Some fresh faces in the Final
Stanley Cup drama enters into unknown territory
There’s no better snapshot of the beautiful, frustrating chaos of the NHL playoffs than the fact that the final matches the defending champion and long-time serious Cup Contender against a 16th seed with a solid record of falling flat on its face in the post-season.
The Stanley Cup playoffs: Where Madness Happens.
As if to underscore the point, it was the latter team that had the easier time getting there. The Nashville Predators, despite winning 41 of their 82 games in the regular season — math-savvy readers will note that is a winning percentage of a nice round 50 — have gone 12-4 in the post-season and not once faced an elimination game. The Pittsburgh Penguins, meanwhile, despite a 50-win regular season and a roster full of guys who have performed well in the spring, lost four games in which they had a chance to secure a series win, ended up needing two Game 7s, and survived double-overtime in the final game against the Ottawa Senators to barely wheeze across the line.
As noted in this space last week, all of this weirdness in the hockey playoffs has compared favourably to the NBA, where Golden State and Cleveland rolled to the Finals with a combined record of 24-1 and made us all feel kind of silly for thinking the last 12 months made a lick of difference in that sport. You’d have a hard time convincing me the next 12 months will matter much, either: What’s going to happen, save catastrophic injury, that would derail a fourth straight Cavs-Warriors match-up in the Finals at this point in 2018?
But, if the NHL’s post-season has been significantly more interesting to watch, it also means one thing, on the eve of the final series: I have no idea what will happen. And neither do you.
We’ll spend the next few days pondering some narratives, because it’s no fun to address a playoff series with a bunch of shrug emojis. Sidney Crosby’s leadership, P.K. Subban’s rebirth, and Jake Guentzel and Pekka Rinne and all that. But, the reality of hockey’s utter randomness is that no sooner do you settle into some kind of storyline than something happens to turn it on its ear. Many an ode was composed last season to thenrookie Matt Murray and his influence on the Penguins fortunes, and then he managed to hurt himself during pre-game warm ups before Game 1 of the first round this season. It didn’t take long before the stories about Marc-Andre Fleury’s surprising comeback, and how the Pens’ veterans have always loved him despite his occasional lapses, and his impressive acceptance of a backup role. Pro’s pro, that guy. And then he gave up four goals on nine shots in Game 3 of the Eastern final and was replaced by Murray, who was great and is the starter again providing he can survive the warmups. Fleury, it turned out, was still the guy who could lay a playoff egg at any time.
Sometimes the post-season can change the storylines about a player without the player having changed at all. These teams provide a few examples of that. Phil Kessel was forever described as a me-first player who couldn’t win in big games right up until he arrived in Pittsburgh, where he won a lot of big games and probably would have won the Conn Smythe last year were he not such a curmudgeon with the media. P.K. Subban was traded from Montreal last summer — you may have heard something about that — and when the Canadiens started hot this year there was much clucking and gloating about how it showed that his risk-taking style and, gasp, showboating, had been holding back his team all along. And then Montreal lost in the first round of the playoffs while he and the Predators won three series and have a chance to win the Stanley Cup. Oh, and the Canadiens coach who publicly rebuked him last season was fired.
The thing with those reversals is that they aren’t a product of the player necessarily having changed appreciably. Kessel didn’t embrace a defensive game in Pittsburgh and Subban didn’t stop celebrating goals enthusiastically. But their teams are winning now, and so the storylines around them change to fit the current evidence.
How much can a close-fought series revise opinions about a player? Consider Crosby, whose resume at his point is bulletproof: two Cups, two Olympic golds, various individual trophies. But had they lost in Game 7 of the East final last year — a game they won by a single goal — then Crosby would be going on eight straight seasons, through the prime of his career, without a Stanley Cup. We’d be wondering, now, why most of his success came on loaded national teams. But, they beat Tampa, he added the Conn Smythe to his trophy case, and no one would wonder such a thing now.
That’s playoff hockey, too: a bounce here, a post there, and a legacy forever changed.