The Utah Hockey Club has been on fire to start the season. They have a 4-1-1 record and are second in the central division.
Utah has already beaten a wide range of opponents, beating the Chicago Blackhawks on opening night; they will likely be a bottom-five team in the NHL. Utah also beat the New York Islanders, who will likely compete for an Eastern Conference Wild Card playoff spot and the New York Rangers and Boston Bruins, who would be considered Stanley Cup contending teams.
Utah has shown a ton of potential through these two weeks of the season, but they have also shown some weaknesses that were exploited in their losses to the New Jersey Devils and Anaheim Ducks.
Let's examine the experts' power rankings after the second week of NHL action to understand better where the Utah Hockey Club ranks amongst its NHL competitors.
NHL Week 2 Power Rankings Roundup: Where are experts ranking the Utah Hockey Club?
Early in the season, NHL power rankings can be highly volatile, especially when perennial playoff contenders such as the Colorado Avalanche and Nashville Predators get off to extremely slow starts, only having one win combined.
Considering the volatility, let's start by looking at the NHL's rankings and their first release of the "Super 16," which ranks the top 16 NHL teams after two weeks.
The Utah Hockey Club was not ranked in the NHL's preseason Super 16. However, their hot start has garnered considerable respect from NHL.com experts.
These rankings are created by the NHL, which polls 15 experts who publish content for NHL.com. Of these 15 experts, 14 were insiders who ranked the Utah Hockey Club among the top 16 teams, and three people who submitted rankings for this poll ranked it as high as six.
Some other notable movement around the league in this poll was the aforementioned Avalanche and Predators, preseason ranks six and seven, falling out of the top 16 teams, the Oilers going from second to 16th, and Utah's division rival, the Minnesota Wild, going from unranked to rank 12.
DailyFaceoff's rankings are slightly different, as only two individuals are involved with creating these rankings. However, they are more transparent with ranking teams, as the article states that they use an aggregate of six different stats. Those stats are "points %, 5-on-5 goal differential, 5-on-5 xGF/60, 5-on-5 xGA/60, power play xGF/60, and shorthanded xGA/60" (via DailyFaceoff).
Why Utah is much lower in these rankings than in the NHL's Super 16 is understandable. Utah could have been better in the expected goal department, allowing the eighth most expected goals per game and having the seventh-worst expected goal percentage in the NHL.
However, it should be noted that the Utah Hockey Club was ranked 9th after the first week of the season, and this week's data could be skewed by Utah only playing two games in the second week of the season: one against the high-powered New Jersey Devils and one against the Anaheim Ducks, who travelled across the country to finish a road trip.
Ranking teams statistically is tough early in the season; these numbers are very reliant on who teams have played so far, and Utah has started the year playing a lot of stiff competition. But it will be interesting to follow along and see how Utah fluctuates in these rankings as the sample size of data gets bigger.
Some other rankings to note:
- The Hockey Writers and Bleacher Report had the Utah Hockey Club ranked sixth.
- TheScore had them ranked eighth, TSN 12th.
- ESPN had Utah ranked 13th after two weeks of the NHL season.
Even after the injury to Sean Durzi, it is good to see that the Utah Hockey Club is almost unanimously viewed as an NHL playoff team after two weeks. While there is a lot of hockey to be played, this has to be a great confidence booster for Utah, knowing that they are starting to be taken seriously as one of the better teams in the NHL.