I think how well a team does during the regular season matters a lot. I get the "get hot at the right time and anything can happen" mentality and what better year to make that point than this one, but I believe teams get into big trouble thinking like that.
If we look at the recent Cup champions and finalists - Washington, Pittsburgh, Nashville, San Jose, Boston, St. Louis, Tampa Bay, Chicago, Vegas - two things jump out at me:
1.All of the cup champions and almost all finalists were regular season division champions or were competing closely for the division.
2. Every cup champion and almost all finalists were perennial playoff teams around the time they won/made the finals (except Vegas because they have only been around for 1 year).
To me, this says be a consistently good regular season team, be a perennial playoff team and eventually you will have a chance to break through.
As for the Flames, I actually don't think we're even at the perennial playoff team part yet. We've been make it one year, miss the next...So before jumping to far ahead and thinking about playoff accomplishments, I'd actually like to see if we can repeat our regular season performance next year. I'm not taking the playoffs for granted, even though I think the acquisitions of Lindholm, Hanifin and Hamonic have pushed us to perennial playoff team status. We will see.
As an aside, I think we wasted a lot of the Iginla years, especially the last few, thinking we just need to make it and once we do we're good enough to go on a long run. I actually think the Cinderella 04 run hindered this team from fully assessing the talent that we had and realizing it was not a perennial powerhouse team, but that's a whole other debate.
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