With conference semifinals underway, is it fair to say the NHL Stanley Cup playoffs are almost half over? We’re getting closer to a team skating off as Stanley Cup champions for the 2024-2025 season, and we’re starting to think about what the legacy will be for this year’s playoffs. When we look back years from now, what will this year’s quest for the Cup be most remembered for?
Our first thought was this might be the year of the dramatic comeback. We saw two Game 7 comebacks in Round 1. First, the Dallas Stars overcame a multi-goal third period deficit to outlast the Colorado Avalanche.
That was followed by the Winnipeg Jets overcoming a similar deficit to beat the St. Louis Blues in a double overtime thriller off the stick of captain Adam Lowry. Jets goalie Connor Hellebuyck turned the switch from the poor play that doomed him early in the both the series and Game 7 to become a virtual brick wall once the puck dropped for the third.
Maybe we have to wait for Game 7 of the second round to get more heroics. However, the Florida Panthers did have an exciting come-from-behind win in overtime against the Toronto Maple Leafs in Game 3 to save them from a 0-3 series deficit. Toronto was leading 3-1 at the start of the second period.
Speaking of one of those games, maybe this year’s playoffs will be known as the “year of Mikko Rantanen." After being traded twice during the season, all three of the teams who employed the Finnish winger this year have made the playoffs. That provided to be enough potential storylines in itself.
We didn’t have to wait long for one of those as his original team, the Colorado Avalanche, faced off against Rantanen and the Dallas Stars in the first round. It was Rantanten’s Game 7 heroics that clinched Dallas’s ticket to the second round, namely a hat trick. For the record, both dramatic Game 7 comebacks of the first round went to the home team for Dallas and the aforementioned Jets.
Rantanen has been scoring on a torrid pace since then with another hat trick in Game 1 against Winnipeg in the second round and another three-point performance in Game 3. That makes Rantanen the first player in NHL history with five separate three-point games in their first ten payoff games for that season.
Another insane stat from The Hockey News is that after Game 3, Rantanen has scored or assisted on the last five game-winning goals for Dallas, which is a franchise record.
There’s a very real chance Rantanen and the Stars could face off against the team that sent him to Dallas, the Carolina Hurricanes, in the Stanley Cup Final. Some of those headlines could already write themselves. A strong showing in our hypothetical Cup Final could cement this year as “the summer of Rantanen”, to borrow a line from George Costanza on “Seinfeld”.
Perhaps this year will simply be known as the year of the unexpected. Comebacks can always be surprising. What would you call how Saturday night’s game between the Vegas Golden Knights and Edmonton Oilers game ended? That buzzer-beater falls into a whole different category of surprising, but a happy one for Vegas fans who were watching.
What this playoff’s legacy might not look like is the year of Alex Ovechkin and the Washington Capitals. After breaking what was thought to be the unbreakable scoring record en route to the Eastern Conference’s top seed, everything seemed to be going right for Ovi and company but they appear to have hit a wall against the Hurricanes in the second round. Ovechkin remains pointless in the first three games of the series after having four goals in five games against the Montreal Canadiens in the first round. If that changes, it starts with Game 4 scheduled for Monday night.