The view from the Woods

A boring train ride to Ottawa for the Sens-Blues game last Thursday means my monthly contribution to this blog.
First off, a shout out to Andrew Bucholtz, the Journal’s assistant sports editor who will now be contributing his vast knowledge of Canadian Interuniversity Sport to the CIS blog. They are better for it, as the Journal has been all year.
Now a few brief thoughts on the NHL. It appears that Gary Bettman and co. have finally obtained the parity that they’ve been chasing after for years. There are literally at least 16 teams in the league that feel they have a shot at a long playoff run. Even early-season heavyweights Detroit and Ottawa hit dry spells that have brought them back to earth with the masses.
Predicting who will end up where in the playoff seeding picture is a total crapshoot, other than the likelihoods of Detroit winning the West and Carolina locking up the third seed in the East due to the Southleast Division’s automatic berth.
That’s one of the problems with the NHL’s newfound parity. With so many good teams but few great ones, the seeding system has really become an issue. Carolina, although they have caught fire lately, is still effectively stealing the third seed from a more deserving team such as Pittsburgh or Ottawa thanks to the NHL’s skewed every-division-winner-gets-home-ice-advantage system.
In the West, if the playoffs were to start today, Dallas and Anaheim would face off. It will be a tragedy for one of these elite teams to be eliminated in the first round, while one of the Northwest teams takes the third seed and likely faces a division rival.
Perhaps with the NHL’s revamped schedule next year, with less emphasis on divisional play, the Northwest won’t be so jam-packed and instead of stealing points from each other they’ll be able to feast on weak Central Division teams as Detroit is currently able to do 32 times a year.
On another note, I’ve heard people say that the 187-foot Rob Davison blast that Vesa Toskala allowed Tuesday night is ‘the Leafs’ season in a nutshell.’ Not quite. If Bryan McCabe had shot it, THAT would have summarized the Leafs’ season quite nicely.
McCabe must have been somewhat relieved to see that puck go in. The Leafs aren’t playing for anything anyway (except a lower draft pick), and McCabe no longer owns the title of biggest gaffe of the year (when he shot the puck into his own net in overtime earlier this season).
And with all the debate over a Hart Trophy candidate, how can it be anyone other than Alex Ovechkin? Find me another player that has led the league in scoring with NO help other than Alex Semin (until Sergei Fedorov arrived) and has his team on the cusp of a playoff spot after being down and out earlier in the season. Evgeni Malkin has played well, but Ovechkin has carried his team on his shoulders for a longer period of time and in a more improbable fashion.
And here’s my outlandish prediction for the day: the Minnesota Wild will make the Conference finals in the West.
You heard it here first.