Sens lose again to Florida this afternoon in regulation. Panthers are a point behind Ottawa but the Sens have a game in hand. Boston is going to OT against Carolina, so they keep picking up points. Florida with two games left against the Bruins, so things are going to stay interesting!
Official Ottawa Senators Thread
- Thread starter Madferret
- Start date
Kin
New member
While the Senators are obviously still in it and I'm ironically pulling for them, I think this highlights so much of what I've come to dislike about the new NHL. They didn't magically pull it together and the team didn't take some big next step forward. They got a few months of unsustainable goaltending and, in the middle of the pack of a mediocre conference, they were able to take a run at a playoff spot currently being held by another mediocre team.
But if they make the playoffs, will it be at all reasonable to say "Man, it was a nice story but they'll never get past those Habs/Rangers/Lightning/Whoever". No, because all of those teams are pretty meh themselves and if the Sens got more unsustainable goaltending they'd have better than a puncher's chance.
That's all the league is right now. Mediocre teams having playoff results decided by who gets a run of hot goaltending.
But if they make the playoffs, will it be at all reasonable to say "Man, it was a nice story but they'll never get past those Habs/Rangers/Lightning/Whoever". No, because all of those teams are pretty meh themselves and if the Sens got more unsustainable goaltending they'd have better than a puncher's chance.
That's all the league is right now. Mediocre teams having playoff results decided by who gets a run of hot goaltending.
LuncheonMeat
New member
Nik the Trik said:
And the NHL lovingly refers to this as 'parity'.
I'm with you, I'm definitely not a Sens fan but have been secretly cheering for them lately, which is not something I ever imagined doing. And it would be that much more sweet if it came at the expense of Boston missing the playoffs.
Frank E
Active member
Nik the Trik said:
You could argue the same thing of teams having success with unsustainably high shooting % (Colorado last year). It used to be the trapping teams getting into the playoffs playing boring defensive hockey, and people complained about that too.
As long as half of the teams get into the playoffs, there's going to be a fair few mediocre teams that get in, no matter which metric they're clinging to at some unsustainable rate.
GhostofPotvin29
New member
Not to mention the Kings won last year with Quick posting a .911 SV% in the playoffs. Not really a run of hot goaltending.
Kin
New member
Frank E said:
The difference being that the mediocre teams who get into the playoffs on the backs of numbers like those(and say, the Leafs in the shortened season) get exposed in the playoffs pretty quickly. Catch a run of hot goaltending in the playoffs and a mediocre team will win the Stanley Cup.
Kin
New member
And just to sort of build on the above, it's important to note that while .920 is obviously very good goaltending it's not lights out goaltending so it's important to draw a distinction here between, say, what the Kings did last year and what the Habs did in '93 or what the Ducks did in '03 or those years where it looked like Cujo's Oilers teams would knock off a titan in the first round. Great goaltending has always been able to carry a so-so team.
Quick's goaltending last year wasn't miraculous and he didn't stand on his head night after night. He wasn't stopping 50 shots a night as his overmatched team got hemmed up in their own zone all night. What happened is that a so-so team that finished 6th in their conference, a team with only one player who scored more than 50 points and only two players who scored 20 goals, started getting pretty good goaltending and they looked as good as any team in the league(including the Blackhawks, the team usually cited as "proof" that great teams can still exist) en route to the Stanley Cup.
Quick's goaltending last year wasn't miraculous and he didn't stand on his head night after night. He wasn't stopping 50 shots a night as his overmatched team got hemmed up in their own zone all night. What happened is that a so-so team that finished 6th in their conference, a team with only one player who scored more than 50 points and only two players who scored 20 goals, started getting pretty good goaltending and they looked as good as any team in the league(including the Blackhawks, the team usually cited as "proof" that great teams can still exist) en route to the Stanley Cup.
Kin
New member
Frank E said:
Well, Jonathan Quick has only ever been able to sustain that level of play for one of the seven seasons he's played in the league so yes, to an extent, but even then you're confusing what I said about the Senators with what I said about the Kings.
I didn't say the Kings won with unsustainable goaltending, I said that what vaulted the Senators into playoff contention was unsustainable goaltending. I didn't bring up the Kings at all but the Kings absolutely fit the last line of my initial post as a mediocre team who won the cup by virtue of getting a hot run of goaltending at the right time.
GhostofPotvin29
New member
But the Kings weren't a mediocre team either time they won the Cup. All the underlying stats basically had them as Cup contenders. I don't think the standings should determine who are mediocre teams or not. Montreal is thoroughly mediocre, though not according to the standings.
I know it's not really the point here, but I gotta take exception to the "so-so" and "mediocre" labels that last years Kings team is getting. They posted some of the best possession numbers we've seen since the first lockout. They were a pretty great team that didn't have much offence during the season for whatever reason. But they averaged 3.38 goals a game in the playoffs, which is a pretty crazy high number. I'd say that their offence carried them more in last years playoffs than Quick.
Kin
New member
CarltonTheBear said:
The reason is it's not a particularly talented group of offensive hockey players. I appreciate that the Standings aren't the be all and end all of what makes a team good but neither is the ability to fit into a system designed to maximize possession numbers.
And, for what it's worth, I never said Quick carried them. In fact, I wrote a post specifically distinguishing between what Quick did and, say, what Giguere did in '03.
Nik the Trik said:
It was more this comment that made me want to post:
Nik the Trik said:
That group of hockey players were also among the highest scoring playoff teams we've seen since the first lockout, along with being an elite possession team. Both of those factors were more important than Quick's goaltending when they won the Cup last year.
Kin
New member
CarltonTheBear said:
I disagree. I mean for starters the idea that a not very good team for 82 games can go on a hot run offensively and win the cup seems to just be the flip-side of what I'm saying.
But let's run with your premise. Let's say the Kings were, in fact, a world beating offensive team despite finishing 26th in the league in goals per game and became their true selves in the playoffs. Ok, well, then we see a team like Pittsburgh get knocked out every year because despite being a team with very good offensive players, they get crummy goaltending.
So the determining factor there is still goaltending. Even if it would be less accurate to say that Pittsburgh won "because" of Fleury getting hot I don't think anyone would dispute that Fleury's play largely determines where the Penguins tend to finish.
Nik the Trik said:
That's not really my premise. I'll try to lay out my argument one final time here. You said that the Kings were a mediocre team that won the Stanley Cup because of Quick. I'll break that into 2 problems.
First, the Kings weren't a mediocre team, even in the regular season. They finished with 100 points. They were a top-10 league in the team. They were the 4th best possession team, a statistic that better predicts future success than any other statistic out there, in the 10 years that Corsi can be accurately calculated in. They had the lowest goals against in the entire league. They had the 3rd best goals-differential in the entire league. Yes, they were one of the lowest scoring teams, but you can't just ignore all that other stuff because they couldn't score. You're making it seem like they didn't deserve to be in the playoffs. They had an 11-point advantage on the 9th place team, they didn't sneak in.
Next, Quick. Yeah he was good for them in the playoffs. But he wasn't great. And he didn't need to be because LA scored at an elite rate due to a very high shooting percentage. If you think that Quick was the driving factor behind LA's Cup win then you're saying that his stats were more impressive than LA's scoring. I made up a chart showing the Stanley Cup finalists in the past 7 years and included their goalies save percentage and their goals per game. I added Quick's "adjusted" save percentage too, even though nobody else had the opportunity to ignore their first 3 games if they weren't flattering to them. Quick's ".920" really isn't all that special in that light.
