What a curiously unpredictable opening round of the 2017 NHL playoffs.
Four of the top seven regular-season teams are on the outside looking in, including the Chicago Blackhawks – the betting favourite going in and, by most objective standards, far and away the best team in the Western Conference. The Blackhawks responded to their early, unexpected demise Monday by firing assistant coach Mike Kitchen on the grounds that you have to do something to mark such a puzzling failure. Besides, head man Joel Quenneville is second only to Scotty Bowman in coaching victories and thus bullet-proof.
Eighteen (of 42) games went to overtime – the most of any round in the history of the Stanley Cup playoffs – which tells you something about how close the games were. But not a single series went the distance, which also tells you something about momentum – specifically how difficult it is to get back once a team has lost it. The happy byproduct of the latter development is that the second round gets under way early, with two games Wednesday, including the Edmonton Oilers in Anaheim to play the Ducks in another too-close-to-call series.
Of the eight remaining contenders, three – the Washington Capitals, the St. Louis Blues and the Nashville Predators – have never won the Stanley Cup before, while three others – the Oilers, the Ottawa Senators and the New York Rangers – have not won in this century. Ottawa's last win came back in 1927, with Dave Gill outcoaching Boston's Art Ross in the last Cup final to include tie games.
Playoff upsets are a way of life in the NHL. Teams are even more susceptible to them in an era of parity, when there really isn't much separating the majority of teams. But what must be particularly maddening for the architects of all these teams is how fickle the goaltending has been and how the shifting netminding sands had such a critical impact on the outcome of pretty much every series.
Take the St. Louis Blues and Minnesota Wild series as an example. In January, if someone had promised you that Blues-versus-Wild was a first-round match-up and furthermore that it would be decided by the play of the goaltenders, you would have nodded knowingly and picked Minnesota. After all, Wild goaltender Devan Dubnyk was in the midst of a Vézina Trophy-calibre season back then, while Blues goalie Jake Allen was playing so poorly that the team gave him a few days off in the midseason to get his head together. This is wildly uncommon in the NHL – telling the truth about what's going on rather than faking a mild groin injury to explain a player's short-term absence. And yet, it worked magically. Coupled with the coaching changes in St. Louis – Mike Yeo in as head coach, Martin Brodeur asked to work full time with the goalies – Allen went from being a liability to arguably the hottest goaltender in the league.
In the opening round, Minnesota won all the territorial battles – except the one that counts: goals. Dubnyk was good, but Allen was so much better. He was the main reason St. Louis moved on, in the same way Predators goaltender Pekka Rinne was the main reason Nashville moved on and Cam Talbot was the main reason Edmonton moved on.
Calgary's Brian Elliott was the biggest single reason they made the playoffs, but his performance at key times in the series against Anaheim was so poor that the Flames now have to ponder their goaltending options.
Last week, the NHL announced the three finalists for the Vézina Trophy, awarded annually to the best goalie as chosen by the league's general managers. They selected Carey Price of Montreal, Braden Holtby of Washington and Sergei Bobrovsky of the Columbus Blue Jackets. Only Holtby has moved on to the second round and he didn't play his best game of the series until the end. Price was good for Montreal, but New York's Henrik Lundqvist was better. As for Bobrovsky, who is heavily favoured to win the award, he stands tied with Elliott for last place on the NHL playoff goaltending charts, picked apart by Pittsburgh's sharp shooters in the opening round.
If you're an NHL GM sifting through the ashes of a first-round exit, how do you react to a subpar goaltending performance from an all-star goaltender? You can't. Your hands are effectively tied. You just have to hope for better next year. Chicago's Corey Crawford has won before, but he was just so-so this year. Elliott was exceptional in 18 playoff games last year, but nothing went right for him this year.
And last year's Stanley Cup-winning goaltender, Matt Murray, is on the sidelines with an injury, leaving it to 2009 Stanley Cup champion Marc-André Fleury to ride to the rescue and get Pittsburgh into the second round.
If playoff pedigree matters, then Pittsburgh should be favoured. The Penguins have won four titles since 1991 – more than the other seven remaining teams combined in that span. And while fans in Ottawa and Edmonton are hoping one or the other can end Canada's 24-year championship drought, the marquee match-up of the second round features the defending champs against the two-time President's Trophy winners from Washington, a team that's been knocking on the door for a while.
The series will feature Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin on the Pittsburgh side pitted against Alex Ovechkin and Nicklas Backstrom on the Washington side.
But if the first round is any indication, even with all that star power up front, the series will ultimately be decided by the goaltending battle. At this stage of the season, the question isn't even if a goaltender is good or bad any more. They're all good. It's more a matter of who's hot and who's not. As the first round proved once again, if it happens to be your week, it could also be your year.