To answer the question, no I do not believe we are a contender. We could miss the playoffs if the goaltending is bottom 5-10 in the league, but I don't expect that to happen so I have us penciled in as a playoff team.
Colorado is the favorite in the West. The got absolutely crushed by the injury this year and still got to game 7 vs Dallas with their 3rd string goalie. They were a top 5 team in the regular season and got better in the offseason. Upgrading Zadorov with D Toews and Nieto with Saad is no small thing. Their blue line is the best in the West and they have 2 top end D prospects pushing to make the roster when injuries hit. MacKinnon is in the conversation to be the best player in the world. Rantanen, Landeskog, Kadri, Burakovsky, Saad, Donskoi, Kompher, and Nichuskin allow them to create a hell of a top 9. They should run away with the West and be overwhlming favorites.
Vegas is the class of the Pacific. They got to the Conference Final last year after pivoting to Lehner, who they extended. They were 3rd in the West in the regular season despite getting bottom 5-10 goaltending all year. Fleury was bad most of the season and Subban is possibly the worst goaltender in the NHL. Lehner was a Vezina nominee in 2018/19, posted a .920 last season and then posted a respectable .917 in the playoffs. There is every reason to believe that they will get much better goaltending in the regular season and then get the type of playoff goaltending that got them to the Conference Final this year. Replacing Nate Schmidt with Petro is a massive upgrade. They lost Stasnty as a cap casualty, but I don't think Stas was a difference maker at this point in his career. He was used as a 3rd line center through most of the playoffs, finishing 8th in both EV TOI and EV TOI per game among Vegas forwards. He was used on their 2nd PK and PP units, but the Stephenson passed him on the even strength depth chart last year. Losing him is a downgrade unless Glass takes a sizeable step forward, but the downgrade is much closer to us losing Bozak than it is for a team losing their 2nd line center. That downgrade is outweighed by the upgrade from Schmidt to Petro along with the improved goaltending situation from last year.
Miro Heiskanen determines whether Dallas is with that group or part of the next tier down. If he truly took the next step and is the guy who we saw in the bubble, then Dallas is the real deal and in the top tier of the West. If he is the very good (but not elite) guy he was in the regular season than they are a step below Colorado/Vegas but still very good. They got to the Cup Final last year and took a fantastic Lightning team to game 6 despite Seguin mostly disappearing with a torn labrum. Dobby played well through the playoffs, but we've all seen playoff Bishop. Bishop's health is far from a guarantee, but I feel comfortable saying that we can expect the Stars' goaltending to be as good or better next playoffs.
Those are the 3 teams I would consider true contenders from the West. Everyone else (Blues included) are a step below them. We are either at the top of this tier if the goaltending holds up or the bottom of this tier if it doesn't. With a likely condensed schedule, we will feel the impact of replacing Allen's .927 SV% with a rookie. I think giving Husso a chance is the correct organizational decision, but it will likely cost the team some points in the standings. We played at a 105 point pace in Jake Allen's starts last season and his GSAA was +11 over just 21 starts. It's unrealistic to expect Husso to play that well. Binny already had one of the higher workloads in the NHL, so we can't really mitigate this impact by starting the backup less. Going from Allen to Husso is going to cost the team a handful of standings points.
But I'm much more concerned with the blue line. Binner is a great first-shot goaltender who excels when lateral passing lanes are closed up and he can rely on rebounds to get cleared by his D. I'm not sure how well our blue line can do that anymore. Those are the 2 biggest holes in Krug's game in his own zone. He plays a similar 'pressure the puck carrier' style that Faulk likes to play. Our system would fall apart when Faulk would try to do that last year, so I don't think that it will work for Krug. He is going to have to adjust his style or we are going to have to change our system to allow the 2 of them to play their style. He was only given top pair even strength minutes in Boston in the year that they missed the playoffs and has been 4th or 5th on their team in even strength usage for the last 3 seasons. Boston built their blue line pretty similarly to ours for the last few years (big guys who are mobile and clog lanes) and consistently felt a need to shelter him from his own zone more than almost every other D man in the league. It's alarming that he was 10th in Bruins D in +/- last year. +/- is a garbage stat in a vacuum, but can be useful with context. Five Bruins D men played 50+ games last year. Four of them were +15 or better and Krug was a -4. The year before, Krug was the only 50+ game Bruins D man to finish below a +9. Krug was a -2. The year before, every other Bruins D to play 50+ games finished +10 or better. Krug was an even 0. Summing these 3 years, Krug was a -6 through 201 games played. Chara was +70 in 203 games played, McAvoy was +58 in 184 games played, Carlo was a +48 in 215 games played, Grzelcyk was a +45 in 195 games played and Kevan Miller was a +24 in 107 games played. His GF% at 5 on 5 is lower than every guy in that group and his offensive zone start rate at 5 on 5 is 70% in that stretch. I can't find any evidence that Krug can adequately play defense in a top 4 role. He also doesn't drive offense at 5 on 5 at a top end level. His 21 even strength points last year were 1 point shy of Parayko's 22 and put him at 42nd in the league. He is good offensively at even strength, but noticeably shy of Petro (7 points back of Petro last year and 16 points back over the last 3 years combined). Again, this is all getting extremely offensive usage. If he is given top 4 minutes at even strength, his numbers should come up but there isn't much reason to believe that he will exceed what Petro has done here. This idea that our offense will improve at the expense of defense is flawed at even strength. Nothing about Krug's history suggests that he will improve the even strength offense, so the improvement will have to come on the PP where he is genuinely elite. Unfortunately, since our PP was already 24%, there isn't much room for improvement. Boston has given up 10 more shorties than we have over the last 3 years with Krug running their PP, so any thought that he can improve the PP +/- by reducing shorties is probably wishful thinking.
I just don't see a top 4 of Parayko, Krug, Faulk and Scandella as being good enough to contend for home ice advantage or in a 7 game series. That group isn't going to be able to shut down good teams and it doesn't have a guy that drives even strength offense at an elite level. Our forwards are going to have to focus more heavily on defense to cover them or we are going to have to shift to a run and gun style. I don't think we have the talent to make run and gun work in the playoffs, because it rarely does.
