Who wants the final wild-card berth in the Western Conference?

Who wants the final wild-card berth in the Western Conference playoff race?

Past the halfway part of the regular season, and with the trade deadline approaching, the Western Conference has seen clear separation between the pretenders and the contenders. If you’re a playoff purist who wants to watch best-on-best matchups, the West is likely putting it on a platter for you.

In the Central Division, the four super-talented teams you would have expected to separate from the pack — the Winnipeg Jets, Minnesota Wild, Dallas Stars, and Colorado Avalanche — are entrenched in playoff spots, all with at least 53 points accumulated on the year.

The same is true in the Pacific, where the similarly loaded Vegas Golden Knights, Edmonton Oilers, and Los Angeles Kings all have at least 53 points banked. Or said another way: The West has seven teams playing to a 100-point pace or better, and they are the seven teams you would have likely guessed at the start of the year.

But the postseason requires eight entries per conference, and four remaining hopefuls — the Vancouver Canucks, Calgary Flames, St. Louis Blues, and Utah Hockey Club — are all vying for the final spot. The only problem is these four teams have turned this race into a rock fight, losing games left and right and leaving an awful lot to be desired on the ice.

The eighth seed may come down to which team can best address or mitigate their lineup’s biggest area of concern. To that end, here is a look at what’s holding each of these four teams back right now.

Vancouver Canucks (19-13-10; 3-3-4 past 10 games)

Losing a goaltender the quality of a Thatcher Demko for a stretch would sting any team. But a team this talented should not be carrying a negative goal differential at even strength this deep into the regular season.

How much Demko can lift that performance down the stretch remains to be seen, but teams outscored in the most important game state typically do not qualify for the playoffs. It’s a textbook statistical red flag.

I also can’t ignore this team’s home/road splits. While there is a lot of statistical noise in how teams fare over short stretches at home versus on the road, teams typically outperform when playing on home ice, and, as a result, tend to accumulate a higher percentage of points from home games.

The Canucks are currently a team with meaningful April and May hockey aspirations carrying a 7-8-6 (33 per cent win rate) record at Rogers Arena. Consider that in contrast to the rest of the West:

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You may be bullish on Vancouver pulling themselves out of their home slump, and additionally, it’s fair to acknowledge they have somewhat offset those dropped games by being road warriors (12-5-4 away from Rogers Arena). But a core reason why this team will be fighting for their playoff life the rest of the way is they (along with Utah, notably) have been steamrolled in what should be friendly confines.

Calgary Flames (20-14-7; 5-3-2 past 10 games)

In heightened scoring environments like we’ve seen in the National Hockey League over the past five years, it’s quite difficult to mask or hide an ineffective offence. And while the Flames have shown themselves comfortable leaning on goaltender Dustin Wolf in grind-it-out games, it may not be enough to offset their scoring woes.

Even with the Flames getting strong netminding this season, the team is running the treadmill of mediocrity, hallmarked by a midseason goal differential of -13. It’s in large part because this is one of the most ineffective offences in the league at even strength, averaging just 2.0 goals per 60 minutes played.

That’s good for 30th in the league, and compared to the rest of the West, it’s a considerable outlier:

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There is scoring talent on this lineup – forwards like Jonathan Huberdeau and Nazem Kadri have already scored 10 goals apiece at even strength, but further down the lineup it’s been a challenge to find a reliable scoring touch.

St. Louis Blues (20-20-4; 5-4-1 past 10 games)

No one remembers the conference’s ninth-best team for obvious reasons, but that’s precisely what the Blues were a season ago – a feisty if undermanned team, but one that leaned on outstanding goaltending from Jordan Binnington and fourth-round draft pick Joel Hofer, hanging around the postseason push until the final hours.

The dominance from Binnington and Hofer surely gave the Blues front office confidence heading into this year as they envisioned their retooling of the rest of the lineup. Halfway into this regular season though, Binnington and Hofer have been shells of themselves relative to what we witnessed a season ago.

More pressing than this lost competitive advantage is that all three competitors here — with Demko in Vancouver, Wolf in Calgary, and Karel Vejmelka in Utah — have an outperforming goaltender of their own.

Consider the Blues goaltenders performance year-over-year decline, and then compare it against what the opposition is bringing to the table in terms of starter quality:

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Goaltenders typically experience very cyclical play, and even the most elite puck stoppers are not immune to slumps. Just about every front office in the league would trade an arm and a leg for New York Rangers goalie Igor Shesterkin, who is amidst a season-long slump of his own.

Binnington and Hofer are no exception to this rule. But it’s hard to see how this Blues roster can hang around for much longer if they can’t elevate their play closer to what we saw a season ago.

Utah Hockey Club (18-17-7; 2-6-2 past 10 games)

The adverse impact of injuries to a team’s overall ability to win is a story as old as sports itself. But the timing of this injury bug arriving at the doorstep of the Utah Hockey Club may meaningfully reshape Utah’s trade deadline plans, from possible buyers to sellers in a blink.

It would have been impossible for Utah to have a bad year in the vibes department — a young upstart team in a new home with an ownership group that actually appears to want to win will sound as good in April as it did on opening night. And, notably, this team has been incredibly competitive. The youth movement appears to be firing on all cylinders, and this lineup — in stark contrast with the Canucks above — is outscoring the competition at even strength.

But the injuries have mounted in a hurry. First the cluster injury bug went after the blueline, knocking out veterans Sean Durzi, Robert Bortuzzo, and John Marino in a two-week stretch. And then came the big one: a multi-week lower-body injury to scoring phenom Dylan Guenther, shelving one of the league’s best young players and hitting the top of Utah’s lineup.

How much the injuries have contributed is debatable, but Utah’s been spiralling in this stretch, with a 2-6-2 record in their past 10 games. It does make you wonder if this team, with a crazy amount of cap space and assets already on the balance sheet, looks to act as a seller one last time. Certainly, they would get a pretty penny for Vejmelka, and that’s just the start of it.

That may be the right answer organizationally. But I can’t blame the fans if they want this front office to hold the line for now, considering how competitive they have been since far.

It’s been a spirited year one for Andre Tourigny and Utah in their inaugural season, but it’s hard to imagine them rallying late without some injury luck coming back in their direction.

Data via Natural Stat Trick, NHL.com, Evolving Hockey