NHL's Thanksgiving playoffs rule unlikely to fit this season

Erik Gudbranson looks at the standings almost every day.

Sure, it's only November, but it's never too early to start thinking about the playoffs and see which teams are atop the division standings.

"Every single point matters," the Vancouver Canucks defenceman said. "You want to stay with that group."

For more than a decade, the status of that group at Thanksgiving has been a significant indicator of who gets to keep playing beyond mid-April. Since the salary-cap era began in 2005-06, 78.4 per cent of teams in playoff position by the fourth Thursday in November have made it. It's so notable that it is considered the NHL's unofficial Thanksgiving rule.

In most years, the picture solidifies in mid-November and an average of 12-13 playoff teams are all but set by Thanksgiving.

Not so much this season, where there are 12 teams separated by eight points in the Eastern Conference and 12 teams separated by five points in the West, making the races too close to call at Thanksgiving.

"With the parity that's in the league nowadays, I don't know if that rule really applies anymore," Calgary Flames winger Troy Brouwer said. "Usually at some point a few teams break away from the pack and the rest of them, because of the three-point games and everybody's playing so many divisional games, you never really gain a ton of ground on a team or lose a ton of ground on a team unless you're continuously losing divisional games."

Led by Steven Stamkos and Nikita Kucherov, the Tampa Bay Lightning are far away the best in the East, while the duo of Jaden Schwartz and Brayden Schenn has the St. Louis Blues atop the West. The Toronto Maple Leafs are talented and the Los Angeles Kings are off to a great start, but there aren't too many teams at the quarter mark that can feel too confident about making the playoffs.

"It's pretty well a .500 league right now," Washington Capitals coach Barry Trotz said. "The teams that have a little more depth like Tampa, who is in a good window, and St. Louis and probably L.A. ... they're the only ones that have really pulled away from anybody. The rest of us are right all there."

A relatively flat salary cap over the past few seasons and the expansion draft that filled the Vegas Golden Knights with the best roster for a first-year franchise in history have served to level the talent discrepancy around hockey.

"There's not much separation between teams," Pittsburgh Penguins centre Riley Sheahan said. "The salary cap makes it a tough league to play in."

But this isn't just about the cap, which has been around 13 seasons. A lot of inter-conference play early is one theory for so many teams being packed together.

"We haven't even started playing in conference, in division games," winger Wayne Simmonds said after he and the Philadelphia Flyers played 17 of their first 22 games against the West. "I think that's where things will start to separate. When everyone's playing the Western Conference or maybe different divisions, the separation you don't see as much."

It's going to be tough going for last-place Buffalo and Arizona to make the playoffs and an uphill climb for should've-been contenders Montreal and Edmonton. The Thanksgiving rule may be moot for this year, but a brutal start is tough to dig out from.

"You can't make the playoffs in November, but you can knock yourself out," veteran Capitals defenceman Brooks Orpik said. "It seems like even when you're down four points at the end of the year, the games get so much tighter and there's more three-point games, it seems like, toward the end of the year. Teams are playing a lot more defensive and safe. It seems like it's easier to pile up points now than it is to try to catch up at the end."

It's not impossible, though, as the 2007-08 Capitals are one of 38 teams to get it done after looking like they're cooked. They fired coach Glen Hanlon on Thanksgiving Day, replaced him with Bruce Boudreau and went from 8-7-6 to a Southeast Division title.

Boudreau, whose Minnesota Wild are 13th in the West but just two points out of a playoff spot, doesn't think much about the Thanksgiving rule.

"If you look at it as this is a truism and you're not in at that time, you have a tendency to (think), 'Aw man, we're not going make it,' and I don't want anybody on our team thinking along those lines," Boudreau said. "But it's going to be close."

It's so close that while Sheahan said you can "start to drive yourself a little crazy" by focusing too much on stats and the schedule, there are no guarantees. Half the playoff teams turned over from 2015-16 to 2016-17, and of the 16 teams in position now, seven didn't make it last spring and one didn't even exist.

The standings are packed, so much that one victory or one loss can shuffle them like a deck of cards.

"It gives you that extra incentive to be ready every single night," Gudbranson said. "You have to be when you can gain one extra point and jump from 10th in the West to a solid wild-card spot — and vice versa, it can go the other way."

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Stephen Whyno, The Associated Press