Honey Badger weaseling Canucks into the win column

Hansen most likely staring down a pot of honey.

With a pair of 1-0 shutout wins in the Canucks' past three games, buzz words like "the intangibles" and "workmanlike effort" have abounded.  To be fair, the Columbus Blue Jackets' 2.15 goals per game ranks last in the league.  The Los Angeles Kings, however, are seventh in that regard (2.88) and were held to just 20 shots on Saturday.  During that game, Jannik Hansen had an assist and two of the Canucks' 13 shots on goal.

It should come as no surprise then, that the Canucks' workmanlike prototype has been leading the way for the past month with 12 points in March.  The Danish winger of uniquely-pitched fame has enjoyed a much-publicized surge in production this year.  If you had been told in January that the third-line staple would be the Canucks' highest-scoring non-Sedin thirty-three games in, you might have imagined that Burrows, Raymond, Higgins, Edler and probably even Bieksa had all joined Kesler and Booth on the injured reseve.  But with 8 goals and 11 assists, Hansen sits third in team scoring at a pace that would see him approach 50 points over an 82-game season.

The Cup-winning model... It's not all black and silver

Another year, another Cup winner.  Another off-season for fairweather fans and professional analysts alike to lose perspective on any success their teams may have recently enjoyed.  (Look under: back-to-back Presidents' Trophies and a Campbell Bowl in two years.)  Unless you're basking in the aftermath of a Stanley Cup parade right now, it's time for the annual "If you can't beat 'em, copy 'em" game.  Fortified by Boston's previous success, enter the era of the L.A. model: Size and goaltending.  An ability to score is a given – this isn't 1999 anymore – but it seems now that your top players require the ability to deposit both pucks and bodies wherever they please if you want to win 16 games between April and June. 

In other words, if your captain can't play like Dustin Brown, who led the playoffs in points and hits, practice your golf swing.  Imagine Vancouver's horror.  Suddenly the finesse and puck possession formula championed by Detroit and emulated most by the Canucks is obsolete, right?  (You mean we can't Sedin our way to the Cup?)

To respond to this growing stream of thought, here's a brief history of NHL analysis in the past five years alone:

The Ducks win in 2007 and the mantra is established to "Get bigger."  A high-profile goalie is also obviously a must.  Then Detroit and Pittsburgh stickhandle their way to the Finals in back-to-back years and size is effectively de-emphasized for skill and puck possession.  The obligatory "high-profile goalie" in net was Chris Osgood.  Chicago continues along the same vein, relying more on skill than size, while being backstopped by no less than Antii Niemi.  Fast forward to the past two years as Boston and Los Angeles re-flip the script for the goaltending-and-size combination to take prominence once more.

These trends are clearly short-lived, but when the nightly analysis on Sportsnet and TSN get going again in September, I'll bet that more than a few of the former players and coaches out of NHL jobs the esteemed experts of the league are gonna start counting teams out based on how dissimilar their rosters are to Los Angeles's.

For all their in-depth knowledge, it will always be easier to deal in straightforward and simple maxims:  Size wins championships.  Defence wins championships.  Build around your goalie.  Don't build around your goalie.

The reality is, if a team with a completely different style and roster composition than the Kings doesn't win the Stanley Cup next year, one probably will the year after.  Where the Broad Street Bullies succeded in the 70's, so did the free-wheeling Oilers the following decade. 

This isn't gonna cut it for most Canucks fans – succeeded league-wide in jadedness by perhaps only Toronto – but the lesson is to stay the course.  I fully understand that said course is approaching a half-decade, but at no point in this Cupless streak has the team been this close, this often.

For those calling to blow up the roster to look more like Boston or L.A., I'd hate to be you when another puck possession team inevitably wins the Cup.  The only thing that Anaheim, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Chicago, Boston and Los Angeles all have in common is that none of those fool-proof rosters won twice in a row.

But if you must insist on reducing it to a simple formula, best to follow the find-team-chemistry-and-get-hot-at-the-right-time-while-getting-above-average-performance-from-all-your-players model.  Although the analysts might be on to something, cause that's significantly less catchy.

-HC

The L.A. Kings -- Not a Cinderella team

Nobody following the playoffs this year needs to be reminded how the L.A. Kings are doing.  The team from Hollywood has written a script worthy of their locale: Top three teams in the West vanquished.  Second eighth-seeded team to ever qualify for the Finals.  Three wins away from the perfect underdog story.  Lookout Dodgeball.

Although I think Vince
Vaughn's character in this
movie is way too nice to
be Dustin Brown...

However, as unlikely as your standard Cinderella story initially seems, between 2002 and 2006, a poorly-seeded team had annually qualified for the Stanley Cup Finals – in order, the Carolina Hurricanes,¹ Mighty Ducks of Anaheim, Calgary Flames and Edmonton Oilers all finished with bottom-three records in their conference.  When you include the current feel-good team of the year, the prevalence of a Cinderella team in the Finals is exactly 1-in-2 for the past 10 years.

With this in mind, are the 2012 Kings really that surprising?  Is their performance really that unlikely?  The answer is as emphatic as a Dustin Brown blindside to the head and/or knee: Yes!  Here’s why.

If teams like the 2006 Oilers and 2002 Ducks represent what Cinderella squads are supposed to look like, the Kings aren’t one of them.  Unlike the other four bottom-ranked teams to make the Finals in the past decade, L.A. has blitzed their way through the playoffs with a current 13-2 record.  Within recent memory, your standard issue surprise team has had to scrimp and scrape their way to a shot at the Cup with one-goal games they didn’t deserve to win and the supremely elevated play of little else than their goalie (See J.S. Giguere).  Ultimately, they were outplayed and overmatched for the better part of 20-25 games.

But this year’s Cinderella edition has consistently either matched or surpassed their higher-ranked opponents in all aspects of play.  No, the Kings probably wouldn’t have achieved this level of success without Jonathan Quick in net, but they are anything but a one-man show.  L.A. has more depth, talent and efficiency than any of their underdog predecessors ever had in their improbable runs.  Statistically, the Kings have outscored their opponents 43-23 and outshot them by an average four shots per game.

The Kings' current win-percentage, goals for/against and shots for/against, in comparison
to the four most recent "Cinderella" teams.

Sixth, seventh and eighth-placed teams can routinely make the Finals.  That’s not what makes the Kings special; it’s that they’ve done so with the level of play of a first seed.  Often times, L.A. has won convincingly.  All of the time, they’ve done so with their opponents’ bodies lying on the ice.  If not for their eighth-place ranking, nobody would ever name them after a Disney princess. 

The L.A. Kings have proved that they simply aren’t underdogs.  The hockey world expects this team to beat New Jersey.  And in that sense, that is surprising for an eighth seed.  That is a big deal.

-HC 

¹The Hurricanes were seeded third by virtue of winning the annual Southwest Division lottery, but had actually finished with the eighth-worst record in the East.

*See the discussion regarding this article on the Canucks.com forums here.