Let’s just get this out there first: yesterday while the Leafs were undertaking the arduous journey to Buffalo, their probability of making the playoffs dropped a tiny bit. Let’s go to the big wheel of perhapsness:
Yesterday at this time it was at 87%.
The famous quote from a Sherlock Holmes story goes: “when you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth”.
That’s great when you’re solving mysteries in fiction, but in hockey, the range of the possible—the extremes of hope and pessimism—is really large. There are only nine games left, and the outcome of none of them is certain.