Daily Faceoff LIVE<\/a>, Tyler Yaremchuk and Carter Hutton dove into what the season could have in store for those three teams.\u00a0<\/p>\nYaremchuk: I think you can look at the Western Conference and there are a lot of teams that need to have better years than they did last year, but I\u2019m more intrigued to see if some of these teams don\u2019t bounce back.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The Vancouver Canucks want to bounce back. They made the decision last year. J.T. Miller out, Elias Pettersson stays,\u00a0 the Quinn Hughes contract thing, and the conversation around him gets very interesting. If they have a poor season this year, and I\u2019m not saying they will, I\u2019m predicting them to be right in the playoff mix, maybe just outside the playoff bubble in the West. But like, if Vancouver doesn\u2019t bounce back, do they have tough decisions to make next summer?<\/p>\n
I look at the Nashville Predators, and, obviously, last year was a wildly disappointing season. This year, they\u2019re running it back to some extent, trying to prove that it was an anomaly. But what if it isn\u2019t? What if Nashville is near the bottom of the Central Division again? Do they need to sit and have some hard conversations next summer?<\/p>\n
Out east, the New York Rangers hire Mike Sullivan, and Artemi Panarin is heading into a contract year, and you give JT Miller the captaincy. What if it doesn\u2019t work? What if you take another step backwards? What if you don\u2019t get into the playoffs? I\u2019m fascinated to see which way it goes.<\/p>\n
Hutton: That is a topic for a lot of teams, too, right? When we talk about those buyers or sellers, right? I thought last year was a year when nobody really sold. Teams were holding on to guys trying to look down the road, and is it going to come back to haunt you as you have expiring players?<\/p>\n
The interesting one is Vancouver, because they\u2019re a few years removed from sending five players to the All-Star Game and being in the mix. A healthy Thatcher Demko can be a difference maker, and he\u2019s had a healthy offseason. It will be exciting to see what happens in Vancouver, but that being said, the Pacific Division is absolutely loaded, and there are going to be a lot of good teams.\u00a0<\/p>\n
You can catch the full segment and the rest of the latest episode of Daily Faceoff Live right here\u2026<\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The 2025-26 NHL regular season gets underway on Tuesday night, and while plenty of eyes will be on…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":196546,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[556],"tags":[64,63,575,85],"class_list":{"0":"post-196545","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-nhl","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-nhl","11":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/196545","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=196545"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/196545\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/196546"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=196545"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=196545"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=196545"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}