Uncle Scrooge
Hockey Bettor
Took everyone's "trash" and is like #1 in injured man games lost all the while almost leading the league. To me this can literally only mean 1 of 3 things. Either it's all rigged, none of these teams are trying in the regular season, or coaching is far more important than most of us thought and most of the coaches are garbage. None are really good options or looks for the NHL.
They didn’t get much trash though..
I don’t see a single bad player in their lineup. Worst players are young guys who coming into the year were top players in the AHL or NHL veterans who not too long ago had good years under their belts.
The rest are proven impact players who their teams didn’t want to give up but had to/were acquired in sidedeals.
And then there’s Wild Bill who is a story of his own.
But i mean lets not kid ourselves. What if Karlsson was still a bottom 6 center and Florida exposed a guy like Petrovic instead of giving up JAM and Smith - effectively taking away the Vegas top line - how good would this team be ? Im going to say they wouldn’t be in the playoffs. Tuch - Eakin - Carpenter would be their 2nd line...
We can talk about the depth etc etc but at the end of the day what’s been giving the team that xtra punch is their legit top line - line Vegas wasnt supposed to have.
What im saying is they’ve been fortunate. Cant see it happening again with Seattle, they’ll probably be the Vegas team we all thought they were supposed to be. I have a hard time believing Seattle will hit another homerun with 1) centers 2) scorers.
I would say none of the things you said are true. In my opinion the biggest factor of all is work. Confidence + insane work ethic all year long, that’s a deadly combination. It makes coaches look better when the players are buying in and executing the gameplan every night. It makes indiviuals look better when they come to play every night.
Teams lack consistency in the regular season from work standpoint. It’ll happen to Vegas too. I think that’s what people don’t realize. There are so many nights over the course of a year where you just don’t have it, either failed preparation, b2b, overconfidence, whaever it is.
When the team is not allowing them to use any excuses they do better than others. We saw the Blues start the year with the same mindset and look dominant, but then they had enough winning and got complacent. Vegas was never satisfied, until maybe the last month or so there’s been some minor stretches of that.
Of course work can only do so much, you still need to have talent, but if you have a competitive team working harder than others will give you an advantage.