2022 Stanley Cup playoffs thread

This series wasn't going to be simple on paper and it certainly hasn't been even if they would have won tonight, but crap, what a lost opportunity to do this at home and on a Friday night. Of course, they may have saved the town from burning down too.

 

They have to not get frustrated when things get mucked up and thus make mistakes.

Negating the power play, which ended up a goal, the two softies, but the last on really bad D, pressing and actually getting called for too many men, etc. Eliminate one and they very likely win.

I don't see this team, this year, losing three straight, but the team they are playing is apparently immune to losing elimination games.

 

I was covering the Kings in 1993 for the South Bay Daily Breeze of Torrance and the Santa Monica Outlook. When the playoffs arrived, the bosses decided we weren't going to travel for at least two rounds. I told them, "For sure, this is going to happen. They're going to be playing in Vancouver and the game is going to go into double overtime ... and at deadline we are going to have nothing -- NOTHING -- in the way of a story. I will be on the desk and everybody will look at me to do a story. I will say, 'If I had been there, you would have had a story.' " Sure enough, a couple of weeks later, Game 5 in Vancouver, double OT. Gary Shuchuk wins it for the Kings. "Chris, can you help us out?" While my first thought was to say fuck no, but I did put together a quick story.
I did make it onto the road for the Conference finals vs. Toronto and the Final vs. Montreal. Lots of memories, including a drunken night with Al Strachan and a couple of other writers who insisted on playing Meat Loaf over and over at a bar called Charles Darwin's in Toronto. Incidentally, I only buddied up to Strachan because I thought he'd be a pipeline to Gretzky.

 

Well, at least you didn’t earn a Darwin Award.

 

I have worked in hockey for 20+ years. I have never been to a Stanley Cup playoff game although I have been to two World Series games and a college football national championship game. (And the Vanier Cup, the Canadian university football championship.)

 

I take it you decided buddying up to Bob McKenzie was pointless then.

 

During the 1997 Finals, Strachan came up to me in the press box and said: “You shouldn’t be wearing that button.”
As the sports editor of the Detroit Sunday Journal, I always wore a button that read “No Scab Papers”
I asked him why not and he said this wasn’t the place for this
I told him he was the first person to object
If the Red Wings and NHL didn’t mind, I certainly wasn’t going to remove it for him
After a little more bitching, he finally said: “This isn’t the place to be talking about this.”
I said: “That’s the first thing you’ve said in this conversation I agree with.”
Of course Strachan worked for the Toronto Sun, which began as a strike paper

 

Strachan is a racist piece of garbage. Nothing more than a mouthpiece for certain agents and NHLPA.

 

Heard him on a recent podcast about his HNIC book. Still likes to call basketball “African Roundball”.

 

The next day, he blamed me for his hangover. I said he was ordering most of the beers. We laughed.
I found out he went to Gretzky's wedding, that's what triggered me to strike up a friendship. I never tried to get anything out of it. I put up with his arrogance, but I also like beer and Darwin's was walking distance from the hotel.