We're always walking the line with these strong northern stream TPV's. They are wind machines aloft and tend to hurl whatever does form north of us fairly quickly.
Models still all over the place with the pacific jet and any possible northern stream interaction.
But end result in the NE is probably lots of snow for upstate NY and NNE and not much if any for the Urban corridor.
Blocking, deampllification and the 50/50 low having a combined impact.
I guess this kind of happened with the PDII storm, but it wasn't this pronounced.
GFS issue in a nutshell. Look at the pacific wave digging off the California coast. GFS is way east of the Euro and every other model. It uses that system to create some sort of a Fugiwara effect that traps the 500mb low in the northern plains.