Daily Update March 24

Sadly, my outlandish bet on the Panthers did not come home. Phil Kessel scored an amazing power forward goal late in the third to make the score close (but remember, Kessel is a soft perimeter player who doesn't go to the dirty areas and disappears at important times) but the Maple Leafs still lost their fifth in a row. Reimer was bad again and may well be playing through a concussion from the game in LA, the same game in which Bernier was hurt. ('through' here is a bad word, since it suggests that playing while concussed will somehow slowly improve the concussion. That is most unlikely.) Just while we're at it, maybe somebody should look at how goalies who play LA mysteriously get hurt; I count Bernier, Reimer, Luongo, and Mike Smith, just off the top of my head. League might want to check that out.

As for tonight, at least the model lines up with my interests by backing Ottawa and Winnipeg while fading Philadelphia and Dallas. Odds on Ottawa look very good for my taste.

Playoff Chances

By popular demand, here is the full set of playoff chances for all 30 teams, using the same categories as I used a few weeks back: Locks, Steady, Bubble, Life Support, Dead. In the east, |Locks| + |Steady| = 8, so even the bubble teams will need somebody to play worse than usual (or be unlucky) to get a spot, let alone the life support teams. These are all over the last fortnight.

Locks

Yeah. If you look extremely closely you can see that there was a time, two weeks ago, where you could just possibly countenance the thought that Pittsburgh wouldn't win the Metropolitan. Not anymore.

Steady

Just keep on keepin' on and she'll be right. These are good teams, mostly, which means that the model is expecting them to win 60% or so of their remaining games. That's not as easy as it sounds late in the season, but these teams pretty handily control their own destiny.

Bubble

Similar chances for all three, around 15-20%, but two are sliding hard and one is sneaking out of the mire. Most likely is that all three miss.

Life Support

Need spectacular efforts and also massive luck. Not gonna happen.

Dead

Bring out the forks. Relevant only to shame teams that lose to them (which will happen several times, to great amusement) and to amuse me as I try to compute outlandish scenarios that save them from being mathematically eliminated.

In the west, there are fewer teams, so the predictions are a little more clear-cut:

Locks

Lots of jockeying for position but none of these teams in the faintest danger of falling out.

Steady

This is pretty close to being a lock in practice since they only need to keep playing as good as they have been and they haven't exactly set a high standard.

Bubble

The only real fight left; only one of these teams will make it, assuming Minnesota does. They play each other on the final night of the season, too.

Life Support

Same story as the east, tremendous runs together with massive luck.

Dead

If there was any doubt about which of these two dreadful teams was the better, look no further than the 8-1 drubbing from the other day. There's bad, and then there's Edmonton.

Points after elimination

Team	Points	Games
Buffalo	2	3

Florida are exceptionally close to being eliminated. The only scenario that seems to work is if they win all of their games in regulation, Toronto must pick up 0 points from 9 games, Washington must pick up no more than 1 point from 10 games, and Columbus must pick up no more than 2 points from 11 games. Amazingly, all of those things can all happen, since Tor/Was/Col have no games among themselves. The situation for Edmonton is similar; win all their games, all but a few of them in regulation, and have phoenix lose all their games in regulation, and Dallas lose all their games in regulation except the one against Phoenix, and have Vancouver take three points or fewer from their last nine. St Louis clinched a spot with the win in Pittsburgh.