I don’t really know enough to know. Tbh, hockey’s my 4th spectator sport at the moment. By my eye test of last playoffs, the Leafs were more physical than the Bolts but nowhere near physical enough to compete with the Panthers. So, the off-season moves that I heard about make sense.

I think regular season performance against specific opponents they might see in the playoffs might be the best predictor of playoff performance. I think some of that is because regular season games have become so analytics-heavy that there isn’t much room to prepare better or differently in post-season games these days. But that’s more of a baseball-based take.

I’m intrigued by how active c/leaf_nation is!! I think I’ll probably watch more games this season and show up here for the discussion :)

Focus on making it, fuck the rest. Rules all change anyways, and most of the cup winning teams are playing cap games with their LTIR, while the NHL looks the other way.

Are they a better playoff team? I mean not really. Their latest contracts are really heavy on performance incentives though, so if these kids want to get paid, they’ll perform a little better. We will see. Fucking refs will be fixing the games anyways, but maybe they’ll let them have another round.