Assuming everyone else stays at roughly the same win rate, with 31 games to go, then:
- As it is, CHI is actually the worst team in the league and is playing like it. They are 3-8-0 in the 11 games without Bedard, and 2 of those were OT wins and one of them was the SO against us. They were 11-26-2 with Bedard, so... they are bad. Losing the remaining two games against them is the best chance we have of "catching" them for 1OA.
- To "lose" to Anaheim and pick worse than them, Sharks would have to win the last game vs ANA and also outpace them by 1 point and they'd have to lose their game in hand... plausible, but maybe not likely if their players at all play to their potential.
- Sharks would have to outpace CBJ by 9 points (plus one CBJ game in hand) in order to "leapfrog" them the bad way. If we beat them twice, that's an 8 point swing, AKA we could make that only a 5 point gap + one game in hand with just two wins against CBJ.
- Sharks would have to outpace OTT by 9 points AND 4 games in hand in order to leapfrog them. We play them once more, so even winning in regulation there makes this a hard one to believe. ~5 wins above in 31 games just to make it super clear is the difference between 15-15-1 and 20-10-1 so... yeah. Not likely.
- MIN is similarly 9 points back, 2 games in hand, but 3 games against remaining. So, that could become 3 points back with 2 games in hand, but we'd have to go 3-0 against them and then still outpace them by 3+ the two games in hand. More likely than OTT but still unlikely.
Taking all that to consideration, best guess is that we end up 2nd worst, and therefore we have a 58.3% chance of picking 1-3, but of course... most of that (30.7% total) is in #3, and the single likeliest pick is #4OA (41.7%).
We'll likely be debating between Levshunov, Silayev, Lindstrom, Dickinson, and Catton from April thru June.