NHL's powerhouses dodge the wreckage
A fairly chalky first round promises some thrilling showdowns in the Stanley Cup playoffs.
The first round of the Stanley Cup playoffs is a double shot of Red Bull, with a chaser of blood. It’s the favorite fortnight of the thinking hockey fan because (1) everyone is healthy as everyone is going to be, during this two-month version of Antietam On Ice but (2) the chaos makes you forget everything the 82-game regular season has taught you.
This particular first round, however, might be close to doing what it should do. It is rewarding the wheat and casting aside the chaff, at least for the most part. In the East, the Rangers and Carolina and Florida have all won their series, and Boston and Toronto, neither a mystery guest, will decide the remaining one. In the West, Colorado got past Winnipeg in five, while Edmonton has a home Game 5 to close out Los Angeles. Vancouver had the chance against Nashville but lost Game 6, so now it has a 3-2 lead and a major hassle on its hands. Dallas and Vegas are 2-2, in a 1-vs.-8 series that nobody thought would be a walkover; the Golden Knights are the defending champs and are thumbing their noses at the salary cap again.
We say we normally love it when Florida Atlantic gets to the Final Four in the NCAA tournament, but we also say we love minor league baseball until we actually go to a game. It’s great as a concept, not so great in reality. This first round is serving its purpose because it has given us all kinds of twisty footnotes without losing a team that can actually win the Cup. Think about it. Was tennis better off because Evert kept meeting Navaratilova in the finals, because Federer, Nadal and Djokovic kept playing each other for championships? Of course it was. The best hockey of the year is still ahead of us.
But just because weirdness hasn’t captured the playoffs doesn’t mean it hasn’t tried.
For one thing, Winnipeg’s Connor Hellebuyck is the assumed winner of the Vezina Trophy, for best goaltender, yet he was buried under a rubble of rubber launched by Colorado. Winnipeg won Game 1, 7-6, and everyone figured the Avalanche had to get the hook for Alexandar Georgiev. But then Georgiev was brilliant for the next four games, with a .940 save percentage. Hellebuyck was at .864 overall. Granted, he was dealing with 177 shots on goal, but he’s accustomed to frequent combat and Colorado still romped to 28 goals in five games. So who knows from goalies?
Not anyone in Vancouver. Thatcher Demko was the bedrock on which the Canucks’ Stanley Cup hopes were built. Then he exited after a Game 1 win over the Predators. Casey DeSmith split the next two games before Rick Tocchet gave the net to Arturs Silovs, a sixth-round rookie from Latvia who had played four NHL games (and lost none). Silovs held the fort in Game 4 while the Canucks amazingly tied the Predators with two goals in the final two minutes and won in overtime, and there was nothing wrong with his game in Tuesday’s 2-1 loss. That’s three goalies with a win in one series, for the third time ever. That’s reassuring to a franchise looking for its first Stanley Cup. The continued struggles of Elias Petterson, who doesn’t have a goal yet and is minus-3, are not.
The Kings came into the playoffs with a few uncertainties but with one article of faith. They could always rely on a penalty kill that ranked second in the league at 84.6 percent, only trailing Carolina. Then they ran into an Edmonton power play that was roaring down the track at 26.3 percent, fourth in the NHL. The consequent pileup was ugly. The Oilers were 8 for 15 through five games. The Kings were 0 for 11. The final indignity was a 1-0 outcome in Game Four which, uncharacteristically, went to Edmonton, thanks to goalie Stuart Skinner. The Kings led Edmonton, 10-9, in 5 on 5 scoring and still faced the task of winning two games in Edmonton to win the series. Otherwise, they will lose to the Oilers for the third consecutive year in the first round, which might damage Jim Hiller’s chances of becoming something more than the interim coach. It also might jeopardize Rob Blake’s chances of remaining the general manager, particularly after trading Calder finalist Brock Faber to Minnesota for Kevin Fiala, and Gabe Vilardi and Alex Iafallo to Winnipeg to the exasperating Pierre-Luc Dubois, whom Blake gave an 8-year contract that, to the Kings’ capologists, seems like 28 today.
The Tampa Bay Lightning finally lost a series to Florida, 4-1, although the first four games were argumentative. Steven Stamkos, an imminent free agent at 34, scored five goals. Can the Lightning afford not to sign him, after 1,156 NHL games, all in a Tampa Bay sweater? Or can it afford to, with all the sudden needs? “Steven belongs here,” coach Jon Cooper said. “He knows it. We know it.” Meanwhile Nikita Kucherov, the Ross Trophy winner with 144 points, had seven assists but no goals and was minus-1. Andrei Vasilevskiy, for so long the best big-game goalie in the world, is 3-8 in the past two playoff years with a sub-.900 percentage. Tampa Bay rushed to the first wild-card spot in the East, but it may be postponing its encounter with gravity.
The Maple Leafs are having their souls X-rayed yet again. They trailed Boston, 3-1, before a 2-1 overtime win in Boston Tuesday, one in which Mitch Marner finally surfaced, and Joseph Woll rose up in relief of Ilya Samsonov. The Leafs rank 16th among 16 playoff teams in blocked shots this spring, and Auston Matthews is out with an undisclosed illness that took him off the ice in Game 4. William Nylander missed the first three games, hasn’t scored in the past two. Their home rink has become a Chernobyl of bad vibes, with six consecutive home playoff losses. Once again the guillotine is coming out, after it fell on general manager Kyle Dubas last year. But the top-heavy roster will probably escape real change. And the Leafs could still win the series, with Boston trying to forget the forfeiture of a 3-1 lead over Florida last year.
The Golden Knights are tied with Dallas, incredibly, although they’ve had only 7:51 of power play time. The road teams are 4-0, and the Stars pilfered Game 3, after they trailed 2-0, with a goal by 20-year-old Wyatt Johnston. “He can’t even go into the casino and play cards,” said Peter DeBoer, his coach. Logan Thompson has been stalwart in the Vegas net, and Jack Eichel has been the Knights’ best skater. But what’s Mark Stone doing out there? The Vegas captain was out with a ruptured spleen and placed on Long Term Injured Reserve (LTIR), which has become the most discussed 4-letter term in the game. The Knights were able to shelve his salary and stay below the cap to the point they could add Tomas Hertl and Anthony Mantha from San Jose. Then Stone could parachute back onto the roster in time for the playoffs because the salary cap only applies to the regular season.
Vegas has done that with Stone before, and Chicago has done it with Patrick Kane, and Tampa Bay with Kucherov — who, notoriously, skated around the rink wearing an T-shirt that proclaimed, “$18 Million Over The Cap” after the Lightning won the Cup in 2021. Why a team must observe the cap on Nov. 7 when it’s playing Ottawa, and why it doesn’t have to when the Cup is in the building, is a riddle that can only be solved when the Collective Bargaining Agreement expires. One idea is to make sure a team’s active roster is cap-complaint for every game. That would seem only fair, but the NHL is selective in how much controversy it tolerates.
The most routine outcome was the Rangers’ sweep of Washington, which had a goal differential of minus-37. Alex Ovechkin didn’t score a point and was minus-2. There are those who want to ditch the current playoff format and seed the top 16 teams regardless of conference. Under that format St. Louis, not Washington, would have been 16th. But we’ve done it this way before, and the extended, random travel made it unpopular. This year would have featured numbing first round matchups like Winnipeg-Tampa Bay, Carolina-Vegas and Florida-Los Angeles. There will be another Wayne Gretzky before there is a playoff matrix that is unanimously applauded. The NHL postseason is not broken, especially this one. Just a little shaken and stirred.