I thought Little was out too.

He is, also Laine is potentially out as well. Shore gets in before Letestpoo.

Oh what happened to Laine?

Hand injury, him and scheifele are both seeing specialists today. Sounds like scheifele injury isn’t a Achilles tear which is lucky. I think he’s done for months, Laine I think will be okay but I guess we’ll see.

Yep, more players should have refused to play, 4 months off and a quick mini training camp will be the cause of many injuries.

First of all, if we have a return to play, players won’t decline. It’s in their competitive nature.

Second, both injuries here could have happened any day. Scheifele was stopping, but lost his footing (with a little help from the tkachuk I don’t like) and giordano slashed laine (he should get disciplined) which resulted in his hand injury. I don’t think the issue is the return to play, they are just injuries that just happened

Also I read somewhere that tkachuk is going to get disciplinary action for clipping scheifele which caused him to fall

This playoffs are like the same as watching preseason hockey still.

That’s kind of true, but some games are heated. For example the nyr-car one and the mtl-pit games. The others have been kind of slow and lack “scrums”. Makes it weird to watch.

Fear there will be lots of upsets, just like in the first month of the regular season, the pretenders jump to a fast start while the contenders can be slow to lift off....with this playoff format it can spell doom....

I don’t think it will be that bad. I don’t think a complete underdog will win the cup without deserving it. Only a few contenders gets off to a slow starts and an underdog would have to go through 4 of them. Add in the fact that there’s re-seeding very round and I don’t see too many upsets without teams deserve it them

I'm a fan of the League moving forward with a 20 team playoff every year. It's crazy seeing the 11th seed Panthers were only 3 points/1 win behind the 6th seed Leafs. Or 2 points/1 win seperating the 6th seed Flames and the 10th seed Wild.

I like the current 16 team format to be honest. 20 would be too long for the players and would make the underdog teams tired if they made it far. There would probably be more separation towards the end of the season (still 10 more games for most clubs)

The last 10 games are usually when the pretenders decide to tank for the higher draft pick....I would suggest a 80 game season and a 3 game qualifier for team 7 V 10 and team 8 V 9. Sure every owner will have to sacrifice one home game, but it'll open 4 NHL teams to at least see 1 playoff home game.

The problem is that it wouldn’t be just one game. If woudl be a series, at which point it gets to be too much. Potentially 28 games in 1.5 months is already a lot towards the end for the winning team. I don’t think 20 teams is a good idea