The number of days left in the 2021 NHL regular season are rapidly dwindling here. With the calendar set to flip over to May any day now, and with a good amount of teams having games played totals that already begin with the number five, it's a good time for us to start sizing up the playoff landscape and thinking more critically about where teams stand heading into it.

There's any number of different underlying performance indicators we can use to look beyond just the raw standings in an attempt to gauge how teams have been actually playing. There's a couple of relatively simple ones that I find immensely useful because they provide us with a better sense of how decisively teams have been taking care of their business in these games.