I'll probably do a wrap-up post at season's end, but want to note two related things that are apparent right now.
First, in mid-season I predicted the playoff line would be somewhere from 42-46 points. To the extent others disagreed it was usually to predict a lower range. Right now it sits at 45 with 2 games to play. It will likely go above my predicted range, maybe by 3-5 points. Nobody, including me, saw that.
Second. The East is closer to the West than most anyone expected, especially in the middle. The West is stronger at both the top (3 teams over 50 points to 1 in the East) and bottom (1 team under 40 compared to 3 in the East), but the middles are very close and right now the key 6th Place team in the East has one more point than the 6th place team in the West. With 2 games left the West could still finish ahead, but the difference is unlikely to be very big.
OK 3 things: Montreal's huge games-in-hand resource caused a lot of people to underestimate them. People would write things like "one win and we're in a playoff spot" and when you pointed out that we'd be barely ahead of a team that had 5 extra games to play they would brush that off as irrelevant, or cavalierly assure you that Montreal would cave, as if it were given that Montreal would lose all 5 extra games. Actually, Monttreal's PPG has gone up during this period of playing extra games.
Which leads to, OK, 4 things: Drogba. Seriously. You could reasonably argue that he is singlehandedly responsible for points 1, 2 and 3 above. Adding Drogba has been better for Montreal than getting Lampard, Pirlo, and Angelino was for us. His signing was announced more than a year after Lampard (and 3 weeks after Pirlo) and he did more for his team than either, and arguably more than both combined. We didn't need two DP strikers so getting Drogba never made sense for us. But if Lampard or Soriano had the ability to feel shame this would be killing them right now. But as far as I can tell they don't give a damn. No apologies still.