blundluntman
Registered User
- Jul 30, 2016
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I don’t think Washington is all that comparable to Colorado. Colorado had way more defensive depth and a surplus of offensive firepower. If you simply compare rosters, you’ll see a significant quality wise. You’ll perform better against a team like Washington who lacks the defensive depth that Colorado had with Makar, Toews, Manson, Byram, Girard and Johnson. You can’t look at Crosby and Mcdavid’s performances in a vacuum because the quality of competition isn’t the same. Perhaps Crosby performs well against Colorado but i don’t think the performance of one player makes a team go from a 4 game sweep to a series win. That’s a bit extreme. I do agree that Crosby played very well on Pittsburgh but i don’t think he wins with the Oilers. Fleury was very inconsistent but in the games he won, he had extremely good numbers. Having a goalie who can turn it on when things matter gives a team a much better chance. Stuart wasn’t inconsistent, he was very consistently abysmal and let it in awfully timed goals. I don’t think one player can make enough of a difference to turn things around to that degreePenguins beat the 4th placed Caps with a 87.78 save percentage in 08-09 in the second round, which seems quite close to the challenge the Oilers faced in beating the 2nd place Avalanche with an 87.21 save percentage.
Now I never saw it but I can look at the numbers.
The Penguins received very little help from their bottom six. They produced a 40% goal differential at 5v5 and had a 73.7% PK with no shorties (marginally lower than the 75% Edmonton posted against Colorado).
The single biggest thing going for the Penguins was Sidney Crosby going +5 through the 7 game series which he mostly did with Chris Kunitz and Bill Guerin.
By comparison Connor McDavid comes out of the Avalanche series with a -2 at 5v5 despite playing over half his minutes with Draisaitl.
In both cases, the results aren't that far from goals are expected.
Sid is also on ice for 8 PP goals in 7 games rather than 2 in 4.
Swap those 2 performances and the the Oilers probably beat the Avalanche.
Also while I'm not sure he'd win with a goalie posting an .883, he did win with MAF's -.238 below expected an hour. Only one other team has been below that since according to Moneypuck - or even just below negative iirc - and that's Colorado. So Crosby has gone as good a shot as anyone at doing it.