NHL weekend rankings: Playoff outsiders I still believe in, at least for now

It was a rough year for one of my favorite stats. Years ago, when Elliotte Friedman introduced his curse of November 1, I had the same reaction that most fans seemed to: It didn’t make sense. Over a decade ago, Friedman pointed out how rare it is for a team to be four points out of the playoffs at the start of November and end up making it, but the results felt wrong. After all, you can make up four points in two games – doing it in five months should be easy. And yet, Friedman found that the failure rate was close to 90%.

So can any teams break the curse this year? Yes. Two of them, and that’s it, because only two teams were four points back as of Friday. Those teams would be the Predators and Blackhawks, and yeah, I think one of them is a little more likely to make the push than the other. But thanks to a late start and Gary Bettman’s beloved leaguewide parity, almost everyone is close enough not to panic yet. (In the East, nobody was even two points back when the new month began.)

OK, so much for this year’s early season curse narrative, at least until US Thanksgiving arrives and we can switch to that one. But there are still lots of good teams that are outside the playoffs right now, including some we all assumed would make it. So today, I’m going to see if I can name five teams that wouldn’t be in the playoffs if they started today (based on points percentage), but that have a good shot to be in when it matters.

That’s going to be tougher than it could have been, since the Oilers moved back into a spot after last night's win and robbed me of a freebie. But we love a challenge, so let’s do this from least to most confidence.

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