from Travis Yost of TSN,

If you love end-of-season hockey and compelling playoff races, a free tip for the final weeks of the season: ignore the Eastern Conference and set your sights out West.

As it stands today, there are eight extremely likely playoff representatives in the West, with teams like the St. Louis Blues (7 per cent) and Minnesota Wild (4 per cent) hanging on by a thread. That’s taken some juice out of any potential wild-card race, though it’s not entirely out of the question.

And yet the next two weeks will be fascinating, in large part because none of the top eight teams have been able to materially separate from one another in the standings. With the points race this tight, the range of possible seeding scenarios and associated matchups for every team remains extraordinarily wide.

Consider just a few points to appropriately frame this.

• The Clarence Campbell race has three teams (Dallas, Vancouver, Colorado) separated by just two points.
• The Central Division race sees three teams (Dallas, Colorado, and Winnipeg) separated by just five points, with chasing Nashville on an 18-game point streak.
• The current No. 5 seed (Edmonton) is just four points ahead of the current No. 8 seed (Vegas).

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