Quote:
Originally Posted by VladtheImpaler
The Blues were a fluke - they had a lot of really good players, they were rugged, and they found a superstar goalie on the garbage pile just in the nick of time. Kind of like the Hab fluke in 1993 (Binnington is obviously no Roy, but he was Roy for all intents and purposes last season).
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Perhaps their goaltending was a fluke, but goaltending is also the most volatile aspect of the sport.
What wasn't a fluke was how they carried the play. Here were all the teams' regular season performances in 5v5 score-adjusted Fenwick following the NHL trade deadline (one of the stonger predictors of playoff success):
The Blues were exactly where you'd expect a cup contender to be. Right near the top, even ahead of "more talented" teams like Tampa, Pittsburgh, Washington. On paper they'd have been favoured in every single series they played except for the Bruins, and that ultimately went seven games, based simply on their ability to carry the play.
The real fluke of all these series, even more than Tampa - Columbus, was Calgary - Colorado. In my opinion the reffing got to the Flames mentally more than any talent disparity. They stopped playing their game because of the nature of the calls, and were caught reacting. And that's been evident in the early regular season where we've been the most penalized team.