Western Conference playoff race remains incredibly close
The race for the second and final wild card spot in the Western Conference is about as close as it gets, even if it’s not due to several teams all getting hot at the same time toward the end of the season.
Few teams have been able to sustain strong play, but the Nashville Predators, Los Angeles Kings, Seattle Kraken, San Jose Sharks and Winnipeg Jets are all within three points of each other with under 10 games to go in the regular season.
On Tuesday’s episode of Daily Faceoff LIVE, host Tyler Yaremchuk and co-host and former NHL goaltender Carter Hutton discussed the state of the race for the second wild card spot, which comes with the honor of taking on the Colorado Avalanche in the first round.
Tyler Yaremchuk: You look at this Western wild card race, I kind of said it a month ago, and they’ve lingered around like all the way down to Winnipeg, Hutts. Winnipeg is not dead in this race at all. If they win that game in hand they have on Nashville, they are one point back of the Nashville Predators.
Carter Hutton: I know it’s crazy to think that they are hanging around in this situation, and it’s been just a bit of a dogfight now because every game is so important, but it’s been so lackluster that all these teams are able to hang around. It was interesting to find for me that after the post-Olympic break the St. Louis Blues have the second best record in the NHL going into last night and that loss to the San Jose Sharks like if they win that game they’re sitting at 75 points, and the Kraken are still there. It’s going to be such an interesting race to get there, and the team for me that I find like hanging around would definitely be the Jets because I feel like we wrote them off a month or two ago… I think about LA and Seattle; they have a lot more pressure on them in my opinion than a San Jose than a Nashville because expectations are much higher to get in.
Tyler Yaremchuk: It just feels like every time you write a team off they find a way to just sort of linger around and win a few games… It’s still so so wide open and you know people have talked about the playoff format and things like that people have talked about do you need to expand the playoff picture and do something like the NBA does with a play-in and all that. There is no need to expand the playoff picture if it’s going to keep staying this close right up until the end of the season.
You can watch the full segment and the rest of the episode here…