GMRwings1983

The referee should be banned from officiating again in the playoffs for letting the fans influence his officiating. Niskanen should not have been tossed from the game just because Crosby got hurt and people were upset.

That would be the dream matchup for the league. Crosby vs. McDavid. As I've said numerous times recently, the league doesn't have a lot of chances to showcase McDavid playing in Edmonton. Edmonton is not good enough defensively, though, to beat the Penguins.

Likely nobody, but the Predators are stingy enough to play against and have a great goalie.

We had a couple against the Pens in game 5 of the 2008 Finals. In OT from what I remember.

Hanging out with regular season Bobrovsky.

How did the Flyers move up so much? I say a conspiracy by NBC, as the Flyers play a nationally televised game almost every week.

These goalies are trash. Holtby is garbage in the playoffs. Varlamov wasn't much better. No brainer why they can't get past the 2nd round. They need to get tougher, get rid of a few Ruskies and get a goalie who doesn't play like Roman Cechmanek's twin brother in the postseason.

Washington needed game 1 more, with their crappy history in the second round.

Having over 3,000 PIM in the toughest era of hockey will do that to you.

The Capitals and Penguins had the two best records in the East. They are playing each other in the second round. Meanwhile, the other series in the East involves the teams with the 5th and 6th best records, in New York and Ottawa. Does this make sense to anyone besides Bettman and his cabinet of fools? In the West, it's likely a mess. The Ducks are the highest seed left, yet instead of playing the 8 seed Predators, they are playing a higher seeded Edmonton team.

Those things happened rarely from what I remember. The old system wasn't perfect, but made more sense and had fewer faults. The problem with the Division format is that the Wild Card team is frequently from a different division than the top seed they're playing against. So the current system doesn't really stay true to its purpose. Otherwise, Washington would have played the Rangers in the first round, with Montreal playing against Toronto. There's a chance now that the two teams advancing to the Conference final will actually be from the same division.

Hard to pick against the Ducks after the last series. As I said before, the league needs to rig it to help Edmonton any way possible, to give McDavid national exposure.

Except, in the previous system, if the top two teams played in the second round, you wouldn't have a 5 and 6 seed playing in the other series.

The NHL must be the only league in sports that enjoys low ratings and the idea of teams from cities nobody cares about advancing into the deeper playoff rounds. I hope we see an Ottawa vs. Nashville final just to see how much Bettman sweats when he's interviewed about it.

Owen Hart?

We need to draft more good Canadian boys from the WHL. Like your boy Darren Helm.

You sure they weren't talking about Rangers Football Club?

Hey, there's only one 6'4 Swedish stud.

Thanks for that. That makes this playoff scheme seem even dumber.

The league wanted to create division rivalries. However, we just witnessed an amazing series between the Caps and Leafs, which don't play in the same division. The NHL playoffs don't need divisional matchups to be interesting. Also, do teams play that many more games against their division than they do against the other division in the Conference? I thought regular season games were pretty evenly split against teams within your division vs teams in the other division in the same Conference. I could be wrong, though.

Now that's really odd. The Senators did not win their division. Can the league just have a do-over and reseed right now?

I don't want to make this a social issue, but Toronto has a higher percentage of foreign born residents than pretty much any city in the world. People from the Middle East, India and China don't care about hockey. And this is a fairly recent trend in Canada. Of course there's not going to be as many Leafs fans everywhere as there may have been 15 or 20 years ago.

I believe the Penguins are 8-1 all time in playoff series against the Capitals.

Pittsburgh in 6. Washington has a terrible history against the Pens and playing down to the Leafs didn't make them look very strong imo. They have some strengths on paper, but that won't matter.

Bye bye Toronto. We don't have to hear about your annoying fans anymore this season.