League left without champions – Kommersant

The opening round of the NHL championship play-offs gave two thunderous sensations. Already at this stage, the Stanley Cup winner Colorado Avalanche and the Boston Bruins, who won the regular championship with record numbers, lost in the seventh, decisive matches of the series up to four victories on their sites – 1:2 and 3:4 – quoted much below the Seattle Kraken and the Florida Panthers.

No matter how high the level of competition in the NHL is, no matter how habitual it is in the early stages of the play-offs of highly seeded clubs, no matter how insignificant the “seeding” is in principle, what happened yesterday draws on An emergency on a colossal scale. Two clubs left the race at the same time, which, for obvious reasons, could not help but look like favorites in pursuit of the Stanley Cup. And each of them was, of course, unhappy in his own way.

The Boston meltdown is hard to rationalize. The irrational lies right at hand. For North American media resources, it is even too banal to remind about the “curse” of the regular season champion. Well, yes, for exactly ten years since the triumph of the Chicago Blackhawks in 2013, the winners of the regular season have not been able to take the Stanley Cup. Moreover, in this segment, real cup failures often happened to them, when they were forced to go on vacation long before the final.

But this was a very special case. Boston was not just the winner of the regular season, the club was a little more stable than the pursuers. He won it, setting new NHL records for wins and points scored, and in the first round he met with a team that had as much as 43 points less in the championship. That is, it seemed that “Boston” and “Florida”, if we talk about the stability class, are separated by a whole abyss.

Moreover, it seemed so already in the course of the series, when the Bostonians took the lead with a score of 3:1. He seemed to be a guarantee of success. But instead of success, “Boston” raked a biting slap in the face from “Florida”, which was resurrected, not least thanks to the decision to return the Russian veteran Sergei Bobrovsky, who started the Stanley Cup in reserve, to the gate.

And the final match of the series turned into something like its quintessence. “Boston”, having already sensed something was wrong, also decided to replace the goalkeeper in front of him, sending Jeremy Sveimen instead of Linus Ulmark, who had swum, and in the third period he probably thought that he had slipped through. He played nervously for a long time, stiffly, conceded two goals, but then he added and took the lead. Only a minute remained until the siren. But Boston was impatient, conceding a goal from defenseman Brandon Montour. And in overtime, he was finished off by the loss of the puck at the boards and a killer shot by Carter Verhaegy, who flashed Swaimen, who was closed by the players, which makes the fact that in the near future Boston’s chances of storming the top unlikely to be as solid as it is now. The group of leaders of the club includes several players at such an age that the end of a career is not far off, and 37-year-old Patrice Bergeron, captain and key center forward, has already made it clear that he is thinking about saying goodbye to hockey.

The trouble with Colorado is, perhaps, more understandable. The fact that the depth of the squad is the problem of this club became clear long ago, in fact, immediately after it won the Stanley Cup a year ago, parting after the triumph with several players. Circumstances only made it worse.

In October, before the opening of the season, captain Gabriel Landeskog underwent surgery on a sore knee. It was expected that the forward should recover by the play-offs, but in the end we had to fight without him. Injuries and suspensions left Colorado during the standoff with Seattle and without other important players. And the strangest thing was the loss of the Russian Valery Nichushkin, without whom it is already difficult to imagine an effective game of the leading links of Denver. He stopped appearing at the base after the second match of the series with Seattle, and in the protocols of matches, the word “personal” always stood opposite his name. What that meant was only partly explained by a Denver police report published last week on an incident at the hotel where the Colorados were staying before the away meeting. In Nichushkin’s room, they found a girl who was in a state of severe intoxication: she was sent to the hospital. Criminal and administrative cases were not opened in connection with this, but the striker has since disappeared from the team.

And, of course, speaking of the defeat of Colorado, it’s stupid to completely ignore his opponent. Seattle had made their NHL debut the previous season and were still too raw at the time to qualify for the playoffs. In the next season, he broke into it, but, having no big stars in the ranks, he still looked like a club that, for happiness, can simply fight with the grandee in the opening round.

Meanwhile, it turned out that the private named “Seattle” pretty well mastered hockey suitable for the playoffs – tight, disciplined and biting. And the efforts of Colorado celebrities like Nathan McKinnon weren’t enough to sap his confidence. Seattle also hit the bullseye with a video challenge in the third period. McKinnon scored a goal that seemed impossible to fault, and the Colorado players had no doubt that they had regained the balance. But watching the episode confirmed the correctness of the Seattle coaches: when Denver entered the zone, Artturi Lehkonen had a tiny offside.

Alexey Dospekhov