The Mighty Oil Typhoon Are on Their Way to the Finals!
On saturday evening the Edmonton Oilers, my hometown and favorite hockey team, beat out the Mighty "Peiking" Ducks of Anaheim to clinch the NHL's Western Division and be one of the final two teams to make it to the Stanley Cup finals and hopefully win the oldest and most sought after trophy in professional sports (the cup is well over 100 years old).
What makes it particularily interesting is that this is the first time the 8th seeded team, since the new playoff format was introduced in 1994, has made it to the finals. This might sound pretty bad, but keep in mind that until they traded for their current goalie, they had swiss cheese in net and they had to beat 3 very good teams.
Conference Quarter Finals vs Detroit (Top team in the NHL) - 4 to 2 series win
Conference Semi Finals vs San Jose - 4 to 2 series win
Conference Finals vs Anaheim - 4 to 1 series win
Very solid performance by a team that most people and analysts, who I suspect are people that only look at stats and don't actually follow the team, had pegged as losing out in the first round.
Interesting side notes:
- Whatifsports.com gave the Oilers the lowest odds of making it this far or even winning the Stanley Cup (at less then 10%). Their prediction based on their analysis was that it was going to be a Detroit vs Ottawa series. Well Detroit lost out in round 1 and Ottawa in round 2, in fact most of their predictions amounted to nothing more than squat after the first round was done.
- Teemu Salanne, a player for the Anaheim Mighty Ducks had this to say:
"I don't think the better team beat us. We beat ourselves"
That's a funny quote coming froma guy whose team lost the series 4 to 1 and was grossly outplayed and outshot all series long. To top it off Selanne here amounted to nothing in probably one of the most important playoff series of his career. Makes me wonder about this guys ability to compete and really want to win it all when he makes up excuses like this. I have to wonder if this guy will be thinking the same thing when hes playing golf while his "lesser" adversaries are playing for the holy grail?
