I think this season's biggest storyline is easily the Great Lakes playoff race. Due to the silly 12 team playoff format we have, one of the Great Lakes team is guaranteed to miss. It's huge this season because every team in the division is ahead of every team in the other East division. At the time of writing last place Chicago is four points ahead of first place Manhattan. It was also a point of contention last season when Toronto was 5th in the conference and 10th in league. This is a storyline that will go on for a few more seasons unless there are changes to the playoff structure. However for this season it's going to be exceptionally tight and go down to the last few games of the season. There's been mentioning of the last place Great Lakes team having 96 points to end the season. If that's the case we could be seeing a historic SHL moment with the greatest team to not make playoffs due to an arbitrary cutoff.