It's pretty clear by now that there is significant stratification in the NHL.

There is a small handful of great teams — Boston, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Jose, St. Louis — and quite a few more very good ones. There are several middling teams thrown in as well, which range from decent to kind of bad, but which will have no impact on playoff proceedings overall.

Then there is a small number of truly dismal teams, and it is this group of three or four clubs that will be of particular interest this season.

Unlike the last time a true “generational talent” came into the NHL (2005, when Sidney Crosby was the consensus No. 1 by a mile), there is actually going to be a season played this year, and for the most part we don't have to get into conspiracy theories about the selection process. The results you see on the ice over the next several months will dictate who picks where, which is the way it should be.

But here's the thing: This year isn't really like last year, in terms of being able to say, “Oh yes, the Sabres are clearly the worst team in the league.” Well, they're clearly the worst team in the league at present, but the gap between them and some of the other contenders for that fateful No. 30 spot in the standings isn't quite so pronounced as it was last year.

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The over-under numbers that came out earlier this week got me thinking about that portion

The first thing to keep in mind about the Sabres of last season is that they were, in addition to being the worst team in the league, almost hopelessly unlucky. They only got to 52 points last season, which is pathetic (literally 40 points below league-average), despite the fact that Ryan Miller and the rest of the goalies stopped 5 percent more shots than the average NHL goaltending (.918); if they'd kept Miller the whole season, instead of wisely trading him, they'd have probably gotten closer to 60. He was that good for them.

But even 60 would have been bad, and the fact that they shed Miller and will instead rely upon Michal Neuvirth to push things along. Things will not go quite so well for them in the goaltending department as a consequence, but Neuvirth isn't bad or anything, and the rest of the team has improved. They brought in Brian Gionta and Andrej Meszaros among other NHL veterans, and re-signed Matt Moulson after trading him to Minnesota. Now that's asset management. The team's biggest problem was scoring, and it's not really been addressed, but the likelihood that an entire team shoots just 7 percent again (almost two points below league average) next season seems quite low.

So the question becomes whether that increase will square up with a potentially big drop in save percentage, and how adding some better players in front of Neuvirth will affect their shots-against total. One assumes that the answer is “not enough to make a difference”, and so this will still be an almost-incredibly bad team, all things considered. I feel pretty confident saying that they weren't really as bad as a 52-point team last year, and they won't be that bad again this time around. They are, however, clearly still downright awful.

It'll be interesting to see if the luck actually goes their way this season, too, and effectively screws them into a race with some other teams for dead last. It's not probable, but it's certainly possible, that such a thing could happen, especially if one of the other deeply bad teams ends up getting the same kind of tough bounces Buffalo did last year.

But because the rules for the draft lottery have been changed to take away some of the advantage of finishing 30th — a hearty screw-you to the tanking crowd from the league — it's also fair to examine the group of teams that might come next, and I'd say there are probably only two or three who have a legit shot at finishing 29th. And by the way, it goes without saying that even if you're picking second in the draft come June, you're still walking away with a very good player in Jack Eichel, whom most scouts said would have been No. 1 overall in this past draft, had he been eligible.

The team that seems to be the prohibitive favorite to finish one step up from the basement is the Calgary Flames, but they're a team that actually improved somewhat this offseason, and might be able to stay afloat better than they should want. The fact is that they finished 27th despite getting awful goaltending (.902) and suffering some major injuries to key players (their man-games lost was third in the league last year, many to key players). They didn't really replace Mike Cammalleri after predictably seeing him walk in free agency, but they shored up some of the team's depth issues with actual decent possession drivers. And, most critically to their non-losing, they brought in league-average goaltender Jonas Hiller, which is not what teams near the bottom of the league should be doing.

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