NHL Playoff Push: How deadline moves altered contenders’ potential paths to Cup Final

We’ve arrived at the final month. Five weeks from now, the slates will be wiped clean, the pressure will be ratcheted up, and the fight for the Stanley Cup will truly begin. 

And as is the case every season, the trade deadline has thrown some bonus chaos into the title race. Cup favourites previously feared around the league have gotten even stronger. Clubs that have been rolling all season long, taking up residence atop the standings, are left to second-guess their deadline decisions. And other usual contenders now find themselves facing down a gauntlet of recently beefed-up rivals.

With the dust settled on the March 7 moves, and the playoff bracket coming into focus, this iteration of Playoff Push takes a closer look at how the deadline action impacts the potential path to the Cup Final for each conference’s best.

The Capitals elected to largely stand pat at the trade deadline, acquiring depth forward Anthony Beauvillier but passing on a swing to add a more impactful piece for the season’s home stretch. You can’t really blame them — the Caps have been the story of the campaign, rebounding from a middling performance last season to emerge as one of the best squads in 2024-25. 

The biggest impact the deadline action could have on their potential path to the Final might not come in anything Washington did, but in what happened elsewhere in the East. If the playoffs were to begin today, the Caps would line up across from the Ottawa Senators — the young Sens look hungry and primed to upset a veteran behemoth, even more so after bringing in Dylan Cozens at the deadline.

Were the Caps to get by Ottawa, though, the bracket as it stands would have them face the winner of a battle between the Carolina Hurricanes and New Jersey Devils, two clubs that just don’t seem to have it this year.

The Devils’ playoff hopes were dealt a significant blow in the form of a shoulder injury that ended Jack Hughes’ season. And the Canes are fresh off a tumultuous deadline saga that saw them pull off a blockbuster to land Mikko Rantanen, before having to author a second blockbuster to trade him away. The jury’s still out on whether the club wound up better or worse off overall by the time the dust settled on the frantic action, but either way, the month-long distraction hardly seems the first chapter of a storybook run.

With three of the conference’s most dangerous squads sitting on the other side of the bracket, and the strongest on Washington’s side remaining in flux, the path through the opening rounds seems to line up for a Caps run.

On the other side of the bracket, the Panthers pulled off a couple key moves to aid in their title defence bid, first bringing in Seth Jones to bolster the blue line — an acquisition made all the more important by the Aaron Ekblad suspension — and then adding Brad Marchand in a true deadline shocker.

The Cats have their own in-house issues to worry about, namely the injury that’s going to keep playoff talisman Matthew Tkachuk out for the rest of the season. But the bracket shouldn’t look too daunting.

Were the playoffs to begin today, Florida would face off against the upstart Columbus Blue Jackets for an opener in which the defending champs would be heavily favoured. If they get past the Jackets, next up would be the winner of a Toronto Maple Leafs-Tampa Bay Lightning meeting. It’s a familiar feel for the Atlantic’s best, the three clubs having faced off against each other in the post-season plenty of times in recent years.

But the Panthers bringing in Brad Marchand adds a novel element to the potential 2025 iteration of a Panthers-Leafs or Panthers-Bolts series.

Neither club would look forward to having to navigate the physicality of Tkachuk, Marchand and Sam Bennett in order to move on — adding insult to injury, the Panthers beat both the Leafs and Bolts in the past two weeks without Tkachuk.

Despite the tumult that’s enveloped the Hurricanes — from the Rantanen acquisition and the trade that sent him away, to the comments from head coach Rod Brind’Amour and the response from Rantanen’s agent — Carolina finds itself on a five-game win streak.

In their first game after the deadline, the Hurricanes took down the Winnipeg Jets, one of the best squads in the league. So, there’s a world in which the Canes could be just fine, their potential playoff success undeterred by the blur of the last month’s front-office chaos.

Still, when Rantanen originally landed in Raleigh, it seemed to give the Canes a long-needed missing piece, a bit of extra star power, needed size, proven playoff ability. Now the all-world Finn is gone, as are Martin Necas and Jack Drury, who were sent to Colorado in the original deal. The net gain player-wise is the addition of Taylor Hall and Logan Stankoven. There’s still plenty to like about the Canes’ roster overall, and they should still be favoured if they get Jersey in the first round. 

But with Canes seeming to hit a wall each post-season when they face the East’s top dogs, it’s fair to wonder if their deadline decisions gave them enough to get by Washington or Florida, who seem on a crash course for the conference final.

Jostling for position alongside the Caps in the Presidents’ Trophy race, the Jets added quality depth pieces at the deadline — defenceman Luke Schenn and forward Brandon Tanev — but similarly opted to pass on a blockbuster to capitalize on their resurgent season. As with Washington, it’s understandable, the team’s brass electing to avoid tinkering too much with the squad’s chemistry. But a glance at how the bracket looks likely to shake out for them shows the risk of that approach.

Flying high as the No. 1 seed in the West, the Jets will get a wild-card matchup to start, which they’ll have every chance of winning — at the moment, it’s the Calgary Flames on track to meet them in Round 1, setting up what would be an excellent all-Canadian clash.

If Winnipeg advances, though, the bracket as it stands would have the Jets meet the winner of a Dallas Stars-Colorado Avalanche bout. And their fellow Western contenders took exactly the opposite approach at the deadline. The Stars — arguably the favourite to come out of the conference — head into the home stretch with Rantanen and Mikael Granlund added to an already potent offence. The Avs, who have been performing roster surgery all season, added Necas and Drury when they traded away Rantanen, and then went out and got Brock Nelson and Charlie Coyle, too, along with some blue-line depth.

Given the assets Winnipeg had available to deal, and the cap space it had to work with, running into one of those two squads and falling just short would sting just a little bit more — or, the Jets win, and put a point on the board for those who believe you shouldn’t mess with winning chemistry.

One thing seems clear in the wake of the deadline: the path to the Cup runs through Dallas. The Stars have put themselves in as enviable a position as you can be in heading into the post-season — having built a genuine contender slowly and methodically, one stocked with stars both young and old, the club also went out and added an all-world offensive talent to their mix, and locked him up long-term. More importantly, they added a proven playoff performer, Rantanen having amassed 34 goals and 101 points through 81 post-season appearances. The towering Finn finished second in post-season scoring in 2022, when he helped Colorado reach the Stanley Cup summit.

The awkward part, of course, is that Rantanen seems on track to meet his former club in the first round, with Dallas and Colorado sitting Nos. 2 and 3 in the Central. That’s a worst-case scenario for the Avs, surely, and one they likely didn’t foresee when they shipped Rantanen to the Eastern Conference. And it’s an opportunity for Rantanen, who should enter the bout with plenty of motivation to show the Avs brass they made a mistake when they dealt him away.

If the Stars do what they’ve done for most of the past half-decade and piece together another deep run in the West, all eyes will be on how much of a difference Rantanen’s presence can make this time around. Dallas has long found success by committee — now, it has a superstar-calibre talent of its own, the X-factor piece who can step up with the type of marquee big-moment performances we’ve often seen from the other Western contenders.

Everyone expected a big swing from Vegas at the deadline, given the Golden Knights brass’s reputation for aggressive team-building.

But, in the end, the club’s only move was a nostalgic one, Vegas bringing back former misfit Reilly Smith. Vegas doesn’t exactly need much — its only a year removed from emerging as Cup champs, and added another vet in Brandon Saad just a couple months ago. Once they get healthy, and get back into the post-season grind, the Golden Knights have proven time and time again that they can make noise when it matters most.

That said, their path to another crack at the Cup is looking like a minefield. As it stands, the Knights would match up with Minnesota in Round 1. Were they to get past that opening-round bout, they’d meet the winner of an Edmonton Oilers-Los Angeles Kings series. History suggests that’ll be the former — Edmonton has bounced L.A. in the first round three years in a row — meaning the Golden Knights will have the unenviable task of trying to shut down Connor McDavid, Leon Draisaitl and an Oilers squad that, while flawed, is just months removed from a trip to the Cup Final. And past that? A conference final that seems sure to feature one of Dallas, Colorado and Winnipeg — three monsters who seem to have all they need to go all the way.

Vegas still heads into the post-season as a bona fide contender and is arguably the strongest squad on its side of the bracket. But for a club that’s made its name through an unyielding aggressive approach, the decision to play it cool at this year’s deadline certainly seems a risky one, given how the landscape changed around them.