Quote:
Originally Posted by iamca
To your point, playoffs are a totally different game and lots of regular season standouts wilt under the pressure and a more physical game.
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Not
totally different. There's a pretty strong correlation between regular-season performance and playoff performance; it's just not 100%.
It's not necessarily even a question of wilting under pressure. The Lightning lost a total of 24 games that year. They had the bad luck to have four of them in a row right at the end. The very next year, pretty much the same team won the Stanley Cup.
Sometimes screwy things happen, that's all. Tampa Bay in 2019 was the very first team ever to win the Presidents' Trophy and be swept in the first round.