The NHL's first round will be remembered for its casualties, including logic
Road teams and first-overall draft picks came to the fore.
The battlefield has been cleared, like a sheet of ice halfway through overtime.
Minnesota’s Joel Eriksson Ek tried to play with a broken leg. Boston’s Patrice Bergeron did play three games with a herniated disk. Colorado’s Andrew Cogliano was knocked out of a game by Seattle’s Jordan Eberle, came back, and then went to the bench again. The eventual diagnosis was a fractured neck.
Their teams all lost and now they recuperate, although Bergeron, the best defensive forward of his generation, might well retire. Other victims of the first round of the Stanley Cup playoffs were officiating credibility, which has become an annual casualty, and general group-think.
The Bruins set a record for regular-season wins and points, had a 3-1 lead over the 8th-seeded Florida Panthers, and then suffered their second 3-game losing streak of the season. They lost Games 5 and 7 at home, a place where they lost only seven games previously.
But then road teams won 31 games and lost 19, after an 82-game siege in which the whole point was the seizure of home ice in the playoffs. Home teams were 3-11 in overtime games, and six series were clinched to the sounds of silence, behind enemy lines.
The Colorado Avalanche followed up Florida’s audacity by losing their Game 7 at home, 2-1, to the Seattle Kraken, a two-year-old franchise that was employing goaltender Philip Grubauer, whom the Avalanche had once rejected. Last year’s champs were living under a bad moon all season, with a river of injuries and a strange hotel incident that knocked off Valeri Nichushkin. They were also top-heavy, depending almost entirely on five players for scoring, while 15 members of the Kraken chipped in.
Then the New York Rangers finished their startling swandive with a 4-0 Game 7 loss at New Jersey. After they won their first two games at New Jersey by twin 5-1 margins, they scored seven goals in the following seven games, falling under the spell of 22-year-old goalie Akira Schmid. The Devils, young and deep, had 118 “high danger” chances in the seven games, compared to the Rangers’ 69. Artemi Panarin, Mika Zibanejad, Patrick Kane, Chris Krieder and Vladimir Tarasenko are being paid to summon more danger than that.
A new generation of fans will frolic over its team’s Stanley Cup, no matter who wins. New Jersey is the most recent champ, and that was 20 years ago, in 7 games over an Anaheim team that was still officially known as the Mighty Ducks. Toronto, of course, hasn’t won the chalice since 1967 and hadn’t won a playoff series since 2004 before it broke through at Tampa Bay, its third consecutive overtime win at Amalie Arena. How long is that in hockey years? Well, in 2004 Sidney Crosby was a 16-year-old, playing for the Rimouski Oceanic.
Colleague Larry Millson tells the story of a bar in Toronto called Steele’s, where an emerging singer played on occasion but was discouraged by the patrons who kept talking and weren’t listening. One night the Leafs were playing Detroit on TV and the customers told him to knock off the singing. Since the singer was a Leafs fan, he complied, and they all watched together. So it was nice to know that Gordon Lightfoot, who died Monday at 84, went out with a W.
All the other first-round survivors have to go back further than the Devils. Vegas and Seattle are neophytes, of course, and Florida never has won. None of the eight remaining head coaches have bossed a Cup winner.
That said, it must be noted that six of the series winners had earned home ice with the better regular-season record, so it isn’t time to go full-NBA and blow off everything and start quarantining players who develop pinkeye. There is still something to play for, even though it’s hard to see it in January, during back-to-backs at Columbus and Detroit.
Most of us forgot that Florida, which stumbled through the winter, had many of the same players who won the cursed Presidents Trophy for the best regular-season record in 2022. Those Panthers were swept in the second round by Tampa Bay. But they were better-suited for these playoffs because of a soft-handed ogre named Matthew Tkachuk, whom Calgary donated in a trade. Boston would have been far better off against Crosby’s declining Pittsburgh Penguins, who gave up the No. 8 spot in the final week of the season.
Unfortunately, the first round also brought an advertisement for tanking, the way Anaheim, Chicago, Arizona and others did in hopes of drafting Connor Bedard. The exploits of first-overall picks made them look wise.
Connor McDavid had 10 points in a six-game over Los Angeles, which seemed almost pedestrian next to Leon Draisaitl’s seven goals and 11 points, and the German’s presence on the ice for Edmonton’s first 14 goals.
Jack Hughes carried the play for the Devils as he has all season.
Aaron Ekblad, the Florida defenseman, was fifth in plus-minus during the first round although he was somewhat eclipsed by Brandon Montour, the John Cusack look-alike who tied Game 7 in Boston with a minute to go and was a force throughout.
John Tavares reversed field and bounced a Game 6 overtime goal off Tampa Bay’s Darren Raddysh’s skate and past Andrei Vasilevskiy. That shot sent Toronto fans into the streets. But the other two goals in that game were also scored by 1-1 picks: Steven Stamkos of the Lightning, who at least gave us a priceless commercial with teammate Victor Hedman, and Auston Matthews of the Maple Leafs.
It was also a time to say hello. Chandler Stephenson was a third-round pick by Washington, which traded him to Vegas for a fifth-round pick. As the Capitals frantically search the pantry for viable youth, Stephenson anchors the Golden Knights’ top line and had eight points in the five-game win over Winnipeg.
Another radical center is Roope Hintz, who has scored 37 goals in each of his past two seasons for the Dallas Stars, who got stronger as their six-game win over Minnesota progressed. Hintz won 60 percent of his faceoffs and led all playoff scorers with 12 points. He and defenseman Miro Heiskanen, a fellow Finn who led the first round in average time on ice (29:02) and will get Norris Trophy votes, helped Dallas look more Cup-worthy than anyone else.
And there was Evan Bouchard, a gifted defenseman of whom much has been expected, if not demanded, in Edmonton. The Oilers were down 2-1 in games and trailed the Kings by three goals in Game 4, but then won that game in overtime and didn’t look back. Bouchard ran an outrageous power play that scored nine times in 16 chances, and at least once in all six games, following its record-breaking performance during the season. Bouchard had six power play assists and eight points overall.
Losing Boston, Los Angeles, Colorado, Tampa Bay and the Rangers will jangle the nerves of TV executives. Losing Nathan MacKinnon and never having Crosby and Alex Ovechkin will too. But the Stanley Cup playoffs are stubborn and willful, and they’ll go where they want to. Riding with them is always a good idea, over the stray body parts, past the wounded assumptions.