2022 Stanley Cup playoffs thread

I am only going by what I saw on TV, but in the Bruins series Carolina's home crowd sure seemed enthusiastic enough to suit anybody. Boston commentators mentioned them as making it a tough place to play.

 

And you're comparing a metropolitan area with 20M people vs. one with 1.4M people. So, it's logical that demand in the secondary market is going to be much greater in the location 15X bigger.

 

These comments remind me of a couple comments from Jack Kent Cooke when he owned the LA Kings.
To paraphrase: There are 8,000 hockey fans in LA and the only way to get a sellout is if they each bring a friend.
Also, Cooke had been told that there were more than three hundred thousand former Canadians living within a three-hour drive of Los Angeles, and remarked, "Now I know why they left Canada: They hate hockey!"

 

Whenever I heard the Pens fans bring that up during that series, I jumped to:

 

About last night's games ...

Didn't see much of Florida/Tampa Bay but from what I did, the Panthers looked somewhat lethargic. How does that happen? Seemed like a lot of empty seats, too. Up thread, someone mentioned something along the lines that South Florida and Carolina are not hockey markets or don't have large fan bases (paraphrasing, sorry). South Florida? Agreed. Carolina? No.

Colorado-St. Louis: Obviously, Binnington was outstanding. That might have been the best post-season game of his career which is saying a lot. Due to being screened, I don't think he ever saw the OT winner. People are talking about St. Louis forechecking more. Well, that's fine and worked in the past ... except Colorado is so exceptionally fast on the outlet that if you don't contain, you're going to give up a hell of a lot of odd-man rushes. The Avs forwards at times last night made the St. Louis D-men look like they were wearing concrete boots. Robert Thomas, who took his game to a new level in the last couple of months of the regular season, has disappeared. Berube is a good strategist and motivator but he, Ott and Montgomery need to make serious adjustments ... quickly.

 

Hockey is one of those games that can be cruel with the wrong bounces and good goaltending or whatever else leading to wins for teams that weren't necessarily better on that night and last night was almost one of those occurrences that the Blues stole. The Avalanche just really dominated that game, but yeah, Binnington. Especially in OT, even though eventually the game winner went past. Still, that Avs hit the post like five times not to mention the chances at open nets. I saw the shots were 13-0 in OT. That is crazy. It was similar to Game 2 in the Nashville series, and Colorado still won both.

 

Old trope? No argument, but you need to keep in mind that NSH is still relatively new to pro sports. Some of us (waves hi) were clutching our pearls when it happened.
As much as I like the person who implemented it here, I also thought the optics of such a thing were poor. This especially true when the lion's share of their GDP is in hospitality.

 

Thanks. Just sitting here typing, I'm chuckling and thinking, "yeah, that would probably hurt the Panthers' gate."