Why the unlikeliest Western Conference Finals in NHL history also has the potential to be one of its best.
By: Jimbo X
Imagine you're a hardcore hockey fan in the year 2008. Then all of a sudden, a time traveler from 2018 shows up.
Because you're a hardcore hockey fan, you don't ask him any stupid questions about who the president is or whether or not World War III has broken out. Instead, you ask him what *any* level-headed person would: "hey bud, which teams make the Western Conference Finals in the '18 Stanley Cup playoffs?"
I can almost smell the 2008 dude's head exploding when the time traveler speaks.
"A first-year expansion team out of Las Vegas and the Atlanta Thrashers ... who, by the way, are now the second incarnation of the Winnipeg Jets."
There's no doubting it: the Golden Knights/Jets 2.0 WCF match-up HAS to be the most unlikely in NHL history. For that matter, it might just be the unlikeliest conference finals in anything EVER.
Yup, weirder than the Minnesota Wild/Mighty Ducks of Anaheim WCF back in '03. More bizarre than the 2012 WCF coming down to Los Angeles and Phoenix. And certainly more randomly-generated sounding than the time the Eastern Conference Finals came down to Carolina and Toronto ... or Carolina and Buffalo ... or hell, pretty much ANY time it boiled down to the Hurricanes against anybody else.
How do you describe just how weird this is to non-hockey fans? Imagine if next season, Roger Goodell announced the Lions were relocating to London and not only did they have a stellar season, they made it all the way to the NFC Championship ... where they took on a suddenly annexed Toronto Argonauts team from the Canadian Football League.
Or if the National League Championship Series boiled down to the Milwaukee Brewers and the Montreal Expos, who just kind of showed up without explanation halfway through the season.
Or next year's NBA Finals somehow involving both the Washington Bullets AND the Vancouver Grizzlies.
THAT is how weird the actual reality before us is in this NHL season.
The runaway success of the Vegas Golden Knights has to be unparalleled in the world of pro sports. Expansion teams are supposed to be historically terrible, the kinds of squads that finish with single-digit win columns and get blown out 6-1 by teams that don't even qualify for the playoffs.
But here we are, with a FIRST YEAR EXPANSION TEAM just four wins away from participating in the Stanley Cup Finals.
A team like the Knights isn't supposed to be in playoff contention. But they very well could win their league's championship their VERY FIRST season. A team that literally had to cobble itself together with the leftovers none of the other 30 teams in the League wanted has already steamrolled two playoff-caliber teams that have had DECADES to build themselves offensively and defensively.
Sure, you could credit their success to Marc-Andre Fleury's outstanding goaltending, or the impressive depth of their defensive lines. You could even credit their success to all of the other teams getting distracted by all of the gambling, boozing and whoring going on before road games (which, if nothing else, gets me REAL excited to be a Raiders fan a couple years down the road.)
But seemingly no logical explanation suffices. Which, naturally, would put them on a crash course with the only other team in the League's whose sudden success is even half as inexplicable — the Winnipeg Jets.
As in, "these guys USED to be the Atlanta Thrashers seven seasons ago" Winnipeg Jets. The "our province's SECOND largest city only has 46,000 people in it" Winnipeg Jets. The "I seriously forget sometimes they're NOT a team that went defunct in 1996" Winnipeg Jets.
Over in the NBA conference finals, it's Star Wars — James Harden vs. Steph Curry in the West and Lebron vs., uh, whoever's on the Celtics, in the East. You're definitely getting big-name value in pro basketball, but in pro hockey? We're getting a duel between Mark Scheifele and Jonathan Marchessault. Forget "brand names," they're not even attempting to give us names we can PRONOUNCE this go at-it.
And I, for one, am ecstatic.
I hope this thing goes a full seven games and at least half of them go to overtime, with maybe one or two double or triple O.T. affairs just for the hell of it. You've got the Golden Knights, rocking their jerseys that look suspiciously similar to the flag of Germany and/or the 1993 Vancouver Canucks uniform, representing the hedonistic, hyper-capitalist, economic-development-uber-alles excess of Degenerate Disneyland going skate-to-skate and knuckle-to-knuckle with a team that's literally cosplaying as a WHA squad from the 1970s, which — through some great cosmological fluke that defies any an all forms of empirical reason — now represents the greatest hope for Canada to take home Lord Stanley in a quarter-century.
As literally the ONLY Atlanta Thrashers fan in history, this thing is triply, if not quadruply, mind-blowing. Not only is it like seeing your ex-girlfriend get gender reassignment surgery, it's like watching her become a legit contender in the UFC's male heavyweight division after getting her cooch snipped and reshaped into a monster-sized wing-wong.
It just ... man, I can't even wrap my head around it, and that's after staring at a computer screen for the lost two hours cogitating on it.
Forget Leicester City winning the Premier League or Virginia getting beat by a 16th seed in the NCAA tourney or even that time Evander Holyfield hit Hasim Rahman so hard he literally turned into the Elephant Man on live television. This upcoming WCF is far and away the STRANGEST thing I've ever seen in my 32 years of watching, imbibing and ingesting sports products.
And you'd have to be a damned fool to miss even a MICROSECOND of the series.
Enjoy it while it lasts, folks. Surely, our old friend sanity has to take the wheel again at some point, doesn't he?
