Option 2: Obviously, it's going to be my own team.

The pieces have been in place for Seattle to bust out for a couple of seasons as, admittedly without doing the research, I would bet we're among if not the youngest rosters in the big leagues. There's certainly an argument that this shouldn't have been an unexpected rise - we were trending upwards between seasons anyway - but I certainly expected us to make another small and gradual improvement that we could keep making year on year, rather than the explosion that had us fighting among the top squads. What is particularly striking is that there truly isn't one obvious catalyst: four of the team's top five point-scorers remain the same, the defensive unit is mostly unchanged, the team has simply taken an extra year of experience and harnessed it.

I do think that an underrated part come in the coaching decisions: season 79 had our offensive talent congregated on the first line since we didn't quite have the depth to spread it out, while this year there is scoring up and down the lineup. Five players broke the point-per-game mark and our third line averaged around 0.7 points per game between them. I think we're at risk of stepping back and not being able to repeat the performance, but that's negative nancy talk and not for here.