NHL weekend rankings: Which playoff bubble teams are facing the most pressure?
The final wild-card spots in both conferences are a giant question mark, but missing out hurts some teams more than others.
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Facing some devastating injuries, the Red Wings are in danger of getting shoved out of the playoffs. Nathan Ray Seebeck / Imagn Images
It’s mid-March, the Olympic break and trade deadline are in the rear-view mirror, and the stretch run to the playoffs is well and truly on. Exactly one month from today, the NHL regular season will see its final night of action. Can you feel the pressure?
Probably. But how much pressure you feel might vary based on which teams you care about, because in the NHL, not all pressure is created equal. Every team wants to succeed. But there’s a difference between wanting and needing, and there’s a difference between playing with house money and going all-in with your last dollar.
So as we cross the threshold into the season’s final month, let’s have a look at the playoff bubble and rank the teams based purely on how much pressure they’re under to make it. We’re going to ignore the teams that are all but in, as well as the ones who’d need a miracle. That leaves about ten teams that are truly on fence. Here are the five that the most to lose if they … well, lose.
Bonus five: Playoff bubble teams under the most pressure
5. Pittsburgh Penguins – I went back and forth for this spot, and you could argue for teams like the Columbus Blue Jackets or Utah Mammoth instead. On one hand, nobody expected the Penguins to be here, so maybe just holding down a spot for this long is a win on its own. But on the other, this feels like a Last Dance sort of season for Sidney Crosby and friends. And you can’t dance if you’re already at home when the music finally starts.4. Ottawa Senators – We’ll get to the Sens in more detail down below, but right now they look like a team that’s clearly playoff-worthy but might miss anyway thanks to shaky goaltending and a bad winter stretch. Last year’s first-round loss was supposed to be a learning experience, not a ceiling.
3. Los Angeles Kings – The whole Western wild-card race is a bit of a mess, and we’ll get into that down below too. But while the San Jose Sharks are one of those “playing with house money” teams and the Seattle Kraken and Nashville Predators would be disappointed by a miss, the Kings would be devastated. After firing Rob Blake for not being able to get out of the first round, missing entirely would be a disaster – especially in Anze Kopitar’s final season.
2. Detroit Red Wings – You can feel it slipping away. Five losses in their last six has seen the Wings drop to the wild-card, and they start the day in eighth place in the East and with a big target on their back. All those thinkpieces about how Steve Yzerman’s patient rebuild was finally silencing the doubters may have been premature. And if they are, it’s going to feel like catastrophe in a wide-open division.
1. Edmonton Oilers – The good news is that they’re in the best shape of any of these teams, with our projections model having them at 83 percent before last night’s win against Nashville. The bad news is that there’s nowhere near the 100 percent it should be, especially given how weak the Pacific looks this year. After Stan Bowman made his big goaltending trade and then had a buyer’s deadline, an early playoff exit would be disaster. Missing entirely? Unforgivable, which is why the Oilers are the easy call for this spot.
On to this week’s rankings…
Road to the Cup
The five teams with the best chances of winning the Stanley Cup.So … are we allowed to talk about the Department of Player Safety being weird about the Toronto Maple Leafs for pretty much the entire George Parros era, or is that still silly conspiracy talk that we roll our eyes at? Just let me know, I’m good either way — it just felt like it was worth a quick check-in here.
5. Buffalo Sabres (41-20-6, +31 true goals differential*) – Sure, what the hell.
They’ve been knocking on the door for weeks now, and while we try not to overreact to short-term trends around here, we’re into month four of this team being a wagon. That’s not short-term. It may not be permanent, but that’s not the standard here. The Sabres have earned a spot.
There’s actually some risk that I’m too late here and am buying high on a team that just lost in regulation to the Washington Capitals, needed a shootout to beat the Leafs at home, and now heads out on a tough western road wing. But with the Tampa Bay Lightning looking legitimately mediocre, the Sabres suddenly find themselves with a clear path to the division’s top seed.
Whether they get there or not, the Sabres have been the league’s most entertaining story. They deserve a toast. Let’s all drink beers.
4. Minnesota Wild (38-18-12, +29) – Between Bill Guerin’s comments and the sheer absurdity of the standings, this feels like the week where we hit a tipping point on the whole playoff format thing. And yeah, it’s dumb, just like it’s always been. Will the league do anything about it? They didn’t when it was teams like Winnipeg or Columbus in this sort of situation, but let’s see.
3. Carolina Hurricanes (42-18-6, +40) – The last week or so has seen them beat the playoff-bound Lightning and Penguins while losing to the St. Louis Blues and Calgary Flames, because hockey makes sense. They get the Penguins twice more this week, and Pittsburgh pretty much needs to take both in regulation to keep any mirage of suspense in the Metro.
2. Dallas Stars (42-14-10, +54) – They just keep winning, with four straight in the bank heading into tonight’s matchup with Utah. Their only recent loss was to the Avs on March 6, and that was in a shootout. Their last actual hockey loss was all the way back on Jan. 22. This race for top seed in the Central may not be over quite yet.
1. Colorado Avalanche (44-12-9, +86) – Two more regulation losses this week, including one to the stumbling Jets. Wednesday night’s showdown with Dallas suddenly looms as one of the bigger games on the year.
*Goals differential without counting shootout decisions like the NHL does for some reason.
Not ranked: The West’s final four – So we’re down to four teams fighting for one spot in the Western Conference, right?
It sure seems like it, and not just because that’s what all of The Athletic’s experts think. In our latest round of staff predictions, which dropped on Saturday, we had seven Western teams getting 100 percent support as playoff teams. (That would be: The Central’s big three, then the Ducks, Knights and Oilers in the Pacific, plus the Mammoth as the first wild-card team.) Looking at the standings, it’s tough to argue; there’s just no way the Oilers or Knights would actually miss, and a six-point wild-card gap is a steep climb at this time of year.
That leaves one spot for four teams, barring some sort of late-season craziness from a team like the Jets or Blues. (And it’s not like those two teams know anything about crazy finishes.) The four contenders are the Kraken, Kings, Sharks and Predators. And… yeah, I have no idea.
Oh, don’t get me wrong, I know who we’re all rooting for. We’ve seen the Kings lose in the first round for years now, the Kraken are a decent team that don’t seem to really excite anyone, and the Predators are a reasonably fun story that still feels like a long shot.
The Sharks, on the other hand, have emerged as one of the league’s must-watch teams. They’ve got Macklin Celebrini, plus other players who occasionally do stuff like this. Hey, remember when Celebrini was playing on a line with Nathan MacKinnon in the Olympics? How about those two taking the opening faceoff in a playoff series? Yes please.
The Sharks were our staff pick, but with only 40 percent of the vote. The Kings (32 percent), Kraken (20 percent) and Predators (8 percent) divided up the rest. That stands in contrast to the model, which had the Kings as the favorite last night with a 57% chance.
Why the discrepancy? Part of it’s probably a combination of wishful thinking and boredom at seeing the Kings as first-round fodder year after year. The trade deadline probably shifted perceptions around too, with the Kings being the rare team that seemed to be actively selling and buying at the same time. They added Artemi Panarin but lost Warren Foegele, and Kevin Fiala is out for the rest of the season. Is that enough of an upgrade to move the needle? Not everyone seems to think so.
The Kraken had been holding a spot down for most of the year before a recent stretch of four straight regulation losses decimated their chances; Saturday’s win over the lowly Canucks felt like a season-saver. The Predators had been the opposite, looking like they were in the running for dead last before climbing back into the race.
How will it all shake out? It should be fun to find out. Just try not to make it too obvious which team you’re rooting for.
The bottom five
The five teams headed towards dead last and the best lottery odds for a shot at Gavin McKenna or Ivar Stenberg.We got an absolute must-read over the weekend from Scott and Other Sean on Gavin McKenna’s second half and what it means heading into the draft. That includes his off-the-ice assault charge, his dip from consensus top pick to merely in the mix, and some impressive recent production.
5. St. Louis Blues (27-30-10, -43) – They were a disaster all year and sold big at the deadline, so of course they’re heating up now. Yesterday’s regulation loss to the Jets was a huge slump-buster — you’ve got to nip those bad habits in the bud.
4. New York Rangers (28-30-8, -19) – Speaking of bad teams getting hot, the Rangers’ four-game win streak might be the biggest news of this section. On the playoff side, it creates some serious spoiler potential for upcoming matchups against teams like the Kings, Blue Jackets and Senators. And on the lottery side, it could open the door to teams like the Leafs and Devils.
3. Chicago Blackhawks (25-30-11, -36) – They’ve got the Wild twice and then the Avalanche this week, which will at least provide a solid measuring stick of how far they have to go. In other news: Tyler Bertuzzi, still weird.
2. Calgary Flames (26-33-7, -41) – The Flames scored well on our annual Tank Index thanks to a busy deadline of selling. But the Canucks are long gone for 32nd, so at this point it’s about defending those second-best lottery odds the rest of the way.
1. Vancouver Canucks (20-38-8, -78) – Canucks fans, where are you at with Adam Foote? Is he going to be the rare one-and-done, or has this miserable season been all part of a process?
Not ranked: Ottawa Senators – Any team can add a first-round pick at the trade deadline. It takes a really talented front office to pull it off the week after.
The Senators managed that last week, getting their own forfeited pick back from the NHL, presumably because the league reads my stuff and enjoys making it immediately out-of-date. As was strongly hinted at in that piece, this outcome always felt like a decent possibility, given the NHL had already set the precedent by backing off on the Devils’ similar punishment a decade ago. To be clear, the Senators aren’t getting their exact pick back, but rather will pick 32nd while paying a fine. Still, it’s a pretty clear win for Ottawa.
Now the question is how many more wins they can bank down the stretch, because they need all they can get. The Senators came into the weekend as a literal coin flip to make the playoffs, sitting at 50 percent in our projections. But that number looks a lot better this morning after a pair of home wins over the Ducks and Sharks, the latter of which moved them to three points back of a wild-card.
That’s still down from a season that touched 75 percent around the holiday break, but also well up from a low point in the teens in late January. That was around the same time that the organization was embroiled in the Linus Ullmark controversy that seemed to be threatening to derail the season. To their credit, the team appears to have used the ugliness as a rallying cry instead, steadily climbing back into the race.
The question now is whether the first-half hole that they dug was too deep. This has always been a good team that was being held back by goaltending, and now it’s starting to look like a great one that could still run out of time.
It sets up a fascinating stretch run with two very distinct outcomes in play. If the Senators make the playoffs, even as a wild-card, they’ll make for a scary opponent for anyone they face, and maybe even a trendy underdog pick. But if they don’t, the season will feel like a step back and a wasted opportunity. The Atlantic is a division in flux, and watching the Wings and Sabres push past them and the Habs hold their ground would feel disastrous for an Ottawa team that was supposed to learn from last year’s loss to the Leafs.
So… a wasted season (that doesn’t even come with a high draft pick), or a legitimate shot to make some playoff noise? It’s one or the other, and this is where the schedule gets interesting. They get the Capitals on Wednesday, with a chance to put a nail in the Caps’ already-closing coffin. The Islanders are next. Then come what should be a pair of easy wins against lost causes in the Rangers and Leafs, followed by the big one: a showdown in Detroit on March 24 that could see the Wings’ once-secure playoff spot back in play.
Can the Senators take two points on the road in that one? It won’t be easy, especially given the Wings will be rested and the Sens play the night before. And of course, the looming Wings matchup might turn the Rangers or Leafs into classic trap games where a young team takes its eye off the ball. The point is there’s little room for error left in Ottawa because of all the points they left on the board in the first half. But there’s also enough runway to still stick the landing. And if they do… well, your team probably doesn’t want to be playing them.