TORONTO — The race for Eastern Conference wild-card spots has been insanely tight, thanks in no small part to the push from teams in the Atlantic Division. Over the past month, it seems like all these teams do is win, and often in overtime, which has led to some fairly jumbled standings.
It also feels like, because there’s no clear juggernaut, just getting in could lead to a magical sort of season for some lucky team.
For the first time, though, we’re starting to see some signs of separation. It’s likely, based on what’s happening in the Metro Division, that the Atlantic will send five teams to the playoffs — keep that in mind while thinking this through. That’s great and all, but that also means three pretty good teams will miss the playoffs, and as of today, the three teams on the outside looking in all made last year’s post-season.
The Florida Panthers won the Stanley Cup, as you might recall.
So let’s dive in and assess the playoff chances, or at least the direction, of each Atlantic team, with a blurb on each. There’s no telling what will happen with injuries and/or deadline acquisitions, but we can speculate.
Current standings by points percentage:
All the sorting by points percentage (rather than points) did was highlight that Tampa is in a better spot than Detroit, but otherwise, the order of the rest stayed the same.
Let’s dive in.
Is this finally the year John Cooper wins the Jack Adams Award for the NHL’s best coach? He’s probably been the best coach for some time, overall, and that’s reinforced by his tenure with the Lightning, stretching into its 14th season.
The Lightning have been decimated with injuries this season, particularly on the back-end, yet no matter who they’ve plugged in, they’ve managed to keep winning. They started slow out of the gate, but have surged since. We know that they have the elite game-breakers and the pedigree to go deep, and they seem like the Atlantic’s most viable Cup hope.
The Red Wings have a lot going for them. In no particular order: Their top pair of Moritz Seider and Simon Edvinsson is a massive difference-maker, they’re now getting elite goaltending from John Gibson, they’ve got speed up front and they’ve got assets and cap space to burn.
As a standalone team, I think they’re just OK, like most teams in the league this year. The expected goals-for and expected goals-against graph I regularly check splits teams into four quadrants (good-good, good-bad, bad-good, bad-bad), and the middle of the graph doesn’t look great for the Red Wings. Right at league average in both departments.
But if you take league average, build on defence and goaltending, and you spend some assets to add a couple legit pieces at the deadline, I gotta tell ya: look out. The Wings could not just make the playoffs — they could win some rounds too.
The Montreal Canadiens have accomplished the hardest thing to do in a rebuild: They’ve acquired the type of elite talent that can break games open. They’re thrilling late in games. But there really is a minimum talent floor you have to reach to have a chance, and between Lane Hutson, Noah Dobson, Mike Matheson, Ivan Demidov, Cole Caufield, Nick Suzuki and Juraj Slafkofsky, they’ve got talent in spades.
They’re now onto the next part of the conversation, which is, what’s their ceiling? They’re in a pack with Detroit among teams who we assume will be in the playoffs one way or another, and then we can start getting those next set of questions answered.
The vibes, the mojo, the belief, it’s almost hard to believe we’re seeing it come out of Buffalo, but it’s all there. They’ve got that positive energy.
The D-corps the Sabres drafted and have been waiting on to be needle-movers? I say if you asked some Sabres fans, they’d tell you the needles are getting moved. Some of their picks are moving from prospect to “player,” the JJ Peterka trade worked out great, and they’re finally getting some saves.
Now, it’s all still fairly fragile (having Josh Norris sure helps them, but that’s never a guarantee), but they do have the chance to add at the deadline. With 22 draft picks over the next three drafts, some prospects in wait and a manageable salary cap, their playoff fate is officially in their hands alone.
More than surprised by the Bruins success this season, I find myself looking at last year’s team and going, “Wait, how did that happen?” They’ve got real talent with a legit star in David Pastrnak, Jeremy Swayman is a true No. 1, and between Charlie MacAvoy, Hampus Lindholm and Nikita Zadorov, they’ve got some guys who can play on the back-end. They’ve got the framework for success, and have been having quite a bit of it.
This may be the theme of this division, but their ceiling is the question, and it’s almost certainly lower than the ones mentioned with, say, Montreal. They just don’t have enough talent behind Pasta up front. But they could steady-D and goal-tend their way to the playoffs and be a tough out once they get there.
I wrote at length about these guys earlier in the week, and what’s funny is, almost as soon as I wrote that piece, the worst-case scenarios started to unfold. I said they’ve got a huge stretch ahead, and that they need to stay healthy or it could turn ugly on their season hopes and fast. Then they lost to Detroit and suffered injuries to Oliver Ekman-Larsson and Brandon Carlo. The “best-case scenario” stuff seemed to drain away fast.
Cut to Friday morning, and it seems like OEL is going to play somehow, and so is Carlo, and after a single practice with the Toronto Marlies, Anthony Stolarz is going to return and start against the Golden Knights, which is a stunner. They’re a Chris Tanev resurrection away from completing some David Blaine-like lineup stunner.
As it stands, they’re still largely hobbled as a team and have some tough opponents on the docket. If they can steal some points and stay in the fight over the next few games, they may add and get healthy over the Olympic break, which would help their odds of a climb.
Florida Panthers
The Panthers aren’t gonna miss playoffs … are they? They may be five points out of a playoff spot today, but they’ve got a couple games in-hand on the Bruins, and one of the easier schedules remaining in the Atlantic. They’ve finally got Matthew Tkachuk back, and they’re in too deep to not add and try to get in the post-season. They know that if they get there, they could get Aleksander Barkov back too, and we all know what can happen from there.
I’d never count the Panthers out, but they’re officially playing with fire.
What’s nuts about the Senators is, by the expected goals data, they’re the best team in the division not named the Lightning. As we know, they’ve just gotten horrific goaltending, and that might just bury them. Seeing them blow a 3-0 lead to Nashville and lose in regulation this week, I had that feeling, “I think they’re cooked.” Points are just too valuable, the standings too tight.
But, honestly, if they just got really good goaltending — call it, like, .910 — for the next 32 games, they’d probably climb into the playoff picture. And while that’s great in theory, if teams could just “get .910 goaltending,” they’d probably hit that button as often as it was offered. With Linus Ullmark’s uncertain future, it seems awfully unlikely to happen.
In the big picture with all these teams, a lot comes down to health in a greatly congested schedule. With the Olympic break in February and all the tight races, I expected the hockey in March to look an awful lot like the pace you usually see reserved for the playoffs.
