I’m not that familiar with Colorado, but in the East, the primary factors where strength/conditioning coaching/style and “confidence”.
TBL had no forwards over 6’1”, and with the exception of Corbon and the guy Willie KOd, next to no physicality on D. Trots was able to continually send out bigger, stronger, players, to out hit, hustle, gut, and work them which wore them down.
TBL also won 62 games. We have seen the Caps tear through the regular season and over look the eight seed. This level of success tends to, not always, lead to a large amount if reluctantly to change what they’ve been doing, and the willingness/ability to do it. This reluctantly makes them predictable which becomes an advantage to the other team, as Torts did.
As zero said: playoffs vs regular season. In this case, regular season gave CBJ a huge advantage
It seems like adversity, pressure/expectations, and having something to play for are real factors. We've seen the Caps steamroll through the regular season but not have to deal with losing streaks, injuries, fighting tooth and nail for a playoff spot, etc. They get bored and lazy down the stretch when other teams are trying to ramp up for the playoffs. TB got through the entire season thinking they could just out-talent everyone else, but they weren't able to out-work even a "lowly" team.
And I agree playoffs are also where you see coaching come into play much more. The importance of a single playoff game in a best of 7 series is way higher than a single game in an 82 game season. You have more time to prepare, with no back to backs, etc. Plus you know you're locked into your opponent for at least 4 games, whereas during the regular season you might have a few games in quick succession and one team is kinda weak so maybe you don't spend as much time on the prep for them and focus on a bigger target, who knows.
Either way, there's a reason why we finally won a Cup when we decided to give a highly experienced NHL coach a shot at the job, rather than the strategy of hiring some no name AHL coach / rookie coach / former player. You need talent, don't get me wrong, but we've seen last year with VGK and this year with NYI that a bunch of misfit toys can be coached into a formidable team.
It still confuses me why we weren't willing to pay up a bit for Trotz (despite his issues last season before the big win). And we weren't willing to get a REAL coach in either. Is it really money? Don't tell me it's money when the team is dropping $12 million on John Carlson. That's like Connor McDavid money. Don't get me wrong, there's a ton of Dmen out there way worse than Carlson, so I'm pretty happy we have him despite how infuriating he can be, but goddamn that's a high price to pay for someone who isn't a Top 5 and maybe not even a Top 10 Dman in the NHL. He just picks up points because occasionally he completes a decent non retarded pass to Ovi on the PP
