On Sunday, the NHL saw a round that will go down in history.
First, the Boston Bruins, who set the record for wins and points in the regular season, started singing. That is, the Boston Bruins, who went into the opening round match series against Florida, the 17th best in the series, with a 43-point lead from the bottom of the regular season.
And the same Boston who, after a clear 6–2 victory a week ago, led the match series with a 3–1 victory.
No one from the outside really believed in Florida in advance. Anyone who claims otherwise is lying. Nobody believed in Florida even less after the 2-6 loss.
The team themselves believed.
Two away wins against Boston and a rise from a losing position to winning on home ice sealed one of the toughest sensations in the modern NHL. For that, the panther pack deserves a lot of credit, including coaching. It found ways and means to turn a series where it shouldn’t have had any chance.
In the end, this is what the playoffs are all about, i.e. developing the game and the rising curve.
The Panthers have been playing their own playoff games for months, because they already fell behind in the playoff rally in the fall season. It tore the maximum result out of itself in the winter of the heart and strung like a church to the last playoff spot. The start against Boston was difficult, but early Monday morning, Florida was actually the better team on the court in many places.
In addition, its best players were better than their peers.
Especially the one playing a fantastic season in Sunrise Matthew Tkachuk showed a tough class leadership within the series, both in terms of the result and the rest of the game. It was different for Boston, whose lines started to tear at the worst possible time, and it played without its two top centers at the beginning of the series Patrice Bergeron and David Krejci.
For the last three games, Bergeron’s power statistics showed a reading of -6 and by Brad Marchand -4.
Florida’s top players were better, and when even the goaltending game turned in favor of the underdog, Boston’s countdown started. Perhaps the most unusual melting seen was the Boston weasel From Linus Ullmark, who will probably be awarded the NHL Goaltender of the Year later based on the regular season. As the series progressed, the Swede became a mortal, who was sidelined for the seventh game.
Rantanen tore Colorado after him
On Monday, we also saw another giant surprise, which, after everything we saw, on the other hand, could not even be considered that big of a surprise. The expansion team Seattle silenced the reigning champion Colorado in the decisive seventh game with a 2-1 away victory.
Of course, Colorado, which started the series with a 30-point lead, was the big favorite to advance to the next round, but the further the series progressed, the more likely Seattle’s victory began to seem.
And the decisive game on away ice was not a problem: Colorado was the second weakest regular season team in the Western playoffs, and Seattle was the second best away team.
The better team went on from this series.
Colorado’s top was tough, but it never became a team. Mikko Rantanen scored no fewer than seven hits in the match series, but nothing happened behind this. Colorado has been a one-string team all season, and that’s what it was in the toughest spot on Monday.
If you think about Ranta, Nathan MacKinnon and Artturi from Lehko As Colorado’s number one chain, behind it, the team got two hits from the other attackers in the match series. Colorado’s season fell apart due to injuries and overloading of key players already in the regular season – being eliminated in the opening round was a clear and logical continuation, especially in retrospect.
You don’t succeed in the NHL with one chain.
While Colorado’s goals were distributed among nine players in the series, Seattle’s top spot in the goal exchange is separated by two hits. As many as fifteen different players got their name in their goal statistics. Only Ryan Donato was left without a single power point.
This is how the NHL works
Monday’s results were a perfect indication of the NHL’s greatest strength: the extreme level of competition. Even the status of a really big favorite is not enough in the dollar league of the salary cap era, if the hand starts to shake at all. Margins are non-existent and the condition of the day is at the center of everything, despite the often marginal material differences.
It’s just great that we see this level of scumbags in the NHL. How many of the world’s toughest football leagues can do the same?
Just four years ago Jarmo Kekäläinen led by Columbus sent Tampa Bay, who set a new regular season winning record at the time, into song in the opening round – even in four straight games. So Monday was not about individual exceptions.
Now, with the reigning champion, the regular season winner, and Tampa Bay, who won two championships before Colorado, the race for the spur takes on a whole new character. Of the teams still participating, Carolina won the championship in 2006 and New Jersey in 2003, but otherwise you have to go back to the previous millennium – in Toronto’s case to 1967.
The charge will be high in the future as well.
In the most recent episode of Ika änär, we talked about prison rules and the referee’s line, goalkeepers and the Finns of Dallas. You can find all episodes of Ika änäri in this link.