On this date in 2019, the St. Louis Blues were a .500 team that had given up 10 more goals than they had scored. They were outside the playoff picture, struggling to turn their season around under interim coach Craig Berube.
They were also about to embark on an 11-game winning streak, followed by a playoff berth, followed by a postseason journey that led to the first Stanley Cup championship in franchise history.
They're an outlier, of course. In the NHL salary cap era, 77% of the teams that were in a playoff seed on Thanksgiving ended up making the postseason.