From the "God Cannot Possibly Love Me This Much" Files
By In a terrific excellent post about the vagaries of the post-season (although I say we bring back the old Lords of the Realm division names! The Snorris will rise again! It would additionally satisfying for the Flames to host a Zeigler Division championship banner next year…) Michael Berube said last Friday:
And I have very bad news for you Canuck fans, in Vancouver and around the globe: as I’ve surmised over the past few weeks, you’ll be sitting out this one. You thought you were clinging to the seventh or eighth spot, but that was only because you’d played three more games than the Sharks. Your only hope, I think, is to sweep San Jose in the home-and-home series next week, April 12-13.
Not being an optimistic man, I haven’t been able to see this happening; they’re just too stacked. Sure, they have suffered devastating injuries to their defense, but then the Flames have almost never had Regehr, Hamrlik and Warrener in the same lineup, and they sure don’t have any Anson Carter on their second line to make up for it–even granting the Flames’ massive edge in goal I can’t compare those rosters and leave the Canucks out. Any yet…I think (and I’ll probably regret jumping the gun on this) I think they’re toast. Running the table gets them 95 points, and I doubt that’s enough. And I don’t see them running the table–San Jose are also baffling underachievers, but they’re a better team, and I don’t see the Canucks beating them twice in a row. And even if they can somehow sneak past Edmonton, Detroit will crush them like a cupcake under a steamroller in the first round.
But we can all learn a valuable lesson form this wonderful development: life is unfair, but not so unfair that you can appoint Todd Bertuzzi as your fucking alternate captain and make the playoffs.
Those benighted who aren’t interested in this stuff (maybe there are blog readers out there who don’t like hockey. I don’t know. Frankly, I don’t want to know. It’s the kind of market we can do without…) can instead enjoy the latest thrilling installment of “you can take the whiny blowhard out of Lenninism but…” with Mr. David Horowitz!