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Originally Posted by Textcritic
It's a week or two late, but they are suffering the relentless slaughter nearly everyone predicted would occur once they got out of Canada.
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That is not the slaughter anyone predicted. What was being predicted was that they would be totally unable to compete with the winner of ANY of the three U.S. divisions. That turned out not to be the case.
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And yes, the Canadian Division was awful
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What's your evidence for that proposition? I see plenty of people saying it, but nobody provides any evidence. That doesn't pass the smell test.
One or two bold but foolish posters tried to make a case that the North Division sucked because it didn't have a team in the top 5 of the overall standings. That only proves that there was more parity in this division than the others. (Note that the North also did not have a team in the bottom 5.) In the absence of any interdivisional games, it means nothing.
Others have suggested that the North sucked because Connor McDavid and Auston Matthews were able to score so many points, so all the teams
must be bad defensively. That also means very little, as we are talking about two of the three or four best offensive players in the league, both in the age range where one would expect their offensive production to peak. Again, in the absence of any interdivisional games, you can't draw any conclusions from that.
The only meaningful argument I've seen depends on looking at the previous season's standings. If you do that, you see a group of middle-of-the-pack teams and two bad ones. Well, one of the bad teams made major changes, and won the divisional playoffs after a mid-season slump that nearly put them out of the playoff running; the other bad team remained bad. Of the two teams that showed major improvements, one relied on a career year from an antediluvian goalie; the other actually paid attention to defensive play for the first time in years, and cut its GAA by 0.6 per game. Both those things will move you up in the standings in any division.
Here are the winning percentages of all seven North Division teams in 2019-20, when they had to play U.S. opponents, and in 2020-21, when they only had to play each other:
Code:
19-20 20-21
Toronto .579 .688
Edmonton .585 .643
Winnipeg .563 .563
Montreal .500 .527
Calgary .564 .491
Vancouver .565 .446
Ottawa .437 .455
TOTAL* .542 .545
*Adjusted for unequal GP in '19-20.
The effect of removing all those vastly superior U.S. teams was to increase the average record of the North Division clubs by .003. Not much of a difference, is it?
I'm waiting for any other argument, but I've yet to hear one.