The New York Rangers Are Exciting. That's Hurting Their Playoff Chances.
The New York Rangers have been on some kind of a roller-coaster ride this season. Coming off a pair of rebuilding years and picked to finish in the lower half of the league again this time around, the Blueshirts nonetheless featured a bevy of exciting players, such as high-scoring winger Artemi Panarin. But they started ice cold and spent most of the season's first half just trying to break even. Recently, though, New York had been ascendant; perhaps as a result, the team even declined to sell off prized trade-chip Chris Kreider at last Monday's NHL trade deadline. Krieder, of course, suffered a long-term injury almost immediately thereafter, and a pair of losses in a weekend home-and-home against the Philadelphia Flyers left the Rangers' playoff odds hanging in the balance at 29 percent, according to .
The Rangers are one of the youngest teams in the league, so we might have expected this kind of up-and-down performance out of them. But there's something else keeping them from a playoff position: New York wouldn't be battling it out like this if not for the NHL's bizarre standings format and the weird incentives that emerge from it.
Since 1999, the NHL has given 2 points to the winner of each game and 1 point to a team that loses in overtime. (At the time, this was done to make teams more aggressive late...