Playoff Bubble - Playing the West

Tyler Dellow took a look at the playoff bubble recently and offers up a lot of really good information. One piece that might be helpful if added is the record of the bubble teams against the Eastern and Western conferences in order to get a better idea of where the points are coming from.

Vs. West

Anaheim 22-16-4 = 0.571 pts%

Vancouver 19-15-6 = 0.550 pts%

Dallas 19-16-4 = 0.538 pts%

Edmonton 20-18-3 = 0.524 pts%

St. Louis 17-16-2 = 0.514 pts%

Los Angeles = 16-16-6 = 0.500 pts%

Phoenix = 19-19-4 = 0.500 pts%

Columbus 18-20-4 = 0.476 pts%

Nashville 18-21-2 = 0.463 pts%

Minnesota 17-20-2 = 0.462 pts%

Colorado 20-25-1 = 0.446 pts%

Vs. East

Minnesota 11-2-1 = 0.821 pts%

Columbus 8-3-1 = 0.708 pts%

Los Angeles 8-5-1 = 0.607 pts%

Dallas 7-4-3 = 0.607 pts%

Edmonton 7-5-1 = 0.577 pts%

Nashville 7-5-1 = 0.577 pts%

Colorado 5-4-0 = 0.556 pts%

Vancouver 6-5-2 = 0.538 pts%

Phoenix 6-6-1 = 0.500 pts%

Anaheim 6-8-1 = 0.433 pts%

St. Louis 5-9-1 = 0.367 pts%

Now obviously all of these teams are going to be facing the Western Conference teams a lot more often than the Eastern Conference teams. The teams that will suffer the most from this shift are Minnesota and Columbus. Colorado benefits the most by far since they still have nine games left against the Eastern Conference. Unfortunately for them, they're almost certainly too far behind for it to matter. The other big benefactor is St. Louis since they only need to play the East three more times... unbelievable. If we extrapolate the current point totals using the above percentages for the remaining games we get the following figures:

Dallas = 90.8

Vancouver = 89.8

Anaheim = 88.7

Minnesota = 88.7

Edmonton = 87.9

Columbus = 86.4

Los Angeles = 85.9

Phoenix = 82.0

Nashville = 80.1

St. Louis = 78.9

Colorado = 77.2

Tyler's data suggested that Columbus and Minnesota had the most difficult schedules remaining and this data is only pointing further in that direction. Los Angeles is also probably pumped up a bit by this measure since these results reflect their early home heavy schedule and they're going to be playing almost two thirds of their final thirty games on the road. The other four teams look to be just too far behind. It looks to me like the four teams that make it in are Dallas, Vancouver, Anaheim and Edmonton with Minnesota having the best chance at spoiling one of those spots (probably Edmonton's).