The 8 Biggest Disappointments of the 2022-2023 NHL Season So Far

One of the beauties of life is that for everything that happens, there is balance. That’s even true in hockey! Earlier this week, Sara Civian looked at five of the pleasant surprises of the start of the NHL season. It's true, everyone loves a happy story, and there are plenty of those to go around right now. But for each joyful start to the season, there’s always…the other side of things.

Plenty of teams and players came into the season with high expectations, hopes and dreams, which right now aren’t looking so hot. Sure, it’s early, but getting out of the gate slowly doesn’t really help with keeping cooler heads around the dressing room and the executive offices.

Maybe it’s an entire team letting down its fans, maybe it’s just a particular player, maybe it’s literally everyone involved, but just know that we’re not mad, we’re just disappointed—just don’t let anyone know we’re mad.

This time around, we’ve picked out eight early season letdowns that made me put on my best Mike Brady impression to let them know we’re all expecting better of them the rest of the way.

It’s hard to not be a fan of “Flower.” He’s one of the nicest guys in the NHL, he holds himself accountable, and it’s joyful to see him do well. That’s why it hurts so much to highlight how poorly things have started for him this season.

In five starts, Fleury is 2-1-1 with a .869 save percentage and a 4.30 goals-against average. According to MoneyPuck.com, he’s third worst in goals saved above expected at minus-4.9. As a team, the Wild have the second lowest save percentage at 5-on-5 (.865) and Fleury’s is .849 in that situation.

The Wild are a strong contender for the Stanley Cup this season after really announcing their presence last season. When they added Fleury from Chicago last season that was GM Bill Guerin’s way of telling everyone they were going for it. The trouble right now is they’re essentially going with Fleury without a net to save him, so to speak. His backup, Filip Gustavsson, is 24 with 29 total NHL games under his belt and new to the organization after he was acquired from Ottawa in the Cam Talbot trade.

Fleury has had an oddly consistent pattern later in his career of having a very good season followed by a rather average one. This season should be a very good one after he had a .908 save percentage with Chicago and Minnesota last season, but even his underlying numbers last season warned of potential trouble (fourth lowest goals saved above expected among goalies with 30 or more games). We believe in Flower, but for the Wild’s sake turning it around sooner than later would be preferred.

As opposed to the neighboring Ducks, the Kings have bigger goals to reach this season. After they bullied their way back to the playoffs last season the thought was the young prospects who have grown into the NHL would continue to improve while veterans Anze Kopitar and Drew Doughty guided them along the way. There’s just one issue though: the goaltending has been bad. The Kings have nearly $11 million invested in Jonathan Quick and Cal Petersen and it’s been equally rough.

Los Angeles got back to the postseason last year because Quick had the kind of season that made people ready to bury him regret trying to do so, and at 2-3-0 this season in five starts, Quick has been the better goalie so far. But don’t let the record fool you because he has a .893 save percentage and minus-2.7 goals saved above expected. It’s not ideal, but it’s much better than Petersen.

Petersen was deigned to be Quick’s successor in L.A. and after a tough season last year in which Quick maintained the starting job, Petersen hasn’t done anything to take it away from him this season. While he’s 2-1-0 in three starts, he has a .842 save percentage and the fourth worst goals saved above expected at minus-4.7. The Kings are 4-4-0 and have done well despite the questionable goaltending but if they’re going to threaten to win the Pacific Division at all, one or both goalies need to improve a lot to do it.

Sometimes you have to deliver a little bit of tough love, and that's what I'm doing for Juuse Saros. Last season, he was one of the best goalies in the NHL (third in Vezina voting) and helped lead the Predators to the playoffs. It's been a bit more trying at the start this season.

In five starts, Saros is 1-3-1 with an .894 save percentage and 3.04 goals-against average. For early season those are rather pedestrian, but there’s something unique about how these numbers came together. There aren’t any areas, be it 5-on-5, power play, or penalty kill where Saros is having obvious difficulty.

The Predators penalty kill so far this season has been solid, Saros has allowed only one shorthanded goal, and Saros’ 5-on-5 save percentage is .908. But it’s the odd situations where the Preds have had issues. They’ve allowed two goals at 4-on-4 and 6-on-5. However, Saros being .908 at 5-on-5 is a bigger problem given his save percentage in that situation was .927 last season (67 games) and .948 the year before that (36 games).

When there isn’t one area of struggle to point at as a problem, it just means Saros needs to be better in general to get things back to the lofty heights he belongs. Easy enough for me to say from behind a computer and all, but we can give him a break considering the sprained ankle he sustained late last season that kept him out of the playoffs.

The bar wasn’t set very high for the Ducks this season. They’re going through a rebuild of sorts, and while they do have some very promising players either on the team or on the way up as prospects, things have been a bit uglier than even they would’ve expected early on.

Through their first seven games, the Ducks have scored 16 goals (second fewest; St. Louis has 14 in six games) and allowed 31 (fifth most in the NHL). They’re dead last in the league with 2.28 goals scored per game. Troy Terry and Trevor Zegras account for half of the goals scored this season with four goals each and they’ve had only seven players put the puck in the net this season. It’s a staggering lack of offense, particularly these days because goals aren’t terribly hard to come by.

What the offensive dysfunction has done is cover for how poorly goaltending has been. Starter John Gibson is struggling with a 1-4-1 record and a .893 save percentage and Anthony Stolarz has three appearances but just one start and his .885 save percentage isn’t so great either.

Making matters worse is their advanced statistics are also poor. At 5-on-5, they have the third-lowest CorsiFor percentage trailing only Arizona and Philadelphia. Their expected goals-for percentage is second worst in the league behind the Coyotes. Coach Dallas Eakins has a lot of work ahead of him with this relatively young group.

There are few teams in the NHL that can take drama and crank it up to 11 the way the Canucks can. They’re 1-5-2, their offense is eighth-worst in the NHL, and they’ve allowed the fifth-most goals.

They blew multigoal leads in their first four games and blew a one-goal lead in the fifth game. A 5-1 loss to the Buffalo Sabres in their home opener led to a mild shower of Canucks jerseys hitting the ice in protest of their poor showing to that point. J.T. Miller said it was their right to do that if they wanted to...only he said it a bit more colorfully.

Vancouver has gotten little outside its top-three players (Miller, Elias Pettersson, Bo Horvat). Prior to Thursday's win over Seattle, of the Canucks’ 18 goals, those three players account for 11 of them (61 percent!). Quinn Hughes, Brock Boeser and Tanner Pearson had points but no goals.

Defensively, they’ve also struggled. They have the seventh-worst expected goals percentage at five-on-five, and the goaltending has also suffered because of that. Thatcher Demko is 1-5-1 with an .874 save percentage, and backup Spencer Martin has had only one start with similar numbers and an OT loss as well. The Canucks are down bad and feel bad about it, and making coach Bruce Boudreau sad should be a crime in itself.

The Islanders have put their own twist on the fun phrase “don’t start none, won’t be none” by not changing anything in the offseason.

They had the ninth-worst offense in the NHL last season and addressed that by adding no one up front to give it a boost. The Islanders are 3-4-0, which is not a bad record, but beating up on the Ducks and Sharks on home ice for two of those wins isn’t exactly impressive. Unsurprisingly, the goals are coming in at a trickle pace this season with 22 in seven games.

“But Joe, that’s not bad. Three goals per game is pretty good, no?”

True! However, 12 of those 22 came in the wins against Anaheim and San Jose. That average going from three goals per game to 10 goals in five games (two per game) is a much more disturbing statistic.

Going from Barry Trotz to Lane Lambert, Trotz’s longtime assistant, means the style hasn’t changed much at all. That puts pressure on Ilya Sorokin and Semyon Varlamov to hold it down in goal. Those are pretty good guys to have to do that, but asking them to win 2-1 games all season is a recipe to struggle eventually.

Campbell knew what he was getting into when he signed a five-year, $25 million deal with the Oilers this summer. He knew there would be a load of pressure, but how bad could it be? He was the Toronto Maple Leafs' starter the past couple seasons and nothing is tougher than that, right? About that…

The Oilers are starved for a Stanley Cup, and the pressure to get one while they have two of the NHL’s best players in Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl is sky-high.

Campbell is 3-2-0 in five starts and sports a .895 save percentage and a 3.62 goals-against average. Those aren’t awe-inspiring numbers, to say the least. Making it a little more stressful is how well 23-year-old Stuart Skinner has played as his backup, going 1-1-0 with a .957 save percentage in three appearances (two starts). What makes that awkward is that Skinner is up because of an injury to Mike Smith. Getting outplayed by the No. 3 goalie a few games into a season isn’t a reason to slam the panic button, but it’s worth grumbling about.

Five years is a long contract length, so there’s plenty of time ahead, and there’s no reason to doubt Campbell’s ability. But first impressions when expectations are he’ll be the guy to take them back to the Stanley Cup set the tone, and right now the tone is like that of someone waiting for a bus that’s running late: annoyed, but happy once it arrives.

First off, everything is fine with the Avalanche. They're off to a great start and the team still plays fast and dangerous hockey. But they're doing it without Gabriel Landeskog, and that is a huge bummer.

It’s weird to mention the defending Stanley Cup champs, but we were so spoiled by their run-and-gun brand of hockey last season that missing Landeskog, out until January, with a knee injury stinks and we're venting our frustration about that.

We're disappointed because whenever the Avs are on TV, we’re not getting them at their fully-armed-and-operational-battle-station selves. Is it so wrong to want to see Nathan MacKinnon, Cale Makar, Mikko Rantanen and Landeskog all at once? If that’s wrong, I don’t ever want to be right. At least Valeri Nichushkin is helping fill the Swedish-captain-sized hole in our heart with his superb start to his season in which he’s not just shutting down opponents, but also scoring goals aplenty too.

The wild part of this is Landeskog had his knee operated on in the spring before the end of the regular season, but he was able to return during the playoffs and be an absolute force with 22 points in 20 games. But it’s those kinds of numbers that make it so sad that he’s not in the lineup now because watching a fully healthy Avalanche squad would be an extreme treat.

Statistics courtesy: NHL.com, Hockey Reference, Natural Stat Trick, MoneyPuck