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Puck Daddy Power Rankings: Brandon Prust, Stanley Cup Playoff fate, end of Lou

Puck Daddy Power Rankings: Brandon Prust, Stanley Cup Playoff fate, end of Lou

[Author's note: Power rankings are usually three things: Bad, wrong, and boring. You typically know just as well as the authors which teams won what games against who and what it all means, so our moving the Red Wings up four spots or whatever really doesn't tell you anything you didn't know. Who's hot, who's not, who cares? For this reason, we're doing a power ranking of things that are usually not teams. You'll see what I mean.]  

6. Brandon Prust

Let's suppose for a second that Brandon Prust is 100 percent right. And he isn't because he can't be.

Let's suppose Brad Watson called him every name in the book then made up a few more on top of that. What does Prust going to the media and making a huge thing out of it really accomplish? All that stuff ex-refs have said about the boo-hooing making Prust a marked man — in that they're going to be on the lookout for every infraction for what could be the very short remainder of this series —is a best-case scenario.

The Canadiens complain all the time about officiating. Michel Therrien did it after Game 1, Prust after Game 2. Maybe they feel hard done by. But calling out officials often has the same effect as calling out an Alex Ovechkin or other great players: It just increases the motivation to hurt you.

Prust is a guy who "plays on the edge" — and based on his other skills probably doesn't belong in the league at all — which is always going to make him feel like he's a target for refs to begin with. It's easy to have a "Why me?" attitude when you're being sent to the box as often as Prust is. But to not recognize that in your own game, or to see nobility in playing to injure your opponents, is a specialty of players of his ilk. It has to be.

So OK, refs look for reasons to whistle you. And maybe Watson really took that verbal run at Prust. That says he doesn't think much of Prust already so to call further attention to that fractious relationship would appear to be unwise. Especially in the way Prust did it, albeit to a deeply sympathetic local media.

The reasonable hockey fan outside the greater Montreal area is never going to have a lot of sympathy for Prust in the the Brandon Prust Versus Literally Almost Anyone debate.

So really all this did was give people who don't like Prust more reason to dislike him. And that includes the damn refs.

Which makes his deep and sincere apology ahead of Game 3 totally believable. Enjoy having every borderline call go against you in the rest of this series, bud.

5. Asset management

“Hey,” says Calgary Flames GM Brad Treliving, “we have this kid on what is technically still his nine-game tryout and we're probably going to get killed in this series. So let's definitely 100 percent for sure burn a year on his ELC to get him into those 15 minutes a night.”

This is good general-managing. No two ways about it.

4. Inevitability

That the Ducks and Lightning emerged from the first two games of their series not only with commanding 2-0 leads, but also with the huge psychological advantage that comes from strangling your opponents.

Anaheim went up to Calgary with a 9-1 advantage in aggregate goalscoring and neither game was anything less than a massacre. Meanwhile, Tampa has an 8-3 scoring advantage, which is really saying something when the goaltending matchup is Carey Price versus Shaky Ben Bishop (Shaky Ben Bishop, by the way, has shaky-ed his was to a .933 save percentage in these playoffs, allowing 16 goals on 239 shots in nine games).

And the thing is this was all foreseeable. The new playoff format let the four worst teams in the postseason play each other in the first round; if they'd played anyone else, Calgary and Montreal probably aren't through to this round. But they are, and this is what happens.

Tampa is worlds better than Montreal. Anaheim is solar systems better than Calgary. These less-thans might get in a win or even two in their series, but the results of these first two games are telling as far as just how long the climb is for teams that even made it this deep into the playoffs to become real and actual Cup contenders, and not just those built up by the local and national media because of their high PDOs.

A lot of attention has been paid to the Lightning basically adding an entire elite scoring line in one summer (because they exploited undervalued markets like small players), and Anaheim's depth quality actually catching up with that terrifying top line. That's how you build sustainable success. The Flames and Habs should be roadkill next season, but the Ducks and Bolts will not be. That's the difference.

3. Braden Holtby

Not enough is being made of how good Washington's netminder has been this season, and indeed, how good he has been more or less throughout his career (minus last year).

Holtby is up to .949 in the playoffs, which is really really really good. Too high to be reasonable, sure, but in his postseason career he's stopped .936 on more than 900 shots. It's starting to look like this is a really, really good postseason goaltender.

And you can say that with confidence because across more than 5,100 shots in the regular season, Holtby has a .921 save percentage. Know who else has a .921 save percentage in his career? Henrik Lundqvist. And sure, Lundqvist has faced three times the number of shots in his NHL career, but apart from last season — when he was a “disappointing” .915 that was only a little bit above league average — Holtby has been at least .920 for basically his entire career.

We are dealing with a franchise goaltender here, folks. That's not a term that should get thrown around a lot, but that's what Holtby sure looks like at this point.

Let's put it this way: Only eight goaltenders in NHL history have ever posted at least a .915 save percentage and faced at least 5,000 shots before they turned 26. Now, that doesn't account for things like “almost no one went .920 even in a single season before the late 1990s,” but nonetheless, this is a solid list of comparables:

The jury is obviously still out on Varlamov and Bobrovsky in the long term, but if you can find yourself in a group with Luongo, Lundqvist, Brodeur, and Price at age 25, you're doing pretty well for yourself.

Washington may have some question marks on that roster, but Holtby is the opposite of one of them.

2. Smartening up

Well, that's the end of Lou Lamoriello calling the shots in New Jersey. It was a long time coming, and only three years too late for the Devils to actually make anything of themselves the last few years.

Is Ray Shero the guy I'd want leading my team's charge into an uncertain future? Nope. All set. But is he going to be better than Lamoriello at building a team that might at least occasionally resemble a decent club? Probably.

When you're listing Lamoriello's various bona fides, the ones that happened in years that happened after they introduced a shootout to the NHL run out real fast (the Corey Schneider trade and extension, and then...?). Ray Shero's biggest accomplishment was winning a Cup, but the amount of work he personally did to build that team wasn't that significant. You take over a team with Crosby and Malkin and you're going to look pretty good. He consequently mismanaged that team into the ground. Oops.

But no Lou is better than some Lou, at least here in 2015. So at least it's a step in the right direction.

1. A CapGeek replacement?

There's still a lot of work to do here, but the presentation at the brand-new General Fanager is pretty close. And word is that, potentially by the time you read this, War on Ice's ReCapGeek could be up and running for teams as well.

All of this is good.

(Not ranked this week: Sending a message.

Ahead of the U.S.A./Russia game at the World Championships on Monday, the latter team announced that their performance against the Hated Americans would be the team's official reply to U.S. sanctions placed on Russia as a result of its invasion of Ukraine.

The Russians, with Evgeni Malkin and Ilya Kovalchuk, lost 4-2 to a team with Matt Hendricks playing significant minutes. This is why we won the Cold War.)

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