NHL schedule for Second Round of 2020 Stanley Cup Playoffs

The National Hockey League (NHL) changed its schedule with three games each set for Saturday and Sunday. The NHL looks to give out the 2020 Stanley Cup in spite of the covid pandemic, so with that, Tuesday ranks as a huge day as NHL 2019-20 Final standings. Commissioner Gary Bettman announced the NHL’s return-to-play strategy, which includes a 24-team playoff format involving 2 hub cities.

A lot of dates still need to be figured out, however there are key windows, such as early June for resuming skating in small groups, and no earlier than the very first half of July for official training camps. If the covid pandemic forces the NHL to pull the plug on playing games then only the 8 most affordable groups by inverse of their routine season points percentage would imply Arizona, Chicago, Columbus, Florida, Minnesota, Montreal, New York Rangers, and Winnipeg would remain in the running for the No. 1 pick. The NHL’s 24-team playoff starts Saturday.

But there might be concerns about how the 2020 NHL playoffs will work. The league shared the competitive format for the 24-team playoff setup for how the 2020 NHL playoffs will work. The qualifying round has previously been referred to as a play-in round. The remaining 8 groups in the qualifying round play best-of-five series to advance to the First Round.

The winners from the qualifying round play the leading 4 seeds in the First Round.

The round robin relate to the seeding for the leading 4 groups in each conference. The top 4 groups in the round robin play for First Round seeding. Format (seeding vs. bracket) and series lengths will be best-of-seven in First Round and Second Round. Toronto will host the Eastern Conference teams at Scotiabank Arena, while Edmonton will have the Western Conference teams at Rogers Place.

In each Conference, groups are seeded by points portion. Best-of-7 series of Conference Finals and Stanley Cup Final will happen at Rogers Place in Edmonton. After six hours, five overtimes, and a combined 151 shots on goal, the Tampa Bay Lightning won an epic Game 1 against the Columbus Blue Jackets. Brayden Point scored 150 minutes, 27 seconds into the contest to give the Lightning a 3-2 win.

It was very special, the Lightning players were all exhausted. The Lightning players were all looking for a goal. When the Lightning players all saw that go in, it was a lot of emotion. And on the winning goal, Point saw a rolling puck coming to him, he just throw it on net, he was not even thinking. It was the fourth-longest playoff game in NHL history.

So long that the next game, originally was rescheduled.

It takes arena workers roughly 90 minutes to disinfect the benches and clean the ice between games, including warm-ups. The Boston Bruins and the Carolina Hurricanes faced a start time typically reserved for beer leaguers. The Columbus Blue Jackets goaltender Joonas Korpisalo made 85 saves, a new NHL playoff record, topping the New York Islanders goaltender Kelly Hrudey’s previous mark of 73 saves, set in 1987.

The Blue Jackets blocked 62 shots in the game. The Lightning alone tallied 88 shots on goal, as many as the New York Rangers had combined in their three games against the Hurricanes in the qualification round. Hrudey was actually hoping that Korpisalo breaks the 100-save mark, and Hrudey was really hoping the game goes so long that Andrei Vasilevskiy breaks his record as well.

It is just an incredible performance, Hrudey has been waiting for this performance for 20-something years at least. Vasilevskiy finished with 61 saves. The Blue Jackets defenseman Seth Jones also set a new NHL playoff record for ice time, skating in 65 minutes, 6 seconds, which beat Sergei Zubov’s old record of 63 minutes, 51 seconds, for the Dallas Stars in 2003.

Jones even bested his father, former NBA player Popeye Jones, for minutes played in a game.

Popeye Jones’ career high was 56 minutes in 1996 while with the Toronto Raptors, during a three-overtime loss to the Boston Celtics. After the game, Jones feels fine but he took umbrage to the way the game was called. The officiating was kinda suspect to Jones. Every player on each team registered a shot on goal except for the Blue Jackets’ Cam Atkinson.

Though Atkinson did have a breakaway opportunity shortly before Point scored. Atkinson crashed into the net after being chased down by a defender, but there was no penalty called on the play. At one TV timeout in the fourth overtime period, the big screen in the fanless Scotiabank Arena announced it was time for a seventh-inning stretch. By the fifth overtime, a new message appeared, “Sorry if you had other plans tonight.”

The Blue Jackets already had tired legs, playing their sixth game in nine days, including two that went to overtime. Players on both sides said the mental fatigue was as exhausting as the physical fatigue. There is no way to prepare for a game that goes that long. There is no reason to rain on the Toronto Blueshirts’ parade following the stunning NHL lottery victory in which the 12.5 percent chance the team had to land the first-overall pick in the entry draft turned into a 100 percent shot at adding projected franchise winger Alexis Lafreniere to a stable of upper-echelon up-and-comers with the first-overall pick in October’s draft.

This was a stunner.

The Edmonton Oilers has won 1 playoff round over these past 11 years, and that is with the player who might have the most complete offensive skill set in NHL history. The Rangers somehow wound up 16th overall in 2005 when they entered the lottery as one of the four teams with the best odds of grabbing the No. 1 and the right to select Sidney Crosby. The NHL instituted a retroactive cap-recapture component to the collective bargaining agreement following the 2012-13 lockout meant to punish the Blueshirts for the front-loaded free-agent signing of Brad Richards.

The Rangers are going to be able to add a big-time talent in Lafreniere, who in time should be an important piece of an NHL Stanley Cup contender. The Blueshirts do not figure to be in that position next year and an attempt to short-circuit the rebuild process that is just two years old because of the result of the lottery drawing would be a terrible mistake. Rangers President John Davidson who has overseen rebuilds in St. Louis and Columbus, and general manager Jeff Gorton understand that there are no short cuts to becoming a perennial contender.

That is the objective. If the Rangers had just wanted to be a playoff team, there would have been no Letter in February 2018. There is no doubt that adding a talent such as Lafreniere accelerates the process just as incorporating Adam Fox, Kaapo Kakko, Ryan Lindgren, and Igor Sheshterkin to the mix did this past season. But there is still heavy lifting to do to become a perennial contender.

There is still final analysis to be done on the Rangers’ frightful performance in their three-game qualifying-round sweep by the Hurricanes.

Gorton and the deciders were placing a significant amount of weight on the Rangers’ performance under the NHL bubble as opposed to the work accomplished over the 37-28-5 regular season that ended March 2020. The Rangers is still trying to get through that one, but it is fairly significant. Even though it was three games, the way the Rangers lost, it has to consider a lot of things it could do differently as it moves forward to be a harder team to play against.

The Rangers is looking at that. The Rangers does not want to dismiss the 70 games and how far it came as a team and where it was prior to the pause. The Rangers was in a good spot, it was winning a lot of games, a lot of young men were doing a lot of good things, there were so many good things that were happening. The Rangers moved into 2020-21 essentially the moment the team received its eviction notice to leave the NHL bubble.

But, even with this lottery victory and the delicious prospect of adding the universally recognized top prospect to the mix, this offseason cannot be about 2020-21. It has to be about 2021-22, 2022-23, and 2023-24. There are no short cuts to sustained success. The Pittsburgh Penguins with Marc-Andre Fleury No. 1 in 2003, Evgeni Malkin No. 2 in 2004, and Sidney Crosby first overall in 2005 did not make the playoffs until 2007.

And it would be a dreadful mistake for the hierarchy to act otherwise.

The Rangers has talents, and it has the first pick in the 2020 draft. A very bright future indeed. But it is one that the Rangers must not mistake for next year. Robin Lehner began 2 of the 3 games the Vegas Golden Knights played in round robin play. Although the the Golden Knights’ head coach Pete DeBoer has not called a starter for the series yet, it would appear Lehner will have the inside track to face his previous group when the playoffs begin.

The Golden Knights, who went a best 3-0 in round robin play versus the other top 3 groups in the west, is a formidable team with strong goaltending, talented, and deep forward. The Chicago Blackhawks made the most of their opportunities in the Oilers as they advanced into the NHL Stanley Cup Playoffs. But now the road gets substantially harder as the Blackhawks will take on the top-seeded Golden Knights in the NHL Western Conference Quarterfinals. In terms of weaknesses, there is one essential area to watch on for Golden Knights, that is its penalty kill.

While the Oilers had among the very best penal eliminating units in the NHL this season, the Golden Knights had one of the worst, exterminating 80.8% of the power plays it faced. Only one team still eligible for postseason contention had a worse charge kill than the Golden Knights, with the Toronto Maple Leafs still dealing with an eliminating game versus the Blue Jackets. That high level of engagement by the Maple Leafs develops a lot of chances for the team’s forward group, and it has one of the inmost groups of forwards in the NHL with gamers like Max Pacioretty, Mark Stone, and William Karlsson all supplying ample scoring prowess to the team.

On the protective side, the Golden Knights is a group with lots of depth and skill.

However, the Golden Knights is headlined by the players that can make plays take place on the offensive side of the ice. Nate Schmidt and Shea Theodore are 2 of the Golden Knights most efficient players offensively. Schmidt’s and Theodore’s capabilities to stretch the ice and keep pressure on opposing forwards can trigger even the most talented of team’s fits as they try to set up their offense.

The NHL is anticipated to release the preliminary schedule quickly, and the Blackhawks will likely once again get late-night billing from the league. Eventually, the Blackhawks do face an uphill climb versus the Golden Knights, who have actually been among the NHL’s most amazing stories throughout their short history in the league. The Golden Knights did end up outside of the leading 10 in the NHL in both goals scored per game and objectives enabled per game.