The Florida Panthers are one win away from returning to the Stanley Cup Final for the third year in a row, but the Carolina Hurricanes are still putting up a fight. The Edmonton Oilers are two wins away from getting back to the final for the second year in a row, but if the Dallas Stars can awaken their goal scorers this series could yet stretch out into next week.
Meantime, four other teams are still licking their wounds and wondering what could have been if things broke just a little differently in Round 2. The Vegas Golden Knights surely have designs on returning a Cup contender in 2025-26, but after being eliminated in Round 1 and 2 the past two seasons, are we sure they’re still in the top tier of teams? The Winnipeg Jets are similar, and have struggled to get past the other Central Division contenders. The Washington Capitals were a hugely surprising regular season success and will look to create momentum to ensure this is just the start, while the Toronto Maple Leafs are facing some sort of ending to an era after a seven-game loss to the defending champions.
So as the four teams left standing fight it out to win the top prize, we look back again at the four teams that were ejected from the playoffs in Round 2 and the big question facing each of them this summer.
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Vegas: What will Jack Eichel‘s extension end up at?
We’ve learned to expect unconventional team building routes for the Golden Knights and after a five-game ousting by the Edmonton Oilers, we should have our heads up for how Vegas will react to another earlier-than-planned off-season.
Is it signing Mitch Marner, Nikolaj Ehlers or Brock Boeser off the UFA pile to address a relative weakness on the wing? Is it making another bold trade to shake up their mix and acquire someone else who could help put them over the top?
Well, it may not be so easy anymore. Vegas has used up nearly all of its futures to get to where they are now and don’t have another first-round pick until 2027. They have $9.615 million in cap space (the eighth-least amount of space in the NHL) with five UFAs and four RFAs on their roster, not all of whom will return. Those who don’t will need to be replaced somehow. Some in and around the market are wondering if the window is beginning to close — not because the team is looking like it’ll fall off a cliff next season, but because the avenues towards improvement are more narrow than ever.
If Vegas did want to explore changing its core, that will not be easy to do. Ten players have some sort of trade protection in their contract, six of which are either full no-move or no-trade clauses.
“We’re going to do everything we can to make our team better in the next six to seven weeks,” Golden Knights GM Kelly McCrimmon said at his year-end press conference.
As the team figures out how to do that, one big piece of business will be Jack Eichel, the team’s No. 1 centre, a force at both ends and coming off a career year with 94 points. In a year from now Eichel will be eligible for unrestricted free agency when he’s 29 years old, but can sign an extension with Vegas as early as this coming July 1. How much of Vegas’ future cap space will he consume and how long will it take for him to come to terms?
Eichel comes up for a new contract at an interesting time. Not only is the salary cap jumping leaps and bounds the next few seasons — which will have an inflationary effect on AAV expectations — but Eichel is due for a raise at the same time as Connor McDavid, Kirill Kaprizov and Artemi Panarin, who could all go above the current high-water mark for AAV. The first to sign will set the tone for the market.
In Eichel, at least Vegas knows it has an elite centre in his prime, which is not the kind of asset a contender usually moves off of, but stranger transactions have been made in Vegas. Eichel’s salary will certainly take a jump and separate him more from the rest of the team as the highest paid player on the roster, but how high will he go ($13 million? $14 million?) and what will that mean for Vegas’s plans and wiggle room?
“That’ll be an important order of business for us,” McCrimmon said. “We sure hope to keep Jack in our organization. Jack loves it here, so I would hope we can find common ground and keep him a Golden Knight.”
Washington: How to come back with a stronger third line?
After making the playoffs by the skin of a tiebreaker in 2024, the Washington Capitals made a ton of adjustments last summer that all hit and led to them finishing first in the Eastern Conference in 2025.
Don’t expect the same flurry of change this summer.
“I think we had some big spots to fill last year. This year there’s fewer holes and we’ve had some growth in young players and we have some players who are young coming up to make the next jump,” said Capitals president Brian MacLellan. “We gotta be cognizant of leaving room for improvement, leaving room for guys to come in and hopefully adding a piece or two, but it’s not going to be the same as last year.”
One area MacLellan and GM Craig Patrick talked about at their year-end press conference was upgrading the third line. It was an area they tried to address in-season with the acquisition of centre Lars Eller, who is now set for unrestricted free agency. In fact the Caps have a number of free agent forwards, and the seventh-least amount of cap space in the NHL.
Connor McMichael had a breakout campaign at 24 years old, with 26 goals and 57 points and will be heading into the final season of his contract. Whether the team views him as a winger (where he spent most of the season) or someone capable of moving to the middle, will determine exactly what the Capitals decide to pursue for the third line in the coming weeks and months.
“It would be great to add another skill player to our lineup,” Patrick said. “It would be great to also have a third line that is a really dependable third line.”
Winnipeg: Will they keep Nikolaj Ehlers and, if not, how do they replace him?
Teams working on internal salary structures are going to find it tough to keep a core group together the moment a key producer comes up for an extension and has unrestricted free agency as an option. Take note of the Colorado Avalanche whose highest-paid player, Nathan MacKinnon, makes $12.6 million against the cap. They parted with Mikko Rantanen because they believed he was going to push up to and, potentially, past that (Rantanen wound up signing an extension with Dallas for a $12 million AAV).
Winnipeg will be an interesting case of that this off-season and their highest-paid players, Mark Scheifele and Connor Hellebuyck, make substantially less than MacKinnon — just $8.5 million. Kyle Connor has one year left on his contract and can sign an extension as of July 1, so the 41-goal scorer will test the Jets’ comfort level with upending the order of the depth chart. More pressing is that Nikolaj Ehlers, the third-highest scoring forward on the team, is on track to become a free agent July 1.
Ehlers has traditionally been around a 25-goal, 60-point player, though his points per game pace this season was one of the best in his career. At the same time, Ehlers has never been a top-line player charged with a ton of minutes and responsibility with the Jets. Just this season he averaged 15:48 of ice time per game, and his 13:14 average of even strength ice time per game was eighth among all Jets forwards.
And yet, nearly every season, Ehlers ranks among the top players in Winnipeg in scoring per minute rates — this season he was second in both points and goals per 60 minutes of five-on-five action.
So what is he worth on an extension to Winnipeg? And what is he worth on a new contract to a different team that might have designs on giving Ehlers more minutes?
As our own Jacob Stoller wrote, all signs are pointing towards Ehlers being a goner from Winnipeg.
Losing Ehlers would be a blow to the offence and while there is some hope Cole Perfetti can bring it to another level, or that a youngster like Brad Lambert or Nikita Chibrikov can step up on to the roster, those are not the moves of a team that believes it has an open Stanley Cup window.
Winnipeg is not often the first choice of destination for UFAs, so failing a successful bid there (which itself could change the internal cap structure) GM Kevin Cheveldayoff will have to again take to the trade market and find someone to fill a key role.
Toronto: Is the Core Four era over?
Surely it is this time.
Right?
We’ve been here before, most notably in 2023 after the Leafs were eliminated in five games by the Florida Panthers. At the time, Mitch Marner didn’t have trade protection, and neither did William Nylander, who was one year away from free agency and in need of an extension. There were options for the Leafs to change up their group. Instead, they changed their GM, and gave the reins to Brad Treliving who had no runway to make such substantial moves to the roster.
The timing for a shift may have been better then, but the results demand that it happens now. The Leafs have fewer options — Marner is a pending UFA along with John Tavares, 10 players have some sort of trade protection — but simply cannot reinvest money into what’s been a failed era.
How do you replace a Marner? Can you move Morgan Rielly (who has a no-move clause) when he’s 31 and coming off one of his worst seasons?
Or does Florida’s destruction of Carolina in the East Final bring a softer landing to Toronto’s seven-game elimination by the defending champs and leave them re-evaluating how much change really is necessary?
The Leafs are likely to put in an effort to change their mix and bring back a new group that can refresh expectations. But it’s also a dangerous off-season in that if the wrong levers are pulled Toronto could set itself up to be more directly challenged in the regular season by a group of teams on the way up.
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