Bababooey


So, big thing pressing here is that the San Francisco took out Edmonton for Winnipeg. Not to say that Winnipeg doesn't beat Edmonton on their own and still make the finals, but the difference between the 14th seed and the 1st seed on a league scale is... well it's notable to say the least. Outside of that, Texas--very good team I had in the top 5 coming into the season (Baltimore killed that thought tho). The big factor here is the fact that Winnipeg took down Chicago who was a higher seed. So 2 higher seeds "slayed" so to speak. Whether that's because of some regular season coasting/underperformance from Winnipeg that they were higher seeded, who's to say. They were just higher seeded.

On New England's side the had a slight reversal in expected matchup struggles. Hamilton took them to 7 from the 13th seed, but then NEW just clicked and took down 2 seeded Buffalo in 5 and 3 seeded Philidelphia in 6. Which is... odd. All in all, pretty similar path to Winnipeg just in reverse. For me I have to give it to New England here. Just off of the higher seeds being taken down. I mean, shit, they just showed all of the Great Lakes teams that taking down Hamilton and Buffalo in the playoffs isn't that hard so it has to count for something.



The age old question is here. What do we consider a more "impressive" victory; mopping up a team as expected or duking it out with, and surpassing a capable rival? Because with no disrespect to San Francisco, that's essentially what we saw here. They had a cinderella run to the conference finals which couldn't keep momentum through Winnipeg. On the other hand, New England had to duke it out against one of 3 >.700 teams in the league. To bring a real world example into this; it was much more impressive when Vegas beat Dallas than it was for Vegas to beat Florida. There is an air of "can they do it again" with SFP taking a top team down, but deep down that's in the sense of "I want to see Winnipeg be embarassed," where as seeing NEW or PHI win that series would have been reasonable either way.

So to cap it off, I think New England's conference finals path was harder.


The easiest way to denote the difference between the perennial contenders from the "others" is to take a simple look at the this past offseason. It's all about using picks to acquire elite talent on the younger side, and then take advantage of other teams trying to reach the upper echelon. For example:

Paul Koivu + 2 2nds for Sawschuk + 1st

New England nets a young (71) player and a 1st for a regression player and 2 2nds, and as they're NEW's 2nds its anticipated they'll end up as late 2nds. Following it up we have:

Peter Svoboda for a 1st and a 2nd.

Same idea as before. Svoboda, great player, but in regression. NEW England needs some cap space, they've acquired Bruno Tooyo at retention, they can afford to recoup assets from Svoboda.

So the net of these two trades is that New England is out a 2nd, up 2 1sts, and has traded Svoboda and Koviu for Sawschuk. So to an extent we can say that it's consolidating assets and cap. To add onto that, we also can include the Tooyo flip which removes a 1st but balances out the player aspect.


The key piece here is that not every team can do this at the moment--it requires multiple seasons of proper management to be able to acquire the pick and player base that gives GM's the currency to make trades. For example, Winnipeg can spend 2 1sts on McBride with retention because it's filling a "final" hole so to speak, and, oh yeah, they draft 8th in S74 anyways and get Juan Tymer despite being a top team again. It takes smart drafting to build up a nucleus of players wherein you have 4 key roles, and 6 players who can fill them, allowing you to push players out to teams where they play a larger role.

Once you hit a certain point, the loop feeds itself. Juan Tymer's going to get called up eventually, allowing an active older player to be moved, and then another smart draft pick from that moved player keeps the wheel spinning. At that point all you need is the GM to continually be aware of other teams trade needs, capitalize on the market, and make smart picks. That's exactly what Ace and Luke have done.