We’ve lost all our sports due to the Coronavirus in an understandable, but disappointing move. Chances are if you’re reading this hockey has hit you the hardest. For many of you losing the NCAA basketball tournament has either caused you to reschedule your vasectomy, caused you disappointment, or both. Today I’m going to try and merge both. There’s no guarantee the season will resume, although I do think it will eventually. For now there is nothing stopping us from declaring a Stanley Cup Champion and you are going to help with it. Why? We have nothing else to do. Let’s turn March Sadness into March Gladness. Introducing March to the Cup
I’m going to seed all 31 teams based on the current overall standings with one play in game because of the odd number of teams. You will have a chance to vote on who you think should win the matchup. I’ll give some brief overviews and you’ll use those and your own intuition to make your selections. The results will be hidden until the next blog when the results are revealed. We will go round by round until we have a winner. Who knows? Maybe our selection will be the only winner this season.
Today we focus on the play-in game between the 30th ranked Ottawa Senators and the 31st ranked Detroit Red Wings.
Both of these teams have had rough seasons, but Detroit has had a ROUGH season. Now Detroit’s awfulness is by design. They are clearly tanking. Right now they only have 39 standings points. There are eight teams who have at least that many victories. Ottawa is the second worst team in the league in standings points and are still 23 points clear of Detroit at 62 points overall.
Detroit has a 44.4 xGF% while Ottawa is at 49.71% per Natural Stat Trick. Goaltending can certainly play spoiler in any matchup, but Detroit is 30th in 5v5 save percentage at .906 while Ottawa is at .917.
Who are you going with?
Let the March to the Cup begin.
Thanks for reading!