine the Kraken sinking even further below their 25th-place finish in 2023-24.

Maybe new head coach Dan Bylsma can galvanize this Kraken team’s younger players and motivate its crop of veterans like he did when he first took over the Pittsburgh Penguins back in 2009. He led the AHL’s Coachella Valley Firebirds to a ton of success over the past few seasons, becoming very familiar with Seattle’s prospects in the process. But it won’t be easy.

Calgary Flames

You could very easily make a case that the other four teams on this list have improved to some degree during the 2024 offseason. The same cannot be said about the Flames, who made nominal moves in free agency after continuing their epic year-long teardown by trading Jacob Markstrom and Andrew Mangiapane around the draft.

The Flames’ lineup still includes a few holdovers from the final days of the Brad Treliving era, including Nazem Kadri, Jonathan Huberdeau, MacKenzie Weegar, and Rasmus Andersson. But for the most part, this is Craig Conroy’s team. Newcomers like Connor Zary, Matt Coronato, Martin Pospisil, and Dustin Wolf provided energy and excitement for a team that finished 24th in the NHL in 2023-24, and they’ll be expected to do more with less to maintain fan interest and win the odd game here and there as the Flames gun for the highest possible draft pick in 2025.

While they have historically been resistant to the notion of bottoming out and rebuilding, the Flames are directly incentivized to finish as low in the standings as possible this season. The conditions of the Sean Monahan trade they made with Montreal in 2022 stipulate that the Flames will give their own 2025 first-round pick to the Canadiens unless they finish in the bottom 10 in the NHL standings in 2024-25, so long as the Florida Panthers, whose 2025 first-round pick the Flames also possess, make the playoffs. Put simply, if the Flames stink and the Panthers return to the playoffs, Montreal gets Florida’s 2025 pick, not Calgary’s lottery pick.

The Flames have some good young pieces, including 2024 first-round selections Zayne Parekh and Matvei Gridin, but they still don’t have anything resembling an NHL-caliber core. Their current roster features an uneven mishmash of declining veterans, reclamation projects, and mid-tier youngsters. They still need to finish near the bottom of the league for a few more years before they can start moving up in any meaningful way.

It’s worth noting that the Flames’ new arena is scheduled to open in time for the 2027-28 season. Don’t be surprised if that’s when they finally start to disappear from lists like these.

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