The Daily Faceoff Show: Is the East or West the better conference?

There have been conversations all season about how stacked the Eastern Conference is this year. In fact, there are so many good teams that if you put the Minnesota Wild, which sit second place in the Western Conference, in the East, they’d be tied for seventh in points and sixth in points percentage.

Of course, there are just as many Eastern teams at the bottom of the standings. While six of the top seven teams in the league are from the East, so are six of the bottom nine. So while the East is stacked at the top, it could just be because those teams beat up on the ones at the bottom.

On today’s "Daily Faceoff Show," Frank Seravalli and Tyler Yaremchuk talk about if the East really is that much better or if the West is just deeper.

Frank Seravalli: “I’ve been bouncing this around in my head since you asked me this morning, and I’m going to say that I think the East is that much better. I think when you take a look at the Colorado Avalanche, they’re arguably the best team in the league, and a lot of these other teams in the West, Minnesota, Calgary, St. Louis, they’re kind of on par with that next rung down in the Eastern Conference that would include Carolina, Tampa, the Rangers, Boston, [Toronto] and Pittsburgh.

But where the East has a significant advantage is I think if you were to put a lot of those teams head-to-head, especially against the bottom half of the Western Conference playoff bracket, there’s a pretty sizeable advantage. I think a lot of those teams in the East would dominate the bottom half of the West bracket, clear-cut series favorites, that I think lend itself to answering the question that the East is so much better this year.

You look at that Atlantic Division bracket and what it’s going to look like. It’s murderers' row. Trying to get out of that side of the bracket, not to say that the Metro is a cake walk by any means, but when you’ve got any one of those teams that could be losing, Tampa, Toronto, even Boston in the first round, and you’re guaranteeing that basically three of those four teams are going to be eliminated in the first two rounds. That’s a banana sandwich to think about. It’s crazy with how good those teams are that no one’s going to be going on a deep run except for one team from that group.”