With the trade deadline a little more than a month away and many teams already starting to make roster moves that will impact their competitiveness down the stretch (if they had any to begin with, that is), much of the attention in the league turns to who is and is not in playoff contention.

These “bubble teams” may be within, say, four, six, eight points of a postseason spot with 30-something games to go. That often leads to both fans and team officials feeling as though they are very much in the race for that final position, and want to push all-in to pursue that end. If that includes trading picks and prospects so they can win the final seed in their divisional playoff group, or a wild card, then so be it. That's the price of doing business when the goal is to make the playoffs.

And leaving aside the absurdity of the egalitarian dream that “once you make the playoffs, anything can happen” — while big underdogs do occasionally PDO their way to a Cup final or even a title, the end result of the playoffs far more often than not is one of a handful of elite teams actually walking away with the trophy — one has to wonder whether this is, necessarily, a good idea.

We know from research done a few years ago by Elliotte Friedman that if you're as little as four or five points out of a playoff spot as early in the season as Nov. 1, your season is essentially over; from the point at which the shootout was introduced (that is, the introduction of the three-point game) only three of 32 teams by 2011-12 that were at least four points out of a playoff spot ended up making it. That's a 9.4 percent chance, and it's not very good at all.

The three teams that did it at the time of that study: Calgary in 2006-07, Buffalo in 2010-11, and Boston in 2011-12. Since then, you can also add in last year's Philadelphia — which was was six points back on Nov. 1 and needed a 39-21-10 record to get in — and Dallas — also six points back, and went 35-25-9 — but you have to assume the latter was helped significantly by the new playoff system and divisional alignment that put fewer teams in the West. Those five teams averaged winning percentages of about .624 over the final 70 or so games of the season.

So this week — prompted by an angry email in which I declared one reader's team “out of it” already despite their only being a handful of points back from the last playoff spot in its conference — I found myself wondering:

If you only have a 9.4 percent chance if you're that far back at the end of October, because you have to go .640 for five and a half months, at what point can we officially declare a team's playoff hopes dead at the start of February?

I looked at all the playoff teams in the salary cap era as well as their positions in the standings as of Feb. 1 in those years. I also ignored the lockout-shortened 2013 season because teams in playoff positions wouldn't have had enough time to build safer leads that you'd see going through an 82-game schedule. February seemed a reasonable cut-off for me because that's when things get “serious” and most teams have about 30 games left on the schedule. And in that time, 19 teams that were out of playoff spots when January ended wound up sneaking into the postseason by hook or by crook.

In all, 112 teams have missed the playoffs in those eight seasons, so the fact that 19 forced someone ahead of them out gives you a success rate of about 17 percent. That is, you have a roughly 1 in 6 chance of making the playoffs if you're not in that position on Feb. 1. But that's also a little more than two teams per season, so you're not necessarily looking at the worst odds in the world, and no fewer than two teams in playoff positions have faltered and ended up missing in any given season.

Heading in, I assumed the cutoff for teams getting into the playoffs would be about three points: Those farther back would find it almost insanely difficult to make up the ground if four points was such an insurmountable deficit as early as Nov. 1. Turns out that this was, for the most part, true.

The teams that made the cut are as follows:

*tied with Calgary at 62, but with one win fewer

It turns out the average deficit overcome during that time was indeed 3.05 points, and as you can see the vast majority of those teams (12 of 19, about 63 percent) were within that range. But that still leaves us seven teams in the last eight seasons that overcame deficits larger than that. Of those, four were back just four points, not appreciably more than the previously assumed cutoff of three. Include those in the “nominally capable of making up the lost ground” group, and 16 of 19 are within two wins. I think, then, that this is a pretty reasonable cutoff.

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