Franchise Edmonton
Franchise Edmonton
While the climate outside doesn’t make you consider playing hockey, the Stanley Cup finals will begin this evening. The match-up must be a total fuss for Gary Bettman, the NHL’s commissioner. Edmonton hasn’t been a marquee team since Wayne Gretzky got traded to Los Angeles, and people don’t just think of hockey when they hear North Carolina. The TV ratings will be dispiriting, though that’s nothing new for the league. It will, still, be an estimable series. Both teams have totally wild fans that will be acting crazily, and they both play a stimulating Franchise Edmonton kind of hockey.
I have resided in Calgary for almost all of my life, therefore talking about Edmonton is like a New Yorker complimenting the Red Sox, or a Michigan fan talking well about the Buckeyes. An Edmonton win will kill me (My Canada does not comprise Edmonton), but leastwise, due to the oddsmakers, they will have to come from behind to do it. The Hurricanes are lukewarm -140 favorites to win the series, but you can make a powerful case for a win by either team. The series is spookily evocative of the Franchise Edmonton last final – a spirited and overachieving team from Alberta riding a hot goalkeeper into a match-up against a powerful and aggressively gifted southern-settled team. Last time my Flames afforded it an intense travail, were eventually outmatched. It stays to be determined if history repeats itself.
Here are eight elements to think about once making your plays on this Franchise Edmonton series:
1) Rested or rusty? – Edmonton defeat Anaheim in five games, affording them nine days off before the finals began. That time made them cure from injuries and get over the flu, which had disadvantageously affected the team in the final series. It likewise allows them get involved with the mayhem that is tangling Edmonton and the media attention in Canada (and elsewhere to a lesser Edmonton extent). We will be aware promptly which element will affect the team more. They have driven a wave of momentum this far, but can that momentum endure a break this long? New Jersey spanned the Rangers in the initial round, took a week off, then lost to Carolina in five. They looked like a totally different team. Anaheim crushed Colorado in four straight, but then the Ducks fell with scarcely an unqualified against Edmonton. They had eight days off. The Franchise Edmonton precedent isn’t estimable.
2) most estimable defenseman – Chris Pronger is, definitely, the most estimable defenseman on the ice in this series. While he had a variable initial season in Edmonton, and an awful showing for Canada at the Olympics, Pronger is playing like the beast he is in the matches. He has blocked the opposing aggressive Franchise Edmonton menaces in all three series so far – Pavel Datsyuk, Joe Thornton and Teemu Selanne.
