Quote:
Originally Posted by Erick Estrada
Yeah unfortunately there's simply too much of a pattern to ignore. Save for the Panthers who only barely squeaked out their win, the rest of the teams that have played the Oilers in the past few seasons playoffs have played scared to get burned by McDavid and Draisaitl and I don't expect the Stars to change that as they will be lucky to win 2 games and even that may required Rantanen in god mode. The Panthers are easily the cockiest team in the league which is why they could continue to stick with what they do best but even they kind of wilted as the series went on winning only 1 of the last 4 games of that series. It's looking like this could be the year unfortunately.
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I feel Dallas has quite a lot untapped potential, so I wouldn't write them off.
In the regular season, the teams leading goal scorers were, in order, Robertson, Johnston, Duchene, Hintz, Marchment and Dadonov, all putting up at least 20 goals.
Currently Robertson, Duchene, Marchment and Dadonov have 2 goals between them in the postseason, so it's not even really that their depth is struggling, their best scorers through most of the season have been shooting blanks. (Which likely says a lot about the quality of the opponents.) Rantanen was on a barely 20 goal pace after the trade to Dallas.
Based on regular season numbers, you could actually argue that Granlund-Hintz-Rantanen IS their depth scoring
It would actually be somewhat anomalous if this continues, you would expect their regular season top guys to start looking like their actual top guys at some point, and if that happens while Granlund-Hintz-Rantanen continue ripping it up and Oettinger plays as good as he has, I don't see Oilers having much of a chance.