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b. It's a bit difficult to determine which road is tougher, since the level of competition was about similar for both. If I were to choose, I would say New England had the harder road. Not only did they have to face the conference leader, but their conference finals was much tougher compared to Winnipeg facing a cindarella team (58 words)

c. New England had the more impressive conference finals victory, since they faced a higher quality opponent in the Philadelphia Forge, who is still part of the cream of the crop in the eastern conference. While it's amazing that San Francisco made it to the conference finals, they still were heavily outmatched in their series against the Aurora. (57 words)


As mentioned, San Francisco had an amazing season, with the bow on top of it all being the 6 game series versus the Edmonton Blizzard. It's amazing for a multitude of reasons. For one, Edmonton were title defenders, and not one that was still drunk off of last season; they were still by far the best team in the west, and of course had the best record in the league with many wins in hand over Buffalo at 2nd. The fact that they were able to beat them as-is is impressive. The other impressive thing is the resilience of the Pride to take the series. If you've been around the SHL for a while, you would know that they've basically only had one cup final appearance since their rebrand to San Francisco, which was in a weird season right before the transition to FHM. The fact is, it seems like they've reached the light at the end of the tunnel, and we can expect them to do more in the near future. (172 words)