Waffles.

a. Fair play to the Argonauts for making it this far, they absolutely obliterated my bracket that had San Francisco making it all the way here. But I just don't see a world where this isn't Atlanta's. They have the perfect balance of youth, experience, strength in depth, and they've been here before and are hungry to right the wrong of S64.
b. Miller has been absolutely sensational in this postseason. His goals saved above average is nearly double second place Elizabeth Doyle, and his save percentage is also way higher than anyone else's. Seattle is going to need him to carry on this godlike form, because if he regresses to the .887 he had in the regular season for even a second, they're going to be cooked. He's going to be tested early. Start strong and you have a chance to carry momentum.
c. I mean, the last prompt literally discussed the main way to shut down Atlanta. Unless your defense is stupid levels of deep you aren't slowing them down on the ice head to head, you're gonna need the guy back there to play in the form of his life. Miller was OK, not great during the regular season and has been dynamite in the playoffs. They need playoff Miller to survive.
d. It's the playoffs. Anyone who's watched even five minutes of a playoff hockey game knows that the whistles are placed in the pocket the entire time, because refs are scared to enforce the rules because "it changes the game." Lax officiating should benefit Atlanta more as they are not as reliant on the whistle to give them chances.

If they weren't capped at 350/425, I genuinely think a fair few good SMJHL teams that could beat the two cellar dwellers this season: the Edmonton Blizzard and Minnesota Monarchs. This particularly goes for the Blizzard, who somehow saw being in Edmonton as not punishment enough and wound up winning 5 games of 66. Looking at the team's TPE totals, outside of the trio of Brian Davenport, Bas O'Bigbers, and Kyle Sutton (two of whom are retiring), you would take one look at this team and realize it would not be out of place in the J - in fact, Justin Time, a Blizzard prospect taken 5th in the S64 draft, would be fifth on this team in TPE, and would only be one TPE short of fourth. Can we really say that that team, which iced multiple 155s and plenty of uncapped players, would beat the Newfoundland dynasty, or last year's Falcons? I'm not so sure the answer is yes. They've got a lot of talent in the pipeline, though, so I'm going to stop dumping on them.

If it were up to me I would simply curse great teams that overreact to some bad playoff series by tearing down the foundation. Listen, we all know playoffs are voodoo, weird shit happens all the time and we mostly have them because they're good theater more than anything (and in real life, revenues). It's a small sample. Sometimes you just get a team that's a bad matchup for you, or you have a badly timed injury, or some role player pops the hell off (never forget we were one game away from Conn Smythe Trophy winner Fernando Pisani). But there's been plenty of times where management overtinkers and screws up the chemistry, maybe not in the SHL, but definitely in real life. A good case in point from real life would be...well, basically everything the Blackhawks have done since 2017, when they overreacted to a sweep by Nashville.

I would call it the Knee Jerk Jinx.


+3 TPE - Milestones