Three lessons to learn (and one to avoid) from the NHL's conference finalists (2024)

We’re down to four teams left in the playoffs, which means 28 teams standing around trying to figure out what went wrong and what to do next. This being the NHL, most of those teams will settle on the obvious answer: Pick one or more of the teams that are still alive, and copy what they did.

But which team? And what do you copy? That’s where we come in. It’s time for the annual copycat’s guide to the final four.

Every year, I like to find three lessons from each of the conference finalists that I’d like to see other teams copy. The emphasis here is on what’s fun for fans, since that’s supposed to be the whole point of this league. I’ll also find one lesson that isn’t fun but that I’m worried will be the one teams choose, and try to talk them out of it.

Let’s see which lessons the final four teams are offering up this year.

Vegas Golden Knights

Fun lesson 1: Be in on every big name.

This is the Golden Knights’ trademark. If a big-name player is available, they’re in. No cap space? No problem. No assets to make it happen? Slight problem, but let’s see. No room on the roster? We’ll figure it out. The point is, they’re in.

We saw it with Jack Eichel, who might win the Conn Smythe. Alex Pietrangelo was another one. So was Mark Stone. And those are just the guys they actually landed.

When stars hit the market, pick up the phone and then figure out the details later. It sounds simple, but some teams refuse to do it. Not the Golden Knights, and it’s worked for them.

Fun lesson 2: Missing the playoffs doesn’t have to mean a rebuild.

Last year’s playoff miss was a shocker, and some teams would have taken it as a sign that it was time to start over. And some teams would have been right — knowing when to fold your hand is a crucial skill for any franchise.

But a disappointing season doesn’t have to mean an automatic call for years of patience from a frustrated fan base. The Knights stayed the course, and it’s paid off in a division title and maybe more.

Fun lesson 3: Don’t be afraid to be aggressive about changes behind the bench and in the front office.

In one sense, it’s never fun to see somebody lose their job. But it is the reality of life in the NHL, and some teams have more patience than others. The Knights have virtually none, cycling through coaches and GMs whenever the team underachieves even a little. Even when guys stay employed, it always seems like there’s a hot seat somewhere in Vegas. They’ve had two GMs and three coaches in just six years in the league, despite winning three divisions and missing the playoffs only once.

That’s not the right approach for most teams. But when it works it works, and it sure makes the Knights interesting. A little bit of off-ice drama is hard to resist, and can be a lot more interesting than the almost pathological patience that some teams show.

And one lesson to avoid: It doesn’t matter who’s in net.

I mean, in Vegas it kind of doesn’t. Thanks to injuries, they had four goalies get double-digit games during the season, and that’s not counting presumed starter Robin Lehner missing the whole year. In the playoffs, it’s been career backups Laurent Brossoit and Adin Hill, and they’ve been more than good enough to beat a Vezina finalist and an All-Star in the first two rounds.

So does that mean NHL teams should just shrug and roll the dice on whoever’s healthy? Not necessarily. It’s fair to say that not every team’s fourth or fifth string is going to be this good. But it does mean we’re probably all overthinking the most important position in hockey. You need a great goaltender to win in the playoffs, but they only need to be great for those two months, and good luck figuring out who that will (and won’t) be.

Dallas Stars

Fun lesson 1: Don’t write off those veteran comeback stories.

The NHL has become more and more of a young man’s game, which is apparent any time you see any sort of study about aging curves. Players, especially forwards, are peaking earlier than conventional wisdom used to tell us to expect. They’re fading earlier too. By the time a guy is into his late-20s, he’s already trending downward. And once the decline has started, we’re told, there’s no coming back.

That’s very bad news for NHL teams that have signed those players to expensive long-term contracts. And it’s bad news for fans, because watching star players adapt and evolve in their later years used to be part of the game. We lose that if we’re writing off everyone older than 25 as a declining asset.

The Stars are a nice reminder that it doesn’t have to work that way, at least not all the time. Jamie Benn has gone from a contractual albatross to a nice rebound year, looking like a first-liner again for the first time since 2018. Tyler Seguin has put his injury woes behind him and is contributing. And Joe Pavelski has defied all those aging curves by having some of his very best seasons in his late-30s.

That’s good for the Stars, and it’s good for fans. A little bit of familiarity is fun.

Fun lesson 2: Not every great goalie has to sit in the minors forever.

There was a time when great young goalies were relatively common. Martin Brodeur was a star at 21. Patrick Roy had a Cup at 20. Tom Barrasso won a Vezina as a teenager, just one year out of high school.

But over the years, the development path for a typical NHL goalie has shifted. Now we see guys spend years in the minors or overseas before finally arriving in the big leagues. Occasionally you’ll get an exception, like a Carter Hart. But generally, your team drafts a goalie and then you forget he even exists for five or six years, because you won’t be seeing him.

Jake Oettinger wasn’t rushed to the NHL, staying in school for two years after being drafted. But he debuted at 22, and has blossomed into a bankable star at 24. That accelerated schedule was clearly good for his development, and it was definitely good for our short attention spans.

Fun lesson 3: Give your GM some time, I guess.

I went back and forth on this one, because front-office drama is fun (except when it’s your team), and letting the same guy work the same plan for a decade can get stale. Still, there’s something to be said for finding the right guy and letting him cook.

That’s been Jim Nill in Dallas. There are five GMs in the NHL right now who’ve been on the job for over a decade. Nill is one. The other four guys combined to win one playoff game this year (thanks, Kevin Cheveldayoff). So yeah, staying the course doesn’t always work. But it can if you’ve got the right guy, and Nill is a reminder of that.

And one lesson to avoid: Recycle those coaches.

NHL teams sure do love to recycle coaches. And it can work — of the final four teams, only Carolina has a first-time coach. But even in a league full of retreads, the Stars stand out. Last summer, they replaced Rick Bowness (now on his seventh team) with Pete DeBoer (now on his fifth), the two leaders among active coaches in terms of most stops. And for Dallas, it worked. For a team that’s also gone with familiar names like Lindy Ruff, Marc Crawford and Ken Hitchco*ck (twice!), there seems to be a pattern here.

The right lesson here is to explore all options, including guys who may not have had success in different situations. The wrong lesson, and the one some teams might prefer, is to just go with the familiar name. A fresh set of eyes can be the right approach, and every great coach needs to get a first job somewhere. Reflexively reaching for the coach getting his fourth or fifth shot isn’t the way. But apparently, neither is slamming the door on those guys.

Carolina Hurricanes

Fun lesson 1: Cap space is a weapon — if you use it.

You hear this one all the time in the NHL. But how often do you hear it from some team that’s cutting the budget while making vague promises about how they’ll use that space in the future, and then … not much happens? Eventually, you think “oh, maybe they were just being cheap.”

Not the Hurricanes. Their well-managed cap put them in a strong position heading into last offseason, and they followed through by getting Max Pacioretty for nothing and Brent Burns for not much more. Pacioretty got hurt, but Burns has been a monster.

Fun lesson 2: Injuries aren’t the end.

Injuries stink. They’re bad for the players, obviously, but they’re miserable for fans, too. You see your team build a roster, you get excited about what they could do, and then some fluke play happens and wipes out a key piece. And then everyone tells you “better luck next year.”

Panthers fans are feeling that right now, as we wait on news on Aleksander Barkov. But the Hurricanes have had more than their share of injuries, especially up front. Their playoff success has been a nice reminder that injuries are a hurdle, not necessarily a dead end.

Fun lesson 3: Top-five picks in their prime aren’t the only paths to success.

The Stars are built around Miro Heiskanen. The Panthers have Barkov, Aaron Ekblad, Sam Bennett and Sam Reinhart. Even the Golden Knights, who’ve never even had a top-five pick, have Eichel and Pietrangelo driving the bus.

But with apologies to 16-year veteran Jordan Staal or castoffs like Jesperi Kotkaniemi and Jesse Puljujarvi, the Hurricanes don’t even have any top-10 picks playing key roles in this run. (Andrei Svechnikov was picked No. 2, but he’s been hurt.) They’ve relied on finding gems like Sebastian Aho, Martin Necas, Jaccob Slavin and Seth Jarvis later down the draft, and they’re doing just fine. That’s great news for fans of teams who don’t regularly bottom out to collect top picks.

Bonus fun lesson: Sign somebody to an offer sheet.

Are you supposed to sign offer sheets in the modern NHL? No! Did the Hurricanes go out and do it anyway? Yes! Has it worked? (Mumbles indistinctly and changes subject.) Look, the Hurricanes did and they’re playing and your team isn’t. Correlation implies causation, just go with it.

And one lesson to avoid: Skip the trade deadline.

The 2023 deadline turned into an arms race in the East, with everyone loading up on big names. Well, almost everyone. The Hurricanes largely sat out, adding only discount depth in Puljujarvi and Shayne Gostisbehere. The Panthers didn’t do anything at all. Yet here we are, with both teams left as the last two standing. The deadline is … overrated?

Well, maybe. But trading isn’t. Both teams made aggressive deals in the offseason to bring in key players. So when the next deadline rolls around and your GM points at this matchup as his reason for sitting out, ask him whether he pulled off any blockbusters over the summer before you let him off the hook.

Speaking of which …

Florida Panthers

Fun lesson 1: Make that offseason blockbuster.

This is the obvious lesson, so much so that every dead-eyed hack columnist is already banging the drum for it. But that doesn’t make it wrong.

The Panthers were very good last year, but flamed out in the playoffs. Rather than preach patience or vow to stay the course, they went out and made one of the biggest trades in recent history, landing Matthew Tkachuk from Calgary. With Tkachuk coming off a regular season where he was a Hart finalist and scoring OT goals every night in the playoffs, let’s just say it’s worked out.

Granted, Tkachuk forced his way out of Calgary, and had some power to choose his destination. Situations like this don’t happen every summer. But it did happen last year, and there’s a little bit of revisionist history happening now over how it went down — the Panthers weren’t initially thought to even be in the running.

More importantly, it’s instructive to look back at how the Panthers got this deal done. With other teams sensing weakness in the Flames’ position and trying to lowball them, Bill Zito elbowed his way to the front of the line and slammed a big offer down on the counter. He gave up key pieces of his roster, and some even thought he’d overpaid. In hindsight, he clearly hadn’t.

The lesson here: Be aggressive. If a player you want is available, don’t get cute. Swing for the fences and make it happen. Yes, it puts your neck on the line as a GM, but if you’re more interested in making your team better than protecting your job security, here’s your model.

Fun lesson 2: Sign that big-name free agent.

Sergei Bobrovsky was one of the biggest UFA signings of the cap era, and among goalies, there isn’t even a close second. He was also a disaster … right up until he wasn’t.

Look, throwing $70 million at a goalie is a bad idea, even if he does go on an all-time heater a few years into the deal. But we said that we were offering these lessons from a fan’s perspective, and a vibrant free-agency market is fun. The NHL usually doesn’t have one, and if Bobrovsky going psycho on the league for six weeks convinces some GMs to get crazy on July 1, that’s a good thing.

(Just, uh, hope it’s not your team that does it.)

Fun lesson 3: Not every win has to be 2-1.

You know my rant by now. The NHL has morphed into a league where defense is everything, to the point that we all act like a minor uptick in scoring is some sort of offensive explosion. Coaches seem like they’d prefer to lose 2-1 than win 6-5. And the real contenders, we’re told, are the ones that play the right way.

Then you get the Panthers, a team that led the league in scoring last year and was in the top five this year, a season that saw them give up more goals than any other playoff team.

You could point to their recent stretch, including eight straight games of allowing two goals or fewer, as evidence that they’re only winning now because they’ve figured it out. But that’s not some philosophical shift, it’s their goalie going on a heater. The point is that this team isn’t afraid to go end-to-end with you, because they think they can win that way. Over the last few years, they’ve been right more than they’ve been wrong. It can be done.

And one lesson to avoid: Anything can happen in the playoffs, so just try to make it in and then hope for the best.

Sigh. We all know this will be the enduring legacy of the 2023 Panthers, right?

Of course it will be. Forget about the aggressive trades or free-agency bidding or playing exciting hockey. The lesson NHL GMs will learn is: Just make the playoffs. Get in as the eighth seed, hope your goalie gets hot, cross your fingers that the overtimes all break your way, and maybe you get lucky.

It’s already been the mantra in lots of markets — every Canucks fan is nodding right now — and seeing it play out for Florida will just reinforce it. What do you want me to do, your weary GM will ask you, build a great team? Good enough is good enough.

Of course, it only works if you ignore the fact that the Panthers have been a great team very recently. They won the Presidents’ Trophy last year! Sure, they weren’t great for much of this season, but there was an elite team right under the surface. By the time they broke through it was almost too late, but they got here.

So when your GM tries to sell you on the “just get in” message, ask him a question before you buy in: When was your last 122-point season?

(Top photo of Panthers’ Matthew Tkachuk and Hurricanes’ Jordan Martinook: Jasen Vinlove / USA Today)