Minnesota Wild's Nino Niederreiter, right, of Switzerland, eyes the puck as he tries to keep Colorado Avalanche' s Daniel Briere at bay in the first period of an NHL hockey game, Thursday, Oct. 9, 2014, in St. Paul, Minn. (AP Photo/Jim Mone)

(Hello, this is a feature that will run through the entire season and aims to recap the weekend’s events and boils those events down to one admittedly superficial fact or stupid opinion about each team. Feel free to complain about it.)

The Minnesota Wild got out to a pretty good start to the season, winning their first two games pretty comfortably by not allowing a single goal from the Avalanche.

However, they remain mortally concerned about their chances to be competitive in their conference.

“I feel like we are a legitimate contender to win the Stanley Cup,” Wild coach Mike Yeo said earlier this week. “And I also am scared to death of missing the playoffs.”

Of course, this has been A Thing in the Western Conference specifically for years. Lots of good teams. Maybe too many. That's what allows bad teams from the East to sneak into the playoffs with pitiful records with some degree of regularity, while there's just about always a fistfight in the West's Nos. 6-10 positions (or even as far as 11th and 12th on occasion) in the standings.

It's an arms race out west, no doubt about that. Teams have to stock up on talent just to compete, and the Wild played their part in that this summer by acquiring Thomas Vanek at a relatively cut-rate deal, even as Dallas and Nashville and Chicago and St. Louis beefed up too. But it is also exceptionally rare that teams which are good over the course of the regular season end up missing the playoffs, and when teams do miss, it's largely because they were exceptionally unlucky, or another team (a bad one) got a ton of bounces to go their way from October to April.

New Jersey — which you'll note is in the East — is probably the only really good recent example of this. Winning games by doing the fundamental things that go into it, like maintaining possession and shooting or stopping the puck at about league-average numbers or better, is a repeatable skill that almost always results in at least a brief playoff appearance. I've long said that for the most part, being able to beat the majority of teams you play over 82 games is something into which the hockey world doesn't put enough stock; winning the Presidents' Trophy isn't seen as the big deal it really should be. Not that Yeo's club is really in contention for that prize, of course, but his fears of being a “legitimate contender to win the Stanley Cup” but still “missing the playoffs” are strange. Even in the extremely difficult West, when was the last time a preseason favorite to win the Cup (which, by the way, the Wild are not) didn't even end up scraping 95 points or so out of 82 contests? If it's ever happened, it almost certainly hasn't been since the introduction of the loser point.

And here's the other thing: People will say that a team that missed the playoffs is “really good” or whatever, but it's so rare that it happens that if it were to happen to your team in specific, it's sort of like winning the reverse-lottery. Playing 82 games means you put in a lot of minutes of hockey, and usually a few dozen rounds of the shootout, so for things to go against you for that long is kind of amazing. You have to stand in awe of New Jersey's ability to not-make the postseason two years in a row despite their overwhelming possession numbers as a consequence.

As for what teams in the West can do to improve their chances, the answer is, “Not much.” The Wild, just as a result of their having improved this summer to actually become a team that's actually capable of earning 98 points, rather than lucking into it with a high save percentage last season, are in a pretty solid position in the Central — tough though that division may be on paper — to at least grab a wild card spot. They're a good team, solid at every position. And while there are obviously great titans in both Western divisions, there are still opportunities out there for the merely good teams to still make some hay, and improve their chances.

If we accept that San Jose, Los Angeles, Chicago, St. Louis and Anaheim are basically locks to make the playoffs from the day the season starts, that leaves three spots left to make the postseason. You'd have to say Minnesota and Dallas have the inside track on them, with Vancouver probably bringing up the rear. Someone like Nashville can't be totally counted out, but it seems obvious which teams are going to make the playoffs. Other than those eight, who makes a push? There are only 14 teams in the West (this is actually a benefit to the teams playing there, kind of a bonus for their tough time in making it at all, because their chances of squeezing in as one of the eight is a little better than that of their Eastern counterparts. But do you really expect a push from Arizona? Edmonton? Colorado? Winnipeg? Hell, Calgary? Those seem like six teams more than capable of giving out tap-in points on a near-nightly basis. All a better club has to do is turn on the offering and put it in the net.