Good morning, Upper East Siders. We’ve officially entered “just get in” season, where arguments are being made for NHL teams to prioritize squeaking into the playoffs above all else. Seems simple enough? Welp, you didn’t subscribe to this newsletter for me to keep simple things simple! Let’s dissect this and make it messier than it needs to be.

Some recent patterns in the NHL playoffs have ignited fascinating narratives.

We’ve all heard about the President’s Trophy curse. I hate it - I’ve always hated it - but one of my 2026 New Year’s Resolutions was to get ragebaited less (and to ragebait more in return) so I will not be talking about it.

As over-invested hockey fans, we tend to overcomplicate things.

Say it with me: You want to have the most wins under your belt as you can going into the post-season. You want to secure home ice advantage in as many series as possible. You want to have the most experience winning close games, kicking divisional rival ass, and creating positive processes.

I’ve always said that in the NHL, any team can surely win any one game on any given night. It does not mean they are highly favoured, nor does it mean that we should expect them to do so, but with how long the season is and how many variables play into outcomes, it’s always a possibility.

And so, it doesn’t take an analytics genius to state this fact: you have a better chance of winning a hockey game you are playing in than a hockey game you are not playing in.

So why not challenge the odds and try to make it to game 83, under any circumstances?

Everyone loooooves the 3-2-1 point system as a concept, but let’s be real - the NHL will never go there.

The tighter the standings are, the better things are for the league. This season in particular, the parity has been astounding. Coming out of the Olympic break, only a handful of teams were being looked at as consensus heavy deadline sellers.

I think the standings give too impersonal a snapshot of most teams’ realities. You can do some quick math to calculate how many games you’d have to win to catch the teams ahead of you, and the number doesn’t seem too daunting. The false hope that “possibility” enables makes us delusional. The truth is, most teams in the middle of the standings in the spring are lacking the upside, consistency, and experience of the league’s elite. If you have to make “buyer” moves when you’re in the mushy middle to just get in… is that worth it?

Main character syndrome is on full display when people think that because something happened to someone else, it’ll happen to them.

Does everyone remember the 2019 Blues? The Craig Berube era, Joel Edmundson’s croptop, Jordan Binnington’s girlfriend ****** ** *** *** - of course you do.

The same way everyone points to the modern Washington Capitals when arguing that retools can work, people love to cite St. Louis’ cup run when a good team underperforms as an example of “what could still be”.

History lesson - the St. Louis Blues started 2019 dead last in the league. They went on to win the Stanley Cup on June 12th of that same year. Many events transpired over the course of those storybook six months, but what’s important is that they were incredibly unique to that group in that context.

The St. Louis Blues entered the playoffs as the 3rd place team in the Central Division. They “just got in”. But “just getting in” isn’t what won them their Stanley Cup. It was players buying into a coaching change. It was a red-hot rookie goalie who met every moment. It was a top 4 of Edmundson, Pietrangelo, Bouwmeester, and Parayko that played an absurd amount of ice time. It was Jaden Schwartz shooting 20% at 5on5 through the playoffs.

Do you want to know the truth about the 2019 St. Louis Blues that big pharma doesn’t want you to know? They got pretty lucky. Don’t get me wrong - most winning teams do - but I recall there being a lot of moments that I would describe as rather fortunate for that group.

And if there’s one thing we know about hockey, it’s that relying on luck to recreate itself is not a sustainable recipe for success.

As I alluded to earlier, I think we sometimes get “it’s possible” confused with “it’s likely”. False hope is one hell of a drug, and sometimes, when people see a path forward, they’re like a horse with blinders on. A Manitoba woman has won an Olympic gold medal in speed skating. I also know how to skate. That doesn’t mean an Olympic gold medal is in my future, especially if we don’t share any similarities that are predictive of that same result.

That’s kind of how some of you sound sometimes. The only similarities between your favourite team and the 2019 St. Louis Blues is that they’re both hockey teams. And also that their goalies are weird.

The opportunity cost of just getting in can vary significantly depending on internal factors (where your team is at in their rebuild/retool, how they draft and develop, etc.) and external factors (namely, what the upcoming draft class looks like).

One of the most dangerous things a team can do from an asset management perspective is commit to “just getting in” by A) spending draft capital to make their team good enough to just get in, and then B) ending up with poor draft positioning because of it. The tough part about just getting in is that if that’s the route your team ends up going, you run the risk of falling out of the playoff race right at the end.

From a hockey standpoint, it’s devastating for fans and players alike, and from a business standpoint, it sucks to forego the playoff revenue they would have accumulated if they’d snuck in.

As Thomas Drance so eloquently put it in this Twitter thread, one of the more harmful things teams can do when rebuilding is deny their reality and be bad by accident before deciding to be bad on purpose.

A lot of the teams who are bad enough to be humouring the “just get in” argument are 1-2 years out of admitting they don’t have the horses to contend and recalibrating their roster. If that’s where you’re going to be in a few years, is it not harmful to fall from a potential lottery pick to a mushy middle first-rounder?

Consider this year. The difference between accepting your fate and prioritizing just getting in could be giving up McKenna/Stenberg/Verhoeff for Viggo Bjorck. No offense, king. And that’s if your efforts to just get in fail. If you squeak in, your first rounder automatically becomes the 17th pick or lower. Most years (I’m not looking at you, 2015), there’s a massive talent gap between those lottery range picks and mid-first rounders.

I guess the interesting thing is this: true to their names, there is a lot of variability at play in the wildcard race and the draft lottery. If you play your odds in the former, you have a chance to win a Stanley Cup. If you play your odds in the latter, you’re just taking another step towards trying to get back to having a chance to win a Stanley Cup.

Let’s say getting to cup contender status is a 25-step process. Let’s say “just getting in” is the 12th step and winning the draft lottery is the 1st step. Let’s say you acknowledge that if you go all the way down to the 1st step, you might end up scaling up to the 25th step more quickly. Do you see how many “if”s and “might”s creep their way into that analogy? If the goal is to climb up that ladder, shouldn’t we cling to any sense of progress we can? Even if you fall down to that 1st step again, there’s no actual guarantee you’ll be able to even get to the 12th step again before having to start all over.

Everything is an odds game. Take the higher percentage shot, I say from my comfy armchair as I look at decision-makers. Every team’s position is a bit different - you have to factor in what your prospect pool looks like, how much a playoff push can impact your team’s morale, what your path to the cup would be, and only about twelve billion other things.

So where do we go from here?