DARRYL DYCK
With all three games Sunday ending in ties at the third period horn, this year's playoffs have now seen 17 overtime contests take place through one round and two games, just one less than there were in four complete rounds last year.
The Sharks are at the head of the class, having won all four overtime contests they've played in. They're followed closely by Boston - which had the worst overtime record in the NHL in the regular season but has scraped out three OT wins to this point, all of them against Montreal in the first round. The Red Wings' sweep of the Coyotes was the only series in the first round that didn't have at least one OT game.
Interestingly, only two teams that were among the top-five OT/shootout squads in the regular season are still alive, and they're playing each other (that would be Tampa Bay and Washington).
The next best team, Detroit, which had the seventh-best overtime in the regular season, lost its last OT test against San Jose, which had a lacklustre 10-9 overtime and shootout record coming into the post-season.
So maybe the playoffs really are a different animal, and who knows, perhaps the Habs' unlikely 10-0 overtime record from their Stanley Cup run in 1993 is actually within reach this year.
Call it the by-product of parity, call it the tighter checking of the playoffs, call it blind luck - just don't forget to set the PVR for an extra hour or so beyond the regular time slot of an NHL playoff broadcast.