Will the Canucks Qualify for the 2016 Stanley Cup Playoffs?

Photo Credit: Bob Frid/USA TODAY Sports

It’s U.S. Thanksgiving weekend, and the Vancouver Canucks are in position to make the playoffs.

For all the challenges the Canucks have faced through their first 23 games, that’s not a bad start for a group that got no respect from the prognosticators in preseason polls. Here’s a sample of some of those expert opinions:

I gave the Canucks a little more credit than most of the other writers here, but I bought in to the popular beliefs that the Anaheim Ducks and Calgary Flames would be the class of the Pacific and that the Arizona Coyotes were at least one more year away from icing a competitive group.

As it stands right now, those three teams are the biggest threats to Vancouver’s playoff status at season’s end.

In November of 2014, Ken Campbell at The Hockey News calculated that over the 10 previous NHL seasons, teams that held playoff positions on U.S. Thanksgiving had a 77 percent chance of joining the dance in April. Those are good odds, but far from a sure thing (especially because the Canucks are not in a playoff spot by raw point percentage).

NHL.com allows us to roll back the clock and look at the standings for any particular date on the calendar. Last U.S. Thanksgiving, Boston and Toronto held the Eastern Conference wild card spots, but they were ultimately bumped out by the Ottawa Senators and the New York Rangers. Yes, the eventual Presidents’ Trophy winners sat 11th in the Eastern Conference on November 27, 2014: that’s a good reminder that none of these prognostications are carved in stone.

In the West last season, only one team fell out after Thanksgiving. Los Angeles was bumped from the first wild card spot once Minnesota started its second-half surge after acquiring Devan Dubnyk. So, 13 of 16 teams overall hung on—that’s 81.25 percent of the list.

Only in the Pacific Division did the top three spots on Thanksgiving match up exactly with the results at the end of the season, with Anaheim in top spot, followed by Vancouver and Calgary.

It stands to reason that the teams most at risk of losing their spot are the ones that are sitting closer to the cut line and yes, that group definitely includes the Canucks this year.

Going into last night’s game against the Minnesota Wild, Vancouver was just one point ahead of the Arizona Coyotes and two points ahead of the Anaheim Ducks—and those two teams were playing each other on Wednesday night. If the Canucks had lost to Minnesota, they would have dropped to fourth place when Arizona beat the Ducks. Vancouver could have fallen all the way to fifth if Anaheim had won in overtime.

By hanging on for a scrambly 3-2 win at the Xcel Energy Center, the Canucks kept control of their destiny and stayed, for the moment, on the positive side of the playoff ledger.

Frank Seravalli of TSN.ca reports that, for once, the fancy stats are actually on Vancouver’s side with respect to their playoff prospects. He cites a detailed model by mathematician Micah Blake McCurdy over at HockeyViz.com, which gives the Canucks a 59.6 percent chance of making the playoffs—good enough for eighth place in the Western Conference.

Click here if you’re interested in the specific details of how McCurdy created his model.

Also interesting: McCurdy’s suggesting that the Canucks will only need 91 points to squeak into the postseason, 10 points less than their total from last year and six points less than third-place Calgary accumulated. That lower point total wouldn’t be unprecedented—the Dallas Stars grabbed the second Western Conference wild card spot with 91 points in 2013-14, the first season of the new playoff format.

Is it in the Canucks’ best interest over the long term to make the playoffs? That’s a complicated question.

The management group has made it crystal clear that playoffs are the goal—this year and every year. But if they’re in the hunt in February, will that limit their willingness to trade future unrestricted free agents like Radim Vrbata or Dan Hamhuis, increasing the chance that they’ll lose them for nothing next summer?

I certainly don’t think the Canucks will be buyers. They won’t sacrifice young players for a short-term shot at the postseason or a stronger playoff run. But if Vancouver is in the playoff ballpark as the trade deadline draws near, I can see how Jim Benning would also be reluctant to be a seller. He likes the team he has assembled so unless somebody makes him an offer he can’t refuse, I expect he’ll want to roll the dice with the players he has—like he did last year.

The first quarter of the Canucks’ season has been a bit of a mixed bag. On the plus side: the Sedins have been otherworldly, Jannik Hansen is playing like a legitimate first-liner and the rookies have integrated into the lineup more quickly than we expected. The negatives include Vancouver’s complete inability to score in 3-on-3 overtime, a tendency to blow leads and some key injuries that have forced other players into bigger roles than they might be comfortable with.

If Wednesday’s win in Minnesota is a sign that Vancouver is going to find ways to hang on and win close games, that will immediately translate into an uptick in the standings. If the injuries start to pile up or the Sedins drop off a cliff due to being overworked in the early part of the season, a second-half swoon remains possible. 

Outside factors could also affect the Canucks’ playoff destiny. Though McCurdy’s model suggests that the Ducks and the Flames won’t be able to recover from their early-season woes and that the Coyotes will fall just short of bumping Vancouver out of that third playoff seed in the Pacific, all bets are off if we see one of those teams make a big trade like Minnesota did last year or get on a second-half roll like we saw from the Rangers.

For the Canucks—better to be in the playoff picture right now than to be out of it, but unlike those easy-breezy days of a decade ago, when the Northwest Division title was all but assured, the battle for a postseason position has already begun.