Cup pairing full of intrigue
There is no shortage of storylines to this year’s Stanley Cup finals that begin tomorrow night in Las Vegas.
The best one, of course, is that it’s in Vegas at all. The Golden Knights are the first team in any major American sport to reach its finals in its first year of existence since the St. Louis Blues in 1970, and — to the shock of everyone, even those who refuse to admit it — George McPhee’s and Gerard Gallant’s creation has been a contender since the first drop of the puck in October. The Bruins learned that the hard way when they made their visit to T-Mobile Arena back in the fall.
On the other side, there is the redemption of Alex Ovechkin.
Though he notched 50-goal season after 50-goal season, each abbreviated playoff run by the Washington Capitals had some of us believing that he was more part of the problem than the solution in D.C. At times, Ovechkin contributed to the view that he was a one-dimensional, offense-only player. (His 51-goal, minus-35 season in 2013-14 remains mind-boggling.) But he has been engaged all over the ice in these playoffs, in a way he hasn’t always been even if the production rarely wavers.
McPhee not only built the Golden Knights from scratch, but he had a large hand in building the Caps as well. In his long tenure as Caps GM from 1997-2014, he drafted Ovechkin, Nicklas Backstrom, John Carlson, Braden Holtby, Dmitry Orlov, Evgeny Kuznetsov, Tom Wilson, Christian Djoos and Andre Burakovsky.
McPhee’s replacement Brian MacLellan, who played with fellow Guelph native McPhee under Jerry York at Bowling Green, has put his own fingerprints on the organization, though, signing both Matt Niskanen and Brooks Orpik to highly criticized long-term deals that now have to be considered successful.
Nate Schmidt, one the Caps’ expendables a year ago, is now a catalyst for the Knights on the back end. There’s Gallant, who was quite literally left on the curb by the Florida Panthers a year ago. And don’t forget Barry Trotz, an excellent coach enjoying a long-awaited breakthrough of his own after banging on the door for years in Nashville and Washington.
So what to expect in this very interesting series? Well, I might be, oh, eight months late to this party, but make room on the Golden Knights’ bandwagon.
Let’s start with the makeup of the team. One of the most useful pieces of equipment a player can have is a chip on his shoulder. Every one of the Knights left unprotected by their previous teams has that. You can see it in their puck pursuit and the relentlessness with which they play. In the best sense of the oft-misunderstood cliche, they are hard to play against. Their fivegame ouster of the imposing Winnipeg Jets was nothing short of stunning.
The Knights also have home-ice advantage — for them and them alone this playoff season, a big advantage. They’ve lost just once on T-Mobile ice, and it took the Sharks two overtimes to do it.
Vegas’ top line has been unstoppable. William Karlsson, Jonathan Marchessault and Reilly Smith haven’t been quite as explosive as Patrice Bergeron, David Pastrnak and Brad Marchand, but they’ve got 47 points in 15 playoff games, which is not too shabby. Smith may forever be an every-other-year player, but when it’s his “on” year, he’s very useful.
But it will come down to what it always comes down to in hockey: Goaltending. The Knights’ Marc-Andre Fleury enters the finals as the leading Conn Smythe candidate. He has a
.947 save percentage (league average is .914 in the playoffs) and a 1.68 GAA (league average is almost a whole goal heftier). All this from a guy whose career appeared shredded on a jetty five years ago. Fleury had essentially lost his job to Tomas Vokoun when the Bruins played the Penguins in the 2013 Eastern Conference finals.
When Tuukka Rask was playing the best of hockey of his career in that sweep, Fleury was relegated to one disastrous cameo appearance in Game 2, when he allowed three goals on 17 shots. Banging on Rask has become a cottage industry in Boston, but his game has never seen those depths.
Now, Fleury is back on top of the hockey world. Because of it, the Golden Knights will complete one of the most stunning seasons in the history of pro sport.
The pick? Vegas in five. The only drama will be to see how the Golden Knights will top the appearance of Vegas icon Wayne Newton in Game 4 of the Western Conference finals.