Three long, grueling rounds of playoff hockey have built up to this moment. Tonight, at 8 pm EST, the Boston Bruins, representing the NHL’s Eastern Conference, and the Vancouver Canucks, the NHL’s top regular season team, will square off in Game One of the Stanley Cup Finals. But it is more than just the last two months of playoff hockey that have allowed us to reach this point. Seven months, a marathon regular season, saw the Canucks finish with a league-high 117 points. No one else was within 10 points of them. The Boston Bruins, on the other hand, were kind of an afterthought in the East playoff race. They finished with the third seed, by virtue of winning the weak Northeast division. This is despite the fact that they finished in … Read entire article »

Cody made up a little bit of ground on me in the second round, as he went 3/4 compared to my 2/4. We both accurately predicted the Canucks would knock off the Predators in 6 games. We each had Boston disposing of the Flyers, although we thought the series would go quite a bit longer than the sweep it turned out to be. Hard to fathom that the Philadelphia goaltending would have been that much of a circus. At last count, I’m pretty certain that Garth Snow was strapping on the pads. We both had the Wings topping the Sharks, and were obviously wrong in that regard, but I’d like to give some props to Cody on this series. He correctly identified that all 7 games would be decided by one goal (except … Read entire article »