Is...is the exaggeration in the room with us now?
DeBoer has been successful at stymieing the Avs' style of play, no matter where he's coached. Bednar's "counter" has basically been to tell his players to work harder.
The point of my post, which was pretty clear, was to not look past them just because of this. They still have to play the games, and DeBoer has a 100% playoff record against Bednar.
You both make good points.
Yes, when you think about it - those series were always very close :
2019 vs San Jose -> we lost in 7 games (Landeskog off-sides baloney) but we just didn't really have the team to win it all. We had a great top line and a bunch of 'meh' for the rest of the forward group. When you're icing Compher, Soderberg, Jost, Kerfoot, Nieto, Derrick Brassard (our big TDL acquisition), Sven AngryGhetto, Gabriel Bourque and Colin Wilson just goes to show how bad the forward group was apart from the top line. When most or all of those guys go on to be 3rd or 4th line players or out of the league completely, it goes to show that you can't win without at least
a decent 2nd line. On defense we had an 'ok' group : Barrie, Sammy G, EJ, Cole, Zadorov, Nemeth (with Makar making his debut in the playoffs) and Grubauer played all 12 games. Team needed better players especially on the 2nd line but also on the 3rd and 4th lines as well. One line team - easy to defend against.
2021 vs vegas -> unfortunately, the Avs were missing Kadri which probably would have made a pretty big difference when you consider the replacements (Compher/Jost/Soderberg). When you look back at that Avs team and compare it to this one - it's not close - there were a lot of holes in terms of depth and quality. (We had guys like Soderberg, Nemeth and Sampa Ranta playing games in the playoffs) Apart from that, it's hard to forget monumental mistakes by guys like Graves that cost us Game #5 and crap play by Grubauer that cost us Game #6. Again, without Kadri - the 2nd line became Burakovsky-Compher-Donskoi (Nuke not yet established) and that scares no one. One line team - easy to defend against.
2024 vs Dallass -> it's all fresh in our minds but we know what happened - in Game #2 that f***ing piece of shit jamie benn waited until Toews' head was down and headshotted him causing injury with OF COURSE no penalty or suspension (big f***ing surprise - f*** you parros you stupid piece of shit). So we lost a top pairing D-Man to injury. Then before Game #3 - on the very same day that the Avs announced that Drouin would be coming back from injury so that we'd finally have a decent Top-6 - we lost Nuke...
again at the worst possible time
. That 1st period in Game #3 was some of the worst playoff hockey I've seen from this team in a long time - it was as if they stopped believing they could win. Even then, we still took them to Game #6 and double OT but that Avs team last year - seemed defeated the moment it was announced Nuke was gone.
So yeah, he's been successful at stymying the Avs and Bednar's system but there is certainly some context there.
All-in-all, when you take everything into consideration - there has to be at the very least some belief that crybaby deboer has some pretty strong insights as to how to play the Avs - especially when you consider that each time he's beaten us, his teams have gone on to get beaten themselves afterwards. There is clearly some sort of 'matchup / style of play' that he gets his players on board with to limit us in what we do best.
At the same time, whenever I see that stars team play against a team like Edmonton, they always seem to have trouble with them - for whatever reason. It's Bednar's job to
figure-it-the-f***-out and see what the loilers were doing that made it so hard on them and apply some of those strategies.
I think it's a bit overblown if you leave out all the context but there is no excuse this time - this Avs team is the best we've had since the 2022 team.