Happy (American) Thanksgiving to our (American) readers.

Heck, Happy American Thanksgiving to all of our readers. And it is a happy occasion for fans of the Vancouver Canucks.

Why?

Because it’s Thursday, November 28, 2024, and the Canucks are in a playoff spot. On points, they’re holding on to the last wild card spot in the Western Conference by a single point over the Edmonton Oilers. But on point percentage, which is the more important measure, the Canucks woke up on Thursday morning in third place in the Pacific Division with a .595 record.

Were the postseason to start today, the Canucks would either be facing the Winnipeg Jets (going by point totals) or the Calgary Flames (going by point percentage) in Round 1 of the Stanley Cup Playoffs.

And why is that so important?

Because, as the old adage goes, the NHL playoffs – and, more specifically, who makes them – are decided by American Thanksgiving. Many folks believe, and then repeat, that if a team is in a playoff spot by this date each year, then they are almost certain to stay in that playoff spot for the remainder of the regular season.

Of course, the same goes for those not in a playoff spot by American Thanksgiving.

But old adages aren’t exactly known for their accuracy. So, we decided to do a little bit of holiday myth-busting today on CanucksArmy.

Last year, in the 2023/24 season, the Canucks hit American Thanksgiving in second place in the Pacific Division, trailing just the Vegas Golden Knights. And the Canucks did indeed hold on to that playoff spot, eventually leapfrogging the Golden Knights to take the Pacific crown by the end of the season.

All told, of the 16 teams in a playoff position on November 23, 2023, 13 would go on to make the playoffs. That’s a success rate of 81.25%.

The most notable team to break the rule were the Edmonton Oilers, who were out of the playoffs on Thanksgiving and bounced back all the way to the Stanley Cup Finals. The New York Islanders and Nashville Predators also beat the Thanksgiving rule, rising to a playoff position.

The St. Louis Blues, Seattle Kraken, and Detroit Red Wings are the three teams that fell out of one.

Now, we were prepared to dig through the standings archives and figure out the longer trend of this average on our own. But we weren’t exactly looking forward to it because it sounded like tedious work.

Thankfully, others have already tread this trend before us.

According to Greg Wyshynski’s writing on ESPN, the American Thanksgiving Rule has held true for 76.6% of teams in the era of the “wild card” playoff format – meaning that 76.6% of teams in a playoff position by American Thanksgiving each year keep that position, and vice versa – which extends back to the 2013/14 season.

An even longer trend, going back to the all-year NHL lockout of 2004/25, shows that the American Thanksgiving Rule has applied to 76.7% of teams over that span. So, year by year, the adage has about a three-in-four chance of ringing true.

Since we are primarily talking about the Vancouver Canucks here, we should note that this trend, like many things in the NHL, has had a bit of an anti-Vancouver bias. Over the past decade, about 30 teams have gone from a playoff spot on American Thanksgiving to missing the playoffs by the end of the year (not counting those strange, pandemic-impacted seasons where the rule didn’t really apply).

If all were distributed evenly, that’s about one miss for each NHL team. But the Canucks have fallen out of the picture twice, going from third in the Pacific to out of the postseason in both the 2015/16 season and the 2017/18 season. The opposite has not been true for them as of yet in the 21^st century.

So what does that mean for 2024/25? Nothing, really, except that the odds say the Canucks now have a roughly 75% shot of keeping their playoff spot from here on through to April 2025. Or, as a pessimist might put it, they’ve got a roughly 25% shot of losing their playoff spot.

Either way, when it comes to answering the question of how accurate this old adage about American Thanksgiving is, the best answer we can give is “probably more accurate than most old adages, but falling short of being any sort of real predictive tool.”

What has happened so far will play a factor in where the Canucks finish in the 2024/25 standings. But what happens from here on out is probably still significantly more important.