The Pittsburgh Penguins have been officially bounced as the defending champion. The Washington Capitals have claimed their first ever Stanley Cup and Alexander Ovechkin was the winner of the Conn Smythe Trophy.

First, it is great to see a player who is among the best of all-time get his team success moment. For years people have tried to hold him accountable and paint negative perceptions about the Russian who couldn’t get his team over the hump. All the while he was just scoring more goals than anybody else. It’s always funny to see the media members who can’t separate team success from personal success flip the switch because the chips fell the right way in a year. Now Alex is a winner. He magically changed this year.

It was fitting that we saw a brilliant Backstrom to Ovechkin east to west play on the power play in the series clinching game.

It’s funny that this was one of the weaker Capital teams and it is the one that lifts the Stanley Cup. That’s hockey for you.

Vegas had a perfect inaugural season. That market loves their team. It will become a great option for free agents who saw the atmosphere and team success this season. The NHL gets so much of what it does wrong, but they sure backed their way into a great thing in the Nevada desert.

Marc-Andre Fleury went from the Conn Smythe favorite regardless of the team results in the final to not being able to register a .900 save percentage in any of the five games in the series. Overall this was the best year of his long career. It didn’t end on the high note it was tracking towards. In fact it was one of his worst performances in a playoff series in his career.



It was a far cry from the 92.6 5v5 and 92.1 overall save percentage he put up last year against Washington. Without Fleury’s play in 2017 the Penguins do not repeat as champs and it could have been Washington who was the first repeat champion in the salary cap era.
The offseason is going to kick into full swing and the Penguins will certainly be active with roster moves per Jim Rutherford.

Happy Jaromir Jagr day

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