With a week to go in the NHL season, the playoff picture is still not fully set, and the league has already been narrowed to about 20 teams still living with meaningful stakes. The East remains unsettled outside of the Carolina Hurricanes, while the Colorado Avalanche have locked down the Presidents' Trophy and sit as the clear favorite to win the Stanley Cup.
That is the shape of the race now: Carolina is likely to win the Eastern Conference and should finish with more than 110 points, while Tampa Bay still carries the kind of top-end talent that has won before. Out West, the Edmonton Oilers are a near-lock to get back to the conference final and could reach that round for a third straight year, with Connor McDavid still driving the pace and Leon Draisaitl expected back.
The playoff map was supposed to be clearer by now. Instead, late-season tiers still have room for movement, even if the top line is obvious. Colorado has already secured the Presidents' Trophy, and that makes it the unequivocal favorite to win the Cup, a status that no other contender can match heading into the final stretch.
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The first real friction point is in the middle of the bracket, where several teams look good enough to matter and not quite good enough to trust. The Dallas Stars and Minnesota Wild are grouped with the Montreal Canadiens and Buffalo Sabres in the same tier, even though the path for those clubs could not be more different. Dallas and Minnesota will meet in Round 1, then would presumably run into Colorado, while Montreal and Buffalo have been red hot in the second half of the year and are still trying to prove that surge is more than a late push.
There is also no tidy answer in the West beyond Edmonton and Colorado. Vegas has been wildly disappointing so far, and Anaheim remains a negative goal differential team, which leaves the conference with a sharper divide than the East but not a clean one. The central truth of the race is that the league’s best teams have mostly separated themselves, but the bracket still has enough uncertainty to keep the final week from feeling like a formality.
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That is why this week matters. November 2023 already pointed to the Central Division ending up with its top three teams in some order, and this season has now reached the point where the broad outlines are visible without the matchups being fixed. For teams still inside that top tier, the next few days are less about survival than about whether they can secure the best possible road before the real season begins.
