Kukla's Korner Hockey

Kukla's Korner Hockey

The Nashville Predators, Really?

05/24/2017 at 8:22am EDT

from Dave Feschuk of the Toronto Star,

It was more than a decade ago that the NHL sacrificed an entire season and forwent the awarding of the Stanley Cup in the name of implementing a hard salary cap to ensure cost certainty and competitive balance.

And when the ugly lockout was finally over, one of the happiest sounding voices emanated from Nashville.

“We’re very excited and optimistic,” Predators general manager David Poile said back in 2005. “We’re much closer to having a fair playing field, and for us to be real competitive right out of the gate.”

It only took a dozen years, but the Predators’ presence in their first Stanley Cup final might be the ultimate demonstration of the grand design behind Gary Bettman’s hard slog of a lockout. A case can be made that the NHL has reached peak parity. Tiny Nashville, the last team to qualify for the playoffs, is the last team standing in the Western Conference. Bitty Nashville, the 16th seed in the league’s 16-team playoff tournament, is the first bottom seed to qualify for the final since the NHL expanded from six to 12 teams in 1967-68 (this according to research by Randy Robles of the Elias Sports Bureau).

And exactly nobody saw it coming. Hockey players have long boasted that the Stanley Cup is the hardest trophy to win in pro sports.

continued

from John Smallwood of the Philadelphia Daily News,

I guess this is the natural offshoot of having teams that are going through decades-long droughts of championships. Less deserving cities get what Philadelphia desperately craves.

On Monday, the Nashville Predators beat the Anaheim Ducks in Game 6 of the NHL Western Conference finals and advanced to the Stanley Cup Finals.

Nashville? Predators?

Nashville, which joined as an expansion team for the 1998-99 season, nearly lost the Predators to Hamilton, Ontario, in 2007.

Can someone please tell me what business a city that came on during the NHL’s great March into the South during the 1990s has playing for Lord Stanley’s Cup when the Flyers have not hoisted it in more than four decades?...

Flyers fans, who support the Orange and Black regardless of how well the team plays, deserve better than to be reminded of their frustration every June – especially if the champion represents some front-runner hockey city like Anaheim, Dallas, Denver, Pittsburgh, Raleigh, N.C., Tampa or possibly soon Nashville.

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About Kukla's Korner Hockey

Paul Kukla founded Kukla’s Korner in 2005 and the site has since become the must-read site on the ‘net for all the latest happenings around the NHL.

From breaking news to in-depth stories around the league, KK Hockey is updated with fresh stories all day long and will bring you the latest news as quickly as possible.

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