Puck Soup: And then there were two

On this week's episode of the Puck Soup podcast:
- How the Knights and Panthers got to be the last teams standing
- Our predictions for who wins the final
- What went wrong for the Stars and Hurricanes
- Brad Treliving gets the GM's job in Toronto; Dubas to Pittsburgh?
- New coaches in Washington and Nashville
- Ottawa's dragging sale, the debut of "Who he work for?" and lots more...

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Panthers or Knights? A Stanley Cup Final rooting guide for 30 other fan bases

The Stanley Cup final matchup has been set, and with hockey’s greatest prize up for grabs, only two teams are left standing.

Spoiler alert: Not yours.

I’m playing the odds a bit here, since 30 teams are on the sidelines. Plus I’m assuming that fans of the Panthers and Golden Knights have other things to worry about right now. Does that happen when your team is in the final? Let’s just say I wouldn’t know, but it sounds reasonable.

Great. What about everyone else? We’ve got what should be a great matchup ready to go, and maybe sitting back and enjoying the show without a rooting interest sounds good to you. But some of us aren’t wired that way, and we need to have a team to root for – or root against – to really get into a series.

If that’s you, I’m here to help. I’ve got a suggestion of which team to cheer for, for fans of all 30 of the loser teams valiant nonparticipants. Let’s do this.

Anaheim Ducks

Sorry Shea Theodore, but expansion cousins need to stick together. That’s especially true when your shared origin story is some random midweek announcement that came literally a few months before your first season would start.

Pick: Panthers

Arizona Coyotes

Has that desert-based rivalry with the Golden Knights ever turned into anything? Not really, but we can pretend. And besides, the Panthers may be the only other market that’s had to deal with more snotty remarks from old-timers about being better off in Quebec City.

Pick: Panthers

Boston Bruins

It’s tempting to pick the Panthers here, since that would retcon that first round from “all-time stunning upset” to “at least kind of understandable”. But if Florida wins, especially as easily as they did over Toronto and Carolina, it will just reinforce what a missed opportunity that loss really was. Do we want Brad Marchand to spend the rest of his life knowing one missed breakaway cost his team an easy Stanley Cup? Everyone else does, yes, absolutely, but not Bruins fans. Instead, go ahead and root for Bruce Cassidy to get the ring he couldn’t get in Boston.

Pick: Golden Knights

Buffalo Sabres

Hey, remember when the Sabres openly tanked for a few years and ended up with a pair of second overall picks, then figured the future was bright because Jack Eichel and Sam Reinhart were the sort of players who could get you to a final? Turns out they were right, kind of.

Now it’s a question of which guy you resent more. Let’s just say I don’t think this is a tough call.

Pick: Panthers

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Filling in the roster for the 2023 playoffs all-disappointment team

It’s the third round of the NHL playoffs, still, thanks to a Dallas Stars team that doesn’t seem to want to quit. With the Golden Knights wobbling and the Panthers resting up, we’re almost at the finish line.

Are you feeling disappointed yet?

Probably. Only three teams remain, which means 29 fan bases are experiencing mandatory misery. Certainly, fans of the 13 playoff teams on the sidelines will be looking for someone to blame.

That’s where we come in. Every year, right around this time, we like to assemble an all-star roster of playoff letdowns. It’s our chance to shine a spotlight on some of those players who were curiously absent from the highlight reels when they were needed most.

As always, we’re not mad, just disappointed. We'll be taking at least one player per playoff team. And we’ll build from the net out, the way all great sad teams do.

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Goaltenders

Andrei Vasilevskiy, Lightning

Goaltending is weird, man. After spending the better part of a decade as the NHL’s most bankable big-game goalie (including three straight years with long playoff runs where he put up a .920 save percentage or better), Vasilevskiy posted the worst numbers of any playoff goalie with at least five starts. I guess that’s just what happens when you’re facing an offensive juggernaut like the playoff Maple Leafs.

Linus Ullmark, Bruins

From the sounds of things, they’ve already engraved his name on the Vezina. Luckily for him, that award is based entirely on the regular season, because Ullmark became the story of the Bruins’ shocking first-round loss. That’s not entirely him – he was hurting, and fatigue was clearly an issue, so Jim Montgomery probably should have swapped in Jeremy Swayman for a game earlier in the series. Instead, the Bruins rode Ullmark until he started to sputter in Game 5, then let him get shelled in Game 6 before benching him with the season on the line.

It didn’t work, and combined with last year’s performance that saw him lose the starter’s job after just two games, it has to create at least a few questions about how reliable Ullmark can be in the postseason.

Stuart Skinner, Oilers

We always have a third goalie on this team, if only because we’ll probably need one. The Oilers may have wished they had a third option too. Skinner was a great story this year, winning the starter’s job as a rookie and even making the all-star team. But he stumbled in the playoffs, especially against the Golden Knights; it got so bad that some Oiler fans were even asking for Jack Campbell to take over. Goaltending wasn’t the only reason they lost, but it was sure one of them, so we'll give him this spot in a narrow decision over Vitek Vanecek.

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Is Sergei Bobrovsky having the most amazing Old Guy Goalie playoff run ever?

Sergei Bobrovsky is the story of the NHL playoffs, and it may not be all that close. At 34 and coming off a season that saw him post substandard numbers across the board, the most expensive active goalie in the league has suddenly transformed from punchline to brick wall. A player who wasn’t even considered good enough to be the starter on an underdog eight-seed when the playoffs began might be about to have his name engraved on the Conn Smythe.

It’s been a pretty wild story. Have we ever seen anything like it?

I’m not sure we have. Oh, we’ve seen goalies get hot in the playoffs before. But most of those stories weren’t all that unexpected – nobody was shocked to see a legend like Marty Brodeur, Dominik Hasek or Patrick Roy look unbeatable, and Tim Thomas had just won his second Vezina the year he had arguably the greatest postseason a goalie has ever had at 36.

Other times, we see younger goalies go on a tear, like J.S. Giguere, Kirk McLean or Ron Hextall. That’s cool too, but in a different way, because you wonder if you’re seeing a guy reach a new tier that they’ll stay at for years. It doesn’t always work out that way, but you never know.

But this? A goalie who’s been around forever, and has a recent track record of mediocrity? Those guys are supposed to be known quantities. They’re not supposed to suddenly morph into Jacques Plante. And yet here we are. Bobrovsky is three-quarters of the way to almost single-handedly winning a Stanley Cup.

I’m not sure there’s a precedent for this. So I figured I’d go back through the history books and find out. I pulled up a list of the best postseasons ever had by a 30+ goalie, based on hockey-reference’s Goals Saved Above Average stat. That’s a flawed number – expected goals are better – but it has the advantage of being available for all of history and not just the analytics era, so it’s a decent starting point.

I picked out eight goalies, including Bobrovsky. Let’s start the list with the man himself, as we look back on some all-time old goalie heaters and ask: Was this run more unexpected than what Bobrovsky is doing in 2023?

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The Athletic Hockey Show: One down, one to go

On this week's episode of The Athletic Hockey Show:
- The Panthers sweep the Hurricanes
- Did Matthew Tkachuk just have the best "clutch" week in NHL history
- Jesse Granger on the Knights being one game away
- Ian fires back over his Sens ownsership reporting
- Lots of listener email
- Gilbert Gotfried for some reason?
- Mark Messier's infamous guarantee and lots more...

The Athletic Hockey Show runs most days of the week during the season, with Ian and I hosting every Thursday. There are two versions of each episode available:
- An ad-free version for subscribers that you can find here
- An ad-supported version you can get for free wherever you normally find your podcasts (like Apple or Spotify)