It was a mostly successful week for the Penguins, all things considered. Pittsburgh went 2-1-1 on the week, which saw them play three games on the road and against three teams who qualified for the playoffs last season. Not bad for a team that hasn’t had two consecutive days without games since October 19+20. Do that all year, and it would be a 102 point-pace in tough circumstances.

As a result, the Pens are still hanging around the top of the division for another week. Their goal differential of +10 is the top in the division, a very encouraging sign. By the time their road trip ends tomorrow, they will have played almost double the games on the road as they have at home (9-5 split, following the upcoming game in Toronto), which also is a testament to an impressive performance so far.

Pittsburgh has cleared the first unofficial and informal hurdle of the “November 1st” rule, as made popular by Elliotte Friedman. The rule says that any team that is 4+ points behind the playoff line at the start of November 1st rarely are able to overcome the deficit. Then again, as of today on November 2nd, every team in the East is within four points of the current final Wild Card spot — which might speak to just how close and competitive the conference is this year. Over in the Western Conference three teams are in the danger zone for this metric — San Jose, Calgary and St. Louis are all four points or more back from the playoff line today.

That first early season indicator is there to confirm suspicions for teams going into the year that aren’t very good and already falling behind the pack more than it is to validate teams who have started off hot. It usually takes more data and in towards Thanksgiving to look and see just how much the hot starts can last through 20+ games.

As such, with a lack of data in (the Pens have completed 15.8% of the schedule so far), much of the modelling are still not believers or buying into Pittsburgh’s hot start turning into full-season success.

Playoff odds by various models

Hockey Reference: 69.3%, points 97.0
Moneypuck: 30.2% points: 89.1
The Athletic: 20.0%, points: 82.6 (updated Nov 1)

It’s interesting to see which models put a lot of emphasis on the results that have come in (Hockey Reference) and which ones are being more stubborn to cling to future projected strengths to tip the tables by the end of the year (The Athletic). Dom Luszczyszyn’s model still has the Rangers (56%) and shoot even the Buffalo Sabres (38%) with better chances of getting to the playoffs then the Pens, the starts apparently not meaning much. And we haven’t used the data to refresh for today after a Pittsburgh loss yesterday.

On the other side of the spectrum, Hockey Reference is already comfortable with calling the Pens a 97-point team — which might be prematurely generous at bound to swing back the other way with a losing streak. Stepping back, I’m not sure the Pens have done enough with their process and high PDO to fully drink the kool aid and believe they can stay this strong for six more months, but hey, it’s nice that at least some statistical model out there is buying into the results that unfolded in October.

Somewhere in the middle is Moneypuck, whose model has actually come around on the Penguins quite a bit. This model was only giving the Penguins a 7.6% projection to make the playoffs at the start of the season, their lowest in the Eastern Conference and third lowest in the NHL, only in front of Chicago and San Jose. Pittsburgh’s climb has been slow, and they’ve still only worked up past NYI, Philadelphia and Boston in the model’s eyes, but they are slowly starting to add confidence by getting their percentages to rise slowly.

The good news for the Pens is that the models won’t decide the playoffs, the outcomes from the games will. So far that has been mostly in their favor with a fun and successful October that wildly exceeded all expectations. The longer they can sustain that, the quicker we will get to the Thanksgiving benchmark in a few weeks and see how Pittsburgh stacks up as far as turning this hot start into building a possible foundation for a realistic run back at the playoffs.