East is LEast no more

[sabresfaninthesouth]

That's more about teams coming from the bottom. There are usually teams from 9-12 that are at the very least in with a chance at this time of the year, no? I know the current alignment complicates things, but right now the conference with more teams has one team on the bubble, and that's it. That makes for 7 teams out of it in one conference by January 19, average 46 games in. At this point last season, the only team that was more than 7 points out of a playoff spot in the East was Buffalo. That's a big swing.

To some extent yes, but I think the basic premise holds that the playoff races aren't really as exciting as the league would like us to believe. But keep in mind he's only talking about 4 points out, which doesn't seem like much. Sure you're talking 4 points back in generally 8-10 games, but with 70+ games yet to be played, logic would suggest that there should be a lot of movement, while stats say otherwise.

And in fairness, his premise was based on Nov. 1 and we're looking at numbers in January, so things have probably shaken out a bit since then.