As we all know, the focus of hockey fans from now until the end of the year will be on the nightly scoreboard and how teams hovering around the 8th spot in either conference fared. It’s the most exciting time of year for fans and even though I have no rooting interest in any of these competing teams, I’ll be watching just as intently as all of you.
However, I’ll also be focusing on two teams in particular that a lot of you won’t. They happen to be the Vancouver Canucks and the Philadelphia Flyers. If you’re fans of either team, then I guess you’ll be with me in tracking their results, but a lot of you have just shunted them from your minds as they’ve pulled away from everyone else in their conferences.
If you haven’t noticed, they haven’t exactly been world-beaters lately and their results don’t necessarily reflect the kind of form that is becoming of conference champions. I understand that there’s going to be lulls in every team’s season and even the winning teams have difficulty here and there during the year, but as results have shown in the past, winning early and coasting to the playoffs hasn’t worked out too often for any team in any professional sports league.
Sure, there have been some teams that have been able to sleepwalk through the regular season only to flip on a switch in the playoffs and walk away with the trophy, but take a look at the recent history of champions in the major sports leagues and you’ll see that the team that is in “playoff mode” ahead of the playoffs have had a lot of success as well. There have also been a lot of examples of teams with regular season success that have done absolutely nothing once the games meant something.
Just take a look at the winners in the last calendar year. The Green Bay Packers were hit-and-miss just to make the playoffs with 2 weeks to go in the NFL regular season. All they did was win their remaining games and they hoisted the Vince Lombardi Trophy. The San Francisco Giants were a .500 team at the halfway point of the 2010 MLB season, but a late-season surge allowed for them to have positive momentum. That push guided them to a World Series title.
I know that the Chicago Blackhawks and the Los Angeles Lakers were teams that had monster regular-seasons and went through fits of coasting as well, so it’s not an exact science, but having 50% of this year's champions come from behind in order to win proves that heart and determination can overcome natural skill quite often.
There’s no doubt that the Canucks and the Flyers have a ton of natural ability, but I worry that the mindset that these teams are carrying heading into the playoffs may end up overshadowing all of that hard work at the start of the year. You just don't want to see a team chalk-full of talent have it go to waste because meaningless ergular-sesaon games dragged them down.