With the season winding down, we’ll take a glance at the team and individual races that remain.

The playoff race, in bullet form:

North

• Belfast will be the No. 1 seed
• Three out of the next four team will have home ice advantage in the first round, so one of St. Petersburg, Helsinki, London and Copenhagen will be sleeping in a hotel the night before the playoffs start.
• Moscow and Minsk are safely in near the bottom of the playoff spots and Dublin and Stockholm  will race to the end for the 8^th and final spot. Dublin seems to hold the high ground with a 2-point lead and three games in hand.
• Edinburgh, Gothenburg and Oslo are all but eliminated

South

• Athens, which has lost just one home game in regulation this season, should be able to hold off Berlin over the last 11 games and clinch home ice for the entire playoffs.
• The battle for home ice in the first round is tight among five teams: Geneva, Madrid, Paris, Milan and possibly Lisbon. Two of those teams will have home ice advantage in the first round of the playoffs and two of the others will face them. The team that finishes last in that 5-team mini race will play – most likely – Berlin, while Bratislava will make the playoffs and play- most likely –  Athens.
• Zurich, Munich, Prague and Bern will sit out the post season and be hoping to win the draft lottery in a few months.

Individual stats

John Tavares, 29, of Lisbon will win the scoring title and there is a realistic chance he will achieve his highest-ever point total of 123. It will be his third scoring crown, all three while wearing a Lisbon sweater. Either Tavares or Belfast’s Gabriel Landeskog will score the most goals, but those two would have to get hotter to hit 50.

P.K. Subban of Madrid needs a goal to be the first defenseman this season to score 20 goals and he has a 2-goal lead over Tobias Enstrom of Helsinki and John Carlson of St. Petersburg,  while Paris star Alex Pietrangelo has a 3-point lead over Geneva’s Keith Yandle in the race for the defenseman scoring title.

Goalie Jimmy Howard of Athens has the best save percentage and goals against average and he should finish at the top in both categories, with Petrograd’s Simeon Varlamov providing a stiff challenge in second.

The Rookie of the Year race is the most fascinating individual race for sure. Five Helsinki Jokerit rookies will finish in the Top 10 plus-minus rating among rookies, but all of them will be considered dark horses for the trophy. Defenseman Brandon Montour and forwards Brock Boeser, Kyle Connor, Alex Debrincat and Sam Bennett are all +11 or better for Helsinki.

But there is a good chance that when the computer picks the 5 nominees for the trophy, no Jokerit will be there. Boeser is Helsinki’s best hope for the award, but he might get bumped off the list by a goalie or defenseman. Like we said, there is stellar competition for the trophy. Charlie McAvoy of Zurich, Ryan Pulock of Milan and Roger Karrer of Bern probably have the best chance among the rookie defensemen to make the nominee list, but a betting man would say McAvoy will and the other defenseman won’t.

Munich goalie Attila Adorjan might make the list with his 3.05 goals against average and .906 save percentage in 47 games.

The three forwards who have the best chance of making the list – Dominik Lakatos of London, Dylan Sikura of Gothenburg and Miro Aaltonen of Prague –  all will have put up 60-points-or-better seasons. Bern’s Nico Hischier will probably be left off the list, but his 52 points so far will only get him there if the computer takes into account his excellent defensive stats which include a +27 turnover ratio and good shot blocking and hit totals.

Lakatos has the most points and most blocked shots among the three top rookie forwards, but he has also played substantially more minutes. Some general managers might think Sikura or Aaltonen could have had better stats with the same amount of ice time, while others might think the fact Lakatos got more ice time proves he’s better.