Arena I'm Not Wearing Hockey Pads! (NHL Discussion, Stadium Series Season!)

That's cold, PG. With a large helping of salt.

 

I find most dishes taste better with a bit of salt and the Knights main course of revenge is also best served COLD and with lots of salt (from other fans)! Lol.

Gallant is such a classy guy, I give him mad props, but there’s always that little part of me that wishes he’s bottling it all up and if the Knights win the Cup, or when he wins the Jack Adams, he sticks it to the idiots in Florida, surely one of sports’ worst run franchises. Maybe just some passive aggressive comment about how he’s never been so happy to take a taxi as when he left behind his past and went to work for a winner lol.

I had so much fun celebrating the victory today, it was just amazing to think back to me in October prepared to watch my terrible expansion franchise stink up the ice but these would be character-building years and maybe 3-5 years down the road we might not totally suck was the hope. Well... it didn’t quite go that way! Lol

 

Congratulations, NHL, you've found a way to make me interested in your product again. Fascinating.

 

@DarthIntegral

I think out of the four major team sports leagues in North America, the NHL has the best on the field (or this case ice) product right now which is insane to say since at the beginning of the century they had the worse with boring games because it was all dump and chase offenses. The rule changes have really open the game up and increase excitement and scoring but isn't video game types scores either.

 

Scoring in general had actually been trending downward until this season where it had the highest goals per game since 2005-06. And it's not due to a lack of scoring talent, it's because goaltending has gotten so much better over the past number of years. I remember when a .920 save percentage was considered elite. Nowadays that's not even good enough to break the top ten in save percentage leaders.

 

omg I'm gonna actually watch the Stanley Cup?

 

To me the craziest thing in all of this is how if you were a screenwriter working this story, you really wouldn't have to manipulate borderline anything to make it "more compelling." I mean the October 1 shooting in Las Vegas is your "this is why it's not just a sports story" kind of thing, the team has done an amazing job becoming part of the community and really providing healing to people in Vegas through sports, which is a great story in and of itself no matter how well or badly the team did after that. It just so happens they were a great team, against all odds.

I heard someone joking around how funny it would be if the movie started with Gerard Gallant getting fired, taking that taxi to the airport, and then when he goes to this random bar (hehe), he happens to sit next to George McPhee, who says, "I'm putting together a team." Hahahaha, that'd be so funny, it's like the setup of every heist movie only the object is to steal the Stanley Cup!

When you get down to the details, some of them are such bizarre coincidences you start to pinch yourself wondering if you're in The Matrix or something, because how can real life be so poetic?! Who else scores the SERIES winning goal against the Kings? Well, of course it's Brayden McNabb, the former Kings player left unprotected by the Kings, because of course it is. Who else? Then who seals the deal against the Sharks? Well it would have to be Ryan Carpenter, who the Sharks released in December only to see him end their season five months later, because why wouldn't that happen?! Or how about Ryan Reaves, who the Knights seemed to acquire mainly to (in a three-way trade) block the Jets from acquiring Brassard at the deadline, instead handing him to the Penguins, figuring that IF by some twist of fate the Knights happened to play the Jets in the Conference Finals, it'd be better not to face Brassard and to face him potentially in the Stanley Cup Final. Then the Penguins are eliminated early, the Knights do in fact meet the Jets, and RYAN freakin' REAVES who didn't have ONE goal with the Knights since the trade manages to hit the game-winning, series-winning goal against his hometown Winnipeg Jets, because of course he did, who else was going to do it?!

I mean the sheer unlikelihood of every event is mind boggling. If you scripted this from scratch, you would be ridiculed and laughed at, with criticisms like "too many coincidences, that would never happen in real life" and told that it's one thing to have a feel-good story about a bunch of misfits maybe making the playoffs, before valiantly going out in the first round, but it's quite another to make a story about them playing for a championship. That's just TOO unbelievable to audiences. I heard one guy say, "Look Rudy ended with the guy making it onto the field for a play, Rudy didn't feature a guy making it onto the field, being selected Number One in the NFL draft, dominating the league, going to the Super Bowl, winning the Super Bowl, and being crowned MVP." No matter what one thinks about the individual players on the team, the simple fact is it's very hard to create instant chemistry, to put a bunch of players together who have mostly never played together, and then somehow coach them to gel as a team in a way that they actually play BETTER as a team than many teams who have been together for many years. It all is pinch-me-so-I-know-I'm-not-dreaming ridiculous.

 

I'd like to see Al Michaels do at least one game of the Finals. If the Golden Knights win the Cup, he should do do the clinching game. There's no one more appropriate for it (and of course he's one of the all-time great sports voices regardless of that).

 

That would be fantastic! I wish the real long-time die-hard hockey fans would have done me a favor and warned me that once you get into hockey, you've never experienced anything like playoff hockey with your team in it. It's ridiculous, you shouldn't care so much about something you can't control and I know that, but my body doesn't apparently give two damns about that. The regular season was never like that, I just enjoyed watching and when the game was over that was kind of that, on with my life. In the playoffs I spend most of my time just thinking about the Knights, reading about them, talking with other fans, obsessing over the next game. The amount of work that has occurred since the playoffs started isn't exactly what I'd call amazing, let's put it that way. It has been spurts between series of a lot of productivity followed by entire weeks where I wonder what I accomplished the entire week besides reading about and watching the Knights.

 

Well, I severely underestimated the Caps in this series. Hats off to them. I hope Ovie and Backstrom can finally lift the Cup. Also gotta love the story of George McPhee going up against his former team that he built.

 

This is an ideal Finals series, with a guaranteed first-time winner. The Capitals have slogged for decades, sometimes with more success than others, never reaching the mountain top, while the Golden Knights are a brand new face with unprecedented achievements to date.

Someone's going home a legend after this series. Whether it's Gerard Gallant or Alex Ovechkin remains to be seen.

 

Yeah, definitely an historic matchup! I'm also loving the angle of the team that McPhee just built versus the team he built last. Hmm.... I wonder, do you think it matters which GM you hire? Someone should ask the Panthers.

No matter what happens from here, it is an absolutely crazy story to realize the Knights went from as high as 500 to 1 underdogs last summer to FAVORITES to hoist the Cup going into this series, between -150 and -160 on sports books thus far. What if I had told someone last summer, "Knights are not only going to make the playoffs, but they're going to have home ice advantage in the Stanley Cup Final." You'd be saying wooooow what a clueless hockey n00b, a complete homer who doesn't understand anything about the game whatsoever. Ah well, he'll learn the hard way! Lol sports are so crazy sometimes.

PS: My friend in Hawaii is a big sports bettor, not for huge sums of money, he just bets everything. He put money on two teams only this year back in October, Capitals $25 to win $200, and Knights $25 to win $2,000. They BOTH made it!

 

I guess I'm gonna go with Vegas in 7. Hope I'm wrong though because I'll be rooting for the Caps.

 

If there was a middle finger, I'd give it to you PG.

Vegas in 5

 

Game 1 is already underway, but I say Las Vegas in 7.

Edit: The teams have already switched off having the lead. Also, it's really so great to see two clubs that have never won the title, and neither had been in the Finals so far in this century (goes without saying for Vegas, of course). I can't imagine a better matchup than this one. I suppose it would have technically been the same with Winnipeg instead of Las Vegas, but this just seems better.

 

Get settled. We're in for a wild one.

 

I think Washington took the lead and then gave it up in the time since I first posted my previous message.

 

Vegas is absurd. That team just never quits and they get lucky too. Smith-Pelley's skate guard falling off and taking him out of the play? You can't make that stuff up.

 

At least for once they looked beatable. Could've easily been a Caps victory.

 

I have a feeling, or would hope, that both teams play better defense in Game 2 and you get a more normal game, whether that's 3-2 or 4-3 or whatever else, but I can't imagine there are so many defensive breakdowns from the Knights. I can imagine that for the Capitals. With all due respect, their defense is pretty garbage (15th ranked during the season?) for being a Stanley Cup Final team. They have, what, 3 guys who can play defense? They certainly don't have a 3rd defensive pairing, whatsoever, so they're trying to use two D pairs and overplay them each game. That's not going to work in a long series against this team, I don't think, it might not work in a short one, either.

The Capitals offense was opportunistic and aggressive just as advertised. I wasn't surprised both offenses were potent, but I was seeing the rust of having 8 days off for the Knights. I thought that might be an issue. The only Game 1 you notice it didn't seem like an issue was against the equally well rested Sharks, since both teams had swept Round 1. But the only game the Knights lost against the Jets was Game 1 looking extremely out of sorts. It was nice to be able to win a game where it was some of the worst hockey from the Knights. I'm sure the Caps aren't happy about the way they played defense, either, which is why I would assume both teams get a better handle on that.

Certainly Game 1 was incredibly entertaining if you're not a fan of either team, but as a Knights fan it was a heart attack game lol. I wasn't a fan of large stretches and the last few minutes was so nerve-racking, especially when they replay something none of us really saw in full motion, which is the Caps dude missing an empty net from 1 foot away. I guess McNabb got a stick in there to deflect his stick, but phew that was close.

This is the second time these playoffs the Knights have won 5 games in a row. I wish they could win 3 more now, any way they do that, doesn't have to be in a row

 

Would someone mind posting the scores of each game of the final here please. It would nice for someone looking through the thread in the future too.