The Second season is the best season!
My usual horse came up lame this year, so I am not sure who I am rooting for.
I know more who I am rooting AGAINST…
NHL Playoffs 2014
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There’s a 99% percent chance Richards will be amnestied (thank the NHL and NBA for making that rarely used verb popular) in the off-season because of his ludicrous contract and the new CBA provision that punishes teams for players retiring early. The other 1% would be Nash.
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I am wondering how long this has been so obvious (it seems like it is now for me anyway), that good teams, which are perennial contenders, rarely get there by BUYING their core/superstars. A team seems to function better when you draft the right guys, develop them and take care of them in your own system. That is a bit of a sequential process in that you cannot be a true long-time contender without good drafting.
Sure a team like the Red Wings of 1995 - 2004 bought a lot of high profile guys like Hull, Robitaille, Hasek, Vernon, Schneider (and more recently, Hossa). But Detroit had an amazing core of drafted players to begin with (Yzerman, Fedorov, Lidstrom, Holmstrom, Konstantinov, Osgood, etc…). They developed their team further by adding the right pieces around them (Shanahan, Chelios, Draper, etc…) and instilled enough success and desire that they stuck around for (or close to) the end of their careers.
Teams like Los Angeles, Pittsburgh, Boston and Chicago are all in that category. They have all won cups in recent years. Their teams have been predominantly home-grown talent. Perhaps they traded or bought some of the guys like Mike Richards and Jeff Carter in LA, Hossa in Chicago, Neal in Pittsburgh, Chara in Boston… but their cores were all drafted and retained such that the team has some sort of identity. It helps to have a single coach who continues to foster this team-atmosphere.
This is not quite a revelation for me, but is something that has become very apparent in the last 5 years or so. You really have to have a bit of luck to pull it off, but more than that I think you just need savvy GMs who make the right choices on players and coaches and don’t look for the big acquisition to make an immediate difference. It is a process and impatience can be the worst killer.
Look at Vancouver… they too pretty much fit into the model of the above teams, and nearly had that success, but it all fell apart somewhere. Over the past 3 years they have nearly gutted their core (in all positions, but especially goal) and made a coaching change. I think that was due to impatience and feeling like they needed to make some change (just to look as though they were doing something), but the changes hurt more than they helped. Now they are farther behind than if they would have just held a steady course.
San Jose is also in the category of perennial contenders, because they have that constant core, but for some reason they cannot seem to finish… ever. That I think is more on the players than on management. The team has drafted well and pieced together excellent and consistent depth, but the guys just don’t close it out. The Sharks are a team that could have very easily won multiple cups in the past years. However, their success and their continual failure is due in equal measure to that team core.
The Rangers seem to be the example of that team who buys the guys but they just don’t work out as planned. They have drafted pretty well too, but when your top 3 forwards (Richards, St. Louis, Nash), and supposed superstar at that, are all huge free-agent contract or walk-away type guys… I think there is a problem.
Minnesota seems to be a minor exception in that Parise and Suter are working out very well for them. Granted, I think they went to the Wild for different reasons than guys typically go to New York, and I do think that is important. We have yet to see how that situation really ends up though.
It has also been a very short time for Edmonton, but while they have gotten great draft prospects for years, they have not been able to put anything significant together. This becomes more of a management/coaching issue, because they have all the home-grown talent they could want (or potential to have that talent)… but they seem to be squandering their golden opportunity.
Colorado is the reverse… but that too is because of a good management and coaching change in Sakic/Roy. They are developing what they have into some cohesive whole.
Calagary is just a hot mess. And always will be.
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Off to Boston for game 5 CAN THEY DO IT ON THE ROAD!!!
Alot of crossbars and posts -
Only if Labron James comes to play for them tonight.
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@suprise:
Off to Boston for game 5 CAN THEY DO IT ON THE ROAD!!!
Alot of crossbars and postsIt’s going seven for sure.
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When the cameras showed a close-up of Fleury after he let in a very saveable Hagelin shot I thought for sure he was flustered and the game would be a blowout. But he and the Pens did settle down to force the Rangers to earn the win. After the disasters in Games 3 and 4 a seventh game is all I could ask for.
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Huge game tonight, GO HABS GO!
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Last night’s game provided the validation Lundqvist needed from the fickle fans here that accuse him of not coming up big in the playoffs. He played on his head, including the sequence with five and a half minutes left where he had to make body saves after losing his stick.
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Last night’s game provided the validation Lundqvist needed from the fickle fans here that accuse him of not coming up big in the playoffs. He played on his head, including the sequence with five and a half minutes left where he had to make body saves after losing his stick.
Yes, his stats in game 7s are also quite impressive. I know there has been a lot of talk about him not being able to deliver in the postseason, but I would say that blame should fall much more on the guys playing in front of him, if anyone. Especially this year.
Now I just need him to pitch a few shutouts for my Pool team and I will cheer his name from the rooftops.
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One of the Monteal newspapers this morning said that the Canadiens had “achieved the improbable” by defeating the Bruins in Boston in Game 7. I don’t know if “improbable” was meant to be a tongue-in-cheek understatement, but anyway the locals were very happy last night.
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@CWO:
One of the Monteal newspapers this morning said that the Canadiens had “achieved the improbable” by defeating the Bruins in Boston in Game 7. I don’t know if “improbable” was meant to be a tongue-in-cheek understatement, but anyway the locals were very happy last night.
I think “improbable” is the appropriate word choice. Montreal was down 3-2 and came back to win 2 games in a row against the best team in the league. I’d say that was improbable, though certainly not impossible.
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The paper said that the next team Montreal will be facing are the Rangers, and that there are only two other teams left in the playoffs. Which two teams are those? (I haven’t really been following the series.)
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@CWO:
The paper said that the next team Montreal will be facing are the Rangers, and that there are only two other teams left in the playoffs. Which two teams are those? (I haven’t really been following the series.)
It was a pretty significant win for Montreal last night. (That was an understatement).
Actually there are 3 other teams left besides the Rangers. Chicago has already won their series and will play the winner of Anaheim - Los Angeles.
My prediction: Final will be Chicago vs. New York
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Actually there are 3 other teams left besides the Rangers. Chicago has already won their series and will play the winner of Anaheim - Los Angeles.
Ah, I see. I though all the other series had already been locked up. Thanks.
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Habs beat the Big Bad Bruins in their own barn during a game 7 of the Stanley Cup playoffs. WWWWWWWOOOOOOOOOWWWWWWWWWWOOOOOOOOOOOOOWWWWWWWWWWWOOOOOO
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@Young:
WWWWWWWOOOOOOOOOWWWWWWWWWWOOOOOOOOOOOOOWWWWWWWWWWWOOOOOO
Yes, that’s approximately the sound I heard outside my window several times during the evening after the game ended. There’s an unofficial traffic law in Montreal which states that when two motor vehicles flying Canadiens flags or other insignia pass each other on the road after a Habs victory, the vehicles are required to honk their horns at each other.
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Question for you guys from Ontario.
IF……The Montreal Canadians make it to the Stanley Cup Finals, do you Ontarions root for them being proud Canadian citizens or do you loathe them no matter what and want to see them lose?
You guys didn’t want Vancouver to win in 2011 right?
Just getting ready for the conference finals :-D
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Yesterday afternoon while I was walking downtown I passed by a sports bar and I saw on one of their TVs that the Canadiens were playing. I thought, “That’s funny – why is a downtown sports bar two-thirds empty during a Habs playoff game?” Then I saw the scoreboard: 5 to 1 for the opposition early in the third period. I stayed for two or three minutes, during which time the Rangers scored two more goals. The Canadiens eventually lost by a score of 7 to 2 – on home ice, to add insult to injury. I hope they learned something useful from this debacle. As Alfred Hitchcock once said to his set technicians when a device for a movie shoot malfunctioned, “Really, gentlemen, this will not do. I think this falls into the ‘raised eyebrow’ category.”
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Question for you guys from Ontario.
IF……The Montreal Canadians make it to the Stanley Cup Finals, do you Ontarions root for them being proud Canadian citizens or do you loathe them no matter what and want to see them lose?
You guys didn’t want Vancouver to win in 2011 right?
Just getting ready for the conference finals :-D
The issue is kinda split up here… as for myself, I don’t associate NHL teams with nationality. I find it ridiculous when Boston fans chant USA, USA, USA when playing the Habs, I mean don’t they know that half the Bruins team and management are Canadians. I also found it silly to hear Montreal fans booing the American anthem a few years back, equally insulting to the American players on the team. I remember back when the Toronto Blue Jays won the world series in 93 and all the talk up hear was how the American Marine Corp held the Canadian flag upside down :roll:. IMO, flag waving is for the olympics, not for professional sports, and I personally would never cheer for the Leafs no matter who they were playing against.
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@CWO:
Yesterday afternoon while I was walking downtown I passed by a sports bar and I saw on one of their TVs that the Canadiens were playing. I thought, “That’s funny – why is a downtown sports bar two-thirds empty during a Habs playoff game?” Then I saw the scoreboard: 5 to 1 for the opposition early in the third period. I stayed for two or three minutes, during which time the Rangers scored two more goals. The Canadiens eventually lost by a score of 7 to 2 – on home ice, to add insult to injury. I hope they learned something useful from this debacle. As Alfred Hitchcock once said to his set technicians when a device for a movie shoot malfunctioned, “Really, gentlemen, this will not do. I think this falls into the ‘raised eyebrow’ category.”
Carey Price got badly injured when the game was still close, it’s been down hill for the team ever since and the fact that he’s out for the entire series, doesn’t help matters going into NY.
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