Now I know I may sound crazy when I say this but I believe that the New York Rangers had a better season than the Tampa Bay Lightning.

Here’s the facts

Tampa Bay Lightning
Tampa had an unbelievable year. Kucherov led the league in scoring, Tampa won the presidents trophy, and overall fans have a great few seasons ahead. But they were swept in the first round and on top of that, they are going to have barely any cap space this year to sign some of their Major RFA’s.

New York Rangers
Going into this season, players and fans alike knew that the Rangers weren’t going anywhere besides the bottom of the standings. They traded some of their key players for draft picks and prospects and now have one of the best if not the best prospect pool in the entire league. On top of that, they have the 2nd overall pick this year (by luck).

Conclusion
So who had the better year?
The team with a magical year who got swept in the 1st or the team that has the 2nd overall and plenty of cap space?

All comes down to how you define a "better season" so its probably gonna boil down to semantics.

Im a Tampa fan. But from halfway through the season on I kept saying that anything short of a Stanley Cup with this roster is failure. They failed spectacularly.

Rangers in a rebuild acquired some assets and have started their rebuild amazingly and achieved everything they set out to achieve.

So "better season" id define as more points and more wins and hand it to Tampa. However I would say the Rangers had a far more satisfying season.

I agree just had an interesting thought

For the teams on the ice it was the Lightning.

I do think winning the Presidents' Trophy is better than people think. I'd take the cup any day over the Presidents' Trophy but especially with 128 points the players will look back on this season and will probably have good memories of this season. It was a very good year for the Lightning, it just didn't end well. No teams' seasons end well other than the team who wins the cup (and you could say the teams who miss the playoffs but win lots of games to end the season).

Lightning fans got to enjoy hockey through April. Rangers fans, as you stated, knew they "weren't going anywhere" before the first puck was dropped.
I appreciate the idea of trying to find the silver lining (it got me through the Sabres tank year 2014-15 for sure), but let's not get crazy.

This is where we could make the argument that the Devils had the second best season out of anyone because they have the first pick, and the only team with a better season is whoever wins the Cup