Not really when you consider the major pieces they lost.
They still have a strong team. Blues are good but defense is questionable. Wild, their offense. Both have above-average goaltending. Doubtful either team is better even with the players Avs have lost.
They still have a strong team. Blues are good but defense is questionable. Wild, their offense. Both have above-average goaltending. Doubtful either team is better even with the players Avs have lost.
They still have a strong team which is why I'm saying they're a playoff team, but their goaltending took a bad hit. Georgiev is not good. They lost Kadri, Burakovsy, Kubel and replaced them with ERod. Yeah, one or two of their young players may step up, but to what degree remains to be seen, so losing that much firepower and stepping down badly in goaltending? That's not a recipe for first place. Not when you consider NSH got better and while MIN lost a good player, they didn't get hurt as bad as STL and COL did.
Not bad, actually. The only big misses here were CGY, SEA, NJ and WAS. Otherwise he generally had the better teams in the top half and the worse teams in the bottom half.