Everyone would love to see the NYI make the playoffs during the 2012-13 season. Going into year 4 of the rebuild, this is where we should be becoming a 7-8 seed team - eventually pushing to a top-5 seed by 2014. When looking at the "goals for" column for playoff teams it takes about 230 goals for a defensive-minded team and 270 goals for an offensive-minded team to make the playoffs. With the addition of Lubomir Visnovsky and Matt Carkner of defense, we should be able to cut out "goals against" down a bit. Having Evgeni Nabakov as our starter will also help us in this category.

The question is - how many goals will it take the NYI to make the playoffs and who can be expected to score these goals?

First we should determine what type of team the NYI are. I think most fans would agree Capuano employs an offensive-minded game with a strong forecheck. He expects his defencemen to head a rush and gain the zone or make a strong first pass out of our zone. The NYI play a little bit more of a finesse game compared to other teams in the Atlantic. We rel on our powerplay for a handful of goals as well - many of these can be expected to come from Streit, Visnovsky, Tavares, and Moulson.

When comparing the 230 goals for defensive teams to the 270 goals for offensive teams I think the NYI will need minimum 250 goals to crack the 8th seed (hopefully our goals against drops to below 220).

So - who can be expect to score these 250 goals? We can break it down by line.

1st line:

Matt Moulson: 35 goals --- John Tavares: 30 goals --- Brad Boyes: 25 goals TOTAL: 90 goals

2nd line:

Josh Bailey: 20 goals --- Frans Nielsen: 20 goals --- Kyle Okposo: 25 goals TOTAL: 65 goals

3rd line:

Michael Grabner: 20 goals --- Casey Cizikas: 15 goals --- David Ullstrom: 15 goals TOTAL: 50 goals

4th line:

Matt Martin: 2 goals --- Marty Reasoner: 5 goals --- Jesse Joensuu: 3 goals TOTAL: 10 goals

1st pairing:

Travis Hamonic: 7 goals --- Andrew MacDonald: 3 goals TOTAL: 10 goals

Mark Streit: 10 goals --- Lubomir Visnovsky: 10 goals TOTAL: 20 goals

Calvin deHaan/Matt Donovan: 3 goals --- Matt Carkner: 2 goals TOTAL: 5 goals

If these numbers were to occur we would see 215 goals come from our offence while 35 goals come from our defence (funny thing is - I just plugged in random numbers/expectations and hoped it would come out to around 250 and it landed on 250 perfectly LOL). This sums up to the 250 goals the NYI will need to make the playoffs.