Sizing up the Eastern Conference playoff picture

So. It’s January 18, and the Flyers are legitimately, truly in the playoff race. We’re still not entirely sure how or why, but we’re more than halfway through the season, and the Flyers are closer in points to the Metropolitan Division-leading Rangers than they are to the first team out of the playoffs in the East. Public playoff models all have them at over a 50 percent chance to make it, while sportsbooks pretty much all have them as odds-on to make the playoffs.

With all of that said, if you haven’t been looking around at who else is in it this year, now’s a good time to take a look at the playoff picture in the East. The middle of the conference this year is packed in pretty tight, and a couple of good or bad weeks could really change a team’s position drastically given how many of them are in the race. With that, below is a look at the teams that the Flyers are fighting with for one of the East’s playoff spots.

There are a few teams that we are not going to spend much time discussing because they are all very, very likely to make the playoffs:

• Boston is leading the East once again. I don’t know how they keep getting away with this.
• New York (the Rangers) are leading the Metro. I actually do know how they keep getting away with this: by being the same team they have been for the last 15 years. Sadly, still working out pretty well for them.
• Carolina is actually only a smidge ahead of the Flyers by points percentage, but public models all feel very sure that they’re going to make the playoffs, as they’ve shaken off an unimpressive start to the season and get some obvious benefit of the doubt based on the team they’ve been for the past half-decade.
• Florida is actually not too far behind Boston in the standings, and what they’ve done on the ice this year suggests that they’re closer to being the team that picked it up late in the year last season and made a run to the Final than to the team they were earlier in that season.

There are also a few teams that we are not going to spend much time discussing because they are very obviously not going to make the playoffs:

• Columbus stinks. Johnny might be cursed.
• Ottawa also stinks. Claude might be cursed.
• Buffalo has started to pick it up after a dreadful start, but it is probably too little too late given how crowded the picture is.
• Montreal doesn’t totally stink and isn’t cursed, but they’re still a couple years away.

If we’re right about those ones, meaning there are four teams that are definitely in and four teams that are definitely not, that leaves us with eight teams fighting for four spots. And there are some notable teams that have been powerhouses in this conference for most of the past decade or longer that we haven’t named yet. Let’s talk about them, listed in order of least to most likely to make the playoffs based on an average of the current odds from three different public projection models out there (at Hockeyviz, Moneypuck, and The Athletic). Any statistics cited below (beyond standings-level stuff like wins/losses/goal differential) are via Moneypuck unless otherwise noted.