So what just happened?
On Sunday, the Vegas Golden Knights defeated the Winnipeg Jets to advance to the Stanley Cup Final.
The win is the latest in what’s been a stunning campaign – they were 500-1 to win the championship at the start of the season – one that’s seen the Golden Knights stake their claim as the best expansion team in the history of North American sports. There’s a very good chance that they’ll win the next round too, becoming Stanley Cup champions in their very first season. Nobody saw this coming – as a new team, the Knights weren’t expected to contend for anything aside from last place. But they’ve defied all the odds, and are now just four wins away from the most unlikely championship the sport has ever seen.
That sounds like an amazing underdog story.
It sure is!
So how did the Golden Knights do it?
No idea!
Ha ha. But seriously, how did they do it?
Seriously … no idea. I don’t know. Nobody does. The entire hockey world is completely perplexed by this. There’s no logical explanation.
Um, aren’t you supposed to be some sort of expert?
Look, I could try to make something up, and pretend that anyone could have seen any of this coming. But I’d be lying. None of this makes any sense.
My explanation: Sometimes bad teams have good seasons. In fact, every season sees at least one team vastly outperform expectations before crashing back to Earth (the Senators are the most recent example).
ReplyDeleteWhat's different about Vegas is that we can't pretend/forget that they're not supposed to be good. Conventional wisdom says that there's no such thing as a bad team that succeeds (or a good team that fails). But now people are forced to either concede that sometimes bad teams can succeed, or else Vegas is truly a good team and nobody knows anything about hockey.
Vegas' success has overshadowed another bizarre event: Colorado made the playoffs. They finished dead-last by a mile, lost their star player for future assets, and got significantly better. That's almost as ridiculous as the Vegas situation. It's a regular occurrence for teams to jump up and down the standings between seasons without any significant roster changes. Theoretically, that shouldn't be possible, but it is because sometimes teams overperform or underperform and it's virtually impossible to predict which teams will do which.
If Vegas wins the Stanley Cup, fine then, a bad team will win the Stanley Cup. It wouldn't be the first time (Carolina, 2006). Does that cheapen the Stanley Cup? Maybe, but that's the price of parity.