Most NHL players claim they avoid looking at the standings, but there’s one trope they have begrudgingly memorized: the standings are largely set by American Thanksgiving.
“I know that’s usually the indicator: 80% of the teams that are in usually make the playoffs,” Blackhawks defenseman Matt Grzelcyk said Wednesday.
Grzelcyk’s guess was pretty close. Since 2005, 77.1% of teams in playoff position on Thanksgiving have wound up qualifying in April (per ESPN), which is significant. Current Kings general manager Ken Holland is credited with first proposing the theory decades ago, and it stuck.
This season, however, the Thanksgiving rule doesn’t seem particularly relevant. The NHL is witnessing a degree of parity not seen in a long time, and it has rendered the standings less meaningful than usual. Most teams are still clustered too tightly to be differentiated.
In the Eastern Conference, the first-place Devils (with 31 points) are just four points above the playoff cut-off line and nine points ahead of the last-place Sabres (22 points). It’s a remarkable logjam.
In the West, the Avalanche (39 points) and Stars (34) are pulling away from the pack while the Predators (18) and Flames (19) drag behind it, but the other 12 teams are also separated by just nine points.
The Hawks have lost four in a row for the first time this season, but with 25 points, they’re still just two points out of a playoff spot —with a game in hand on the Mammoth above them.
“It’s an interesting league right now, to be honest,” coach Jeff Blashill said Tuesday. “It probably has as much to do with confidence as anything else, because everybody is so close.
“[The Lightning] went through a stretch early where they weren’t winning with a full roster; now they’re winning a bunch with not a full roster. Throughout the league, Boston has gone on long streaks; Pittsburgh has gone on streaks. The league is so tight where [most games are] really close games, and once you find a way to win, you can go on streaks. If you lose, you’ve got to be careful of going on a bad streak. That’s where we are. We’ve got to find a way to play with the urgency level necessary to stem the tide.”
Blashill is correct about the close games, too. As of last week, when the NHL reached the quarter mark of the season, 81% had been decided by one goal when excluding empty-netters — the highest rate in history — and 90 had gone to overtime, the most ever at this point.
Those frequent overtimes are having the secondary effect of distributing a lot of “loser points,” which contributes to the bunched-together standings.
“It’s good for the league to have so much parity,” Grzelcyk said. “There will be more meaningful games at the end of the year. A lot of teams feel like they have a chance.”
The Hawks are included in that. For them, the relatively even distribution of talent across the league — and resulting lack of dominant contenders — should give them a better chance of playing in those meaningful games.
They’ve played fairly well in three of their four defeats during this skid, so there’s reason to believe they’ll snap out of it soon. If they can simply hang on the 10th-to-12th range of the Western standings entering March, that should put them within striking distance of a wild-card spot as winter begins to thaw.
Whether or not they end up actually earning a spot — something projection models and betting lines don’t currently have much faith in — the chase would provide valuable experience for their young, raw roster.
The Hawks provided a first indication last April in Montreal that they have the moxy to step up in high-intensity, high-stakes environments. It would be interesting to get a larger sample size of that this season.