Where things stand

The Atlantic Division, truly, is a division divided. At its top, the Penguins and the Flyers own 44 and 43 points, respectively. That's good enough for the best two spots in the whole league, with the closest runner-up, Detroit, at 41. The Pens, who we have to play here in Pittsburgh on Wednesday, are riding a 12-yes-that-says-twelve-game winning streak. In fact, the last time they lost was the last time we played here in Pittsburgh, a month ago. Sidney Crosby, mistakenly called the greatest hockey player on the planet since he turned 17, actually seems to be the greatest hockey player on the planet right now. In that 12-game stretch, Crosby has scored 14 goals and has 9 assists, for 23 points. He has a +13 rating in that stretch alone, while averaging 21:24 a game. That's just stupidly good.

Did I mention that we have to play them, here in Pittsburgh, on Wednesday?

So that's the top of the division: top two spots in the league, 2 points ahead of the best non-Atlantic Division team. What about the bottom of the division? You guessed it: the bottom two spots in the league. The Devils and the Islanders, with 18 and 15 points, respectively, find themselves ranked 29th and 30th in the NHL, with the Devils' 18 a full 8 points behind the 28th-place Maple Leafs.

I always feel bad talking about the Islanders, because they've been shitty for the entire time I've had a memory. So, I'll keep it brief. But, for you older Ranger fans out there that might still feel good about this, the Islanders started the season 4-2-1. They are currently 5-17-5. Mean Mr. Subtraction says that means they have won one game in their last 20. That dates back to October 23. Oof.

You know who I never feel bad talking about? The Devils! You guessed it; it's time for another edition of Kovalwatch!!!! Checking back in with our fair protagonists, we see that they have lost 5 in a row. The Devils have won one game in regulation time in their last 15 (although they've won one in OT and 2 in shootouts since then as well), putting them at 8-19-2, on track for 51 points at the end of the season. When we last checked in with them, they were finishing with 61. 51 would make them the worst team in hockey since the 1999-2000 Atlanta Thrashers, in their debut season.

And Ilya himself? 5 goals and 9 assists, for 14 points. On pace with Manny Malhotra ($7.5m/3yr), Mike Green ($21m/4yr), and Tomas Fleischmann ($2.6m/1yr). And incidentally, the same number of points as Sean Avery (1-13-14). More remarkable, those other players all have positive +/- ratings: Malhotra and Fleischmann are each +3, and Green is +7 (Avery, for completion's sake is +4). Kovalchuk's +/- has steadily declined since our last report, bringing him down to a comical -18. You read that right, -18. Kovalchuk, for all his money and his mediocre production, is ranked 743rd in the league in +/-, ahead of only Andy Greene (another Devil) and John Tavares and James Wisniewski (two Islanders).

Wanna play the math game? 18 in 29 games...we've done this math before, when we were calculating the Devils' point trajectory. It puts him on pace to be -51. Slightly worse than when we last calculated it, still the worst in all of nhl.com's databases, still worse than Rico Fata. Just...wow.

And I guess that brings us to the remaining team in the Atlantic...us. We're 6 points behind the second-place Flyers. We're 19 points ahead of the 29th-place Devils. We're technically ranked 6th in the league right now, and if the playoffs started today, we'd be in 5th and play the Flyers in the first round. We've won 4 of our last 6, 8 of our last 12, etc. We consistently beat the bad teams and sometimes squeak past the good ones. We're a hot streak from being mentioned in conversations with the Penguins and the Flyers, but we're a losing streak from the only positive thing about us being that we're not the Islanders or the Devils. We're definitely better than we were last season.

Oh, and hey, check this out! Drury's coming back! That's certainly not gonna hurt. Sorry, Todd White or Erik Christensen. It's just that you don't matter very much.