First off, its "parity" and, second, of course the other team plays but if you didn't see us take our foot off the gas in the 2nd and start coasting then you don't get hockey as well as I know you do. To win in the playoffs you need to play the full 60 every game. I'd like to see us start doing that as we get closer to playoff time.
Haha thanks, I was going to correct him, parody means a joke, which is what this team is in the playoffs. Parity means that many of the teams in the league are just as good as each other, or close to it.
But I gotta agree with you Apace and DC, the sailent points DC made about the Lightning not just having the Cup win but also Conference finals and finals appearances in recent memory is a reason for their fans not to care about one stinker. They know their team is capable of going deep. Is our team capable of going deep? Maybe. The issue is it all comes down to match ups and stuff.
I think one the things the positive people can't fathom is our dissatisfaction with being a marginal playoff team. Like when someone makes the counter argument that the NHL has a lot of parity, I don't really think they recognize that most of us already know that. It's why we want to build a playoff team, not a "maybe we'll win the playoff" team. We build a team fully capable of making the playoffs but that doesn't buy in deep enough in one aspect or another to put ourselves in a position to go deep. When our roster has holes, we always fill some and then make others. There were seasons we had grit figured out but no secondary scoring, so we sacrified depth grit for secondary scoring, and now we have that hole. Teams like the Lightning don't do that.
See who they traded? A young, attitude filled sniper. Sure Drouin is a fully capable player and will one day be a good first liner for Montreal. That would be the equivalent of us trading Burk or Vrana, or Bowey. But you know us "you have to ice a team that makes the playoffs and one that has youth to think for the future." This we can have our cake and eat it to argument is irrelevant since the stats prove otherwise. The in the middle never works in the NHL. Detroit maybe I guess has the best example of that, but a big reason for that is while they were winning their scouts were so god damn talented that they found first like NHL talent and quality players in round 5 and 6 of the draft. They also developed strong. But even then after so many succesfful years that team is probably going to go through a rather long rebuild before they are back up and at em.
Nonetheless we aren't them. Ovechkin keeps getting older, Backstrom keeps getting older, Carlson will only be a relevant NHL defender so long as his main skillset is offensive positioning and speed, both of which become obsolete as more and more younger, smarter, faster, hungrier scorers flutter into the league. Nobody is implying the team didn't look alright to a degree in the win tonight either. They did. But seeing the same pyschological problems manifest and with no hope in seeing any sort of roster overhaul or changes at this point to change that is frustrating for us. Because if we don't get the match ups, or our goalies don't play great, or our offense doesn't suddenly become playoff crazy hot (which it won't, scoring always goes down in the playoffs unless your playing against an AHL goalie, and hell even then defense and physical play ramps up) the chances are we are due another 2nd round exit. We are sick of that. The team should be built every season we are trying to win, to win at all costs. And we just never do that.
