TORONTO – With only two games left in the NHL season for some teams, there’s one glaring difference between the Edmonton Oilers, the Toronto Maple Leafs and the rest of the Canadian NHL teams: playoffs.
Playoffs?! Yes. The Vancouver Canucks, the Calgary Flames, the Winnipeg Jets, the Montreal Canadiens and (possibly) the Ottawa Senators are all in the playoffs while the Edmonton fans long for the days of Gretzky and Leafs fans talk to their grandparents about that time in their more youthful days when there was a parade down Yonge Street.
“You’re really in an 82 game test that 46 per cent of the people fail,” Bob Stellick, a former executive with the Toronto Maple Leafs said in an interview Friday.
Stellick explained that making the NHL playoffs is harder than it ever has been; almost half the teams don’t make it, the gap between the best and worst players is shrinking, and the salary cap is allowing formerly thrifty teams to compete against wealthier teams.
Draft high and win? Maybe not
There’s also a natural ebb and flow to who wins, he said. The weak teams, through high drafting and player development, should pull themselves out of the gutter eventually (with some exceptions – Toronto).
There’s more complicated reasons why Edmonton and Toronto may be the only teams left out of the playoffs, as well – like player development. Edmonton has been drafting high for years, pulling in players expected to be superstars like Taylor Hall but are still floundering at the bottom of the league.
Why? They need a veteran presence.
“You have to build a core of solid, veteran, leadership, if you don’t have that your young guys don’t develop,” he said.
And there’s the virtue of patience. The Calgary Flames, Stellick said, have been rebuilding slowly for a number of years now and have avoided firing coaches (Bob Hartley has been the head coach since 2012) and, for the most part, general managers. They’ve had three general managers since 2010, Jay Feaster, Brian Burke and Brad Treliving. Burke is still with the team as President and Treliving took over the GM’s role in 2014.
WATCH: 5 Canadian teams could be headed to NHL playoffs. Mike Drolet reports.
What about numbers?
Hockey Analytics have become a big part of analysis over the last few seasons, with commentators pointing at certain numbers – like the PDO– as predictive of a team’s chances of winning.
PDO is determined by adding the team’s on-ice shooting percentage and its on-ice save percentage. The numbers usually hover around 100 and for the most part, the teams that are making the playoffs have a higher number than those that aren’t.
Montreal is the highest Canadian team with a PDO of 101.74, according to puckalytics.com. Calgary’s next at 101.23, followed by Ottawa, and Winnipeg. Vancouver (99.22) is an outlier with a PDO below Toronto’s (99.52).
Edmonton, as expected, has the worst PDO in the league at 96.94.
What have the Canadiens done right?
The Habs have been the most successful Canadian team in recent years (and in the history of the NHL). So what have they done right this year? For one thing, Carey Price is currently among the best goaltenders in the league.
And the statistics prove it: The Montreal Canadiens have allowed the fewest goals against in the league. The Habs also own the best save percentage at 93.89 per cent.
The team is currently in second place in the Eastern Conference and owns the second best record in the league with one game to go. Their offence however, has struggled compared to their stellar goaltending. The team has only scored 217 goals this season, putting them in the bottom half of the league in 19th place.
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