I have spent the offseason reviewing the fantasy seasons of non-playoff teams. This covered the San Jose Sharks, the Chicago Blackhawks, the Anaheim Ducks, the Columbus Blue Jackets, the Montreal Canadiens, the Arizona Coyotes (now in Utah), the Ottawa Senators, the Seattle Kraken, the Calgary Flames, the New Jersey Devils, the Buffalo Sabres, the Philadelphia Flyers, the Minnesota Wild, the Pittsburgh Penguins, and the St. Louis Blues.

Today, let's get talk briefly about some of the eliminated playoff teams. These Ramblings will cover the Eastern Conference while my next Ramblings will cover the West. Data from Natural Stat Trick and AllThreeZones, unless otherwise indicated.

Washington Capitals

This is a team that is trying to overhaul while staying competitive: Nicklas Backstrom is effectively retired, Evgeny Kuznetsov is gone, we have seen the decline of Alex Ovechkin begin in earnest, TJ Oshie's future is uncertain, and so on. There is a group of good young forwards with Connor McMichael, Ryan Leonard, and Andrew Cristall, but it's clear this franchise is going to be taking steps backwards before they move forwards.

We probably should highlight Dylan Strome's performance, though. After Chicago let him go for nothing (lol), Strome now has 50 goals and 132 points over his two seasons in Washington. His 2023-24 campaign saw a career-high 27 goals, a career-high 67 points, a career-high 169 shots, a career-high 22 power play points, and a career-high 61 blocks. Now imagine if he was used as the team's top forward all season rather than second fiddle to Kuznetsov for half of it.

For his part, Strome led the team by scoring chance assists per 60 minutes at 5-on-5 (helpers on teammate chances) as well as scoring chance contributions per 60 (those assists plus individual chances):

This is Strome's second season in Washington, and second season he's led the team in both categories. He is the engine of the offence now, and with Kuznetsov gone, hopefully he can get to 19, if not 20, minutes a night.

Tampa Bay Lightning

The Lightning are starting to feel a lot like the post-2014 Los Angeles Kings in that they're not quite bad enough to be out of playoff contention but they're not good enough to be a true Cup contender. They already traded for Ryan McDonagh and have a big decision to make on Steven Stamkos, so what this lineup looks like in September remains to be seen.

Players like Stamkos, Nikita Kucherov, Brandon Hagel, and Victor Hedman have already been discussed ad nauseum. We do need to have an Andrei Vasilevskiy discussion, though.

Vasilevskiy had the worst fantasy season of his career with a .900 save percentage and a 2.90 goals against average. He also missed a lot of time because of a back surgery and is turning 30 years old in July. It is worth reminding everyone that he had a bad season in 2019-20 (at least relative to the league and his own expectations) before peeling off three pretty good seasons in a row, so he's earned the benefit of the doubt.

Maybe Vasilevskiy just needs some time to really recuperate, and the team will be better defensively with McDonagh in the fold. However, his average shot distance faced in 2023-24 was 35 feet. The year before, it was 33.7 feet, and the year before that was 33.5 feet. Ostensibly, the team was better defensively in front of him than in 2022-23 but he performed much, much worse. Maybe some rest and an overhaul will help him, but there are definitely questions about his ability to turn in a Vezina-calibre performance across 60 starts.

New York Islanders

It was a tale of two seasons for the Islanders. They hired Patrick Roy as head coach on January 20^th, replacing Lane Lambert after a 19-15-11 start. Here is how the team fared in the two halves of the season under each coach:

	Lambert (45 games)	Roy (37 games)
Goals-For/60	2.89 (T-23)	3.02 (15th)
Goals-Against/60	3.31 (24th)	2.86 (12th)
Expected Goals-For/60	2.86 (27th)	3.1 (15th)
Expected Goals-Against/60	3.42 (28th)	2.9 (T-11)
Goal Share	46.6% (25th)	51.4% (15th)
Points%	0.544 (20th)	0.608 (T-13)

It was across-the-board improvement for the Islanders, but it's also worth noting there were no top-10 performances in any of those areas. They were better, but they still weren't a top team, and that matters.

What also matters is the performance of the top players. For example, here is how Mathew Barzal fared in a number of areas in the two halves:

	Barzal w/ Lambert	Barzal w/ Roy
TOI/Game (All Strengths)	19:22	21:03
Goals/60 (AS)	0.84	0.87
Shots/60 (AS)	9.29	8.55
Points/60 (AS)	3.24	2.69
Shot Attempts/60 (AS)	16.12	14.56
Chance Contributions/60 (5v5)	10.6	9.1
Rush Contributions/60 (5v5)	13.4	12.2

The Islanders improved offensively under Roy, and Barzal added nearly 1:40 per game in ice time, but his points per game fell from 1.05 to 0.94. That is mirrored by his drops in shot rate, chance contributions, and playing off the rush. The improvements didn't come from Barzal or Bo Horvat, but rather from guys like Kyle Palmieri, Anders Lee, Pierre Engvall, and Cal Clutterbuck. Depth scoring clearly helped the team, and it helped fantasy managers with some of these mid-tier options, but it did not help their top stars, and that's important.

Boston Bruins

Coming off an historic regular season, and the retirements of Patrice Bergeron and David Krejci, it seemed likely Boston would take a step back. They did, but that step back still saw them finish second in the division, fourth in the Conference, and tied for seventh in the league. That is still pretty good, all things considered.

The drop offensively was huge, though. In 2022-23, the Bruins were second in goals scored per 60 minutes, but the 2023-24 Bruins were 14^th in goals per 60 minutes at 3.15. There are top-6 centres in Pavel Zacha and Charlie Coyle, a 36-year-old Brad Marchand, a middling Jake DeBrusk, and a bunch of dudes.

There is also David Pastrnak, and this gives us a good opportunity to highlight just how good he was. His 47 goals were a step back from the 61 from the year before, but still good for seventh in the league. His 110 points were fifth in the league, his 35 power play points tied for 12^th, and his 382 shots was second. In fact, when compared to his teammates, he out-performed basically every top forward in the league. Here is the percentage gap between Pastrňák and the next-closest teammate by some all-strengths offensive measures, and how that stacks up to some elite forwards and their next-closest teammate (min. 750 minutes):

	Pastrnak	MacKinnon	McDavid	Kucherov	Kaprizov	Panarin	Matthews
Goals/60	55.9%	12.3%	-43.2%	-13.3%	39%	17.1%	66%
Assists/60	36.7%	35.6%	58.8%	83.9%	-20.9%	45.8%	-44.4%
Points/60	57.2%	31.7%	28.8%	46%	22.8%	49.3%	5%
Shots/60	60%	31.3%	-14.7%	-4.4%	1.7%	15%	10.7%

So, Pastrňák had a higher gap in point rate than any forward on the list, a higher shot rate gap than any forward on this list, a higher gap in goal rate than any forward except Matthews, and was in the middle by assist differential. He was the only forward on the list to have a gap between him and the next-closest teammate of 50% in two of the four measures, let alone three of the four measures. He was also the only forward to clear his next-closest teammate by at least 33% in all four measures, and no other forward in the last managed it in more than 2/4. In a season where the MVP debate revolved around point production, it seems pretty insane that Pasta's name was never mentioned in the same breath as MacKinnon, McDavid, Kucherov, or Matthews. The only thing that held back Pastrňák was his coach. Imagine what he could do if he had Leon Draisaitl as his centre and was skating 21:30 per night rather than Pavel Zacha as his centre skating 19:55 per night.

We will skip Toronto and Carolina right now. It feels like those two teams are both in a bit of state of flux and will make for more interesting conversations a month or two in the future.  

New York Rangers

There are any number of interesting players in New York, but it is hard to think about the team's playoff run and not immediately turn to Igor Shesterkin. He had a slow start to the regular season with an .899 save percentage (bottom-half of the league) and a .790 high-danger save percentage. At the All-Star break, he did some work with goaltending coach Benoit Allaire and took nearly two weeks off between starts. He responded spectacularly by leading the league by overall save percentage (.929) while being in the 85^th percentile by high-danger save percentage (.838). Shesterkin was one of the most valuable fantasy performers over the final 10 weeks of the regular season and it erased that slow start from memory.

As for the playoffs, Evolving Hockey has him leading the way with 15.6 goals save above expected. It is a cumulative stat, so that he played 16 games pushed him to the top, but on a 60-minute basis, he wasn't very far behind Jeremy Swayman, and those two were far ahead of every other goalie:

The issue with Shesterkin is not his talent or play, but the team in front of him. The Rangers finished their playoff run with the highest expected goals against rate at 5-on-5 of any team that made it out of the first round, and the same can be said of high-danger shots allowed. The (likely) injury to Adam Fox exposed the lack of defensive depth on the team. K'Andre Miller is not that top-end defenceman yet, Jacob Trouba and Ryan Lindgren probably should have been scratched at certain points, while Braden Schneider and Erik Gustafsson are not good enough to play anything approaching top-pair minutes. CapFriendly has the Rangers with just four defencemen signed for next year, including Zac Jones. They can overhaul the blue line a bit, and Fox should be healthy, but there should be reason to believe that Shesterkin won't quite reach the highest he reached from February onward.