Yeah, pretty much would have taken a miracle, and it only got worse from there. A good run by the Stars (with some glaring mistakes), and now I gotta root for the Knights in the final.
I have no vested interested in either the Knights or the Panthers, but I’ll be watching the Cup Final just because these are two powerhouse teams who should provide for a great series!
I can’t believe how poorly the Stars played last night. No energy, lots of coasting.
Oh well. It was fun while it lasted. The finals should be interesting with 2 teams that have not won it before.
For the Panthers now it is the rust versus rest trade off.
My interest in the final series will be more anti-VGK than pro-Florida.
Teams that sweep a round are just 11-13 against teams that came off a series of six or seven games so there is something to the idea that rust at least outweighs rest.
Florida should get Jaromir back into their line-up!
Heh, he’d be game! But, well, maybe also not quite as spry as he once was.
It’s interesting how this varies from sport to sport. Getting rest always seems to help football teams. It doesn’t seem to make a difference for baseball teams.
Rooting for Vegas, mainly because then the Oilers can say, “Well, we got knocked out by the Stanley Cup Champs.”
Football and hockey often leave players bruised and battered and sore. Not so much in baseball. Football and Hockey also push players to the point of exhaustion. No one in baseball runs more than a third of a field, and then only in short bursts.
But that doesn’t explain the 11-13 win/loss record for rested hockey teams vs the ones that go straight into the next series. That could just be small sample size, or maybe the psychological effects of resting are a bigger problem than the physical rest is an asset?
We’d have to see the teams involved to know for sure; 24 series isn’t that many and it’s possible the teams with rest just weren’t as good.
Baseball effectively resets in no more than two days, since that’s as long as it takes for a bullpen to pretty much be recharged, so we shouldn’t see much effect there, and we don’t; there is no discernible advantage OR disadvantage to long periods off.
Football is more interesting; it’s a very rough sport but a week is a lot of rest. The thing is that the only times a playoff game would be contested between a team with one week off and a team with two weeks off is if one team got a bye in the first round - and getting a bye means that team is probably a better team than the team that didn’t get a bye to start with.
Not a playoff team and definitely won’t be with this hire, Blue Jackets decide to hire Mike Babcock?!
Heh, I’ll always remember Babs for quite strangely getting a player (Mitch Marner) to come up with a list ranking the team’s players, and then sharing that list with them. 
Surprised he’s garnered a 700-418-19-164 record.
No Pomerian in the fight for the finals - predicting a battle between Bobrovsky and Hill (all low-scoring games).
Well, the magic of Bobrovsky may have worn off. That game ended 7-2 and didn’t even seem that close. On to Florida to see if the Panthers can turn it around.
With a sweep, Cup Final will be a Saturday night which I quite like.
Also, Tkackuk won’t get any game misconducts this series. At all.
or, wait
His hit on Eichel, btw - which thankfully none of the GMs were for - was clean.
With the cliche that a series doesn’t get interesting until the home team loses, I suspect it will get interesting tomorrow night.
So far this series looks very much like a series between a team that won their division and a team that eked into the playoffs.
The record would suggest Babcock has always succeeded at the level of the talent available to him and not one inch higher. He did win a Cup in Detroit but with a ludicrous amount of talent. He certainly didn’t get as much out of the talent in Toronto as he could have. He has two Olympic gold medals… coaching Canada, a country that could quite easily be split in two and put two gold medal contenders on the ice. He’s been riding the fastest horses his entire career.
More rumors of another recycled coach. Pete Laviolette to the Rangers? I hope not and could care less about the Rangers. Let someone else have a chance.
I have a feeling we will be closing this thread soon as I don’t think a Florida team without Tkachuk is going to coming back down 2-0 in the 1st period.
I’ll relax and enjoy what I think will be the last game of the season. Otherwise, it’ll be an instant classic if Florida finds life on the road in a deep hole early.