Best of luck to the odds-makers tasked with making sense of the NHL playoffs this year.

There truly is no favourite for the Stanley Cup in 2015, no matter how you look at it.

In what became the year of the tank at the bottom end of the standings, at the top, an incredible 12 teams put up 100 points or more – an NHL record. The separation between the top team going into the postseason – the New York Rangers (113 points) – and the bottom – the Calgary Flames (97) – is also the smallest it has been since the NHL first put 16 teams into the playoffs 35 years ago.

If you subtract the extra point for winning in a shootout, the parity level is even greater: the bottom 13 playoff teams are separated by only nine points.

Over an 82-game season, in a league filled with one-goal games, that's almost nothing.

You can easily make the case this year that 11 or 12 teams are contenders for the Cup, which means an unexpected run from an unheralded team such as Minnesota – one of the NHL's hottest teams in the second half – Winnipeg or Tampa Bay could put it in the final.

Beyond the parity, what makes this season so challenging to forecast is the divisional structure of the playoffs. The Central Division is by far the NHL's toughest, with five of the NHL's top 10 teams by my calculations, but two are guaranteed to be eliminated in Round 1.

A team such as Anaheim or Vancouver, meanwhile, is not as formidable as Chicago or St. Louis, for example, but their road to the third round is dramatically easier in the West and that greatly increases the probability they can go the distance.

This is Gary Bettman's grand crap shoot – and it should make for terrific hockey given how thin the margins truly are.

Eastern Conference