5. New York Islanders – 89<\/p>\n
The focus of the Eastern Conference has shifted away from the wild-card race to the Atlantic Division.<\/p>\n
Tampa Bay, Buffalo and Montreal all enter Wednesday with 102 points. The Lightning and Canadiens face off Thursday in Montreal. Buffalo faces the New York Rangers on Wednesday night. <\/p>\n
The Lightning lost three of their last five to open up the door for the Sabres or Canadiens to win the division.<\/p>\n
If Tampa Bay can beat Montreal, or at least get a point out of the game, it should win its final three against Boston, Detroit and the Rangers. <\/p>\n
Buffalo finishes with the Rangers, Columbus, Chicago and Dallas. Montreal takes on Columbus, the New York Islanders and Philadelphia after its clash with the Lightning.<\/p>\n
The Canadiens have the most difficult schedule of the three, so it might come down to the Lightning and Sabres picking up points against worse teams. <\/p>\n
Ottawa has two points of separation between itself and the rest of the challengers for the final wild-card spot. <\/p>\n
The Senators face three eliminated teams and the Islanders to conclude the regular season. They will be in the postseason if they handle their business in those games. <\/p>\n
The four chasers need the Senators to slip up on multiple occasions to have a sniff at landing the final playoff position in the East. <\/p>\n
Columbus, Detroit, the New York Islanders and Washington all had opportunities to distance themselves from the pack, but they haven’t been consistent enough to do so.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"5. New York Islanders – 89 The focus of the Eastern Conference has shifted away from the wild-card…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":547526,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[463,464],"tags":[5,4,60,14,104,718],"class_list":{"0":"post-547525","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-nhl-playoffs","8":"category-stanley-cup-playoffs","9":"tag-hockey","10":"tag-nhl","11":"tag-nhl-playoffs","12":"tag-stanley-cup","13":"tag-stanley-cup-playoffs","14":"tag-stanley-cup-playoffs-nhl"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nhl\/116369636321384536","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/547525","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=547525"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/547525\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/547526"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=547525"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=547525"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=547525"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}