I get a kick out of people using analytics to argue that the team isn't as bad as their record suggests. Yet those same people are awfully quiet when it comes to analyzing last season. Would they be willing to apply the same standard and say that the team last year wasn't as good as their record ended up being?
The legend/mystique that has grown about the 2020 playoffs, and what they then meant, has become legitimately weird at this point. The team won
one playoff round without fans or home ice (moreover against an opponent who had suffered a COVID outbreak not long before). People on Twitter (and I think even here?) were calling it "the 4th best season in team history". Whaa? Like winning three playoff games in a round vs. two or one, against totally different opponents, in a totally different era, in drastically different circumstances is a distinction enough to overturn
entire seasons' worth of evidence? Seriously?
Plus these are many of the same people who claim the team "has never won a thing" (despite plenty of distinctions throughout the last 50 years) and refer to the 2009-12 team as a "failure".
I already think North Americans have some sort of insane and fatalistic self-deception when it comes to playoff systems as a yardstick in general, but to make claims like that being one of the best seasons in team history is especially preposterous.