March to the Cup is where you will vote on hypothetical playoff matchups in a bracket style setup mimicking the NCAA basketball tournaments. Here is the setup.

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.

This is all hypothetical. However you want to analyze things, go for it. If you want to assume every team has full health, go for it. Anything goes in the Coronavirus era of hypothetical playoff hockey.

We have some truly great matchups today for the Jaromir Jagr Division semifinals

(1) Boston Bruins vs (8) Vegas Golden Knights

Both these teams are very good and to be honest I think would be favorites to exit their real conferences if the league were to have a playoff this year. Vegas has been an elite xGF% team this year and the Bruins are have been building towards being at that level the second half of the year.



I find Vegas’ numbers to be impressive because they’ve been dealing with some high key injuries to Mark Stone, Max Pacioretty, and to a lesser extent Alex Tuch. Fully healthy they are a buzz saw even though they felt the need to make their defense worse with the acquisition of Alec Martinez. The Bruins will be the beneficiary of getting back Torrey Krug and Brandon Carlo from injury

The real weakness for the Golden Knights this year was their goaltending.



I say was because it has rebounded. A big reason is they shored the position up by finally giving themselves a legit alternative to Marc-Andre Fleury. Nobody will ever take away Fleury’s amazing run the first year in Vegas, but he’s still the same goalie he’s always been. You are going to get the bad version eventually and this year they did. Lehner has been consistently above average the past few years and he is the better option at this stage. Tuukka Rask is really good and has been his entire career. Even when it looks like the numbers are crashing down they are still above average because the crash was coming from elite numbers.

Boston has the monster line of Marchand-Bergeron-Pastrnak leading the way. Vegas has two really good lines with Pacioretty-Stephenson-Stone and Smith-Karlsson-Marchessault. They still have Stastny and Tuch to round out a third line. They are pretty deep at forward.



(4) Tampa Bay Lightning vs (5) Washington Capitals

A battle of Southeast Division foes rounds out the semifinals. Neither team has been shy about adding talent this year to go for it all. Only one of them will be moving on past this round. The acquisitions for Washington have included Ilya Kovalchuk and Brenden Dillon. While Tampa has Blake Coleman, Barclay Goodrow, and Zach Bogosian. The biggest additions for this matchup for Tampa will be Steven Stamkos and Victor Hedman who will be healthy and back in the lineup.

Overall Tampa has had better underlying xGF% numbers, but as we see here both teams are converging on the same location even though they are coming for vastly different places.



Both sides have fire power. Both sides are built to win it all. How will the bounces fall in this one?



Submit your votes. Results in a couple of days.

Thanks for reading!

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