What the Heck Is Going on in the NHL's Metropolitan Division?

Throughout last season, the NHL's Metropolitan Division was on the receiving end of countless jokes because A) Most of the teams were pretty bad at hockey, and B) The name sounds like something out of a made-up generic league in an old Superman comic. But the race for the division down the stretch got pretty good as a group of seemingly mediocre teams battled for a playoff spot.

This season, the division (which features teams in North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, and Washington, DC) will be wide open once again. The only team that arguably took a step forward is the Pittsburgh Penguins, who addressed their bottom six woes. Even without offseason tinkering, the Penguins would be division champion banners on a regular basis thanks to superstar forwards Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin down the middle—and filling the offensive void left by James Neal's departure shouldn't be too tough, while the team actually got better by letting some of the bottom-six forwards like Tanner Glass and Deryk Engelland walk.

What about Crosby's wrist, which was reportedly all fucked up by the end of the season? Don't worry about it, the team assured everyone: "After seeking additional medical advice, doctors have decided not to perform surgery on Sidney Crosby's wrist," General Manager Jim Rutherford told the press. "Sid will continue treatments and be evaluated regularly while he prepares for training camp in September."

The rest of the division is basically a bunch of old cars skidding around aimlessly on the ice. Last year's runner-up, the New York Rangers, lost some key role players due to the salary cap crunch and having some important restricted free agents hit the market at a really poor time. Depth players like Anton Stralman, who could reasonably fill an NHL team's top defensive pairing, were just that for the Rangers, depth.

The third-place finisher, the Philadelphia Flyers, have more questions than answers, especially defensively. Anyone who can define Corsi, Fenwick, and PDO can easily catalogue all of Andrew MacDonald's myriad shortcomings, but in case you don't understand those terms, just know that he sucks. Mark Streit is getting up there in age, as are Kimmo Timonen and Luke Schenn haven't turned into the defenseman that teams expected, when he was drafted near the top of the first round. They have a multitude of talented prospects, but it's a hard position to master as a first-year professional. The Flyers better hope Steve Mason doesn't understand the definition of regression this year, or the bottom could drop out of things rather quickly.

After years of trying to find a top-line center for Rick Nash, the Columbus Blue Jackets, the division's last playoff team, just gave up and moved the winger—who will now be a scapegoat for trouble in New York—and started fresh. The team re-signed Brandon Dubinsky, who exemplifies the type of dude Columbus likes: a little bit annoying, a little bit cheeky, but you can't help but root for them.

"I came to a team that had 65 points, was the bottom of the basement, and a team that everybody wrote off as a team that was never going to be good," Dubinsky said in a press conference after the signing. "My goal is to go from the very bottom to the very top."

If the team can lock up Ryan Johansen, their top-line center who's currently a restricted free agent, they could reasonably compete for the number two seed.

Then comes the curious case of the New Jersey Devils, whose shootout (that's a thing that decides actual hockey games in the NHL) ineptitude and commitment to an over-the-hill franchise great in Martin Brodeur has probably cost them a playoff spot last year. From a fiscal standpoint, not all of their moves made a ton of sense—hello, hefty contract for Mike Cammalleri—but they are a more dangerous offensive team this season than they were last season.

Along with Cory Schneider—who the team just locked up long-term, showing a clear commitment to him as the number one guy, finally—making around 20 more starts, the Devils could turn things around and be trouble in the Metropolitan next year.

The other team in New York, the Islanders, had a quietly tremendous spring in summer. First, they brought in Jaroslav Halak, a true number one goaltender. Then they signed both Mikhail Grabovski and Nikolai Kulemin. Defensively, the team has sort of been a train wreck, but they have so many defensive prospects in their system that some of them have to click eventually. (Right?) It also helps that they have the third best center—behind those two guys in Pittsburgh—in John Tavares.

Last, and almost certainly least, are the Carolina Hurricanes, who have been caught perpetually in that "going for it" state and haven't rebuilt since winning the Stanley Cup nearly a decade ago. If the Staal brothers find a way to clone themselves, they could make a run for a playoff spot, but unless the science of genetic manipulation advances greatly in the next few months, they'll be down around the bottom of the division.

The Metropolitan's parity makes some think of the division as the weakest in the league, but that's what makes it fun—in the land of the one-eyed, the one-eyed dudes just wail on each other until one emerges as the third playoff team.