LindG1000

That player was Rejean Houle. The Canadiens also flexed their star power quickly in the expansion era. They'd routinely ask future first-round picks from newer franchises in exchange for stability/gate draw. That's how they ended up with Guy Lafleur and multiple first-overall picks while they were winning Cups. Every single year they had an extra first from an expansion team and just did not miss - Lafleur, Shutt, Gainey in consecutive drafts. Heck, even when they missed, they didn't miss hard - Doug Risebrough and Mario Tremblay - were good to great NHLers. It was only when the league grew to 18 or so and years of developmental advantage - both as the 70s Habs aged out and as the QMJHL became far less about the Canadiens - that they finally normalized.

I'll tell you what - if you're the Hurricanes right now, what did you learn in game 1? The Rangers can keep you outside. They aren't afraid of taking penalties because they're going to kill them. They're not going to break structure without you going full force all the time. And if you take a penalty? Good luck. Your PK got smoked.

Yeah, I mean, you can't plan for the marathon OT game. So...play your guys, let Rempe show the Hurricanes what causing chaos really means, and keep riding the wave here. And if we end up in a spot where Rempe's just getting the Stu Bickel treatment, so be it. Though, I don't think he would be too much of a liability taking a shift or two in an OT. Doubly so when you have a guy like Rempe out there to goad the Canes into taking penalties, and we've put the fear of Mika into them.

Seriously, @Zuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuc. This trophy may as well be renamed for Bergeron, who probably should have been winning Datsyuks. Barkov will probably win 5 of these in the next 6 years, with a pity win thrown to like...Mika at some point.

Apparently, the MoneyPuck model from the moment Vegas got shitcanned (and thus including our game 1 win) now heavily favors us.

Normally you get one prediction in this thread but....

Dude may have been casually taking a few weeks off there to make sure he's able to go absolutely fucking nuclear in the playoffs.

For a brief moment, let's consider the possibility that it doesn't and that extra time is actually quite important. In most cases, Trocheck or Zibanejad receives those extra minutes, and Goodrow plays the wing for a few shifts. Why is it that giving one of our top two centers—both phenomenal two-way players—a few extra shifts a game should be considered a net negative? Isn't it good to have your best players on the ice more often? Where this bites us in the ass is when we finally get a marathon OT game, and we're playing 11.5/6 instead of 12/6. I get that. But you can't plan for what if, and as things stand, I like Rempe setting a tone and flipping the personnel when the lead needs defending. I'll double down on that if we can get Carolina to keep taking penalties like they did in the first.

Matt Rempe gonna show these bitches what a Category Five Shitstorm looks like

Yeah. No arguments there, though I think your smart use example is why I so strongly prefer Vally's CSA data collection to the xGF/Corsi approach. Would you rather be the team that gets 60% xGF and no high-danger chances against Igor Shesterkin or the team that gets 47% xGF and six high dangers against Freddy Andersen? I know my answer on that one.

I think context matters so much with this, though. The Rangers will celebrate the 100th anniversary in 2026-2027 and had a stellar team to begin with, but with the rights and sponsorship situation carving up territory, the Rangers had no access to youth. Montreal and Toronto (and Detroit) had a decent monopoly on Junior team sponsorship, and would repeatedly sign players to so-called "A" forms (an annual "tryout rights renewal") - so a player brought up through a Montreal-sponsored team would sign this form every year as a rights retention mechanism for the Canadiens - or "C" forms (professional rights forms). It froze out Chicago, New York, and Boston for a while as they'd only really get the late bloomers, so from 1940 to the 1967 expansion, the Rangers, Bruins, and Blackhawks made a combined 12 finals APPEARANCES - and that gets worse when you balance out that 4 of those appearances were in the WW2 years, where Canada was involved in the war earlier (as it was British Canada at the time). A lot of the "breakthroughs" were dumb luck - Stan Mikita fleeing Slovakia with his family and just luckily landing in territory in Ontario that had a Blackhawks sponsorship team, or the Wings giving up too early on Bucyk and dealing him (though to be fair, they got Sawchuk in that trade). The Rangers weren't on "even footing" until the late 1960s, when the modern draft was conceptualized. Then, these endless rights renewals and sponsorship deals started falling under intense legal scrutiny, and the monopoly broke. And pretty quickly, they competed. So...yeah, I mean...Kreider's probably not yet a top 5 Ranger; for many, he may never be. But he's a few seasons away from being one of the most prevalent names in the franchise record books if he isn't already, and it's at least somewhat understandable why that is.

If we win the Cup, Kreider is my pick for "will damage the Cup"

So, uh, about that PLD contract.....

The flaw with xGF as a ratio is that it fails to account for shot quality. So, when you have teams that are great at forecheck pressure and great at just...shooting pucks, they're going to hold the xGF% every single time. And truthfully - having the puck, pressuring puck carriers, shooting the puck - these are generally things that help you control a game and win them. Think about how xGF "accrues" throughout a game - look at the way Vally pushes that data, for example. The "Corsi Canes" love, and I mean love, to shoot the puck. We've heard the term "chuckers" a few times here, and that might be accurate. An "everything to the net" approach is great for accruing low-danger xGF - those only really become high-danger chances when there's a rebound, so the Canes get in the zone, shoot low, and crash the net. And they maybe do this 30 times a game, so let's say that's .05 xGF a chance with three spiking into mid-high danger - those moments ALONE accrue ~1.7 xGF. It's a really smart formula, and it works often, but even if you consider the Islanders series - they needed goalie mistakes to get out of the series in 5, because that's how the system works. So, yeah, of course, they're going to hold that "constant" 55%-45% xGF advantage - but when you can keep them off the counter and keep them to the outside, you're not going to have to worry about that advantage because it's volume shooting at low-quality and you've got Igor back there.

For whatever it's worth, in the games where Igor Shesterkin wasn't on a vision quest, we won twice and held shit down.