The defense was good enough to make it within a goal or a goal being called back to make it to the WCF a few years ago. You could easily argue that outside of McDavid, Nuge, Nurse and Drai that every single player had a career worst or well below average season last year. Last year a lot of things went wrong, a betting person wouldn’t bet on it being that bad again.
But I’m going to walk away now as there’s no point in ever trying to get you to attempt to look at the positive side of anything. It’s your thing to be extremely pessimistic, I get it.
The defense isn't nearly the same and even that defense was average at best. They bought out arguably their best Dman from that season. The guy who was also arguably their best Dman (Larsson) is a shell of that beast from '16-'17 and Klefbom played injured the season after that and was injured again last year so can't count on him being healthy the entire season.
Oh and Russell is 3 years older than the Russell of that season.
Nurse is the only player who appreciably approved and he still has some defensive warts.
Not to mention that they don't have the Talbot of that year to backstop them.
Sure GK leans towards pessimism generally but in this case, it's justified. The team has a long way to go to even be a wild card team and a lot would have to go right for that to happen.
Anything can happen in the NHL but, on paper, this is one of the weakest teams in the west.
We'll see if Tippett can maximize the talent he has to work with. They will need complete buy in from everybody to sniff a playoff spot this season.