Well, it’s not yet October, not for another four and a half hours as I type this. And the regular season doesn’t get underway for another week yet.
But I figure the leaves are changing colour, the wind is getting colder, and that means hockey season!
Some good storylines to follow this season. Can the Caps make it over the hump? Can the Penguins get back to the top? How will the Blackhawks rebound from making some tough roster decisions?
Let’s drop the puck, eh?
It will be interesting to see which SE Division team improves most, and if the can challenge the Caps for the Division. Also, Tim Gleason and Brandon Sutter are the new Assistant Captains for the Canes, and Sergei Samsonov is on IR after his hit on last Saturday.
[Wayne’s World]GAME ON![/WW]
My quick, way-too-early predictions: No. No. Yes.
The Caps are essentially the same team as last year, having really only lost their late season acquisitions and only adding a couple kids and swapping out one inconsistent goalie for another. Their loss to Montreal last year, while a legitimate upset, was not all that shocking. Defense wins championships, and time and time again we see that even the most prolific offenses can be shut down when it matters most.
The Penguins improved on defense, but not as much as most seem to think. Martin is a talent, and does some things very well, but he’s soft and doesn’t come close to matching the offense they lost from their blueline and PP when Gonchar left (and their PP was pretty bad to begin with). With so much of their cap being tied up in their strength, their Centers, they still struggle to find the right combination of cheap but effective wingers to flank them. They’ll make the playoffs, and probably contend for the division, but a stronger, but still weak, defense and shaky goal tending will do them in.
The Blackhawks should be fine in a relatively weak division that Detroit has been exploiting for years. They kept their core, and any team that can boast Kane, Hossa, Toews and Sharp up front, and Seabrook, Keith, Campbell and Hjalmarsson on the blue line can’t be counted out. I don’t see a repeat, but I think they’ll be fine and make some noise in the playoffs.
My more immediate concern is if the Devils can get over the hump of first round disappointment and get Brodeur one more Cup before he retires.
Nah. Habs will win the cup.
What? I can make my predictions too!
This is the most excited I’ve been about the start of any season since the lockout. The Philadelphia and Montreal runs in the playoffs last year really helped renew my enthusiasm for the NHL.
I’m really looking forward to watching the Southeastern division. Atlanta and Tampa should be interesting to watch. Washington will probably win, but they won’t run away with it.
Vancouver is my pick to win the cup this year. Luongo has to step it up this season.
I’m ready for the Coyotes drama to end. Move them to a Canadian city. I’m tired of reading about it.
I hope NHL Gamecenter online improves. Hopefully their technical group has fixed the horrible buffering delays.
I’ll be watching the Carey Price situation with interest as well as Halak in St. Louis.
Fair enough. I think a NJ/Montreal ECF would be fun. Lots of storylines to follow.
See you there?
The southeast has improved, but I don’t think that there will be a serious threat to Washington from the SE.
Wow the pacific is really stacked. I think that Vancouver is as good of a pick as any. Each year I pay attention more to the west and I’m really impressed. Is the west coast “style” different or is it just a differnt mix of player skills?
There is also a good story in Boston…will Tim Thomas come back or is Rask going to get the job for good?
It’s a combination of the two. The Western Conference teams have a much tougher travel schedule, so they tend to be built to better withstand the rigors of the road (i.e. bigger, stronger, more defensively responsible).
Not to say the EC is “soft”, but take a team in the Atlantic Division who has 24 intra-divisional games all within a short bus ride of their own beds, and you can see how that might impact an 82 game season differently than a team in, say the Pacific Division for whom most team’s closest divisional opponent is at least a six hour drive away. Also, the EC is more tightly packed together, largely along the eastern seaboard, so that a team like the Maple Leafs doesn’t have to go much further than Florida four times per year (except for the one or two west coast trips per season), whereas a team like the Kings has to come to Nashville twice and Detroit twice and Columbus twice, etc., just for intra-conference play… plus the requisite inter-conference trip or two.
I think that, ultimately, what ends up happening is that the WC teams are built to be more defensively responsible, whereas the EC teams can afford the extra energy commitment to be offensively flashier… and the League’s efforts to increase goal scoring has benefited the WC more than the EC (even though goal scoring has been slowly declining since the lockout).
Sounds good! Habs in 6! 
A little preseason humor courtesy of Down Goes Brown, who gives his 2010-11 Eastern Conference Preview.
And yet that same “weak” division saw 4 teams make the playoffs 2 years ago (with the 5th team just missing out) and 3 teams making the playoffs last year. It’s actually a pretty sold division top to bottom these days.
The exception doesn’t prove the rule. Looking at the conference that year, I’d say that four teams from the Central getting in is less a case of their being good enough as the rest of the conference just being that bad.
Comparatively, it’s a weak division. Outside of that one year when four teams made the playoffs (and two of them subsequently crapped the bed in being swept out of the first round), the division is typically a one horse race with a couple of average teams and one or more whipping boy teams down among the bottom of the conference.
Last year it had a two horse race (at the end of the season, anyway, once Detroit got healthy); a competitive, but average Predators squad that’s never made it past the first round of the playoffs and remains competitive in spite of its cheapskate owners almost solely through the sheer willpower of Barry Trotz–who should win the Jack Adams every freaking year; an average Blues team; and a thoroughly terrible squad from Columbus.
Considering the other two WC divisions, I maintain that it’s a weak division.
You give Detroit far too much credit; they never had a legitimate chance to win the division last year.
Cammalleri got one game for this spear/slash on Nino Nederreiter.
And the Canes lose to SKA 5-3 in a “rough” game. Also, the NHL and KHL have agreed to honor each other’s contracts.
Pacific Division is going to be brutal this year, but I think this will be the Kings who will end up on top.
Poor guy.
If Mike Myers were making The Love Guru now, he would have been all over that.