Toronto Maple Leafs: NHL Playoff Preview: Contenders and Pretenders

The Toronto Maple Leafs are less than two weeks away from playing the Columbus Blue Jackets in the best of five play-in series.

The Toronto Maple Leafs and Blue Jackets will be one of eight play-in series, the winners of which will take on the teams that received byes to the playoffs.

Should the heavily favored Leafs get by the over-achieving Blue Jackets, they would play one of Boston, Philadelphia, Tampa or Washington, depending on the results of a small round-robin tournament that will happen concurrently with the play-in round.

The NHL playoffs, such as they are, contain 24 teams.  So who are the contenders and who are the pretenders?

NHL Playoffs

The NHL generously let eight teams into the playoffs, and most of them are pretty bad, although the Canadiens, for instance, had a bit of an unlucky year and probably have a better roster than several of the teams ahead of them

The Duds:

Rangers:  If not for Artemi Panarin’s Hart-worthy season they’d be competing with the Senators, not the Leafs.

Islanders: From the first game of the season to the first of December, the Islanders got the second best 5v5 save percentage in the NHL and were ranked 3rd overall.

After the first of December, they got the 23rd best goaltending in the NHL and were ranked 23rd overall in the standings during that period.   They are truly one of the NHL’s worst teams. (stats naturalstattrick.com).

Florida:  Sergei Bobrovsky can always go on a tear, but otherwise they are extremely thin after their best players.   That they were seven points ahead of Montreal when play stopped should tell you all you need to know about the randomness of the NHL standings.

It’s pretty ridiculous that one of Florida or the Islanders is guaranteed to make the next round.

Canucks:  They have a nice core group of players, now they need a GM who won’t trade Brock Boesser.  They’re still well off competing.

Nashville: They’ve got a nice blue-line, that’s about it.

Blue Jackets:  Like the Islanders, they’re entirely propped up by wacky goaltending.  They may legitimately have the worst roster in the NHL if you don’t count Detroit and Ottawa.

Chicago: It’s kind of embarrassing for the NHL that they’re in this.

Only a Goalie Can Save Them:

Arizona:  They’ve got one of the best goalies in the world in Darcy Kuemper who only injuries prevented from being in the Hart conversation two years in a row.  If he’s hot, the Coyotes get elevated status.

Winnipeg:  Like the Coyotes in that they aren’t a very good team, they’ve also got a fantastic goalie who can win them the Cup under the right circumstances.

Dallas:  Again, not a very good team but a great goalie in Ben Bishop.

Underrated

To me, two teams really stand out as being  underrated.

The Canadiens roster is so much better than people give it credit for being, and their low standings position is really the result of two luck driven losing streaks that sabotaged their season.

Strong team stats and just a generally decent roster with some nice high-end pieces make them really underrated.

The Wild are another team who is crazy underrated.  Tons of great defensive and otherwise underrated players populate their roster, and I think they could be the kind of unsuspecting team that goes on a run. Regardless, they have one of the NHL’s more underappreciated rosters.

Middle of the Pack

These teams are OK, they’ve got decent enough rosters but aren’t quite good enough to be true contenders, while at the same time, if they did chance to win the Cup, it wouldn’t really surprise anyone:

Pittsburgh, Washington, Philadelphia, Colorado, St. Louis, Edmonton and Calgary.

The Contenders

Toronto, Boston, Tampa, Vegas and Carolina are the NHL’s best teams.  They all have excellent offense, strong defense and good goalies.

But most of all, they are the teams that have the most elite players.  The standings go up and down; results are random.  Injuries occur.

These five teams are significantly better than there competition.  Unfortunately for them, however, in the NHL there isn’t a very large margin between any of the teams.