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What Unearthly Way is This Happening?

May 22, 2018, 9:15 AM ET [1 Comments]
Jay Greenberg
Blogger •NHL Hall of Fame writer • RSSArchiveCONTACT
It’s voodoo or die for either the Caps or Lightning. To the final they had better bring a swinging watch, a potion, and a Rasputin, otherwise wind up like the Kings, Sharks and Jets.

Suggested late roster additions for the Eastern Conference representative: Merlin Malinowski, Kent (Magic Man) Nilsson, Tom Wandell, Kevin Deviner, Marty McSorcerer. Tampa Bay or Washington can defeat the spell that sustains the Golden Knights only with another spell. Unlike other years, proving better end-to-end isn’t going to win the Stanley Cup. The Lightning or Caps need also to do it zen-to-zen.

“Coming into this, I thought we had the best team,” said Blake Wheeler, his head spinning 360 degrees in the Game Five aftermath like that of the little girl in The Exorcist. “But it was just their time.”

The Jets had thought they had those rejects where they wanted them. Granted, following a Game Four blowout-shutout, the Sharks, too, believed they were in the process of proving to be the better team. But this was one round deeper for a team that should finally have been in over its head against the second-best team in the league, one that had just decisively beaten the top one on its home ice in Game Seven. As the Western final proceeded, signs pointed to the superior team getting its legs and enforcing its will.

Winnipeg played the entire third period of Game Three in the Vegas zone without getting the tying puck past Marc-Andre Fleury. But that happens, right? The play, if not the score, was trending the Jets way. They finally made Fleury give up a between-the-legs softie, at last had a breakthrough goal by the struggling Patrik Laine, and were playing like the superior squad once more when Dustin Byfuglien fanned at the point and Reilly Smith exploded a bomb down off the cross bar on one of just two good Vegas chances in the third period. Winnipeg lost again.

The Jets nevertheless had two of the last three contests at home. Hey win Game Five and the pressure reverses, seen it many times, right? But their confidence was broken when they took the ice in Game Five. You could see it in the giveaways, the passes in the skates, the intimidated shots wide of the net, and in all the tiptoeing steps they took just trying to gain the zone in that first period.

When the Jets couldn’t get ahead, they were doomed long before Ryan Reaves – Ryan Reaves! – scored Vegas's second winner in two games off the crossbar. And then, just as the Golden Knights cleanly closed out San Jose on the road, their putaway in Winnipeg was even better; the Jets falling off a cliff in slow motion, in shock at what was being done to them by this opponent playing as if in a trance.

The Golden Knights are the Steptford Knights. They think alike, play alike, and are without an apparent dislike amongst them. The best scoring line by far ever on an expansion team checks as closely as the fourth line, and plays within seconds of the same amount of even-strength minutes. Their belief is so sincere that it has changed William Karlsson, a guy who never scored more than nine goals in two full NHL previous seasons, into a 43-goal star and Nate Schmidt, the once spare defenseman on the Capitals, into Serve Savard.

A lot of such selfless underdogs, on a lot of fast legs, have, with the help of upsets in other series, ridden hot goaltending for a couple of rounds. But the bubble inevitably has burst by this point of the playoffs. Here are the Golden Knights in the final, with Tampa Bay or Washington the last defense against humiliation for much of the NHL.

Vegas is a wonderful story, of course, maybe even the best ever told in this sport, The public loves an underdog and expansion castoffs just one year later being four wins from a championship are the greatest Cinderella men of all time in any team sport. But there is no charm to this story any longer in other NHL cities, where fans and, more ominously, owners, wonder: Why, in all these years, hasn’t we done this at least once? When a new team can do this in one year, why are we not even close?

Not since 1976, when the despicable Broad Street Bullies were the NHL’s final opportunity to save face against the touring undefeated Soviet Red Army team, will there be so much perverse, silent, cheering for a NHL team as there will be for the Caps or Lightning. Even objective observers find the Golden Knights jarring to standard sensibilities about the game. Not disregarding Vegas’ relentless work ethic, this is supposed to be so much harder than it has been for those guys.

Since birth in 1974, the Caps have been to one final, 20 years ago. The Lightning has its 2004 Cup but the rise to power by the current nucleus includes a 24-win season, a loss in a final, a Game Seven defeat in a conference final and a playoff miss just two years ago.

If it doesn’t kill you, it makes you stronger, we always believed; no wine, or team maturing before its time. Ask the repeatedly heartbroken Alex Ovechkin, who is killing himself, shift after shift, like a guy who knows this might be his last shot.

When this season started either Tampa Bay or Nashville, the latter coming off a loss in the final, looked like the eventual winner. And now the Lightning, loaded up with the deadline acquisition of Ryan McDonagh, has become another example of how much patience, heartache, practice, and trial and error goes into getting over the top.

Exhibit C is the Jets. Loaded up in talent like an eventual champion, they got this far this time only to suffer a shortage of secondary scoring, some terribly-timed miscues by Connor Hellebuyck, and not the production required from their stars that they enjoyed in the first two rounds. The Jets never got it from Laine, missing in action when he wasn’t witnessed missing the net.

More than once, Byfuglien suffered the dropsies at the point. Young Josh Morrissey’s possession numbers were terrible, and he didn’t look much better to the naked eye. Toby Enstrom got blown by on a key goal and was eventually benched, and Tyler Myers wasn’t exactly Larry Robinson back there, either, indications the Jets, back to the drawing board, could use another good D going forward. When push came to shove, they looked much more comfortable as underdogs against Nashville than they proved as a favorite against Vegas, all part of the growth process.

We are assuming the Lightning and Caps are through all that, ready to win, But this year the Eastern Conference entry will need more than just the standard ingredients of talent, experience and resolve to prick an underdog’s balloon. How many times have the Golden Knights answered an opposition goal within seconds or minutes? Superb coaching by Gerard Gallant and the buy-in has sustained a winning culture so ingrained in such a short time that Vegas has a spooky absence of doubt.

Players lucky enough to have played in a final will tell you that the intensity foes up one more level. Tampa Bay or Washington had better bring a sense of its inevitability to match that of Vegas, plus some alakazam, or the Lightning or Caps will go down as just another prop in the greatest hockey story ever told.
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