OT WHAT IS GOING ON IN THE CRAZY NHL PLAYOFFS????
Right now if New York wins tomorrow the Stanley Cup finals will be.
#7 in the (central/east) New York Islanders vs #8 in the (North/West) Montreal team that was 24W-21L-11OTL in the regular season
This has to be near historic what other sport have had complete underdogs playing for the title? This is basically the equivalent of 2 13 seed's playing for the NCAA title. Even if New York loses game 7 and the Lightning makes it and its #2 vs #8 would still be historic Montreal has the worse record of any team to make the finals in NHL history. and this run has been amazingly fun to watch.
I'd also like to point out the Red Wings swept Montreal 4-0 in their last season series, so per application of the transitive property, Detroit is officially a Cup contender next year.
Two teams that didn't make the playoffs, Dallas and the Rangers, both had more points than the Habs in the regular season but fuck it, GO HABS GO!
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOLLLLLLÉÉÉ OLÉ OLÉ OLÉ OLÉÉÉE OOLÉÉÉÉÉÉÉÉ
Feeling hot, hot, hot!!!
A shortened season with extremely restricted scheduling led to a very unique year and suspect standings.
Islanders have been a good team though, so them in the final 4 isn’t shocking. The Habs are more surprising, but they also have Carey Price and we know what great goaltending can do to a team’s overall confidence during the playoffs.
I’m rooting for Tampa tomorrow though. Hopefully Kucherov can play.
I'm all set with Tampa. They've won enough recently; let's get some new blood in the Cup.
They’re fun to watch though. That combined with the fact that Yzerman had his hands all over that team makes me root for them.
Montreal is a boring team. Caufield and Suzuki can flash youth and skill, but overall Montreal is all about getting a 1-0 lead and then making the game as ugly as possible by clogging up the middle.
Compare that to watching Kucherov and Point and it’s night and day.
Go Habs.
2012 was similar.
E6 v W8 Final.
Also in the East the 5, 6, and 7 seeds all won in the first round.
In 2014 the 5th and 6th seeded teams in the conferences made the Finals. It's really not that uncommon for low seeded teams to make the stanley cup finals.
Its the best goalie in the league and everyone else trying to laugh at Toronto via Tavares.
Happy for the Habs. Hoping for an Islanders-Habs final so I can be happy with either team winning
Not to be overly pedantic, but the gap between a 1 and an 8 seed in the NHL (or any pro league) is far narrower than a 1 seed to a 13 in the NCAA tournament
An 8 seed in the NHL is middle of the pack. It’s equivalent to the 8th best team in the Big 10. If MSU had made the NCAA tournament this past season, they would have been an 11 seed. So while I agree the gap is more narrow, I wouldn’t go so far as to say it is far more narrow.
Agree with OP. The gap from 1 to 8 in the NHL is not as vast. Lower seeded teams win fairly regularly. Upsets still feel surprising and dramatic, but they are commonplace in the Stanley Cup Playoffs, especially when compared to other major sports tournaments.
You're comparing apples-and-oranges, though. Being in the middle of the pack in the NHL is incredibly different than being middle of the pack in college basketball (even being in the top 15% in college basketball is further from the top than being middle of the pack in the NHL.)
The NHL is a small league with a high amount of parity. The best team in the league is generally winning ~70% of the time and last place is generally ~35%. In college basketball, that range is generally 95% to 0%. Even when you look at basketball teams ranked around #50, there's a bigger drop in the expected teams' performance compared with the top 5 teams than the entire range of outcomes in an NHL season (need to use EM or similar metrics in college basketball - instead of win/loss - since the schedules are enormously imbalanced.)
College basketball mitigates (to a very limited extent) its lack of parity with a single elimination tournament. If college basketball used a best-of-seven format, there would almost never be significant upsets, and so yes, there is a substantial difference in parity in the NHL and college basketball.
After 103 years, Montreal finally picks up their first Western Conference trophy.
Whatever keeps that shit-hole Southern Nevada abomination of a city OUT of the Stanley Cup Finals is a good thing. Go Habs Go!!!
Whatever you think of Vegas, you've got to admit that their success since their inception is pretty remarkable. I imagine expansion teams are supposed to struggle for an extended period of time before finally having the right pieces in place. That has not happened with Vegas. I think they've been to three Western Conference Finals and one Stanley Cup Finals in the last three years.
I'm not expecting the same level of success when Seattle takes the ice next season.
I imagine expansion teams are supposed to struggle for an extended period of time before finally having the right pieces in place. That has not happened with Vegas
That's because the deck, err draft, was stacked in favor of VGK.
Expansion previously meant getting scrubs. Not anymore. Nowadays, billionaires aren't going to pay hundreds of millions in league fees and to build a stadium only to lose for the first 20 years.
Look for Seattle to potentially have immediate success -- they get the same draft setup as VGK did.
Exactly right, no sane expansion draft allows for the drafting of James Neal
No snow? No hockey!
I hear the trumpet playing in the Forum!
Covid
A hot goalie always seems to be the key to the playoffs. As a big Kenny Dryden fan from Hockey Night in Canada days when I was in Ann Arbor, all I can say is 28 years? It’s about time! Go Habs!
Wasn't Tampa 5th in the central/east?
This is cool and all, but I take issue with the OP's idea that this is like two #13 NCAA tourney seeds playing for the championship. Two #5s? Maybe.
The difference between a #1 and #8 NHL playoff seed is way less than the difference between a #1 and #13 NCAA seed.
Habs significantly improved with Cole Caulfield. Go Habs Go!
That kid is a player. I still can't believe how many teams passed on him in the draft.
I will admit despite heavily watching World Juniors every year and a lot of Big Ten hockey, I did not think his game was going to be able to translate this well or this quickly to the NHL.
I'm rooting for Islanders/Lightening in the finals. For the Habs to be the first Canadian team to win since '93 would be very disappointing. I've spent a lot of time in Ontario so maybe the anti-Francophone bias has rubbed off on me.
The islanders making it this far and possibly to the finals isn’t as surprising as their #7 slot would indicate. They have been legitimately good for 3 years, and for a chunk of the season were in the top 3-4 in the eastern conference. They lost their best goal scorer (Anders Lee) midway through the season and then struggled for a solid month or so, falling to 8th, but added some key players late in the season (including Kyle Palmieri) and started to click again as a team heading into the playoffs. They also play a grinding style of defensive hockey that is almost tailed-made for the playoffs, and have really good goaltending with Varlomov.
Not a surprise at all. They made it to the Eastern Semi's last year and this team is built for playoff hockey. Hard hitting, responsible defensively. Varlomov is good but I think Piero Greco deserves a world of credit raising his game, even more than it was when he was in Colorado.
As a Rangers fan, I don't want to see them win but they would definitely be deserving if they do.
As a Tampa native I'm obviously still hoping for the Lightning to pull Game 7 out tonight, but Kucherov is possibly out tonight, and he is arguably the last guy on the Lightning's roster they want to be without right now. New York responded great to getting humiliated 8-0 on Monday night, and while it never hurts to have home ice, I'd say Game 7 is anyone's game.
That said, if the Lightning go down tonight, I'm all in on the Habs. Amazing to see that they've gotten this far, but that's what a great goaltender can do for you. If you have elite goaltending at the right time, that can carry you all the way to the Cup. Carey Price is an elite goaltender.
Canada hasn't won since I think 1993, so it would be really cool to see them finally take the Cup back after an almost 30 year drought.
NHL playoffs are always ultra competitive and fun to watch.
Rooting for Jon Merrill and the Habs
To think he was playing for the Red Wings this year...
I don't really follow hockey, but know that upsets by seed are generally much more common in that sport then hoops or even baseball - what are the biggest factors behind this? The most obvious one I can think of is simple math - there are only a handful of goals in a given hockey game and the 'worse' team just needs to get a few breaks to win a game or two - but I gotta think there's much more to it than that.
Parity is driven by the rules of the sports, which these days is predominantly driven by salary caps, importance of individual contributions, and entry draft rules.
Comparing parity between college and professional sports is largely driven by 'entry draft' differences (or, more broadly, 'talent acquisition' since there's no draft in college.)
Since all the major professional sports approach the draft similarly, salary caps play a big role - NHL and NFL have hard caps which forces talent distribution in the league. NBA has a soft cap, and MLB has a luxury tax which is essentially a soft cap. Thus MLB and NBA make it easier for talent concentration. College sports technically has a scholarship limit which functions as a type of soft cap, but it's set so incredibly high compared to the number of contributors on a roster that it's largely irrelevant in creating parity.
Finally, roster size and contributions impacts parity as well. This is why in individual sports (tennis, swimming, track and field) you can often see the most talented individual ranked #1 for incredibly long periods of time. In the NFL you have 30+ players who contribute meaningfully in a game; in the NHL you have 19; MLB is ~12, and NBA is ~7. The lower the impact of any one (most skilled) person, the more parity you're likely to see (especially when paired with a salary cap or other method of talent dispersion, which is what you see less of in NBA, MLB and college sports).
Here's a good video that explains skill vs. luck in sports. It doesn't fully explain parity since it doesn't get into the distribution of skill, which is where the salary caps and entry drafts come into play:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HNlgISa9Giw&t=437s
As other responses you got are correct, to put it in the most narrow of narrow answers, goaltending. A goalie like Carey Price can stop even the best offensively talented teams, frustrate them, steal games, steal series and potentially steal a Cup.
No other sport has one guy who is the last stop for stopping a potent and sometimes dominating offense in every game.
Thanks for jinxing the Isles! What the hell?!
Definitely rooting for the Islanders tonight.
For those who believe in historical analogies, there are shades of 1993 here. The Islanders took the Stanley Cup defending champions to Game 7 that year (the sequence of victories was the exact same between 1993 and 2021, the Islanders winning games 1, 4 and 6) and beat them in Overtime on a Friday night, to set up a next round match-up with Montreal.
That 1993 Islanders win over Pittsburgh was their greatest win in the last 28 years. Tonight would finally top that.
That series in 93 was insane and a complete upset, not sure tonight would top it at all. That Pens team, coming off of two Cups, a Presidents Trophy with the best player in the world, at the time, on an absolutely stacked team with the greatest coach of all time, that looked like they'd bulldoze anyone that got in their way got punched in the face and punched and punched again. And the Islanders did it without Pierre Turgeon, their best player, after that scumbag Dale Hunter drilled him from behind during a goal celebration. You can say Anders Lee is their best player and while they didn't look the same for a while, I think Barzal is.
That Penguins team was better than this Lightning team, sans goaltending, but this Islanders team is much better than the 93 Islanders team.
Darius Kasparaitis' play in that series, going after and abusing Lemieux and Jagr through most of that series is something I still fondly remember.
Fair points. And I remember Kasparaitis in that series too --- none of the Penguins ever stepped up to fight him, which was telling.
I was at PSU in the mid-90s, all my Pens fans friends hated him. Of course, then the Pens traded for him not long after!
Agree completely. As a Habs fan the Isles’ win was a godsend. The Pens were the only team I thought could beat us that year.
Reminiscent of the 1966 Frozen Four, where MSU finished the 65-66 regular season barely above .500 overall and sub-.500 in the WCHA, finishing 6th, but got hot in the postseason, won the WCHA Tournament and the Frozen Four for their first title. Then they d*mn near did the same thing the following year, one game over .500 overall, losing record in the WCHA in 5th place but wins the tournament, but loses the opener at the Frozen Four.
A NCAA Tournament makes that a little less improbable because of single elimination instead of a best-of-seven series, but still...
I was at Game 7 last night. What an incredible game. As a Bolts fan, it was nerve racking the entire game. Kuch was obviously nowhere close to 100% but he gutted it out.
Vasy wasn't challenged much (only 18 SOG) but still made the big saves when called upon. McDonagh had a monster game, blocking 5 shots (TV had him at 9 blocks) and he started the shortie that was the difference in the game.
The Finals should be entertaining