Where will the Florida Panthers finish in the standings?

Pucks and Numbers: a weekly statistical look at what's happening around the NHL. This week: A look at where the Florida Panthers should be expected to finish in the standings.

If the Florida Panthers end up making the playoffs this season their fans shouldn't really care why or how it happens. Especially if it results in the team winning its first division title in franchise history.

After sitting through 10 straight years of mediocre-to-bad hockey without seeing a postseason game, they're just as deserving as anybody else to see meaningful games in April.

That doesn't mean the rest of us can't sit back and wonder just how in the heck it's happening.

Or why it's happening.

We've already established that the division, the Southeast, is pretty terrible, and as of Tuesday afternoon the Panthers are sitting in the top spot with 77 points (one ahead of the Capitals), a total that is only seventh best in the Eastern Conference, and worse than 15 other teams around the NHL.

No matter how you slice it, the Panthers are a completely mediocre team that is in a position to take advantage of an equally mediocre division, but because they're on top of said division, they currently have one of the top three seeds in the Eastern Conference.

Quite honestly, this isn't even the best team the Panthers have put on the ice over the past 10 years. If they maintain their current pace in the win column they should finish the season with around 38 or 39 wins. By comparison, the 2008-09 team, which finished the season with 93 points and missed the postseason due to a tiebreaker with Montreal, won 41 games and, for the only time in the past decade, finished the season by scoring more goals than they allowed.

Which, again, brings us to this year's Panthers and the fact that, as of Tuesday, have been outscored by 25 goals this season. To be in such a hole for the season and still be in a position to potentially, maybe win your division is pretty unbelievable. Your ability to outscore your opponents (or their ability to outscore you) is usually a pretty good indicator of where a team will finish in the standings, and right now the Panthers are an obvious outlier.

I went back to the start of the 2001-02 season and pulled out every team that was outscored by at least 20 goals during the regular season, and where each team finished in the standings.

Teams in the Panthers area (the minus-20 to minus-30 area) usually finish somewhere between 10th and 13th in their conference.

See for yourself on the chart below...



See that dot away from the pack? That is the 2011-12 Panthers. Kind of stand out, don't they?

Obviously, the counter response to questions about the Panthers ability to sustain this is that when they win, they simply win by one or two goals, and when they lose, they lose big. And that's probably very true.

The Panthers have already lost seven games this season by at least four goals, including four games by at least five goals.

But good teams don't generally lose 7-0 or 8-0 games, as the Panthers have done this season, (or get blown out as often as the Panthers do) while squeezing out a lot of one-goal wins, or gaining points in shootout and overtime losses (more than every team outside of the Carolina Hurricanes this season).

So here is the question: When the regular season ends in early April, where will the Florida Panthers be sitting in the standings?

Will they end up where their goals for and goals against say they should be, which, barring a sudden turnaround over the final month of the season, is somewhere in the 10th place area (which could very easily happen if the Capitals, the team with the best goal-differential in the division, pass them)?

Or will they continue to defy the odds and complete what can only be described as an absolutely bizarre season and take advantage of a perfect storm within the division?

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