Stanley Cup Windows 2024-25: Atlantic Division

Credit: Apr 16, 2024; Sunrise, Florida, USA; Toronto Maple Leafs center Auston Matthews (34) and Florida Panthers center Sam Bennett (9) face-off during the third period at Amerant Bank Arena. Mandatory Credit: Sam Navarro-USA TODAY Sports

During the NHL offseason, as teams scramble to improve their rosters via trades and free agency, they recalibrate their fans’ expectations. In the fog of war, it isn’t always easy to assess what your favorite team has become. Is it now a Stanley Cup contender after signing that big-ticket UFA, or did it just delay the inevitable for a group heading in the wrong direction? Should you be nervous if your team did nothing, or does the inactivity reflect confidence from a management group that knows it has a juggernaut?

I’m here to help by mapping out where I believe each NHL team is in its contention window. The term ‘window’ matters a lot in the salary-cap era, when each team has a limited juncture in which its top young players mature into their primes while still carrying reasonable AAVs. Where does your team sit in its Stanley Cup timeline?

We begin the four-part annual series with the Atlantic Division.

WINDOW WIDE OPEN

Florida Panthers

The Panthers reign as Stanley Cup champions and do so with a group of prime-year players that was finishing at or near the top of the standings for several seasons before breaking through this past June. Top center Aleksander Barkov, star right wingers Matthew Tkachuk and Sam Reinhart and shutdown defenseman Gustav Forsling are signed long-term, and none of them is older than 28, so this core has at least a couple more kicks at the can during its peak years. Third-line center Anton Lundell is only 22 and armed with a fresh six-year extension.

That said, as is the case with pretty much every Stanley Cup winner, glory drives the price up for the pending UFAs, and the Panthers lost several key pieces in free agency, most notably defenseman Brandon Montour. Their blueline looks pretty thin at the moment, with GM Bill Zito banking on a collection of reclamation projects including Nate Schmidt and Adam Boqvist. Still, the Panthers are actually one of the youngest teams in the NHL, with an average age of 27. Most of their key forwards are locked up, and they’ll have cap flexibility to improve their D-corps during the season or next summer if they need to. The champs should remain one of the NHL’s top teams in 2024-25.

WIN-NOW WINDOW

Toronto Maple Leafs

Eight years of Auston Matthews and Mitch Marner. Eight playoff berths. One series win. Even though they haven’t consummated a Marner trade, the Leafs’ offseason behavior has been that of a team that knows it’s running out of swings. Matthews and William Nylander are signed long-term, but Marner is a UFA in 2025, as is John Tavares. The Core Four nears the end of its run. By adding a Stanley Cup winning coach in Craig Berube and signing shutdown blueliner Chris Tanev to a six-year deal that pays him until he’s 40, Toronto is clearly thinking about the present. Team president Brendan Shanahan’s contract expires after the 2024-25 season, so it feels like the Shanaplan era will conclude unless Toronto finally breaks through with a deep run. The Leafs enter the year as the NHL’s seventh-oldest team, but if Matthew Knies and Joseph Woll can build on their excellent playoff performances and Easton Cowan can make the team, they can help prop the contention window open a bit longer.

WINDOW CLOSING

Boston Bruins

Wait – didn’t Boston just upgrade with Elias Lindholm at center and Nikita Zadorov on defense? Doesn’t that make them a win-now team? Not necessarily. Let’s zoom out a bit. The Bruins had a single player score more than 29 goals last season. Even with Lindholm joining the fray, David Pastrnak remains their only elite forward. Yes, only; Brad Marchand is a future Hall of Famer, but he’s 36 and his offensive production has already begun declining. The Bruins also have arguably the weakest, thinnest, lowest-upside prospect pool in the NHL, so there is very little help coming from within. With Jeremy Swayman in goal and a top four of Hampus Lindholm, Charlie McAvoy, Zadorov and Brandon Carlo, the Bruins still look sturdy as can be from the net out. But does this team have a chance to win the Stanley Cup? They haven’t reached the third round of the playoffs since 2018-19. They’ll remain competitive and a shoo-in playoff team, but their ceiling is lower than Toronto’s even though they beat Toronto in the 2024 playoffs.

Tampa Bay Lightning

Let’s repeat the exercise. Wait – didn’t Tampa just sign Jake Guentzel? Doesn’t that move vault them back into Cup contention? Not so fast. He should deliver some great years in the Bolts’ top six, but he turns 30 in October and is nearing the end of his prime. Similar to the Bruins, the Lightning absolutely still have a lineup good enough to accumulate 100 points in the regular season. Their forward group includes the reigning scoring champion in Nikita Kucherov and excellent two-way forwards in Brayden Point, Brandon Hagel, Anthony Cirelli and Nick Paul. But check out that D-corps. Victor Hedman is still scoring but has declined defensively at 33. Bringing back 35-year-old Ryan McDonagh doesn’t really remedy the problem. The Bolts are getting long in the tooth, especially on defense. They traded away pick after pick during their dynastic run of 2020-2022, and they’ve since lost in the first round in consecutive years. It feels like they’re just beginning a long period of still-competitive decline. Think Chicago from 2016 onward or Pittsburgh from 2018 onward. You remain loaded with star power, but as your championship squad ages, you stop winning playoff series. Eventually you stop making the playoffs, too, but the Bolts won’t sink that far for another couple years.

FOGGY WINDOW

Buffalo Sabres

Sigh. I don’t know what to tell you, Sabres fans. Missing the playoffs for an NHL record 13 consecutive years has to be demoralizing, especially after only falling one point short in 2022-23. It has been a head-scratcher of an offseason for GM Kevyn Adams. He bought out Buffalo’s third-leading goal scorer, Jeff Skinner, despite having considerable cap space. He traded Matthew Savoie, one of the team’s top prospects, for a checking-line center in Ryan McLeod. It’s true that Buffalo suffers from the law of diminishing returns in having too many good young forwards in the system, so I get the rationale behind trading one away, but to get a low-ceiling player in return was befuddling. By now, you’d think Buffalo would be beginning to make the playoffs consistently and earn valuable experience for core members Rasmus Dahlin, Owen Power, Tage Thompson and Dylan Cozens. But it doesn’t feel like this team has gotten any closer to playoff contention this offseason. Meanwhile, the Sabres’ direct competition on the bubble in Detroit and Ottawa have been aggressive in their attempts to improve.

Detroit Red Wings

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Wings GM Steve Yzerman made his move too early in the rebuild, before he’d assembled enough true star-grade prospects, and has painted himself into a corner now. It started in summer 2022 when he signed Andrew Copp, Ben Chiarot and David Perron. It continued the next summer with the big contract for J.T. Compher. All those moves made Detroit better – but only enough to push them to the playoff bubble while taking them out of the running for Draft lottery picks. Now you have a strange hybrid operation in which the Wings have built around Dylan Larkin, Lucas Raymond, Alex DeBrincat and Moritz Seider but are supported by a brigade of modest-ceiling veterans, including Kane, Compher, Copp and new additions Vladimir Tarasenko, Erik Gustafsson and Cam Talbot. If you look at Detroit’s incoming prospects, there are plenty of good ones, from Marco Kasper to Nate Danielson up front to to Simon Edvinsson on defense to goaltenders Sebastian Cossa and Trey Augustine. But there is no future scoring champion in that group. Detroit became a middle of the road team a bit too early, and I’m not convinced it’s good enough to escape that tier.

Ottawa Senators

You’d think a team with forwards Brady Tkachuk, Tim Stutzle, Drake Batherson and Josh Norris and defensemen Jake Sanderson and Thomas Chabot locked up as the long-term core would’ve tasted some postseason success by now, but nope. Ottawa hasn’t made the big dance since 2017, one year before they drafted Tkachuk. Adding goaltender Ullmark and veteran winger Perron will help. But it’s not like the Sens narrowly missed the playoffs last season; they fell 13 points short of the final Eastern Conference Wildcard spot. Considering they also traded Jakob Chychrun to the Capitals, does this team look 13-15 points better than last year’s? At this point, after so many false starts and predicted breakouts, the Sens have to earn our trust.

WINDOW UNDER CONSTRUCTION

Montreal Canadiens

Count the Habs as one of the few unabashed rebuilders in the league and certainly the Atlantic. Their 2024-25 lineup will look a lot like last season’s aside from letting a couple of depth UFAs walk. Two seasons removed from the third-lowest points percentage in their 107-year history, they’re focused on two things right now: (a) prospect asset accumulation, having added an extremely exciting one in Ivan Demidov at the 2024 NHL Draft; and (b) giving their young NHL talent room to keep growing. Juraj Slafkovsky, the 2022 Draft’s No. 1 overall pick, made quite a jump this past season. Could we see a similar impact from blueliner Lane Hutson? He doesn’t have to make the big club in 2024-25 but acquitted himself with a pair of assists in his first two NHL games late in 2023-24 after turning pro.

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