The day is here. Fans have been pinching themselves waiting to awaken for days but this is happening and the Calgary Flames will hit the ice tonight against the Vancouver Canucks for the first of a potential seven game series in the 2015 NHL Playoffs!!
As I mentioned yesterday, there are a ton of fans across the NHL and members of the media who have turned 180 degrees toward how they feel about this particular group.
Those who claimed the team will regress and have no chance of smelling the jock straps of playoff teams are now, funny enough, claiming these sentiments were never expressed and further, that the team may actually go deep!
Whether you choose to embrace the band wagon jumpers or not is up to you, but I think the overall excitement and appreciation for what this group has put together this year should be the main discussion.
These freak’n guys. They just won’t quit!
I was chatting with a die-hard Flames fan the other day and found it funny that it took a few minutes to sink in that this was not in fact the first time the Flames made the playoffs since their last cup run in ’04, as he offered – “sure feels like it!….
And that’s just it – the team hasn’t had too much success over the past handful of years and it certainly seems like decades to some fans. For all the younger fans who haven’t necessarily experienced the 2004 Cup run and the highs and lows which came about, they are certainly in for a good time for the 2015 version!
What this particular series is going to offer will essentially be a battle between youth/inexperience, and experience. To put that into perspective, the Calgary Flames have a total of 262 playoff games under their belt, while the Vancouver Canucks have a whopping 827. That’s a sizeable difference.
It will be important for the guys with experience in not only the league but also the playoffs to shed as much light on to the younger players in the dressing room as the playoffs are an (entirely) different animal than the regular season. While all these players have dealt with a version of playoffs throughout their hockey careers, nothing matches the speed, physicality, and level of talent of the NHL playoffs.
The importance of pregame preparation, meals eaten, relaxing muscles, getting plenty of sleep, getting calm etc etc, is essentially magnified and this will be a very big learning curve for the new era players of Calgary. And while they cannot match up to the Canucks in terms of experience, where they have an advantage is their speed and (hopefully) gas tanks.
In terms of who is going to win this series, it is certainly a very tough call given what I offered in yesterday’s blog, however as biased as it will likely sound, I favour the Calgary Flames in this game (solely) because of the level of heart and intensity which has been displayed this year. That said, here are my 2015 Western Conference Brackets!
STL vs MIN St Louis in 6
NSH vs CHI Chicago in 5
ANA vs WPG Anaheim in 7
VAN vs CGY Calgary in 7
Good luck to the good guys out there tonight and hopefully everyone has an…okay…morning at work tomorrow!
Thanks for reading!