1. waffles

2a. I think this Rage team is definitely a different beast. When one guy is popping off, you gameplan around trying to slow him down particularly. Get depth scoring and your lines rolling, however, and it becomes significantly tougher because it's essentially picking your poison. Try to slow down Tomas Lind and maybe you get bit by Aksel Fiske. Stop Greg Davies, and Robert E O Speedwagon eats your lunch.
2b. For me, the most likely cause for Seattle slipping up would be regression in goal. Willie Miller has once again put together a stupendous playoff run, but his numbers are way above what he was doing in the regular season. I don't see this deep, talented offense slowing down, but there's a reason goalie is such an important position.
2c. Yes in both cases, but if one were to slow down I would bet it would be Lind simply because he is sliiightly overperforming his shooting percentage from the regular season. Manning broke the league in the regular season and he is once again impressing in the playoffs, while Lind wasn't the best scorer on his team in the regular season.
2d. I like this Rage team a lot. They've got a lot of quality players and quality human beings. That said, this Seattle team is an absolute wagon at the height of its powers, and I don't see any reason why they would slow down now. The Rage will compete, but the Argos take this.

7. +1 TPE - Milestones

16. Building a hockey megateam, eh? I'm basing things off real life because that's what I do. Instead of lazily just slapping together a couple countries with great teams, I want to be a bit more thorough. I want geography to be important, and also language barrier. The easy answers, then, would be the return of Czechoslovakia and a combined Nordic team (specifically Sweden and Finland, as Finland does have a decent Swedish speaking population). Czechoslovakia was, of course, a world power before it dissolved into two independent nations, and while Slovakia has been pretty mid over the last few years, the generation coming through is very exciting and when you combine them with the quality the Czechs have...medals would be far more frequent. As for Sweden and Finland...yeah, this one doesn't need a ton of elaboration. Aside from the banned Russia, these are two top-5 hockey countries, arguably two of the top three; combine them and you'd be PRINTING gold medals.

17. I don't think there is such a thing as a true neutral site for a host country in real life. Even if you move it to a country where they have no national team but do have a rink (one that comes to my mind is Uzbekistan, who does not participate in IIHF play but has a 12,500 seat ice arena in the capital of Tashkent, the largest ice arena in Central Asia), you will still get travelers from nearby countries and diaspora (using the Uzbekistan example again, Kazakhs and Russians would flock there). However, there is one single continent on the planet with no full IIHF members, which would probably be the closest thing you can get to a true neutral site: South America. Now having to figure out where to put it is the hard part, but I personally would chose Argentina - you're even further from ice hockey playing countries, and unlike, say, Bolivia, you don't have to deal with insane altitude.

23.

Lefty
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Up and coming
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