If there is a stronger verity in hockey than "Trust nothing in the playoffs," it is surely, "And whatever else you do, trust nothing you saw before the playoffs." The fetish of the team with the best record rarely proving it when everyone is watching is as secure a bet as past-posting, to the point where the Presidents’ Trophy, which is what the team with the best regular-season record receives, is now aligned with the American president in plain undesirability.
But every year, someone wins it anyway, the morons. Either a star goes dim, or a reliable goalie goes bad, or the exertions of the past six months pile up, or a lesser team goes on a heater, or as is often the case, something stupid simply happens.
Thus, the most interesting questions about the Western Conference this year were (a) just how bad is the Pacific? and (b) when are the Colorado Avalanche going to figure out that it's time to start tanking for the good of their Cup run? The answers are (a) abominable, and (b) they tried a bit in March but didn't have the stomach to finish the job.
So they gave up and went back to kicking ass for their own satisfaction, and with Thursday's season-ending 2-0 win over long-dead Seattle, they became only the 12th team in NHL history to finish the regular season with 120 points. For you recidivist hoopheads out there, that is the equivalent is finishing 67-15, and nearly every basketball team to do that won its championship. In other words, success in hockey is time-specific, and everything else is just losing in a decorative fez.
Anyway, the Avalanche. Having been the best team in the sport at both Thanksgivings (Canadian and American), Christmas, the Olympic break, and every single day we threatened to annex Canada because some fool left an atlas open on the president's desk, they now enter the playoffs with home-ice advantage and the pleasure of watching Dallas and Minnesota fight to the death. They have the game's best goal scorer in Nathan MacKinnon, the best defenseman by acclimation in Cale Makar, one of the finest coaches in Jared Bednar (and we know this because he has never been named coach of the year), and they scored the most goals and gave up the fewest.
Now they enter the postseason with a series against Los Angeles, a team most notable for having won only 22 games all season in regulation time and therefore the liveliest kind of underdog, especially if you're prepared to watch a lot of overtime. The Kings were never quite dead in the water because the Pacific Division was oleaginous sludge top to bottom, but they needed to can Jim Hiller and replace him with D.J. Smith, and trade for top-shelf scorer Artemi (Yeast Mode) Panarin to escape the shame they, and truthfully all Pacific teams, deserved.
But as we mentioned, they played the equivalent of three full extra games by never finishing on time, and if that form holds, the entire series will last forever. Sudden-death/play-until-breakfast-if-needed hockey is decided entirely by the whims of the gods, and that is never good news for the obviously better team, because teams that have to play a lot longer are placed at a geometrically increasing disadvantage with every new series. In short, the Kings may have lost 47 of 82 games in real talk, but it’s the way they lose that could be irksome to the Avs, either immediately or in the longer term.
And while we're at it, let's talk the longer term. Colorado’s second-round series would be against the winner of the Dallas-Minnesota series, as in the second-best team against the third-best team. This hardly seems fair to anyone involved, but the NHL laughs at fair. It's almost as if through dint of dumbassed luck the league itself decided to reinforce the already rich Presidents’ Trophy jinx. Colorado is not prevented from winning that series either, to be sure, and they’re spared from having to beat both of them in succession, but their advantages over the Stars or Wild are significantly smaller, and by the transitive property of punching until your arms go limp the Avs are in even deeper offal.
In other words, Colorado and its multiple gifts are in deep against their standings-based inferiors for no better reason than "Suck it." The NHL's version of fairness runs in a braid with its alternating theory of "But it's supposed to suck," and the Avalanche is running up against it simply by forgetting that the sport is best at pounding down the upraised nail. The only teams ever to amass 120 points in the regular season and win the Cup are the 1973, '76, '77, and '78 Canadiens, which is to say the same team repeatedly. Thus, well done to the Colorado Avalanche for winning most often. They were mesmerized by their own history, specifically having had the best record in 2001 and then winning that Cup. In doing so, they failed to realize that it’s not your old man’s NHL anymore, and being the best wins you squat.
