We have 12 NHL games on the schedule Saturday night. While some big hitters in the Western Conference meet up in cross-divisional games, there’s also a variety of matchups that will factor in to the tight wild-card races in both conferences, and shape how we view everyone’s chances in the coming days.
Here is your Stanley Cup Playoff outlook heading into Saturday.
EASTERN CONFERENCE
If the regular season ended today…
(A1) Tampa Bay vs. (WC2) Columbus
(A2) Boston vs. (A3) Toronto
(M1) Washington vs. (WC1) Carolina
(M2) NY Islanders vs. (M3) Pittsburgh
Team on the rise: Pittsburgh Penguins
It’s a yearly tradition: write off the Penguins, or at least consider the possibility they’ll miss the playoffs in the middle of a season, and then watch it all come together down the stretch as they arrive in the post-season a top contender again.
Considering Kris Letang has been out of the lineup since last month’s outdoor game, Phil Kessel just came off a 16-game goal drought 10 days ago and Evgeni Malkin has a single goal this month, Pittsburgh’s late bid for first-round home-ice advantage this time can be chiefly attributed to two players in particular: Sidney Crosby and Matt Murray.
Starting with Crosby who is, quietly for him, fourth in league scoring. He’s done his best to keep pace with Nikita Kucherov for the past quarter. In 21 games from Feb. 1 to today, Crosby has 34 points, which is just two back of Kucherov in that span and good for a 13-point lead on the next-highest scoring Pen, linemate Jake Guentzel. Crosby’s also been the main reason why Jared McCann is suddenly finding some offence in his game.
Murray has been significantly better in the second half after starting October and November with an .877 save percentage. Since mid-December and among goalies who started at least 19 games, Murray’s .931 save rate is tied for third-best in the league.
Performances like these from Pittsburgh’s best are why they’re never a team you can count out. You figure it’s only a matter of time before Malkin and Kessel start to come around in a big way (and actually, Kessel has already started to). There’s a distinct possibility the Penguins will come out of this weekend second in the Metropolitan Division.
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Team in decline: Montreal Canadiens
Their power play has just never got going this season, but Montreal’s 5-on-5 play is what kept the offence alive for much of the season. Through the 2018 part of the schedule, the Habs had 96 5-on-5 goals, which ranked behind only Tampa Bay and Toronto in the NHL.
Since then it’s taken a turn, though. In January they ranked 27th in 5-on-5 goals, they were back up to fourth in February, and so far in March they’re 15th. All told, Montreal has the 13th-best 5-on-5 offence in 2019. Meanwhile, their power play continues to flounder, with a league-low 10 per cent conversion rate since the calendar flip.
As always, the key to Montreal even getting into the playoffs is Carey Price and he’s been great, allowing more than three goals in a game just three times over the past month. But the fact the offence is slowing and that Shea Weber has been leaking shots, scoring chances and goals against this month much more than he had been in his reliable late start to the season is a concerning trend for Montreal. And now, on Saturday night, they have to hang with Chicago’s surging offence.
Here’s what the Eastern Conference standings look like today:
What’d I miss? It was ugly, but the Columbus Blue Jackets earned a two-point advantage on Montreal in the race for the second wild-card spot with a 3-0 win over Carolina on Friday. They did it on just 20 shots, recording only two in the second period and four in the third. Sergei Bobrovsky put forth another super effort and his 46 saves were the second-most in a shutout effort in the NHL this season. Bobrovsky has been carrying a solid .926 save percentage since Feb. 1.
Meantime, the Leafs continue to bleed defensively with the second pair of Travis Dermott and Jake Gardiner still out of the lineup. We knew defence was the weak point of this club, but it’s slightly worrying to see Frederik Andersen struggle a bit recently. After getting pulled in back-to-back games, he allowed six goals on 29 shots in Friday’s 7-6 win over Philadelphia. It’s a little reminiscent of last season when Andersen posted an .884 save percentage in March and proceeded to allow three goals or more in five of the seven first-round games against Boston.
Andersen has been Toronto’s MVP all season for how he’s patched up some of the defensive issues with the team, but cracks are at least starting to show. If he’s cold come playoff time the Leafs are doomed, so it’s worth watching how he responds in his first game next week against either Nashville or Buffalo.
Fun fact: The Lightning finished with 54 wins and 113 points last season, which set franchise records, and Saturday night they have a chance to pass both marks. With Washington in town, the Lightning are going for their 55th win, which would also give them 114 points. They’re chasing NHL history, too: with 11 games left, the Lightning are eight wins shy of tying the NHL record for 62 wins in a season, set by the 1995-96 Detroit Red Wings.
Game to watch: Chicago at Montreal
For playoff implications, look no further than this game where the Habs try to equal Columbus’ 83 points on the season. With 12 goals in their past six games, Montreal is up against Chicago’s high-octane offence, which hung up five on Toronto and seven on Arizona already this week. The emergence of a devastating third-line combo of Dylan Strome and Alex DeBrincat has made the Blackhawks’ forwards a bit of a nightmare to match up against so the Canadiens offence, and goalie Carey Price, will have all the pressure on Saturday night.
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WESTERN CONFERENCE
If the regular season ended today…
(P1) Calgary vs. (WC2) Arizona
(P2) San Jose vs. (P3) Vegas
(C1) Winnipeg vs. (WC1) Dallas
(C2) Nashville vs. (C3) St. Louis
Team on the rise: San Jose Sharks
Look, the Sharks have been thought of as a contender all season and have a star-studded roster, so we’re not saying they’ve come out of nowhere. But the weakness on this team all season was in net, where Martin Jones and Aaron Dell have combined to post the league’s worst save percentage at 5-on-5. And though they still hold that distinction today, there are signs of improvement.
Jones has started six of their seven March games and has a .921 save percentage. This follows a stretch where he allowed 20 goals in just six games, so whether or not this is just a blip is still to be determined. As a team, San Jose’s 5-on-5 save percentage has been improving for an extended stretch now. Since Feb. 1 their .913 save percentage ranks 24th and their .919 mark since March 1 ranks 15th in the NHL.
This is a team that has the luxury of putting Joe Thornton with Kevin Labanc or, for a time, Gustav Nyquist on its third line so scoring won’t be an issue. Erik Karlsson has been out since Feb. 26 and will add even more dynamism with Brent Burns on the blue line when he returns. Even league-average goaltending would bring the Sharks to a height we haven’t seen much this season, and would make them a of top one or two team in the West.
Team in decline: Minnesota Wild
Bruce Boudreau has been no stranger to calling out his players through this frustratingly inconsistent season. When they went on a four-game losing streak following their bye week, capped off by a 4-1 loss to Edmonton, Boudreau said some of his players were “just a shell” of their former selves. It didn’t help – the Wild won just one of their next six games.
They did kind of get back on track at the end of February, going 6-0-2 through March 7, but it appears they’ve fallen back again. Right after becoming the first team to shutout the Tampa Bay Lightning for a regulation win this season, the Wild followed up with three losses in which they were outscored 13-3 by Florida, San Jose and Dallas. After the most recent loss, it wasn’t the coach who was calling out the effort, but some of the players in the room.
“At this point of the season, at this type of playoff push, your leaders have to be your best — myself included — and right now we’re just struggling with it,” Marcus Foligno told the Minneapolis Star Tribune.
“We have no heart right now,” he continued. “It kind of looks like (the playoffs are) slipping away. We’ve got to figure it out. We still have games left to turn it around, but we keep saying that. We’ve been saying that a lot this year.”
And before you think it can’t get any worse, consider this: the Wild have the toughest schedule remaining in the Western Conference.
Here’s what the Western Conference standings look like today:
What’d I miss? The Vegas Golden Knights and Marc-Andre Fleury continued rolling Friday with a 2-1 win over Dallas that prevented the Stars from taking over third place in the Central Division. It drove the point home about how important the race for first place in the Pacific between Calgary and San Jose is. No one wants to play the Golden Knights in Round 1.
Calgary took care of business with a 5-1 win over the Rangers, led by a five-point effort from Matthew Tkachuk, but also out of that game came news that Sean Monahan is ill and will miss Saturday’s game against Winnipeg. While the Flames have a fair amount of organizational depth when it comes to the blue line or bottom-six, plug-and-play forwards, making up for Monahan is a whole different challenge.
How Peters chooses to proceed will be interesting. As Eric Francis noted, Derek Ryan is likely to end up in Monahan’s spot centring the big line, but if that doesn’t work there’s always the possibility Elias Lindholm could be put there and Tkachuk gets promoted to load up the top trio. Facing the rested Jets on the road in the second half of a back-to-back won’t be easy, but the two points available are huge to Calgary’s long-term outlook.
Fun fact: Tkachuk’s five-point game followed Johnny Gaudreau’s six-point game in Tuesday’s 9-4 win against New Jersey. It was the third time in Flames history that two different players recorded five or more points in consecutive games, with the others being Guy Chouinard and Kent Nilsson (Feb. 25 and 27, 1982) and Joe Mullen, Sergei Makarov and Gary Suter (Feb. 22 and 25, 1990).
Game to watch: Nashville at San Jose
We’ve touched on how big Saturday night’s game is for Calgary and the same is true for the Sharks, who are one point back for the division lead. While the Flames take on the Central’s top team, San Jose gets the second-place Predators who have their own proving to do. A dreadful power play and so-so goaltending from Pekka Rinne in 2019 have been troubling trends for the team, but now their even-strength goals are drying up, too. Since Feb. 1, Nashville’s 51 even strength goals is 24th in the NHL.
Saturday night marks the end of Nashville’s California road trip and the hope is Thursday’s win over the Kings is a building block to a better finish, but the Preds haven’t beaten a team other than lowly Los Angeles in regulation since Feb. 19.
