The first couple of Game Ones in the Playoffs has come and gone, and our friends out east that hog all that mental headspace in the sport are set to begin their first games. Why don’t we have a look at
The Battle of Ontario – Toronto vs. Ottawa
This is gonna be the most fun series of the entire playoffs…but I am so bored of the Leafs.
That doesn’t mean this series won’t be fun, don’t get me wrong, because this series is gonna be great! Ottawa and Toronto hate each other’s guts, and a Sens team that seems raring to go to both inflict punishment via sheer physicality and a deep willingness to game the referee’s interpretation of the rules will drive a Toronto team that is trying desperately to make it seem like their dragons can in fact be beaten crazy. It will be bloody, it will be fierce, there will be goals scored that have no business happening in regular NHL games. Some of the most ridiculous provincial discourse you’ve ever heard in your life will be flung back and forth as both sides declare the other the true worst team in Ontario. It’s gonna be a wonderful time!
The Sens aren’t a perfect team by any stretch; while they have some damn fine scoring threats like Tim Stutzle Drake Batherson and Shane Pinto, their defense is looking a little thin thanks to a plethora of injuries. The Injuries are rough too; Claude Giroux, Jake Sanderson, and Brady Tkachuk are either out or day-to-day, with Tkachuk only recently being greenlit for play on Thursday. Linus Ullmark has been phenomenal, but he will be called upon to be spectacular. If the Leafs come out swinging and Ottawa has to adjust to being down multiple games, I won’t be shocked at all.
But I will only be shocked if it’s a rout. Toronto’s issues are built in and have only barely been addressed.
The Leafs will come into this series, their best players will suddenly be bottled up, their depth will fail them, and even good goaltending will not save them from the sustained pressure. Everyone will blame defense or the goaltending and never once interrogate why the goals keep drying up on them once the postseason starts. They might lead this series the entire time and still never figure it out. They will repeat this process until Brad Treliving loses another trade and Leafs fans insist a curse will have once again be risen from the grave, even if the only curse that team ever had was that of Indolent management and ownership for over 60 years.
So it was, so it shall be.
I’m bored of the Leafs because you can see the seams in where they usually fail, and they’ve never, ever figured out how to actually cover for it in spite of the loud insistence of their fanbase. They might get out of this round alive, but I don’t see how ceding the ice and the puck to your opponent for long stretches of game time is a better way to do things than what they were doing before.
Anyway I’m sure we’ll all be watching Game 7 with bated breath. See you when we get there.
Florida Men Duke it out on sheet of ice next to massive parking lot – Florida vs. Tampa
If you wanted the Battle of Ontario but wanted slightly more guns involved.
Both sides have been Eastern Conference favorites for years at this point. Florida’s commitment to finding insane value and the Lightning’s enormously shrewd if sometimes heartless management have created strong teams with plenty of pedigree among their skaters for both good reasons and bad, with world class talents that take turns being infuriatingly creative rulebreakers who seem to know how to game the system better than anyone in the NHL; leading to high event penalty-fests and a season series that went 2-2, with each game being a penalty filled gong show. Adding Brad Marchand and Yanni Gourde back into this particular brew, even if they themselves aren’t quite at their peak, will be adding a truly spectacular finishing touch if you’d like to see the kind of hockey that makes you annoyed with refereeing as a concept.
The X-factor, as it often is, will be goaltending; Andrei Vasilevskiy has returned to form after a year off to be one of the league’s premiere netminders again, and Sergei Bobrovsky has also returned to form…as the deeply, deeply inconsistent goaltender who rubber bands between all-star and sub-AHL in terms of performance. It also behooves the Florida Panthers to play to their potential; something they have not been able to do over the last few weeks as cracks in their tradeline acquisitions appear to have formed, and many of the important players on the Panthers are already out; Ekblad, Barkov, Lundell, Tkachuk, and Reinhart are out for one reason or another. Maybe one or two being gone would be less of a challenge, but all five of them feels like the version that’s limping into the playoffs now will be a far cry from what this team wants to be, and unless they can get more out of their impressive depth, they may not be able to hang with a mostly healthy Tampa.
For all of our sakes…I hope they do it and make this series a grueling war.
Turnaround vs. Taking a Step – Washington vs. Montreal
Washington last year ended up being just bad enough to be less an underdog, and more of a consolation prize for a team that managed to suck the least to make it to the NHL Playoffs in an East that seemed interested in ensuring nobody got that spot. Now, Washington is the one on easy street looking down at the kids down in the wildcard wondering what all the racket’s about.
Hockey can be very funny like that.
Of course, ever since Alex Ovechkin got his goalscoring record, the Caps are in need of a bit of a wakeup call. They’ve been playing some pretty ugly hockey recently; even with the multiple healthy scratches they’ve been utilizing to get to the playoffs. Part of that has come from their goaltending deciding to take April off; as Logan Thompson finished his season with some mediocre starts and an injury, and Charlie Lindgren having taken until Tuesday night to have a half decent game; all the rest being .880 or below efforts.
That’s a bit of a shame, because otherwise the Caps scoring has been pretty strong outside of their crazy russian uncle’s one timers; Alexei Protas, Dylan Strome, and yes, even Tom Wilson have been phenominal pieces for the Red Machine, and have been bolstered by Pierre-Luc Dubois, Connor McMichael, and Jakob Chychrun. Given where the Caps were last year; this turnaround has been dramatic and a pretty fun story, and this recent stint of poor play threatens to undo it all.
Meanwhile, Montreal played spoiler for Columbus by finally taking the fabled step forward they were prophecized to do months ago by beating a sleepwalking version of the Carolina Hurricanes after failing to beat the Blackhawks and almost the entire Atlantic Division down the stretch; the only actual thing they needed to do in order to advance. Nick Suzuki, Cole Caufield, Lane Hutson, and Juraj Slafkovsky have blossomed into fine NHL talents, and have dragged the rest of Montreal’s roster to a half respectable season. The inclusion of Ivan Demidov and his flashes of brilliance make for a roster that is scrappy, a bit flawed, but innately fun to watch if you don’t happen to have some pre-determined hatred for them like I do.
That said, if the Habs wanna win this and shock the world, then they need to start testing their opponent’s goaltender for consistent periods of time, and critically control their own slot; something they have been both really, really bad at letting shots through on…and the place where the Caps do an outsized amount of their shooting. If they can’t do that, then even with all the goodwill they’ve managed to pull together, it will be a very short series.
“We’re good! We Swear!”: The Series – New Jersey vs. Carolina
You could also call this series “Fraudwatch” if you really wanted to.
New Jersey and Carolina are two very interesting teams because they’ve met each other a lot over the years, and either absolutely annihilate their foes in lopsided asskickings or fail to generate enough offense to beat teams they probably should and their goaltending, which hasn’t been a strength for either side, starts to fall apart at the worst possible time. That’s been true in the regular season and the playoffs in equal measure, and little about that has changed even with their fairly regular success.
For Carolina, part of it is Rod Brind’Amour’s system; which prioritizes fishing for rebounds and taking shots above all else; even if they aren’t especially dangerous shots. That means they forecheck like crazy and shoot constantly, but rarely if ever find a way to go to the net if the puck didn’t make it there off a defenseman’s stick, and tend to leave their goalie out to pasture if things go wrong. They even have spectacular talents who could help overcome that if they really wanted to, but Rod’s got a system, and he’s sticking to it. It’s not a bad idea necessarily, but it does turn their defenders into potential targets, and the men they’ve been using to facilitate that haven’t been all that great at it lately. The Canes also have, by my count, seven players who are day-to-day; that might be a major problem if Slavin and Aho can’t go.
For New Jersey, they simply have some of the most atrocious injury luck possible and to the worst possible players for it to happen to. They just got Dougie Hamilton back, which is a major shot in the arm for them, but they’re now missing Jack Hughes, Jonas Siegenthaler, and Ondrej Palat. Siegenthaler was expected; he’s been out for awhile, but being without Hughes sucks, as their center depth gets kind of spotty once you get past Hischier and Cody Glass. While the Devils are a blindingly fast team that’s been able to get some exceptional performances out of guys like Stefan Noesen and Jesper Bratt, the games the Devils have played all seem to be somewhat stifled without their Hughes to help push it along.
Both happen to share the same issue in net; it’s going..fine! It’s just fine. Both sides have had their injuries at netminder, but neither Markstrom nor Andersen have been truly dominant in their division nor conference, and that has sunk them on more than one occasion. The single biggest x-factor for both sides will be their netminders and whether or not they can pull it together long enough to survive the round. This in my opinion makes for the kind of series that could either be enormously fun, north-south boatrace nonsense, or it could be a much more stoic series on account of what both teams are going through.
There’s also a lot of rubbernecking going on in this series for fans outside of either fanbase as a great many narratives beg to be born; Are the Canes actually bad all this time for cheaping out? Is Sheldon Keefe actually a terrible coach in disguise? Whose goaltender is the bigger flake in the playoffs? Your average midwit hockey podcaster/commentator is just raring to go about all this! This is the series for the hack writer in you!
Today’s games are:
- New Jersey vs. Carolina, 12pm PT – ESPN
- Toronto vs. Ottawa, 4pm PT – ESPN2
- Vegas vs. Minnesota, 7pm PT – ESPN
Have fun!