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Hello, this is a feature that will run through the entire season and aims to recap the weekend's events and boils those events down to one admittedly superficial fact or stupid opinion about each team. Feel free to complain about it.

Occasionally you will hear that playing top teams several times a season, like those in the Atlantic and Central Divisions did this season, is a great way to prepare yourself for the postseason.

They say it makes you ready to face the tougher competition in the playoffs, and by extension, those teams playing in softer divisions must logically be ill-prepared for similar rigors once the postseason rolls around. Both of the Atlantic and Central divisions were littered with 100-point teams, boasting eight of the league's 10 to eclipse the century mark between them (the other two being Boston and Vancouver), and it therefore stood to reason that they would likely send the lion's share of competitors to the conference finals.

The better teams in the regular season tend to do about as well in the postseason, because they are, after all, very good teams. That makes sense.

It turns out, though, that having a bunch of teams even in the neighborhood of 100 points in your division at the end of the regular season actually may be more of a detriment to a squad's postseason success. Since the lockout, only two teams have played in a Stanley Cup Final after playing in a division with three teams that managed 100 points. However, both those teams (Anaheim in 2007 and Chicago in 2010) won the Cup. If you expand that number out to even 97 points — which typically assures you a playoff berth but not home ice — only two more teams are added to the mix, the 2008 and 2009 Penguins.

Conversely, teams coming out of divisions with two or fewer 97-point teams got into the Cup Finals with far greater frequency, doing so eight times since the lockout (including both Boston and Vancouver last year).

But now we've seen the Los Angeles Kings advance to the Western Conference Final for the first time since 1993, and the Phoenix Coyotes stand on the precipice of doing the same for the first time since ever. Phoenix won the Pacific Division with 97 points, and is only a home ice team by virtue of its division title. Had seeding been based on points, they'd have slotted into the sixth spot. Los Angeles, meanwhile, finished with 95. The now-eliminated Sharks were sandwiched between them with 96.

Three teams from one division in the playoffs, yes, but one terribly underwhelming division from which not much was expected.

(Coming Up: America is a hockey superpower, thanks to Jack Johnson; Barry Trotz is wrong; Dustin Brown is awesome; Jordan Staal of Carolina; Thomas Vanek makes bank; Luongo to the Blackhawks?; Rick Dudley to the Habs; Jonathan Quick vs. Terry Sawchuck; trading Sidney Crosby; Todd McLellan-to-Calgary rumors; and the best and worst of the Capitals.)

Getty ImagesTrending Topics is a column that looks at the week in hockey, occasionally according to Twitter. If you're only going to comment to say how stupid Twitter is, why not just go have a good cry for the slow, sad death of your dear internet instead?

All it takes is one mistake.

As you might have heard by now, Russian hockey players are, by nature, at least one of all of the following things:

Lazy, selfish, quiet, obsessed with their homeland, loners, bad teammates, lazy, lazy, selfish, lazy, and of course enigmatic.

But no one was paying a particular amount of attention to the work of Russian players in these playoffs, at least not through the lens of, "Look at what these Russians are doing," and were instead just judging them as players.

We have by now all seen Keith Jones' brutal takedown of a guy who we can now at least guess was at least overtired if not actively hungover, and there's no excuse for that kind of behavior from a team's leading scorer in the playoffs. The most of it was disingenuous, with Jones pointing out missed nets on the rush and turnovers along the boards in Game 1 as signs he's not performing up to standards. He even blamed a point man bobbling a pass on Radulov almost-losing a puck.

Then Jeremy Roenick added his two cents on the subject — which was worth far less than that — about how they must not track plus-minus in the KHL (and childishly pretending he didn't remember the league's name) given that it's such a telling and important stat; which is funny, because they do track plus-minus in the KHL and Radulov was a plus-98 in the last four seasons. He's also a plus-29 in the NHL in less than two seasons of work.

But nonetheless, it was fair enough, even if it continued NBC's proud tradition of slagging off European players given the slightest opportunity. Radulov had a just point and only one shot to his name in the first two games of the series, both of which Nashville lost.

Then it came out that Alex Radulov and Andrei Kostitsyn stayed up late drinking in Glendale, had a bad Sunday, and thus started a firestorm of xenophobia and anti-North American prejudice that you've come to expect from that kind of incident.

Getty ImagesHello, this is a feature that will run through the entire season and aims to recap the weekend's events and boils those events down to one admittedly superficial fact or stupid opinion about each team. Feel free to complain about it.

Watching Saturday's Capitals/Rangers game was an exercise in masochism.

Sitting through that game was a test — not unlike that delivered unto Abraham — to see just how much you actually like watching hockey. Two teams playing hockey not so much against each other but rather at each other, or, to put it another way, in defiance of every hockey fan's patience. In that game, four goals were scored on 32 shots. That was between both teams, and not just one, in case you were wondering.

Certainly, convention states that playoff hockey is more defensive by nature than the regular season. And though you'd be a fool to subscribe to the belief that defensive hockey is boring hockey, even the most stoic men would have been reduced to tears by the kind of temerity it takes to dare people to sit through 60 minutes of whatever that was on Saturday afternoon.

But one team, at least, flatly refuses to play anything like boring hockey. That would be the Philadelphia Flyers, whose efforts have thrilled all viewers not openly supporting their opponents, and enlivened what is otherwise shaping up to be a rather drab final few rounds of the playoffs.

(Coming Up: Pierre McGuire as Habs GM; trading Patrick Marleau; Jagr vs. Brodeur; Matt Greene's unlikely goal; Predators' revenue troubles; Nail for Staal?; Landeskog graded; Columbus addresses its goalie needs; Alex Ovechkin controlled by Rangers; in praise of Danny Briere; the Winnipeg Jets are dogs; and the future of Tim Thomas.)

Getty ImagesTrending Topics is a column that looks at the week in hockey, occasionally according to Twitter. If you're only going to comment to say how stupid Twitter is, why not just go have a good cry for the slow, sad death of your dear internet instead?

An aging goalie on the wrong side of 30 who appeared in a Stanley Cup Final last spring and now looks primed to get shipped out of town via trade this summer, in favor of a younger and cheaper option who looks ready to become a franchise goalie in his own right.

That should sound familiar to both Boston Bruins and Vancouver Canucks fans, as both Tim Thomas and Roberto Luongo face very uncertain summers, and look for all the world as if they've played their last games in the uniforms they've worn for more than half a decade.

But in the end, it's all about how the two teams handle the shipping-out of their soon-to-be-former(?) star players where you can see which did so in the correct way and which did not.

As I'm sure you can probably guess, the city where one has been a whipping boy for everyone from the fans to some of the local media is the one that is handling things incorrectly.

Getty Images(Ed. Note: As the Stanley Cup Playoffs continue, we're bound to lose some friends along the journey. We've asked for these losers, gone but not forgotten, to be eulogized by the people who knew the teams best: The fans who hated them the most. Here's Puck Daddy's own Ryan Lambert, fondly recalling the 2011-12 Vancouver Canucks. Again, this was not written by us ... OK, by all of us. Also: This is a roast and you will be offended by it, so don't take it so seriously.)

Hello everyone and welcome to this memorial service for the Vancouver Canucks 2011-12 season.

Boy that was a wild one, eh? It's too bad about the whole "losing on home ice thing." Fortunately, I've been assured that the city took precautions this time, girding itself against the massive amount of water damage that's sure to originate from Jim Hughson's position in the broadcast booth.

Such is life in the Stanley Cup Playoffs, where it's really hard for any President's Trophy winner to advance past an eight-seed that scored six goals in the regular season.

Like, really, really hard. So hard, you guys.

I know it's been said that the Canucks avoid excuse-making like the Sedins avoid defensive-zone faceoffs, but come on everyone, they had a bunch of very legitimate excuses this time around. For one thing, there was Daniel Sedin. He was way, way, way too injured to play in the first three games of the series, which is what made his recovery just in time to prolong the team's prospects ever-so-slightly in Game 4 so miraculous.

It was as if the Hockey Gods themselves reached down from the heavens and made all those clouds swirling in his brain go away all at once, and, at last cobweb-free, he was able to save the team's bacon that one time. Just the one time, mind you. But that has to count for something.

Getty ImagesHello, this is a feature that will run through the entire season and aims to recap the weekend's events and boils those events down to one admittedly superficial fact or stupid opinion about each team. Feel free to complain about it.

And so it was that two long-standing Western Conference powers crashed out of the 2012 Stanley Cup Playoffs, bending the knee to upstart franchises in just five games each …

You might not have liked the Sharks or Red Wings in their series against the Blues and Predators, but it was very difficult to see either one crashing out in five, wasn't it?

Now both find themselves at a bit of a crossroads. Detroit, of course, has been hearing "they're too old to keep doing this much longer" forever. But were it not for what even the staunchest of statsphobic old-timers would call a lucky, impossible-to-replicate home winning streak, it's difficult to get excited about the team's prospects going forward. No one on the Wings broke 70 points, and that's the first time since 2003-04 that such a thing has happened. They only had 17 road wins this season, and didn't win once at Joe Louis Arena in the playoffs. Causes for concern, certainly, made no less worrisome by the prospect of Nicklas Lidstrom hanging them up.

[ Related: After first-round elimination, Sharks face uncertain future ]

Make no mistake, this is an old team. Second-oldest in the league behind New Jersey, in fact. The number of players in their top-10 for scoring under the age of 30 was just three, and they weren't exactly three guys you see a guy as apparently smart as Ken Holland building a team around: Valtteri Filppula and Jiri Hudler, who played most of the year with Henrik Zetterberg, and Ian White, who took the majority of his shifts with Lidstrom. That's not to say they're not good players in their own right (well, White isn't), but they are complementary players, and guys like Zetterberg would still succeed regardless of who played with them.

They also have few particularly tantalizing prospects (the result of a decade or so of drafting pretty poorly) and Lidstrom, with his career very obviously on its last legs, simply cannot be the rough-and-ready warhorse at both ends of the ice he has been in the past, and the prospect of Niklas Kronwall playing any more minutes than he already does has to be concerning to anyone who watched this Nashville series.

[ Related: Preds make Stanley Cup statement by eliminating Red Wings ]

Now, none of this is to say that the Wings didn't carry long stretches of their playoff games, and outshoot Nashville significantly in three of the five. They did. But as the series wore on, they also often appeared baffled with how to handle the looks a line led by Martin Erat was giving them, and didn't do a very good job of silencing anyone over the course of five games.

(Coming Up: It's Claude Giroux's world, we just live in it; the end of the Pens; Marty Brodeur is old; Mike Cammalleri gets his sweater; hoping for a Nicklas Lidstrom retirement; the Islanders probably aren't Brooklyn bound; the Coyotes and Blackhawks play a lot of overtime games; Cam Ward is charitable; the Rangers can't score; Tyler Seguin is pretty good; Emerson Etem ignites; and a trade to get Roberto Luongo to Tampa Bay.)

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Trending Topics is a column that looks at the week in hockey, occasionally according to Twitter. If you're only going to comment to say how stupid Twitter is, why not just go have a good cry for the slow, sad death of your dear internet instead?

The problem, inherently, isn't with guys like Raffi Torres.

Don't get me wrong, Raffi Torres is definitely a problem. It's gotten to the point with him -- and players exactly like him, who seemingly exist only to injure other players -- that we must assume any hit they deliver that does not result in a concussion is one for which they'd like a mulligan. Guys like him, after amassing this long a rap sheet, should probably not be allowed to play in the National Hockey League any longer.

But they are not the root cause of the current situation in the Stanley Cup Playoffs. If they were, it would be guys like him, and like him exclusively, that were picking up suspensions and fines left and right. Unfortunately, for those looking for an easy scapegoat, guys like Andrew Shaw and Carl Hagelin and even poor, much-criticized Shea Weber are not like Raffi Torres. The things they did were insidious, but they are not idiotic.

And you would have to be an idiot to play like Raffi Torres does in 2012.

And so then the blame must reasonably fall on the League's inconsistency in laying down the law on those villainous enough to bring injury upon their fellow player, right?

Well, not entirely.

APHello, this is a feature that will run through the entire season and aims to recap the weekend's events and boils those events down to one admittedly superficial fact or stupid opinion about each team. Feel free to complain about it.

It has never once been said that hockey pundits are ones to give up their long-held beliefs.

Things like wins still matter a lot when it comes to Vezina voting, people still believe most careers were failures unless the player won a Stanley Cup, and the idea that a player can be "clutch" is still valued more than anything else once the postseason rolls around.

Case in point: Marc-Andre Fleury.

All we heard in the run-up to the playoffs was that the Flyers and Penguins were more or less each others' equals as far as the forwards and defense were concerned, and that the difference was in net. Ilya Bryzgalov: Fragile goalie. Marc-Andre Fleury: Big-game goalie. The Penguins, therefore, would win this series, even if it wouldn't be easy.

And now we sit here, nine-plus periods of hockey having been played between these two bitter rivals, and Fleury has been nothing short of shambolic. The stats don't speak for themselves so much as they roar from the mountaintops that this is a goaltender who's in so far over his head that the Roberto Luongo who faced the Blackhawks those few times looks as mentally secure as Fort Knox by comparison.

As netminders go, Fleury has been the worst in these playoffs by several country miles. He's the only one to start all three games and not earn a win (that's for all you old-schoolers out there). The worst save percentage of anyone. Worst goals-against average of anyone.

(Coming Up: Pekka Rinne is OK; James Neal is a punk; the Blues bench breaks; a way to get PK Subban to Edmonton; Bruins stars invisible vs. Capitals; Tortorella doesn't go crazy; huge off-season for Colorado; why Brent Sutter left; will Jackets go for Murray at No. 2?; Wild, Fletcher work on deal; Claude Noel's odd conversation with fan; Mike Green doesn't feel well; and why Canada's getting ready to cry.)