The competitors this week and next are those teams that lost their divisional competitions. Now they're back for one last chance to advance by winning the single wild card spot available in their conference.
Read on to see the best and worst of the losers:
The logo rankings mostly fit into a few categories. Rather than redo the descriptions and analyses of each logo, this grouping characterization is reviewed.
Bringing up the rear of the group are the natural disasters. Aside from being very expansion-ish, the actual catastrophic theme isn't an impossible one to overcome, but these versions fail to keep to simple, coherent ideas that would raise them above their awkward names. To be clear here, while the Hurricanes are not near the quality of the top logos, the Lightning are far and away the worst logo of the Eastern Division. As has been said before, they would do well to completely scrap every aspect of their current version and start over.
12th place: Tampa Bay Lightning
11th place: Carolina Hurricanes
Thankfully the Islanders are the only members of the map-as-mascot club. It doesn't work on a state's quarter, it doesn't work on a nation's flag, and it certainly doesn't work on a hockey team's sweater.
10th place: New York Islanders
The next grouping are the animals. Buffalo, the Thrashers, the Penguins. the Panthers (and, stretching a bit, the Senators) all use an angry, forward-charging animal, and their placement reflects the adeptness with which they render their mascot. The better ones stylize their characters by taking out all but the necessary details, and keeping to consistently thicker lines with a minimum of shading.
9th place: Ottawa Senators
8th place: Florida Panthers
7th place: Pittsburgh Penguins
The final group of logos fit into the generic words and symbols category. Montreal, Boston, and the Rangers all only barely bother to symbolically identify the mascot, location, or sport, other than by initial letter, or spelling the whole thing out. They do, however, make good use of color, clear letters, and bold, solid lines. New Jersey breaks out of the group with typgraphic tweaking that pulls in the Devils mascot, without over-complicating the letter forms.
6th place: New York Rangers
5th place: Boston Bruins
4th place: Atlanta Thrashers
3rd place: Montreal Canadiens
2nd place: Buffalo Sabres
1st place (and Wild Card Winner): New Jersey Devils
Just for fun, check the relative success of each division by adding up its members' rankings; lowest score being better. (For instance, New Jersey's 1st place adds 1 point to the Atlantic total, while Tampa's 12th adds 12 points for their Southeast division.) Here's how the Eastern Conference divisions stack up:
3rd place: Southeast, 35 points
Saddled with the two final finishers and no one breaking into the top 3, the southeast division is fully — and, barring league reorganization, permanently — in last place in the Eastern Conference.
2nd place: Atlantic, 24 points
With the big winner and a couple of strong middle of the pack logos, the Southeast take second place. A few slight tweaks, and a revision of the Islanders logo and they'll have a good chance at moving into first.
1st place: Northeast, 19 points
The veterans of the league pull out first place, with solid, consistent, just-above-average classic designs. The turtle wins the race in this division competition.
Congratulations to the wild card winner, New Jersey, and good luck in the later rounds.
How would you rank the Eastern Conference losers?