It’s not about another supposed last run, even if it seems that way. TRENDS:* Red Wings are 0-4 in their last 4 vs. a team with a winning record.
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The Wild are also one of the worst teams to make the playoffs (at least based on their record where they earned just 87 points during the season) in a decade. The first four came with Caps. And they don’t walk around the dressing room wearing ankle weights. “We’ll try to go out there and do that for him”.
Richards began his career with Tampa Bay, helping the franchise win its only Stanley Cup in 2004, and couldn’t be happier about facing his former team in a best-of-7 Eastern Conference quarterfinal series that begins Wednesday night.
They also got big contributions from now injured forwards Scott Wilson and Bryan Rust. They think they do, for precisely the reason they made it here despite their struggles – they’ve defied conventional wisdom for a while now.
“We’re here to win a championship”, general manager Brian MacLellan said. “It’s been proven before they’ve been wrong”. “We generated some good chances. We knew what we could do with it”. Management sticking with us and not making any major changes. He said the President’s Trophy “doesn’t mean much besides what you learned about yourselves to get here”. Both the Panthers and Islanders are going to score a lot of goals in this series as their offenses have a lot of firepower so whichever goaltender can withstand the most pressure and whichever team can stay out of the penalty box will have a huge advantage in this series as it will take a major burden off of either Luongo or Halak.
Theyre going to throw everything they have at us, Alzner said. “When we won the Presidents’ Trophy, they were young, and sometimes when you’re young, you think you’ve got the world by the tail and everything is going to happen great”. After just barely missing out on the postseason a season ago, the Panthers were able to finish the job in the regular season in 2015-2016 and win the Atlantic Division.
This year feels different, Laich said. The Lightning scored twice, and Tyler Johnson netted the victor in overtime to knot the series.
During the 2014 playoffs, the Sharks became only the fourth team in National Hockey League history to blow a 3-0 lead en route to losing a series. Starting with a 4-2 win over Philadelphia on December 27, Anaheim closed the season 34-10-5.
Why? Because Game 1 starts at nearly 9 p.m., and people have been up all day at work and/or have to work the following day. Steve Yzerman’s Lightning is without injured stars Steven Stamkos and Anton Stralman, although its other ailing players appear to be ready. “But we’re definitely heading in the right direction”. This has been done at the expense of some Western teams with great fan bases, and at the expense of fringe fans and those who may start watching hockey regularly once they get a taste of this postseason.
From the outside, observers see an aging Wings team without any stars in their prime.
In the past 10 seasons, only the 2007-08 Detroit Red Wings and 2012-13 Chicago Blackhawks have finished first overall in the regular season and gone on to win the Stanley Cup. It is part of the allure of this tourney, where not so long ago all four top-seeded teams in the east were knocked off by the bottom four.
Chances of winning: Tampa Bay 58%, Detroit 42%.
NEXT GAME: The first round of the Stanley Cup playoffs, finally.
Amid those crushers were the last runs by Babcock, Nicklas Lidstrom, Tomas Holmstrom and other veterans. Trotz frequently implored his players to “play the right way”, his manner of saying that they needed to stick to the system and stop freelancing. At times, it was simply Larkin. Now? “No mixed emotions”, Blashill said. “We never broke. We faced lots of tough moments and we could’ve broke, and we never did”.
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The Blackhawks not doing well coming into the playoffs is something we are not yet accustomed to to, but there it is.
