Damn I was gonna make this exact post

from games against Seattle this year you can tell they were a solid team, they were able to run 3 scoring lines and were gifted some talent. Basically no bad players

Avs just weren't the same team as last year where everyone knew they were stacked and no one wanted to play them
Landeskog injured, lost Burakovsky and Kadri + Nischuskin disappeared for whatever reason

The Devils were insanely better and the team played way more confident in front of Akira Schmid. They have all the speed and skill in the world, hound the puck and the Rangers looked like they wanted to be anywhere else but there.

I remember saying that I wasn't convinced that Tarasenko/Kane didn't feel like the right moves at the deadline, not that either were bad, they were both rentals and the main guys on the team (Fox, Panarin, Mika and Kreider) should have been doing the heavy lifting anyway. I don't think offense was the issue they needed to address and blocking your younger guys from progressing with even more vets in the way just seemed strange. Just the wrong targets

bump

LMAOOOOOO AIN'T NO WAY

ROUND 2 BABY

we were up 3-1 against montreal a few years ago and lost that series as well

this leafs team is better compared to the one a few years ago, with more depth throughout the line up in comparison. playoff type d-men with big additions throughout the bottom six. Running Matthews, Tavares and O'Reilly down the middle is awesome.

One of the big things about Tampa is that other than playing like 100 playoff games over the past 3 years is that they're missing a lot of their d-men this year. Hedman, Cernak injured, and they lost McDonagh who did the heavy lifting defensively for most of their cup runs.

UH OH

UH OH

not letting binner and flower fight is a fucking atrocity

also we had zero trade deadline posts so I'm gonna just list some of the big moves with everyone in the east basically loading up heavy

meier to jersey - great move since they can extend him, I think he's still an rfa

o'reilly, mccabe to toronto is great, except o'reilly gets hurt. awesome. losing sandin in another trade sucks but what can you do

chychrun to ottawa is huge for the sens even if they don't make the playoffs this year, huge need. arizona really dropped the ball by asking for too much for so long, teams that had the assets to actually bid for him all just lost interest.

boston picks up orlov and bertuzzi - the best team in the league just gets better, both seem to be a good fit with both rentals being able to fit in anywhere on the lineup

nyr getting kane and tarasenko for cheap is good for them, added to an already good lineup. honestly the rangers are great throughout their whole lineup but for some reason I feel like both adds were unnecessary, although kane was the best playoff performer of the last decade so who knows

edit: forgot about edmonton getting ekholm, huge need, didn't cost too much and he's a great player. They really miss klefbom/larsson and i'd say ekholm is better than both those guys were.

don't really remember anything else other than vancouver buying for some reason and Jonathan Quick getting shafted when he should have retired a king

alright so the other 5 guys in this thread can reply their playoff predictions

everything just goes right for the bruins this year

canucks have a terrible defensive group and poorer than expected goaltending isn't helping at all. They have a bunch of bad contracts in OEL and Myers that are just taking up space, and they're playing Luke Schenn in the top 4 which is not a recipe for success

Really made no sense to acquire guys like Garland, OEL, Mikheyev, when you knew you had to sign Pettersson, Hughes, etc. Now they're going to end up losing Horvat who's been insane this year. The top six forward group is great, I don't think the bottom six has that much depth. They also overcommitted to Miller who isn't producing at the level he's expected too and has been embarrassingly lazy defensively this year. Good player still, seems he's been a problem on previous teams though

Bringing in Rutherford was kind of dumb since he's looking at a quick retool rather than a proper rebuild which the canucks kind of needed since Benning fucked their cap structure and got rid of assets like candy. The way they handled the coaching situation was unreal though lol, absolute shit show

Really though its not all that bad since there's a lot of good talent on the team, just need defensive help, and if Demko can get back to where he was the past few years, they add a top pick they'll be looking good.

we tested something back in january 2020 and its about to be 2023 hahahaha

discuss

https://i.imgur.com/FBzFn82.png

mcdavid is just stat padding

tage thompson is my goat

jack hughes is so good