Playoffs Show Varying Paths To Success

Watching the Stanley Cup Playoffs has again proved eye-opening and raised additional questions for me about what team goals should be as opposed to what prevailing wisdom says. I’ve never loved prevailing wisdom in sports, largely because it doesn’t “prevail” as often as we pretend.

Everybody says the true goal is winning a Cup – and of course, it is – but it just doesn’t happen often for even the best franchises. I’d say a secondary, more realistic goal, based on past seasons and this year’s four remaining NHL conference finalists, appears to be making the playoffs and then hoping for some good fortune in matchups and results.

This year’s final group – Colorado, Carolina, Vegas and Montreal – contains teams in various stages of rebuilds, retools, or whatever you happen to call it. A couple, Colorado and Montreal, benefitted from “tear it all down” rebuilds that see teams suffer through multiple years of rock bottom and draft lottery picks under the same front office. Then, you’ve got Carolina, a team that tried building through the draft, wound up firing its GM, then made some player additions under a different front office before hitting its stride.

And then you have the Golden Knights, who will never be accused of benefitting from a draft lottery, unless you believe they hit the lottery in the 2017 NHL Expansion Draft and have lived off “win now” moves ever since. Vegas is an interesting case study because I’m old enough to remember way back on the eve of this year’s Winter Olympic break when the Kraken were breathing right down the plated helm armor of those Knights, who weren’t looking so golden at the time.

The Kraken waltzed into Vegas and beat the Pacific Division leaders 3-2 on Jan. 31. At the time, that gave the Kraken 26 victories compared to 25 for the team that would ultimately finish in first place. Back then, the Kraken sat three points out of the division lead with only a quarter season to go. It was easy at season’s end to make “pillow fight” jokes about how the division race ultimately ended with Vegas topping it at only 95 points following a disappointing final six Kraken weeks.

But now, nobody’s laughing quite as much.

That’s because heading into Friday night’s action, the two teams closest to a Cup are Vegas and Montreal, both seven victories shy.

That would be a Vegas squad that fired its coach with eight games to go in the regular season because it feared missing the playoffs altogether. And a Montreal team now said to be years ahead of its Cup contention window – more on such thinking in a moment – and that barely scraped through its opening round with a record-low nine-shot victory over Tampa Bay in Game 7.

Sure, both could still lose their respective conference finals in five games.

But their opponents head into Friday and Saturday facing must-win home games to avoid very low odds of series recovery. Of 54 prior teams that lost the first two games of a conference final at home, zero moved on.

In the case of Vegas, their Colorado opponent is the team prevailing wisdom felt would mop the floor with all comers and why merely making the playoffs was supposedly futile for any other squad.

Again, that might still prove true. But very few will be parroting such wisdom should the Avalanche lose Friday night and trail 0-2. Same with a Carolina team facing Montreal in Game 2 on Saturday night.

And I’ll submit that when a season hangs in the balance based on a single game, the right to make “sure thing” predictions about any team goes out the window.

That’s also been the reality of championship goals for any NHL team the past quarter century. For all their dominance, the Avalanche have won exactly one championship after embarking on their teardown a decade ago.

The list of recent teams that haven’t won a Cup at all lately despite championship level rosters and superb young talent includes Edmonton, Dallas and Minnesota. I’ll even throw Toronto into that mix, offensively tilted roster construction and all. Carolina might still win it all this season but hasn’t in 20 years.

So, yeah, the goal of winning a Cup isn’t realized very often by anybody.

This long ago sealed my belief that getting to the playoffs in a modern age of parity is a far more logical goal.

That doesn’t mean sacrificing the future to barely sneak into the postseason and immediately get obliterated. There are other ways to make the playoffs by entertaining fans all season and then continuing to do so in May.

We saw the Kraken do it just three years ago. They finished with a solid 100 points – five better than this season’s Golden Knights -- beat defending champ Colorado and probably should have eliminated Dallas the next round ahead of losing in seven games.

Ah, but fans usually want teams doing that year after year. If not winning a Cup outright, then at least providing consistent hope of playoff fun. I’d say that’s very reasonable.

In fact, that’s also why, as a sports fan, I’ve learned to live in the moment a lot more than to constantly worry about an idealized perfect future. You can still focus on bettering the future without giving up on the present.

Living in the present is also why I don’t buy prevailing wisdom the Montreal Canadiens – four years into their rebuild -- are currently playing with “house money” because they’ve yet to reach their championship window and will long be a guaranteed Cup contender. The reality is this may be the closest these Canadiens ever get to a title. They may keep making the playoffs without ever again winning more than a round or two without some luck.

Folks also thought the St. Louis Blues peaked early winning their lone Cup in 2019. They never peaked again.

Dallas made the Cup Final six years ago and hasn’t been back, no matter how often the Stars tweaked their roster to fashion the ultimate championship team.

Buffalo is now the trendy pick to be a youthful, emerging Cup contender for years. Much like New Jersey was a few short seasons ago.

Modern sports are not like decades past. Parity is real and designed. You can build and build, tweak and perfect, but there is no guaranteed recipe. Even teams making the playoffs annually can require big luck to get there some seasons. As sports fans we often hate to admit that part. Leaving things to the whims of fortune goes against our nature as humans. We like to feel in control.

But there is only so much control you can engineer in trying to build toward a championship. Sometimes, your best shot comes years before your supposed window fully opens. Or never at all. Knowing that, the idea of sacrificing three, five, or seven years to build that contention model is not some throwaway consideration. It may work out great in the end, as for Colorado and now, it seems, Montreal. It also may fail miserably years later with no playoffs at all.

So, all that weighs into any decision. As does figuring out the end goal.

If it’s winning a championship, that’s one conversation. If the goal is to make the playoffs and look for some bounces, that’s a very different discussion. And knowing there are myriad ways of getting into that postseason derby, I personally celebrate when my favorite teams make it. And fret when they, like the Kraken this past season, do not.

That doesn’t mean I aspire to “mid” status. I want my teams constantly trying to improve, draft good prospects, develop better and make shrewd moves to bolster the existing lineup.

I expect them to try to consistently make the playoffs to give fans some fun. And then hope for that magical season where it all comes together. Of course, that requires planning. And some plans work out better than others. When one plan doesn’t work, you look to different plans. But I’d argue, with this year’s playoffs as the latest example, there is no surefire roadmap to get there.

If there was, they wouldn’t play the games to begin with. And watching these games play out, in both conferences, has been unpredictable and a lot of fun for the fanbases involved.