On one hand, not much separates the Buffalo Sabres and Pittsburgh Penguins right now. The two squads play in arenas that are only about a three-hour drive from each other and, at the moment, the clubs are separated by just four points in the Eastern Conference standings.

That gap will widen, one way or the other, when the Penguins visit the Sabres on Thursday night. And, of course, if we zoom out and look at the past 15 years for these clubs, the gulf could not be bigger.

Pittsburgh has hung three Stanley Cup banners since 2009, while Buffalo last appeared in the playoffs in 2011. 

Steel City supremacy, Queen City quagmire.

The here and now might be a little easier to stomach for spoiled Pens supporters given glories of the relatively recent past, but that doesn’t mean it’s any fun watching this team limp toward a third straight year out of the post-season. 

As for the Sabres, let’s just say that Western New York’s fine hockey fans are in about as dark a place as you can be.

Of course, Buffalo and Pittsburgh are not the only clubs that can start thinking about the off-season. By this cynic’s count, the Sabres and Penguins are two of 10 teams that, realistically, have no shot at the 2025 playoffs.

So, where is everyone going from here?

The most interesting exercise, for our money, is not to figure out which teams stand a decent chance of bouncing back immediately next season, but which ones are positioned to jump a tier — or, in some case two or three tiers — to get where every club wants to be, which is a consistent playoff contender?

As such, we’ve ranked the 10 squads that almost certainly won’t be 2025 playoff teams by how close they are to becoming — if not a true Cup contender — a club that hits the ice October after October with expectations of making the playoffs and seeing what happens from there. Teams are listed from the closest to competing to the furthest. 

For some, this exercise may assuage some of the hurt from a difficult season; for others, it may trigger fears that the hard times have only just begun.

Utah is already the best team we’ll talk about today and should only be getting better as the seasons roll on. UHC has been on the fringes of the Western Conference playoff race for much of the season despite missing key defencemen John Marino and Sean Durzi for a big portion of the schedule. Utah has already shown its ready to vaporize futures for help right now and figures to be an aggressive player in the summer trade market and free agency. Key players like Clayton Keller and Mikhail Sergachev are firmly in their prime, while up-and-comers like Logan Cooley and Dylan Guenther are just getting started. 

After failing to make the playoffs in their final 10 82-game seasons as the Arizona Coyotes, Utah may start a positive playoff streak as early as next April.

The Ducks are starting to flower. Mason McTavish is having a great second half and Leo Carlsson will be a third-year NHLer next year. The defence is also shaping up nicely, with Jackson LaCombe, Pavel Mintyukov and Olen Zellweger in the bigs already and Trisan Luneau having a very strong AHL season. You know the Ducks will be shopping in the summer, too, and Orange County is certainly a preferred place to play. Perhaps the biggest thing in Anaheim is the fact that Lukas Dostal, 24, provides a solid foundation and is right at that age where puckstoppers who have it in them make their leap to elite. 

Honestly, if we were doing this exercise a year ago, a team like Boston — on the back end of a contention window, leaning into a re-tool — may have been ranked much lower. However, the Washington Capitals have completely changed the view on what’s possible for a re-loading club.

A year ago, the Caps narrowly avoided a second straight season out of the playoffs by squeaking into the final wild card before getting blown away by the New York Rangers.

It seemed like they were going nowhere but down.

Cut to this season, where Washington is in pole position to finish first overall thanks to a slew of summer moves — to say nothing of some internal growth — that put the club in a catbird seat absolutely nobody thought they’d occupy.

Now, Washington’s front office has set the re-tool bar impossibly high, which is something other GMs probably want to stress with their own demanding owners. 

But you look at the bones of the Bruins — who are not embarking on a full rebuild — and you wonder if they could be a quality club again soon. Charlie McAvoy and David Pastrnak are still in their 20s; Hampus Lindholm is going to wind up playing only 17 games this year; Jeremy Swayman was just never right all season following a summer-long contract dispute and you could see the team adding players via free agency and trades that fit a certain age bracket and can help win now. 

What the B’s really need is to smoke their first-round pick this year and add an elite, high-end talent. Each loss — and they’ve had seven of them in a row — brings them a hair closer to a potential top 5 — or even 3 — pick.

You might think the last thing I want to do is open myself up to laughter and ridicule by saying anything remotely positive about the Sabres. You’re wrong; the last thing I want to do is provide any false hope to long-suffering Sabres fans, who deserve so much better.

I’m ignoring my instincts, though, and rating Buffalo relatively high here.

It’s just hard to look at a roster with such legit, in-their-20s talent and think there isn’t some way for it to all come together. Buffalo just feels like a squad that needs to make one move to make everything else fit better together. Unfortunately, of course, the Sabres have excelled at being the team that provides that one piece to other clubs, Dylan Cozens to Ottawa perhaps being the latest example.

Still, there are actual dudes on this squad, a goalie — in Ukka-Pekka Luukkonen — who could still take a jump and good, good prospects in the AHL. 

If there’s a new GM at the helm by May, that might move things along, too. 

It’s not going to happen tomorrow, but there’s a texture to the Sharks rebuild that makes you believe, in two or three years, they could really take off. Whenever you’re talking about ground-up rebuilds, you have to give the disclaimer that progress is never linear and you just never know where things are going.

That said, Macklin Celebrini looks like everything you could ask for in a 1C; Will Smith is emerging as super-skilled second offensive banana; defence prospect Sam Dickinson has a huge frame and, at the other end of the size spectrum, five-foot-nine defenceman Luca Cagnoni leads all AHL blue-liners in scoring with 47 points in 56 outings. He looks like a fourth-round steal.

Of course, the Sharks also traded for one of the top goalie prospects in the game, Yaroslav Askarov, last summer and he turns 23 this summer. 

And, as we’ve said of a couple clubs on this list, San Jose is the kind of franchise and location that can attract players. 

This team might start making the playoffs in 2027 and not stop for a decade, and there’s going to be enough high-end skill in the mix to believe the Sharks can do big things as opposed to plateauing. 

I get it; it’s bleak. Chicago is fast becoming a cautionary tale for take-it-down rebuilds. But Connor Bedard — who is not yet 20 years old — remains an extremely nice centrepiece to build around, and you could argue finding that player is still the hardest thing to do. Chicago is going to go hard at NHL-ready help in the summer (again) and should add another high-end talent in the draft — maybe even another No. 1 pick. Goalie Spencer Knight was a nice bet in the Seth Jones trade before the deadline and, with Alex Vlasic, Artyom Levshunov, Sam Rinzel and Kevin Korchinski all in the mix, the blueline could be very solid in two years. 

A lot of this comes down to how things shake out with Matty Beniers and Shane Wright as young centres in the NHL. Obviously, Beniers is now two years removed from a rookie-of-the-year showing and it’s fair to fret a little about his high-end potential. Shane Wright is figuring it out in his first real NHL campaign, but it’s hard to see him being a high-ceiling centre. Maybe Berkly Catton, the eighth-overall pick last June, winds up being this team’s offensive engine?

Joey Daccord is passable in the crease, but isn’t going to transform the franchise fortunes. After the surprise playoff showing in Year 2, it just feels like it might be a slow, steady rise in Seattle — slow being a not-insignificant part of the equation. 

The Flyers cratered down the stretch last year with just nine wins in their final 28 games and are one-upping themselves this season with 11 L’s in their past dozen showings. Related, the club just axed coach John Tortorella on Thursday morning. 

The good news is, the Flyers could conceivably draft first overall this year for the first time since the mid-70s. And when you consider they got Matvei Michkov seventh overall in 2023 and he came to North America two years before most of us expected, there’s a case to be made Philly — if it actually won the draft lottery — would be adding two first-overall-level talents in three years.

Still, this team doesn’t have a pipeline brimming with talent, and it definitely needs to figure out a goalie fix for both the near- and long-term.

If we were here to pick which teams may quickly bounce back and make the 2026 playoffs, Nashville might be one of the first clubs you’d take from this list. The formula would be: Steven Stamkos lights it up in Year 2 and scores 43 goals, Roman Josi is a Norris finalist and Juuse Saros returns to fringy Vezina form.

Still, what does that land you; a wild-card spot, like the one the Preds got last year? 

This team is now larded with in-their-30s veterans on bloated contracts and does not have a farm system that will spit out a game-changer any time soon. Even if the Preds draft first overall, it could be a long, long road back to consistent contention. 

The Pens have some good prospects in the AHL like Rutger McGroarty and Ville Koivunen, but that’s not nearly enough to alter the team’s fortunes in coming years. Even with incredible lottery luck, you might add a first- and second-overall pick in the next two Junes, but where are you if Sidney Crosby — just ahead of his 40^th birthday in 2027 — calls it a career at the end of his contract? Those high-end selections could be just finding their NHL way as Crosby rides into the sunset. 

It’s just a unique bar to be clearing in Pittsburgh where, as a club clearly in need of a refresh, you have one golden asset — Crosby — who is not getting dealt and other vets — Evgeni Malkin, Kris Letang, Erik Karlsson — who, even if you earnestly tried to move, would not return much and would require serious salary retention in addition to the player’s sign-off on a deal thanks to no-movement clauses.  

I just don’t think a potential Rickard Rakell return is going to get this thing turned around in the summer.

It feels like we’re very much only in the infant stages of the descent.