When are young, exciting NHL teams ready to turn the corner?

In the NHL’s salary cap era, even smart teams are forced to endure a fairly typical life cycle.

Which is unfortunate.

I say “unfortunate” because when you build a team that’s “too good,” you can’t afford to keep your players (unfortunately), so you sell off good fringe players while your core ages, you get bad again, draft talent, and the circle of life begins anew. (I’m not saying they’ll be bad, but I admit I have Tampa Bay in mind here while seeing Yanni Gourde and Blake Coleman and Ondrej Palat and Barclay Goodrow and Alex Killorn play for non-Tampa teams.)

With that, we’re always looking for the next team that’s planted the best garden and predicting when they’re going to be in for a bountiful harvest. And oh baby, is it prediction season, as some fans and analysts think Ottawa is finally there, or maybe Arizona is ready to take a step, or maybe it’s Buffalo’s time.

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Once upon a time the Toronto Maple Leafs had just drafted William Nylander and Auston Matthews and Mitch Marner, and you could see a successful team coming. They even made a surprisingly early cameo in the post-season, giving the Washington Capitals all they could handle in 2017. More recently, the New Jersey Devils went from “Hey, that’s a crazy talented young team” to a team that won a playoff round before getting dispatched fairly handily in round two.

The thing is, it takes most teams years to become an “overnight” success. The Devils finished eighth, eighth, seventh and seventh the previous four years, and lots of their current talent was on the roster for that last seventh place finish. They’ll get a number of kicks at the can with this group, but last year a much older (fifth-oldest in the NHL) and more playoff-tested team in Carolina handled New Jersey in five games.

And with the Leafs, well, we’ve seen that youth and promise doesn’t guarantee post-season success once you get to the same level as the truly good teams.

What I see happen among fanbases who feel as though they’ve paid their dues and are ready to reap Devils-like rewards (and hopefully better), is that they typically think their team will arrive one season before it actually does, minimum. I cover the Leafs on a daily basis so I follow the Atlantic Division closely, where last season Senators fans thought their team was ready, but they just weren’t there yet. Fans of the Detroit Red Wings felt good about their team, or were at least hopeful, and same for those who rooted for those aforementioned Sabres.

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The theme with some of these young teams is that when it switches from “Hurray we’re just happy to have talent” mode to “It’s time to win,” everything gets harder. I think of building a successful NHL team like trying to lower your handicap in golf.

If you’re a 30 handicap, a few changes and some practice can bring you to a 20. For example, maybe Arizona, Chicago, or Columbus are ready to take a step out of the basement after adding a nice player or two. Playing golf more consistently and eliminating dumb mistakes might take you to a 15. But once you get down to about a 10, getting better becomes increasingly more difficult. The margin for error is slimmer.

In the NHL, going from “bad” to “near playoffs” is easier than going from “near playoffs” to “playoff team,” which itself isn’t as hard as going from “playoff team” to “Cup contender.”

It’s been said for years that the NHL is a young man’s league now, and that speed and skill have taken over the game. But it hasn’t exactly been young upstarts flash-and-dashing their way to championships. Four out of the past five Cup champions were among the league’s top-10 oldest teams, with Colorado the lone exception. Heck, Lou Lamoriello has delivered the New York Islanders to two Conference Finals after betting on proven veteran experience rather than young skill. When it gets tight, and you can’t make mistakes, the league has shown that it’s not entirely a young man’s league after all.

And so as we head into the 2023-24 season, I wonder if sometimes it’s worth tempering expectations for young and rising teams, or if the game really has changed enough that maybe things like age and experience will finally become less relevant.

Can the New Jersey Devils go further with a D-corps leaning heavily on Luke Hughes, and Kevin Bahl, with Simon Nemec in the picture too? Can the Sens go from “improved” to “legit good” leaning on a core of mostly 25-and-unders? And again, can Buffalo go from a point out of a playoff spot to getting in there, with Owen Power and Rasmus Dahlin and Tage Thompson and Dylan Cozens?

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The NHL is undeniably getting younger and faster all the time, yet to turn the page from OK to a Cup contender teams typically need some age and experience. That’s the story of the NHL this season for me, and of the Atlantic Division in particular. As older and more experienced teams try to hang on (Boston, Tampa Bay, even Toronto), will the league’s young talent be able to take those next, challenging steps, and not just get into the playoffs, but push into the later rounds?

If I had to say yes to any of those teams, it’s the Sabres, who have the experience of being just a point shy last season. The Sens are also right there if they can get decent goaltending, and these teams on the cusp can always add, too.

“It’s a young man’s game,” sure, but even these days, that only seems to get you so far.

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