[WarningTrakPower]

Let's start with a recap of the trades we made leading up to the trade deadline:

-Traded Barrett Hayton to NJ for Michael McLeod
We upgrade our bottom 6 centre position by adding McLeod who was over 57% in the dot on the season. He is also signed for 2 more years at about $4m per (a little more than we would like but we have room).

-Traded a 3rd round pick to Minny for Alex Goligoski
Although he is left handed, we wanted to bring him back to Arizona to play on the right side.

-Traded Dysin Mayo and a 5th rounder to Pitt for Jeff Carter
Mayo was the odd man out after adding Goligoski and we add another veteran forward who is good at faceoffs in Carter (expiring contract).

*Janis Moser tore his hamstring and was expected to miss 2 months leaving a lot of icetime to replace on the right side of our D pairs

-Traded Tyler Johnson with a 3rd rounder to Seattle for Justin Schultz
We didn't have room for Johnson and bring in Schultz to eat up some of the minutes left behind from the Moser injury

-Traded Jan Jeník to Philly for James van Riemsdyk
James was having a nice season with 30 points in 48 games. He slides in on our 3rd line and pushes Crouse to the 4th line

*Justin Schultz separated his shoulder late March and is going to miss about a month.

*Claimed Jesper Boqvist off waivers from the Kraken (38 points in 59 games).

After putting together a terrific season, we finished with a record of 45-28-9 for 99 points which put us alone in 6th place in the Western Conference overall.

The defending champion Oilers missed the playoffs by one point Also, out East the Bruins missed as well finishing with only 87 points.
Top team in the league by points was Carolina with 112 and Colorado finished with 111 points.

Let's check out our end of season player stats starting with our forwards:



What a strange contract between our first and second lines. The top line was ~ -15 each and the second line was ~+29!

Overall, very happy with the production from the top 7 forwards including a nice 21 goal rookie season for Connor Bedard.



Losing Janis Moser definitely hurt us down the stretch as he was averaging over 23min a night for us.
Alex Martinez turned back to clock potting double digit goals for the first time since 2015/16.
Mikey Anderson didn't find the back of the net once and suited up for all 82 games.



Ivan Prosvetov played an absurd 66 games when we expected him to just be a competent backup at the start of the season.

We let Connor Ingram walk in free agency and he played 71 games for the Blackhawks this year!
Something strange going on with goalie starts as there was 10 guys who played in at least 70 games ()

Here is the Stanley Cup playoff bracket



In the first round we faceoff against a very strong Winnipeg team.
They are still led by Kyle Connor, Nick Ehlers, Mark Scheifele (day to day injury) & Pierre-Luc Dubois up front, but Blake Wheeler is out for the season.
They are thin on defense where the only player to eclipse the 30 point mark was Josh Morrissey and he is also done for the season with broken ankle.
Their rock is obviously Connor Helleybuyck who had a very nice bounce back season (3.41 GAA in 2022/23).

Next recap will be after the first round!