{"id":933558,"date":"2026-10-15T05:10:14","date_gmt":"2026-10-15T05:10:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/933558\/"},"modified":"2026-10-15T05:10:14","modified_gmt":"2026-10-15T05:10:14","slug":"where-five-struggling-nhl-teams-land-on-the-panic-meter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/933558\/","title":{"rendered":"Where five struggling NHL teams land on the Panic Meter"},"content":{"rendered":"

When an NHL team is swirling, all you can hope for is some promise to temper the panic.<\/p>\n

On Tuesday night, Connor Bedard \u2014 playing as Chicago Blackhawks<\/a> captain for the first time in his career \u2014 returned ahead of schedule from off-season surgery and, with one assist, helped the Hawks to their second win of the season.<\/p>\n

Will it be smooth sailing for the Blackhawks from here? Perhaps not, but Bedard\u2019s presence is surely a reason for shaken Chicago fans to slowly back away from the ledge.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Of course, not every struggling team has a guy ready to step in who can counteract the crumminess.<\/p>\n

With that in mind, we\u2019re checking the Panic Meter in five NHL cities to get a sense of how worried everyone should be. To be clear, we\u2019re not concerning ourselves with squads that courted misery. Difficult as they may be to watch night after night, the likes of the Vancouver Canucks and Calgary Flames are exactly where they want to be in the standings.<\/p>\n

For teams with playoff hopes, however, early-season scuffles bring about a much different feeling. As such, let\u2019s examine the gauge on the Panic Meter for a handful of clubs.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s almost as though getting waxed 7-0 on home ice by the Pittsburgh Penguins on opening night broke the Flyers. Even with the rebuilding Flames and Canucks in the league, the Flyers \u2014 still in search of their first win after eight outings \u2014 have the worst five-on-five goal differential (minus-15) in the NHL (thanks largely to that lopsided loss to Pittsburgh). Philly also has the worst expected goals percentage (34.5 per cent) to match according to Moneypuck.<\/p>\n

The Flyers, recall, made the second round of the playoffs last spring and even if we all figured it would be a chore for them to again be among the East\u2019s top eight clubs, nobody thought they\u2019d be buried by mid-October.\u00a0<\/p>\n

You could make a case the only Flyer who is performing the way the team hoped is newcomer Joseph Woll, who\u2019s basically personally responsible for pushing the team to extra time on two occasions and snagging single points in both those outings. Woll has a .914 save percentage in four contests and has received a grand total of six goals support in those games.<\/p>\n

Only two Flyers \u2014 Christian Dvorak and Matvei Michkov \u2014 have more than one goal so far (both are at two) and the team has yet to tally more than two goals in a single game.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s about as grim as it can get. The only \u201cyeah but\u201d you can offer is that despite making the playoffs last season, we all understood this team remained a work in progress.<\/p>\n

Still, nobody could have imagined\u00a0this much\u00a0work had to be done.<\/p>\n

We opened with one winless squad, so naturally it\u2019s time to discuss the other.<\/p>\n

About all you can say for the Kings is at least they\u2019re only 0-for-5, as opposed to having whiffed in eight attempts like Philly.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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The difference, though, is that while the Flyers are in some state of organizational build, Los Angeles is old as dirt with no hope on the horizon.\u00a0<\/p>\n

New coach Peter Laviolette was brought in to kickstart the offence, but only three teams \u2014 Philadelphia, Calgary and (surprisingly) Dallas \u2014 are averaging fewer than the Kings\u2019 2.20 goals per game. L.A. began the year by putting up four goals in each of its first two outings, but has managed just one goal apiece in its past three showings. Making matters worse, the team is allowing a goal nearly half the time it\u2019s shorthanded (the penalty-kill is only effective 57.9 per cent of the time).\u00a0<\/p>\n

If you want to be extremely kind to the Kings, you could point out four of their games have come against teams \u2014 Colorado, Edmonton, Florida and Vegas \u2014 that could conceivably win the Stanley Cup.<\/p>\n

Maybe when injured winger Kevin Fiala returns and the team gets used to Laviolette\u2019s teachings, the scoring will tick up. But if you were to make a list of teams going nowhere in the near- and long-term future, the Kings might land at No. 1.<\/p>\n

If Bedard\u2019s return brought some calm to the Blackhawks, the Wednesday-morning news that Alex DeBrincat has inked a seven-year extension with the Wings must bring a glimmer of happiness to Detroit.<\/p>\n

But one beam of sunlight isn\u2019t much to latch onto.\u00a0<\/p>\n

While one Michigander, in DeBrincat, is staying, it\u2019s still jarring to realize another \u2014 former captain Dylan Larkin \u2014 has asked out of his home-state team. Throw in the contract standoff with restricted free agent defenceman Simon Edvinsson and it\u2019s easy to lean into the worst fears \u2014 that the team is simply mismanaged \u2014 in Detroit.<\/p>\n

On the ice, the Wings have one win in six tries despite five of those contests coming in their own building. Before the season, the Wings were the one Atlantic team you figured had no hope of making the playoffs and nothing that\u2019s happened so far would move you off that viewpoint.<\/p>\n

It looks like it\u2019ll be 10 years and counting without post-season hockey in the Motor City and, quite honestly, a well-performed re-tool is probably in order.<\/p>\n

The question is, does Detroit have the people in place to perform that task?<\/p>\n

For all the stats we keep these days, the telling metric in Columbus might be how many times coach Rick Bowness puts them on blast.<\/p>\n

After taking a torch to the team for its lack of effort at the end of last season, Bowness barely made it past Thanksgiving before laying into the Jackets again. Following Tuesday\u2019s 7-3 home-ice loss to the Panthers, the coach was throwing around the word \u201cembarrassed\u201d<\/a>\u00a0in relation to his team\u2019s performance.<\/p>\n

Columbus is 2-3-0 out of the gate with four of those contests occurring at home. Like Detroit, much of the drama has come off the ice. To be fair, a couple of those situations came to a quality resolution, with the unhappy Kirill Marchenko shipped out for a good, young player in Matthew Knies, while top centre Adam Fantilli ended a summer-long negation by inking a new deal on the eve of the season.<\/p>\n

That said, reining Norris Trophy winner Zach Werenski is anything but a sure bet to remain in Ohio long-term and the club \u2014 which has not made the playoffs in an 82-game season since 2019 \u2014 really could have used a hot start to the season with a home-heavy schedule.<\/p>\n

Instead, we\u2019re hearing more rants from a cranky coach.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Chicago Blackhawks 6.5\/10<\/p>\n

The Panic Meter was much higher when the Hawks were 0-3-0 out of the gate \u2014 outscored 15-5 \u2014 and playing with the understanding that Bedard might not see his first game of the year until November. At that point, it felt like Chicago could be dead and buried by Halloween.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Certainly Bedard\u2019s return in a 5-3 win over the Penguins on Tuesday calms things down a little and allows us to focus on some positives, like rookie Roman Kansterov bagging a pair of goals in that game while fellow freshman Anton Frondell has a team-leading six points in seven contests.<\/p>\n

Still, there was lots of leap talk in Illinois entering the campaign and, at 2-5-0, the Hawks need to get going to make that a reality.<\/p>\n

Perhaps the new captain \u2014 surrounded by a pair of promising rooks \u2014 can turn the conversation back to something that requires a Hope Meter in Chicago.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When an NHL team is swirling, all you can hope for is some promise to temper the panic.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":933559,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[49,48,82],"class_list":["post-933558","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/933558","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=933558"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/933558\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/933559"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=933558"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=933558"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=933558"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}